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 »
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 »
A student of both the game and the fame that comes with it, Joel Embiid is not interested in prolonging traditions of generational deference, but breaking them. Read more »
For the first time in a long time the Knicks stand as a basketball product that's cohesive with a pie-skyed, post-everything, Kumbaya dream of excellence. Read more »
After the Bulls burned it down to rebuild, Lauri Markkanen shoots out of the soil with rarely seen cohesion and color, ahead of schedule by even an insane optimist's standards. Read more »
With the NBA emboldened by new and alarming superstar alignment, the year has begun with a series of outsize shots of ecstasy, straight to the heart. Read more »
Despite his ascendancy to the throne, Kevin Durant is clearly unsatisfied enough by the notion of people being wrong about him on the internet that he pretends to be other people to combat them. Read more »
Now 25, Kyrie Irving is ostensibly ready to walk away from automatic championship contests every June for the more self-as-business glory of earnestly bowing out, but doing more on the court and for longer, every April or May. Read more »