Markus Andrews

The last time Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart were in a Game 7, they were up-and-coming youngsters on a 2018 Boston Celtics team that was full of potential going up against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Tatum even famously dunked on James in the fourth quarter of a losing effort — a small taste of his growth to come.On Friday night against the Toronto Raptors, Tatum, Brown and Smart solidified that they are no longer up-and-coming. The trio combined for 66 points as the Boston Celtics eliminated the reigning champion Raptors, 92-87, to return to the conference finals for the third time in four years.In a neck-and-neck series, all three players made crucial plays down the stretch. Brown had a momentum-shifting dunk. Tatum saved the game with an offensive rebound in the final minute. And Smart’s chase-down block — also in the final minute — surely will be in Celtics highlight reels for years to come.“I’m first team all-defense for a reason,” Smart said after the game.Is it possible to be young in age and old in experience? Tatum is 22. Brown is 23. Smart is 26. But they have now played seven playoff series together, not including the playoff games Smart and Brown had before Tatum entered the league. Sunday was the third Game 7 for the trio and the fourth for Brown and Smart.“We have three 30-year-olds,” Coach Brad Stevens said, referring to Kemba Walker, Brad Wanamaker and Gordon Hayward. “We’re like basically a college team with a couple of guys.”The young core looked poised down the stretch. They made just enough shots, grabbed just enough rebounds and stretched their arms just high enough to keep the Raptors from scoring when they needed to. For Toronto, Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam looked out of sorts — especially when Lowry threw the ball into the backcourt for a turnover with about five minutes left. Siakam, who played poorly most of the series, finished with 13 points on 12 shots, while Lowry scored 16 points on 15 shots.Even so, it took every bit of the Celtics talent to hold off the resilient Raptors. This was not a team keen on giving up its crown easily.With 0.5 seconds left in Game 3 and Toronto down 2 points, the Raptors hit a 3-pointer to get back into the series. In Game 6, the Celtics led late in the fourth quarter, overtime and double overtime, yet Toronto still won. And in Game 7, even when the Celtics were up 10 points with less than five minutes left, the Raptors came back to within 2 in the final minute. It wasn’t even that surprising. That’s the kind of team Toronto was: You just assume they will come back.“Both teams were really tired,” Stevens said. “Both teams laid it all out there. This has been a grueling series.”And therein lies the cruelty of professional basketball: You live by the bounce and die by the bounce. Last year in a conference semifinal Game 7, the Raptors won by virtue of a fortuitous shot that rimmed in at the last second, beating the Philadelphia 76ers and effectively pushing the Sixers to drastically change their team. On Sunday, when the Raptors needed one more bounce, the plays went the other way.“We had more to give,” Lowry told reporters. “But, you know, unfortunately, we’re not getting any more now.”Toronto’s win last year followed by Friday’s elimination laid bare how rare championship runs are — and why it is imperative for the Celtics to take advantage of this opportunity. The league’s dynamics can shift on a dime, a result of player empowerment in free agency and unexpected trade requests.If you are a glass-half-full type, then you are probably feeling bullish about the Celtics’ chances against the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals, which begin on Tuesday. After all, the Raptors were significantly better than Miami during the regular season. And Hayward is expected to return against Miami.“We should definitely be hardened,” Stevens said. “We should definitely have a lot more in our toolbox to go back to, but we also have to get ready for a different, more unique team in Miami.”And Walker — barring an injury — is a better player than he showed against Toronto, against whom he averaged 17 points and six assists on 42 percent shooting.“These guys saved me all night,” Walker said, referring to his teammates.But Boston fans are never the glass-half-full types (rather, they often ask, is there anything in the glass?). In that respect, the Celtics are still a work in progress.For the first time since the late-2000s era of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, the Celtics will be favored in the Eastern Conference finals.Boston finished ahead of Miami in the regular season, beat opponents by more points and had a better offense and defense. Boston won two of the three games they played against one another, and probably has the best player on the floor in Tatum.The Celtics have been here before. But now fans expect them to win, unlike in 2018, when Kyrie Irving and Hayward were injured, and James was the opponent. Or in 2017, when the Celtics made an unexpected run to the conference finals and lost Isaiah Thomas to injuries and to James once again in the series. Brown and Smart were on that 2017 team.If the Celtics do not reach the finals, there might not be another opportunity as more teams drastically retool and the league shifts again.That they put themselves in position to be the favored team in