In the end, the Miami Heat—so full of bluster, dance moves, promise and pyrotechnics last July—went out with not so much a whimper (because even that takes effort), but more of a shrug, in a 105-95 loss. And as their aged, largely silent fans shuffled to the parking lot, heading home to face an uncertain off-season of oppressive heat and 5:30 dinners, they were probably wondering: We paid so much money for this?

LeBron “Coma-Toast” James has another one of his textbook Finals games, largely invisible in its most crucial moments, content with setting up people named Mario Chalmers, Juwan Howard and Udonis Haslem to shoulder the burden that he [...]

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 [...]

When I woke up on Friday morning and read that Jerry Sloan has abruptly quit as head coach of the Utah Jazz, I panicked, as just three days earlier I had joked that I thought he was already dead. (It sounds way worse than it is.) I thought, “Oh great, he has cancer, now. Wait, am I going to be fired for this?”

Thankfully, he wasn’t sick, just sick and tired of dealing with his point guard, Deron Williams, who clearly knows far better what it takes to win in the NBA than a guy who coached two players into the NBA Hall of Fame, and won [...]

“So what’s your theme this week?”

It was a simple question from a friend, one that I laughed off, but privately sent me spiraling. As we all know, sports don’t have a new theme every week. This isn’t fashion with “a return to femininity!” or “urban lumberjack cool!” It’s basketball. Games are won, games are lost. Occasionally, if you get lucky, you can follow a group of players that behave, both collectively and individually, in an engaging and flamboyant manner and that creates its own good story.

The Miami Heat aka the Heatles, would certainly fall into that category. And yet, even when the players contribute [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Usually, at the NBA trading deadline, there are a couple of minor trades here and there, Troy Murphy and Tim Thomas get thrown in to make the money work, and the league’s balance of power remains largely unchanged.

Not this year and certainly not in the Atlantic Division. Overnight, by trading a bunch of .500-caliber ballplayers and Timofey Mozgov, the Knicks made themselves a whole lot better with the addition of another superstar-and-a-half. The Celtics went in the opposite direction by trading their starting center for a much smaller guy who will be of zero help versus any team with a scoring center or power forward. Still, as [...]

This weekend will mark the midpoint of the NBA season, which is a true moment of reckoning. It’s time for owners to take stock in their teams’ fortunes—which ones have a chance to make some playoff hay, and who had better start playing the rookies and grooming the fall guy—head coach or GM, whoever has fewer contract years left.

Rather than just solely ruminate on the fortunes of the Miami Heat any longer—and let’s face it: that conceit is getting older than Charlie Sheen’s TV nephew—I figure that I would take stock, too. Why not? I’ve already made enough friends in Miami; it’s time to spread the love.

As they travel around the country like an exceptionally tall, five-button suited, emo band—talking about their feelings and crying about perceived injustices—the Miami Heat are making themselves an easy target for people who like to point out their shortcomings.

LeBron James, in particular, has diminished himself to the point that Jiminy Cricket could stab him to death with a shanked toothpick. One week after I warned him about his single use of the “Idiot Defense”, he turned in another bravura performance of Scaredy Cat: The Musical.

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 [...]

Kobe Bryant won the Most Valuable Player award at last weekend’s NBA All-Star game in Los Angeles, which had all the suspense of an episode of “iCarly”. This was the marquee player on the NBA’s marquee team winning an award on his team’s home court. If Kevin Durant had scored a few more points during the 3rd quarter, someone from the NBA would’ve probably gone all Tonya Harding on him during a fourth-quarter timeout. For everyone’s sake No. 8 had to win. All you needed to know about the suspense was written on the faces of his teammates, who had to stand there for 180 seconds while Commissioner David [...]

It was deemed “Goggle-gate” by boyish Miami Heat coach Eric Spoelstra, and rightly so. There were goggles involved, and there was definitely a ’gate aspect to the kerfluffle that Dwyane Wade’s choice of doctor-prescribed eyewear had raised. Designed to alleviate his migraine symptoms, they were darkened to the point that he looked like a player in one of those halftime charity games where nobody scores and yet everybody cheers; or a character in a 1970s Disney movie about a blind point guard who singlehandedly wins the state championship and gets the scorchingly hot, sighted girl.

So the Heat sent some lackey (no offense, sir or madam) to [...]