Jack Tien-Dana Articles - Page 2

The Baltimore Ravens enter the 2023 NFL season with ambitions to be bigger than Lamar Jackson. In years past, the Ravens’ entire offense (and, really, season) rested on Jackson’s arms and legs—when he played, they were very good; when he was hurt, they were doomed. After crapping out in the Wild Card round with Lamar […]

The Denver Broncos’ floor in the 2023 NFL season will be determined by whether they’re highest paid, highest profile player can pull his weight—if Russell Wilson barfs up another tragicomic lemon of a season, the team is doomed no matter what. The team’s ceiling, though, relies on everybody else. Once again, the Broncos have the […]

Being an NBA coach is a precarious, fragile thing—outside of a handful of elite coaches and wet-eared newbies with no expectations, most NBA coaches are just a bad week in May away from getting fired. This year alone, immensely pedigreed coaches like Nick Nurse (Raptors), Monty Williams (Suns), Doc Rivers (Sixers), and Mike Budenholzer (Bucks) […]

At the risk of getting overexcited, the Texas Rangers might be the best team in baseball. Sure, the Tampa Bay Rays have the best record and the Los Angeles Dodgers have the most pedigree, but no team has consistently beaten the brakes off teams like the Rangers through the first third of the season; the […]

After flopping so galactically hard last year, the Denver Broncos are one of the NFL’s biggest mysteries heading into the 2023 season. Nobody knows if Russell Wilson will rebound from his galling 2022 campaign—or even if he still has the capacity to rebound; it remains to be seen how new coach Sean Payton will adopt […]

Through 68 games, the Baltimore Orioles have enjoyed a charmed (and charming) season. At 43-25, they have the second best record in baseball—if not for the Tampa Bay Rays’ torrid start, the Orioles would be in pole position to claim their first AL East divisional title since 2014. The offense mashes, pouring in exactly 5.00 […]

After spending the first decade years of his career languishing with the Washington Wizards, Bradley Beal is seemingly finally ready to play serious basketball once again. Beyond the fact that the Wizards have hardly ever been good during Beal’s 11 year tenure in D.C. (just one playoff win in the last five seasons), they’ve been […]

No matter what some anonymous general manager and/or Kevin Durant may say, Bruce Brown is a winning player. For evidence, just look at this year’s NBA Finals, which Bruce Brown won. In his first year in Denver, Brown proved to be the missing piece for the Nuggets. After breaking in Brooklyn over the last two years, […]

For 29 teams, the NBA Draft is one of the tentpole events of the calendar, a franchise-defining night that represents their best (and maybe only) chance to land a superstar. For the LeBron James-era Los Angeles Lakers, though, it’s traditionally just been another Thursday in June; the Lakers haven’t added a first round pick to […]

It doesn’t have to be the end of things. To a degree, the Celtics’ comeback-turned-humiliation feels like a bad vibes denouement for the NBA’s most underwhelming powerhouse; Jaylen Brown, their second-team All NBA shooting guard, is a free agent after 2024, forcing the Celtics to confront the choice of whether they should offer him a […]

In the regular season, the Boston Celtics were one of the deepest teams in the league. Beyond their obvious superstar duo of Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum, the Celtics boasted a veritable cornucopia of useful bench players. The guard troika of Derrick White, Marcus Smart and Malcolm Brogdon was sneakily one of the best backcourts […]

The NBA Draft is set—the lottery has been drawn, the player pool has been confirmed. With the withdrawal deadline coming and going this week, NBA Draft buzz is kicking into high gear. Similarly, it’s also time to look ahead at college basketball as rosters have finally come into clearer focus. Led by Syracuse, Kentucky and […]

This season, the Minnesota Twins are a good roster. Not a great one, mind you (they seem destined to win 92 games before crapping out in the playoffs to the Yankees for the 100th time), but a very good one all the same. And in the pillow fight that is the AL Central, good is […]

Joe Kelly is the clown prince of the bullpen. Throughout his peripatetic career, Kelly has wormed his way into the hearts of baseball fans everywhere by being a shameless, hilarious troll—and also by making hilarious faces at Carlos Correa and the rest of the Houston Astros. Besides his antics, Kelly has also been a fine […]

In 2021, the San Francisco Giants authored one of the most remarkable seasons in recent baseball history, cobbling together a 107-win juggernaut from a roster of journeymen and unheralded veterans. To start the 2023 season, the Giants are simply a roster of journeymen and unheralded veterans. With Brandon Crawford the last tie to the Giants’ […]

Things aren’t looking great for the Miami Heat. A 3-0 lead over the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals has quickly turned into a 3-3 deadlock with a decisive Game 7 in Boston looming on Monday. Jimmy Butler, their star wing who was eliciting unironic conspiracies that he was Michael Jordan’s bastard Michael Jordan’s […]

By just about any standard, the Philadelphia Phillies have a better roster this year than they did last year when they made the World Series. After coming up just short against the Houston Astros, the Phillies returned just about every key contributor and then added superstar shortstop Trea Turner on a record setting 11 year, […]

For years, the knock on the Baltimore Ravens has been that their otherwise excellent offense has been hamstrung by ineffective receivers and an out-dated offensive scheme. While Lamar Jackson has been one of the winningest quarterbacks in the NFL since taking over the starting job in 2018, the team has struggled to find any offense […]

Lakers point guard D’Angelo Russell is either the worst good player or the best bad player in the NBA. His regular stats are almost unfailingly always pretty good—since making his first (and only) All-Star Game appearance in 2019, he’s averaged 19.7 points and 6.5 assists on perfectly average efficiency. This isn’t revelatory, next level stuff, […]