the conference finals was an unexpected 2020 twist to begin with — the Celtics were not expected to be here before the season started. Remember that last year — and yes, we realize last year feels like decades ago — Boston was unceremoniously dumped from the postseason in the second round by the Milwaukee Bucks. Then Irving, Al Horford and other key rotation players left the team.The Celtics had to hit the reset button — just as Philadelphia did — with Walker as an Irving replacement, and a motley crew of various rookies. The Celtics quickly went from expected championship contenders to predicted mediocrity.One of those rookies, the 21-year-old forward Grant Williams, drafted near the end of the first round, played essential minutes at the end of Game 7 on Sunday — and made a number of key plays to seal the win.The youth movement has paid real dividends for the Celtics. The shoulders of Tatum, Brown and Smart collectively carried the franchise to one of the most momentous series wins for the Celtics in the last decade.Now this young core will find out if it has another veteran performance in store. More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The N.B.A. announced Friday that Danuel House Jr., a reserve forward for the Houston Rockets, had breached the league’s health and safety protocols by inviting an unauthorized guest to his hotel room and that he would be leaving the Walt Disney World campus, where the league has made a major investment to finish out its season inside its so-called bubble.House did not play for the Rockets in Games 3 and 4 of their Western Conference semifinal series against the Los Angeles Lakers this week as the league conducted its investigation. The N.B.A. concluded that the guest, who was not identified by the league, had spent “multiple hours” in House’s hotel room at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa on Tuesday, in direct violation of league rules. The league has stringent policies about who can be on campus — or even interact with the players — as it seeks to insulate itself from the coronavirus pandemic.The league said in a statement that “no evidence was found that other players or staff had contact with the guest or were involved in this incident” and that House “will not participate with the Rockets team in additional games this season.”The Rockets trail the Lakers, 3-1, in their best-of-seven series, with Game 5 scheduled for Saturday night.The unauthorized guest was a woman who had worked on campus several weeks ago as a temperature checker, according to a person who was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to publicly discuss it. It was not clear how she had managed to gain access to the property, which has secure checkpoints around the perimeter. But House propped one of the hotel doors open for her, the person said.It also was not immediately clear whether House had been forced to leave the bubble by either the N.B.A. or the Rockets. A spokeswoman for the Rockets declined to comment. In a 113-page rule book issued before the season resumed in July, the league said that a violation of protocol would be punishable by “a warning, fine, suspension and/or removal from the campus.”House, 27, was an important role player for the Rockets coming off the bench. In his fourth N.B.A. season, he averaged a career-best 10.5 points a game. He went undrafted in 2016 after playing college basketball at Houston and Texas A&M, then bounced around the N.B.A. — including stops in the G League — before working his way into the Rockets’ rotation. More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The Houston Rockets managed to make things interesting in the fourth quarter, which is one thing the Rockets do well: make things interesting. They reinvent offensive schemes and engineer big trades and offer nightly rebukes to conventional wisdom. Houston’s style may be polarizing, but it is not a boring franchise.Now, two months since the Rockets’ arrival at Walt Disney World for the N.B.A.’s restart, their playoff run is coming unglued. After spending about an hour-and-a-half scuffling through some of its worst basketball of the season, at precisely the worst moment with the most at stake, Houston staged a late rally on Thursday night before falling to the Los Angeles Lakers, 110-100, in Game 4 of their Western Conference semifinals series.If fans watching from home were left dumbfounded, so were some of the team’s central figures: How could the Rockets have come out so flat?“That’s a good question,” James Harden said.“I don’t have an explanation for you,” Russell Westbrook said.“Just a lack of spirit,” said Rockets Coach Mike D’Antoni, whose team trails in the best-of-seven series, 3-1.The loss came as the league continued to investigate an alleged violation of protocol in its so-called bubble by at least one of Houston’s players, Danuel House Jr., a reserve who has now missed Games 3 and 4 of the series. The team has cited “personal reasons” as the cause of House’s absence on its injury report.D’Antoni was asked before Thursday’s game whether he expected House to return at some point in the series. Game 5 is scheduled for Saturday night.