Which team will be this year’s NBA champion?

The 2022 Finals features the league’s top two defenses throughout the regular season, but the Golden State Warriors–Boston Celtics clash will focus on some of the most dangerous offensive threats in the game.

Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, their Splash Brothers partnership whole again after Thompson missed more than two seasons with ACL and Achilles’ injuries, are making nearly eight 3-pointers per game during Golden State’s run to the Finals, while Boston’s dynamic duo of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown each have a 40-plus point performance on their 2022 postseason r?sum?.

This series also presents a host of lineup decisions for coaches Steve Kerr and Ime Udoka. Will the Warriors go heavy on smallball, with Draymond Green at center? Who will be the primary defenders on superstars like Curry and Tatum?

Which side will prevail? Our experts are making their predictions for the Finals winner and which player will be named Finals MVP.

MORE: What to know for the Finals | Schedule and news

Kendra Andrews: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Stephen Curry

Jerry Bembry: Celtics in 6 | MVP: Jayson Tatum

Tim Bontemps: Celtics in 6 | MVP: Tatum

Nick DePaula: Warriors in 6 | MVP: Curry

Nick Friedell: Celtics in 6 | MVP: Tatum

Kirk Goldsberry: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Israel Gutierrez: Celtics in 6 | MVP: Jaylen Brown

Baxter Holmes: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Tim Legler: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Andrew Lopez: Warriors in 6 | MVP: Curry

Tim MacMahon: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Bobby Marks: Warriors in 5 | MVP: Klay Thompson

Dave McMenamin: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Kevin Pelton: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Omar Raja: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Jorge Sedano: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Ramona Shelburne: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Thompson

Andr? Snellings: Celtics in 7 | MVP: Tatum

Marc J. Spears: Warriors in 7 | MVP: Curry

Ohm Youngmisuk: Warriors in 6 | MVP: Curry

Finals winner: Warriors 15, Celtics 5

Finals MVP: Stephen Curry 13, Jayson Tatum 4, Klay Thompson 2, Jaylen Brown 1

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Chrissie Dickinson was a multimedia artist and award-winning country and rock ‘n’ roll critic whose work appeared in the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, the Boston Phoenix, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. She died on May 19, 2022, from heart failure. She is remembered here by friend and creative partner Cynthia Hammond Jenkins.

It was Halloween 1980. I was 18 and a freshman at Indiana University.

I was dolled up in a pink vintage minidress with diagonal mirrors sewn all over it and a pair of suede ankle boots, both of which my new friend Angi had loaned me. She had just painted a colorful, pop-art flower over my eye, transforming me into 60s supermodel Twiggy. She was going as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.  

I’d met Angi a few days before at the IU student union grill, where she was flipping burgers in an old-school hairnet. In a southern Indiana twang, she asked me who my favorite band was. I told her it was a tie between the Stones and the Who. Angi immediately invited me to join her that Friday for my first off-campus party. 

When we arrived at that art-school shindig, the crowd was spilling onto the front porch and sidewalk. Kids were smoking, drinking keg beer, and jamming to “Mirror in the Bathroom” by the English Beat. Some were dressed for Halloween, but others were simply letting their freak flags fly. Angi pointed out a girl across the room—someone she said she couldn’t wait for me to meet. 

Chris Dickinson.

Chris was talking to a friend. I watched her hands dance around with a lit cigarette as she told a story. She threw her head back and laughed.

She was wearing a black leather jacket, straight-leg jeans, and Beatle boots. Her hair was feathered and blondish. She looked like Suzi Quatro, the Detroit rock bassist who’d played Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days.

I smiled as she crossed the room toward me. Her first words were, “Why are you wearing my dress?” As I scrambled to make sense of her question, she added, “Are those my boots too?” 

I looked down at my outfit, embarrassed. “I didn’t know,” I said lamely.

She turned to Angi, who mumbled a long-winded excuse—she thought it’d been another friend, Julie, who’d left the clothes in Angi’s dorm room. “No, Angi,” Chris answered. “That was me. It’s OK. Just return them tomorrow.” She walked away in a plume of cigarette smoke.

The next Sunday, Angi invited me over to her room, knowing that most of the other dorm kids would be off campus for dinner. She invited Chris too, saying she wanted to make things right with us because we were destined to be great friends. 

Chris showed up with a smile and a milk crate filled with albums. We laughed about the Twiggy dress fiasco.

