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Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein’s weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. It was at the 2018 All-Star Game in Los Angeles that I asked Steve Nash, one of the foremost imports in N.B.A. history, if the league would ever be ready — really ready — for a Rest of the World […] More
LOS ANGELES — R.J. Barrett, the Knicks’ 6-foot-6 teenage rookie, dribbled into the lane on Tuesday evening and confronted the Man Wall that is Lakers center Dwight Howard. Barrett tossed up a high floater, and Howard rose higher still and swatted the ball as if slapping a housefly. Barrett is 19 and not easily flustered, […] More
Nets guard Kyrie Irving, addressing the media for the first time in two months, said on Saturday that he had taken a cortisone shot in an attempt to avoid surgery on an ailing shoulder that has kept him out of games since Nov. 14. He did not give a concrete timetable for his return but […] More
I’d usually wait until after the N.B.A. season to take stock of all the basketball takes I got wrong and issue a mea culpa. But with slightly less than half of this campaign completed, I am finding that the season has flummoxed me more than any other in my years of watching basketball. So many […] More
The last time I saw David Stern was the day after the greatest night of my professional life. It was a Friday in September in Springfield, Mass., minutes before the Basketball Hall of Fame’s 2019 induction ceremony. The previous evening, I had noticed Stern in the crowd as I nervously ambled through my speech after […] More
Before Wednesday night’s game at Madison Square Garden, Carmelo Anthony found himself glancing up at the rafters. He was wondering whether his No. 7 would be up there someday. The Knicks will ultimately make that decision, he said. But he was hoping to nudge the process along. “They say in life you have to envision,” […] More
It was late in the summer of 1995, weeks of labor strife having consumed the N.B.A., and an off-season lockout had come to an end. David Stern, suddenly viewed by players as more corporate pariah than patriarchal commissioner, was asked about Michael Jordan’s uncharacteristic (anti-owner) activism, which one national commentator had compared to a “drive-by […] More
David Joel Stern was born in Manhattan on Sept. 22, 1942. It was the day after Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and the Nazi march east through Europe was grinding to a halt outside Stalingrad. Closer to home, the Dodgers topped the Giants, 9-8, in extra innings at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. The Knicks, […] More
