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    Not Even LeBron James Could Save the Lakers

    The team that was built to be unbeatable just kept losing.On Jan. 25, the Los Angeles Lakers went to Brooklyn to face the Nets and displayed a joyfulness that was unusual for them this season.Their top stars LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook were all healthy — one of only 21 times this season that happened. It was Davis’s first game back from a knee injury. It was James’s only appearance in New York City. He had been suspended for the team’s November visit to Madison Square Garden, his favorite place to play.On back-to-back Nets possessions, James stole the ball and raced the other way as the crowd murmured in anticipation. They erupted into cheers each time James dunked.After the second one, James grinned. He laughed with Michael Strahan, the former N.F.L. star, who was sitting courtside, and jogged back to the Lakers’ bench still smiling.“The more minutes that we log, we continue to see how dynamic we can be,” James said after that game.The Lakers were in eighth place in the Western Conference, and the night offered hope. At the time it felt inconceivable that a team built to be an unbeatable superteam might get stuck in the play-in tournament, but the Lakers had plenty of time to rise in the standings. Many assumed they could still be dangerous in any playoff situation.Back then, few expected what would actually happen.The Lakers were eliminated from playoff contention by the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday, even though James had the second-highest point average of his 19-year career this season. On Friday, James was ruled out for the final two games of the season because of a lingering ankle injury that had already kept him out of the three previous games. The Lakers are likely to finish 11th in the Western Conference, a spectacular failure for a team that expected to compete for a championship this season.This season was challenging for many teams, as the N.B.A. attempted a return to normal with the coronavirus pandemic still happening and with high-profile injuries afflicting many teams. But no team in the league will finish the season with as large a chasm between expectations and reality as the Lakers did.“It’s obviously disappointing on many levels,” Westbrook said. “But there ain’t much you can do about it at this point.”Westbrook was introduced with superstar fanfare in August, as Rob Pelinka, the Lakers’ president of basketball operations, declared that he gave them a chance to win the franchise’s 18th championship. But his arrival didn’t come without questions.Russell Westbrook was booed and jeered, both at home and on the road, because of his shooting struggles.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesHow, for example, would a player who needs the ball in his hands to be productive fit with James, one of the best offensive facilitators ever? Was it wise for the Lakers to get older — by signing a slew of over-30 veterans — when they had already been plagued by health issues that often come with age?Preseasons don’t always foretell the regular season, but the Lakers went winless in theirs.When they stumbled at the start of the season, there was an easy way for the team to explain their situation: It happens. Superstars don’t always jell right away.The pandemic offered an excuse — it made continuity nearly impossible for any team in the first few months of the season.Pandemic disruptions reached their apex during the Omicron wave in November and December, during which dozens of players entered the league’s health and safety protocols.The N.B.A.’s testing system wasn’t perfect and James suffered because of it — he flew home from Sacramento on a quarantine plane because of a false-positive coronavirus test result before a game against the Kings. It was the 12th game out of the Lakers’ first 23 that James had missed.A few weeks later, a coronavirus outbreak spread through the team, even sidelining Lakers Coach Frank Vogel for six games.Many teams, though, were hit even harder than the Lakers, including the Chicago Bulls, who had 10 players in health and safety protocols at once in December, and had to postpone two games.Injuries offered another explanation for the Lakers’ stumbles. James and Davis missed more than 60 games combined — not an unexpected outcome, given their recent histories. Davis said he was “disappointed that we haven’t had a chance to have a full team.”“Not sure how good we could have been,” he said. “With myself personally, two unfortunate injuries that kept me out for a while. That just came to be part of the season. As one of the leaders on the team, especially on the defensive end of the floor where guys need me to be out there, sucks for me, sucks for our team, our organization.”But this season, injuries throttled many teams.The Miami Heat lost Jimmy Butler for nearly a month. The Phoenix Suns lost Chris Paul for a month. The Los Angeles Clippers spent all season without Kawhi Leonard and lost their other star, Paul George, for three months.While those teams found ways to adapt and keep themselves in the playoff conversation anyway, the Lakers couldn’t.James and Anthony Davis (3) missed more than 60 games combined because of injuries this season.Gary A. Vasquez/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThis was in part owing to a roster that was thinner than it should have been because of the resources dedicated to Westbrook.To acquire Westbrook, the Lakers traded away young role players in Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Kyle Kuzma. They declined to re-sign Alex Caruso, who went on to be an important defensive piece for the Bulls.The Lakers’ defense was among the bottom third in the N.B.A. this season, as they have given up 112.8 points for every 100 possessions. The only team that has given up more fast-break points per game is Houston.The Lakers also struggled to defend inside the paint, a symptom of their complicated big-man rotation.During their championship season two years ago, the Lakers used JaVale McGee and Dwight Howard as their primary centers, occasionally asking Davis and James to fill the role. This season they brought back Howard, two years older and less effective. They signed DeAndre Jordan, 33, who proved past his prime as well.They didn’t have the assets at the trade deadline to make a move that didn’t hamstring them further. Westbrook’s contract will become more attractive to other teams next year when he is on its last year, assuming he picks up his player option for the 2022-23 season.As clear as it was that the Lakers’ roster was not working, it was even more clear that a fix would not come soon.They were losing to the league’s bottom-dwelling teams. The best teams were beating up on them, too. Young playoff teams like the Grizzlies and Timberwolves were mocking them, with Westbrook’s poor shooting a regular target.“This was the season that we just didn’t get it done,” Lakers forward Carmelo Anthony said. “We had the tools. Some things was out of our control. Some things we could control, some things we couldn’t. We didn’t get it done. We can’t make excuses about it. We just didn’t get it done.”In the past nine years, the Lakers have missed the playoffs seven times. It is a previously unthinkable stretch for a franchise that was once used to competing for, if not always winning, championships.This is a franchise that expects adding superstars will save them, and sometimes they do. This season that equation didn’t work. More

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    Herb Turetzky, Nets’ Official Scorer for 54 Years, Dies at 76

