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      Celtics Beat Warriors, Despite Off Night From Jayson Tatum

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      Boston beat Golden State and has the N.B.A.’s best record. But the Celtics aren’t perfect, and neither is their star.BOSTON — Jayson Tatum has had some brilliant nights this season. Nights when he drops in parabolic 3-pointers and slings crosscourt passes and guides his Boston Celtics to lopsided wins. Nights when no one can impede his 6-foot-8, 210-pound frame on his drives to the hoop. Nights when he plays pristine basketball, boosting his candidacy for his first N.B.A. Most Valuable Player Award.Thursday? Thursday was not one of those nights.Facing the Golden State Warriors in their much-anticipated return to Boston, Tatum tossed passes into the hands of defenders. He launched jump shots that drifted wide and carried long, as if pushed around by a swirling breeze. And he coughed up his dribble — including once to Golden State’s Stephen Curry, who capitalized on the mistake by casually draining a 50-footer at the halftime buzzer.It was not Tatum’s best game. The good news for the Celtics is that they did not need it to be.“Those are the most rewarding wins that you can have,” Tatum said.Jaylen Brown and the Celtics got the best of Jordan Poole and the Warriors for a change.David Butler Ii/USA Today Sports, via ReutersNothing about Boston’s 121-118 overtime victory over Golden State was artistic. The Celtics, renowned for their offense this season, shot 39.8 percent from the field. And Tatum committed seven turnovers, including two in the final 74 seconds of regulation that would have gotten him booted from noontime hoops at the South Shore Y.M.C.A.But Joe Mazzulla, the Celtics’ interim coach, describes himself as someone who likes to see if his team can “operate in the chaos” — especially against an accomplished opponent like the Warriors.On Thursday, there was plenty of chaos. But Jaylen Brown compensated for Tatum’s late-game blunders by sending the game to overtime with a 3-pointer, and Al Horford and Tatum then sealed the win with back-to-back 3-pointers of their own.“You need games like this,” Tatum said, adding: “I think that just shows the depth of our team, on a below-average night for us, that we can still find a way to win.”The Celtics, who improved their league-best record to 34-12, have not been perfect this season. In mid-December, they lost five of six games, a skid that included back-to-back losses to the lottery-bound Orlando Magic. Tatum missed one of those losses so that he could attend his son Deuce’s 5th birthday party, which was probably not the best look for him at the time. “Social media was mad,” he said.In any case, it was a stretch of lackluster basketball that was alarming enough for fans and pundits to question if Mazzulla had the necessary experience (as a first-time N.B.A. head coach) or gravitas (at age 34) to lead a team with championship hopes.That stretch turned out to be a blip. Boston has won eight in a row. Before Thursday’s game, Tatum was coming off a tour de force against the Charlotte Hornets, when he scored a season-high 51 points and shot 15 of 23 from the field.Tatum was not going to sniff 50 points against Golden State — not after scoring 2 points in the first quarter, and not after shooting 3 of 11 from the field in the first half. Andrew Wiggins, one of the league’s craftiest defenders, might as well have attached himself to Tatum using duct tape, and Tatum could have been forgiven for feeling as if it was all a bit too familiar.It was the Warriors’ first trip to TD Garden since last June, when the team clinched its fourth title in eight seasons by defeating the Celtics in Game 6 of the N.B.A. finals. That night was a triumph for Golden State, which celebrated in a club section of the arena until 5 a.m. before boarding a flight to California with another championship trophy in its possession.Stephen Curry outplayed Jayson Tatum in winning the N.B.A. championship last season, but Tatum said he learned from it.Maddie Meyer/Getty ImagesIn many ways, the finals had been billed as a referendum on youth versus experience, pitting Boston’s ascendant stars against Golden State’s title-tested core. Two players in particular personified the matchup, and it turned out to be a bit of a mismatch: There was Curry, who reasserted his supremacy by averaging 31.2 points for the series. And, of course, there was Tatum, who shot the ball poorly (often while being defended by Wiggins) and appeared gassed by the end.Tatum has since spoken about how that series affected him, about how he had trouble leaving his house for several days in its immediate aftermath, and about how he ultimately looked at it as a learning experience. He had thought he understood that the playoffs were a grind, he said then, but now he really knew.Still, the ghosts from the finals seemed to linger when Boston visited Golden State on Dec. 10 in their first of two meetings this season. In hindsight, Tatum said, the Celtics were too excited, too eager for some form of revenge: Tatum struggled, and the Celtics lost by 16.“Everybody wanted to win so bad,” he said.Before Thursday’s game, the Celtics tried to maintain a more balanced perspective. The gist of their conversations this week, Tatum said, was that one game was not going to erase what happened last season.“The fact of the matter is, we lost — we lost the championship,” he said. “We can’t go back in time and change that. So we didn’t look at this as a rematch of the finals. It’s just one game against a great team, great players and obviously a great coach. But it’s just one game.”Tatum kept repeating that phrase — that it was just one game — as if he were trying to convince himself that it was true. Some of his actions on Thursday indicated otherwise. Consider: He played 48 minutes. Mazzulla said he had a brief conversation with Tatum about whether to leave him in the game early in the fourth quarter.“I looked at him, he looked at me, we kind of said, ‘Yeah,’ and that was it,” Mazzulla said.Perhaps fatigue played a role in a few of Tatum’s mistakes. He shot only 9 of 27 from the field, though he made up for it in other ways, collecting 34 points, 19 rebounds and 6 assists — a stat line that would have made other players proud.Tatum, though, has higher standards now, and bigger goals. On Thursday, his teammates backed him up, another sign of growth for a young group that continues to move forward. Sure, it was only one game. But even Tatum acknowledged a deeper meaning.“Just trying to put the past behind us,” he said. More

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      This Isn’t Who the Lakers Are Supposed to Be. Right?

