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      Luka Doncic Makes Basketball Look Easy. It’s Not.

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      SALT LAKE CITY — Luka Doncic couldn’t sleep after playing the game of his life. None of the N.B.A.’s one-name greats — Wilt, Kobe, Jordan, LeBron — had ever managed a night quite like his. He was exhausted, but tossed and turned in his bed for hours, then got up to channel his energy into playing the video game Overwatch until the sun rose.Everything had gone right that December night: 60 points, 21 rebounds, 10 assists, an overtime win for his Dallas Mavericks against the Knicks at home. He wows crowds without appearing to break a sweat.“It’s hard every game,” Doncic said recently in an interview at his hotel on the road. “People say that it looks easy, but it’s not easy, trust me.”He smiled. “Maybe it looks easy because I’m slow,” he said.Doncic, who is from Slovenia, came to the N.B.A. five years ago as both a known commodity and a mysterious figure, already a superstar in the EuroLeague but still a media-shy teenager trying to find his way.At 23 years old — “I’m 22, no, 23, about to be 24,” Doncic said — he embodies the N.B.A.’s decades-long effort to have global reach.“Luka plays at the highest level with joy, passion and creativity,” N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver said. “He’s an exemplar of this new wave of international stars who are influencing the game in their own unique way.”Mavericks Coach Jason Kidd said Doncic, above, has a “cheat code” for the game with his court vision.Tim Heitman/Getty ImagesDoncic received more than 5.5 million fan votes for the All-Star Game on Sunday night in Salt Lake City and will make his fourth consecutive appearance. His jersey ranks among the league’s top sellers. College teams and even some N.B.A. players play in his signature sneaker from Nike’s Jordan Brand line. And now, after Dallas traded with the Nets for Kyrie Irving this month, he may have the dynamic partner he has been missing as he has tried to lift the Mavericks to their first championship since 2011. He’s slowly stepping into the spotlight, opening up about how he got to this point — and where he wants to go.“I’d rather have the championship than M.V.P.,” he said, “but if you win an M.V.P., it’s amazing, too.”‘He didn’t have any fear’Doncic said he was nearly trembling when he became the youngest professional player to debut for Real Madrid in the Spanish basketball league at 16.He shot a 3-pointer in the closing moments of a game against Unicaja in 2015. “I don’t know how it went in,” Doncic said. “It was the 30th of April, my girlfriend’s birthday. So that’s a good day.”Doncic is now known for wanting the ball with the game on the line.“Some people are just put on the planet and they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do,” said Bill Duffy, Doncic’s agent, who has known him since he was 14.Those who recall Doncic’s early days in Slovenia describe his play as the merging of genetic gifts and tunnel-vision devotion. His father, Sasa Doncic, played professionally for years. He had “the greatest court vision,” said Damir Radenovic, who practiced with Sasa Doncic and is the marketing director for the Basketball Federation of Slovenia.Luka Doncic could always be found in his father’s shadow, begging to take shots during downtime or talking in the locker room. “He learned, maybe unconsciously, some of those veteran things,” said Marko Milic, a Mavericks assistant coach who was the first Slovene player drafted into the N.B.A., in 1997.Playing against children his own age was too easy for Doncic. Grega Brezovec coached an 8-year-old Doncic for about 13 minutes. “OK, Luka, this is not for you,” he recalled telling him before moving him up to a group of 12- to 14-year-olds.Doncic wanted to play so often that Jernej Smolnikar, another of his youth coaches, worried about how his prepubescent body would absorb some of the drills. He occasionally tried sending Doncic home, only for Doncic to plead with his parents to call Smolnikar to let him back on the court.At 13, Doncic left Slovenia, signing a five-year contract with Real Madrid.Doncic was a star for Real Madrid as a teenager. He was named the most valuable player of the Adidas Next Generation Tournament in 2015.Luca Sgamellotti/Euroleague Basketball, via Getty ImagesAlberto Angulo, a former Real Madrid player and director of the Real Madrid Academy, said in an interview in Spanish that Sasa Doncic saw it as a good development opportunity. Mirjam Poterbin, Luka’s mother, was more reluctant, he said.Doncic was wary of leaving the familiarity of his home and mulled the decision for months. “Then the last week came, I made a decision,” he said. “I just decided to.”Real Madrid had rules designed to build character in its young players — no hats in the dining room, finish your dinner, be on time. Doncic once overslept for a morning meeting. Coaches sat him the next game.“To punish a player, you take away what they love the most,” Angulo said.Doncic never overslept again. He wanted the chance to sharpen his game, Angulo said.“He didn’t have any fear — in fact the opposite — of bringing in a player that could be better than him or take minutes away from him,” Angulo said. “He thought, ‘No, no no, if he’s good, he’ll make me better.’”Doncic was named the most valuable player of the under-16 Spain championship. But Doncic said he missed his friends and being home.“So that’s one part I’m never going to get back, but I think it’s worked,” he said.He added: “If I had it to do again, I would do it.”