    He recorded the statistics of more than 2,200 home games for the team in both New York and New Jersey, and in both the American and National Basketball Associations.Herb Turetzky, a passionate basketball fan who was the official scorer for nearly every home game played by the nomadic Brooklyn Nets franchise from its inception in 1967 until his retirement last year, died on Monday at his home in Whitestone, Queens. He was 76.His wife, Jane, said the cause was primary lateral sclerosis, which causes nerve cells in the brain that control movement to fail. In recent years, he attended games in a wheelchair.Over 54 years of meticulously keeping statistics, Mr. Turetzky recorded the field goals, rebounds, assists, fouls and free throws of Nets stars like Julius Erving, Rick Barry, Buck Williams, Jason Kidd and Kevin Durant. He became a forever Net, the team’s de facto historian and a gregarious friend to players and the news media.He took his seat at center court with his scorebook for more than 2,200 Nets home games, first when the team was in the American Basketball Association and later in the National Basketball Association, after the leagues merged.“He brought so much class and care to the scorer’s table, not a place where you necessarily look for that,” said Mr. Erving, who led the New York Nets to A.B.A. championships in 1974 and 1976. “The job is drudgery for some people, but not for Herb. He cared so much for it, and his reputation preceded him everywhere.”Mr. Turetzky was a senior at Long Island University in Brooklyn in 1967 when he took his future wife, Jane Jacobs, to the Teaneck Armory in New Jersey to see the first game in the team’s history. Then called the New Jersey Americans, they were playing the Pittsburgh Pipers in a matchup of two storied forwards from Brooklyn: the Pipers’ Connie Hawkins and New Jersey’s Tony Jackson, who, like Mr. Turetzky, was from the Brownsville neighborhood.“We had no money and he had free tickets, and we were going to watch the game,” Mrs. Turetzky said by phone.Before the tip-off, Max Zaslofsky, the Americans’ coach and general manager, noticed that the scorer’s table was empty and spotted Mr. Turetzky. He knew Mr. Turetzky from his attending games of an Amateur Athletic Union team that Mr. Zaslofsky had coached. He asked him if he could keep score.“Max, I’d love to,” Mr. Turetzky recalled saying, as quoted in a Sports Illustrated profile last year. “I’m here, so why not?” He added, “I’ve never left that seat since.”After one season in Teaneck, Mr. Turetzky followed the Nets to Long Island, where they played in three arenas, including the Nassau Coliseum; then to three homes back in New Jersey, including the Prudential Center in Newark; and finally to Barclays Center in Brooklyn.Between 1984 and 2018, he scored 1,465 consecutive games.“When I did my 900th straight game, they covered it on NBA TV,” he told the New Jersey newspaper The Record in 2012. “Charles Barkley was on, and when they made that comment to Barkley, all he said was: ‘Nine hundred straight Nets games? Boy, that man’s seen a lot of bad basketball.’”“I have seen some bad games,” he added, “but I’ve seen some great ones.”In 2020, when all the bad and great games — and those in between — added up to 2,206, Guinness World Records certified them as the most by an official scorer in N.B.A. history.Mr. Turetzky was inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004.Herbert Stephen Turetzky was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 19, 1945. His mother, Rose (Pearl) Turetzky, was a bookkeeper for the maker of Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup. His father, Sam, was a plumber. Herb played basketball at the Brownsville Boys’ Club (now the Brownsville Recreation Center), where he also learned how to run a scoreboard and maintain a scorebook.After he graduated from L.I.U. in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he was a teacher and then a principal at a Brooklyn elementary school. After that, he worked as a grants writer for the New York City Board of Education and owned a trophy business. He earned two master’s degrees, in education and in administration and supervision.All the while, Mr. Turetzky was traveling to Nets home games. His longest break from his scoring duties began in November 1968, when he was driving to a game in Commack, on Long Island. He lost control of his car on the Long Island Expressway, crossed a grass divider and crashed into an oncoming car. The driver was killed.“I was in a coma for about six weeks and broke my entire left side up, creating some muscular damage, had a concussion, broke my jaw,” he told The Asbury Park Press in 2005.He returned to the Nets the next season and rarely missed a game after that. Along the way, he and his family became part of the fabric of the team.He was pushed, fully clothed, into the showers at Nassau Coliseum and doused with champagne as the team celebrated its 1976 title. His family hosted the guard Levern Tart, known as Jelly, at their Thanksgiving dinners. The team’s mascot, Duncan the Dragon, was a guest at the bat mitzvah of Mr. Turetzky’s daughter, Jennifer. His son, David, was a Nets ball boy.In addition to his wife, Mr. Turetzky is survived by his daughter, his son and two grandchildren.Jennifer Turetzky recalled listening to her father call in the box scores of Nets games to the Elias Sports Bureau, the N.B.A.’s longtime official statistician.“A box score has a certain direction, and he delivered it in the same cadence, with each player on both teams, starting with minutes — say, 37 — then 5-for-12 and 6-for-9,” she said by phone, describing the field-goal and free-throw statistics. “Then the big number at the end, 45 points. He did it all through my childhood.” More

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    Knicks Rookie Quentin Grimes Can’t Stop Scrolling, Either