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      The Lakers have long been seen as a glamour franchise of big names and big wins. LeBron James is dominating. But the wins have been much harder to come by, for a while.LOS ANGELES — LeBron James fidgeted as he answered questions after a second consecutive frustrating Lakers loss in which he thought the referees had missed a potential game-altering foul call.He was terse and dismissed a question about scoring his 38,000th career point in the N.B.A., something only he and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have done. He was asked if he thought much about what the Lakers’ many losses in recent seasons meant to the franchise.“No,” James said. Then he turned and sped out of the locker room, into a rainy Los Angeles night.The gloom outside reflected the mood in the building.For decades, the Lakers defined themselves as one of the N.B.A.’s glamour franchises — a place the biggest stars went to play, win championships and achieve basketball immortality. Making the playoffs was an expectation, not an accomplishment.Then 10 years ago, two seismic events shook the franchise. On Feb. 18, 2013, Jerry Buss, who bought and revitalized the Lakers in 1979, died at age 80, leaving the franchise to a trust controlled by his six children, some of whom would wrestle for control of the team. Less than two months later, as he tried to drag the Lakers into the playoffs, Kobe Bryant tore an Achilles’ tendon, the first in a string of injuries that would spell the end of his 20-year career.Since then, the Lakers have gone through several discordant phases, from Bryant’s return and retirement to chaos in the executive ranks to a championship in 2020 that seemed proof of purple-and-gold exceptionalism, no matter the obstacles.But new obstacles have the Lakers once again facing the question of whether the excellence they spent decades building can return. For the second year in a row, James, 38, is having to produce herculean efforts to try to pull his injury-plagued team out of the bottom of the Western Conference standings.LeBron James is averaging nearly 30 points a game at the age of 38 as he tries to power the injured and struggling Lakers to the playoffs.Jae C. Hong/Associated Press“We’re going to figure this thing out,” said Lakers Coach Darvin Ham, the team’s fifth in the past 10 years. “We’ll definitely figure this thing out.”‘Kobe realized that he could not win’If success is measured by championships, the Lakers have still been one of the top teams in the N.B.A. during the past decade. They are one of the six teams to have won championships since the 2012-13 season.Broadening the measure to playoff or regular-season success, the Lakers become less impressive. With only two playoff appearances since the 2012-13 season, the Lakers are in the bottom third of the league. Only two teams have been to the playoffs fewer times in that span — the Knicks (once) and the Sacramento Kings (none).By contrast, between 1960-61, the team’s first season in Los Angeles after moving from Minnesota, and 2012-13, the Lakers had missed the playoffs just four times.Frank Vogel coached the Lakers to their only two recent playoff appearances, guiding them to the championship in 2020 then a first-round loss in 2021. The Lakers fired him in April after they missed the playoffs.Even though injuries and roster construction played major roles in the Lakers’ struggles in the 2021-22 season, Vogel became a casualty of heightened expectations with James on board. James’s arrival as a free agent in July 2018 marked the first time since Bryant retired two years earlier that the Lakers had a transcendent star.Bryant had spent his whole career with the Lakers and won five championships. So even after his Achilles’ tendon injury, the Lakers rewarded him with a two-year contract extension worth $48.5 million, giving him the highest salary in the league at the time. They were confident that he deserved it no matter what happened next.To announce Bryant’s return from injury in late 2013, the Lakers created a video with dramatic music and an image of his jersey being battered by weather until a lightning bolt finally tore it. The video closes with the jersey having been mended by unseen means and with the words: “The Legend Continues.”Bryant returned for six games in December, then fractured his knee and missed the rest of the 2013-14 season as the Lakers won just 27 games. He missed most of the next season as the team won only 21 games.“At some point, I think it’s obvious to everyone that Kobe realized that he could not win,” said Gary Vitti, who was the Lakers’ head athletic trainer for decades until Bryant retired. “And once he realized he couldn’t win, then a lot of the stress and the pressure sort of came off him and he really started having fun and being a lot happier around the game and his teammates.”Kobe Bryant, who died in 2020, spent his entire 20-year career with the Lakers, though the final few seasons were rough. He scored 60 points in his final game in April 2016.Harry How/Getty ImagesOpposing fans feted him everywhere he went. They cheered the first shot he made, even if it took him a while to get there. Coach Byron Scott, a former Lakers guard, led the team during Bryant’s loss-filled farewell tour, a franchise-low 17-win season.“Losing — it’s horrible,” Vitti said. “But if you put it all in the context, if you’re Kobe, you know, basically Kobe could do whatever he wanted out there. Byron took over and kind of fell on his sword for the team. He said, let’s send Kobe out the way he wants to go.”Said Metta Sandiford-Artest, who played for the Lakers on their 2010 championship team and again from 2015-17: “At that point, you just wanted to make it comfortable for Kobe. That’s it. Nothing else really matters at that point.” He added: “He deserved it.”