Category: Sports News

Nothing has gone according to plan over the last 36 hours for the Spurs. First, in a game that in hindsight should have been postponed, what was supposed to be a 2:00 PM CT game in Charlotte yesterday got moved back to 11:00 AM with the hopes being the Spurs would be able to play and get out before the impending winter storm hit. Unfortunately, it was already snowing by tip-off, and after sitting on the tarmac for two hours hoping the runways would be cleared, the Spurs flight was canceled, and they were forced to stay overnight. As a result the tip-off for today’s game at home vs. the Orlando Magic was moved back from 3:00 PM CT to 6:00.

However, today hasn’t been smooth sailing, either. San Antonio Express News’ Tom Orsborn has been monitoring the Spurs’ odyssey to return home today, and it has been everyone’s worse nightmare. After finally leaving Charlotte at little after 10 AM, they were forced to land in Atlanta to change planes after their’s suffered mechanical issues, causing another extended delay.

They finally took off from Atlanta around 1:30 PM CT, and with the flight taking approximately two hours, they should land in San Antonio around 3:30 PM. That would not give them enough time to get to the arena and adequately prepare and warm up, so as a result, the game has now been pushed back again to 8:00 PM CT.

To add insult to injury, Stephon Castle and Victor Wembanyama have been listed as questionable for tonight’s game, with adductor and calf soreness, respectively. (Sounds like code for potential rest games since they’re referring to previous injuries, but most of these scenarios have resulted in the players playing, so hopefully that continues, especially with the added time before tip-off.)

This scenario is unlike anything I’ve seen a team go through ahead of a game, and honestly, the Spurs should be completely forgiven if they can’t pull out a win tonight. They never should have been put in this situation to begin with, and it seems like every other game that happened in the eye of this storm was properly handled. While today’s mechanical issues are not the fault of the NBA, I feel like the game in Charlotte never should have happened, and now they are in a nearly unwinnable situation tonight. If they do somehow pull this one off, it just might be their most impressive achievement of the season.

Oh, and if they win and the Nuggets lose to the Thunder, Mitch Johnson will be an All-Star coach. There’s some added motivation for tonight.

On Saturday evening, Sixers fans gathered to reminisce about the one shining moment this franchise has had in over four decades. The 2001 Eastern Conference Champions team reunited in South Philadelphia in a celebration of what once made professional basketball so special in this city.

The Sixers, of course, did not win the NBA Finals that season. Facing a vaunted Lakers team in the midst of a three-peat, they won Game 1 of the Finals before falling in the next four. Los Angeles went 15-1 that postseason, just a historical throttling that featured two of the game’s all-time greats at the peak of their powers. On the other side of things were the people’s champion in Allen Iverson, the late, great Dikembe Mutombo and a host of beloved role players.

It was great seeing fans young and old cheer on and pay tribute to the lone great Sixers squad of my lifetime before, during and after Saturday’s win over New Orleans. The energy Pat Croce showcases is the epitome of the spirit a professional sports owner should have. Iverson was instrumental to building my love of not just the Sixers, but the sport of basketball overall. His on- and off-the-court impact for a generation cannot be overstated. What 1990s kid doesn’t love Hip-Hop the mascot on top of it all?

I went out of my way to buy tickets for Saturday because it was specifically a 2001 reunion game. I wanted to soak up all those throwback vibes on top of watching this year’s Sixers team make some noise. I wanted to remember what it was like being six or seven years old and seeing the Sixers be the class of the Eastern Conference.

I had a blast seeing the likes of Iverson, Croce and Eric Snow out there and it was lovely to have Joel Embiid put up a 40-point performance on top of it all, but the more I reflect on it, and this is likely more of a me thing, I feel slightly more empty than I anticipated.

I think of Philadelphia’s own Da’Vine Joy Randolph in her Oscar-winning performance in The Holdovers. Her most famous line in the film is, “You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?”

