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Close games, social justice protests and a principal role for Rudy Gobert, again. More

There was an exhortation for patience and a newfound optimism for the future. There were assurances about a disciplined style of play and the willingness to build a winning culture. And there was a shout out to the 1990s Knicks.It was not déjà vu. It was yet another introduction of a new Knicks coach, this time Tom Thibodeau, a former Coach of the Year Award winner, whose hiring was announced at a Zoom news conference on Thursday.“This is a dream come true for me,” Thibodeau, 62, said in prepared remarks. “This is my dream job. I’ve been there before. I have a great understanding of New York. We have the best city in the world. We have the best arena in the world. We have the best fans in the world.”Thibodeau will become the team’s eighth coach since 2011. He is the latest to try to revive the Knicks, who will miss the playoffs for the seventh straight year, the longest streak for the franchise since the 1960s.The last time the Knicks were a perennial powerhouse, Thibodeau had an inside view as an assistant coach from 1996 to 2003, including a finals run, a point he made sure to emphasize to reporters. He thanked Jeff Van Gundy, the former Knicks coach, for hiring him then and singled out players like Patrick Ewing, Larry Johnson and Allan Houston, who are considered near-deities among the Knicks fan base.“We saw how hard they played. They gave us everything they had each and every night,” Thibodeau said.He was joined in the news conference by Leon Rose, the recently hired Knicks president, and Scott Perry, the general manager, whom the team extended for at least another year. Rose has had a two-decades long relationship with Thibodeau, in part because Rose was a longtime agent at Creative Artists Agency, which represents Thibodeau.“The relationship gives me a comfort level, knowing Tom for that long,” Rose said. He added, “Tom was really the perfect candidate from the standpoint of that he’s going to demand accountability, he’s going to have development and he’s going to create a winning culture.”Thibodeau said he was drawn to the Knicks because of its roster — which he called “young and talented” — and his connections to the Knicks front office, as well as the team’s abundance of draft picks and cap space. He also said that, as far as on-court play, he would focus on five pillars: defense, rebounding, low turnovers, having the ball touch the paint and making the extra pass.“You go step by step. I think you don’t skip over anything,” Thibodeau said. “The first thing is to lay the foundation, develop your plan and then work the plan.”While Thibodeau mentioned RJ Barrett and Mitchell Robinson as two current Knicks players he was fond of, it’s not clear, given the team’s draft picks and cap space, what the roster will look like next season, which Rose acknowledged. Rose said that the Knicks “had not set a timeline” for when the team would be a playoff contender again.“We felt that Tom was that coach that can take us from development to becoming a perennial winner,” Rose said.Thibodeau spent more than 20 years as an assistant coach in the N.B.A., developing a reputation for designing strong defenses, having an obsessive work ethic and playing his stars for heavy minutes. He was the architect of the defense for the 2008 Boston Celtics, who won a championship.His first head coaching job came in the 2010-11 season with the Chicago Bulls, where he went to the Eastern Conference finals in his first year. Thibodeau went 255-139 with the Bulls but was fired in 2015 after clashes with the front office. He landed with a rebuilding team — the Minnesota Timberwolves — in 2016 as coach and president of basketball operations. Thibodeau was fired abruptly last season after only making the playoffs once and going 97-107.He told reporters on Thursday that while he had caught a few Knicks games this season, he also traveled quite a bit, including a trip to unwind in Miami.“I also went on vacation a couple of times,” Thibodeau said. “I know people don’t think I do that.” More

LeBron James defended both Paul George and Kawhi Leonard on the Clippers’ final possession. Zion Williamson played in the first game of the night’s doubleheader, but the Pelicans missed a game-winner at the buzzer against Utah. More

The N.B.A. is finally back.More than four months after the N.B.A. suspended its season because of the coronavirus pandemic, the league on Thursday night will stage a pair of real games — ones that actually count in the standings — inside its bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. To mark the occasion, the league made sure to include a bunch of headliners in its grand reopening.What You Need to KnowWho is playing?After the Utah Jazz and the New Orleans Pelicans christen the festivities at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, they will clear the stage so that the two heavyweights from Los Angeles — the Clippers and the Lakers — can reacquaint themselves at 9 p.m. E.T. in what could be a preview of the Western Conference finals.How to watchThe doubleheader will be broadcast by TNT.What are we watching?Twenty-two teams are participating in the league’s restart, and each will play eight seeding games before the playoffs are scheduled to begin on Aug. 17. Players have spent recent weeks knocking off the rust at accelerated training camps, and teams played in a series of televised scrimmages. Some looked more prepared than others.