When the NBA drafts its newest class of rookies Thursday, big guys should be the order of the night. According to rankings from ESPN’s Jonathan Givony, six of the top seven prospects in this year’s draft stand 6-foot-10 or taller. (The one exception is Real Madrid’s Luca Doncic, a 6-foot-8 point guard.) If things play […]
EDITOR’S NOTE (July 6, 2018, 2 p.m.): On June 20, about a week before the annual update of our CARMELO NBA player projections, we published this article using CARMELO’s preliminary data for players who were set to be selected in the NBA draft. In our haste, we failed to notice a problem with our file […]
When healthy, San Antonio Spurs swingman Kawhi Leonard is a card-carrying MVP candidate and one of the game’s premier all-around talents. But here’s the thing: Leonard hasn’t really been healthy since the 2017 playoffs, when he landed awkwardly on Zaza Pachulia’s foot in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals. Between that season-ending ankle sprain […]
Welcome to The Lab, FiveThirtyEight’s basketball podcast. On Monday’s show (June 11, 2018), Neil, Kyle and Chris debrief after the 2018 NBA Finals, in which the Golden State Warriors again prevailed over the Cleveland Cavaliers. They talk about why this Warriors dynasty feels different, where the Warriors rank relative to other dynasties, and how this […]
Welcome to The Lab, FiveThirtyEight’s basketball podcast. On Thursday’s show (June 7, 2018), Neil, Kyle and Chris catch up after Game 3 of the 2018 NBA Finals. They talk about what a sweep would mean for this Warriors “dynasty” and for LeBron James’s legacy, debate whether LeBron is partly to blame for how his team […]