She played us the Clash’s London Calling and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. She dropped the needle onto the first albums by Elvis Costello, U2, and the Police. She pulled out Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five, and the Temptations. She turned me onto Loretta, Dolly, Tammy, and George. But it was Patti Smith’s poetic, punk Horses that sealed the deal. 

I had to pee and raced down the hall, where I discovered the primo acoustics of the ancient dorm’s bathroom. I could hear Smith’s “Elegie” playing from the stereo in Angi’s room, and I joined its lament, my voice echoing from the tiled loo out into the empty corridor.

By the time I got back, Chris and Angi had decided that we were going to be a band. Chris on guitar, Angi on drums, and me on bass. A power trio. No worries that I had never picked up a bass. We’d figure it out. 

We called ourselves the Altered Boys. Our first gig was in spring 1981. We banged out a set of four originals and two covers—“Not Fade Away” and a punked-up version of “Love Me Do.” Angi had a bleach-blonde Mohawk and hammered away on a patched-up floor tom and a metal sink turned upside down. I was playing a borrowed Höfner bass. Chris rocked her 1965 Music Man. Our passion was contagious, and the audience clapped and hollered for an encore. We were hooked.

Sally’s Dream: Cynthia Jenkins (aka Cyn Hammond), Chrissie Dickinson, Emily Jackson (upper right), and Jenny Davis (lower right) Credit: Courtesy Cynthia Jenkins

We tumbled hand in hand into the verdant music scene in Bloomington, Indiana. Altered Boys morphed into Glass Factory, and by 1983 Chris and I had found a long-term musical home in the band Sally’s Dream, with Jenny Davis on keyboards and Emily Jackson on drums. 

We toured the midwest and the south in Stella, our faithful step van, playing the legendary rock ’n’ roll dives of the day. The stories that Stella could tell . . . 

At the same time, Chris began her career as a journalist in Bloomington, the land of Hoagy Carmichael and Ernie Pyle. She started writing about music at IU’s newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student. 

Her editor there, Karla Fisk, remembers her well. “As a guitarist and songwriter, Chris understood rock and punk from the inside out,” Fisk says. “In 1982, Richard and Linda Thompson came to Bloomington. Chris’s review of that performance was one of her first reviews ever. She soared from there, becoming a music writer of great perception and range.”

Sally’s Dream opens for Romeo Void at Jake’s Nightclub in Bloomington, Indiana, in the mid-80s. Left: Chrissie Dickinson; right: Chrissie Dickinson and Cynthia Jenkins.
Credit: Jeff Mathews

In 1987, Sally’s Dream packed up our instruments and moved to Boston to seek our fame in the grungy rock clubs that surrounded Fenway Park and Cambridge. After four adventurous years, Chris and I returned to the midwest and settled in Chicago. We had ill and aging family members and wanted to be closer to home. Sally’s Dream never officially broke up; life just got in the way.

In the mid-90s, Chris was recruited as the pop music critic at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering all genres of popular music. Then Nashville called her name. 

A Chrissie Dickinson original from 2018

In the 90s, the Country Music Hall of Fame was a funky little barn on Music Row, bursting at the seams with history. It also housed the office of the Journal of Country Music, an influential magazine for which Chris wrote and served as editor for five years. In 2000, the journal published her pioneering article “Country Undetectable: Gay Artists in Country Music.” 

“She was an absolutely fearless writer and ahead of her time in her groundbreaking coverage of women artists, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folk in country music,” says Lauren Bufferd, former director of the library and collections at the Country Music Hall of Fame. 

Chris returned to Chicago in September 2001 and began using the byline “Chrissie Dickinson.” She continued writing her smart and insightful articles for the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, TONEAudio Magazine, and the Washington Post, among others. 

But most important, Chrissie was a passionate artist, constantly creating her own lyrically bold and brilliant music, haunting and evocative videos, and hilarious and heartbreaking characters. Some of her videos are available on YouTube. My favorite is “The Endless Summer (of Joni Mitchell).”

Chrissie Dickinson’s “The Endless Summer (of Joni Mitchell),” which she posted in 2013

In the heart of the pandemic, Chrissie and I started playing around with an essay that she had written called “The Far Side of Forty.” Using shared docs on the Internet, we wrote a novel called Girl Rock Reunion, about lifelong friendships between former bandmates. We were on our final draft when Chrissie’s illness took hold.