‘That’s the cheat code’In every N.B.A. generation, a player or two can see the future. In the 1980s, it was Magic Johnson. In the 1990s, there were Jason Kidd and Steve Nash. Then LeBron James and Chris Paul came along. Now it’s Doncic who can see a play or two ahead.“It’s not all about speeding,” Doncic said. “Obviously, speeding would be even better. But it’s just the angles, the timings.”He isn’t fast like other top guards, but he said his legs give him an edge for getting into advantageous positions. “I was just born like this,” he said. “My father is like this. His legs are really strong. The trainers call them tree-trunk legs.”Dorian Finney-Smith, who signed with the Mavericks two years before Doncic was drafted, laughed as he recalled the origins of Doncic’s now trademark step-back shot. Doncic tried one in a game. Rick Carlisle, then Dallas’s coach, said it a was bad shot and told Doncic to put it where the sun doesn’t shine, Finney-Smith said.“Against the Sixers, he came out, made three in a row,” Finney-Smith said. “Nobody else said nothing else about that step-back.”Kidd, who took over as Mavericks coach last season, said he could tell Doncic viewed the game the way he did from their first game together.Doncic has one of the top-selling jerseys in the N.B.A.Jake Dockins for The New York TimesDoncic leads the N.B.A. in scoring, with 33.3 points per game.Jake Dockins for The New York TimesA defender had ducked under a screen. Kidd called a timeout, but before he spoke, Doncic told him that he had seen it and would take advantage of it.“That’s the cheat code, and some are born with it, some are not and some can take it to a different level,” Kidd said.Doncic plays dominoes with Kidd on team plane rides, and he loves chess. He plays on his phone so often that Chess.com recently partnered with him. “I always say basketball, you try to play like chess,” Doncic said. “We’re trying to anticipate opponents’ moves and read the game.”Kidd likes to push Doncic. He has jokingly asked him if he can pull a Klay Thompson and score 60 points on just 11 dribbles.“When you have a Picasso-like player, you got to challenge him in other ways to be successful because there could be boredom,” Kidd said. “Because he’s seen everything.”‘He markets himself’The Phoenix Suns trailed badly in Game 7 of the 2022 Western Conference semifinals. By halftime, Doncic had as many points as all of the Suns. As he leaned over in one moment, he looked up at Suns guard Devin Booker and grinned, creating a cutting and defining meme for the Dallas victory. He has racked up dozens of technical fouls in his career, but not this time. “I was like just: ‘Don’t blow this, please. Let’s not do this,’” Doncic said.Dallas lost to the Golden State Warriors, the eventual champions, in the conference finals.“It was really hard to win against them,” Doncic said. “We won only one game. But you can learn from them. You can learn from losses.”He also had a brief chance to learn from a Dallas legend: Dirk Nowitzki, 44, who retired from the Mavericks after Doncic’s rookie season. Nowitzki, who is from Germany, said he initially wondered if he belonged in the N.B.A. But he was a trendsetter for international players thriving in the league.“If you look at some of the M.V.P. candidates now with Jokic, Giannis and Luka in the mix now every year, that already tells you where European basketball is at the moment,” Nowitzki said, referring to Nikola Jokic of Serbia and Giannis Antetokounmpo of Greece. He added of Doncic: “He’s tons of fun to be around. He’s cheeky, he’s funny and he’s got a good heart.”Dirk Nowitzki, right, played for Dallas for 21 seasons. He set the stage for international players like Doncic, left, to thrive in the N.B.A.Tom Pennington/Getty ImagesDoncic is steering the N.B.A.’s future.“His play supersedes everything,” Mark Cuban, the owner of the Mavericks, wrote in an email. “We don’t really have to market him. He markets himself.”The rapper Bad Bunny frequently mentions Doncic in his music. “When you hear your name in a song from Bad Bunny, it’s amazing,” Doncic said.Doncic recently went viral after he came to a game in a doomsday-looking Apocalypse HellFire truck. He’d been wanting a six-wheeler like it for a long time. He used to stand in the street, marveling at the cars here; they’re much nicer than in Slovenia, he said.But he said his life is low-key.Doncic and his girlfriend, Anamaria Goltes, have known each other since they were children. They share three dogs, Hugo, Gia and Viki, who help Doncic escape from the game he has chased all his life.“They don’t know if you had good or bad game,” Doncic said. “They’re just happy to see you. So they bring a real joy to my life.”He already has his retirement planned out.Doncic wants to farm.“It’s slow,” he said.James Wagner More

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      N.B.A. Dunk Contest Highlights: It’s Still Fun

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      [embedded content]By the time McClung, who plays for the Philadelphia 76ers’ developmental league affiliate, went for his final dunk, the trophy all but had his name on it. Fans stood and players crowded the court to see his finale.Wearing his high school jersey, McClung finished a spinning reverse dunk and yelled “it’s over” as the crowd cheered. He ended up with perfect scores of 50 on three of four dunks. More

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      Brittney Griner Will Return to W.N.B.A.