[See: This Is What Pandemic Basketball Looks Like]But Thursday’s games are the culmination of an enormous gambit by the league, which desperately hopes to finish the season without any problems. (Looking at you, Major League Baseball.) So far, the N.B.A.’s highly restrictive campus has remained secure. On Tuesday, the league reported that none of the 344 players in the bubble had tested positive for the coronavirus since the results were last announced on July 20. Officials want to keep it that way.Players to WatchLeBron James and Anthony Davis. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. And Zion Williamson — maybe?Lakers vs. ClippersWith all due respect to the Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, who will make his much-anticipated return for Milwaukee in a game against the Boston Celtics on Friday night, LeBron James remains the league’s most captivating presence. At 35, James had the Lakers soaring when the season was interrupted in March. But he clearly kept in shape during the long layoff, and he sees another clear shot at a fourth championship — regardless of all the talk of adding an asterisk to this year’s title because of the shortened and unusual season.Of course, none of this would even be possible for the Lakers without power forward Anthony Davis, who was averaging 26.7 points and 9.4 rebounds a game when the season was suspended. Davis got poked in the eye a few days ago and missed the Lakers’ final scrimmage. But he says he plans to play against the Clippers.The Clippers have their own outsize ambitions: to win their first championship. Kawhi Leonard, one season removed from his title run with the Toronto Raptors, has paired with Paul George to form one of the league’s most fearsome duos, and the Clippers have ridiculous depth — or at least they should in time for the playoffs.The Games ResumeSports and the VirusUpdated July 30, 2020Here’s what’s happening as the world of sports slowly comes back to life:Some of the N.B.A.’s biggest stars, including LeBron James and Kawhi Leonard, are in action on opening night of the resumed season.With no summer tournaments to play in, top high school basketball stars are committing to colleges earlier. Villanova is one of the beneficiaries.Baseball’s botched return could be a warning for the N.F.L., which is returning without sequestering players. It may be too late for the league to change its plans.Jazz vs. PelicansAnd then there is Zion Williamson, the Pelicans’ first-year forward. You remember him, right? Steamer-trunk physique? Spring-loaded hops? He left the bubble for what the team described as an urgent family matter, but he has since returned. Coach Alvin Gentry told reporters that Williamson participated in the Pelicans’ practice on Wednesday but that his status for Thursday’s game against the Jazz would be a “game-time decision.”As for the Jazz, they played an unwitting and unfortunate role in the league’s shutdown on March 11. It was center Rudy Gobert’s positive test before a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder that sent the whole thing tumbling. Gobert had been casual about the dangers of the virus in the days before his positive test, and it wound up causing friction with point guard Donovan Mitchell, who also tested positive. Gobert, one of the best defensive players in the league, has repeatedly apologized for his actions.Who Is Missing?Several players around the league opted out of the restart, citing family concerns or injury issues. The Lakers are coping with the absence of Avery Bradley, who chose not to participate. Before the season was suspended, Bradley had been the team’s top perimeter defender.The Lakers are also without point guard Rajon Rondo, who broke his right thumb in the bubble and is expected to be sidelined for several weeks. The Lakers have tried to shore up their backcourt by signing J.R. Smith, and he played well in their final scrimmage, scoring 20 points on 6-of-9 shooting in 25 minutes off the bench.The Clippers are missing a bunch of pieces. Lou Williams, one of the league’s best reserves, will not play Thursday because he is stuck in his hotel room, serving a 10-day quarantine for breaking league protocol during an excused absence from the bubble. While home in Atlanta for a funeral, Williams stopped for wings at a strip club.In addition, the Clippers’ Montrezl Harrell will miss the game after leaving the bubble, and Coach Doc Rivers assessed Patrick Beverley as a “maybe” after he recently returned. More

