The Basketball Section

With the 2017-18 season less than two months away, we'll finally get to see the 2017 rookie class play their first games against professional competition. While a lot of the attention has been put on the top draft picks like Markelle Fultz & Lonzo Ball along with Ben Simmons, who was the #1 pick last year, that doesn't mean you can sleep on some of the players drafted beyond the lottery. Here are 5 rookies that you shouldn't sleep on for the 2017-18 season. Caleb Swanigan  If Portland fans got worried after Zach Collins' terrible Summer League performance, Caleb Swanigan might have them covered. Coming off a great sophomore season at Purdue where he averaged 18.5 points and 12.5 rebounds per game while shooting 53% from the field and 45% from three point range, Swanigan was drafted by the Portland Trail Blazers with the #26 overall pick. Swanigan ended up being a huge asset for the Blazers' Summer League Team, as he averaged 16.1 points and 10.6 reboun...

There's nothing worse than seeing a player with so much talent & potential have it taken away because they got hurt. Joel Embiid missed two years of his career after breaking the navicular bone in his right foot while we have yet to see if Ben Simmons' can succeed now that the foot injury that cost him his rookie season has healed. Some players like Paul George are able to recover from bad injuries and resume their careers as normal. However, some players end up being hounded by injuries for the rest of their careers, stopping them from reaching their potential and continuing to play at high levels consistently. Here are 6 NBA players who had their careers ruined by injuries. Derrick Rose Let's start off this list with what has to be the most infamous example among active players. In 2008, Derrick Rose was coming off a single year at the University of Memphis where he led the Tigers to a record of 38-2 ( or if you ask the NCAA, 0-1 ) and took them to the NC...

One month after he had demanded a trade, which led to countless rumors & predictions concerning where he would go, Kyrie Irving has gotten his wish. On Tuesday, Irving was sent to the Boston Celtics for Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, Ante Žižić, and the Brooklyn Nets' first round pick in 2018. While the Celtics weren't shafted by any means (how could you be when you get an All-Star point guard?), I do personally believe that the Cavaliers ended up getting the better end of this trade. For starters, trading Kyrie Irving for Isaiah Thomas might have been a best case scenario for Cleveland. Irving & Thomas are very similar as players, as they are both ball dominant point guards capable of putting up 25+ points a night, but are also bad defenders. Irving is better in my opinion (even though he's not a good defender, he's still infinitely better than Thomas is on defense), but going from an All-Star point guard to a slightly worse All-Star point guard is not somethi...

Every high draft pick in sports comes in with a lot of hype. Basketball is no exception. Players like LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and more recently the likes of Kyrie Irving and Karl-Anthony Towns, have been drafted and have all lived up to the big expectations set for them by fans & analysts. This year alone saw loads of hype built up for the #2 pick Lonzo Ball, even if a lot of that hype was built up by the human embodiment of the Cocoa Puffs bird that is his father. While it's impossible to tell if Ball Brother #1 lives up to those standards, it's not impossible that he won't, and if he doesn't, he wouldn't be the first. That being said, here are 5 players that didn't live up to their hype. Jimmer Fredette Jimmer Fredette was pretty much unstoppable in his last year at Brigham Young University. In his senior year, he led the nation in scoring with 28.9 points per game, helped BYU win over 30 games that year and led them to a #3 seed in the NCAA ...