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      Griner, who was released from a prison camp in Russia in December, signed a one-year contract with the Phoenix Mercury.Brittney Griner, the basketball star who was detained in Russia for 10 months, has signed a one-year contract to continue her playing career with the W.N.B.A.’s Phoenix Mercury, according to a person with knowledge of the agreement who spoke on the condition of anonymity.Griner became the center of a geopolitical showdown between the United States and Russia for much of 2022 after customs officials at an airport near Moscow detained her for carrying a small amount of cannabis oil in vape cartridges in her luggage.A Russian court convicted her of drug smuggling, and in August Griner was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony. The State Department declared Griner wrongfully detained and sought a prisoner exchange for her release.An exchange was made in December, with Griner being returned to the United States while Viktor Bout, an arms dealer who had been convicted nearly a decade earlier, was sent back to Russia.In an Instagram post after her release, Griner pledged to work to free other Americans who have been declared wrongfully detained and said she planned to play in the W.N.B.A. again. Griner last played in the W.N.B.A. in 2021, producing one of the best campaigns of her career, with averages of 20.5 points, 9.5 rebounds and 1.9 blocks. Phoenix opens its season against the Los Angeles Sparks on May 19.Tania Ganguli More

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      Boston Celtics Hire Joe Mazzulla, Cutting Ties With Ime Udoka

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      Mazzulla had been the interim head coach since September after Boston suspended Udoka for the season for violating team policies.The Boston Celtics named Joe Mazzulla as their permanent head coach on Thursday, and they have fired Ime Udoka, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.Udoka had been suspended since September for unspecified “violations of team policies.” According to two people with knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly, Udoka had a relationship with a female subordinate.Mazzulla, 34, who had been an assistant in Boston for the last three years, was named the interim coach in his stead. With him at the helm, the Celtics have not skipped a beat since going to the N.B.A. finals last season. They are entering the All-Star break this weekend with the league’s best record at 42-17.“As he has shown, Joe is a very talented coach and leader,” Brad Stevens, the Celtics’ president of basketball operations, said in a statement. “He has a unique ability to galvanize a room around a mission. We are thankful for the work he has done to help get us to this point, and excited that he has agreed to lead us into the future.”The Celtics said in a statement that they had agreed to a contract extension with Mazzulla, but they did not disclose the terms of the deal.Udoka had been a highly respected assistant for nearly a decade before the Celtics hired him in 2021. He led last year’s team to a 51-31 record and a surprise trip to the N.B.A. finals, where Boston lost to Golden State in six games.But just days before training camp began this season, the Celtics suspended Udoka with the vague explanation of team policy violations, leading to an avalanche of social media speculation about the team’s female staff members as rumors swirled.“I want to apologize to our players, fans, the entire Celtics organization and my family for letting them down,” Udoka said in a statement after the suspension was announced.Mazzulla, a former college basketball player at West Virginia University, was handed the reins. The Celtics began the season 18-4 and have been among the best teams in the N.B.A. on both ends of the floor. More

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      Keep the Dunk Contest Weird