“I don’t know,” he said. “The investigation is going on. When they come out with their ruling, then we’ll just go from there.”Afterward, D’Antoni said he was not going to use the situation as an excuse for his team’s poor effort. Which was admirable, but there is little doubt that it has been a distraction — and there is the small matter of House’s importance to the team. He scored 13 points off the bench in Game 2. The Rockets could use him moving forward.Then again, they could have used a lot things against the Lakers on Thursday. An extra player. Stilts to defend Anthony Davis. Perhaps a postponement.The Rockets trailed by as many as 23 points. They scored exactly 2 points on fast breaks. And while Frank Vogel, the Lakers’ coach, countered the Rockets’ small-ball approach by benching JaVale McGee, who typically starts at center, Los Angeles still outrebounded Houston by 52-26.“There should’ve been a sense of urgency on everybody’s part,” Westbrook said.Here were some scenes from a debacle:In the third quarter, the Lakers’ Alex Caruso fouled the Rockets’ Austin Rivers, who went to the free-throw line but not before yapping back and forth with Caruso’s teammate, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Rivers made both free throws, but the episode seemed like a lot of work. The Lakers proceeded to inbound the ball and break the Rockets’ full-court press in about 2.7 nanoseconds before Davis finished an alley-oop so ferociously that the ball nearly bounced off the court into outer space.LeBron James opened the fourth quarter for the Lakers by going end-to-end for a layup as the Rockets watched him glide on by as if he were riding a Schwinn.The Rockets’ P.J. Tucker, a 6-foot-5 forward who has the thankless task of matching up against Davis, found himself later in the fourth quarter defending the Lakers’ Rajon Rondo after a switch. Tucker lunged at him near the 3-point line, then Rondo dribbled past him and discovered to his delight — if not to his total surprise, given the events of the evening — that no one was within 10 feet of him. It had to be one of the most wide-open half-court layups of his career.No one, though, had a more challenging time than Harden, who picked up three early fouls and was double-teamed by defenders whenever he had the ball. Those double-teams came in all shapes and sizes: Caruso and Davis, Caldwell-Pope and James. It was a constant canvas of yellow jerseys for Harden, who scored 21 points (most of them from the free-throw line) while shooting just 2 of 11 from the field. He also had 10 assists as he tried to facilitate for his teammates.“They’re playing real well, running around like crazy,” D’Antoni said of the Lakers.The Rockets miraculously trimmed the Lakers’ lead to 5 before Caruso sealed the win by burying a 3-pointer with 35.2 seconds left. For Houston, that late spurt — the team was sparked by reserves like Rivers and Ben McLemore — offered some cause for optimism amid an otherwise bleak night in the bubble.D’Antoni also alluded to some recent history: The Denver Nuggets trailed the Utah Jazz, 3-1, in their first-round series before advancing with three straight wins.“We fought, which is good, and we know what we have to do,” Westbrook said of the fourth quarter. “It’s going to take a lot of effort. It’s going to take everyone being uncomfortable in their role and making sure we understand that we have to sacrifice some of the things we love to do. But we’ve got to scramble. That gives us the best chance to win games.”At this point, they do not have much of a choice. More

In early March, Michele Roberts announced she would be stepping down as executive director of the National Basketball Players Association after six years on the job.Days later, the National Basketball Association said it was suspending its season because of the coronavirus. Basketball was the first major sport to shut down, and the decision became one of the defining moments of normal life around the country rapidly grinding to a halt.Six months later, Ms. Roberts is still on the job, and working as hard as ever. She helped the league, owners and players design the “bubble” in Orlando, Fla., where the N.B.A. resumed play at the end of July. As part of those negotiations, she worked with stars like LeBron James and Chris Paul to get the league to paint “Black Lives Matter” on every court, embrace the concept of printing messages supporting social justice on jerseys and set up a fund to support economic growth in Black communities.That work continued last month when the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take the court after the shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, by the police in Kenosha, Wis. The Bucks’ decision triggered a leaguewide stoppage, and prompted players in other sports to join the protests. For a short time, it was unclear if the N.B.A. season would continue.The players ultimately agreed to resume play, but not before Ms. Roberts collaborated with them to get the league to agree to additional efforts to promote racial justice, including a commitment to try to use some N.B.A. arenas as voting sites in November.Her work isn’t done. While players won a lucrative contract three years ago, the pandemic has upended the economics of live sports, and Ms. Roberts, the union and league officials are trying to figure out when the next N.B.A. season will begin, under what conditions it will be played and how much money players will earn.Ms. Roberts had no experience in the sports business before taking over the players association. She had spent decades as a lawyer, first as a public defender and then as a corporate attorney at firms including Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. But basketball, Ms. Roberts said, was “another business that I had to immerse myself in.”