I watch/cover a lot of sports, but I don’t often have a strong opinion on how an event will turn out, before the fact. This is an exception. The Los Angeles Lakers and Denver Nuggets meet in Game 7 of their first-round NBA playoffs series tomorrow night, and I want to get on record with […]

[Read more →]

The Rams moved to St. Louis and became dead to me. Never appreciated the Raiders gangsta thing, and then they went back to Oakland. The Dodgers fell under the spell of the necromancer Frank McCourt. Never was an Angels guy. (I still consider them the Johnny-come-latelies who play 10-man ball.) Don’t care about hockey. Major […]

[Read more →]

I am astonished, from the other side of the globe, at the determination of Kobe Bryant. The man suffered a broken nose and an apparent concussion in the All-Star Game on Sunday … and three days later he scored 31 and played 33 minutes. While wearing a mask to protect his nose and while admitting […]

[Read more →]

I cannot remember the last time I was paying such close attention to the NBA. And not just the Lakers. The whole league. (And yes, I am the same guy who three months ago wrote on this blog that the locked-out NBA could take the season off, for all I cared.) I am more interested, […]

[Read more →]

The things you learn on Twitter. Well, from links posted on Twitter. With 140 characters, you can’t divulge much information on the site. In this case, it was a link to a site ranking sports teams globally by the number of their Facebook followers. And guess who was No. 4. (Did the headline tip that, […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

I have seen pieces of NBA games, this season, over here in the UAE, and the whole of the Lakers-Bulls game on Christmas Day. I have seen all of the scores, however. Some former colleagues and I are in about the third decade of an NBA fantasy league (I have both LeBron and Kobe; feeling […]

[Read more →]

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. […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]