neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): So we just witnessed what our friend Zach Lowe called the “wildest lottery ever.” The Zion-Williamson-to-the-Knicks (or its less-heralded cousin, Zion-to-the-Lakers) hype train gained a ton of steam when both teams were revealed to be in the Top 4 … and then it crashed and burned on live TV as […]
The NBA draft lottery on Tuesday night pitted the repeated good luck of Cleveland against the long-standing bad luck of New York — and somehow, New Orleans won. The Pelicans landed the No. 1 overall pick despite having just a 6 percent chance to do so, and they’re widely expected to use it on Duke […]
The 2018-19 NBA regular season is finally over, and the playoffs start this weekend. In anticipation — and in honor of our first season tracking the league with our new depth-chart forecasts — we wanted to share visualizations of the most interesting storylines of the regular season. These charts trace our projected seedings as the […]
There are deals made at the NBA trade deadline every year, but rarely do those last-minute swaps truly change the trajectory of a season. Yet that sort of potential might exist this season: We learned Monday that superstar big man Anthony Davis wants out of New Orleans, which all but means that the Pelicans have […]
The highs and lows of being an NBA fan aren’t necessarily dependent on wins and losses. When your team has been bad for a while, small victories — like upsetting a better team during the regular season — can be your version of winning a championship. Conversely, when your team is a finals contender every […]