LeBron v Steph has been the defining rivalry of my basketball life. Their latest chapter did not disappoint, but it’s clear their special rivalry is nearer to the end than the beginningThere are certain constants in our lives: north stars by which we can measure and trace the changes that occur around them as time passes us by. For the better part of the last decade, the steady fulcrum around which the NBA has revolved has been the special ongoing rivalry between future first-ballot Hall of Famers LeBron James and Stephen Curry.Some basketball fans grew up at a time when they watched Magic Johnson and Larry Bird duke it out year after year, and other fandoms were formed during the...
The modern-day uptick in team-switching has made for less of the classic rivalries that defined previous eras. But matchups like Zion v Ja and Celtics v Bucks are bursting with promiseThe NBA’s ever-changing nature means that rivalries are fickle. When Philadelphia traded picks with Boston to take Markelle Fultz with the No 1 overall pick in the 2017 NBA draft, and the Celtics selected Jayson Tatum third, the teams’ proximity and prior history had all the makings of a classic. But while Tatum is a perennial All-Star, Fultz soon developed the shooting yips and was quickly shipped to the Magic.The modern-day uptick in team-switching has made for less of the classic rivalries that defined previous eras, such as Magic Johnson’s...
Golden State’s former head coach helped ease the likes of Klay Thompson and Steph Curry into the league. He hasn’t had a top job in the NBA sinceThe Golden State Warriors pretty much owned the Western Conference for half a decade, appearing in five successive NBA finals from 2014 to 2019. Three of those five ended up with Golden State hoisting the Larry O’Brien trophy; if it not for a superhuman comeback by the Cavaliers in 2016 or a rash of catastrophic injuries in 2019, they might well have won all five. The fact that they’ve made the postseason this year – they face the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday night in the play-in tournament – despite the season-long absence of...
The Warriors still want to be the newcomers, the radicals shaking up the sport. But they’re the establishment nowAfter Detroit’s Chauncey Billups-inspired demolition of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2004 finals, perhaps the NBA’s greatest post-season upset of the early 2000s came in the first round of the 2007 Western Conference playoffs. The Dallas Mavericks, owned by billionaire Mark Cuban and led by MVP-in-waiting Dirk Nowitzki, had come off a record-breaking regular season in which they’d won 67 games and lost just 15. The Golden State Warriors had not made the playoffs since 1994; their squad included a number of oddballs and castoffs from other teams such as small forward Stephen Jackson, who was traded by the Indiana Pacers...
African American athletes can be everything: grand slam champions, Olympic medalists, explosive, magic. Everything, that is, except benignWhat’s a brother gotta do to catch a break in sports? Asking not for myself, a black sportswriter, but for a friend. OK, not for a friend. For DeShone Kizer, the beleaguered rookie quarterback of the terrible Cleveland Browns.Early one Saturday morning last month Kizer ducked into a downtown bar for a break, a bit of release. The pressure on him at the time surely pinched, what with the Browns being 0-6 and his passer rating at a league-worst 27.3. He is of legal drinking age, didn’t break any laws and didn’t violate any sacrosanct policies held by the team. But a Zapruder-grade...