by gordie | Jul 28, 2025 | NFL
My cell phone sat atop a dresser in a cramped dorm room at Lehigh University, where I was covering Eagles training camp one July day in 2008. I was getting ready to go to dinner with Les Bowen, then of the Philadelphia Daily News, when it rang. What followed was the...
by gordie | Jun 25, 2025 | High School Sports
Dell Jackson, the founder and driving force of LLHoops.com, died a month ago. And when his obituary appeared, I was struck by how many things I didn’t know about him. He was from Wyalusing? Huh. He liked beekeeping? No way. He crafted stained glass? Whoa. None of that...
by gordie | Jun 24, 2025 | NBA
There is a runway now for the Oklahoma City Thunder, one that extends beyond the NBA championship they won Sunday night and into the foreseeable future. One that could enable them to build a mini-dynasty, to soar over a league weighed down by parity. The roster, led...
by gordie | Jun 22, 2025 | NBA
It hardly seems appropriate to discuss the made-up drama of a Game 7 shortly after American bombs have fallen in Iran, but here we are. At a time like this, I can’t help but think of the immortal words that appeared on the satirical website The Onion, shortly after...
by gordie | Jun 20, 2025 | NBA
The Oklahoma City Thunder holds the ultimate hole card – Game 7 at home in the NBA Finals – and that might be enough. But if we have learned nothing else from this series, it is this: Expect the unexpected. We began this exercise believing the 68-victory Thunder held...
by gordie | Jun 16, 2025 | NBA
Forty-one years ago, then-Lakers coach Pat Riley – long before he became the legend he has since become – unveiled a simple mantra amid one of those knock-down, drag-out meetings with Boston in the NBA Finals: “No rebounds, no rings.” One year earlier, Moses Malone...
by gordie | Jun 13, 2025 | NBA
Just imagine T.J. McConnell on the Western Pennsylvania playgrounds way back when. Imagine how a guy who looks like that and plays like that was regarded by his fellow competitors. Especially after he spent the day contesting every dribble, every shot, every inch of...
by gordie | Jun 7, 2025 | NBA
Watching Tyrese Haliburton’s latest miracle – a wing jumper with less than a second left that lifted his Pacers over Oklahoma City in Game 1 of the NBA Finals – had me thinking about the original “Rocky,” and one scene in particular. Small exaggeration, but only a...
by gordie | Jun 4, 2025 | NBA
The 1983-84 NBA season was the last of eight Wally Walker played in the NBA, and with he and the Houston Rockets visiting Philadelphia just past that season’s midpoint my mission was to write the obligatory local-boy-still-doing-us-proud piece about the Penn Manor...
by gordie | May 31, 2025 | NBA
The “overrated” designation attached to Indiana Pacers point guard Tyrese Haliburton never felt quite right. Not when The Athletic designated him as such in an anonymous poll of his peers (a few of them, anyway) on the eve of the NBA playoffs, and not as he has led...