“I had to understand its historical context, the relationship between management and labor, figure out who the stakeholders were and identify my enemies and friends,” she said in an interview from the bubble. “It was very much the way I prepared when I would get a new corporate client.”This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.Tell me about growing up in New York.I grew up in the projects in the South Bronx. We were poor. My mom raised us pretty much on her own. She was an extraordinary woman. She kept me safe, happy, fed and sheltered. And she kept me dreaming that there was nothing I couldn’t do. I give myself zero credit for this wistful desire to be great. My mom decided that, and I went along with the program.What was the program like?When you got home from school, you didn’t play. You went upstairs and did your homework. We had a television, but it didn’t go on until my mom had a chance to make sure the homework was done. If I brought home a B, I had to explain why it wasn’t an A. It sounds harsh, but I didn’t feel put upon. I enjoyed school. I loved to read.Why did you decide to become a public defender?My mom introduced me to the world of litigation and trial work. She was a trial watcher. It was a hobby she somehow developed. She liked to go watch cases and arraignments in a nearby court, and I went with her. I didn’t understand half of what I was seeing, but I thought it was the most magnificent thing in the world, and very early on I wanted to be a lawyer.What did you learn about the American criminal justice system during your time as a lawyer?I think the apparatus, the legal system, is second to none on the planet. I mean, if you think about the notion of a presumption of innocence — that someone does not have to prove his or her innocence, but instead that the state has to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt — that’s an incredibly high standard. And the system is required to appoint competent counsel. So there’s nothing that strikes me as being necessarily wrong with the legal apparatus.It’s the operation of the system that can be horrifying, especially if you’re a person of color, and most especially if you’re poor, no matter what color you are. People say the criminal justice system is corrupt, and there’s some truth to that. But the corruption comes from the actors who abuse it. It’s not the system itself that is inherently corrupt.As a woman leading a group of male players, have you ever felt like your gender was an issue?Admittedly there was a time when I’d be incredibly conscious of the fact that I was the only woman at a meeting, or the only woman in the courtroom, or the only person of color. But I soon realized that spending energy and time on that was detracting from my ability to do my work. And so I trained myself to stop it. I’ve never encouraged anyone to spend a lot of time sitting in a meeting saying: “I’m the only Black woman in this room. Should I say anything? Do they hate me? Do they think I’m stupid?” That’s a process, a passage that I think everyone who looks like me has to go through. But you’ve got to go through it. And then you’ve got to stay through it. Thankfully I’ve been done with that for a while.Why do you think we’re seeing players engage in social activism so forcefully these days?Two words: social media. I have not stopped being amazed at the reach that is made possible through social media. When a new kid comes into the league I’ll check his Facebook and Twitter accounts, and he has 250,000 followers. Because he plays basketball and is very good at it, people want to hear what he has to say. That’s power.These guys feel both the power but also the responsibility that they have. If they feel passionately about an issue, and they do, they want to be able to say: “This is wrong. This has to change.”It’s a very different viewing experience now, with “Black Lives Matter” written on the courts, the slogans on the jerseys, and the announcers talking about Breonna Taylor and the Tulsa race massacre.The world has changed. People always say, “When I watch sports, I just want to shut off the rest of the world.” OK. But the world is still out there. You can spend that two hours watching a basketball game, but the minute you click off that game, it’s still the case that Black men are being killed disproportionately in their contact with police. The world right now is on fire.I’m a Christian. And so I think that I have responsibility to understand what’s going on in my world and in my community. If I was blissfully ignorant of what’s going on in the streets, I would consider it a sin. And people that want to just put blinders on and just not be bothered with events in the world that are uncomfortable, you know, shame on them.The walkout following the shooting of Jacob Blake prompted athletes from other sports to take action, too. What did the N.B.A. players learn from that experience?One of the reasons they decided to continue to play was because they saw the overwhelming amount of media attention that they received, and they observed the influence their behavior had on athletes in other sports. It just underscores that if they really want to influence what’s happening in this country, they can, and they can do it collectively in a way that sends a message throughout the country and