The Buddies are celebrating their hometown New York Knicks, who won the 2025 NBA Cup on Tuesday night!
The Budster and I are in a celebratory mood after the New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs to win the 2025 NBA Cup Championship!
The NBA Cup is a mid-season tournament, now in its second year, that serves as an early indicator of league balance, team resilience and talent, and a championship in its own right.
It’s not an NBA championship, and to be clear the team has a long road ahead with some extremely dangerous teams — including the 24-2 Oklahoma City Thunder — to contend with en route to the goal of a ring, but every contender had its eye on the NBA Cup trophy, and the Knicks came out on top. That bodes well for them.
The Knicks sit at 18-7 in the standings (19-7 total) with the best points margin in the NBA’s Eastern Conference, and are currently third in betting markets to win it all in the postseason. Not bad for a bunch of guys casually dismissed as non-factors just a year ago.
For now, it’s time to enjoy the win and hope the momentum carries forward for a team that has made basketball exciting in New York again.
Abdul Raheem found peace when he adopted his beloved cat, Bambi. Now he wants other men to know felines are awesome.
There’s something to the idea that people who aren’t fond of felines just haven’t met the right cat.
For me, it was the experience of interacting with a friend’s affable tuxedo — just one, since all my experiences up to that point had been with people who kept an unreasonable number of cats.
For Abdul Raheem, it was adopting a cat named Bambi after he and his wife fostered and fell in love with her.
“She brought me so much just happiness, and she made my mental health better,” Raheem told the Washington Post. “My anxiety was better when I was around her. So I just want to give other people that feeling.”
Raheem and his wife, Shamiyan Hawramani, became regular fosters for a shelter near their home, and Hawramani began filming her husband’s doting interactions with the baby felines.
Raheem with one of his bottle babies. He and his wife have fostered about 200 kittens and cats since the COVID pandemic.
Their friends found the videos amusing, and lots of people online have too. Abdul’s Cats, an Instagram account documenting Raheem caring for fosters, has a large following — including young men, many of whom are thinking about adopting a cat for the first time because Raheem is showing them something that challenges stereotypes.
My favorite anecdote is about Raheem’s enthusiasm for cats spreading to his friends. At first, they got accustomed to the idea of baby cats jumping in their laps and taking curious swipes at controllers on nights when they’d hang out and play video games.
Then they came to the same conclusion Raheem had: hanging out with cats is relaxing. Several of those friends have since adopted their own feline overlords, and Raheem says one friend now has four cats running around his house.
As for stereotypes, I think cat ladies get a bad rep. They’re the ones who do all the hard work of managing colonies, trapping, fostering, volunteering in shelters and placing cats in good homes.
When you think of the sheer volume of work, and the things they’ve accomplished — including a dramatic reduction in euthanized cats thanks to TNR efforts — they are the unsung heroes. They do it because they love cats.
Jordan Poole is one of several NBA players who have professed their love of felines. In the off-season Poole volunteers with his local shelter.
But it’s also good to toss aside labels and outdated attitudes, like the insistence that cats are companions for women only, and that adopting and caring for a feline friend is somehow unmanly.
Like Jordan Poole, the NBA guard who evangelizes the awesomeness of cats to his fellow players, men like Raheem show guys that they can adopt too.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Bud and I have a busy day of lifting weights, watching football, working on the hot rod we’re restoring in the garage, and drinking beer. Then we’re gonna chant Viking drinking songs until we pass out.
In a match-up hailed by boxing promoter Don King as “a magnificatious spectacle of pugulisticary skillsmanship,” Jake Paul will square off against Buddy the Cat at Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve.
He’s defeated men more than twice his age, hammered opponents 70 pounds lighter than him into submission, and made his mark as a six-time winner of the Billy Blanks Tae Bo Championship.
Now Jake Paul, the Youtuber-turned-boxer, will step in the ring with Buddy the Cat, a gray tabby from New York.
Despite the 190 pound weight advantage and Paul’s 76-inch reach vs Buddy’s 4.5-inch reach, Paul’s manager, Nakisa Bidarian, said the 6 foot 1 Paul and the 11-inch Buddy were evenly matched.
