You will be spared this, presumably, back at home, but the guy who just did the national anthem here at Staples Center decided to change the wording. That’s what anthems are for, right? Whatever wording you feel like going with. Well, no, they’re not. Except at Lakers games. The guy who sang the anthem was […]

[Read more →]

I don’t usually do this. Predict a game. I just have a stronger hunch than usual about this one. The Lakers didn’t come all this way to lose home court five games into the conference finals. They aren’t going to be eliminated in Denver on Friday. Just aren’t. So they will win tonight, and the […]

[Read more →]

Interesting reader “poll” on the espn.com home page. Which only reinforces how many of us are most impressed by what we have seen most recently. It asks readers to vote on “which is the best team right now in the NBA conference finals?” A week ago, I’d guess that this vote would have come in […]

[Read more →]

Sure, the Lakers would have liked to end this in five games. But Denver rolled through the first two rounds, hadn’t lost a home game since March and won Game 2 in L.A. Had to expect the Nuggets would win one of these two in Denver. So, the Lakers, 2-2 in this series and looking […]

[Read more →]

It’s been a bit more than 24 hours since LeBron James made the three-pointer at the buzzer to beat the Orlando Magic and, without making any effort to search it out, I figure I have seen tape of the that final one second, oh, 200 times. By now, you are excused for considering it the […]

[Read more →]

Game 2 final: Nuggets 106, Lakers 103. That’s a game apiece, with Nuggets having taken home-court advantage from the Lakers. That’s bad enough news for the Lakers. It gets worse. The Nuggets played the Lakers almost dead even in two games in Los Angeles. Thus, it appears quite likely the Nuggets can win another game […]

[Read more →]

ESPN the Magazine has done a long piece on Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, by far the least successful franchise of the four “major” North American sports. The profile is interesting on several levels, but these are the two that struck me while reading it:

[Read more →]

I can’t be the only person this happens to. You begin watching a sports event. You don’t think you care what happens. You may not even have thought about caring about what happens. And then at some point in the middle of the game, you realize that you not only are interested in the outcome, […]

[Read more →]

Wow. Tough game. Rough game. Up-and-down the floor, lots of contact, bodies flying, a scrambling, awkward, bump-and-run, busted-play, improvisational scrum of a game. That is, the sort of game the Los Angeles Lakers have not been likely to win since, oh, Magic Johnson. Yet they won it, and it was a huge victory. Lakers 105, […]

[Read more →]

This LeBron-Kobe story on espn.com is interesting enough, and was written in a way that is appropriate for generic sports/basketball fans. Jerry West, The Logo, the greatest Laker of them all, the Hall-of-Famer, coach and front-office architect of the Showtime Lakers as well as the Shaq-Kobe Lakers, was quoted as saying he believes LeBron James […]

[Read more →]