The Saturday Blues Column

Hello, old friend. Much like Zach Lowe and Joel Embiid, it’s been a while since I’ve talked or written about basketball here. While I’ve been watching the games and keeping up regularly with the NBA and all of the results, narratives, trades, and news, I have been silent in the long-form writing that I’ve become so accustomed to in the last few years.  Well, it is time to get back in the ring and write not only this piece - some thoughts on the NBA - but my playoff preview, releasing tomorrow. In the meantime, I wanted to make my awards predictions and talk about some of the things that I missed out on while I was gone. Let’s hope I haven’t lost my fastball. What’s going on with my Celtics? I have to start with spewing all of my thoughts on the Celtics onto this blank Google Doc before I can discuss anything else regarding the NBA. The East’s two seed, the “best starting five in the NBA”, and the most well-rounded team in the league has had quite an interesting year. In my eyes, it...

            In basketball, we often associate a quiet whimper with a series ending in four or five games. These conference finals, while blowouts on paper, were made up of close games, interesting dynamics, and surprise breakouts. As a primer for my perspective on these playoffs, the deeper we’ve gotten into the postseason, the worse the takes have been surrounding individual players as well as teams. For the most part, I’m going to try and focus my recaps and analysis on what I saw rather than lazy and contrived takes but I’m leaving this as a warning that as I dive into the finals matchup, which is the most toxic NBA Finals in a while, I could fall victim to focusing on a narrative. I’ll do my best because the basketball itself is actually quite intriguing but there are certain ways of thinking about these playoffs that do need some critiquing. That being said, there have been two series of basketball since I last wrote here, and there is one more to...