around the world. To the extent the players didn’t appreciate their reach, they certainly do now.How do you counsel players about these sensitive issues? A recent association meeting allegedly got heated when one player, Patrick Beverley, took issue with you discussing the financial implications of an early end to the season.I don’t really want to comment on the Patrick thing. What happens in our meetings should stay in our meetings. But players have the responsibility to understand the consequences of their actions with respect to the business. And this is a business. This is how they make their living. Some of them are fortunate to be able to do this for 15 or 20 years. But most of them are not. Most of them have an average of less than five years in the league, and those will likely be their best revenue-generating years. So I’ve got to make sure that they understand what they’re doing, how much it will cost and what’s the impact.Black men and women are underrepresented in front offices around the league. What needs to be done to change that?When there’s a challenge to diversify in other industries, you frequently hear the complaint, “Well, it’s just hard to find people that have the skill set and experience to fill these roles.” That’s not something that can be claimed in this game at all. So there is no excuse. The way to remedy it is to be more inclusive. It’s that’s simple. Same thing with women. It just comes down to people just putting their money where their mouths are and just hiring more people of color.How is the bubble in Orlando working so well?I’m shocked when I turn the TV on and see college kids who are acting as if they are immortal and congregating with abandon. Our players are about the same age, but they got it. They comply, and people have all been safe. That’s the key. You’ve got to have a protocol, and then you’ve got to have cooperation. It breaks my heart to watch kids who want very much to go back to school and then immediately can get engaged in conduct that can shut these institutions down. They should take a lesson from the Orlando bubble. You can make it work if you just follow the protocol.What do you think next season will look like, both from a protocol perspective and an economic perspective?I do think we’ll have a season, but I don’t think it will begin in December. Some bubblelike environment may be necessary. I suspect that we will have a hybrid environment, maybe with division bubbles that last for a certain number of months, and then we stop. But the concept of putting our players in a bubble for an entire season is unrealistic.There will be a revenue drop. I do see a possibility of there being some reopening of some arenas. But if we’re lucky we will see 25 percent of the revenue that ordinarily comes through gate receipts, etc. That’s optimistic. Hopefully we can soften the blow, but I don’t see us packing arenas. More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The joke doesn’t have quite the same bite now that the N.B.A. is playing all of its games in a so-called bubble, but it elicited a hearty laugh from P.J. Tucker of the Houston Rockets regardless.Have you heard the one about how the only center in Houston is the Toyota Center?“That’s true and false,” Tucker said, chuckling at the reference to his team’s home arena. “But it’s mostly true.”The Rockets, you see, insist that none of their players have assigned positions, no matter how they are listed in the box score. Tucker has invited onlookers to call him a center — “Label it however you want to,” he said — but he is not even Houston’s tallest starter. Nor does Tucker jump center for the Rockets when the game tips off, typically ceding that duty to the 6-foot-7 Robert Covington.Tucker is nonetheless often described as the closest thing to a center among the Rockets’ primary players, which owes largely to his physical defense. Yet even when Tucker, who is 6-5, guards someone much bigger, such as the Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Davis, he is quick to point out that his offensive responsibilities call for him to “still do everything” asked of smaller forwards.One clear takeaway amid all these contradictions is that LeBron James and the Lakers have been thrust into a precarious position in the second round of the N.B.A. playoffs against Houston because they have to cope with the Rockets’ unconventional approach — with Tucker at the heart of the chaos. The Lakers lead the series, 2-1, but have been forced to play smaller lineups than they prefer to counter a fleet, floor-spacing front line led by Tucker and Covington.“Every team needs a P.J. Tucker,” Cleveland’s Larry Nance Jr., a former Laker, tweeted Sunday during Game 2 of the Rockets-Lakers series.Tucker played a starring role defensively in Houston’s Game 1 victory, then overcame foul trouble in Game 2 to register 18 points and 11 rebounds, though the Rockets’ rally fell short. He managed just 3 points Tuesday in a quiet Game 3 performance, shortly after openly disappointed Rockets officials learned that Tucker had not been selected to the N.B.A.’s all-defensive first or second team.