Category: Sports News

Why Butler vs. Dončić is matchup to watch in Warriors-Lakers game originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

It’s fascinating each time Stephen Curry and LeBron James go after each other, as they will Thursday night when Curry’s Warriors face James’ Lakers in Los Angeles.

But another matchup might be even more intriguing.

The venerable superstars, with eight NBA championships between them, will have to share the marquee with their team’s new toys: Jimmy Butler III for the Warriors, and Luka Doncić for the Lakers. The curiosity factor is high.

Neither Butler nor Doncić has won an NBA Finals, but each was acquired in February to pursue that goal. Curry-James has a long and distinguished history of high-stakes hoops, but Butler-Doncić has no postseason story – and no previous game of this magnitude.

The atmosphere will be intense when the ball tips off at 7 p.m. inside Crypto.com Arena. Coverage on NBC Sports Bay Area begins at 6 with “Warriors Pregame Live,” with “Warriors Postgame Live” immediately after the TNT telecast.

Golden State (44-31, fifth place in the Western Conference) and Los Angeles (46-29, third place in the West) are among six teams within 2.5 games of each other in the standings. Four will earn playoff berths, with the bottom two headed for the dreaded play-in tournament.

Butler has been a tonic for the Warriors, who were in 10th place with a 25-26 record before his Feb. 8 debut. Their 19-5 record since his arrival has pushed them up the standings. His individual statistics have been impressive enough – 17.5 points, 6.2 assists, 6.1 rebounds, 7.6 free-throw attempts per game – but his reservoir of intangibles has made an extraordinary impact on his teammates.

When Golden State coach Steve Kerr said this week that the Butler trade “saved our season,” there was not a trace of hyperbole.

“He’s just a big-time defender, big-time two-way player,” Kerr said. “Jimmy has made the rest of the pieces fit.”

The trade that sent Butler to the Warriors was stunning, but the deal a few days earlier that sent Doncić to the Lakers was a shocker of such proportions that the widespread initial reaction was disbelief. It rocked the entire NBA.

Doncić, however, has not shifted LA’s season into overdrive. Three of his four highest-scoring games were in losses. He’s shooting 41.5 percent from the field, including 36.1 percent from distance. The intangible impact has been negligible; the Lakers won 62 percent of their games (31-19) before his arrival and have won 60 (15-10) percent since he was added to the roster.

Butler projects to be the first defender on Doncić, as Andrew Wiggins was before Golden State traded him to Miami for Butler. Whoever puts the bigger stamp on the game likely shifts the outcome in his team’s favor.

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Kerr had NBA revelation after watching Steph, Jokić's monster games originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

Steve Kerr is in awe of today’s NBA, and for good reason.

The Warriors coach joined 95.7 The Game’s “Willard & Dibs” on Wednesday, where he was asked about Nuggets superstar Nikola Jokić’s monster 61-point game in Denver’s 140-139 overtime loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday night, which took place shortly after Steph Curry scored a whopping 52 points in Golden State’s 134-125 win over the Memphis Grizzlies at FedExForum, and made a loud declaration about today’s NBA.

“We watched the end of that game on the plane, and man, what a performance,” Kerr said of Jokić’s big game. “You know what I was thinking while watching Steph last night and watching Jokić? If these type of games had happened 10 years ago, honestly, I think NBA fans would have been absolutely losing their minds. And I think what’s happened is the players have gotten so skilled and they’re doing such amazing things, and I think our game is being taken for granted right now.

“What these guys are doing is so spectacular. I could have never survived the NBA if I were playing today. I couldn’t have survived. These guys are so talented, they’re so good, and it’s like you read these articles (saying) ‘the NBA product isn’t that great.’ Are you kidding me? Are you looking at these guys? They’re just spectacular and they’ve never been more skilled and I’m just blown away by what I see night after night.”

The 37-year-old Curry, in his 16th NBA season, scored 52 points with 10 rebounds and eight assists on 16-of-31 shooting from the field and 12 of 20 from 3-point range against the Grizzlies. Jokić, who currently is battling Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for his fourth MVP award, scored 61 points with 10 rebounds and 10 assists, setting the record for the most points scored in a triple-double in league history.

