Former Item writer Sean Deveney stars for The Sporting News

Sean Deveney knows he made the correct career choice.
?I covered baseball in 2007 when the Red Sox won the World Series,” said Deveney, who has also covered 16 NBA Finals, including the Celtics-Lakers series in 2010. “I still smile every time I cover these games ? I’ve never lost my excitement.”
Deveney captures his passion in his writing. The Lynn English High School alum is The Sporting News? national NBA writer, and covered Major League Baseball for one season, fittingly, during Boston’s World Series run in 2007.
?I started with The Sporting News in 1999,” said Deveney, who admits he prefers to cover basketball. “I did a lot of feature writing for the magazine, and covered a lot of baseball, but I really enjoyed covering the [NBA], the people inside it and the really unique characters. The NBA players are never boring; they always have something interesting to say.”
The 41-year-old Deveney worked for The Item before teaching eighth-grade English for a year at Lynn?s Thurgood Marshall Middle School in 1998. He has excelled at The Sporting News, working with four different ownership groups during his 16-year tenure with the magazine-turned-website, which does not include his internship in 1997.
Quality and content are two of the reasons Deveney has excelled as a journalist, and he has also authored four books. His fifth book, “Fun City: John Lindsay, Joe Namath, and How Sports Saved New York in the 1960s,” hits shelves this October.
?It?s about New York and sports in the ?60?s,” explained Deveney, who graduated from Northwestern University in 1996. “It all started with the new mayor, John Lindsay. He was a different sort of character than a lot of the other politicians. He was this tall, dark, handsome man, and was talked about as presidential material and on par with the Kennedys.
?Joe Namath and the Jets were overtaking the Giants, the Mets were overtaking the Yankees, and the whole establishment of New York ? as a city and its sports scene ? was turned on its head. So much else was going on with the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and a lot else in the backdrop of New York City.”
He still keeps a close eye on the Boston Celtics.
?The Celtics will be better next season,” said Deveney, before catching a flight to cover the team in the NBA’s Las Vegas Summer League. “When you look at their record and how they played after the Jeff Green and Rajon Rondo moves (20-11 after the trade deadline), the Celtics played much more like (coach) Brad Stevens wanted. Now, with a full training camp, and getting some additional development from Marcus Smart and James Young ? who I think is going to be a pretty good player ? they could be a middle of the pack team, which will be an improvement.
?They?re still not quite in the upper echelon of the Eastern Conference, but they added Amir Johnson, who is a terrific defensive player, and David Lee, who can add a great deal of offense.”
Deveney understands the uphill battle Danny Ainge faces while trying to reconstruct the Celtics into a championship contender.
?Everyone is working from the same script in the NBA,” he explained. “I just wrote a story about how hard it is to get players to leave their current teams. I went through the last six years, and only 35 percent of all the major free agents actually leave their teams. Most of them end up staying put. It?s not just the Celtics ? every team that has cap space is dealing with this problem.”
Despite living in Chicago for 10 years, traveling the nation to cover the best basketball in the world, and now residing in Springfield, Mass., Deveney remains proud of his Lynn roots.
?Whenever I go back home, and I go home quite a bit, it brings back so many memories,” he said. “My parents still live in the house where I grew up, and I grew up reading the Globe, reading the work of Dan Shaughnessy, Leigh Montville, Will McDonough, and Jackie MacMullan. To become colleagues with them, covering the NBA Finals, it?s really, really humbl