The DeAndr-ankings

Remember when last season took a 5 month break, gave 8 teams an 8-month offseason, put a bunch of teams into a fan-less quarantine, allowed players to opt out of the end of the season + playoffs, played games in mid-afternoon, squished the schedule, and we thought "this is the weirdest season the NBA is ever gonna see?" Well, this year is already weirder. Between Harden finally getting dealt, Kyrie Irving disappearing for personal reasons and then word getting out that he's basically just hanging out and not playing basketball, the Toronto Raptors playing all of their home games in Tampa, multiple teams having 5+ players out at a time due to COVID, games being canceled, half the season not getting scheduled at all yet, the Knicks and Cavs winning games early in the season, the growing realization that the NBA stats-people are giving out assists for almost any play where someone passes the ball to another player within the 24-second shot clock, seeing scoring outbursts fr...

Basketball is in (relatively) full swing: star players are upset (Siakam and Harden), bad teams are looking good (Cleveland), and trade rumors are flying around like wasps on a garbage can at a carnival (Harden, Beal, Griffin, Love, etc). That means we have enough of a sample size to make some real judgments about the league's four same-named/different-spellinged DeAndres. Instead of the 5-question intro this week, I'm going to mull on something obvious for a couple hundred words. LeBron James was celebrated this week for clearing 1,000 consecutive regular season games with at least 10 points scored. Thousands upon thousands of words have been written about this accomplishment, but I'm going to throw a few of my own into the ring. Here is a rundown of things that have happened to me since January 6, 2007, the last time LeBron scored fewer than 10 points.  I was a sophomore in college in January of 2007. Starting from there I changed my major, met a girl, dated her for 2 yea...