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      It’s a campy celebration of basketball’s pugnacious spirit, and a jolt to the predictable pageantry of the N.B.A.The N.B.A.’s Slam Dunk Contest is the showiest, most polarizing and occasionally most transcendent event of the league’s All-Star Weekend. The most captivating contest in recent years took place in February 2020. The Miami Heat forward Derrick Jones Jr. opened by jumping over his teammate Bam Adebayo and then breezed into a 360-degree reverse tornado dunk. The Milwaukee Bucks’ Pat Connaughton opened with an allusion to “White Men Can’t Jump,” clearing the Brewers’ star left fielder, Christian Yelich. And the 2008 champion, Dwight Howard, made his fourth appearance in the event, revealing a Superman tank top emblazoned with a tribute to Kobe Bryant. The first round held all the now-traditional markers of the contest — costumes, people used as props, self-referential rabbit holes and, yeah, plenty of bounce.In the final round, Jones dug back to the most iconic moment in the contest’s history by channeling Michael Jordan’s Jumpman logo, running down the floor and taking off a step inside the free throw line to fly to the rim for a one-handed slam:From NBA/YouTubeFor his final try, Orlando’s Aaron Gordon did a speedy one-two toe-tap and took off, seemingly in slow motion, to vault over the 7-foot-6 Tacko Fall, leapfrogging up to grab the ball resting on Fall’s nape and hoist it into the basket:From NBA/YouTubeIt wasn’t even the best dunk in the contest, but for better or worse, it came to encapsulate all the inventiveness, camaraderie and athleticism that a dunk contest can bring. The reaction was thunderous; it seems most spectators felt relief that Gordon, one of the league’s best dunkers, competing in his third contest, had finally won it. But after a prolonged period of deliberation among the judges — the former N.B.A. players Scottie Pippen and Dwyane Wade, the current W.N.B.A. player Candace Parker, the musician Common and the actor Chadwick Boseman — they gave Gordon’s dunk a score that left him in second place. Gordon, along with seemingly everyone else, was incredulous. Players watched with their mouths wide open or their hands on their heads in dismay, and commentators, like Kenny Smith, called the outcome “highway robbery.” That outsize response, farcical in any other context, speaks to just how much the Dunk Contest means today.What became an annual event in 1984 with nine superstars (including winners like Jordan and Vince Carter) has since morphed into a niche event for up-and-comers and high-flying outliers, one that is simultaneously celebrated and maligned for its theatrics. The Dunk Contest is the only All-Star event that invites suspense: The Celebrity Game is painful to watch, the Rising Stars Game is a fun but disorganized jumble and the Skills Challenge is an expeditious but usually rote relay. The All-Star game switched formats recently but is still mostly an overly friendly, rhythmic seesaw of the best basketball players in the world lightly jogging back and forth up the court. The Dunk Contest, All-Star Weekend’s midpoint in an overproduced, sponsorship-heavy, blurry three days of predictable pageantry, has become its weird little beating heart. It’s one of professional sports’ last strange, silly, subtext-free and wonderfully overwrought occasions.In order to appreciate the Dunk Contest, it helps to understand the move it revolves around. The dunk’s official origins are murky: The word “dunk” was used as early as 1935 to describe a shooting movement that may or may not have been the shot as we know it today. Wherever it started, by the 1940s it began to draw ire from critics who claimed that it was diminishing the value of more traditional shooting, and the tenets of accuracy and passing. When dominant college athletes like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) added it to their repertoire, criticism of the dunk often had racial undertones (or overtones, retrospectively). In 1967, the N.C.A.A. banned the dunk, and during the nine-year period that the move was outlawed, the directive was known as “the Lew Alcindor rule.” At the pro level, the shot became more prominent. The American Basketball Association held the first official dunk contest in 1976 to sell more tickets and show off its talent, and by the early ’80s, the N.B.A. began using special rims that accommodated dunking.A manifestation of vulnerability, intense clarity, power and ability, the dunk exists in a split-second span of decision making. The dunker toys with velocity and time itself. The move offers a break in the sport’s fourth wall; it’s a reminder that pro basketball is in fact meant to be entertaining, despite how serious and moneyed the game has become. In a league known for the personalities of its players, the dunk is the most signature move there is, because it is dictated by a player’s particular tendencies; it’s an autograph scrawled in the air. It’s no wonder that the dunk, not the three-point shot or the crossover, is the move that’s most immortalized in posters: It’s a snapshot of basketball’s overwhelming grandeur.Although it’s become common in contemporary gameplay — even the best players get dunked on — “posterizing” someone used to be considered an ego-ender; the idea was that the dunker turned the defender into a joke. Now the action is just part of the sport’s iconography. The move is so normalized that references to it have entered pop-culture lexicons. To “dunk on” someone is to vehemently make fun of or criticize them. So often the dunk is seen as a humiliating gesture, but maybe it’s better to lean into the second definition. Dunking is an emphatic form of critique: When players dunk, they undermine physical limitations.As a forum for this kind of epic, athletic drama, the Dunk Contest allows contestants to lean into basketball’s theatricality, and the audacity it takes to fly and potentially fail at a high level. Dunkers, by necessity, always go big. (I’ve embraced this quality in my own life — as a reminder to be bold, I have the words “DUNK CONTEST” tattooed on my arm.) The act of slamming a ball in one vociferous swoop is one of the stagiest things a player can do. Dunking puts the player in league with great performers of all kinds: actors, wrestlers, rappers. It is literally over the top.At Gordon’s post-contest news conference, he appeared crestfallen. He suggested that he would never compete in another Dunk Contest. Two months later, he released “9 Out of 10,” a diss track aimed at Dwyane Wade. In the song’s video, Gordon sips Wade’s branded wine and walks the knife’s edge between wincing overindulgence and gotta-hand-it-to-him commitment. That spectacle is as campy as any of Gordon’s competition slams.Source photographs: Brian Spurlock/Icon Sportswire, via Getty Images; Mercedes Oliver/NBAE, via Getty Images; Rich Schultz/Getty Images; Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire, via Getty Images; Melissa Tamez/Icon Sportswire, via Getty Images; Steph Chambers/Getty Images; Alika Jenner/Getty Images; Steve Bell/Getty Images; Justin Ford/Getty Images; screen grab from YouTube. More