“Buddy the Cat is probably Jake’s most vicious opponent yet,” Bidarian told reporters. “Jake is taking this fight seriously, as seriously as he took the fight with Nate [Robinson],” a 41-year-old, 5 foot 9 former NBA player who had no boxing experience before stepping in the ring with Paul.
An early poster promoting the fight, which has since been postponed to New Year’s Eve.
Asked by another reporter what Paul and his team make of critics blasting him for “making a mockery of the sport” by fighting a succession of cans, geriatric opponents and people without boxing training, Bidarian waved a hand in dismissal.
“Buddy’s a cat, isn’t he? Tigers are cats, too. We’ve all seen how dangerous tigers can be, so obviously Jake is taking a huge risk here by fighting an animal who is, in essence, a slightly smaller version of a tiger.”
Buddy the Cat
As for Buddy, the massive differences in height, weight, reach, species and training haven’t deterred him. The 11-pound southpaw feline promised to “tear into Paul like a bag of Temptations” and “chew him up and spit him out like diet kibble.”
“You see this wand toy?” Buddy told reporters, throwing punches at a colorful felt parrot that dangled from the end of a stick. “That’s what I’m gonna do to Jake’s face. And if it’s legal to attack his feet, I’m gonna do that too. I’m awesome at attacking feet.”
Longtime boxing promoter Don King called the bout “a magnificatious spectacle of pugulisticary skillsmanship.”
Paul vs Buddy is set for Dec. 31 at Madison Square Garden, only six weeks after Paul is scheduled to duke it out with retired super featherweight Geronta “Tank” Davis. Despite Davis giving up more than 70 pounds and eight inches in height, Bidarian insisted the bout will be “about as evenly matched as possible.”
While most traditional boxing fans and critics dismissed the Paul vs Buddy fight as another gimmick, legendary boxing promoter Don King hailed it as “a monumentilacious rejuvenalizationary occasion” for the sport.
“Jason Paul is a heraldific resplendinizer of pugilistic entertainmentized sportulations,” King gushed, “while Buddy is the most splendiferously sanguinarius felid fighter to ever set paw in the ring. I can’t think of a better match-up between two pugnaciously bellicoserized combatulants anywhere. This is gonna be epic!”
Thirty years after the Knicks suffered one of the most humiliating losses in basketball history, it happened again…
The image of Reggie Miller running up and down the court at Madison Square Garden, both hands around his own neck, gleefully screeching “Chokers! Chokers!” is indelibly burned into my brain.
It was May 7, 1995. The Knicks were leading the Indiana Pacers by six points with 18.7 seconds to go. The game was essentially over.
Even though Miller was an excellent shooter, a three-pointer would still leave the Pacers short and the Knicks with a win in the Eastern Conference Finals.
What happened next is still hard to believe all these years later.
Miller hit a three pointer, stole the ball on the inbound pass, bolted back behind the three-point line and hit another three-pointer, tying the game. After two missed free throws and a missed shot by the Knicks, Miller was fouled, made two free throws, and the Pacers won the game.
Miller had just scored 8 points in 8.9 seconds, a feat widely considered impossible, to turn a six-point deficit into a two-point win.
This was the kind of thing that might happen in a video game, not real life.
As a young Knicks fan, I was devastated. Kids raged the next morning as we gathered before the first bell at school. Miller was public enemy number one.
That was 30 years ago, or 10,972 days if you prefer.
Tonight, with Miller calling the game from the broadcast booth, the Knicks and Pacers met once again for game one of the Eastern Conference Finals at Madison Square Garden, just like they did 30 years ago.
New York had a 14-point lead with about two and a half minutes to go. Victory was assured.
Then the Pacers came storming back with three pointer after three pointer, cutting the lead to two. With seconds left on the game clock, the Pacers’ Tyrese Haliburton launched a three pointer, which bounced off the rim high into the air…and came down clean through the hoop.
Just like Miller had three decades ago, Haliburton ran the court at MSG with his hands around his neck, yelling “Chokers!”
It was deja vu. It was a nightmare.
As “luck” would have it, Haliburton’s toe was on the three-point line, rendering his basket a two-pointer that sent the game to overtime.
The crowd tried to rally the Knicks and broke into chants of “F— you, Reggie!” as if to ward off a repeat of history. It didn’t matter. Indiana had all the momentum, and the stunned Knicks couldn’t hold on despite a combined 78 points from the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns.
