It would have been very easy to write off the Miami Heat at different points on Sunday. Some likely counted them out as soon as the Heat announced that injured star forward Bam Adebayo and guard Goran Dragić, their second-leading scorer, would be forced to miss Game 3. Others likely thought they were done when […]
chris.herring (Chris Herring, senior sportswriter): Well, this NBA season that went inside a bubble and is on the cusp of lasting an entire calendar year officially begins its Finals round tonight. Lakers-Heat is almost certainly not the matchup any of us thought we would get. But it’s one full of storylines for any number of […]
chris.herring (Chris Herring, senior sportswriter): Game 4 of the Celtics-Heat Eastern Conference finals went pretty much as we expected it to: With Boston’s Jayson Tatum going scoreless for an entire half, Miami rookie Tyler Herro dropping 37 points, and the Heat — a team that wasn’t even on a 50-win pace during the regular season […]
LeBron James has spent his career burdened by comparison. He is the poster athlete of the Age of Scrutiny: applauded at 17 for maintaining Magic Johnson’s collaborative basketball legacy, denigrated at 34 for lacking Michael Jordan’s last-second cold-bloodedness, measured annually against contemporaries from Carmelo Anthony to Giannis Antetokounmpo. In just the past few seasons, he […]
LeBron James is, of course, no stranger to the postseason: He has missed the playoffs only three times in his 17 seasons in the NBA, including his disastrous inaugural season with the Los Angeles Lakers. But though LeBron has been a fixture in the finals, he hasn’t usually been favored by seeding to get there. […]