Anthony Davis can be dominant, brilliant, unstoppable, invaluable. But we have also seen him tumble over and over and over. Read more »

Marc Gasol offers the Lakers much needed equilibrium. A cool counterweight to the occasionally overwhelming aesthetics of tell-don't-show Laker grandiosity. Read more »

Billionaires have their own ideas about what's tacky and what might severely compromise the quality of play, but their taste is all that separates the league from becoming a total cash-grabby farce. Read more »

The Grizzlies do not carry themselves, or play the game with small market energy. They are, rather, a team that understands both the fluidity and the brutality of basketball, and the emotional rhythms that tend to shape 48 minutes. Read more »

The NBA has historically had a tough time rewarding elite defenders with limited or low usage style play on the offensive end. Rudy Gobert was the most valuable player on the team with the best record in the NBA but was nowhere near the MVP conversation. Read more »

The regular season felt even more random than usual. What this has meant for the seeding has been clear, but what remains to be seen is whether that sense of arbitrariness will continue into the postseason. Read more »

Fully 36 years old and nursing a high ankle sprain, LeBron James is into year two of his elder title contention phase with the Lakers, and his tendency to grandly narrativize everything he accomplishes has kicked into as high of a gear as we've ever seen from a player. Read more »

The guys that go into the Hall of Fame precede the current crop of players by a generation or several and their accomplishments have begun to acquire the smell of warehoused memorabilia. Read more »

The Jazz jumped from ninth in Net Rating last season to first in 20-21. Read more »

Top-heavy NBA teams do something to the way we look at the landscape of contenders that frustrates us more than the notion of great players joining forces; they seemingly render a tier of masterfully skillful players obsolete. Read more »

The Jazz and Suns have established themselves as two different types of main character but they're both defined by a kind of improbability, an anxiety about whether or not what they've been so far reflects what they're truly made of. Read more »

The eight-team play-in zone is all of the following: extra competitive padding, extra competitive pressure, confusing, ephemeral, purgatorial, and a new benchmark for ascendancy. Read more »

For all his flaws, Nate McMillan knows basketball and he knows how to treat people. That's not something to be taken for granted. Read more »

Russell Westbrook does everything so rapidly and all at once that it's hard to make sense of it, so it is fitting that his decline should happen unevenly. Read more »

The Lakers will either be the most spontaneous, sensationally improvised championship team of all time- or, more likely, a monster that is not actually under anyone's bed. Read more »

Championship teams come apart. Kevin Love and the Cavs both went on grasping at the pieces that were better off burning up in a return to the atmospheric realities of a league that, healthy or not, never stops. Read more »

The Knicks are exploring the outer limits of what a not-great team can do when they play really hard every night. That counts for a lot, especially in a sleepy pandemic season. Read more »

It's not so much that Paul George has lost in the playoffs, but it's also the way that he's lost. There's still time for George to change his story. Read more »

It is lousy to watch a sulking and thoroughly bummed out former star imposing his dissatisfaction on everyone else, uncaring and unaware. Read more »

Stephen Curry is giving it everything he's got, as if these April games were playoff contests, and it's exciting to see how expansive he can get, how much blank space he can fill. Read more »