NBA teams are increasingly trotting out lineups with five players who can play (and guard) nearly any position – but is it merely a fad?The revolution is being televised. The bedrock of NBA strategy, and basketball in general, has long been its positions on the court. Those positions – point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward and center – have traditionally been prescribed according to height, with shorter guards and taller centers. In a round peg, round hole game, everyone has a role, tall players were guided to go stand under the basket while shorter guards told to dribble and pass the ball. Related: Starbucks and the San Antonio Spurs: a tale of two misguided boycotts Related: Is this...
This week’s roundup also features more NCAA drama, the evergreen Ichiro Suzuki and Football Italia nostalgia1) The Masters starts on Thursday, so let’s dip into the archive. Bob Goalby seizes the moment after a scorecard error by Roberto De Vicenzo’s partner meant the Argentinian signed for a 67 rather than the 66 he had gone round in. Tiger Woods’s return to form and prominence gives us an excuse, if one was needed, to relive that famous 16th-hole chip in 2005. And has a pressure moment ever been dealt with better than Sandy Lyle’s bunker shot at the last in 1988, which set him up for a remarkable victory? Two years earlier, Jack Nicklaus was on the charge, sealing victory with...
Despite LeBron’s heroics on Wednesday night, the Cavaliers struggled to defend and are riven by locker room divisions. The immediate future doesn’t look brightThe NBA calendar is pretty similar from year to year. The regular season officially tips off in October, then there is great debate throughout the land about whether LeBron James’ team is not what it was a season ago highlighted by James making a cryptic social media post alluding to his team’s struggles. Next on the schedule are the Christmas Day games, which are soon followed by a period of deep contemplation on LeBron’s team, if it just might be falling apart (but for real this time) and where LeBron might play next. That period is promptly...
US sport – from NFL to basketball and Olympic skiing – is caught up in actions of a president unafraid, and determined, to change the rulesSports and politics have always existed at a very public intersection in the United States, but you would be hard-pressed to recall a time when the illusory firewall keeping them apart was more nakedly exposed.Over the past year Trump has co-opted American sports as not merely a proxy battle in the culture wars that reflect a country’s deep divides but the primary theatre. It is fair to say there was no more influential sports figure this year than the president, whose bellicose rhetoric and crisp volume counterpunching have had far-reaching effects on the industry (ask...
The NFL can’t get out of its way with video replays and confusing rules deciding games and the NBA isn’t much better, but don’t expect anything to be doneDo you have an idea for a new sport that would feature some of the greatest athletes in the world, but instead of having the athletes decide the outcome in the final minutes, the game falls into the hands of officials and coaches? Then the American market is right for you. Yes, the United States, home to more than 300m people, seems to love sports that are at their worst at the very end. Sunday night’s Steelers-Patriots matchup brought in the biggest TV ratings of the 2017 season, with 27m people tuning...