    A dolphin trend on TikTok made his name on the internet. Now Grimes, 21, is trying to make his mark at Madison Square Garden.Quentin Grimes was leaning on his kitchen island, snacking on tortilla chips and scrolling through TikTok. It was October 2020, and he was a couple of months away from starting his junior season of men’s basketball at the University of Houston. On his TikTok feed, he encountered video after video of people imitating dolphins and bumping their bodies into friends and strangers. Grimes couldn’t stop laughing, so he decided to jump into the deep end of the trend.He downloaded the audio track from the app, tilted his iPhone against a toaster oven and hit record. While he was still chomping on a chip, he held his hands out in front of him, arched his back and jumped in sync with the sound of a gun firing. When two more shots from the song rang out, he sprang forward twice more, laughing as he fell out of the camera frame. The whole video lasted six seconds.He didn’t think anything more of it until he got into bed that night and opened the app again. Within a few hours, the video had been streamed more than 100,000 times. By the next day, the number was more than half a million, and Grimes had gained 20,000 followers. It was just the ninth video that he’d posted to his account, but it convinced him that the app was where he could share the fun side of himself that basketball fans rarely got to see on the court.“As an athlete, you want to be known for something besides just your sport,” Grimes, 21, said as he swiped on his iPhone 13 during an interview at his apartment in White Plains, N.Y. “You don’t want to just post basketball, basketball, basketball. You don’t want that to be your whole life. I think fans want to see you as an actual person.”Grimes checks TikTok while signing basketball cards.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesThe Knicks acquired Grimes in a draft-night deal in 2021, about nine months after his dolphin video introduced an ever-expanding TikTok audience to his offbeat, playful personality. That charisma, as well as his penchant for the irreverent, has helped him amass more than 100,000 followers on the increasingly influential social media app, a count that trails only Josh Giddey (515,000) and Jalen Green (326,000) among the 2021 N.B.A. draft class. As a league, the N.B.A. has been quick to embrace TikTok, and its official account has nearly double the followers of the most popular sports league in the country, the N.F.L. As Grimes’s career progresses in a major market like New York, he’ll be poised to profit from his growing following. But for now, he’s more in it for the LOLs.“I save the dunks for the people who come to the Garden,” he said. “On TikTok, I’m just trying to make people smile.”Grimes took a circuitous path to playing for the Knicks. A Texas native, he was a consensus 5-star recruit in the Class of 2018 and joined Kansas as a presumed one-and-done player. But after a disappointing freshman year, he transferred to Houston to be closer to home. As a sophomore, he helped Houston win its second-straight conference championship and climb into The Associated Press Top 25 with a 23-8 record. Twelve days after the N.C.A.A. announced it was canceling the 2020 men’s basketball tournament because of the coronavirus pandemic, Grimes started his TikTok account. His first post was captioned: “Boreddddddd!”As a junior, Grimes guided Houston to its first Final Four since the Phi Slama Jama teams of the early 1980s. That April, he declared for the draft but was projected as a second-round pick until a standout performance at the draft combine. In July, the Los Angeles Clippers selected him with the No. 25 pick on behalf of the Knicks, who had received the draft slot in a trade. That night, he posted a TikTok with the caption: “NEW YORK WHAT’S GOOOOD!” It received almost 500,000 views and nearly 1,500 comments.When Ben Perkins, Grimes’s former A.A.U. coach and longtime trainer, saw the video making the rounds on social media, he gave Grimes a hard time. “In basketball, I rarely compliment him. I like to push him and prod him,” Perkins said. “The first thing I said when I saw the video was: ‘Come on, man! Who would want to look at you this much?’ But it’s really fun. It’s like his alter ego. If you only know him as a killer on the court, this is a chance to see the silly side of him.”Grimes said he sometimes has to “force himself” to put down his phone and go to sleep.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesMost of Grimes’s posts involve him dancing, typically in a hotel room or a bathroom. Though he only posts a few times a month, he said he spends as much as three hours a day on the app and sends and receives hundreds of memes each day. If he sees a trend enough times, he attempts it. If it takes him more than a few takes, he abandons it. At Houston, he regularly included his teammates in his TikToks, but as an N.B.A. rookie this season, he thought it would be best to hold off on asking for cameos from his veteran teammates.Early on in the season, Knicks fans saw him more on social media than on the court — he didn’t appear in 12 of the team’s first 16 games. But between those games, he was impressing Knicks coaches with his effort in practices, his commitment to studying his defensive assignments and the energy he showed even in garbage-time minutes. Grimes got his first start in December, when the team was without RJ Barrett, Obi Toppin and Alec Burks. He set a franchise rookie record with seven 3-pointers. The jersey from that game hangs on a chair in his kitchen, waiting to be framed.“My attitude was: ‘If I only get on the court for the last minute, then it’s my goal to play 110 percent in that minute,’” Grimes said. “In one minute, you can still get a big stop or a big bucket. The coaches take note of all that. Even if you get in for eight seconds on defense, how you play is important. That was my role early. They’d say, ‘Go guard Jimmy Butler,’ and I’d say, ‘OK, I’ll go do that.’”From Christmas through the All-Star break, he averaged more than 23 minutes per game and notched five more starts. His toughness impressed even his notoriously gruff head coach. “I love Grimes. I love Grimes,” Knicks Coach Tom Thibodeau told reporters after a January practice. “He’s a fierce competitor, can shoot the ball, can guard multiple positions, and he’s only going to get better.”Grimes (6) has started six games this season for the Knicks, who have been eliminated from playoff contention.Adam Hunger/Associated PressIn February, Grimes partially dislocated his right kneecap when he was trying to get around a screen in the first quarter of a game against Miami. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the kneecap, adrift on the side of his leg — thinking about it even a month later sent him into a shiver — but he breathed a big sigh of relief when he learned that the injury wouldn’t be career-altering. The only lasting disappointment was that it cost him a chance to play in the same arena on the same day as his half brother, Tyler Myers, a veteran defenseman for the Vancouver Canucks. He made it back onto the court less than a month later, but he’s taken it slow as the Knicks season ends without a playoff berth.He’s also slowed down his posting during his recovery. But that doesn’t mean he’s spending less time on social media. Every night, after he’s taken a shower and turned off all the lights in his apartment, he puts his phone in his hand and his head on his pillow. “It’s just me and the brightness of the screen, scrolling and scrolling,” he said. “You get hooked” — he snaps his fingers — “like that! And then you’ve got to force yourself to go to sleep even though you’re not tired.”With his rookie season almost behind him, Grimes has big plans for his future in New York — on the court and online. He said he wants to do more videos next season with Barrett and Cam Reddish, whom he has known since they were sophomores in high school. And, of course, he hopes that as a healthy group, they can help steer the Knicks back to the postseason. “Next year,” he said, “people are really going to see what we can do.” More

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    Lakers Eliminated From Playoff Contention

