Paris or Phoenix. Barcelona or Oklahoma City. If you're planning a vacation, these aren't difficult choices. And if you're pursuing a career in professional basketball it's barely a choice at all. For all the fringe perks of gig hooping in Europe, playing in the NBA offers better pay and a higher public profile than playing anywhere else, as well as the opportunity to be posterized by Blake Griffin and endure reliably wrongheaded, weirdly passive-aggressive criticism from TNT's Reggie Miller.

But because of the long-running lockout, the NBA seems likely to make a lengthy stop in federal court before returning to the hardwood kind. This means that America's ballers are [...]

Leading up to last night’s game, the NBA Finals had gone as nearly everyone expected: the Miami Heat have played better than the Dallas Mavericks, and they have behaved worse. Game One was a textbook Heat win and exemplified why this match-up is so difficult for the Maverick defenders. LeBron James and Dwyane Wade performed their “I go, now you go” routine and Dirk Nowitzki’s “I go, now…hey you’re a really old and streaky shooter” was simply no match for them.

Game Two was a textbook “Why everyone hates the Heat” loss. Their boorish antics toward the end of the second game, preening and prancing about, throwing fake [...]

Let’s gloss over the fact that I blew the last round. Everyone thought the Lakers would win easily and I merely went with the crowd. That’s the simplest explanation for how I misread that situation so thoroughly. Allow me to explain: I had the Celtics favored, sure, but I’d been worried all season that their trading of Kendrick Perkins would ultimately cost them against the Heat. (And it did.) The Thunder was my pre-season (trust me), mid-season, and pre-playoff pick to emerge from the Western Conference. The Memphis Grizzlies pushed them about as far as they could, but the Thunder rotation is eight deep. James Harden [...]

That headline says it all, really. The teams whose core players are nearing 30, or have passed it, certainly looked aged last weekend. The Lakers lost, as did the Spurs, while the Celtics, Mavericks and Heat escaped by the skin of their teeth in about as exciting a first round of playoffs as I can remember.

Rarely is the end for basketball players both extreme and definitive; instead, often a gradual deterioration takes place. Players will start getting beaten off the dribble or having their shots blocked—signs that don’t immediately show up in the traditional stats line. But a decline in skills becomes more noticeable when the playoffs arrive [...]

During a 400-meter qualifier of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, a scene unfolded that has stuck with me until today—and I'm someone who can’t remember what he did on Saturday. A British runner named Derek Redmond tore his hamstring late in the race, hopped a few times, and collapsed onto the track. He lay there like he’d been shot; and while the winners were celebrating after crossing the finish line, he slowly rose to his feet and began limping pathetically toward the finish line. A few minutes and several dozen hops and leg-drags later, his dad burst onto the track and helped him shuffle across the finish line. [...]

Oh my. You have to feel for Miami Heat soon-to-be-former coach Eric Spoelstra. He’s been a calming influence during what has been a relatively tumultuous, but successful, season. He’s managed to help LeBron and LeDwyane from trying to split the ball with an axe, and has keep a relatively unhealthy team winning a high percentage of their games. Then on Sunday, after losing to yet another talented, balanced squad, this time the Chicago Bulls, he told a group of reporters that the players were back in the locker room crying like little babies, which no doubt they were. (He has subsequently amended that statement to say he noticed “glossy [...]

There was no reason for me to be at the NBA Draft. I cover the San Antonio Spurs, which had the 20th and 49th picks in the draft. Any players drafted that late weren't even likely to be there (the Spurs selected James Anderson and Ryan Richards, neither of which were). Any player drafted that late is not likely to have a significant impact on his team (although, in Anderson, the Spurs may have plucked some starting-caliber wheat from amidst the chaff). And any player that did happen to be there was either too well coached or too nervous to say anything of interest. (Every interview I have [...]

In financial circles, the Miami Heat making the NBA Finals is what could be considered a solid return on investment. When the team was cobbled together, an appearance in the NBA Finals seemed like its destiny. Then we saw them play and there appeared to be a chance that they might not even make past the first round of the playoffs. We bought into the Celtics, the Magic, the Bulls. (And by ‘we’ I mean ‘me’ and maybe you, too.)

Yet the NBA Finals, which begin tonight with the Dallas Mavericks looking to pull a “not so fast” on the Miami Heat, feature as much a “team of destiny” [...]

I should have known. Despite winning in six games, the Los Angeles Lakers pretty much mailed in the Hornets series. It was disquieting to see them struggle to contain Chris Paul, much less Trevor Ariza and Marco Belinilli. As I said last month, they looked so tired. Meanwhile, the Mavericks, when tested by the younger, more athletic Trail Blazers, responded forcefully, closing them out in six games as well. But I was fooled by the teams’ respective reputations: the Lakers as the-tough-get-going champions, the Mavericks as playoff underachievers. And so, to me, the path to the conference finals was clear for the Lakers. Pffft. What a joke.