Chrissie died of heart failure on May 19 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, with her two surviving sisters, Lore and Marie, at her side. She leaves behind hundreds of friends, colleagues, and readers longing for what she still could’ve created as a writer and artist.

Chrissie Dickinson recorded this song at her home with Cynthia Jenkins in summer 2009, when Jenkins still lived in Chicago and the two of them got together every Saturday to make music.

I think about those early days and how lucky our circle has been to have Chrissie for four decades of friendship, music, and laughter. I was madly in love with her from that first Halloween in 1980. I thought we would grow old together—two aging punk ladies, still rockin’ after all these years.

Chrissie Dickinson and Cynthia Jenkins on the lakefront near Hollywood Beach in 2013 Credit: Matt JenkinsRead More

Chrissie Dickinson was a multimedia artist and award-winning country and rock ‘n’ roll critic whose work appeared in the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, the Boston Phoenix, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. She died on May 19, 2022, from heart failure. She is remembered here by friend and creative partner Cynthia Hammond Jenkins.

It was Halloween 1980. I was 18 and a freshman at Indiana University.

I was dolled up in a pink vintage minidress with diagonal mirrors sewn all over it and a pair of suede ankle boots, both of which my new friend Angi had loaned me. She had just painted a colorful, pop-art flower over my eye, transforming me into 60s supermodel Twiggy. She was going as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.  

I’d met Angi a few days before at the IU student union grill, where she was flipping burgers in an old-school hairnet. In a southern Indiana twang, she asked me who my favorite band was. I told her it was a tie between the Stones and the Who. Angi immediately invited me to join her that Friday for my first off-campus party. 

When we arrived at that art-school shindig, the crowd was spilling onto the front porch and sidewalk. Kids were smoking, drinking keg beer, and jamming to “Mirror in the Bathroom” by the English Beat. Some were dressed for Halloween, but others were simply letting their freak flags fly. Angi pointed out a girl across the room—someone she said she couldn’t wait for me to meet. 

Chris Dickinson.

Chris was talking to a friend. I watched her hands dance around with a lit cigarette as she told a story. She threw her head back and laughed.

She was wearing a black leather jacket, straight-leg jeans, and Beatle boots. Her hair was feathered and blondish. She looked like Suzi Quatro, the Detroit rock bassist who’d played Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days.

I smiled as she crossed the room toward me. Her first words were, “Why are you wearing my dress?” As I scrambled to make sense of her question, she added, “Are those my boots too?” 

I looked down at my outfit, embarrassed. “I didn’t know,” I said lamely.

She turned to Angi, who mumbled a long-winded excuse—she thought it’d been another friend, Julie, who’d left the clothes in Angi’s dorm room. “No, Angi,” Chris answered. “That was me. It’s OK. Just return them tomorrow.” She walked away in a plume of cigarette smoke.

The next Sunday, Angi invited me over to her room, knowing that most of the other dorm kids would be off campus for dinner. She invited Chris too, saying she wanted to make things right with us because we were destined to be great friends. 

Chris showed up with a smile and a milk crate filled with albums. We laughed about the Twiggy dress fiasco.

She played us the Clash’s London Calling and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. She dropped the needle onto the first albums by Elvis Costello, U2, and the Police. She pulled out Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five, and the Temptations. She turned me onto Loretta, Dolly, Tammy, and George. But it was Patti Smith’s poetic, punk Horses that sealed the deal. 

I had to pee and raced down the hall, where I discovered the primo acoustics of the ancient dorm’s bathroom. I could hear Smith’s “Elegie” playing from the stereo in Angi’s room, and I joined its lament, my voice echoing from the tiled loo out into the empty corridor.

By the time I got back, Chris and Angi had decided that we were going to be a band. Chris on guitar, Angi on drums, and me on bass. A power trio. No worries that I had never picked up a bass. We’d figure it out. 

We called ourselves the Altered Boys. Our first gig was in spring 1981. We banged out a set of four originals and two covers—“Not Fade Away” and a punked-up version of “Love Me Do.” Angi had a bleach-blonde Mohawk and hammered away on a patched-up floor tom and a metal sink turned upside down. I was playing a borrowed Höfner bass. Chris rocked her 1965 Music Man. Our passion was contagious, and the audience clapped and hollered for an encore. We were hooked.

