With the nation on lockdown during a pandemic, turning somewhere nostalgic with "The Last Dance" for their sports fix, this plague of cognitive dissonance is thriving more than it ever has. Read more »

Jordaniacs galore have dived gleefully into the cracks of his veneer, reveling in the hidden humanity of the man with the perfect smile and the unparalleled on-court artistry, presented to them for so long as not-real. Read more »

Gone are Justise Winslow, Hassan Whiteside, Dion Waiters, and anyone else with a conspicuous gap between potential and performance. Remade in Jimmy Butler's self-maximizing fashion, rich with diamond-in-the-rough upstarts and over-achievers, this team would be a fitting sendoff crew for Pat Riley, if he were capable of quitting. Read more »

The mark of Kawhi Leonard's spirit on the Raptors' Finals run is unmistakable. They are no longer any more prone to mental or spiritual lapses than any other title fighter; in fact, they are noticeably allergic to the psycho-emotional flights. Read more »

The Bucks and Celtics finally playing serious basketball, the Kawhi Leonard avalanche, auditing Warriors-Rockets and the hardwood candy of Nuggets-Blazers. Read more »

The past several weeks of NBA basketball have been scantly watchable, and it's primarily because of structural issues wrought by businessmen. Read more »

The standards for player effectiveness have shifted so remarkably that entire typologies of the game are fading from existence during this stylistic hegemony. Read more »

In freeing himself from old concepts about franchise loyalty and how you're allowed to move around the league, LeBron James has forged his own kind of kingdom that other ad-campaign-worthy stars see and want for themselves. Read more »

Anime Hayward is a fiction borne from a culture so over-producing and so neurotic about what it is, and who it is, that his stenciled visage feels all but inevitable. Read more »

The way Chicago's signings of Jabari Parker and Zach LaVine were received by some begs the question of why is it that we have created an intellectual environment that evaluates players in the way we'd want an Amazon review to evaluate a screwdriver? Read more »

Every year, we draw a shiny red circle around a handful of lottery selections, anointing them as harbingers of the future even though we know better. Read more »

Imagine the 72-win Bulls replacing Luc Longley with Shaquille O'Neal. Kevin Durant and the Warriors have shown a path toward a title that is wholly new in its elision of competitive resistance. Read more »

It's as if Bryan Colangelo and all the Eric jrs out there, whether he pretends to be one amidst their millions or not, are chasing more similar ghosts than one might suspect. Read more »

The Warriors have become the thing they had to fight against, but they have morphed into it in such spectacularly earth-burning fashion that their arc creates a sentiment that transcends the usual jadedness that all upstarts-become-destroyers inspire. Read more »

The 2018 NBA postseason has being unusually rich with rudeness, razzing, and sometimes out-and-out animosity. Read more »

The sheer amount of how much has happened in the Thunder's brief existence has been downright cosmic. Read more »

Denver missing the playoffs by one year again isn't the sort of disappointment that begs for start-over or vast structural change; it is the kind that promises to be transformative as motivator. Read more »

Industries of their own, superstars have begun to more fully appraise where their money is coming from, and they are increasingly disabusing themselves of older definitions of success and glory. Read more »

Two young men talented enough, and bold enough in their vision, have exercise their indifference to the traditions that each of these legends have wrought. Read more »

The more we are able to scrutinize referees, the larger our inventory of their flaws will become, and the messiness of human emotion that results. Read more »