Basket

Subterms

    More stories

    • 50 Shares179 Views

      in Basket

      My Rick Pitino Story

      by

      A basketball coach’s persistence has a newly retired journalist reminiscing about newsgathering in a different era.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Of all the gym joints in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine.That’s how I felt last spring, when I learned that Rick Pitino had become the head basketball coach at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., which happens to be my alma mater. The mere thought of Mr. Pitino, 70 years old and still strolling the sidelines as I watch basketball at home, newly retired, took me back to the most bizarre moment of my 38-year career at The New York Times.I’m referring to the first time Mr. Pitino and I crossed paths, in May of 1989, under the most unusual circumstances: at the beginning of a new day (2:30 a.m.) and the end of a long, winding driveway. A colleague and I could see Mr. Pitino through a large bay window. Clad in a bright red sweater, he was chatting on the phone, sitting on a sofa in what appeared to be his living room. The sound of car doors slamming behind us was enough to make Mr. Pitino whip his head around and rush out his front door to confront us.“Who the hell are you? What the hell are you doing here?” I remember him asking.To be honest, we were sort of wondering the same thing ourselves. Several hours earlier, I had just finished a long clerical shift in the Sports department at The Times when Bill Brink, the weekend editor, summoned me and a colleague to his desk.It was late, and Bill told us he had just been on the phone with Sam Goldaper, our venerable basketball writer, who told him that Mr. Pitino, then the head coach of the New York Knicks, was about to resign and return to his first love, college basketball. It was rumored that Mr. Pitino had accepted a job offer from the fabled University of Kentucky, where he had always felt that the blue grass was greener.Sam didn’t have Mr. Pitino’s phone number, but had given the Sports desk the address of Mr. Pitino’s home in Mount Kisco, N.Y., in the upper reaches of the Westchester County suburbs. Neither of us had a vehicle, so Bill wrote out a transportation slip, which allowed us to use one of the cars The Times then kept for reporters in the parking lot next door.Before we left, Bill told us to try and get a quote from Mr. Pitino. Even if he wasn’t home, the reader would still know that The Times had tried to contact him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Basket