The gold standard of Sixers basketball for more than four decades has been a gentleman’s sweep at the hands of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. It’s bittersweet to me. Our memories, the ones we cherish the most, are important. Iverson winning MVP and his iconic step over in Game 1 of the Finals will live forever in NBA lore. The 2001 Sixers were about more than mere hardware, but I am still dreaming about a summertime parade down Broad Street for this franchise for the first time in my life.

I don’t know when the Sixers will return to the NBA Finals. Hell, I don’t when they’ll be back in the Eastern Conference Finals even. Are the memories and highlights of the 2001 team enough to carry us all over until then? I sure hope so.

The Cleveland Cavaliers have made the three-team trade that broke late last night official. The Cavs acquired Dennis Schroder and Keon Ellis from the Sacremento Kings along with Emanuel Miller from the Chicago Bulls. In return, the Cavs shipped De’Andre Hunter to the Kings and a second-round pick to the Bulls. To make room for Ellis, the Cavs waived former second-round pick Luke Travers.

The team announced the news on Sunday afternoon, along with a statement from Koby Altman, the Cavs’ president of basketball operations.

The statement from Altman reads:

“After careful evaluation and a clearer view of the Eastern Conference landscape, we believe adding Dennis and Keon strengthens our depth, expands our flexibility, and positions us to keep building a Championship caliber team now and into the future. In a season defined by its parity, this move better aligns us for a deeper postseason run. I’m thankful as well to De’Andre, who made an immediate impact upon his arrival to Cleveland and represented the Cavaliers with class. We appreciate everything he did for us both on and off the court, and we wish him the best in Sacramento. We drafted Luke in 2022 and have seen his development improve each year and thank him for his contributions to the franchise.”

The most interesting part of this statement to me is that Altman mentioned that the trade “expands our flexibility.” The move saves the Cavs approximately $50 million in luxury cap payments this season. That is something that would undoubtedly interest the ownership group. However, it also got the Cavs closer to getting under the second-apron threshold. Cutting the money that they did makes it more viable for them to go big-game hunting if they wanted to.

We’ll see what other moves, if any, the Cavs make before the Feb. 5 trade deadline.

The kid Cooper Flagg had just put together an all-time performance, accomplishing something we’d never seen a teenager do in an NBA game, and he was getting ready to follow it up with 34 and 12.

So, of course, Saturday afternoon was the perfect moment for two of the most insane media takes you could dream up in the interim.

Udonis Haslem and Jamal Mashburn, both former NBA players, proved on Saturday that they don’t watch actual NBA games as part of their duties as media personalities, unleashing separate takes on Cooper Flagg’s rookie year that were equally untethered to reality.

Perhaps it’s healthier to simply ignore takes as asinine as these, but this isn’t the doctor’s office. After all, one of them was offered by an “analyst” who was also a highly sought-after NBA Draft prospect once, selected fourth overall by the Dallas Mavericks in 1993. Let’s start with Mashburn.

He was being recorded for broadcast to a wide audience of sports viewers when he said on Saturday, “If I was to put [Cooper Flagg] on that list [of current college Freshmen], he would be sixth.”

Imagine telling a million sports fans with eyes that the guy who had just matched Michael Jordan’s best scoring output as a rookie in an NBA game would be the sixth pick in the upcoming NBA Draft if he hadn’t reclassified, because he “still has some holes in his game.”

It’s true, the 2026 NBA Draft class is likely going to be one of the best in recent memory. BYU’s A.J. Dybantsa, Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, Houston’s Kingston Flemings, Arizona’s Koa Peat, North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson and Duke’s Cam Boozer are all legit prospects with the potential to help change the trajectory of an NBA bottom-feeder. One or two of them may even end up being generational players. Miss me with the “Caleb Wilson’s game is a better fit for the NBA than Cooper Flagg’s” nonsense, though. One is actually doing it. The other hasn’t been given the chance yet. Comparison, and especially this brand of comparison, is the thief of, not only joy, for fuck’s sake, but sanity.

