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The math was, shall we say, daunting for Kobe Bryant’s first coach with the Los Angeles Lakers. Del Harris had a veteran team with two future All-Stars in his backcourt even before Bryant arrived in the summer of 1996. Harris’s priority was thus ensuring that those two star guards, Nick Van Exel and Eddie Jones, […] More

Nets guard Kyrie Irving will have an operation on his ailing right shoulder and miss the rest of the regular season, Sean Marks, the team’s general manager, told reporters on Thursday. Marks said the decision had been made after Irving spent the “last few days visiting with a specialist.” Irving is expected to return in […] More

LOS ANGELES — Kawhi Leonard slipped into the interview room at Staples Center clad in pearl-white sweats, calling to mind a Jedi sage. His face a mask, he gave no sign of recognizing any reporter, and set to analyzing the just-concluded game with the dispassion of a chess grandmaster. What, a reporter asked, did you […] More

CHICAGO — The N.B.A.’s 69th All-Star Game played out just as it was billed — and it also veered wildly off script to a delicious degree. The evening, as promised, served as the emotional culmination of a days-long Windy City tribute to Kobe Bryant, the former All-Star killed in a helicopter crash last month. There […] More

Lakers Coach Frank Vogel could have been concerned. The N.B.A. All-Star break was looming and his team still had one more game to go. But Vogel said he could sense from his players, and from LeBron James in particular, that they were focused. “You could just tell that he was really, really locked in,” Vogel […] More

CHICAGO — After Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks revealed that Kobe Bryant hit him with some Slovenian trash talk from courtside during a game, admiration for Bryant’s linguistic versatility was a common reaction. Bewilderment was another. Bryant had long been known to speak Italian and Spanish in addition to English. What was never clearly […] More

Kobe Bryant, the former Los Angeles Lakers star whose death last month continues to cast a pall over the N.B.A., was among eight finalists announced on Friday for induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Bryant, who was 41, retired from the N.B.A. in 2016 after spending his entire 20-year playing career with […] More

Fans hoping to attend the official memorial for the late N.B.A. superstar Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gianna, in Los Angeles this month will face a difficult time obtaining tickets, and they might have to spend big. A “limited number of tickets” will be on sale to the public on Tuesday for as much as […] More