‘Pieces for the future’All the losing gave the Lakers enviable draft positioning.With picks earned by their records in the final few years of Bryant’s career, the Lakers drafted or acquired several promising young players, like Julius Randle, Jordan Clarkson, D’Angelo Russell, Larry Nance Jr., Brandon Ingram and Ivica Zubac.Randle, Clarkson, Russell and Nance have said they learned from Bryant’s example. But his star power was such that they had to wait until he retired in April 2016 for the franchise to focus on their development.“It felt like a career-beginning training camp because it definitely was not the pieces at the time you needed to win,” Sandiford-Artest said. “There was more, you know, pieces for the future.”Those players would not be part of their future, except as trade chips to build the championship roster.In the gap between Bryant and James, Jeanie Buss, the controlling owner, overhauled the front office and thwarted a coup attempt by her older brothers as the team’s losses — and external criticism — mounted.In the summer of 2017, the Lakers signed Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who is represented by James’s agent and close friend, Rich Paul. That gave Paul an inside look at the organization a year before James became a free agent.Paul knew the situation wasn’t perfect, but few teams are. He advised James that signing with the Lakers could work, in part out of trust in Buss. James chose the Lakers and suddenly the drama of the past few seasons didn’t seem to matter.After missing the playoffs in James’s first season, when he dealt with a groin injury, the Lakers tried again. Magic Johnson, whom Buss had hired to run basketball operations and who had helped to recruit James, abruptly stepped down before the last game of the 2018-19 season. They traded several young players and draft picks to the New Orleans Pelicans for another Paul client: Anthony Davis. Rob Pelinka, the team’s vice president of basketball operations, said he consulted with James and Davis as he built the rest of the roster.The two stars were electrifying together. The rest of the team fit perfectly and charged through the coronavirus pandemic-interrupted season. When Bryant died suddenly in a helicopter crash in January 2020, James became the public face of the organization’s grief.Months later, James led the Lakers to the franchise’s 17th championship. Buss felt vindicated against those who had questioned her leadership.Jeanie Buss, the Lakers’ controlling owner, has faced criticism as the team has struggled. She oversaw the franchise’s 17th championship run, in 2020.Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesOnstage as the team celebrated the victory, James enveloped Buss in a long embrace. He told her they had accomplished what they set out to do.“I think the hug for that long a time was to really let it soak in,” Buss told the Los Angeles Times at the time. “He’s won several championships now, and he knows that those moments are to be cherished and to be recognized.”But it was only one championship. They would soon tumble from their pedestal.‘Things are going to get right’This season is Ham’s first season with the Lakers, and it began disastrously.The team lost its first five games, and 10 of its first 12. Ham benched Russell Westbrook in October after three starts. Westbrook had struggled in his first season in Los Angeles last year.James has been a bright spot. In his 20th season, he has been playing like he is still in his 20s. He’s had trouble enjoying the chase for Abdul-Jabbar’s career scoring record as losses and injuries have piled up this season.Ham has remained optimistic.“I get disappointed, but I don’t get discouraged or down on myself or the team,” he said in an interview. “Yeah, there’s moments in games we should have won, or different moments we should have played better, but at the end of the day working in the N.B.A. for one of the most, if not the most storied franchise, having a lot of great people I get to work with, great people I’m working for. It’s been fun.”The Lakers lack depth, but there is evidence lately that, with the right additions, they can contend for a championship if they have Davis, who had been playing like a candidate for the league’s Most Valuable Player Award before his foot injury in mid-December. The Lakers went on a five-game winning streak starting Dec. 30 and recently they nearly beat two contenders — the Mavericks and the 76ers.Lakers guard Russell Westbrook, left, has had a rocky tenure in Los Angeles, but has found success coming off the bench this year. Coach Darvin Ham, right, pulled Westbrook from the starting lineup after three games.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressThe trading deadline is Feb. 9, giving the Lakers until then to make a major move to get back on the championship track. But all of the trades of the last few years, particularly those for Davis and Westbrook, have left them with little flexibility and salary-cap space. They can’t trade any of their first-round picks until the 2027 selection, and have been reluctant to lose more draft assets.Ham said he has felt support from Pelinka and Buss, who signed Pelinka to a multiyear extension last year despite the team’s struggles. After a five-game road trip from Christmas to Jan. 2, Ham and Pelinka went to Buss’s office.“She gave me a big hug and told me: ‘Hang in there, you’re doing a phenomenal job and things are going to get right. We’re going to start winning consistently, but Darvin, we’re totally happy with what you’re doing and you and your staff are doing an excellent job,’” Ham said. “It was cool. It was really thoughtful.”Ham said the mood when he sees both Buss and Pelinka is light and full of smiles.“It’s not like a lack of an awareness, but just a gratefulness, a thankfulness to be in this together,” Ham said.He is being afforded patience, at least for now. More

