What the Hardaway? Flacco hit & endless searches...

It’s early in the season, for sure, but already you find yourself asking this existential question about Tim Hardaway Jr.: Why exactly is he here? Here’s another basketball question:

Is it possible that the Clips might be a better team without Chris Paul than they were with him? What, I can’t ask? I find myself rooting more and more for Lonzo Ball, not just because he has to deal with a father who so often is the head float in the clown parade, but because of this:

The kid, for now, does something almost incomprehensible in the current culture of sports.

He just keeps his head down, and shuts up, and plays. Weird, huh? Well, you clearly can’t stop the Boston College football team these days – 121 points in their last three games against Louisville, a 5-1 (at the time) Virginia team and Florida State – you can only hope to contain them. The Lupica boys are right: Bring on Bama. I love the idea, from the Jets offensive coordinator, that Josh McCown didn’t see that defensive back sitting out there in the flat last Sunday. He didn’t see him? The guy did everything to announce his presence except hire a skywriter.

Kiko Alonso should have been tossed from Thurday night’s game for that hit on Joe Flacco after Flacco had gone into his slide, unless you think Flacco’s helmet knocked itself off.

It was a headhunting hit in a head-injury league and until the refs start tossing guys like Alonso for hits like that, they are only going to continue. As Dave Roberts of the Dodgers, who at one point in this World Series used 17 pitchers in 20 innings, went through eight relief pitchers in Game 2, I kept hearing the voice of my Hall of Fame friend Bill Madden inside my head.

Mr. Madden, from the first time I sat down next to him in a press box, has always talked about “the endless search for the guy who doesn’t have it.”

That’s what we saw in Game 2, exactly. If Bob McNair’s guy, the president, can fire James Comey, what makes anybody think he won’t fire Robert Mueller?

Salman Rushdie’s guest shot on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” was only one of the funniest ever.

Somebody explain to me what the Jets accomplish this season if McCown goes 7-9 and they don’t know anything more about Hackenberg and Petty than they did in August.