HoopsHype

2 days ago | hoopshype.com | Frank Urbina

A draft class littered with busts out of the Top 10, the 2017 group is saved by the fact that it has had a few late lottery picks – and late first-rounders –  totally outplay pre-draft expectations. The 2017 NBA Draft does have its fair share of good role players after the cream of the crop, but overall, its depth isn’t all that great, considering we couldn’t even fill the 30 spots in this re-draft with guys who are still in the NBA.

4 days ago | hoopshype.com | Bryan Kalbrosky

Egor Demin is on the verge of becoming the first Russian-born player drafted by an NBA team since … Sergey Karasev in 2013. “Well, that means a lot,” Demin told The Athletic. “Obviously, everybody knows about Andrei Kirilenko, the legend of Russian basketball. A lot more Russian legends that got to the NBA, and even though maybe they didn’t spend as much time in the NBA as they wanted to, they had great careers back in Russia in EuroLeague and became legends.

5 days ago | hoopshype.com | Mark Deeks

With 68 regular-season wins and a colossal 16-game lead over the second-placed Houston Rockets, only the brave man or the professional contrarian would have predicted the Oklahoma City Thunder not making the 2025 NBA Finals. And so despite a tough test in the form of the Denver Nuggets, and an excellent NBA Finals series against the Indiana Pacers, the Thunder won the first championship in the franchise’s history, confirming that they really were the best team all along.

1 week ago | hoopshype.com | Jorge Sierra

In the NBA, the downside of playing at an elite level for a long time is that although you are going to amass a lot of records, they’re not all going to be the glamorous kind. As an example below, you’re going to see four-time league MVP LeBron James, who we consider to be the NBA’s GOAT, at the top of the list as far as players with the most Finals losses in their careers.

1 week ago | hoopshype.com | Sam Yip

We are deep in the NBA Finals, and yet the Lakers still manage to grab the headlines. The Buss family agreed to sell the Lakers to Mark Walter for a record price in professional sports franchises of $10 billion. Jerry Buss originally bought the team for $67.5 million back in 1979, and his family gets to reap the benefits now. Mark Walter is famously part of the Dodgers ownership along with Magic Johnson and has turned that franchise from instability to perennial contenders in the baseball universe.