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      In the Shadow of Superstars, Golden State’s Young Players Try to Bloom

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      Moses Moody would be wrapped in his blankets, protected from the morning chill, when his alarm went off at 5 a.m. Nothing about the situation appealed to him. What teenager wants to drag himself out of bed before dawn?But as a seventh-grader in Little Rock, Ark., Moody was beginning to sense his promise as a basketball player. And he knew, even then, that if he wanted to go places, he would need to work at his game — and then work at it some more.His father, Kareem Moody, had made a deal with him: He would help Moses train each morning before school, but only if Moses got up on his own. It was both a test and an early lesson in self-reliance: How badly did he want to improve?“So, if I wanted to work out, I had to wake him up, go get dressed, and then go wake him up again,” Moses Moody recalled in an interview. “And then he’d know I was for real.”Their early mornings at LA Fitness soon became routine. Moses also had the keys to the gym at Absolute Athlete, a nearby training facility. He was always looking for the next workout, the next pickup game, the next challenge.“You want to have challenges, and you have to have obstacles,” Moody said. “Because if you’re bad at something, that just means you have more room to grow.”As a second-year guard with Golden State, Moody, 20, has a new challenge: cracking the rotation and playing consistent minutes. He can commiserate with two other former first-round draft picks — James Wiseman, 21, and Jonathan Kuminga, 20 — who are trying to become contributors on a team without much time to waste.For Golden State, in Boston on Thursday for a rematch of last season’s N.B.A. finals against the Celtics, there is tension between defending its championship and developing its young players. Ideally, it would be able to do both. But it is a complicated puzzle, especially for a team with outsize expectations.Kuminga, a second-year forward, has spoken of upholding the “legacy” established by his teammates Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson. Wiseman, a third-year center whose career has been slowed by injuries, has cited his sporadic minutes as chances for him to “grow and learn.” And Moody has straddled a fine line between patience and impatience.“It’s hard to keep the right head space,” he said. “But I also don’t want to hide those emotions from myself, saying that I’m OK with staying on the bench. I don’t want to be OK with it because I’m not OK with it. I want to play. I always want to play.”Moody is just three years removed from high school, and his playing time in the N.B.A. has been limited as Golden State leans on its veterans for a championship push.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesMoody, Kuminga and Wiseman have all spent time in the G League, where each has gotten ample minutes to score and, in most cases, create as the best player on the court. (Moody said his five games with Santa Cruz last season were “sufficient.”) Coach Steve Kerr has also tried to augment their development via “the golden hour” — a period of extra work before the start of practice.“But there’s no substitute for game reps,” Kerr said.In late November, when Golden State visited the New Orleans Pelicans, Kerr rested a bunch of his banged-up starters. As a result, Moody and Kuminga were among the young players who supplied big minutes. Golden State lost by 45.Afterward, Kerr had dinner with Curry and Green. He asked them a question that happened to be on his mind that night: When did they feel confident that they could win games — really win games — as N.B.A. players?“Draymond said it was his third year, and Steph said it was his fourth year,” Kerr recalled. “And you’re talking about two guys who had a lot of college experience, who played deep into the N.C.A.A. tournament and played games that mattered.”Kerr crunched the numbers. Curry spent three seasons at Davidson, while Green played four seasons at Michigan State. So, from the time they left high school, it took both about seven years before they understood the ins and outs of the N.B.A., seven years before they were experienced enough to win when it mattered.Moody, who spent one college season at Arkansas, is three years removed from high school. Wiseman appeared in just three games at the University of Memphis before Golden State made him the No. 2 overall pick in the 2020 N.B.A. draft. And Kuminga, who is from the Democratic Republic of Congo, went straight from high school to the G League Ignite, playing in a handful of games before he went to Golden State as the seventh pick of the 2021 draft — seven spots ahead of Moody.“You would think their growth would be a little more accelerated because you’re already in the N.B.A. and you’re picking things up that you wouldn’t pick up in college,” Kerr said. “But the point is, grown-ups win in the N.B.A. It’s very rare to see kids winning titles.”Golden State Coach Steve Kerr said it’s hard to give the youngest players more minutes since the team is so reliant on its superstars as it makes a playoff push.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThompson recalled his own growing pains. Early in his second season, with a chance to seal a win against the Denver Nuggets, he missed two free throws. The game went to double overtime and Golden State lost. Thompson was so despondent that he left the arena in his uniform.“We all go through those lapses,” he said.But Golden State has less leeway for mistakes now, with its championship window narrowing as its stars age.“We can’t give these young guys the freedom that they need to learn through their mistakes,” Kerr said, adding that there is pressure from being on national TV so often and playing behind such accomplished stars.A handful of blowout losses have presented opportunities for Moody, Kuminga and Wiseman to play longer stretches. In a 30-point loss to the Nets on Dec. 21, Wiseman scored a career-high 30 points in 28 minutes.“I was able to play through my mistakes,” Wiseman said.Moody, meanwhile, figured to have a bigger role this season given some of the team’s free-agency losses last summer. But development is seldom linear, and Moody, who was averaging 5.2 points in 14.8 minutes a game entering Thursday, has occasionally dropped off the back end of the rotation. He wants his defense to become more instinctive. Kerr wants him to take better care of the ball.Moody was averaging 5.2 points in 14.8 minutes a game entering Thursday.Kelley L Cox/USA Today Sports, via Reuters“Stuff doesn’t always go your way,” Moody said, “but you’ve got to grow up. There’s also a sense of comfort knowing I’ve been in similar situations before, and it’s worked out.”As a high school sophomore, Moody led North Little Rock to a state championship, then transferred to Montverde Academy, a basketball powerhouse outside of Orlando, Fla. He wanted to be pushed by teammates like Cade Cunningham, who would become the No. 1 overall pick in the 2021 N.B.A. draft, and Scottie Barnes, last season’s rookie of the year with the Toronto Raptors.At his predraft workout for Golden State, Moody spotted a celebrity sitting courtside: Stephen Curry. Afterward, Moody made sure to “chop it up” with him, he said. Who knew when he would have that chance again? He figured he should pick up a few pointers.As it turned out, Moody had no reason to worry. He has spent the past two seasons absorbing regular lessons from Curry and the team’s other veterans. Moody described Golden State as an “elite basketball academy.” Green might be the self-appointed dean.“With Dray, you don’t have to listen to him,” Moody said. “But since he’s constantly talking and constantly giving out game, I try to take in as much as I can.”Not so long ago, the team had a reprieve from the pressures of chasing another championship. Golden State entered the 2019-20 season fresh off a fifth straight trip to the N.B.A. finals, then swiftly morphed into the worst team in the league. The season was an injury-induced oddity that landed the team in the draft lottery while accelerating the growth of Jordan Poole, then a rookie guard, who played more than he would have if the team had been at full strength. Poole has since established himself as one of the team’s leading scorers.The team doesn’t have that luxury this season — the luxury of losing. Golden State is fighting for a playoff spot.Moody obviously would prefer to be playing big minutes. But in many ways, he said, he feels fortunate. If he were playing for a lousy team, he might be developing bad habits that he never corrects. With Golden State, there is no margin for error.“You’ve got to be perfect,” Moody said. “So if I can figure out a way to play perfect basketball right now, that’ll set me up for the rest of my career.” More

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      The Brooklyn Nets Have So Much Talent but So Little Charm

