I loved coming back to Mike Lupica. He has a strong style, and his books wind you in and keep you there, eagerly awaiting the next development. His game scenes are always spectacular, so perfectly tense that they have me all bound up in suspense. And that fight on the court at night—hands-down the best scene in the book; it was very well done.
There is one downside (or I suppose a lot of people might see it as that) to his unfailing style: his characters are all similarly witty and charming. It doesn't bother me too badly, though, just because I know I can always count on those bits of sarcastic humor when I open one of his books. But when a less-than-typical character is dropped in (like Rasheed or Tarik), that makes them even more lovable. Those two were still charming, and Tarik was the most hilarious guy of the bunch, but they were different—in race and attitude—than the others, and that made them extra special.
There was one major thing that irked me about the plot in particular. There were two antagonists, and although one was clearly a self-righteous idiot and I didn't really have any problems with his character staying the way he was, the other definitely deserved a character arc. He had redeemable qualities, and yet they were never recognized by the protagonist or his sidekicks, and that annoyed me. If that had been different, I believe my review could've jumped to a 4.5 or even a 5.