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      4-2 Game Rekindles Shot Clock Debate in High School Basketball

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      One of the two teams from Oklahoma, the Anadarko High School Warriors, passed the ball around for nearly the entire game in what an announcer called “stall ball.”Something strange happened during a recent high school basketball game in Oklahoma.The home team, the Weatherford High School Eagles, controlled the tip-off and immediately missed a three-pointer. Then the visiting Anadarko High School Warriors grabbed the rebound and slowed the game down — way, way down.For nearly the entire game, Anadarko played “stall ball” — passing the ball back and forth in the backcourt as the seconds dripped by like molasses, fans shouted scattered boos and the cheerleaders gamely stuck to their routines on the sidelines.The final score, after four eight-minute quarters, looked nothing like the high-scoring games that have defined the N.B.A. this season: Weatherford beat Anadarko, 4-2.The absurdly low score has renewed debate about whether high school basketball needs a shot clock to keep the game moving.Seventeen states and the District of Columbia use shot clocks in some or all high school games, and two more plan to use them starting next season. Oklahoma rejected them last month, citing the cost of the clocks, among other factors.After the Anadarko-Weatherford game last Tuesday, some are questioning whether that was the right move.“What are we doing here in Oklahoma?” Bryan Keating, the sports director at KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City, wrote on Twitter. “We have to play with a shot clock. The players deserve a whole lot better than this.”The game tested the patience not only of the fans who packed into Weatherford’s gymnasium but also the local television announcer, Chuck Ramsey, who repeated the names of the Anadarko players as they tossed the ball around in what he called a game of “keep away.”“Not the best friend of a play-by-play announcer on this type of offense,” Mr. Ramsey said.The game underscored one of the reasons the National Federation of State High School Associations, the governing body for most high school sports, voted last year to allow states to use a 35-second shot clock.Proponents say the clock, by forcing the offense to try to score within a certain period of time, prevents teams from sitting on the ball to kill time, especially if they have a lead with only a few minutes left in the fourth quarter.“It changes end-of-the-game situations,” said Joe Ortiz, who has won four state championships as head coach of the boys’ basketball team at ThunderRidge High School in Highlands Ranch, Colo. “People holding ball like that — that’s not the current game of basketball. It doesn’t make sense.”It once did.Before the N.B.A. adopted a 24-second shot clock in 1954, the league was plagued by slow, low-scoring games. In 1950, the Fort Wayne Pistons beat the Minneapolis Lakers 19-18 in the lowest-scoring league game on record. Fans were not impressed.After several years of experimentation, the N.C.A.A. adopted a 45-second clock in 1985, pushed in part by a 1978 Sun Belt Conference championship game that ended with a score of 22-20. The N.C.A.A. cut the shot clock to 30 seconds in 2015.“The shot clock was about making the game more exciting for spectators,” said Pamela Grundy, an independent historian and co-author of “Shattering The Glass: The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball.”But thrilling fans is not always a priority in high school sports.Grant Gower, assistant director of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association, which oversees high school sports in the state, said the board voted 8-7 last month against the use of shot clocks in basketball.He said that board members cited the cost of the clocks, the expense of paying someone to operate them and the training for referees to enforce the time limit. Prices vary, but a set of two clocks can cost between $2,000 and $11,000, he said.“I know it will be addressed again and not in response to the 4-to-2 game but in terms of what the schools want to do,” Mr. Gower said, adding that the low score “sure brings an awareness of situations like this that are completely within the rules of the game.”Some have speculated that Anadarko’s coach, Doug Schumpert, a member of the Oklahoma Coaches Association Hall of Fame, was merely deploying an old-school “freeze the ball” strategy to keep his ninth-ranked team close to third-ranked Weatherford. Indeed, Anadarko almost won with a three-pointer at the buzzer.Mr. Schumpert did not respond to an email seeking comment.Derrick Bull, Weatherford’s coach, faced questions about why the Eagles had not tried to trap the ball and force turnovers. He did not respond to an email, but he pointed out in an interview with WWLS, a local radio station, that his team never trailed after going up 2-0 in the second quarter.“Once we got the lead, we were pretty content to let them do what they were going to do because we were confident that if they were ever able to tie it, we could go down and execute and score,” Mr. Bull said. “Even though we didn’t have the ball, we felt like we were in control of the game, as long as we had the lead.”Mr. Bull told WWLS that he was “never too much for, or too much against” the shot clock.Playing without one can give lesser teams a “fighting chance,” he said, but having one “improves quality of play” and makes it “more entertaining” for players and fans, he said.“I was definitely for the shot clock last night, I will put it that way,” he said. More

