Category Archives: On the NBA

As a person who writes a column about the NBA, once per week, I am both thrilled and annoyed by the sheer amount of compelling news and media surrounding the sport, between each column. Usually, I react to the overwhelming question of what to write about by picking a manageable topic—like assessing the season’s wins-and-losses [...]

One of the league’s premier players, Rajon Rondo, will miss the rest of the season with a torn ACL. This signifies a huge shift in franchise prospectus for a handful of teams; now that the Celtics, already struggling for the East’s final playoff spot, have lost their most important piece, they’ve become a major factor [...]

Much has been made of post-Collective Bargaining Agreement days of the NBA, which, with all its new tricks to managing salary caps and free agency, have even the most casual of fans thinking more often like businessmen than as fans of the game—assessing the success with which a team handles this new landscape on a [...]

‘Trying hard,’ long celebrated, is an act so metaphysical that it eludes even those most comprehensive of contemporary NBA analytics. The oft-mysterious rise and/or fall in a plaeyer’s—or, more importantly, a team’s—actual exertion toward winning is also a maker or breaker of any prognostication, however Hollingerian it may be. And trying, more than anything, is [...]

So this was interesting.  Fights are common in the Association as is the “‘x’ was waiting for the ‘y’ team bus after the game” narrative. But when was the last time an altercation involved two players of this magnitude?  You have your usual fight archetypes in ‘over-anxious scrub vs. star’, ‘borderline star’ vs. ‘borderline star’, and [...]