The N.B.A. has been accused of helping run basketball academies in China where children were regularly abused by coaches and staff members at government-run facilities, according to a scathing ESPN report on Wednesday that put the league’s relationship with the authoritarian country once again in a harsh spotlight.The report, published one day before the N.B.A. resumes a season delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, cited several league staffers who spoke on condition of anonymity. The staff members, according to ESPN, said that Chinese coaches physically struck players and that athletes were housed in poor conditions and deprived of schooling that was promised when the academies began their relationship with the N.B.A.One former coach described watching a Chinese coach throw a ball into a player’s face and then “kick him in the gut.”The N.B.A. had three academies in China, including one in the Xinjiang region, in the far northwest of the country, where the government has been accused of perpetrating human rights abuses against the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority.“The allegations in the ESPN article are disturbing,” Mark Tatum, the N.B.A.’s deputy commissioner, said in a phone interview with The New York Times. “We ended our involvement with the basketball academy in Xinjiang in June of 2019 and we have been re-evaluating the N.B.A. Academy program in China.”The N.B.A.’s presence in Xinjiang had already caught the attention of lawmakers in Washington. At the end of June, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, wrote a letter to Commissioner Adam Silver, asking what steps the league was taking to end its involvement with the camp because of the widespread abuses. Tatum responded with a letter on the league’s behalf on July 21 to say that the N.B.A. “had no involvement with the Xinjiang basketball academy for more than a year.” The N.B.A.’s response appeared to be its first public acknowledgment of the academy’s closure.The Chinese government did not immediately respond after the ESPN report appeared early on Thursday morning Beijing time.A former American coach told ESPN that at the Xinjiang camp, rooms meant for two people were sometimes used to house eight to 10 athletes each. The other two academies are in the Zhejiang and Shandong provinces, both in eastern China. They were also supposed to provide education to the students, but at least one American coach quit, according to ESPN, because of the lack of schooling provided.According to the NBA Academy website, the players in these academies range from 14 to 18 years old. Tatum told ESPN that officials in the N.B.A.’s New York office, including Commissioner Adam Silver, were not aware of broad mistreatment of players.In Xinjiang, the N.B.A. “didn’t have the authority or the ability to take direct action against any of these local coaches,” Tatum said.The three government-operated camps in China were already operating before the N.B.A. partnered with them to great fanfare in 2016. They were meant to help develop young Chinese players for professional basketball, in hopes of grooming the next Yao Ming, the former Houston Rockets star who became China’s most celebrated basketball celebrity. To find the next Yao, the N.B.A. was to bring elite coaching to the camp. (ESPN, a league broadcast partner, owns a stake in N.B.A. China, the entity that oversees the league’s operations in the country.)“Nothing is more important than to grow the game of basketball here in China,” Silver said at the time. “We’re thankful for the terrific reception we’ve had in China. It’s very important that we give back as well. One of our means of giving back is to help develop elite players here.”The next year, the N.B.A. launched academies in India, Australia and Africa, and one in Mexico City, in 2018, more targets for a league that has long touted its international growth.Nowhere has that growth been more apparent than in China, where the N.B.A. has more fans than it does in the United States. But the N.B.A. and the Chinese government have been on the outs since the fall, when a social media post by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, appeared to support pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — just as the N.B.A. was going to play preseason games in China.The Chinese government was furious, setting off an unusual dispute that intertwined professional sports, international politics and business. According to Silver, the Chinese government wanted Morey fired, a request the league denied, and N.B.A. games were taken off the air on China Central Television, the state-run television network. Silver has said that the N.B.A. will likely lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as a result of the rift.Silver has maintained an interest in repairing relations with China.“We’ve continued a dialogue with the Chinese, with our business partners there. In certain cases, with certain government officials,” Silver said recently in an interview with Time magazine. “And you know, we’re just going to keep at it. We’ve had a long history in China. And certainly this is a bump in the road in our relations.”Chris Buckley contributed reporting. More