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      How the Nets Fell Apart From the Top

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      Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant have become the faces of their superteam’s failure, but the Nets leadership could have averted disaster several times, and didn’t.Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant didn’t trade themselves from the Nets.They didn’t hire Steve Nash to coach the team, even though he had no experience.They didn’t trade for — and then trade away — James Harden.They didn’t sign off on Irving playing only part-time because he would not get the coronavirus vaccine.As players, they couldn’t have done any of those things. But the team owner Joe Tsai and General Manager Sean Marks could. And they did.Over the past three and a half years, the Nets’ ambitious plans to form a championship-winning superteam have fallen apart in fits and starts, finally imploding over the past week with the trades of Irving and Durant. Those two superstars have become the faces of the collapse, but the rubble of the franchise may reveal that the problem extends to the foundation — to the people who had the power to avert disaster many times and never did.During a news conference on Thursday, Marks was asked whether he deemed the Durant and Irving era in Brooklyn a failure.“I think it would be easy to look in from the outside,” Marks said. “And, you know, honestly, I look at it internally and say, ‘Wow, it didn’t work.’ Like, let’s be honest there. We did not reach the full potential of where we thought we could get to.”‘We do have the pieces’In the summer of 2019, Durant and Irving spurned the Knicks and joined the Nets in free agency. Tsai, a billionaire co-founder of the Chinese conglomerate Alibaba, assumed full control of the Nets and Barclays Center at a record-setting $2.35 billion team valuation. The Nets were primed to be not just the dominant basketball power in New York, but also in the N.B.A.“I think the fans expect that we win a championship,” Tsai said in a YES Network interview months later. “And the good thing is, I believe that we do have the pieces in place.”Few teams ever do, and the Nets, it’s now clear, didn’t either. But it wasn’t for one of the most common reasons — a cheap owner — since Tsai has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in luxury tax penalties for his starry teams over the past three seasons.But he waffled on key decisions, signed aging veterans who were little help and tolerated behavior that eroded the team’s culture. He was more visible than most team owners, often sitting courtside at games and posting on Twitter in response to rumors about team drama. The N.B.A. has fined him for criticizing officiating on Twitter.Tsai also has been willing to use his financial muscle to help his players, even if it invited public criticism. He arranged for all of the Nets to be tested for the coronavirus early in the pandemic when tests were scarce for the general public, earning a rebuke from then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. Tsai also owns the W.N.B.A.’s Liberty, and in 2021 the women’s league fined the team $500,000 for secretly chartering flights to games for the players. Tsai has been critical of the W.N.B.A. requirement that players fly on commercial airlines.But catering to players can backfire, as Tsai found out.Steve Nash won two Most Valuable Player Awards as an N.B.A. player, but he had no coaching experience when he was hired to coach the Nets in September 2020.Vincent Carchietta/USA Today Sports, via ReutersA coach with no experienceCoaching is typically considered a crucial piece for superstar-laden teams. Coaches must manage egos, maximize talent and manage workloads, all while winning basketball games. Only Golden State’s Steve Kerr has won a championship as a rookie head coach without having been an assistant coach first.But for the Nets superteam, Tsai and Marks decided their head coach would be Nash, who won two Most Valuable Player Awards as an N.B.A. player but had no coaching experience. They drew criticism for overlooking Jacque Vaughn, an experienced Black assistant coach, for Nash, who is white. The hiring, in September 2020, came at a time when only seven of the N.B.A.’s 30 team head coaches weren’t white. Most N.B.A. players are Black.But Nash and Marks were teammates on the Phoenix Suns, and Nash knew Durant because he consulted for Golden State when Durant played there.Irving almost immediately undermined Nash during an appearance on Durant’s podcast, saying: “I don’t really see us having a head coach. You know what I mean? K.D. could be a head coach. I could be a head coach.”While both expressed their respect for Nash, Irving’s comments indicated that the Nets would need structure and accountability, since Durant and Irving were already resisting the traditional hierarchy. For his part, Durant responded to Irving and called the partnership with Nash “a collaborative effort.” It was a glaring instance in which leadership experience might have made a difference. After Durant requested a trade over the summer, he described a culture on the Nets that seemed adrift.