“What we see,” Rockets Coach Mike D’Antoni said, “we think he’s the best.”The Rockets, to use General Manager Daryl Morey’s word, were for years unabashedly “obsessed” with trying to topple the Golden State Warriors, who won three championships in their five consecutive trips to the N.B.A. finals from 2015 to 2019. This season, with the Warriors missing Kevin Durant (left in free agency) and the injured guards Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry, Morey took even bigger swings than usual in his roster construction. He followed the much-debated trade that dispatched Chris Paul to Oklahoma City for Russell Westbrook by assembling a four-team trade in February that sent Clint Capela, Houston’s starting center, to Atlanta to acquire Covington from Minnesota. The emphasis on small ball was widely rebranded as “microball.”Despite the 2-1 series deficit, and fears that Houston’s small lineups are being worn down by the Lakers’ power, Tucker has not wavered in his belief that the Rockets can win the series. As significant a surprise as that would be, it would also not automatically rank as the biggest upset by a Tucker team.The Toronto Raptors drafted Tucker No. 35 over all in 2006, but he didn’t stick, and headed to Israel for the 2007-8 season. There he led unheralded Hapoel Holon to a stunning victory over Maccabi Tel Aviv, the perennial European club power, for the championship; it was one of only two seasons between 1970 and 2008 that Maccabi failed to win it all domestically.“To this day, that’s my No. 1 basketball moment,” Tucker said.It was the start of a five-season odyssey in the international game, with additional stops in Ukraine, Greece, Italy, Puerto Rico and Germany, during which Tucker developed the long-distance shooting touch that makes him one of the N.B.A.’s most productive corner 3-point shooters.“He used to just bully guys down low,” said Omri Casspi, Israel’s most successful N.B.A. export and a teenager with Maccabi when Tucker was named the most valuable player with Holon. There was “no match” in the league for Tucker physically, Casspi said.Tucker excitedly recounted how loud the crowds were, calling them the most vociferous fans he has ever played for — “no doubts, hands down, no close seconds.” Yet he said that his current role, as a key two-way contributor for an N.B.A. championship contender, seemed like an unreachable dream for much of his time abroad.“Back then the league was different,” Tucker said. “Being a ‘tweener’ was terrible. Nobody wanted tweeners. You had to be a wing player that could shoot 3s or a back-to-the-basket big — and if you fell in the middle you didn’t fit. So a lot of times, I was lost.“Going over there, I learned how to be a team player. I had to grow up. Being the main guy for three or four years, I understood what it took to be the leader. Coming back to the N.B.A., being one of those other guys again, I knew exactly how to do my job.”Becoming proficient from long range certainly didn’t hurt: Tucker made a league-high 90 corner 3-pointers during the regular season. As D’Antoni noted, Tucker is also the key defender in Houston’s schemes that depend on the frequent switching of individual assignments.“Now I bask in that whole area of the unknown,” Tucker said. “It’s the most beautiful thing ever.”At 35, Tucker averaged a career-high 34.3 minutes per game during the regular season. His seemingly boundless determination to collect sneakers tends to generate more media attention than his game — Tucker plans to open his own sneaker store in Houston next month called the Better Generation With P.J. Tucker — but what he covets most is an N.B.A. playoff memory to usurp what he did in Israel.He continues to agonize over the Rockets’ fate in the 2018 Western Conference finals. Up, 3-2, over the Warriors, Tucker’s Rockets had two shots to eliminate the reigning champions but could not overcome the loss of Paul to a hamstring injury in Game 5. In Game 7, Houston missed a still-unfathomable 27 consecutive 3-pointers and lost at home.“It’s been frustrating; I won’t lie about that,” Tucker said. “I still haven’t watched Game 6 and Game 7 from two years ago, because we knew that was the championship, whoever won that series. There’s nothing worse than that.”Yet the stakes for the Rockets seem higher than ever this postseason. D’Antoni’s future is uncertain in the final year of his contract as coach, and Tucker, who will be seeking an extension this off-season, has just one year left on his deal. Questions likewise persist about how Westbrook fits alongside James Harden — and the holes in Harden’s and D’Antoni’s playoff legacies.All of that tends to generate considerable noise around the Rockets, but Tucker, defiant as ever, said, “We laugh at it.”“We think it’s hilarious,” Tucker said.Such material is presumably not as humorous as the Toyota Center crack, but imagine the last laugh Tucker would have if, spotting the 6-foot-10 Davis five inches and after all those years abroad, if he led a Houston comeback to take down the West’s No. 1 seed. More