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      The Nets are again one of the Eastern Conference’s best teams, with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant leading All-Star voting. So why is there so little joy in watching them?I watched the Nets play in Brooklyn last week, and a Boston Celtics home game broke out.“M-V-P, M-V-P, M-V-P!” rang the chants, aimed not at one of the Nets but at Jayson Tatum, Boston’s feather-touch, do-it-all forward, as he toed the free-throw line in the fourth quarter of what became a runaway victory for his team.This was one of the most significant rivalry tests of the N.B.A. season, a battle between two teams vying for the best record in the Eastern Conference. It was also the first of a spate of games the Nets would play without Kevin Durant. The team’s best player, and the core of the offense, Durant sprained his left knee earlier in the week and stands to spend at least two weeks recovering.In other words, it was the type of game that reveals a team’s DNA.With much in the balance, the Nets mounted only a tepid response, fading late and losing, 109-98. That may be why the fans at Barclays Center seemed muted, why they allowed a rival like Boston to roll into town and treat the arena like a personal penthouse. The team rolled over for the Oklahoma City Thunder at home Sunday night, dropping back to four games behind the Celtics in the East.High hopes have stuck to this Nets team since the summer of 2019, when Kyrie Irving signed on to be the franchise’s floor general and promised to persuade Durant, the 2014 league M.V.P., to join him. Both stars had won N.B.A. championships in the not-so-distant past. It stood to reason that Brooklyn would become a perennial contender.The Nets are again an elite team this season. When they are clicking, as they were in December, they are capable of winning a dozen straight games on the strength of hot shooting and stern defense.So why isn’t it more joyful and exciting to watch them?Brooklyn is the N.B.A.’s most enigmatic team — awkward to root for, understand, figure out and believe in. Over the past several seasons and into the current one, the high hopes for what the Nets could become have consistently been dashed by soap opera controversies.“If you love the Nets, you have to focus on the skill of the players,” one fan told me during the game. “It’s all about the skills of this team. That’s why you watch. Because their big stars all have, how do I say this, well, they have some baggage.”For the uninitiated, here’s a quick rundown of the plot twists.Steve Nash was hired as head coach in 2020 despite having no coaching experience. His first year went well enough: The Nets were a Durant 3-pointer away from making the Eastern Conference finals.The promise of this team never quite outpaces the spectacle. The 2018 league M.V.P., James Harden, arrived in 2021 thinking he would complement Durant and Irving perfectly. Break out the Champagne, N.B.A. titles here we come.But Harden beefed with Irving, partly because Irving — who seems to have never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t want to bear hug — refused to get vaccinated for the coronavirus as the pandemic raged. That meant Irving couldn’t play home games during a period when New York demanded immunization as a prerequisite for work.Kyrie Irving led all Eastern Conference guards in All-Star voting, despite being at the center of several controversies.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesSo the Nets shipped Harden to Philadelphia midway through last season. “There was no structure” in Brooklyn, Harden said, offering a parting shot. “And even superstars, they need structure.”He continued pulling back the curtain. “Internally, things weren’t what I expected when I was trying to get traded there,” he said.In trading for Harden, the Nets received Ben Simmons, a player talented enough to have once been viewed as Magic Johnson Lite.Problem is, Simmons arrived in Brooklyn so saddled by injury and self-doubt that he had become allergic to one of basketball’s most essential and elementary skills: shooting the basketball.Nash’s team stumbled through last season, dogged by injuries, a teamwide Covid outbreak and, yes, more drama, only to be swept ignobly by the Celtics in the first round of the playoffs. Durant peppered the team with a demand: Fire Nash, or trade me. (He later relented.)When the Nets began this season losing five of their first seven games, Nash was let go.I haven’t even detailed Irving’s self-inflicted wounds. They’re enough to fill a book. To keep from dragging on, I’ll say that this season could have been a redemption tour until he started it by publicly backing a holocaust-denying documentary that blamed Jews for many of the world’s woes.No, the Nets don’t leave you with the warm and fuzzies — not in the way, for example, that Golden State, fronted by Stephen Curry, or the Denver Nuggets, led by Nikola Jokic, do. But the Nets’ stars remain popular, at least by one nonscientific measure. Durant and Irving are among the league’s vote leaders for this year’s All-Star Game.“It’s all about the skills” seems to have become a necessary mantra for the many fans willing to look past all of this team’s travails.What will the Nets’ future be? How can anyone be sure when, despite all that skill, the team remains such a work in progress?Simmons is 26, still capable of becoming the superstar he was billed as when he was drafted No. 1 overall in 2016. He put up quite a stat line against Boston: 13 assists and nine rebounds, the type of play vital to Brooklyn with Durant out.But there were times when Simmons was near the basket and attempted awkward layups. Clang. He tried again. Clank.All game, Simmons did not score a single point. As he sat on the bench in the fourth quarter, the Nets already having given in, Celtics fans filled Barclays Center with their loudest roars.In the news conference after the game, I asked him: What is this team’s identity?I wanted to know if the Nets had a trademark trait they could rely on, something not only excellent but sustainable in the crunch. All championship teams contain such a quality; if you ask me, all deeply embraceable teams do, too.Simmons leaned back, shook his head as if bewildered and paused for a beat.“We are still trying to give ourselves an identity,” he said. “So maybe at the end of the year, I will give you that answer.”Basketball fans have been waiting long enough. More

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      Measuring Up to Wilt Chamberlain May Take More Than Stats