    The loss to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday sealed their fate. It’s the second time the Lakers will miss the postseason since LeBron James joined the team in 2018.The Los Angeles Lakers’ last glimmer of hope for this season is gone.With LeBron James watching from the bench, the Lakers lost to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night, ending their chances of making the playoffs. A win by the San Antonio Spurs over the Denver Nuggets earlier in the evening made the Suns game a mathematical must-win for the Lakers to stay in contention for the postseason.The Lakers lost seven consecutive games beginning in late March, allowing the Spurs to eclipse them for the 10th-best record in the Western Conference and a spot in the N.B.A.’s play-in tournament, which will decide the seventh and eighth seeds in the playoffs that begin April 16.During the Lakers’ seven-game slide, James and Anthony Davis played together only once, highlighting a problem they have faced all season.Davis returned April 1 after missing 18 games because of a right mid-foot sprain. James has been managing soreness in his left ankle, which has caused him to miss five of the team’s last seven games.Since the league’s All-Star break in mid-February, the Lakers have the second-worst record in the West, having won only four games. Only Portland has been worse.This marks the seventh time in the past nine years that the Lakers have missed the playoffs, a once-unthinkable stretch for the organization. Before the 2013-14 season, the Lakers had missed the playoffs only five times since the franchise’s inception in Minnesota in 1948.Anthony Davis had 21 points and 13 rebounds for the Lakers in the loss on Tuesday.Rick Scuteri/Associated PressIt is also the second time James has missed the playoffs since joining the Lakers in 2018, when he came to Los Angeles following eight consecutive appearances in the N.B.A. finals with Miami and Cleveland.During his first season with the Lakers, James joined a young team that featured Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, Kyle Kuzma, Alex Caruso and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope — all players who went on to be productive elsewhere.James injured his groin in a Christmas Day game that season and played in just 55 games. The Lakers went 37-45 and finished 10th in the West, which, before the advent of the play-in tournament, gave them no postseason hopes.They traded for Davis that summer and immediately won a championship in 2020, when the league finished its season in a bubble environment at Walt Disney World in Florida because of the pandemic.Last season, which was shortened because of the pandemic, Davis was injured and played in only 36 of the 72 games. The Lakers went 42-30 and lost to the Suns in the first round as the seventh seed.In the off-season, the Lakers looked to make themselves into championship contenders again. They traded young role players to the Washington Wizards for the aging nine-time All-Star point guard Russell Westbrook, whose $44 million salary made him the highest-paid player on the team this season. They hoped Westbrook’s playmaking ability would help the Lakers when they were without James, who typically runs the Lakers’ offense.“I’m coming to a championship-caliber team and my job is to make sure that I’m able to make his game easier for him,” Westbrook said at his introductory news conference when asked about how he would fit with James. “And I’ll find ways to do that throughout the game.”As the season began, very little went according to plan.James missed 11 of the Lakers’ first 19 games because of injuries, the first suspension of his career and a false-positive coronavirus test.Davis has played in only 40 games this season, missing several weeks with two different injuries — first a knee injury then the foot sprain.Westbrook has struggled to find his footing. That led to Lakers Coach Frank Vogel, who has experimented with lineups all season, moving away from Westbrook in the closing minutes of games.Westbrook’s 18.4 points per game are his lowest average since the 2009-10 season, his second year in the N.B.A. His rebounds per game (7.5) and assists per game (7.1) also dropped sharply from last season.Still, with James in contention for the league’s scoring title, the Lakers had the ninth-best record in the West at the All-Star break, and a chance to force their way into the playoffs. But they couldn’t make the necessary late-season push. More

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    Gene Shue, All-Star and Longtime N.B.A. Coach, Dies at 90