Just another Tuesday night in the Association, right?

While the league and fans around the world have grown accustomed to these herculean-efforts from players like Curry, Jokić and many others, Kerr believes it’s necessary to take a step back and appreciate the greatness of today’s NBA.

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Jaylen shares update on knee injury, how he plans to manage pain originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

Jaylen Brown scored a team-high 24 points in the Boston Celtics’ loss to the Miami Heat on Wednesday. But the right knee injury that kept him out of six of Boston’s previous 13 games clearly is still impacting him.

“I was in some pain today,” Brown told reporters after Wednesday’s game at TD Garden. “But you know, just pushing through it, trying to find ways to still be aggressive and add value to the team and stuff like that. Just something I gotta work through and manage.”

Brown looked visibly hobbled at times during Wednesday’s game yet still hit 10 of his 20 shots to go along with nine rebounds and four assists. The Celtics star suggested the ailment — which the team has described as a “right knee posterior impingement” — will simply need to be managed on a nightly basis.

“It’s a good step forward,” Brown said of playing with the injury. “I’ve had to come to grips that every night I’m not gonna feel my normal self, but that doesn’t mean I still can’t make plays and things like that. So, it’s just something that we are working through. Today was a good step forward.”

Brown has played in 60 games this season, and he’d need to play in at least five of the Celtics’ final six regular-season games to hit the 65-game threshold of eligibility for awards like All-NBA and Defensive Player of the Year.

Brown insisted that threshold has zero impact on his decision to play or not play, and that his goal is to be in a good place health-wise when the playoffs begin.

“I’ve got some stuff lined up with the medical staff in order to feel better come playoffs,” Brown said. “But for now, just mentally working through not feeling great, but still (being) able to find ways to be effective.

“… I’ve seen some specialists and stuff like that, but we’ve got a great medical staff, and we’ve got good people around. Come playoffs, my goal is to be feeling my best, so we’re just working through that.

“It’s a thing that we kind of manage and push through, but we’ve got a good plan in place.”

With the Eastern Conference’s No. 2 seed essentially locked up, Celtics fans probably wouldn’t hate to see Brown take a few games off down the stretch, even if it disqualifies him from making All-NBA. The C’s will have about a week off between the end of the regular season and the first round as they await the winner of the NBA play-in tournament, however, so Brown will at least have that time to make sure his knee is right for the postseason.

Boston’s next game is Friday night at TD Garden against the Phoenix Suns at 7:30 p.m. ET.

Who would win in a fight between LeBron James and Stephen A Smith is a question only Stephen A Smith would think to ask. There has been little avoiding the question since the Los Angeles Lakers superstar confronted ESPN’s No 1 personality during a recent game against the New York Knicks. The player was venting his displeasure at Smith for his pointed comments about James’s eldest son, and Lakers teammate, Bronny – the 55th pick in last year’s NBA draft.

James approached Smith, a courtside spectator for the game, and appeared to tell him to “keep my son out of this shit” – a callback to Smith questioning whether Bronny deserved to be on a league roster. Smith went on TV the next day to make clear that he wasn’t actually picking on Bronny, the player; he was really calling out LeBron as a bad father for setting a high bar for his son’s pro career. Smith would come back to this point often while making the media rounds after signing a $100m ESPN extension. That should have been the end of the argument – but then last week LeBron sat down with Pat McAfee, whose show follows Smith’s on ESPN, and dismissed Smith as an ice cream-bingeing, couch-bound fanboy.

That set the stage last Thursday for Smith to make his most unhinged ESPN appearance yet. Among other things, he bashed James for skipping the hall of fame induction ceremony for his friend and former teammate Dwyane Wade and for skipping Kobe Bryant’s funeral – claims that were made in bad faith, as it turned out. Viewers were quick to remind Smith that James had indeed attended Bryant’s funeral, and had a pretty good excuse for missing Wade’s ceremony: Bronny had just suffered a cardiac arrest. But the wildest shot by far was the 6ft 1in, 57-year-old Smith saying he “would have immediately swung on” James if the 6ft 9in, 250lb NBA forward had “put hands on me.” That was the moment when the sports world realized its narrator had made himself a main character – although Smith did at least have the good sense to admit he would have lost the fight.