      Herbert Kohl, Former Wisconsin Senator and Milwaukee Bucks Owner, Dies at 88

      by

      A member of the family that founded Kohl’s department stores, he guarded federal budgets as a U.S. senator while spending lavishly to revive the N.B.A. team he owned.Herbert H. Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat who kept watch over federal budgets in four terms as a United States senator, but as the die-hard owner of the National Basketball Association’s often mediocre Milwaukee Bucks spent lavishly to keep the team afloat in his hometown, died on Wednesday afternoon at his home in Milwaukee. He was 88. His death, after a brief illness, was announced by the Herb Kohl Foundation, his nonprofit organization.By his own account, Milwaukee meant everything to Mr. Kohl. His parents had immigrated to the city from Poland and Russia early in the 20th century, and his father, Maxwell Kohl, had opened a corner grocery store there in 1927. Herbert and his three siblings were born and raised in the city, scions of a family that in one generation had built an empire of Kohl’s stores across the Upper Midwest.In Wisconsin and surrounding states, the Kohl name became almost as familiar as Schlitz, which called itself “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.” By 1972, when the British American Tobacco Company bought a controlling interest in Kohl’s, the company, still managed by the Kohl family, had 50 grocery stores, six department stores and several networks of pharmacies and liquor stores.In 2012, under new owners, Kohl’s became the largest department store chain in the United States, surpassing J.C. Penney, its biggest competitor.Herbert Kohl was president of the Kohl Corporation from 1970 to 1979, when British American Tobacco bought the remaining corporate interest. He then left management, a tycoon in search of new challenges. He found two: the Milwaukee Bucks, which he bought in 1985 for $18 million and owned for 29 years of mostly losing seasons; and a seat in the Senate, which he held from 1989 to 2013, and where he became a popular advocate of working families, small-business owners and the elderly.His political experience had been limited. He had been chairman of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party from 1975 to 1977, but he had never held office. The 1988 Democratic primary election to succeed a retiring William Proxmire, who had fought wasteful government spending for 32 years in the Senate, centered on two major issues: campaign expenditures and name recognition.Mr. Proxmire had boasted for years that his last re-election campaign, in 1982, had cost him just $145.10. Mr. Kohl acknowledged that he had spent more than $2 million in the 1988 primaries alone, mostly on television ads, but argued that it was nearly all of his own money and that, as a senator, he would not be beholden to special interests.Wisconsin voters knew the Kohl name from his family business and his Bucks’ ownership. But his primary opponents were well known, too: former Gov. Anthony Earl and Wisconsin’s secretary of state, Doug La Follette, a shirttail relative of Robert M. La Follette, the former governor, senator and presidential candidate. Mr. Kohl won the primary and easily beat a Republican in the general election.Kohl greeting soldiers before a Milwaukee Bucks game in 2012.Gary Dineen/NBAE, via Getty ImagesWith assets of $265 million, he was Milwaukee’s wealthiest resident and one of the Senate’s richest members. What colleagues found in Mr. Kohl, however, was a friendly, unassuming and modest man, something akin to what the country’s founders might have imagined in the Senate: a person of stature and accomplishment with a sense of obligation to the citizenry.He believed that government, like a family, ought to live within its means, and he supported a constitutional amendment to require Congress to pass balanced budgets. It was never adopted. But he tracked deficits that soared for most of his tenure, and voted consistently to restrain spending.Early in his Senate years, Mr. Kohl stopped taking money from special interest groups. “I think I was the only person in Washington that didn’t solicit money,” he told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2016. “I stopped taking money from people because it detracted from my ability to do my job well. We need a system that gets the ugly money out of it.”Senator Kohl strongly supported public education and educational savings accounts. On social issues, he favored abortion rights and affirmative action programs, and he voted to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. He also supported environmental protections.He opposed legislation to authorize the Persian Gulf war in 1990, but in 2002 he voted to endorse military force against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. He often joined more liberal Democrats in trying to cut military spending. At times, his voter-approval ratings were as high as 73 percent, and he won re-election campaigns in 1994, 2000 and 2006. All of them were largely financed with his own money.During his final term, Mr. Kohl supported President Barack Obama’s health care reforms, voted for the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and received high ratings from groups that sought universal health care. He voted to expand Medicare and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which became a federal program that provided matching funds to states.When Mr. Kohl announced that he would not seek a fifth term in 2012, President Obama said: “America’s children will grow up in a better place thanks to his advocacy of childhood nutrition programs, a strengthened food safety system, access to affordable health care and child care and juvenile crime prevention.”Herbert H. Kohl was born on Feb. 7, 1935, the third of four children of Maxwell and Mary (Hiken) Kohl. Herbert and his siblings, Sidney, Dolores and Allen, attended public schools in Milwaukee. At Washington High School, Herbert was an excellent student and played football, basketball and baseball.He and another a boy from the neighborhood, Allan Selig, who was known as Bud, became roommates and fraternity brothers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Mr. Kohl earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956. They remained friends as Mr. Selig went on to become the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team and the commissioner of Major League Baseball.After receiving a master’s degree in business from Harvard in 1958, Mr. Kohl invested in real estate and the stock market for some years, and then created Kohl Investments to handle his assets. He and his brother also helped manage the Kohl Corporation in the 1970s until the completion of the company’s sale to British American Tobacco.Kohl talking to the media in 2005.Gary Dineen/NBAE, via Getty ImagesThe chance to rescue the Bucks arose in 1985 when it became known that Jim Fitzgerald, the team’s largest single shareholder, was ill and that he and other investors wanted to sell. The Bucks, which were created as an expansion team in 1968, had won an N.B.A. championship in 1971 and had been a regular playoff contender over the years, and yet they were playing in the smallest arena in the league.As fears spread that new, deep-pocketed owners might move the Bucks to another city, Mr. Kohl bought the team for $18 million in March 1985. He spent millions more on contracts for players, coaches and other personnel, as well as on team travel, promotions and arena maintenance. Still, in the 1990s, the Bucks were mired in mediocrity. Even reaching the conference finals in 2000 seemed only a temporary respite from the gloom. In 2013-14, the Bucks won only 15 games. It was the worst record in team history.In April 2014, Mr. Kohl sold the Bucks to two New York hedge-fund billionaires, Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens, for $550 million. At Mr. Kohl’s insistence, the team remained in Milwaukee. The new owners and Mr. Kohl put up a total of $200 million for a new arena, the Fiserv Forum, which was completed in 2018.Mr. Kohl also gave bonuses, totaling $10 million, to every member of the Bucks organization and every worker at the BMO Harris Bradley Center, the Bucks’ aging and soon-to-be-replaced arena. Ushers received $2,000 each, and some longtime Bucks employees got enough to pay off mortgages or buy new homes.“I was happy to do it, and they were deeply appreciative,” he told The Journal Sentinel. “It doesn’t change my life, but it changes theirs.”Mr. Kohl, a lifelong Milwaukee resident who kept a horse ranch in Jackson, Wyo., never married and had no children. He is survived by his older brother Sidney, his older sister Dolores and his younger brother Allen.He gave $25 million to the University of Wisconsin for construction of the Kohl Center, a 15,000-seat basketball and hockey field house built on the university’s Madison campus in 1998. He also founded an educational foundation that each year provides grants to graduating seniors and teachers in Wisconsin high schools.Mr. Kohl’s net worth was never disclosed, although in 2016 Forbes estimated that it was between $630 million and $1.5 billion. He remained a loyal Bucks fan, with season tickets at the Fiserv Forum, a few rows up from courtside.As if vindicating Mr. Kohl’s faith in the team, the Bucks ended decades of drought by winning the N.B.A. championship in 2021, defeating the Phoenix Suns in seven games. Mr. Kohl was presented with a championship ring for his efforts to keep the team in Milwaukee, and he rode in the lead car in the championship parade, proclaiming: “This is one of the big days of my life.”Orlando Mayorquin More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Basket

