Which of the following U.S. universities compete in NCAA Division I basketball? Belmont, Binghampton, Bryant, Campbell, Charleston Southern, Detroit Mercy, Elon, Gardner-Webb, High Point, Kennesaw State, Longwood, Mercer, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Oakland, Savannah State, Stony Brook, Towson, Wofford, Cal Baptist. How many D1 basketball schools there? It’s a sort of trick question. Everyone […]

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Americans hate floppers in sports. It’s one reason that it took soccer so long to establish a toehold in the U.S. — all the guys who go down, writhing, grabbing at a knee or an ankle, after little (or no) contact. Dark forces in the NBA have tried to bring those vile tactics into basketball, […]

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At 11 a.m. yesterday, Derrick Rose of the New York Knicks joined his teammates for a shoot-around in Westchester, N.Y. Sometime between 1 and 2 p.m., the onetime MVP flew to Chicago without telling anyone in the Knicks organization. Which was a problem because the Knicks had a home game that night. Knicks coach Jeff […]

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We concluded most of our holiday activities on Christmas Eve, aside from getting a photo of “hanging Santa” (above, info below). So that left me free to eat a lot of turkey and watch NBA December 25th games till tryptophan and hoops overload knocked me out. I saw the whole of the game of the […]

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If you had told me, when I left the Inland Empire in 2008, that a high school basketball team from that area would be ranked No. 1 in the country within a decade … I probably would have laughed at the idea. And if pushed to declare which school might have become nationally relevant in […]

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Two remarkable events occurred this month involving major North American sports leagues. The NBA and Major League Baseball agreed to new collective bargaining agreements with their players. Before the old CBA ran out. No weeks or months of acrimony between deadlocked players and management. No games lost to a strike or a lockout. No seasons […]

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College football is huge in the U.S.  Any American who saw any of the big games today knows that. American college basketball isn’t far behind football, especially when we consider March Madness, when John Q. Public becomes a fan of whichever Cinderella is dancing. Could make a case that college baseball and softball have their […]

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It was a rough three seasons for Los Angeles Lakers fans. Not long after the conclusion of a five-titles-in-10-years run, those fans saw their team become an NBA afterthought … if not a laughingstock. After the Lakers went 45-37 and made the playoffs, in 2012-13, the decline came hard and deep. To 27-55 in 2013-14 […]

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I belong to a fantasy basketball league made up of a half-dozen former co-workers, a competition we have been contesting for two or three decades now. The SHL (Sun Hoops League). Our league was developed independently of others, but it turns out we use pretty much the same stats as more formal leagues: Scoring, field-goal […]

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I did not plan on making the Chicago Cubs a topic for two days running, but today it struck me anew that I really would prefer they not win a World Series for the first time since 1908 … Because I love, love, love long championship droughts, and when it comes to North American sports, […]

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