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      Several N.B.A. players have had Chamberlain-like performances this season. But to some, he will always be untouchable.From a courtside folding chair at Fiserv Forum, where Dick Garrett has assisted fans as a Milwaukee Bucks employee for more than two decades, he recently watched Giannis Antetokounmpo toy with the Washington Wizards, levitating above the rim as if he were frolicking in a slam-dunk contest.“Fifty-five points and he was doing it so easily, like no one could even challenge him,” Garrett said. “I’m thinking, ‘Geez, he’s a man playing against boys.’ ”Not unlike what he witnessed, but with an even better view, more than a half-century ago.Such physical dominance took Garrett back to his rookie N.B.A. season, 1969-70, with the Los Angeles Lakers. In a postseason run to a Game 7 finals loss to the Knicks, he lobbed passes into the post from his backcourt position to the man best known as Wilt, in that familiar one-name tribute to fame.This season, Antetokounmpo, among others, has been drawing enough statistical comparisons to Wilt Chamberlain — who scored a record 100 points in a game and averaged a mind-boggling 50 per game for a season — to wonder if the sport has ascended to its most exceptional athletic plane.Or, if its video-game mimicry is as much or more the result of competitive engineering.Take a significantly expanded area of attack due to rampant 3-point shooting; open up driving lanes to the physically blessed and skilled likes of Antetokounmpo to score or find open teammates on the perimeter. What you get is an array of eye-opening individual stat lines in a league where team scoring has soared by roughly 15 points from where it was a decade ago.On Dec. 30, Garrett watched Antetokounmpo manhandle the Minnesota Timberwolves for 43 points and 20 rebounds, two nights after notching 45 points and 22 rebounds against the Bulls in Chicago. Antetokounmpo’s seven assists in Chicago and five against Minnesota made him the first player to record at least 40 points, 20 rebounds and 5 assists in consecutive games since, well, Wilt.Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo is one of several players who have put up Wilt-like stat lines this season.Michael Reaves/Getty ImagesAntetokounmpo, with his seven-foot frame and elastic wingspan that can optically delude one into thinking he scratches the ceiling, is indeed what Garrett called the ringleader of a “big man revolution.”It hasn’t just been the tallest of the league’s elite — Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic in Denver, Joel Embiid in Philadelphia — whose statistical bingeing has reintroduced Chamberlain, who died in 1999, into the N.B.A. discourse.When Luka Doncic, Dallas’s 6-foot-7 do-everything Slovenian import, strafed the Knicks for 60 points, 21 rebounds and 10 assists in a comeback overtime victory late last month, commentators breathlessly noted that no one, not even Wilt, had ever posted such a line.Walt Frazier, the Hall of Fame guard who broadcasts Knicks games and once shared a backcourt with Garrett at Southern Illinois, has an idea why.“What you mostly see now are guys running up and down, dunking on people,” he said in a telephone interview. “Only a few teams buckle down on defense. They don’t double-team when someone goes off. When someone came in and dropped 40 on me, it was always, ‘Clyde got destroyed.’ Now Doncic scores 60 and no one even says who was guarding him.”Frazier, 77, was echoing recent laments on the state of the sport from the old-school coaches Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr. It’s no surprise that appreciation, or lack thereof, for the contemporary N.B.A. would break down along generational lines. For those who played with or against Chamberlain, he is basketball’s Babe Ruth, the game’s all-time goliath. Everyone has a tale, perhaps on the tall side, to tell.Billy Cunningham, 79, a Hall of Famer and Chamberlain’s teammate with the Philadelphia 76ers, cited the night Gus Johnson, a very strong forward for the Baltimore Bullets, went at Wilt with every intention of dunking over him as he’d done earlier in the game.Chamberlain didn’t just block the shot, Cunningham said: “He actually caught the ball, and while Gus went to the floor, he just stood there holding it over his head.”However grainy the video, however dorky the short shorts, do not try to convince Cunningham and company that what Chamberlain achieved was the result of an ancient, inferior era. They will remind you that he averaged 45.8 minutes per game for his career and seldom sat one out, in stark contrast to the more coddled modern star — who, in fairness, represents a far greater financial investment to protect.But when a knee injury limited Chamberlain to 12 regular-season games in 1969-70, he returned for all 18 playoff games to average 22.1 points, 22.2 rebounds and 47.3 minutes per game. And this, Garrett reminded, was Chamberlain at 33, several years removed from when he could run like the track-and-field star he had been at the University of Kansas — as freakish an athlete as the Greek version, Antetokounmpo.Chamberlain and the Lakers lost to the Knicks in the N.B.A. finals in 1970 but beat them two years later, giving Chamberlain his second championship.Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated, via Getty ImagesIt is foolish to think that professional athletes aren’t physically enhanced from a half-century ago, if only for their weight training and nutrition. As Garrett said: “You look at the size of Giannis — who’s not as strong as Wilt or even Shaquille O’Neal. But he and a few of these other big guys, they’re athletic enough to play like smaller guys, and that’s what’s changed.”Having played with Elgin Baylor on the Lakers, and watched from up close the modern-day smaller and midsize players, Garrett said: “I honestly think the wing players and guards are pretty similar in what they do.”But, he added, in comparison with Wilt’s time: “The way Giannis and some others are scoring, the level of resistance is not the same. I don’t know if that’s for the better or not.”Now the league eagerly awaits the arrival of the latest in a parade of big men from abroad who have, along with the likes of Kevin Durant, dramatically altered positional perception. France’s Victor Wembanyama may be the next greatest thing or at least Kristaps Porzingis 2.0. But for every progression in size, skills and worldwide production of talent, the old guard will judiciously argue that their game was fundamentally sounder, tactically superior, defensively stouter.They will remind you that when Wilt averaged 50.4 points per game for the Philadelphia Warriors in 1961-62, team scoring was at 118.8 points per game — or five points per game higher than this season. And that was when there was hand-checking, hard fouls and other generous interpretations of traveling rules.Wilt established four of the top five season-scoring averages while clanking half his free throws and, as Cunningham noted, “when there were only eight or nine teams and he had to play against Bill Russell 10 times a year.”Conversely, in Wilt’s time, the flow of African American talent into the N.B.A. was limited by a de facto quota system, which no doubt affected the league’s overall quality.Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics posts up against Chamberlain during a game in 1968.Dick Raphael/NBAE, via Getty ImagesCunningham conceded that comparisons are, beyond futile, “almost unfair because everything is so different. The game in all sports now is about entertainment.”The bottom line: The more cash that pours into sports, the more tinkering there will be to satisfy contemporary highlight tastes, especially those of younger fans who drive internet clicks, fantasy leagues, merchandise sales and the newest revenue deity: online gambling. In a league where regular-season relevance has been dampened by injuries and load-management caution, and further diluted by recent postseason expansion, why so many games have taken on the eye candy nature of all-star games is no great mystery, just calculated marketing.For Frazier, who quarterbacked the acclaimed 1970 and 1973 championship Knicks, the playoffs are when the bridge between old and new is rebuilt. “That’s when the continuity and defense that we older guys love does return,” he said.Only then, perhaps, can we gain a meaningful perspective on the historical numbers game currently in play, and on how to more accurately measure the young wannabes against Wilt. More

