Hey, no pressure, but … –The Lakers are one championship behind the Boston Celtics for the most NBA titles, 17. They could catch their green arch-rivals by winning The Bubble Finals in Florida. —LeBron James already has passed Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant in career scoring, has only Karl Malone and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in front […]

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I believe it is time to give the National Basketball Association full credit for pulling off something no one was quite sure would work: The NBA Bubble. Twenty-two teams, dispatched to the ESPN/Disney enclosed sports pod in Orlando, and left to figure out the bottom of the standings, and then stage the whole of the […]

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Baseball is on the way back, we were told this week. “Spring” training camps will open on July 1, a 60-game mini-regular-season will begin play on or about July 24, and the World Series will finish no later than October 28. The NBA’s plan for a return-to-play “bubble” in Orlando was made public on June […]

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The NBA returning to action this season? For a while there, it seemed unlikely. Everyone’s attention was focused on the killer Covid-19 virus, as it should have been, and during the harrowing height of the pandemic it was easy to forget this salient basketball fact: Los Angeles’s two teams would have lost a chance to […]

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Sports may not be the be-all and end-all we came to count on. Many of us have only recently grasped that, as sports content disappeared from our TV diets, shoved aside by a microscopic but deadly bug known as Covid-19, or the Coronavirus.

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“Blasts from the Past” is the idea. On days when I feel like writing but don’t feel like doing much research, I am going to revisit topics from my 40 years in journalism. This will be one of those. It is my take, from January of 2008, on Kobe Bryant’s chances of winning his first […]

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I heard about Kobe Bryant while leaving church, around 11:15 a.m. today. “Killed in a helicopter crash in Calabasas,” someone said. It took me a few seconds to process. “Kobe, dead? That can’t be right.” Pause. “A helicopter? That’s possible; how many celebrities have died in private planes and copters?” Pause. “Wow. Kobe dead.” At […]

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Los Angeles Clippers supporters have been waiting a long time for their team to win an NBA championship. Or play for a championship. Or even get into the Western Conference finals. None of which the club has accomplished. Which seems to have made many of them impatient. They figured Kawhi Leonard, architect of the Toronto […]

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As the NBA season opens tonight, let’s pretend some readers are interested in finding out how a fantasy draft went for a six team league. Who went first?

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We live in France. We can vouch for this. The 89-79 French victory over the United States in the Fiba World Cup quarterfinals yesterday was such a big deal over here that at least two national news shows — including that of government flagship TF1 — led their prime-time broadcasts with the news from Les […]

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