      George McGinnis Dies at 73; Powered His Way to Basketball Stardom

      by

      He won two titles with the Pacers of the A.B.A. before joining Julius Erving on the N.B.A.’s 76ers, but it was 35 years before the Hall of Fame inducted him.George McGinnis, whose rare combination of size and agility made him a pillar of two early 1970s championship teams in the upstart American Basketball Association, but whose heralded pairing with Julius Erving on the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers failed to fulfill expectations of a title, died on Thursday in Indianapolis. He was 73.The Indiana Pacers, the team with which he won his A.B.A. titles, said his death, in a hospital, resulted from complications of cardiac arrest, which he suffered last week at his home in Indianapolis. McGinnis had struggled to walk in recent years after undergoing multiple back surgeries because of a hereditary condition, the team said.McGinnis played at the high school, college and professional levels in basketball-obsessed Indiana, where he broke Oscar Robertson’s scholastic scoring records while leading Washington High School in Indianapolis to a 31-0 record and a championship in 1969.McGinnis led Washington High School in Indianapolis to a 31-0 title run in 1969.Frank Fisse/IndyStar, via ImagnAs a forward, he averaged 30 points and 14.7 rebounds in his one season at Indiana University before joining his hometown Indiana Pacers. The Pacers immediately won successive A.B.A. championships, though McGinnis, surrounded by the veterans Mel Daniels, Roger Brown and Bob Netolicky, was not the team’s unquestioned star until his second season, when he averaged 27.6 points and 12.5 rebounds per game.At a chiseled 6 feet 8 inches, 235 pounds, McGinnis was a harbinger of basketball’s athletic revolution, featuring taller players who could be brawny around the basket but more agile away from it with each passing decade, navigating skillfully in open space.“Big guys in my era couldn’t handle the ball,” he said in an interview with the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame before he was inducted into it in 2017, an honor that many believed was egregiously overdue 35 years after he retired. “But I could dribble with my left hand, my right hand and take guys outside.”He credited those skills to the coaching he had growing up in Indiana, where “fundamentals are well taught,” he said.Len Elmore, a Pacers teammate for one season — McGinnis’s last in Indiana before joining the 76ers in 1975 — said in a telephone interview that he harked back to McGinnis when LeBron James, slightly bigger at 6-foot-9 and 250 pounds, entered the N.B.A. in 2003 with the Cleveland Cavaliers.“Similar size, strength, mobility,” Elmore said, “I remember saying it immediately — George was LeBron before LeBron. You couldn’t believe that with his body he could be that agile.”McGinnis during Game Two of the N.B.A. finals against the Portland Trail Blazers in 1977.James Drake/Sports Illustrated, via Getty ImagesOne distinctive part of McGinnis’s game was his midrange jumper, a right-handed shot-put-like release that made purists cringe. “It was different, but he made it work for him,” Elmore said.After leading the A.B.A. in scoring, averaging 29.8 points, and sharing the league’s 1974-75 Most Valuable Player Award with Erving, his future 76ers teammate, McGinnis left the cash-strapped Pacers, calling his departure “a dollars and cents thing.”In a challenge to the N.B.A.’s constitution, he tried to circumvent Philadelphia’s draft rights by signing with the New York Knicks. But when the league voided the deal, McGinnis joined the 76ers, accepting a six-year contract for $3.2 million (the equivalent of about $18.3 million today). It was one season before the team acquired Erving from the New York Nets as it entered the N.B.A. with three other A.B.A. teams, including the Pacers.“George was the turnaround factor in pro basketball in this town,” Pat Williams, the team’s general manager, told Sports Illustrated in 1982. “Julius put up the walls and a roof, but it was George who built the foundation.”The 76ers’ slogan for McGinnis’s first season in Philadelphia was “Let George Do It.” Led by McGinnis, who was voted to play in the first of his three N.B.A. All-Star games, the 76ers increased their win total to 46 from the previous season’s 34 but lost in the first round of the playoffs.Erving’s arrival electrified the sport, though questions abounded on whether the two prolific forwards could coexist. “It was inevitable that people would say we hated each other, but Julius and I knew it wasn’t true, and we were above it,” McGinnis said in the Sports Illustrated article.The 76ers were within two victories of fulfilling their supposed destiny, taking the first two games against the Portland Trail Blazers in the 1976-77 league finals. But the Bill Walton-led Blazers won the next four. McGinnis struggled with his shot until the last game in Portland, when he scored 28 points.The Western Conference All-Stars in 1979. McGinnis is seated on the left, in the front row.NBAE, via Getty ImagesTrailing by two with one last possession in Game 6, the 76ers’ head coach, Gene Shue, called a play for McGinnis. Erving, who had already scored 40, was bewildered by Shue’s bypassing him and Doug Collins, the team’s best pure shooter.After another disheartening playoff exit the following season, the 76ers dealt McGinnis to the Denver Nuggets, landing Bobby Jones, whose staunch defense better complemented Erving and helped the 76ers win the title in 1983.McGinnis did not have a long career, especially compared with James’s 21st-century standard. His performance declined in Denver, in part because of an Achilles’ tendon injury. He returned to the Pacers during the 1979-80 season, finishing his 11th and final pro season, 1981-82, with an average of 4.7 points over 76 games.George F. McGinnis was born on Aug. 12, 1950, in Harpersville, Ala., about 30 miles southeast of Birmingham, the son of Burnie and Willie (Keith) McGinnis. His father was a carpenter. With a daughter, Bonnie, the family settled on the west side of Indianapolis.During McGinnis’s senior year of high school, his father died after falling off scaffolding at a construction site — days after watching George score 53 points and grab 30 rebounds in an All-Star game. McGinnis, who was also an all-state football player, said he left Indiana University early to help support his mother.He expressed regret that he had missed out on playing for the Indiana coach Bobby Knight by one season, speculating, “I think it would have given me different values.” (Knight died in November.)Many believed McGinnis’s induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017 was egregiously overdue, coming 35 years after his professional retirement from the sport.Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE, via Getty ImagesMcGinnis was married for 43 years to Lynda (Dotson) McGinnis, who had been a high school girlfriend. She died of cancer in 2019, not long after he underwent surgery to address a back issue, spinal stenosis, that forced him to walk stooped with a cane or walker. His survivors include his sister, Bonnie McGinnis.After his playing years, McGinnis worked as a broadcaster in Indianapolis, where he and his wife founded GM Supply Company, a provider of special tooling and abrasives to manufacturers, in 1991.McGinnis remained a popular fixture in the state’s basketball community, and in September was inducted into the Indiana University Athletics Hall of Fame.Twenty years earlier, he told The New York Times, “One of the great things about being a basketball player in Indiana is that they never forget you.”Alex Traub More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Basket