LeBron James has seen a great deal during his 17 seasons in the N.B.A. He has already won three championships, and now aspires to win his first with the Los Angeles Lakers. At 35, he is one of the oldest players in the league, with patches of gray showing in the beard he grew out during the four months he recently spent in relative seclusion.It is not often, then, that James finds himself in a new environment, coping with unusual circumstances that no one could have seen coming. But there he was on Thursday night, stationed on the foul line in a largely empty arena at Walt Disney World, barking defensive assignments at teammates as a game-operations crew piped in artificial crowd noise.James had not played basketball for the (television) viewing public in 135 days, since the N.B.A. suspended its season in March because of the coronavirus pandemic. But if there were questions about how he would look in his much-anticipated return, as the Lakers faced the Dallas Mavericks in a scrimmage ahead of the league’s official restart later this month, he crammed his 15 minutes of playing time full of answers.In short, LeBron James looked exactly the same.There are so few guarantees as the N.B.A. hopes to finish the season in its so-called bubble at the sprawling theme park near Orlando, Fla., but James seems determined to fill his familiar role. Against the Mavericks, he collected 12 points, 5 assists and 3 rebounds while shooting 4 of 6 from the field. He watched the second half from the bench, where he put ice packs on various parts of his body and accessorized his warm-up top with a couple of gold chains. The Mavericks’ 108-104 victory in a game with 10-minute quarters was an afterthought.“We wanted to try to get better,” James said. “We’re using this moment as a training camp to implement our identity, and our identity is to defend, share the ball, push the tempo and play together. I think we were able to accomplish that for as close to 40 minutes as possible.”Skeptics have suggested that this season — interrupted and uncertain, somehow both abridged and extended — will come with an asterisk. James does not subscribe to that theory, and why would he? As the window on his career narrows, he wants to seize another crack at a title. History will not remember that he won his fourth ring in a bubble.Giannis Antetokounmpo would love to win his first. Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks’ do-everything forward and the league’s reigning most valuable player, described the format as “the toughest championship you could ever win, because the circumstances are really, really tough right now.”It is an argument that suits his purposes, but there are merits to it. Players had to stay in shape during the long layoff, and even now, teams are short-handed. Like the Lakers, the Bucks made their Disney debut on Thursday. And in a 113-92 win over the San Antonio Spurs, the Bucks were without Eric Bledsoe, their starting point guard, and Pat Connaughton, one of their reserves. Both players recently revealed that they had tested positive for the coronavirus. Connaughton live-tweeted the game from his home in Milwaukee.As for Antetokounmpo, the odd atmosphere became apparent to him when he went to shoot free throws in the first quarter.“It was just quiet,” he said. “But at the end of the day, you play basketball, try to make the right play. Just listen to your coach. So for me personally, I tried to lock in.”Antetokounmpo also said that he felt out of shape, adding that he hoped to spend the next couple of weeks ratcheting up his fitness. All he did against the Spurs was score 22 points in 21 minutes while shooting 9 of 13 from the field. Imagine the havoc once he has his legs under him.The Lakers, too, are dealing with some absences. Avery Bradley, their top perimeter defender, opted out of participating in the restart, citing family reasons. Rajon Rondo is expected to miss several weeks after fracturing his right thumb shortly after the team arrived in Orlando, and Alex Caruso sat out Thursday’s scrimmage with a back injuryIt is worth noting that all three of those players are guards. James often has the ball in his hands regardless of his supporting cast, but it is a safe assumption that he will be his team’s primary facilitator throughout its stay at Disney. One scrimmage is a small sample, but he was the driving force on Thursday — and it worked out well, per usual.“You’ve got to create your own energy here,” James said.At the same time, James appears determined to continue speaking about issues that are important to him. After Thursday’s game, he prefaced his news conference by saying he wanted to “shed light on justice” for Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker in Louisville, Ky., who was shot and killed by the police on March 13.For more than 10 minutes, James fielded additional questions about social justice causes and challenges facing Black people across the country. At one point, he objected to the idea that Black Lives Matter was a movement with some sort of resolution in the near or distant future.“When you wake up and you’re Black, that is what it is,” James said. “It shouldn’t be a movement. It should be a lifestyle. This is who we are. And we understand that. And we know that for one step that someone else might have to take, or for one yard someone else may have to take, we know we’ve got to take five more steps.”He added, “I don’t like the word ‘movement’ because, unfortunately, in America and in society, there ain’t been no damn movement for us.” More

