Editorial
Editorial

The NBA Can Kill College Basketball and the G-League Is the Murder Weapon

- by Fox Doucette

As a sports fan and an NBA guy, I generally find that anything that moves toward finally cutting the diseased heart out of college sports is a good thing, whether it’s minor league baseball long ago rendering college baseball completely irrelevant or Canadian junior hockey doing the same to college puck. And with everything that’s been in the news about college basketball over the past couple of years, and the plantation purgatory that is the one-and-done rule, it is long past time that someone takes NCAA basketball out back behind the woodshed and puts a bullet in its brainstem once …

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Analysis / Editorial

The Draymond Green Effect: Redefining Positions for the Modern NBA

- by Fox Doucette

by Zach d’Arbeloff Basketball is changing rapidly, and the name of our website proves it. The Pace and Space era is in full throttle, and as teams jack up tempos, shoot more threes, and generate open shots with spacing and ball movement, the traditional understanding of positions has changed. This article originally appeared on January 12, 2016. Stats cited in this article are as of that date and from the 2015-16 season. The sport has gotten smaller, faster, and more skilled. Most teams now have certain “positionless” lineups, designed to put five players on the floor that can dribble, pass, …

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Editorial

Pace and Space Returns September 5 With 2019 Season Previews!

- by Fox Doucette

Hey there Smart NBA Fans, your intrepid writer here… First off, thank you to everyone—over 20,000 of you—who have dropped by since the WordPress relaunch last fall to read and enjoy what I’ve had to say about the Association. This is my passion project and has been since 2015 on the old webhost (sadly, a lot of that content’s been lost to the whims of Internet history, one reason I’m on WordPress now.) And for those of you who have taken a look at the homepage and periodically wondered where I’ve wandered off to, well, yeah, maybe Summer Reading wasn’t …

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Editorial

LeBron on the Lakers—What on Kyrie’s flat Earth is he thinking?!

- by Fox Doucette

LeBron James is a Laker. 4 years, $154 million, take-the-money-and-run Los Angeles Tinseltown Lakers. And his supporting cast? Well, he’s just traded the Canton Charge for the South Bay Lakers, with Lonzo Ball, Lance Stephenson, JaVale McGee, and whatever other curios and relics a 35-win team in 2017-18 can drag off the bottom of the ocean off Long Beach and suit up in a Lakers uniform. Paul George re-upped with the Thunder. The Spurs would rather surrender the Alamo than trade Kawhi Leonard to Los Angeles unless it’s to the Clippers. And the Rockets are one Trevor Ariza short of …

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Editorial

November 7, 1991: Remembering the Day Magic Johnson Made HIV Real

- by Fox Doucette

Earvin “Magic” Johnson did not invent HIV awareness. If Gaetan Dugas and Rock Hudson and the Ronald Reagan administration’s blatant failures and Ryan White and Freddie Mercury and MTV hadn’t made you HIV/AIDS-aware by November 7, 1991, when Magic announced to the world that he had contracted the virus, you either had your head in a hole or you possessed extraordinary powers of “that only happens to other people.” Ed. note: This article originally appeared on November 7, 2016. What made Magic Johnson special wasn’t that some celebrity got HIV. What made Magic Johnson special was that he was a …

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