Steve Nash, the newly minted Nets coach, sounded all the right notes at his introductory news conference on Wednesday. He called the first coaching job of his career a “unique opportunity” and said the Nets had “an incredible roster” at an “incredible point in the history of the franchise.”He also defended his hiring, which has reignited the long-simmering debate over how much more often white people are chosen for N.B.A. head coaching jobs than Black people in a league where an estimated 80 percent of the players are Black.[Read: N.B.A.’s Head Coaching Diversity Under Scrutiny as Vacancies Loom]“Well, I did skip the line, frankly,” said Nash, who is white and has no coaching experience. “But at the same time, I think leading an N.B.A. team for almost two decades is pretty unique.”He added: “To be the head of the team on the floor. Think on the fly. To manage personalities, people and skill sets, and bring people together. Collaborating with a coaching staff for almost two decades. I mean, it’s not like I was in a vacuum.”Nash’s hiring was a surprise to many basketball observers. He has never officially coached at any level. Jacque Vaughn, who had been the Nets’ interim head coach since March, was passed over for the permanent role and asked to remain on as lead assistant.Nash’s résumé is almost entirely based off his N.B.A. playing days, which lasted from 1996 to 2014, during which he become one of the greatest point guards in N.B.A. history. He won two Most Valuable Player Awards and made eight All-Star teams. He led the Phoenix Suns’ so-called “seven seconds or less” offense that focused on quick shots and 3-pointers, which contributed to a broad evolution in playing style across the league.These attributes, General Manager Sean Marks said, made Nash the ideal head coach. Marks, a former teammate of Nash’s, joined Nash at the news conference. They wore matching black Nets polos and sat several feet apart, socially distanced.“As we spread the net in our search for the next leader, the next connector, a communicator and a cultural driver, we looked for these qualities, and all these qualities we found in Steve,” Marks said. “His résumé, his Hall of Fame résumé, his experiences both on and off the court and his character are second to none.”Nash told reporters that he reached out to Marks over the summer to express interest in the coaching job, but the conversation was a culmination of a two-decade relationship with Marks.“I love to compete,” Nash said. “I love to teach, lead and to be a part of the team. So to be in a position where I can do all those things on a day-to-day basis is a perfect fit. While I haven’t necessarily publicly stated a desire to coach, privately it’s always been in my mind.”He added: “When you can’t run up and down the court anymore, what can you do? What can you contribute?”Nash was close with Nets forward Kevin Durant before taking the coaching job. In 2015, Nash was hired by Golden State as a player development consultant and worked with Durant, who spent three seasons with the Warriors. Nash also said Wednesday that he has a relationship with Nets guard Kyrie Irving. They worked out together in New York after Nash retired. Durant and Irving are two of the best players in the league and together make the Nets a formidable championship contender.“Kyrie is one of my favorite players of all time,” Nash said. “He’s brilliant. His skill level is historically off the charts. Creative. Guts. Competitiveness. So for me to get to coach him is a pleasure.”Asked what kind of coach he would be on the sideline, Nash said he wasn’t sure yet.“I don’t see myself as a yeller and screamer,” Nash said. “But I haven’t actually been over there yet so we’ll see what transpires. But I think the reality is I’m going to be myself. If I’m anything other than myself, it’s not going to work. I can’t come in trying to conform to what I think a coach is supposed to be.” More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Everything was simpler in November and December, back when the Milwaukee Bucks were rolling through the regular season and chasing a championship and no one knew anything about the coronavirus. Giannis Antetokounmpo had somehow improved his game, and the future was rife with possibility.When the Bucks reconvened here at Walt Disney World for the N.B.A.’s restart in July, they were not whole. Two players did not make the trip after testing positive for the coronavirus — Eric Bledsoe and Pat Connaughton eventually joined the team — but it seemed to foreshadow the challenges that loomed.The challenge of reassembling the unusual qualities that had made the Bucks such a special team before the season was suspended. The challenge of generating energy in a spectator-free bubble. The challenge of unearthing their chemistry after a four-and-a-half-month hiatus. And, of course, the challenge of shining a spotlight on social justice issues as the world watched.The basketball part of the equation never came together for the top-seeded Bucks, who were eliminated from the playoffs after losing to the Miami Heat on Tuesday night in Game 5 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series. Antetokounmpo, favored to win his second consecutive N.B.A. Most Valuable Player Award, sat out the Bucks’ 103-94 loss with a sprained ankle, relegated to the role of cheerleader as his teammates pushed on without him. Antetokounmpo had hoped to be healthy enough to play in Game 6.“If it’s up to me, I play with one leg,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we have people with the team that sometimes have a bigger say than you and have to protect you.”One of those people, Coach Mike Budenholzer, helped make that decision. It was also Budenholzer, along with team executives in the front office, who supported the players last month when they chose to sit out a first-round playoff game against the Orlando Magic, a move they described as a boycott after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, in Kenosha Wis., about 40 miles south of Milwaukee. Similar protests spread across multiple sports leagues.On Tuesday, Budenholzer choked back tears as he tried to reconcile the twin threads of the Bucks’ experience in the bubble. There was the obvious disappointment of his team’s early exit, especially given the expectations of a deep run. But those feelings were counterbalanced by the protest and the platform that his players seized.