Flagg is already busy proving he is the guy these other six hope to one day become. His 49-point outburst in the Mavericks’ 123-121 loss to the Charlotte Hornets was the best scoring night by a 19-year-old in NBA history. It was his second 40-plus point outing this season. He would follow it up with 34 points and 12 boards in a 111-107 loss to the Houston Rockets mere hours after Mashburn inserted his foot into his mouth on cable television, becoming the youngest player in NBA history to record back-to-back 30-point double-doubles in the process.

We’ll save this clip for a year or so to see how many 40-point nights any of these six tremendous prospects have in their rookie NBA seasons. Kobe Bryant never scored 40 as a rookie. Neither did Luka Dončić. Victor Wembanyama scored exactly 40 once in his rookie season. Flagg is putting together a rookie year that separates him from even these greats. He’s entering rarified air occupied by only Wilt Chamberlain and LeBron James on his best nights.

Now, onto everyone’s (read: no one’s) favorite, Udonis Haslem, who also ran his mouth on Saturday before Flagg continued his run of excellence, when he said that if he were starting a team with one of the NBA’s current rookies, he’d choose Philadelphia 76ers’ guard VJ Edgecombe over Flagg.

“If I’m starting a team, I’m starting a team with a two-way guy,” Haslem said — the inference being that the two rookies he was comparing Edgecombe to are not two-way guys.

“I know Cooper [Flagg] is doing his thing, I know Kon [Knueppel] is doing his thing, but out of all these guys, VJ is the two-way guy,” were the words that tumbled from Haslem’s mouth hole. “He is the guy that can impact the game on both ends. I’ve watched three quarters of VJ Edgecombe guarding Brunson, guarding Luka and then all of a sudden in the fourth quarter, he’s making big shots.”

My brother in Christ, you just described Flagg’s rookie year in an attempt to credit another rookie with doing the exact things that Flagg has accomplished. Too many times, through Flagg’s first 30 or so games with the Mavericks, his teammates forgot about him, the offense flowed through a revolving door of role-player schlock, while Flagg worked tirelessly on the defensive end to keep the opposing team’s best player in check. Then, at a certain point, whether in the fourth quarter of a close game or as fall turns to winter in Flagg’s first season in the NBA, Flagg takes any choice in the matter out of the hands of his coach and his teammates.

He’s been one of the top-10 performers in clutch-game scenarios in the NBA this year. He’s taken his development — again, as a 19-year-old — to another level by asserting his will on games after getting his feet wet for the first 20 games of his rookie campaign. You say you’re describing Edgecombe, but what you’re actually doing is proving that, despite your lofty title at your cushy Amazon gig, you haven’t watched Flagg play.

What you find out when you watch way too much basketball and basketball-related content is that these “analysts” often say shit just to say shit. They blather and meander and meander and blather, filling endless segments with meaningless debate fodder. But when they open mouth and insert foot to this degree, I’m glad Flagg is there with a 34-point, 12-rebound retort at the ready, and I’m glad he’s wearing a Mavericks jersey when he does it.

WINSTON, SALEM, N.C. (AP) — A bomb cyclone over North Carolina forced NASCAR to push its preseason exhibition to Wednesday night because the snow-covered roads are too dangerous for teams and fans to get to historic Bowman-Gray Stadium.

The Clash had been scheduled to run Sunday night and has now been postponed twice, with a schedule adjustment, because of the intense snowfall that blanketed the area. NASCAR first condensed the race into a one-day, Sunday-only show, then pushed the race to Monday.

NASCAR said Sunday it was moving it to Wednesday evening “due to the impacts of historic winter weather across the North Carolina region.”

The race is now scheduled to run one week before qualifying for the Daytona 500, at Daytona International Speedway, where The Clash was held from 1979 through 2022.

The Clash went to a temporary track inside the Los Angeles Memorial Stadium for three seasons, then moved to its grassroots anchor at Bowman Gray last year.