Sally’s Dream: Cynthia Jenkins (aka Cyn Hammond), Chrissie Dickinson, Emily Jackson (upper right), and Jenny Davis (lower right) Credit: Courtesy Cynthia Jenkins

We tumbled hand in hand into the verdant music scene in Bloomington, Indiana. Altered Boys morphed into Glass Factory, and by 1983 Chris and I had found a long-term musical home in the band Sally’s Dream, with Jenny Davis on keyboards and Emily Jackson on drums. 

We toured the midwest and the south in Stella, our faithful step van, playing the legendary rock ’n’ roll dives of the day. The stories that Stella could tell . . . 

At the same time, Chris began her career as a journalist in Bloomington, the land of Hoagy Carmichael and Ernie Pyle. She started writing about music at IU’s newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student. 

Her editor there, Karla Fisk, remembers her well. “As a guitarist and songwriter, Chris understood rock and punk from the inside out,” Fisk says. “In 1982, Richard and Linda Thompson came to Bloomington. Chris’s review of that performance was one of her first reviews ever. She soared from there, becoming a music writer of great perception and range.”

Sally’s Dream opens for Romeo Void at Jake’s Nightclub in Bloomington, Indiana, in the mid-80s. Left: Chrissie Dickinson; right: Chrissie Dickinson and Cynthia Jenkins.
Credit: Jeff Mathews

In 1987, Sally’s Dream packed up our instruments and moved to Boston to seek our fame in the grungy rock clubs that surrounded Fenway Park and Cambridge. After four adventurous years, Chris and I returned to the midwest and settled in Chicago. We had ill and aging family members and wanted to be closer to home. Sally’s Dream never officially broke up; life just got in the way.

In the mid-90s, Chris was recruited as the pop music critic at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering all genres of popular music. Then Nashville called her name. 

A Chrissie Dickinson original from 2018

In the 90s, the Country Music Hall of Fame was a funky little barn on Music Row, bursting at the seams with history. It also housed the office of the Journal of Country Music, an influential magazine for which Chris wrote and served as editor for five years. In 2000, the journal published her pioneering article “Country Undetectable: Gay Artists in Country Music.” 

“She was an absolutely fearless writer and ahead of her time in her groundbreaking coverage of women artists, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folk in country music,” says Lauren Bufferd, former director of the library and collections at the Country Music Hall of Fame. 

Chris returned to Chicago in September 2001 and began using the byline “Chrissie Dickinson.” She continued writing her smart and insightful articles for the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, TONEAudio Magazine, and the Washington Post, among others. 

But most important, Chrissie was a passionate artist, constantly creating her own lyrically bold and brilliant music, haunting and evocative videos, and hilarious and heartbreaking characters. Some of her videos are available on YouTube. My favorite is “The Endless Summer (of Joni Mitchell).”

Chrissie Dickinson’s “The Endless Summer (of Joni Mitchell),” which she posted in 2013

In the heart of the pandemic, Chrissie and I started playing around with an essay that she had written called “The Far Side of Forty.” Using shared docs on the Internet, we wrote a novel called Girl Rock Reunion, about lifelong friendships between former bandmates. We were on our final draft when Chrissie’s illness took hold.

Chrissie died of heart failure on May 19 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, with her two surviving sisters, Lore and Marie, at her side. She leaves behind hundreds of friends, colleagues, and readers longing for what she still could’ve created as a writer and artist.

Chrissie Dickinson recorded this song at her home with Cynthia Jenkins in summer 2009, when Jenkins still lived in Chicago and the two of them got together every Saturday to make music.

I think about those early days and how lucky our circle has been to have Chrissie for four decades of friendship, music, and laughter. I was madly in love with her from that first Halloween in 1980. I thought we would grow old together—two aging punk ladies, still rockin’ after all these years.

Chrissie Dickinson and Cynthia Jenkins on the lakefront near Hollywood Beach in 2013 Credit: Matt JenkinsRead More

SAN FRANCISCO — As he prepares to face off against the Boston Celtics and reigning Defensive Player of the Year Marcus Smart in the NBA Finals, Draymond Green disagrees with NBA voters that there were five defenders better than him this season.

The Golden State Warriors‘ defensive leader is vexed that he was voted NBA All-Defensive Second Team earlier this month. Green was the front-runner for Defensive Player of the Year until he suffered a back injury in early January and only played in 46 games this season.

