(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
Hard to believe really, that I just watched a replay of the last game of the season. No more games on Foxtel or One. No more huddling around laptops at work with Justin TV streaming during lunch breaks. No more alt-tabbing frantically as the boss walks past your desk. The last Finals [...]

(AP Photo/Chris Graythen, Pool)
So it happened again. In last year’s Finals Game 4 we saw the Celtics historic comeback, an improbable win snatched from the jaws of defeat, a 48-minute nightmare that LA would wake from only to see the insurmountable 3-1 deficit staring back at them. It happened again this year, not a comeback [...]

AP Photo/Matt Sayles
The Orlando Magic were within inches of leveling this series at 1-1. Inches of Courtney Lee’s layup dropping through at the buzzer in regulation. Inches within a Dwight Howard deflection of a Kobe pass to Gasol that resulted in the game-sealing three point play. Make no mistake, this was a game that could [...]

AP Photo/Chris Carlson
I watched parts of Game 1 Friday afternoon at work, trading emails with a few friends about a possible Magic upset, before heading out to a farewell lunch. I checked the scores later on my phone - in the space of one quarter the game had been blown to high hell. Curious to [...]

It always amuses me when I read a playoff series preview, how people do the position vs position thing, coach vs coach, bench vs bench, and then make some sort of conclusion that amounts to adding up points accrued along the way. Hell, it’s the easiest way to do it, and without trawling through two [...]

Kobe Bryant has now done something that Tim Duncan never did: lead his team to back-to-back Finals appearances. That thought startled me a little when it first entered my brain, but it’s true. Since MJ and the Bulls faced off against Karl Malone and the Jazz in ‘97 and ‘98, it’s been exceedingly difficult for [...]

So today Kobe did the team thing and it paid off. Not without being a “gamble” in his eyes, which he admitted after the game, but rarely has such a huge gamble paid off. Not just because of the win, but because of what it means. Kobe had his second lowest shot-total of the entire [...]

My lingering memory from Game 3 of this series will not be Kobe’s clutch three or Ariza’s steal. It will be Pau Gasol’s fourth quarter performance and the Lakers persistence in running their offense through him. That Gasol needed more touches was painstakingly obvious through the first two games of this series, because as was [...]

This series is one Ariza steal away from being 2-0 in the Nuggets favor, and one Kobe fumble from being 2-0 in the Lakers favor. It’s almost impossible to split these teams over the first two games, but here’s two things we’ve learnt:

The Lakers are incapable of stopping Melo, not because they don’t have suitable [...]

AP Photo/David Richard
Could you have asked for a better start to the Conference Finals? The two games so far were decided by a total of three points, we saw 40 point games from Kobe and Lebron (and a just as impressive effort from Melo), a broken shot-clock by Dwight Howard, a 70-foot hail Mary from [...]