    He had a seven-decade pro career, starting as a guard with the Pistons before coaching for 22 years, leading the Bullets and the 76ers to the finals.Gene Shue, an All-Star N.B.A. guard of the late 1950s and early ’60s who went on to turn losers into winners in 22 seasons as a pro coach, died Sunday at his home in Marina del Rey, Calif. He was 90. Shue’s death was announced by the NBA. His partner, Patti Massey, said he had been treated for melanoma.Shue embarked on his pro career playing with the old Philadelphia Warriors in 1954, the year the 24-second shot clock was adopted. He was an N.B.A. presence for seven decades in a journey with second and even third acts.Long after joining the Warriors as a first-round draft pick out of Maryland, Shue returned to the city twice, as a coach of the 76ers (formerly the Syracuse Nationals) and later in front-office roles. He had two stints playing for the Knicks.He ended his playing career with the Baltimore Bullets and later coached them in Baltimore and Washington. He coached the Clippers in San Diego and Los Angeles. He was an All-Star for five consecutive seasons with the Detroit Pistons, twice averaging more than 20 points a game. And he was named a first-team all-N.B.A. guard in 1960, along with the Boston Celtics’ Bob Cousy.Shue was twice N.B.A. coach of the year, with Baltimore in 1969 and with Washington in 1982, and he coached the Bullets and later the 76ers to the N.B.A. finals.“I’ve never had a perfect team, and I’ve always settled for something less,” he told The Boston Globe in 1985. “My whole history involves taking weak teams and turning them around.”Eugene William Shue was born on Dec. 18, 1931, in Baltimoreto Michael Shue and Rose Rice. When he played basketball in grammar school, the court’s ceiling was barely higher than the hoops, so he developed a line-drive feet-on-the-floor set shot. He went on to average more than 20 points a game at Maryland in his junior and senior seasons.A slender 6 feet 2 inches, Shue was selected by the Warriors as the third overall pick in the 1954 N.B.A. draft. But after six games with them, he was sold to the Knicks and spent two seasons in New York playing in a backcourt with Carl Braun and Dick McGuire.The Knicks traded Shue to the Pistons in 1956, during their final season in Fort Wayne, Ind., when the N.B.A. still included medium-size cities and travel was hardly luxurious.“Every time we flew from Fort Wayne to the East Coast, we had to stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, to gas up or we’d run out of gas over the Great Lakes,” he told Terry Pluto in the oral history “Tall Tales” (1992), recalling trips on the owner Fred Zollner’s DC-3.Shue was an All-Star with the Detroit Pistons from 1958 to 1962. He played his final two seasons with the Knicks and the Bullets, then retired with a scoring average of 14.4 points a game for 10 seasons.He began his coaching career with Baltimore in 1966, taking over a Bullets team that had won 16 games the previous season. His Bullets went 57-25 in 1968-69 behind Earl Monroe and Wes Unseld, whom Shue selected in the two previous drafts. They won the Eastern Conference title in 1971 with a seven-game playoff victory over the Knicks, the defending N.B.A. champions. But they were swept in the finals by the Milwaukee Bucks of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson.Shue became the coach of the 76ers in 1973, when he was asked to resurrect a team that had gone 9-73. He coached them to the N.B.A. playoff finals in 1977 behind Julius Erving, but they lost to the Portland Trail Blazers in six games. When the 76ers got off to a 2-4 start the following season, Shue was fired.Shue, right, was an All-Star guard for the Detroit Pistons when he drove to the basket by Richie Guerin of the Knicks during a game at Madison Square Garden in 1961. At left was the Pistons center Walter Dukes.BettmannHe became the coach of the San Diego Clippers in 1978-79 after they won 27 games as the Buffalo Braves. He took the Clippers to a 43-39 record, but he departed midway through the following season when they were losers once more.Shue had a costly run-in when his Clippers were facing the Bulls in Chicago in January 1980. After referee Dick Bavetta called a technical foul on the Clippers for having too many men on the court, Shue shoved him.Commissioner Larry O’Brien fined Shue $3,500 and suspended him for a week without pay.“I am a mild-mannered man,” Shue said afterward, “but sometimes you have to stand up and assert yourself.”Shue spent nearly six years in his second stint with the Bullets after they moved to Washington. He finished his coaching career with the Clippers in Los Angeles in 1989 after a season and half of losing basketball.His teams won 784 games and lost 861 over all.Shue stressed defense as a coach.He “taught the right defensive theories — overplaying your man, helping out, double-teaming the ball,” the Bullets’ forward Gus Johnson told Pete Axthelm in “The City Game” (1970).Shue’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Massey, his survivors include his daughters, Susan and Linda Shue, and a grandson. His son, known as Greg, died in 2021.Shue returned again to Philadelphia in July 1990 as general manager of the 76ers.“There’s no such thing as nine lives,” he told The Philadelphia Daily News. “I spent 20 years in coaching, and so much can happen when you do that job. You can get fired, you can leave, but it doesn’t reflect on your abilities.”The 76ers’ owner at the time, Harold Katz, said, “Some guys survive. There are people like that, who continuously show up.”Shue remained in the post until May 1992, when he was reassigned as director of player personnel.He was still at it into his 80s — this time searching for the next N.B.A. phenom as a 76er scout. More

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    Julian Gaines Has a Question: ‘How Do I Paint Oregon Black?’