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      Miami Sinks the Thunder With Record Night at the Free-Throw Line

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      The Heat were 40 for 40 on free throws, winning the game on Jimmy Butler’s 35th point (and 23rd free throw) of the game.What’s the most exciting play in basketball? A posterizing dunk? A block swatted 10 rows into the stands? A sweet-swishing 3-pointer from downtown?Chances are you didn’t say, “Consistent free-throw shooting.”But the humble free throw had its moment Tuesday night in Miami when the Heat set an N.B.A. record, taking and making 40 free throws without a miss.The Heat were led by an in-the-zone Jimmy Butler, who made 23 of 23 from the stripe. No other Miami player had more than six. Their opponents, the Oklahoma City Thunder, were comparative bricklayers, shooting 14 for 21.Every one of those 40 Heat freebies was needed. Miami won, 112-111. The deciding point, which came with 12 seconds left, was, of course, a Butler free throw.Butler ended with 35 points, yet needed only six field goals (on 17 shots) to reach that total.The Heat broke a record that was held by two teams. The Utah Jazz shot 39 for 39 in 1982 (Danny Schayes was 14 for 14), tying a mark first set by the 1953 Fort Wayne Pistons (the Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University graduate and eventual convicted point shaver Jack Molinas was 11 for 11).There have been a couple of close calls. In 2000, the Indiana Pacers were 40 for 41 (Jermaine O’Neal missed one). In 1950, the Washington Capitols were 44 for 45. Dick O’Keefe missed his only free throw, and the team folded before the season was over. Those two things were not related, probably.In terms of free throws made, 40 is far from the record. That was set by the Phoenix Suns in 1990 when they shot 61 for 80. Though Suns fans were treated to a free-throw bonanza that night, the success rate was a pedestrian .763.Before you dismiss the Heat’s feat on Tuesday, consider that free throws are far from gimmes. N.B.A. teams this season are making about 78 of every 100 free throws. But that still leaves 22 that miss.In perhaps the worst team performance ever, the Detroit Pistons somehow shot 3 for 17 in a 2017 game (they were also 3 for 23 from 3-point range and lost to the Pelicans by 23). The expansion Toronto Raptors hold the “record,” with a .000 free-throw percentage in a game in 1996. But it comes with an asterisk: They were somehow awarded only three total free-throw attempts in the game.The individual record 0-fer goes to the legendarily poor free-throw-shooting Shaquille O’Neal, who was 0 for 11 in a 2000 game with the Los Angeles Lakers. But worse still, perhaps, was Chris Dudley’s horrifying 1-for-18 effort in 1990 with the Nets. In a promotion between quarters, a blindfolded spectator made the same number of free throws as Dudley did all game.As for Butler, his 23-for-23 mark on Tuesday was oh-so-close to the individual record. James Harden was 24 for 24 in December 2019. Adrian Dantley of the Jazz was an agonizing 28 for 29 in 1984.Dantley is also near the top when it comes to total free throws made in a game. He had games with 26, 27 and 28 free throws made in the 1980s, although none of them were perfect. Bob Cousy was 30 for 31 in a 1953 four-overtime playoff game.Dantley’s 28 tied the regular-season record, which was set by Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors, who made 28 of 32 free throws in a game in March 1962 game against the Knicks that was played in Hershey, Pa. The feat was scandalously overlooked at the time, as fans and journalists focused on some other statistic. Something about 100 points. More

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      NBA Has Sharp Rise in 50-Point Games