Its first year was a success but the second running has been interrupted by the bomb cyclone, known to meteorologists as an intense, rapidly strengthening weather system. It contributed to nearly a foot (30 centimeters) of snow in and around Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city and home base for the majority of the NASCAR teams.

The snowfall represented a top-five snow event all time in Charlotte, said Peter Mullinax, a meteorologist with weather prediction center in College Park, Maryland.

___

AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing

The Detroit Pistons were a very good basketball team last year, and they have graduated to excellent this season. While saying as much earlier in this season might have generated some side eye, you don’t generate a 5.5-game lead in the Eastern Conference by accident.

The Pistons have made this leap on the back of great coaching and culture setting by JB Bickerstaff and the front office, and continued growth from a core of young players. Nobody has been more important than All-NBA candidate Cade Cunningham, but not too far behind are likely All-Star at 22 years old Jalen Duren and steady growth from Isaiah Stewart, Ausar Thompson, and Ron Holland.

Armed with the third-best point differential in the NBA and the league’s second-most potent defense, the Pistons are for real. They have the foundation, personality, and alpha scorer needed to go to the NBA Finals.

They also have the critical flaws that could see this team bounced in the first round. It deserves better than to chance that fate.

That is why the Pistons front office must make a deal at the NBA trade deadline this week to add at least one and maybe two shooters. Headlines indicate that the Pistons are unlikely to make a big swing at the deadline (think someone like Michael Porter Jr.) and, you know what, fair enough. Detroit doesn’t want to strip away its core or its long-term roster-building vision. Fine.

But you don’t need to make a deal at the top of the market to address this team’s most glaring weakness, and it is glaring. Detroit ranks 28th in 3-point attempts per game and 21st in 3-point percentage. They are middling in overall shooting efficiency despite being able to absolutely dominate in the paint, and that is because they have so few reliable 3-point shooters.

Detroit does have Duncan Robinson, and he has been critical to Detroit’s success. The Pistons rank dead last in 3-point makes this season, and Robinson accounts for just under 25% of the team’s total successful attempts. Only five teams have a player eclipsing 24%, and two of those are the Pelicans and Mavericks. Detroit’s second-most prolific marksman in Cade Cunningham with 78 makes. That is bottom-4 in the league, along with Orlando, Memphis, and the Los Angeles Lakers. In contrast, the No. 2s at the top of the league include former Pistons wing Tim Hardaway Jr. in Denver (140 makes) and Anthony Edwards in Minnesota (156 makes).

The Pistons are playing a dangerous game, and it is one they cannot win in the playoffs. There is too much time between games to scheme up your defense, and there are too many targets on Detroit’s roster offensively and defensively. You want Ausar on the floor, but he needs shooters around him to stick on the floor. Conversely, you need Robinson on the floor for shooting, but how many times can the opponent force a switch so their best player can flambe Robinson’s D are you willing to risk?

The other side of the coin is just how dangerous this team could be if they address the relatively low-hanging fruit of adding some shooting. Their defense would likely remain elite, and they would still be able to dominate opponents inside. They would even better be able to maximize the Cunningham-Duren pick-and-roll. They would still rebound the hell out of the ball, generate steals, and get out and run. That is the recipe for great success in the playoffs. If only the defense isn’t allowed to ignore the perimeter or send two or three guys at Cunningham all game.

I don’t expect or need the Pistons to be going all-in for a title this season. But I need them not to sabotage their chances at a deep playoff run, and the valuable experience it provides for players we are confident will be on this roster for a true potential title run (guys like Cunningham, Duren, and Thompson).

Detroit doesn’t need to sell the farm for Michael Porter Jr., but there are other ways to add 3-point shooting to this roster. The Trail Blazers added Vit Krejci from the Hawks for the cost of Duop Reath and two seconds. Krejci is no All-Star, but he is a 6-foot-8 wing shooting 42% from deep this season.

That is the level of move the Pistons need to make this season. Anything less is letting down their players, their fans, and potentially sabotaging their future. They can’t let that happen.