rayratto Page 3 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Get Excited For Free Agency, A Delightful Graveyard Of Best-Laid Plans
According to Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer, who got his number from someone else, there is around $474 million in available cap space to be flung about the NBA this summer, more than the last two seasons combined, and his conclusion from the resultant analysis is that the most important thing a team ...
All NBA Draft Grades Are Useless. Here Are My NBA Draft Grades
Now that the mock drafts are dead, the fashion show is done, all the crying parents have come and gone and Woj and Shams are back in the holster for a few hours, let us see what Postseason Advent has wrought:...
The NHL Offseason Is Off To A Roaring, Boring Start
This right here is why the National Hockey League doesn’t get it. Erik Karlsson just signed a record-setting eight-year deal worth more than $11 million per year with the San Jose Sharks without any fuss or muss. Deal framed, talked about, signed. Couldn’t be easier....
Oakland's Past Is Brighter Than The Warriors' Future
OAKLAND — The nostalgia in the building was thick enough to cut with DeMarcus Cousins, so much so that many of the last 19,596 humans shoved into what has always been known by the locals as “The Coliseum” almost forgot that there was a championship to defend, a season to prolong and a summer to defe...
Who The Hell Knows How This Ends, But At Least It's Not Without A Fight
Nope, I have nothing for you. I cannot explain how the Golden State Warriors won Game 5 of the NBA Finals, and neither can any of you. A team in tatters refused to shred, and it remains obstinate in the face of a hockey team’s list of injuries. This is almost not at all about the Toronto Raptors any...
The Raptors Are The Warriors Now
Recency bias is a hateful but dominant force in the best-of-seven world, so the clear assumption to be made from Game 4 of the NBA Finals is that Game 6 seems unlikely. The Toronto Raptors are the new Golden State Warriors, and the Golden State Warriors are finally all about the trailing step, the a...
The Raptors Won But Finals Chaos Still Reigns
It’s cheap to say that the Raptors beat the Gldn Stae Warors (which is to say, 63 percent of the Golden State Warriors) in Game 3 of the NBA Finals; in fact, it isn’t much of a stretch to say that the Raptors might have won the game anyway....
The Weirder The Finals Get, The Better
The news from the NBA Finals is all good, kids, and it is this: Nobody has any narratives left to invent. The events of Games 1 and 2 have savaged all the preconceptions, conceptions, and the way it’s looking, the post-conceptions of this series. Nobody has any idea what’s coming next, and nobody wi...
What Happened To All The Interesting Refs?
One of the nerdier things a basketball fan can do at 9 a.m. Eastern Weirdo Time is to go to the NBA website and glom onto the identities of the officials who will work whatever game interests you True, NBA ref nerddom is an exceedingly small subset of Nerdvania, but let a thousand sets of hipster gl...
Even If The Warriors Win, Oakland Loses
This is the real NBA Finals, the one that transcends Larry O’Brien, Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Doris Burke, Woj, Adam Silver, dynasties, the next Why-The-Lakers-Are-On-Fire tell-all, the works. This is Oakland’s last stand with the team it raised from a pup, its last healthy bite of an apple that ...
This Is The Most Entertaining The Lakers Have Been In Years
Now THIS is the kind of story fantasists are asking for, and there isn’t as much as a matchbook in sight. There is an attempt here by several people of power and influence to seize the Los Angeles Lakers, and though you may wish this kind of plot turn concerned a team relevant enough to actively hat...
Is There Anything Fishy About The Sharks?
The San Jose Sharks have forged a reputation over the decades of always being invited to the party and always having to leave by 10:30, either because that’s when their ride is leaving or they have to relieve the babysitter or they have to work in the morning and need their eight hours because they ...
If The Pelicans Don't Deserve Zion Williamson, Every Other Team Deserves Him Less
When the New Orleans Pelicans landed the right to seize the beginning of Zion Williamson’s basketball career, the reaction was swift, predictable and consistent: “What did those people do to deserve such a prize?”...
Do The Blazers Have A Chance Against The Warriors?
Now that we have entered the dog days of the Western Conference playoffs, it is incumbent upon us to find ways to caricature the Portland Trail Blazers to keep up our interest in what most folks fully expect to be a desultory series against the Golden State Warriors....
We Demand More Overtimes
The best overtime game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs was the Denver-Portland game Friday night. All glory and honor to Blues-Stars Game 7 Tuesday night, which certainly did its best, combining multiple overtimes with the additional sparkle of not just sudden death but expulsion, but it remains the sil...
The NBA Got Out Of Basketball's Way
When Allie LaForce was dispatched to get a postgame interview from Tuesday’s Rockets-Warriors game, she or maybe her producer chose the sport’s third eye, Klay Thompson. Not bad, as these things go. Thompson is always a better choice than nearly anyone else for these say-little-and-then-go-inside se...
If This Is Rockets-Warriors, Let's Just Get It Over With As Soon As Possible
In case you ever decide to hate sports without the crutch of a rooting interest, financial, familial, or simply laundry-based, here’s your ticket. The pre–NBA Finals NBA Finals are already a drunken bar argument, and they’re only going to get worse. The Houston Rockets ... the Golden State Warriors ...
Sports Were Good As Hell Last Night
When God (or whatever you decide is the name of the invisible being you keep nagging for favors for your favorite sports team) stops letting the nutters run the world and starts listening to the constituents, we will get Thunder-Blazers and Knights-Sharks on a loop that never ends, with a crawl acro...
Welcome To The Jon Gruden Show
The NFL Draft is the world’s largest nonsense bazaar, and more tonnage is shoveled in the final two weeks than in the other 50 combined, so when Ian Rapoport tweeted out the other day that Jon Gruden and Mike Mayock sent all the Raiders’ scouts home and did not expect to recall them before the NFL D...
Is This The End For Joe Thornton And The Sharks As We Know Them?
The San Jose Sharks have been reduced in their time to being the NHL’s glorified version of the Portland Trail Blazers—almost always in the playoffs, always ultimately being on the business end of a handshake line. It’s almost a zen koan at this point; when unrequited love turns to “Call us when you...