The first round of the NBA playoffs is upon us—thankfully, I don’t mean that literally—and I, for one, am excited. Not only because I will get to hear “Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty alongside footage of Kevin Garnett staring and sweating (pretty much the content of every NBA promo during the past five years), but also a really good team is going to lose their first round match-up to someone not as good, and an ESPN anchor of indiscriminate race will dutifully report how it is a “shocker” and how it “changes things”—even though, you know, we aren’t morons.

If I had to choose a team least likely [...]

Last week, during the course of my weekly address, I wrote that I thought Dwight Howard should be named the league's most valuable player. It was as if I'd claimed that Osama bin Lizard would be a fine name for a pet iguana. Usually two or three people take the time to scrawl in and give me problems. This morning, I counted 21 emails from readers telling me I was an idiot (and nearly all of them were related to my column).

Seriously, people went mental and accused me as having an “axe to grind” against everyone from Kobe (nope) and LeBron (perhaps) to Derrick Rose (I [...]

There are plenty of reasons to dislike the decision that LeBron James announced last night, which you of course already know was to leave bleak, broken Cleveland for steroidal, coke-optimistic Miami. These reasons are so familiar and obvious-and the spectacle of James spending an hour of prime time television breaking up with his hometown and referring to himself in the third person so spectacularly sorry-that I'm going to skip over all that. (Although you can click here if you want to read all the good reasons James shouldn't have gone to Miami in one place.) The whole dubious story has been covered to death, but one notable aspect [...]

The NBA Draft: it's where dreams are made, franchises broken and Patrick O'Bryant mercilessly mocked. Where ESPN TV announcer Jay Bilas goes on and on about teenage boys' length (and it is still okay to do that without any tinge of irony?), where suits range from the file cabinet to the Colonel Sanders to the vanilla sheriff to whatever this and this are. The draft kicked off with NBA honcho David Stern at the lectern at Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Liberty. He put the Wizards on the clock and then we are treated to a flashback to the Kwame Brown era. That's a decidedly mean-spirited [...]

Haters, am I right? Just waiting for you to fail, pulling for it with all the sad vigor in their mean, withered selves—it's like they take all the things that are wrong with their lives and put them on you, blame you for what's wrong with them and expect you to take the punishment for them. Am I right, though? It's not a rhetorical question.

I honestly do not know if I'm right, because haters just are not a thing in my life or probably in yours, or really in the lives of anyone with a reasonable self-image. You will see a teenager on mass transit in a hater-baiting [...]

If it were anyone other than the Dallas Mavericks—a team whose past playoff flameouts are legendary—the Western Conference championship series would be over today.

The word “devastating” is the only apt one for Monday night’s developments: Oklahoma City, at home, blew a 15-point lead with 5 minutes left and now find themselves down three games to one, teetering on the brink of losing, again, in the Western Conference Finals. They were poised to knot the series at 2-2, on the verge of overcoming what appears to be a postseason-long hierarchical rift between maybe the best player in the game, Kevin Durant, and the NBA’s fourth-best point guard, Russell Westbrook. It [...]

Picking huge upsets in a playoff series is a relatively cowardly enterprise that's made to seem courageous by those calling them. “Going out on a limb” isn’t really any such thing, as two days after predictions are made, no one remembers them. Except if they were right. Then everyone knows about this stunning act of bravery.

Most of the time, I gravitate toward the moderate upsets, all of which I believe in my heart will happen. And my picks either pay off handsomely (Hawks over the Magic—told ya!) or do not (TrailBlazers over the Mavericks—oops).

I’ve spent a few hours looking at everyone’s prognostications, including the 412 people ESPN.com [...]

On Monday evening, I watched the National Championship game at Old Town tavern, which was a relatively brainless (but in no way shocking) decision, as the mounted TV’s 25-inch screen appears to be coated with a viscous substance that I will assume, for all intents and purposes, is hurled biscuit gravy. And by hurled, I mean thrown. Of course. I was meeting a friend and neither of us are exactly rocket scientists, or even scientists or any kind, so we decided, “Hey let’s watch the game on the worst TV left in America.”

In the midst of watching the UConn Man-Huskies (probably the lousiest National Champion I have ever [...]

After a thoroughly hyperbolic summer, where experts’ predictions had the Miami Heat winning no fewer than 70 games, it’s shocking to see the Southeast division race is even remotely competitive at this point in the season. And yet here we are, watching the Orlando Magic take advantage of the Miami Heat’s up-and-down campaign to challenge them for the division crown. And if the Magic catch the Heat then, oh boy, we may be in for some late-season waterworks.

Others would argue that since the Heat publicly cleared the air and their tear ducts, they’ve been pressing less and winning more. Heck, the team used a balanced attack on [...]

"But if LeBron and his minions can prevent the news from leaking, ESPN tomorrow night is going to be insanely compelling television, whether you're sick of this or not! ADMIT IT. It's so much more fun than it would be if some random reporter broke the news on like, SI.com! That it's an hour long is ridonk, sure, but that's how TV works: stringing you along before delivering the debilitating and/or delicious blow. Didn't anyone ever watch Joe Millionaire?"