Absolutely brutal. To rub salt in the wound, my cousins gleefully texted me with taunts like “Oh, the pain of it all!” A small text group consisting of me, my brother and one of our closest childhood friends turned somber. We couldn’t believe this was happening again.
Haliburton, top, and Miller, both mocked the Knicks after improbable wins 30 years apart.
I don’t usually blog about sports, but I feel like I have to release some of this pent up energy. I’d already showered treats upon Bud in celebration and had just given him catnip during a commercial break. We were playing a wand toy game. The mood was jubilant, then it wasn’t. I’m sure little man was confused, but he knows I wasn’t upset at him. Besides, I laughed at how absurd the whole situation was.
After the game, Charles Barkley, legend of the court and the booth, summed up his feelings after watching the ridiculous spectacle: “We get to watch this for our jobs. We’re the luckiest guys on Earth.”
He’s right, although as a lifelong Knicks fan, I don’t feel particularly lucky right now. Let’s hope Lady Luck finally smiles upon a franchise that hasn’t won a damn thing in 50 years and the Knicks turn tonight into nothing more than a bad memory en route to the NBA Finals.
The series, and the rivalry, resumes Friday night at 8 p.m. Whichever team wins the seven-game series will go on to the NBA Finals.
El Capitan, also known as Captain Clutch and The Maestro: Jalen Brunson had 43 points tonight, but it wasn’t enough.
Hart and Soul of the Knicks, Josh Hart, pulled down 13 rebounds and dished out 7 assists in game one of the Eastern Conference Finals.
The Washington Wizards’ Jordan Poole loves cats, and he’s showing his fellow NBA players what awesome little buddies they can be.
Jordan Poole finds it difficult to leave the Falls Church, Va., animal shelter where he volunteers.
He likes the staff and fellow volunteers, but most of all he hates leaving while knowing the cats he’s interacted with still need homes.
“Every time I come, it’s: ‘Let me leave with all of them! Give me 14 of them right now!’” he joked to the Washington Post’s Candace Buckner, who calls him “the lead crusader of the Secret Society of NBA Cat Dads.”
Some aren’t so secret: teammate Tristan Vukcevic recently adopted a cat after Poole converted him to the dark side, and a coy Poole says he “may have” convinced NBA superstar Stephen Curry to adopt a feline friend.
Poole with one of his tabby cats, brothers he adopted together from a California shelter when he was with the Golden State Warriors. Credit: Jordan Poole/Instagram
In a 2022 profile in The Athletic, Poole’s mother Monet says her son adopted his first cat when he was in high school.
“And when I tell you he fell in love with cats,” she said. “He loves his cats. … And he’s got some pretty cats too.”
When Poole was drafted by the Golden State Warriors in 2019, his cat stayed with his mom back in Michigan because she wouldn’t have adjusted well to the move to the west coast, as well as an empty apartment when Poole was on road trips with the team. Later that year, the then-rookie adopted brother cats who had been abandoned by their former owner.
Since he was traded to the Washington Wizards, Poole has volunteered at a Virginia shelter.
His enthusiasm is one reason why he’s been able to get teammate and friends interested in adopting. The NBA has other notable cat dads, including twins Brook and Robin Lopez, whose cats hilariously can’t stand each other. But Poole takes it to another level.
“A lot of guys are dog people, but just the energy [and] the way I talk about [cats], the pictures and videos and stuff that I show them, it just gives them a little bit more interest,” Poole told the Post. “So I give them a different perspective. Maybe they’re not as much maintenance, but they’re still a really dope companion and friend to have. You don’t have to really take them out three or four times a day. You can still get your rest. Normally [my peers] like to explore it. I’ve had a lot of friends and teammates who are also cat people.”
Former Knicks center Robin Lopez, pictured with his cat Edward, says his brother’s cat is sneaky and evil for attacking Edward: “The second I lay eyes on him, he’ll act like, ‘I’m a cherub. I’m innocent.’ I’m not buying it.”
The 25-year-old Poole is averaging 20.3 points, 4.8 assists, 3.1 rebounds and 1.5 steals per game this season while shooting an excellent .391 on three-point attempts. The 6’4″ guard spent his first four seasons with Golden State before he was traded to Washington.
Pain In The Bud 