Editorial

Earlier this month, when the NBA announced a 72-game season to commence on December 22, I posed the question “when’s the season supposed to end? How are they supposed to avoid cramming in too many games in not enough time like they did when they started a 66-game season on December 25 back in the 2011-12 season?” Well, the NBA seems to have learned its lesson from the mistakes made during and after the 2011 lockout, and they’ve taken a powerful first step toward making the 2020-21 season a success. First off, the planned end of the season is May …

Wrapping up Draft Week, let’s take a look back at 2013, the greatest collection of good-not-great mediocrity ever to go in the first round. Sure, the first round produced three All-Stars—Giannis Antetokounmpo, Rudy Gobert, and Victor Oladipo—but this was otherwise in hindsight a draft that was so beautifully “blah”, so dreary in its mediocrity, and oh by the way included one of the worst first-overall-pick busts in NBA history (Anthony Bennett) that it goes down in history as a special sort of screwed up. There are no second-round salvations to be had in this draft the way there were in …

An old saying holds that the darkest hour is just before the dawn. For the NBA, this was certainly true of the 2002 draft. A year before LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Carmelo Anthony, and a slew of journeymen and role players arrived to haul the NBA out of the Dark Ages, the league barfed out one last wretched draft class to ensure that the league wouldn’t emerge from the doldrums until that next draft class came of age. Yao Ming went first overall to the Houston Rockets, and while in theory that’s a great way to start a …

As the 2020 NBA Draft wraps up and people who actually follow the college game because they mistakenly believe it provides insight into an NBA player’s potential go nuts over their team’s selections, it’s time to take a moment and look back into the past when great players stepped up to the podium as the beginning of their Hall of Fame journey to greatness… …nah, forget all that. It’s time to go ahead and dig a prime example out of the vault of why the college game is stupid, the NBA Draft is stupid, and you can’t tell a single …

What do you get when you cross Rasheed Wallace with Eric Clapton? You get the 1986 NBA draft. Because ball don’t lie, ball don’t lie, ball don’t lie…cocaine. The ’86 draft represents a low point in what was otherwise a seemingly uninterrupted 19-year run of awesome for the league, from the 1979 draft (where Magic Johnson went first overall and, after Larry Bird finished his senior season at Indiana State, he finally took up the mantle of having been the sixth overall pick a year earlier and joined the Celtics as a rookie) through “The Last Shot” at the end …