It struck me as a bit odd to see a photo of Kobe Bryant hugging a teammate on the home page of espn.com. Kobe had passed Shaquille O’Neal to take fifth place in the NBA all-time scoring list, but the Lakers lost the game to the 76ers in Philadelphia, 95-90. And doesn’t losing the game […]

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More basketball! I wasn’t planning to go this way. Though I did think, the day before the Lakers played in Miami, that the Heat would win, no problem, and considered writing that just to show my powers of analysis … but then it got too late, and the Heat led by 21 after three before […]

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Kobe Bryant ranks third in the NBA in scoring, so far, at 26.4 points per game. But the Lakers are 4-4, and are beginning to have the feel of a .500 team. Are these concepts related? Well, yes. In that the Lakers have managed to win four games … but have contrived to lose four. […]

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I can’t believe I’m writing a blog post with the “Kardashian” name in the headline. But this is about sports. Really. A news item last week revealed that Kris Humphries is the most-disliked player in the NBA, according to recent surveys of the American public. Fifty percent of all respondents identified Kris Humphries as an […]

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I didn’t really plan to watch the Lakers in their season-opener on Christmas Day. The game didn’t start until 2:30 p.m. in Los Angeles (which was early December 26 here in the UAE), and I prefer my sports-from-the-other-side-of-the-world to end about that time. Not start. But the night kinda dragged on, and when I got […]

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Generous of me, yes, to allow the Clippers to have Chris Paul — since the trade is already made and I’m not the erratic and capricious commissioner of the NBA who can step in and quash a deal. Lakers fans will be agitated about this trade, for two reasons: That Chris Paul will not be […]

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Huge day for sports in greater Los Angeles. The Angels signed Albert Pujols to the second-biggest contract in baseball history and the Lakers traded for Chris Paul — only to see the NBA commissioner kill the deal. But being “big news” doesn’t mean also mean it is “good news.” One of these stories is bad […]

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I may have done this before … just turned over a blog entry to the analysis of a former colleague. In this case, it pertains to the Lakers, who are down 2-0 to the Dallas Mavericks and look unlikely to survive this round. How can they be losing to a one-man Dallas team? That is […]

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I believe many of us like to think we’re glass-half-empty people. Doesn’t a sort of world-weariness make us seem, oh, more sophisticated? More realistic? Cock-eyed optimism … doesn’t the “cock-eyed” tell us all we need to know about optimists? Certainly, in the news biz, where we document famine and pestilence and death and destruction, optimists […]

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Even 15 years ago, keeping track of a U.S. sports team from the other side of the world would have been a dicey proposition. The first sport-specific bloggers were just firing up. (This was even before Bill Simmons.) Not every newspaper paid close attention to its website. (I worked at a place where the managing […]

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