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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

MILWAUKEE — Pat Connaughton has crammed enough high-flying acrobatics into his drives down the lane as a reserve guard for the Bucks that he was invited to compete in Saturday’s slam dunk contest at N.B.A. All-Star weekend. He loves playing for the Bucks. He loves playing for them so much, in fact, that he is […] More

Snoop Dogg apologized on Wednesday to Gayle King, the lead anchor of “CBS This Morning,” after criticizing her over a recent interview in which she brought up a 2003 rape allegation against Kobe Bryant. Last week, Ms. King was subjected to a social media backlash in which her critics pointed to an excerpt from her […] More