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      Donovan Mitchell’s 71 points in a game this week was the top mark since 2006, but a rise in offense (and a lack of defense) has made high-scoring games a routine affair.We don’t know who will do it, and we don’t know exactly when it will happen. But we do know that somebody sometime soon will score 50 points in an N.B.A. game. And then it will happen again. And again and again and again.The headlines have started to sound familiar. Giannis Antetokounmpo scored 55 on Jan. 3. Klay Thompson scored 54 and Donovan Mitchell scored 71 on Jan. 2. Luka Doncic scored 50 and 60 and 51. Pascal Siakam and Darius Garland have 50-point games this season. Lauri Markkanen just missed, with a 49-point game on Thursday. Who’s next? Kevon Looney?An event that was a rarity as little as a decade ago is now becoming commonplace, and this season in particular, players are going off for 50 or more regularly.Ten years ago, in 2012-13, only three players had 50-point games. Going back through the ’90s, ’80s and ’70s, the number of 50-point games per season was almost uniformly in the single digits.But lately, 50-point games have taken off, with an average of nearly 20 over the previous four seasons. So far this year, with a little less than half of the season complete, there have been 14.So what’s going on?To start with, teams as a whole are scoring more. The average N.B.A. team has scored 113.8 points a game this year, the highest total since 1970. Ten years ago the average was 98.1. The pace of games has also sped up, with teams averaging nearly 100 possessions every 48 minutes over the past five seasons, which had not been done since the 1980s. More possession, more shots, more points for everyone.Luka Doncic’s dominant performance against the Knicks last week included 60 points, 21 rebounds and 10 assists.Tim Heitman/Getty ImagesA lot of that offense has been driven by a drastic increase in 3-pointers. In the late 1990s, teams made an average of four to six 3s per game. Ten years ago, they made 7.2. In 2017-18, the total passed 10 for the first time, and this season the average is 12.2, off 34.3 attempts.In eight of the 14 50-point games this season, the player made at least six 3s, with Thompson and Garland sinking 10 each. (Shout-out to Antetokounmpo for scoring 55 while shooting 0-for-3 from 3.)Golden State Coach Steve Kerr this week pointed to 3-point shooting and pace as key factors in the surge of 50-point performances. He also blamed defense.“Transition defense is at an all-time low in this league,” he said. “Every single night on League Pass, you see five guys standing there, somebody shoots, somebody runs long, and everybody goes: ‘Oh, the guy’s laying it up down there.’“We do it, every team does it. I think the game has gotten really loose and the players are so talented, it’s made for a lot of big scoring nights.”Saddiq Bey, a third-year player for the Detroit Pistons, has averaged 14.2 points a game in his career thus far, but he had 51 in a win over the Orlando Magic last season.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressThe 14 games this season were accomplished by 10 different players, and the trend over the past few years has wrapped in players with far smaller profiles than that of Antetokounmpo or Doncic. Detroit’s Saddiq Bey had 51 points last March. Fred VanVleet of the Raptors did it in 2021, and T.J. Warren had 53 points in a game for Indiana in 2020.In the past, 50-point games were typically the reserve of the greats. Wilt Chamberlain had 118 of them (one of them, of course, reaching 100 points). Next are Michael Jordan with 31 and Kobe Bryant with 25.Though some less expected names are popping for 50 these days, the big names are actually doing it less often than the Chamberlains and Jordans and Bryants. Among active players, James Harden has 23, LeBron James has 14 and Damian Lillard has 12. Of the players who scored 50 this season, Stephen Curry is tops with 11 career 50-point games.As you might expect, with 50-point games up so much, so are games in the 40-to-49-point range. Ten years ago, there were only 33 such games. In recent seasons there have typically been about 100. But this season there are already 76.A single player scoring 40 points in an N.B.A. game? Ho-hum. More

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      Texas Longhorns Fire Basketball Coach After Domestic Assault Charge

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      Chris Beard, who was named head coach of the University of Texas men’s team in April 2021, was arrested in December and charged with a third-degree felony.Chris Beard was fired on Thursday as the head coach of the University of Texas men’s basketball team, weeks after he was arrested on a felony domestic violence charge in Austin.Chris Del Conte, the university’s vice president and athletic director, said in a statement on Thursday that the university had decided to terminate Beard’s contract effective immediately.Beard, 49, was suspended without pay on Dec. 12 after he was arrested and charged with assault on a member of a family or household by impeding breath circulation, a third-degree felony, according to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. Beard posted a cash bond of $10,000 and was released from jail the day of his arrest.Rodney Terry, the team’s associate head coach, has been serving as acting head coach of the Texas Longhorns men’s basketball team since Beard was suspended. Del Conte said that Terry would finish the season as the team’s acting head coach.“This has been a difficult situation that we’ve been diligently working through,” Del Conte said.The Austin Police Department said officers responded to a call about a disturbance at a home in Austin at around 12:15 a.m. on Dec. 12. The caller told the police that the disturbance had ended and that one person at the home had left, the police said in a statement. When the police arrived at the house, a woman told them that Beard had assaulted and choked her.Perry Minton, a lawyer for Beard, said in a statement on Thursday that Beard was “crushed at the news he will not be coaching at the University of Texas.”“At the outset of Coach Beard’s suspension, the university promised they would conduct an independent investigation surrounding the allegations and make a decision regarding his employment only after they had done so,” Minton said. “They proceeded to terminate Coach Beard without asking a single question of him or his fiancée.”The university declined to comment on its investigation.A few days after Beard was arrested, Randi Trew, Beard’s fiancée, said in a statement that her lawyer shared with The Associated Press that the two had engaged in a “physical struggle” after she broke his glasses in “frustration.” Beard, she added, “did not strangle me.”“Chris has stated that he was acting in self-defense, and I do not refute that,” she said. “I do not believe Chris was trying to intentionally harm me in any way. It was never my intent to have him arrested or prosecuted.” A university spokesman confirmed that Beard had been offered the opportunity to resign or have his contracted terminated by the university. Minton, Beard’s lawyer, told James Davis, the university’s vice president of legal affairs, in a letter on Thursday that the offer “came as a shock.”“With this, I want to be on record as emphatically stating, and herein memorializing, that Coach Beard has not done anything to violate any provision of his contract with the University of Texas,” Minton said in the letter. “He was arrested, then his fiancée retracted her previously reported statement.”The Texas Longhorns named Beard head coach in April 2021 after he spent five seasons as the head coach of the men’s basketball team at Texas Tech University, which he led to the N.C.A.A. national championship game in 2019.Before coaching the Longhorns, Beard was the head coach of the men’s basketball teams at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas; McMurry University in Abilene, Texas; Seminole State College in Seminole, Okla.; and Fort Scott Community College in Fort Scott, Kan. Beard graduated from the University of Texas in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology, the study of human motion. More