I’m not going to unveil anything by saying the NBA is a league of individual stars. That has been the case forever — since, like, George Mikan emerged as a 7-foot human-beast. It is not about generations, magnificent peer-groups coming out at the same time, or the engendering of übermensch.

It is just about basketball being a sport in which a small squad of five men — at most — combine at the same time in the playing hardwood, thus making it much easier for one of them to rise above the rest, and therefore giving birth to the figure…

Facing a San Antonio Spurs team playing below .500, the lowly Pelicans inaugurated Zion for the first time with high hopes of righting their season’s wrongs — New Orleans entered the affair with a putrid 17–28 record (.378) more than halfway through the season. Williamson started his first pro game and went on to play a staggering 18 minutes that were more than enough to make us all drool about his future — possibilities unsolidified, a blank canvas still to be colored by the then-rookie and fresh-out-of-training No. 1 pick.

Zion’s 18 rounds of the clock felt short. Way too…

We are mere hours past the league-changing James Harden trade. Yes, league-changing trade, I said. Houston netted itself “eight” draft picks — four first-rounders and four pick swaps, the latter not adding to the bounty but still turning things into best-case-scenario assets no matter what— spanning from 2021 to 2027 (!) and depending on how where does end, the league can get into one of the very different potential timelines.

Anyways, I’m not here to discuss anything related to James Harden, nor his beard, nor his belly, nor his clubbing/partying ways — note entirely, at least. I’m here to talk…

If you’re like me, you spend an unreasonable amount of your days consuming NBA content. If you’re like me, you also follow some of the most “influential” Twitter accounts: [dear reader, insert your favorite #NBATwitter handles here]. And, if you pay the slightest attention to the headlines popping from any of these sources like I do, you know what’s buzzing in the Capital of Basketball, the Mecca of Hoops, the Ball-Handling Cradle, Madison Square Garden itself: where the New York Knickerbockers are above .500 in the month of January for the first time since 2013.

Pause for a moment. Back…

Let’s go back in time. Place yourself in 2005. At that moment, only four players had retired while having spent twelve or more seasons with the team that initially drafted them — John Stockton, Rik Smits, David Robinson, and Reggie Miller.

Now, fast-forward to December of 2019. What you’d find is a list of single-team players not much longer than the previous decade: Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Jeff Foster, Manu Ginobili, Udonis Haslem, and Nick Collison were the ones engrossing one-team careers.

Think about this: In two full decades of basketball, only eleven players went on to play…

The National Basketball Association launched its restart back on Thursday, July 30. Everybody was super excited about it. So excited, in fact, that folks got to their Twitter accounts in anticipation of the Utah Jazz vs. New Orleans Pelicans first game since the league got suspended to proclaim that “basketball is back!”, Wrong statement, my men.

Basketball was about to be back, sure, but only NBA basketball. Why, you say? Well, because — and I’m keeping this purely to American sports, as leagues around the world had already come back then — the Women’s National Basketball Association had been in…

The year was 2010, and this Harvard-graduate was a California-native of Chinese and Taiwanese descent. You can count the number of Harvard alumni to get drafted and play in an NBA game with one hand —it takes two fingers, to be exact. And to be Taiwanese? Even fewer fingers. So it wasn’t surprising to have never heard of this kid; even when checking the list of names called during the 2010 NBA Draft, you wouldn’t find Jeremy Lin’s name on it.

Somehow, the appeal and rareness that turned Yao into a sought-after asset might’ve slightly killed Lin’s chances of making…

Once upon a time, giants roamed the Earth. And back then, they were considered fundamental tokens, the absolute truth of winning and dominance. In fact, in the big world of basketball, the biggest men became the ultimate rulers, the be-all and end-all of the great orange equation. The Folktale of Russell. The Myth of Wilt. The Legend of Kareem. There is no shortage of stories painting colossus-men conquering courts in hoop’s lore. Those fancy tales weren’t only a thing of the far past, though. …