    In a cavernous studio on a wind farm in Forest Grove, Ore., about halfway between Portland and the Tillamook State Forest, Julian Gaines, an artist born and raised in Chicago, is creating a body of work devoted to Black American life.He starts his workday at 9 a.m. and goes until the work tells him he’s done, creating images of the civil rights movement’s heroes and martyrs, including James Baldwin and Malcolm X, in a state where Black people make up roughly 2 percent of the population, according to the United States Census Bureau.“I can’t complain about an environment that I’m in but not actually try to change it,” said Mr. Gaines, 31, who left Illinois in 2016. “I get out here and I see that Oregon is culturally inept. It is identical to a blank canvas. I think, ‘How do I leave my lasting mark here? How do I plant my Pan-African flag? How do I paint Oregon Black?’”On a recent afternoon, his studio was filled with the sounds of a fellow Chicagoan, Curtis Mayfield. An American flag occupied part of a 30-foot wall. Mr. Gaines lifted the flag to reveal two stark paintings that appeared to depict lynchings. They were part of a recent series, “Under the Flag.” On the other side of the room, there was a canvas, 14 feet wide, called “Better Timing.” It showed the face of Emmett Till, the Black boy from Chicago who was lynched at 14 while visiting Mississippi in one of the most brutal hate crimes of the last century.Artist at work: Julian Gaines in his Oregon studio.Amanda Lucier for The New York TimesMr. Gaines got widespread attention in 2020, when his series “KAREN(S)” was featured on the cover of New York magazine. It was Pop Art with a political edge — a bold image of a white woman holding a phone to her ear, her expression stern, a tear running down her cheek. It evoked a string of incidents involving women who had called the police on Black bystanders: a bird-watcher, a man entering his apartment building, an 8-year-old selling water.“KAREN(S)” owed something to an experience Mr. Gaines went through himself, after a neighbor damaged his car two years ago, he said. When he asked the neighbor, a white woman, to provide her insurance information, she threatened to call the police and report him for elder abuse, he said. As she approached him, ranting and pressing a finger to his chest, he recorded her with his phone. Once the police arrived, Mr. Gaines was able to show them the images on his screen. The neighbor ended up admitting to the police that she had caused the damage to the car, and the officers left soon afterward.“If I did not have that video, who knows what could have happened?” Mr. Gaines said.Nike released a limited-edition sneaker designed by Mr. Gaines in 2017.Amanda Lucier for The New York TimesAfter the incident, the woman sent Mr. Gaines a note of apology: “I am sorry for my actions and unneighborly behavior,” she wrote. The note hangs in his studio.Mr. Gaines has a key supporter in the art collector James Whitner, the chief executive of the Whitaker Group, the company behind the fashion labels A Ma Maniere, Social Status and APB. Works by Mr. Gaines, including “KAREN(S),” appear in Mr. Whitner’s North Carolina home, along with paintings and sculptures by KAWS, Nina Chanel Abney and Jammie Holmes.“He’s speaking to the Black experience, and he’s not blinded by institution,” Mr. Whitner said in an interview. “Some people don’t necessarily get Julian, but I get Julian because for years people didn’t get me.”Last summer Mr. Gaines had his first solo show, “Painting the Blueprint,” at the Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects gallery in Lower Manhattan. In September, “Benji,” his monochromatic rendering of Ben Wilson, a top basketball prospect who was killed in his Chicago neighborhood at 17 in 1984, sold for more than $20,000 at a Phillips charity auction. Mr. Gaines was born on the Southeast Side of Chicago and raised in a building owned by his great-grandmother, Gladys Pelt. His mother, Pamela Robinson, still lives there. An image of the building is tattooed on Mr. Gaines’s right wrist.He was born into a city and a world where Michael Jordan, whose Nike Air Jordans had become a streetwear staple, was everywhere. As a boy, Mr. Gaines loved Nikes, but he got only one pair a year — usually Nike Air Force 1s. He started expressing himself artistically at age 13, when he painted his Nikes to camouflage the wear and tear. In high school he kept at it, decorating classmates’ sneakers and T-shirts, sometimes for a fee.Mr. Gaines’s neckwear includes an easel pendant.Amanda Lucier for The New York TimesHe was also deeply involved in the Trinity United Church of Christ, where a young politician, Barack Obama, was a frequent presence. Mr. Obama’s rise to the presidency helped Mr. Gaines view history as something other than an abstraction.“My church family was really the first people to let me know that I could be a great artist,” he said. “I remember being in the room when Barack Obama was in the early stages of his campaign. Just being there and seeing those things really set a foundation for my work.”In 2010, he accepted a partial scholarship to play football at Northern Michigan University. He thought he had a shot at making it to National Football League, and he saw himself following the path of Ernie Barnes, a pro football player and artist who was often fined during his career for sketching when he should have been at practice. Mr. Barnes went on to make more than $100,000 a year from his art, after his retirement from the N.F.L. His painting “The Sugar Shack” appeared as the cover of the 1976 Marvin Gaye album “I Want You” and as the image shown during the credits sequence of the 1970s CBS sitcom “Good Times.”Injuries put an end to Mr. Gaines’s dream of going pro. So he focused on his art. “I got to see what it means to be a real student and not an athlete,” he said. “In college your time is monopolized if you’re an athlete. I’m really grateful for that injury.”The clothes are stained with paint after another day in the studio.Amanda Lucier for The New York TimesAn older classmate offered to buy one of his paintings for $300. His pastor and family members had purchased his artwork before, but this was the first time someone without a clear rooting interest in his success had become a patron.After graduation, he moved back to his great-grandmother’s place and used the garden apartment as a place to make art. “I wanted to paint myself out of there,” he said in his studio, before taking a drag on a joint.In 2016, before the legalization of marijuana in Illinois, he was arrested during a traffic stop after a police officer said he smelled of marijuana. During the brief time he was in custody, he decided to leave his home state. “I can’t be as creative as I want to be living in an area where my freedom was taken from me because of the way I smell,” he said.Nike, which has its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., loomed large in his thoughts. He moved to Portland in 2017 and made regular visits to the Beaverton complex, walking seven miles there and back and taking meetings in the cafeteria with whoever would see him. In his studio he keeps a sneaker box filled with 80 visitors’ badges from those days.“You’re supposed to return those badges,” he said. “Most people didn’t know who I was. I knew three people that worked at Nike, and they were not in any position to give me a job.”While trying to join the company in some way, he was building a reputation as a sneaker artist by selling his embellished versions of Nike Air Force 1s to his Instagram followers. Nike hired him as a freelance designer to create a collection especially for people in creative fields.“What I brought to Nike, and they were so gracious to believe in, were shoes for creating in,” Mr. Gaines said. “This is a shoe that embodies me, where I can feel comfortable and stand in the shoe all day.”Mr. Gaines’s recent work on display in his studio, including KAREN(S).Amanda Lucier for The New York TimesHe worked with two Nike models, the 1982 Nike Sky Force ¾ and 1985 Nike Air Vortex, and called the collection Game Worn. Nike released it, in a limited edition at a store in Chicago, in 2017. Since then, LeBron James and Russell Westbrook have been spotted wearing his creations. As part of the sneaker release, Mr. Gaines led a weeklong workshop, backed by Nike, that included art classes at Chicago’s South Shore Cultural Center.“I wanted to do something for the kids in my community,” Mr. Gaines said. “A lot of times children in Chicago live so far from where people are doing these events that they can’t pay $50 or risk their lives taking public transportation to get to the North Side.”Now he is focused on his art as he prepares for a solo show scheduled for August at the Russo Lee Gallery in Portland.“He’s doing it in his own way,” said Gardy St. Fleur, a curator who advises National Basketball Association players on their art collections. “It’s raw and it’s real.”Mr. Whitner, the art collector, thinks there may be something missing in Mr. Gaines’s work — and that once he figures it out, his paintings may become even more interesting.“I don’t think Julian has allowed himself to be vulnerable,” Mr. Whitner said. “I don’t even think Julian has reconciled his feelings about coming from Chicago. And I’m curious to see how that shows up in his work once he does start to really reconcile those feelings.” More

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    As His CNN+ Show Debuts, Rex Chapman Fears His Own Success

