Posts by Ben Detrick

  • Clippers

    The Clippers, the Thunder, and the NBA Elite

    First, bowing to the tyranny of the news cycle, we’re going to discuss The Dunk. The challenge here is figuring out how to describe something in a compelling way that everyone has seen 50 times, screamed over, and tweeted about. As a novelty, let’s take it in reverse. Three minutes after the incident, the Staples […]

  • LeBron Makes Kobe Look Thirtysomething

    Part of the reason the tiresome LeBron James/Kobe Bryant debate lingers on is that they’ve never, ever played a meaningful game. All-Star antics and a handful of regular-season meetings aren’t enough to shift either party’s ideological platform. Kobe has five championship rings. LeBron is statistically superior. Kobe has played with an outlandish collection of talent. […]

  • Time to Pray to Your Winged Deity, Knicks Fans

    Poor Toney Douglas. In the middle of last season, the Knicks were looking to acquire a backup point guard to ensure the diminutive reserve wouldn’t ever have any distribution duties. Six months later, he was asked to orchestrate the offense for a team with championship aspirations. To the surprise of far too many people, Douglas […]

  • How Syracuse Held Off Marquette to Remain Beasts of the Big East

    Last March, the Marquette Golden Eagles dropped a guillotine on the Syracuse Orange with a 66-62 victory in the second round of the NCAA tournament. As far as beheadings go, it was an especially ugly one.

  • Syracuse Stays on Track

    Sports analysts love talking about “distractions.” These intersections between athletics and real life — arrests and contracts, marriages and divorces, births and deaths — offer ready-made narratives that are easy to spout and difficult to deny. In the postgame rundowns, winners are more heroic and losers more forgivable. Write it down now: As Kobe’s mileage […]

  • RIP, Rip-through: Celebrating the NBA Rule Change

    Some things exist only in movies. Epiphany-spurred couples reconcile at airports seconds before one embarks for Madagascar. Villains leave heroes tied up next to timed explosives after explaining their fiendish plan to steal the world’s magnesium supply. And twentysomething people in New York City live in spacious, vermin-free apartments. Ah, Hollywood.

  • Democracy Now: On the Sixers Mascot Elections

    In late November, the new owners of the Philadelphia 76ers announced that Hip-Hop, a doo-rag-wearing rabbit who was the team mascot since 1996, had “relocated to a rural part of Pennsylvania to start a family.” We can read between the lines. That’s corporate code-speak for “sentenced to 12 years in Frackville State Correctional Facility for […]

  • Feral Dingos And The Kardashians: Secrets Of The New CBA Revealed

    After months of negotiation, NBA owners and the vestigial representatives of the players’ association agreed to a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that saved the 2011-12 season. Here’s a look at some of the fine print.

  • Henry Sims, Jeff Withey

    Georgetown, Kansas and Big East Expectations

    More than 100 years ago, in the First Battle of Bull Run, the Union Army marched against Confederate troops in Northern Virginia. A painless Yankee victory was anticipated, and white-gloved society types from Washington, D.C., packed mince pies and mutton into their picnic baskets and headed out to watch battlefield action. This seems a gruesome […]

  • Kentucky’s Kids Grow Up Against Kansas

    Obsessively combing through information on high school basketball players has never been the coolest of hobbies. Outside the fungal patches of obscurity that grow in the crevices of the blogosphere, it is the pastime of someone with too much time on their hands and not enough imagination to use it constructively. You could be memorizing […]

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