“For me, it’s a slight,” Green said when asked if he took his second-team designation as a compliment or slight. “When I look at the first team, I am not sure I can pinpoint, definitely not five guys that had a better defensive season than me. And there are no (games played) requirements (for All-Defensive voting). There is not some amount that you have to play in. If there was an amount that you had to play, then I would be an idiot sitting here and saying that.”

Green added: “What you had to see, I think it would be hard for someone to come and show me better (defense this season). Especially not five guys (better). It is more of a slight to me than anything.”

NBA voters named Smart, the Boston Celtics guard, the Defensive Player of the Year, ahead of Phoenix’s Mikal Bridges and Utah’s Rudy Gobert. Those three, along with Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo and Memphis’ Jaren Jackson Jr. were voted to the All-Defensive first team.

2 Related

Green finished on the second team along with Miami’s Bam Adebayo, Milwaukee’s Jrue Holiday, Philadelphia’s Matisse Thybulle and Boston’s Robert Williams. The Golden State power forward garnered five first-team votes and 24 second-team votes.

“It goes on the resume as an All-Defensive team so I will take it,” Green said after practice. “But I was a little shocked when (I heard the unveiling of) the first team and I was like, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting. Maybe I didn’t make it at all.’ But then the fact that I made the second team, there are more than five defenders (better) … you had to totally take me off and then I’ll be like, alright, they voted on the amount of games (played). But it makes absolutely no sense to say, well, he was a second team All-Defensive player because then you can’t be taking the amount of games into consideration. And if you are taking the amount of games into consideration and say, ‘Oh this guy is second team,’ then you are just making stuff up.

“I think it was more of a slight. But seven out of 10 years on All-Defensive team, it ain’t so bad.”

The NBA Finals matchup between the Warriors and Celtics will feature two of the best defenders in the game in Smart and Green. Warriors coach Steve Kerr recently likened Smart to “the guard version of Draymond” because of his ability to read angles, switch and defend all five positions, his basketball IQ and versatility.

“Yeah for sure,” Green, the 2017 Defensive Player of the Year, said of seeing the comparison. “He’s their emotional leader, he’s the anchor on their defense, in a way. Robert Williams is the anchor in a way, Al Horford is actually an anchor in a way. But Marcus Smart is like your real anchor on that defense. And then on the offensive end, he’s the one getting everybody involved, he’s the one calling the sets. I definitely see some of that.

“That is a guy I have a lot of respect for. To see him coming into his own and to see him once again looking like the Marcus Smart that came out of Oklahoma State, that had so much promise, to see him back playing that way and at that level, has been fun to watch.”

Green caused a bit of a stir last week with the Miami Heat when he said on a TNT broadcast before Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals that the Warriors were “going to play Boston” in the Finals. The Heat forced a Game 7 and Miami forward Udonis Haslem told Yahoo Sports that Green “broke the code” by saying that.

“I didn’t really predict it,” Green explained on Tuesday. “I think I just know a little about basketball. If you know a little bit about basketball and you saw the two teams, I just thought Boston was the better team. It wasn’t a prediction or a slight at anybody. I thought they were the better team and clearly I wasn’t far off.”

Green had nothing but praise for the Celtics.

“We’ve been watching for months now, where their defense is absolutely incredible,” Green said. “They have a good offense, and more importantly on offense, they have a guy that is one of them guys. Jaylen Brown is absolutely a very good player but Jayson Tatum is one of them guys.

“And when you have that, you always have a chance at winning, when you have a guy like that. You couple that with all the pieces around him, the defense around him, they have veteran leadership… you look and say, ‘Wow, they actually have what it takes.'”

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SAN FRANCISCO — As he prepares to face off against the Boston Celtics and reigning Defensive Player of the Year Marcus Smart in the NBA Finals, Draymond Green disagrees with NBA voters that there were five defenders better than him this season.

The Golden State Warriors‘ defensive leader is vexed that he was voted NBA All-Defensive Second Team earlier this month. Green was the front-runner for Defensive Player of the Year until he suffered a back injury in early January and only played in 46 games this season.

“For me, it’s a slight,” Green said when asked if he took his second-team designation as a compliment or slight. “When I look at the first team, I am not sure I can pinpoint, definitely not five guys that had a better defensive season than me. And there are no (games played) requirements (for All-Defensive voting). There is not some amount that you have to play in. If there was an amount that you had to play, then I would be an idiot sitting here and saying that.”

Green added: “What you had to see, I think it would be hard for someone to come and show me better (defense this season). Especially not five guys (better). It is more of a slight to me than anything.”

