Nikola Jokić’s case to win the NBA’s Most Valuable Player Award for a second-straight season is quite compelling. The Joker finished in the top 10 in points (27.1), assists (7.9) and rebounds (13.8) per game while shooting an astonishing 58.3 percent from the field. As FiveThirtyEight’s Robert O’Connell wrote recently, no high-scoring big man has […]
The New Orleans Pelicans’ impromptu September mini-camp in Nashville after the devastation of Hurricane Ida drew headlines for the one player who didn’t show up: Zion Williamson. But as the outside world fixated on the supposed franchise player’s previously unreported foot surgery, the rest of the Pelicans players were witnessing the birth of a three-word […]
No NBA team was more disappointing this season than the Los Angeles Lakers. L.A. opened the season among the inner circle of favorites to win the NBA championship, joining the Brooklyn Nets and Milwaukee Bucks as the only teams with better than 10-to-1 title odds, according to Basketball-Reference.com. Alas, the Lakers won’t even get to […]
The Detroit Pistons last made the NBA playoffs in 2019, capping Dwane Casey’s first year as head coach. In the years since, the Pistons immersed themselves in another rebuild: They traded that season’s leading scorer (Blake Griffin) and the franchise’s second-leading rebounder (Andre Drummond). Now, no one remains from the roster general manager Troy Weaver […]
For much of this season, the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks have not seemed like the same Milwaukee Bucks team we had come to know over the past few seasons. Milwaukee won more than 71 percent of its regular-season games and led the league in wins (by a mile) during the first three years of the […]