A sure thing is hard to find in sports betting and basketball scouting, although some players are guaranteed to be great. Jabari Parker is a next-best-thing player.
Matt Youmans
Instead of shooting for back-to-back championships, the San Antonio Spurs spent the entire season bouncing back, and their comeback Sunday in Game 5 of the NBA Finals was symbolic of it all.
With the final round falling on Father’s Day, and especially because he has played second fiddle six times in the U.S. Open, Phil Mickelson will be the sentimental favorite of most fans and media this week.
No asterisk goes next to this result, and no excuses will come from the Miami Heat. Only one player pulled up lame and limped off with cramps, but it just happened to be LeBron James, the best player in the game.
Old-age jokes no longer bother Tim Duncan and the San Antonio Spurs, who continue to age gracefully and inspire senior citizens everywhere.
A depressing era is ending. It spanned eight years, years of mostly mediocre and sometimes really bad baseball. Tim Chambers finally has put an end to it.
Sooner or later, something needs to change. The Oklahoma City Thunder are going out with a whimper again, and Kevin Durant deserves better.
Time will tell if LeBron James stepped into a time machine this season and traveled back to Cleveland. That was where he spent seven years trying to resuscitate a corpse.
Fourteen quarterbacks were called during the three-day NFL Draft marathon, and at least half will be busts in the long run. Expect none to make a bigger impact this season than Josh McCown will for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
It could have been dumb luck that brought the Cleveland Browns and Johnny Manziel together. He was there for the taking, but team after team passed him by, and eventually everything fell perfectly into place.
As a quarterback, Johnny Manziel is a playmaker and risk taker, the definition of a gambler. Sometimes that’s a problem. But even the cynics can see his entertainment value is a sure thing.
At one point, it was almost a given that Paul George, the NBA’s next big star, would lead the Indiana Pacers to the stratosphere. The sharps and squares often are at odds and see things differently, but on this point, almost everyone agreed.
On any other day, Stephen Curry’s seven 3-pointers would have been the only story. Sideshow aside, Curry shot life back into the Golden State Warriors, and that’s what mattered most to underdog bettors. The Warriors were aiming to get even in a first-round playoff series. The Los Angeles Clippers are tied up in a full-blown media circus.
How about a rematch with Seattle and another road trip to New England? Those are the so-called highlights of the Denver Broncos’ regular-season schedule, which calculates as the second toughest in the league. It’s not necessarily a doomsday scenario, but for Peyton Manning, it’s definitely not getting any easier.
Everything starts with the coach. Gregg Popovich sets a steady tone for the San Antonio Spurs, who resemble the Aristotle theory that excellence is a habit, not an act.