NBA voters named Smart, the Boston Celtics guard, the Defensive Player of the Year, ahead of Phoenix’s Mikal Bridges and Utah’s Rudy Gobert. Those three, along with Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo and Memphis’ Jaren Jackson Jr. were voted to the All-Defensive first team.

2 Related

Green finished on the second team along with Miami’s Bam Adebayo, Milwaukee’s Jrue Holiday, Philadelphia’s Matisse Thybulle and Boston’s Robert Williams. The Golden State power forward garnered five first-team votes and 24 second-team votes.

“It goes on the resume as an All-Defensive team so I will take it,” Green said after practice. “But I was a little shocked when (I heard the unveiling of) the first team and I was like, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting. Maybe I didn’t make it at all.’ But then the fact that I made the second team, there are more than five defenders (better) … you had to totally take me off and then I’ll be like, alright, they voted on the amount of games (played). But it makes absolutely no sense to say, well, he was a second team All-Defensive player because then you can’t be taking the amount of games into consideration. And if you are taking the amount of games into consideration and say, ‘Oh this guy is second team,’ then you are just making stuff up.

“I think it was more of a slight. But seven out of 10 years on All-Defensive team, it ain’t so bad.”

The NBA Finals matchup between the Warriors and Celtics will feature two of the best defenders in the game in Smart and Green. Warriors coach Steve Kerr recently likened Smart to “the guard version of Draymond” because of his ability to read angles, switch and defend all five positions, his basketball IQ and versatility.

“Yeah for sure,” Green, the 2017 Defensive Player of the Year, said of seeing the comparison. “He’s their emotional leader, he’s the anchor on their defense, in a way. Robert Williams is the anchor in a way, Al Horford is actually an anchor in a way. But Marcus Smart is like your real anchor on that defense. And then on the offensive end, he’s the one getting everybody involved, he’s the one calling the sets. I definitely see some of that.

“That is a guy I have a lot of respect for. To see him coming into his own and to see him once again looking like the Marcus Smart that came out of Oklahoma State, that had so much promise, to see him back playing that way and at that level, has been fun to watch.”

Green caused a bit of a stir last week with the Miami Heat when he said on a TNT broadcast before Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals that the Warriors were “going to play Boston” in the Finals. The Heat forced a Game 7 and Miami forward Udonis Haslem told Yahoo Sports that Green “broke the code” by saying that.

“I didn’t really predict it,” Green explained on Tuesday. “I think I just know a little about basketball. If you know a little bit about basketball and you saw the two teams, I just thought Boston was the better team. It wasn’t a prediction or a slight at anybody. I thought they were the better team and clearly I wasn’t far off.”

Green had nothing but praise for the Celtics.

“We’ve been watching for months now, where their defense is absolutely incredible,” Green said. “They have a good offense, and more importantly on offense, they have a guy that is one of them guys. Jaylen Brown is absolutely a very good player but Jayson Tatum is one of them guys.

“And when you have that, you always have a chance at winning, when you have a guy like that. You couple that with all the pieces around him, the defense around him, they have veteran leadership… you look and say, ‘Wow, they actually have what it takes.'”

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TORONTO — The Chicago White Sox put shortstop Tim Anderson on the 10-day injured list because of a strained right groin Tuesday and activated outfielder Luis Robert off the COVID-19 injured list.

Anderson’s IL stint is retroactive to May 30. The 2019 AL batting champ left the win over the Cubs on Sunday, going down in the outfield after fielding P.J. Higgins‘ fifth-inning grounder and throwing to first for the out.

A first-time All-Star in 2021, Anderson ranks among the league leaders with a .356 batting average. He has five home runs and 19 RBIs in 40 games.

The struggling White Sox have been hit hard by injuries this year. Right-hander Lance Lynn (right knee) and outfielder Eloy Jim?nez (right hamstring) are also on the injured list.

Robert last played May 22 against the Yankees. He’s batting .285 with six homers and 17 RBIs in 33 games.

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It has been pretty clear for a while now that Akiem Hicks was not returning to the Chicago Bears in 2022. He has been a superstar-level defensive lineman for a long time and has been a part of a very good Bears pass rush. Even though the writing was on the wall, there was still hope.

Now, that hope is gone as he has signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He went from playing on a pretty bad Chicago Bears team over the last few years to singing with a team that is a legit threat to win the Super Bowl.

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