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 believe the 2011-12 NBA season should not happen. At all. It’s not as if the NBA is missed, which is probably pretty damning. Do you know anyone — anyone — who is talking about how the lack of NBA games is tearing them up? Or even vaguely disturbing them? That, then, is a league […]

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For the first time since 2007, we have an NBA Finals without the Lakers in it. Seems a bit strange. Almost not-quite-real. But we may have to get used to it — Kobe isn’t a kid anymore, and Mike Brown doesn’t seem like an inspired hire as coach. So, Miami Heat vs. Dallas Mavericks?

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Even over here in the UAE, we know the Lakers are being dissected and deconstructed, and the prevailing notion seems to be that they need to be disassembled. My first thoughts, and these go back to when the deficit to Dallas was 2-0, were “maybe they do need to blow it up.” But then I […]

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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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I no longer recall what made me mull this topic. Maybe I was thinking of the new facilities in the Big Three sports in the U.S., and how many of them I have not seen. Which in a roundabout way led me to consider how many stadiums and arena I have been in that 1) […]

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