Recently, the NFL announced a new touchback rule that enables teams to call a fair catch on any kickoff and receive the ball on their own 25 yard line, thereby discouraging dangerous kickoff returns. While this is technically just a temporary, preliminary measure for now, it’s a logical, common sense rule that’s been in place […]

In last year’s NFC Championship Game, the San Francisco 49ers had to play the second half essentially without a quarterback once starter Brock Purdy and backup Josh Johnson both got hurt. Predictably, it was a mess. As a result, the NFL has introduced a new rule ahead of the 2023 season, allowing teams to designate […]

The Los Angeles Lakers are nearly great. Despite struggling for most of the season and backdooring their way into the playoffs through the play-in tournament, the Lakers were legitimately one of the best teams for the last few months of the season. When you have LeBron James and Anthony Davis, you only need competence to […]

Shannon Sharpe and Kwame Brown, two of our premier sports shouters, are at loggerheads. After Brown blasted LeBron James as a “stat sheet junkie ” for getting swept by the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference Finals, Sharpe passionately came to James’ defense, calling Brown a “joke” and saying that the former #1 pick deserves to […]

The NFL announced the slate of new rule changes for the 2023 season. Namely, kickoffs will be marginalized as the league works to gradually phase out the play. Starting next season, teams will be able to start with the ball on their own 25-yard line by calling for a fair catch on any ball behind […]

At the risk of jinxing it, the Chicago White Sox might just be scratching themselves into the playoff hunt. After a truly putrid 13-27 start over the first quarter of the season, the White Sox have sneakily played solid baseball for the last two weeks, going 7-3 over their last 10 games. To a degree, […]

Ever since Lamar Jackson assumed the starting job in 2018, the Baltimore Ravens have been unlike the rest of the NFL, leaning on the NFL’s most intricately punishing ground game. For the most part it worked—Jackson was the unanimous MVP in 2019 and is 45-16 as a starter. But it was unsustainable, wholly reliant on […]

The Atlanta Hawks need everything and need nothing. On one hand, this is a loaded roster—they have an all-world guard duo of Trae Young and Dejounte Murray yet also legitimately go ten deep and even struggle to carve out minutes for young studs like Jalen Johnson and AJ Griffin. On the other, they aren’t especially […]

Becoming good is fun. This season, the Kings took the NBA by storm thanks to the most efficient offense in NBA history. Led by a pair of All-NBA studs in Domantas Sabonis and De’Aaron Fox, the Kings blitzed an unsuspecting league to the tune of 119.4 points per 100 possessions and a top three seed […]

For years, the Texas Rangers have been the other team in Texas. The Houston Astros have been a dynasty, making the ALCS for six straight years and taking home two World Series titles; the Rangers haven’t even won more than 80 games in any year over that stretch. This year, though, the Rangers are a […]

Like Tony Soprano, the Houston Rockets are on the precipice of an enormous crossroads heading into the 2023 NBA Draft. After three years of egregious tanking, they’ve established a solid base layer of young talent. Jalen Green, Jabari Smith Jr., Alperen Sengun, Tari Eason, Kevin Porter Jr.: all good players. Similarly, new head coach Ime […]

Ezekiel Elliot is one of the most accomplished running backs in the NFL and is currently a free agent; the Pittsburgh Steelers have ample cap space and a need to improve their ground game after Najee Harris averaged fewer than four yards per carry over the last few years. So, naturally, Elliot showing up at […]

For the first 69 holes of the PGA Championship, everything was coming up Viktor Hovland. Sitting eight shots under par, the 25 year-old Norwegian budding star entered the 16th hole on Sunday just one stroke behind the leader (and eventual champion), Brooks Koepka. Coming off top ten finishes at The Open Championships and The Masters, […]

The San Francisco 49ers have been a great team because they’ve been a smart team. Thanks to their long-standing brain trust of general manager and head coach Kyle Shannahan, the 49ers have built a killer, synergistic operation—Lynch lands talented players who Shannahan can then easily incorporate in his gameplan. Their stable of homegrown studs is […]

James Harden is the NBA’s most inscrutable player. On the court, he’s reached the point where his reservoir of brilliance is more or less tapped and must be conserved and deployed judiciously—his 40+ point masterpieces in Games 1 and 5 of 76ers’ playoffs loss to Boston were offset by his clunkers in Games 6 and […]

Tyson Fury (the best boxer in the world) and Jon “Bones” Jones (the best mixed martial artist in the world) will never fight each other for obvious reasons; namely, they play different sports—Jones would undoubtedly beat Fury in the octagon while Fury would undoubtedly best Jones in a boxing ring. But logic has never gotten […]

Scoot Henderson’s goodness–his greatness, even—is undeniable. Despite being just 6’2, his supreme athleticism and canny court-sense make him the most alluring guard prospect since Kyrie Irving in 2013. Having spent the last two seasons with the G League Ignite, Henderson is already fluent in the spacing and tempo of the NBA game; he’s internalized the […]

In 2020, Bryson DeChambeau sought out to transform golf by transforming his body, packing on 50 pounds in an attempt to outmuscle the competition. For a while, he was literally too big to fail, winning the 2020 US Open and rising up to 4th in the World Golf Rankings. Since then, though, he’s been waylaid […]

After a star turn as one of the stars of National Champion runner-up TCU, running  back Kendre Miller became the 71st pick in the 2023 NFL Draft when the New Orleans Saints nabbed him in the third round. As the leader of the Horned Frogs’ backfield, Miller was a powerful presence on the ground, rushing […]

Over the last few years, the Wizards have earned the reputation as a place where promising careers go to die. Recent high NBA Draft picks like Rui Hachimura, Deni Avdija, Corey Kispert and Johnny Davis have withered away in relative obscurity, shoved into weird, unnatural roles as the Wizards mount yet another doomed attempt for […]