Smith definitely has main character energy; he’s the ESPN omniscient who struts into the arena dressed to the nines while cameras are rolling, just like the players, and cries blasphemy! at the ideas that offend his logic. For a minimum of two hours on weekdays, the native New Yorker can be seen offering up his singular brand of hysterically provocative opinions on ESPN’s morning show, First Take. That’s when he’s not serving up cultural takes on his podcast or entertaining a run for president on The Sean Hannity Show or acting on General Hospital. It’s enough to make you wonder if Smith ever sleeps or runs out of steam.

I can’t knock Smith’s hustle. He has been starting arguments as far back as the late-1980s, when he was a scholarship basketball player at Winston-Salem State in North Carolina – a powerhouse historically Black College. Tim Grant, a longtime Winston-Salem hoops assistant, remembers dividing the team between two vans for one far-flung away game, and his boss – the legendary coach Clarence “Big House” Gaines – picking Smith to ride with him in the one that didn’t have a functioning radio. (“He’ll talk all the way to Memphis,” Gaines quipped.) While writing for the college paper, Smith called for Gaines – who trailed only Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp on the NCAA’s all-time wins list – to retire. “But then my dad helped him get his first gig at the Greensboro News & Record, a newspaper,” says Clarence Gaines Jr, a respected former NBA scout. (Smith’s playing career was ultimately cut short by a freak knee injury.)

Within six years Smith was on the Philadelphia 76ers beat covering Allen Iverson – a close relationship that set the stage for his rise. He broke through at ESPN in 2005 as a talkshow host and NBA analyst, only to wind up out of a job four years later when he and the network couldn’t agree on a new contract. He’d spend the next two years in TV wilderness – on CNN one minute weighing in on the government intervention in Wall Street pay practices, on ABC the next playing a bit part as a fixer on America’s longest-running soap – before ESPN brought him back as a debate partner for Skip Bayless, another columnist who became a TV blowhard.

With Bayless, Smith turned the network from a journalism paragon that once penalized on-air personalities for expressing their political views to the wanton clickbait farm where Smith now measures himself against McAfee – the ex-NFL punter turned $85m show pony who has filled ESPN with frat house energy. Sadly, that includes amplifying dismal rumors about a teenage college student. Still: even within the mad scramble of the sports media hunger games, there’s something surreal in seeing Smith – an NBA booster for a TV rights holder – get sucked into a slanging match with the biggest name in the sport. In response to Smith’s fighting words, James posted a clip of Smith creakily swinging at a boxing trainer’s padded hands.

Smith has had manyepic rants over the course of long career, but this is the first one that feels truly personal. (Some observers reckon the bad blood goes back to Smith spending years promoting Michael Jordan as the greatest basketball player of all time over James.) It also has James, the most media friendly superstar in sports since he entered the NBA in 2003, acting out of character. The egos in conflict here are unfathomably large. “I was here before he got here in 2003, and, in all likelihood I’m going to be here when he’s gone,” Smith said – as if James isn’t also a media mogul in his own right. It’s a weird flex coming from a soap opera actor, even if drama is the point.

Sport feuds tend not to break out when the athlete and the media star are both at the top of the game. Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell never feuded publicly, but they did have plenty of on-air exchanges full of sharp words and good-natured banter – with Ali getting in the best jabs at Cosell’s hairpieces and speaking cadence. And even when Cosell did buck up and say Ali was past his prime as the champ kept on fighting into his late-30s, most saw those blows for what they were: tough love.

It used to be that if a sports journalist criticized an athlete on the record, they faced them afterward to accept the consequences – so give Smith some credit for making himself available for James’s broadside. He could have maintained the higher ground by acknowledging theaudacity (to borrow Smith’s words) of the most prominent Black man in media calling another Black man who grew up fatherless a bad dad for – checks notes – raising a son who somehow managed to beat the odds and achieve his own NBA dream. Instead, Smith tripled and quadrupled down.