“I went to them and was like: ‘Yo, I don’t like how we are preparing. I don’t like shootarounds. I like practices. I need more,’” Durant told Bleacher Report in November.He added, “Hold me accountable.”The Nets fired Nash in November and hired Vaughn.Irving vs. TsaiNowhere were the cautionary signs for the Nets more clear than in the rift between Tsai and Irving. Irving declined to take the coronavirus vaccine as the 2021-22 season got underway, but Tsai was a vocal proponent of vaccines, telling ESPN that it wasn’t “a matter of belief” but rather a scientific “matter of fact.”Irving became a liability. He was not allowed to play in home games because of a local vaccine mandate, and he showed no signs of changing his mind. Tsai and Marks allowed him to become a distraction. First, they said he would not be allowed to play in road games either, citing the harm to the organizational culture of having him play only part-time. But just two months later, they changed their minds, even though Irving hadn’t changed his and the team was in first place in the Eastern Conference.It sent the message that Irving could play by his own rules.About a year earlier, the Nets acquired Harden from Houston by trading away promising young players. But soon after Irving was allowed to return, Harden stunned the Nets by asking for a trade. Harden later told reporters that Irving’s decision to not get vaccinated had a “very minimal” effect on his trade request, but he acknowledged that “it definitely did impact the team.”The Nets quickly acquiesced to Harden in February 2022 by trading him to the Philadelphia 76ers, the competitor of his choice, instead of riding out the season, since they were playing well, or giving themselves time to explore all of their options to be sure they were getting the best deal.In December, Harden told Fox Sports why he wanted out of Brooklyn.“It was just, there was no structure and even superstars, they need structure,” Harden said. “That’s what allows us to be the best players and leaders.”Four days after the Nets sent Harden to Philadelphia, one of the popular players they had traded away to get him from Houston — center Jarrett Allen — was named an All-Star with his new team in Cleveland.Days after trading Kyrie Irving, the Nets reached a deal to send Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns.Brad Penner/USA Today Sports, via ReutersLast chanceEven after the Boston Celtics embarrassed the Nets last year by sweeping them in the first round of the playoffs, the Nets still had a shot to fulfill the promise of Durant and Irving this season. The Nets leadership attempted a culture reset — a public display that they would not be pushed around by stars anymore. When asked about Irving receiving a long-term extension, Marks demurred.“I think we know what we’re looking for,” Marks told reporters in May. “We’re looking for guys that want to come in here and be part of something bigger than themselves.”After Durant requested a trade in the off-season, Tsai tweeted support for the front office and coaching staff. A few weeks later in August, Durant backed off his request and Marks said the sides had “agreed to move forward with our partnership.”Then in October, when Irving refused to disavow antisemitism or apologize after posting a link to an antisemitic film on Twitter, Tsai publicly rebuked him and suspended him.Irving missed eight games. But when he returned, the Nets showed their tantalizing potential once again, going 18-2 in one stretch, only to unravel again as Durant got injured and Irving’s contract-extension talks fell apart and he asked to be traded.“I want to be in a place where I’m celebrated and not just tolerated or just kind of dealt with in a way that doesn’t make me feel respected,” Irving said Tuesday, a day after the Nets traded him to the Dallas Mavericks.Two days later, the Nets traded Durant, too, to Phoenix. “We believe making this trade now positions the franchise for long-term success,” Marks said Thursday in a statement.Marks, at a news conference Thursday, was asked what his message would be to Nets fans who expected to see a championship contender this year.“That’s honestly tough,” Marks said. “But my goal here and our goal is, from ownership all the way down, is to put something out on the floor that everybody can be proud of.” More