Although athletes who say they’re “in the best shape of their life” after a long off-season aren’t usually to be trusted, the oft-overlooked W.N.B.A. had a solid claim on the cliché heading into its 24th year.Following a hard-fought five-game finals in 2019, the league saw one of its most dramatic free-agency periods ever as the shuffle of A-listers like Skylar Diggins-Smith and DeWanna Bonner created an almost entirely new field of competition. The W.N.B.A. welcomed point guard Sabrina Ionescu — a triple-double phenom and one of its buzziest prospects in years — and most notably, players secured a new collective bargaining agreement that allowed the average W.N.B.A. player to earn six figures for the first time, including base salary and incentives. It’s common for players to compete year-round by going overseas in the off-season to make additional money.[Coming Friday: capsule previews for all 12 teams.]“It was long overdue progress,” said Dawn Staley, a Hall of Famer who spent eight seasons in the league and now coaches the University of South Carolina women’s basketball team. “It’s not like playing in the W wasn’t a real profession before, but you don’t have to supplement your income in the same way anymore. You have choices.”“We were just seeing tremendous momentum for the W.N.B.A. and women’s sports over all,” W.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told The New York Times. “Obviously, then we hit the pandemic.”Suddenly, that optimism — already rare in a league that is still too often compelled to defend its very existence — evaporated. Players, scattered across the globe with their overseas teams, scrambled to find a way back to the United States, and league officials started questioning whether they could stage a season at all. More

What kinds of moments are you missing as a fan in the stands? We’d like to hear from you in the callout at the bottom of this article.LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Kawhi Leonard of the Los Angeles Clippers was the first player on the floor Wednesday afternoon, lining up for the N.B.A.’s first jump ball in more than four months — without waiting for the public-address announcer to begin introducing the starting lineups.The improvisation was one of many aspects of the N.B.A.’s long-awaited return that could be classified as untraditional. With no fans to be found in the stands, hockey-style plexiglass encasing the scorer’s table and the Orlando Magic operating as the visiting team just 23 miles from their home arena, Leonard’s Clippers posted a 99-90 victory in a game that was predictably scruffy after such a long layoff. The game also did not count, but it was a significant occasion nonetheless.It was the first time two N.B.A. teams had shared the same floor since the abrupt suspension of the season on March 11 after Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the coronavirus shortly before a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. After months of negotiations, preparations and debate about the feasibility of resuming and sustaining an indoor, contact sport during a pandemic, the league took what it regards as a significant step in its comeback by holding four scrimmages, 15 days after teams began arriving at the Walt Disney World campus.Twenty-two teams were invited to live, practice and play in a so-called bubble with greatly restricted access at Disney World near Orlando, Fla., to try to complete a season some within the league initially feared would not be salvaged. Each team will take part in three of these scrimmages before the New Orleans Pelicans face the Jazz on July 30 to begin an 88-game schedule leading into the playoffs. Wednesday, then, was a test run for the N.B.A. as much as for the players in what many regard as the most ambitious undertaking in league history.“Once you get in between the lines, you can make a case that that’s probably as comfortable as the players will ever be,” Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said. “You can see the rust and all that, but for them, they were back in their natural habitat.”Quirks were plentiful in the N.B.A.’s return, with 10-minute quarters instead of the usual 12, extended bursts of quiet during free throws, and music and synthesized arena sounds piped in to fill the noise void. A vibe reminiscent of the N.B.A.’s annual summer league in Las Vegas was unmistakable, but the first competitive basketball played in the bubble also appeared to play out without incident, with Lou Williams (22 points) and Paul George (18) combining for 40 points to lead the Clippers. Nikola Vucevic had 18 points and 10 rebounds for the Magic.The N.B.A. has leaned into its starting-over reality, judging by the numerous signs all over the building that display its #WholeNewGame slogan. Without the clamor of fans, chatter among the players was frequently audible during lulls in the sounds playing over arena speakers and the occasional recorded chants of “de-fense, de-fense.” More