    With 1.2 million Twitter followers and a new show debuting Monday, the former N.B.A. player appears to have an enviable life. But he’s haunted by what happened the last time he was famous.Sitting in a Midtown Manhattan cafe after shooting B-roll for his new show on CNN+, Rex Chapman says he knows that he’s living a dream, and it’s making him uncomfortable. “I struggle with it,” he said.Chapman, a former pro basketball player now best known as a Twitter personality, loves doing the show, which debuts Monday on CNN’s new streaming service. The show is not the problem. Simply titled “Rex Chapman,” it features him in conversation with a diverse array of people who have faced challenges, as he has, and who now try to make the world better, as he says he is trying to do.Chapman has interviewed Jason Sudeikis in London, the N.B.A. forward Kevin Love in Cleveland, the actor Ben Stiller in New York City and the paralyzed former college football player Eric LeGrand in New Jersey. After this conversation, he was going to the bar next door to meet the comedian, writer and talk show host Amber Ruffin.So why the struggle?“People dream of doing this,” said Chapman, whose height (6 feet 4 inches), gleaming bald head and bright blue glasses make him conspicuous. “They dream of having their own show. I struggle with whether I deserve it or not.”He explains: “I’ve been through some things,” he said. “And I’ve put myself through some things. And, uh. …”He hesitated, his voice catching.“I’ve got four kids,” he went on. “Sitting here talking to you is probably easier than many of the conversations I have with my kids.”His son and three daughters — Zeke, Caley, Tatum and Tyson — range in age from 29 to 21. “And,” Chapman said, “not a day goes by that I don’t think about disappointing them.”Chapman, now 54, was once the best high school player in his home state of Kentucky, a superstar at the University of Kentucky, the first-ever draft pick (No. 8 overall) of the expansion Charlotte Hornets and a member of the U.S. national team. He estimates that he made $40 million in 12 seasons in the N.B.A.Chapman, who played with the Suns, Heat, Wizards and Hornets during a 12-year career, taking a shot in a game against the Seattle SuperSonics in 1999.Dan Levine/AFP via Getty ImagesBut the attention and scrutiny that came with success never felt right. When he was 10 years old, he quit swimming after other kids made fun of his Speedo. When he was 15 and a high school basketball star, students from another school stopped him in a mall, asked for his autograph and then tore it up in front of him.Love and success seemed to lead to pain.That feeling intensified in the N.B.A. After some injuries and surgeries, he ended up addicted to opioids, exacerbating his long-running gambling addiction. Retirement from basketball led to deeper addiction. Chapman burned through money. By his 40s, he was crashing on couches and shoplifting goods to pawn for cash. His wife, Bridget, divorced him in 2012.At the height of his addiction, Chapman was consuming about 10 OxyContin and 40 Vicodin pills per day, chewing them to get them into his bloodstream quicker.“At some point, I had just resigned myself to the fact that my life’s just going to be as a drug addict,” he said, adding an expletive for emphasis.In September 2014, he was caught shoplifting more than $14,000 worth of electronics and was arrested. His sister, Jenny, took him in, and with the help of friends persuaded Chapman to go to a rehab center in Louisville, Ky., where his college roommate, Paul Andrews, was an executive. “Saved my life,” Chapman said.After Chapman got clean, he began speaking in public about recovering from addiction. He found work covering Kentucky athletics on the radio for a regional media company around 2016. The company pushed him to be more active on social media, particularly on Twitter, but Chapman resisted. “The landscape was just toxic. Everybody hating each other,” he said.A dolphin video changed everything: “I saw a video one day of a school of dolphins swimming out to sea, and a guy on a paddle board coming in, and a dolphin jumped up and hit him in the chest and knocked him off. And I said to myself, ‘That’s a charge,’” Chapman said, adding another expletive. (The account that first shared the video is now suspended.)Chapman and his production crew filming B-roll for his new show.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesPeople responded well to the tweet, so he shared other slapstick videos, inspiring lighthearted debates about whether a given collision was, in basketball terms, a block or a charge. In time, he began posting “feel-good stuff” — videos of dogs, babies and animals interacting adorably — and paying two people to find content for him.Chapman, who now has 1.2 million followers, later ventured into tweeting about politics, with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky a frequent target.In 2019, his friend Steve Nash, the former basketball star and current coach of the Brooklyn Nets, called Chapman with an idea for a podcast about people rebuilding their lives after making terrible mistakes. Chapman was wary of seeking fame again — “I didn’t fare real well with it the first time around” — but went forward after his children told him it was OK to do the show.The podcast was called “Charges.” To make his guests more comfortable, and in the hopes of helping people, Chapman began publicly sharing more of his story. This was healing at times, painful at others. “There’s something really cathartic about it,” he said. On the other hand, he said, it never doesn’t hurt, because you’re telling a bunch of strangers the worst stuff in life.He added: “I still can’t believe it was me. But it was. So I have to deal with that constantly.”Worse, he knows his children do too. “If they had any reservations,” he said, “then I wouldn’t do any of this stuff.”In an interview, Chapman’s daughter Caley, 27, said: “After he retired, that was a dark time. But he was always still my dad. I have respect for him. I just wanted him to get better for himself. And he’s done that. So I’m proud of him.”She expressed concern that her father is too hard on himself.“He holds a lot of guilt,” she said. “But there was never anything to forgive him for. From my point of view, I just wanted him to do better. So he’s been forgiven. And I’ll continue to say that until he forgives himself.”Chapman’s son, Zeke, declined to be interviewed, but sent a statement by text.“I’m extremely proud of my dad and how he has bounced back after a very tough time for him and our family,” he said. “I’m super excited for his new show and know how hard he’s been working on it.”“Life’s weird, man,” Chapman said. “And life’s hard.”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesChapman was approached about the CNN+ show late last year. Rebecca Kutler, the senior vice president and head of programming for the streaming service, sought him out because she liked his Twitter feed. Like many of his followers, she didn’t know much about his basketball life.“I found him to be an incredibly compelling human being,” she said. “He has come forward and talked about these challenges publicly, and really tried to use his experience to help others. That, along with his history as an incredible athlete, and the way that he’s been able to connect with an entire new generation of fans using social media, and sharing really uplifting content — I thought he would be a great person to bring new stories to CNN+.”The shows will range from 20 to 40 minutes per episode, with episodes to be released on Mondays.Chapman shooting an interview on Wednesday in New York.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesLeGrand, the former Rutgers football player whose spinal injury requires him to use a wheelchair, said he quickly felt a connection with Chapman when they met on campus in January. Chapman wore Nike Air Force 1s and a zip-up Jordan brand jacket, prompting LeGrand to say, “Look at you, all swagged out!” The two laughed and the conversation flowed.“When somebody else has been through a rough patch or overcome adversity in their lives, and they’ve been able to get through it and impact people in a positive way, it makes you open up,” LeGrand said. “It makes you feel that sense of comfort.”During the interview, Chapman asked what LeGrand dreamed about, a question no one had ever asked him before. LeGrand said: “When I’m dreaming, I’m always on my feet. I’m never in a wheelchair.”Chapman said he learned empathy from his mother, and from his own pain. He still wrestles with the guilt and shame of his past, particularly for not being a better father. “What they had to go through at school, and people knowing that their dad was in trouble and got arrested,” he said. Chapman said it “crushes” him.Now, he said, “I’m just trying to make up for lost time. I feel like I was gone for about 15 years.”This year, Chapman moved from Kentucky to Brooklyn, 10 minutes from his son. When his new success makes him uncomfortable, he reminds himself that it helps him be the father he wants to be for his children.“We have really no issues at this point,” he said. “Still trying to just show them a better me.” More