“Our team,” Budenholzer said, “was on the right side of history.”Nothing about the restart was easy for the Bucks, who were 3-5 in eight seeding games ahead of their series against Orlando. And then something much more significant happened. After Blake was repeatedly shot in the back by a white officer, George Hill, a point guard and one of the team’s veteran leaders, expressed regret about having decided to play at all in the bubble.“We shouldn’t have came to this damn place, to be honest,” he said at a news conference. “Coming here just took all the focal points off what the issues are.”He was referring to issues like systemic racism and police brutality, issues that the Bucks sought to highlight by sitting out their game against the Magic. The league wound up postponing its schedule for three days, and there was some doubt about whether the postseason would even resume.But the players opted to stay, as N.B.A. team owners pledged to try to use some arenas across the league as voting sites in November.The Bucks soon closed out their first-round series before meeting the Heat — a formidable opponent that ran out to a 3-1 lead. After spraining his ankle in Game 3, Antetokounmpo aggravated the injury early in Game 4. Without him, his teammates plowed to a 118-115 overtime win to extend the series to a fifth game.But it was a temporary reprieve for a tired (and injured) team, one that had also committed itself to addressing problems that the players felt were of greater importance.“Obviously, it’s hard to balance those two,” Antetokounmpo said, adding: “We chose as a team to do both. Is it harder to do both? Yes, it’s harder to do both. But that’s what we chose as a team, to stand up for something that’s bigger than basketball, to stand up for something that we believe, and at the same time play basketball. But it’s not easy.”As for his own future, Antetokounmpo said he was already looking ahead to next season — yes, with the Bucks.“We can learn from this and get better as a team,” he said, “and come back and hopefully build a culture in Milwaukee that, for many years, we can come out here and compete every single year for a championship.”Antetokounmpo, a 6-foot-11 forward whom Milwaukee drafted in 2013, is eligible to sign a contract extension this off-season. But if he declines to do so, he could become an unrestricted free agent after next season. The Bucks need to sign him, or they risk losing him. The entire situation is already producing agita among basketball fans in Wisconsin.For now, Antetokounmpo appears committed to the Bucks. (He told Yahoo Sports on Tuesday night that he would not request a trade if he does not finalize an extension, saying he wanted to “get right back at it next season.”) But his contract situation will remain a source of intrigue, and the Bucks will need to find ways to improve his supporting cast.Even so, the Bucks left an imprint on this odd, challenging season — not in the way that many would have predicted at the start of the year, with a championship parade along the shores of Lake Michigan, but in a meaningful way that went beyond the game and a season that ended too soon. More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Another season for the Milwaukee Bucks ended in disappointment, this one nearly 11 months after it started. The top-seeded Bucks were ousted from the N.B.A. playoffs on Tuesday night with a 103-94 loss to the Miami Heat, who clinched their Eastern Conference semifinal series, four games to one.In an odd season that was interrupted and then extended by the coronavirus pandemic, the Bucks still seemed primed for a championship run when they arrived for the N.B.A.’s restart at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., this summer. But after finishing with the league’s best regular-season record for the second straight year, the Bucks again flamed out in the playoffs.Last season, Milwaukee lost to the Toronto Raptors, the eventual champions, in the conference finals. This season, the Bucks went up against a formidable opponent in the conference semifinals. Led by Jimmy Butler, who has left his tough-minded imprint all over the Heat in his first season with the team, Miami wore down the Bucks, who were undermanned by the end of the series.The Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is widely expected to collect his second straight N.B.A. Most Valuable Player Award sometime in the coming days, sprained his right ankle in Game 3 before tweaking the injury early in Game 4. Without him for much of that game, the Bucks were able to stave off elimination with an unexpected win that showed their resolve.But Antetokounmpo, 25, did not play in Game 5 — he warmed up before the team ruled him out — and his teammates could not compensate for his absence.Now, the Bucks are sure to face questions — and important decisions — about their future. Antetokounmpo, a 6-foot-11 forward and generational talent whom Milwaukee drafted in 2013, is eligible to sign a contract extension this off-season. But if he declines to do so, he could become an unrestricted free agent after next season. More