Loose Balls

All good things must come to an end. Having lost five games in a row, the hot start that the Utah Jazz got out to this season seems to have fully cooled off. They came out of the gates storming with an unlikely amount of synergy, and peeled off 12 wins in their first 18 games. They were considerably better than everyone expected, including those who expected them to be better than everyone else expected.

The same growing pains that...

Across successive NBA Collective Bargaining Agreements, instruments have been put in place to protect teams against the threat of losing their best young talents to free agency, theoretically correcting a situation brought about by years of travel in the opposite direction.

Restricted free agency is an imperfect tool, though, and there does still exist a pathway through which young players can up sticks and leave careless teams. An...

Father time, they say, is undefeated. But you can at least negotiate with him.

In what will indisputably be the latter stages of his career, Cleveland Cavaliers big man Kevin Love is holding back the inevitable. As the hair greys and the team around him transforms, he remains the mainstay, the lone holdover from the championship era, the bridge to the past. And he also remains very good.

It has been quite the reputational transform...

For whatever reason, Deandre Ayton has become the barometer by which the Phoenix Suns are often measured. The man who has simultaneously been a big-minute starter and an afterthought, who they did not much value yet whom they gave a maximum salary to, who they would not extend but who they would match an offer sheet for, and who can be both underwhelming and irreplaceable, occupies an enigmatic place in the hearts and minds of his ...

The Philadelphia 76ers drafted Tyrese Maxey with the 21st overall pick in 2020, directly between Precious Achiuwa and Zeke Nnaji. He had averaged 14.0 points, 4.2 assists and 3.9 rebounds per game in a heavy minutes share in his only season at Kentucky, but had not really shone in any area of the game; while he had few weaknesses and played with energy, he was not a huge athlete, a sub-par shooter, inefficient from many areas of th...

"Culture", a thing that is both hard to define and badly yearned for, is key to creating winning sports teams. So says everyone.

Basketball is no different. The late Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause was widely mocked for his (paraphrased) statement that "organisations win championships", and his clunky phrasing (which either gave or allowed for the inference that he was saying he and his front office were more important than Mich...