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    Are Super Seniors the Secret to N.C.A.A. Tournament Success?

    A number of the most successful teams in the 2022 tournaments feature athletes who are older than their N.B.A. counterparts.If this year’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments look a little bigger — a little older — your eyes are not deceiving you.Call it a silver lining of the pandemic.Before the pandemic intervened, college students had five years to complete four seasons of play. For various reasons — among them injuries, one-time transfers or competition waivers — athletes were always able to find ways to extend their eligibility. But after the pandemic eliminated many conference tournaments and the entire 2020 national tournament, the N.C.A.A. added a special bonus year: Any athlete who lost playing time during the 2019-20 season could extend their college career by a full season.Now, every team heading into the Final Four this weekend, both in the men’s and women’s tournaments, will include players who have taken advantage of this option.The additional season was meant to even the playing field, but some rosters are more stacked with super seniors and graduate students than others, and the trickle-down effect may linger for years.“I don’t think there’s any question that any of us in college athletics would see the benefits of a more experienced squad,” said Tom Burnett, the commissioner of the Southland Conference and the chairman of the Division I men’s basketball selection committee.A handful of athletes this year are older than their N.B.A. counterparts. Just look at Kansas. Last Friday against Providence, Mitch Lightfoot, 24, a veteran bench player and sixth-year student, had four blocks, and Remy Martin, a 23-year-old Arizona State transfer, came off the bench to lead the Jayhawks in scoring with 23 points. Both wouldn’t have returned to college if not for the pandemic, Coach Bill Self said last weekend, adding, “I actually think Mitch is the best he’s been.”Jalen Coleman-Lands, a super senior guard for Kansas, is 25. So is Devin Booker, who is in his seventh season with the Phoenix Suns.And there are more seasons remaining. “If you look at just our starters, those starters have eligibility left,” Self said. “Even though we’re an old team, they technically could all come back next year.”Self noted that Providence also had a handful players who were playing past the standard eligibility period.“If they didn’t have those four cats, they would look a lot different,” Self said. “If we didn’t have Remy, we’d look a lot different. If Villanova didn’t have Gillespie, they’d look a lot different.”Villanova guard Collin Gillespie averages 15.6 points per game. He won the Big East Conference Player of the Year Award for a second consecutive season.Scott Wachter/USA Today Sports, via ReutersCollin Gillespie, a 22-year-old guard, is the youngest of the three Villanova graduate students playing this weekend.But, parity concerns aside, Self said the bonus year had contributed to the “great quality of ball this year.”That was the case in the Horizon League, where Macee Williams, 23, a super senior center for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, won her third straight league Player of the Year Award in the 2020-21 season. She chose to come back for the 2021-22 season — her fifth year — and once again won the award.“That’s an example of how our women’s basketball programs really capitalized on that opportunity,” said Julie Roe Lach, the commissioner of the Horizon League.I.U.P.U.I., a No. 13 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament, lost by only 6 points in the first round to No. 4 Oklahoma.Depending on who you ask, the additional year of eligibility can be viewed as a glass half-full, half-empty issue. It allows college athletes to reclaim their lost year of play, and a bigger, older team can mean an extra layer of cohesiveness.“Once athletes are upperclassmen, there’s a certain maturity that comes with leading the team and handling the pressure once you are in those end-of-season moments,” Roe Lach said, adding that “younger students and their teammates can benefit from their senior leadership.”But some officials are worried about the long-term effect padded rosters will have on recruiting. If athletes choose to use their extra year of eligibility, that could limit spots for fresh faces.“A lot of us are asking that question: Are the opportunities still there for high school student-athletes?” Burnett said.Macee Williams, right, returned to I.U.P.U.I. for a fifth season and won her fourth Horizon League Player of the Year Award.Mitch Alcala/Associated PressThat’s exactly what worries Adam Berkowitz, the associate executive director of New Heights Youth, a sports-based youth development nonprofit in New York. The additional season of eligibility added to an already complex system in light of the N.C.A.A.’s 2021 decision to eliminate the rule that had required athletes to sit out a season upon transferring, which had the effect of “doubling and tripling” the number of players in the transfer pool, Berkowitz said.Both those factors have created a “changed landscape” when it comes to college recruiting, he added, resulting in an all-out “scramble.”“Last year was the most difficult year I’ve ever experienced placing students at schools,” said Berkowitz, who has worked with transfer students for 20 years. “If you have an offer on the table, you have to strongly consider it, because it otherwise may not be there.”As a result, Berkowitz said, students are increasingly feeling “under-recruited” and opting to attend lower-ranked schools, both in Division I and Division II, before attempting to transfer. Berkowitz said that when he spoke to college coaches last year, many were not even looking at high school students, preferring to turn to the transfer portal and then junior colleges.Berkowitz said he anticipated this being the case for several more years, as athletes’ option to play an extra year lingers. High school sophomores will be the first class not affected by the change.“It’s just logjam at a lot of places,” he said. “If 200 guys are taking their fifth year, that’s 200 fewer spots for high school graduates.”Mitch Smith More