Besides, Bronny’s rookie struggles don’t mean he doesn’t belong in the NBA – players often take a while to find their feet. Reed Sheppard and Tidjane Salaun, who went No 3 and No 6 overall in last year’s draft, have spent time in the G-League alongside Bronny, and Smith hasn’t spent significant airtime interrogating their pro prospects. No, LeBron hooking up his kid with his job isn’t the best argument for fair play – even though LeBron has pulled that move before with his high school teammates to gangbusters effect. But the second round of the draft is kind of a crapshoot anyway. The Lakers could’ve done worse than pick Bronny over a similar caliber player who hasn’t been in their orbit for the past six years. And after Bronny’s furious run to close the G-league season, who can’t say the Lakers were justified in taking the flyer?

There’s a saying in journalism: never become the story. By beefing with James, Smith shows why his opinions shouldn’t be regarded as anything more than an exercise in making television. The longer he runs his yap, the more he ruins the games by making them all about him. Sports discourse overall is poorer for it.

Report: Morant, Hield issued warnings for ‘inappropriate' gestures originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

The NBA concluded its investigation of the viral antics at the end of the Golden State Warriors’ win over the Memphis Grizzlies on Tuesday night.

After the league reportedly looked into Grizzlies star Ja Morant and Warriors guard Buddy Hield appearing to use finger gun gestures toward each other in the final seconds of Golden State’s 134-125 win, the NBA deemed the actions were not intended to be violent in nature, but were inappropriate and issued warnings to both players and their respective teams, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Thursday, citing sources.

Things got chippy between the two teams with 20 seconds remaining in the game, as both Morant and Hield were issued double-technical fouls after the Warriors guard appeared to make the gesture first.

Morant previously was suspended twice for flashing a gun on Instagram live videos in 2023, with the first being an eight-game suspension for having a gun at a Denver nightclub. The second video happened over the summer, when he flashed what appeared to be a gun in a car and had to serve a 25-game suspension.

And while the NBA doesn’t believe the gestures were violent in nature, it still took action in the form of warnings.

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Why Kerr believes Steph earns fewer foul calls than other NBA stars originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

Warriors coach Steve Kerr has a theory about why superstar Steph Curry doesn’t receive the same amount of foul calls as other NBA stars.

In speaking to 95.7 The Game’s “Willard and Dibs” on Wednesday, Kerr detailed how he believes Curry’s style of play is hard to officiate for league refs.

“Trust me, it does not, because I’ve been trying that for 10 years,” Kerr told Willard and Dibley about Curry pleading for foul calls not being a successful tactic. “It has not helped at all. I just think Steph is a very different player than all the other stars in the league. He’s the only star who plays off the ball as much as he does. 

“And he’s the only guy who faces the kind of face-guarding – we call it top-locking defense – and I think what happens sometimes is the officials just aren’t used to making that call, where he’s being held and grabbed away from the basket; to me, those should be automatic fouls.”

Curry has averaged 3.9 free-throw attempts throughout his 16-year career and 4.0 over 63 games during the 2024-25 NBA season. 

As Kerr – and Dub Nation – know all too well, Curry doesn’t get the same whistles as the league’s other top names.

For example, Oklahoma City Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a leading candidate for his first NBA MVP award, has averaged 8.1 free throws over 72 games; and that’s not even his highest figure, as he averaged 9.8 in 2022-23. Similarly, Los Angeles Clippers star and known charity-stripe connoisseur James Harden is averaging 7.3 this season, but that’s low compared to his 11.8 in 2019-2020.

Kerr has done years of complaining on Curry’s behalf. But the coach just doesn’t believe the refs give Curry the same credit they do other stars because of his unique, off-ball style.

“The league makes a point of talking about freedom of movement, but let’s face it, most of the league plays pick-and-roll,” Kerr told Willard and Dibley. “And so they’re used to calling pick-and-roll fouls and seeing that kind of action. 

“I don’t think our officials are as used to seeing off-ball stuff; honestly, that’s my biggest complaint when I’m talking to the refs or send clips to the league; it’s almost always about off-ball holding of Steph because that’s supposed to be a foul.”

Defenders often hold onto Curry’s jersey and body for dear life when guarding the four-time NBA champion on the perimeter. But perhaps officiating crews are focused on other things.

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