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      NBA Trade Deadline 2023: Suns Get Durant as Power Shifts to the West

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      No move was bigger than Phoenix Suns’ agreement to trade for Kevin Durant. But the Lakers and Mavericks look stronger after deals of their own.It was supposed to be a quiet dinner with friends and family, who were there to celebrate Mat Ishbia’s big win — officially taking over as the controlling owner of the Phoenix Suns and Mercury.But Ishbia had his sights set on another win.An energetic 43-year-old billionaire in the mortgage industry, Ishbia kept ducking out of the room to take phone calls Wednesday evening as he and James Jones, the Suns’ president of basketball operations and general manager, worked together to make a deal for one of the greatest scorers in N.B.A. history: Kevin Durant.On his first full day on the job, Ishbia agreed to trade with the Nets for Durant, adding him to a competitive Suns lineup that already has the star guards Devin Booker and Chris Paul.In doing so, he had delivered the biggest splash in a season full of them, and he’d done so during a critical moment: the frenzied days before the N.B.A.’s trading deadline, which may have shifted the power in the league to the Western Conference.The Lakers got rid of their ill-fitting and expensive guard, Russell Westbrook. The Dallas Mavericks acquired the disgruntled but dynamic Kyrie Irving from the Nets to pair him with Luka Doncic, the star 23-year-old guard. Around the league, smaller deals tinkered with rosters and reset timelines, but no team changed as much as the Suns. Now, they are a championship contender and a potent threat to everyone else, including elite teams like the Boston Celtics, Milwaukee Bucks, Memphis Grizzlies and Denver Nuggets.It had been difficult to know what to make of the West for much of this season. While the East has two teams at the top that have proved that they can win in the playoffs — Boston and Milwaukee — the West has been a jumble of aging stars and unproven youth.Heading into Thursday, only three games separated fourth-place Dallas from 11th-place Utah. No team is dominating, not even the Nuggets, who have led the conference since Dec. 20 but have developed a reputation for stumbling in the playoffs.The Grizzlies have been firmly in second place since Jan. 1, but they are also an unproven team in the postseason. They earned the No. 2 seed in the West last year, but were challenged by the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round before losing to the Golden State Warriors, the eventual champion, in the second round.A few days before Christmas, the Grizzlies’ star guard Ja Morant was interviewed by ESPN’s Malika Andrews. She asked him what teams he would have to go through to win a championship.“Celtics,” Morant said, without hesitation.“No one in the West?” Andrews said.“Nah,” Morant said, shaking his head and smiling mischievously. “I’m fine in the West.”On Christmas, the Grizzlies faced Golden State, then struggling in 11th place. Golden State didn’t have its best player, Stephen Curry, but taunted the young and braggadocious Grizzlies team on the way to a 123-109 victory.The Warriors have had a confusing season as well. Their stars — Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green — are older. The team has had injury issues, most notably to Curry and the starting forward Andrew Wiggins. But every once in a while Golden State notches a signature win, like its Christmas game, that reminds everyone why this team has won four championships in the past 10 years.And now Morant’s team has more competition to worry about.After news of the Durant trade broke Thursday, New Orleans Pelicans shooting guard CJ McCollum recalled Morant’s oft-memed words.“This all because @JaMorant said he was good in the West,” McCollum posted on Twitter, adding at the end three emojis of laughter with tears.The Los Angeles Lakers traded Russell Westbrook to the Utah Jazz as part of a three-team deal on Thursday.Frank Franklin Ii/Associated PressHours before the Durant trade surfaced, the Lakers agreed to trade Westbrook to the Jazz in a three-team trade that included a package of draft picks and players headlined by Minnesota’s D’Angelo Russell. The Lakers are in 13th place in the West but just four games away from a secure spot in the playoffs above the play-in tournament positions.With LeBron James and Anthony Davis on the Lakers’ roster, it stood to reason that a few tweaks could dramatically change their fortunes. Russell, whom the Lakers drafted No. 2 overall in 2015 but traded two seasons later, is a much better 3-point shooter than Westbrook and should help on offense. Two other players the Lakers received in the Westbrook trade — Malik Beasley and Jarred Vanderbilt — should help the team, too.The addition of Durant, one of the best to ever to play the game, could make the West a lot less open.On Wednesday, Ishbia woke up at 5 a.m. in his Detroit-area home and flew to Phoenix with his wife, three children, parents and some close friends.After meeting with some team employees, he walked onto a stage at the Suns’ arena, the Footprint Center, for his introductory news conference. He eschewed the lectern, using it only to hold a bottle of water he sipped from during questions. He paced the stage with the energy of a start-up founder giving a keynote address, using his hands to emphasize his rapidly delivered words.“I’m not going to be sitting here counting the dollars,” Ishbia said when asked if he would be willing to pay the league’s luxury tax penalties to exceed the salary cap, adding, “Money follows success, not the other way around.”He spent the afternoon at the team’s practice facility strategizing with Jones. Later, after the dinner with his family and friends, Ishbia stayed up all night working on the details of the Durant deal.Durant, 34, improves the team immediately, and dramatically. He has been out with a knee injury since Jan. 12, but his health is the only thing that has slowed him lately.He comes to a Phoenix team searching for a steady postseason identity.The past two seasons have ended with different kinds of heartbreak for the Suns. They lost to the Bucks in the finals two years ago, with Paul working through injuries. Then last year, despite setting a franchise regular-season wins record, they ended their season with an embarrassing blowout loss to the Mavericks in Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals.If all goes as planned, the West will now go through Phoenix. More