      Bought as an N.B.A. Team, the Mavericks Are Being Sold as Much More

      by

      Pro sports franchises are increasingly providing much of their value as anchors for larger business enterprises, including entertainment complexes.The sales of most professional sports teams are fairly predictable.They happen because owners die or cannot figure out how to pass the team on to their families. They run out of money, are more focused on other pursuits or are pushed out because of misconduct.Once the decision to sell is made, the process plays out in a relatively public way. Bankers are hired, potential purchasers register interest, an auction occurs, and weeks or months of reports in the news media follow.So it was a complete surprise last month when, with no warning, the families that control the Las Vegas Sands casino empire announced that they had reached a binding agreement to buy a controlling interest in the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban. The only thing that made sense was that the situation involved Mr. Cuban, who has long run the Mavericks in an unconventional manner.Still, more than two weeks later, the basic question surrounding the sale — Why did Mr. Cuban do it? — remains mostly unanswered. The reliably loquacious Mr. Cuban, who always seemed to be having more fun than any other owner, declined to speak on the record for this article. The Adelson and Dumont families, wary of getting ahead of an N.B.A. approval process that includes due diligence and a vote on the sale by other team owners, declined to comment beyond a statement expressing their excitement.But what is clear is that the sale represents a window into the rapidly changing nature of the business of sports.When Mr. Cuban bought the Mavericks in 2000, flush with cash from selling Broadcast.com just before the dot-come bubble popped, professional sports teams were still mainly just teams.Now they are anchors for larger business enterprises. Anchor tenants for arenas that are the beating heart of vast entertainment complexes, as in Sacramento. Anchor content for regional sports networks or other media conglomerates, as in Washington, D.C. Anchor brands for millions of fans newly allowed to bet on sports, as in Phoenix.Mr. Cuban is also many things — a dot-com billionaire, an owner of a company trying to reduce the price of prescription drugs and, for one more season, one of the main investors in the reality show “Shark Tank” — but what he is not is a real estate mogul, providing a possible motivation for the sale.The Dallas Mavericks partly own the American Airlines Center, where they play their games in the Victory Park development just north of downtown. But while the owners of their co-tenant, the National Hockey League’s Dallas Stars, have invested in land near the arena, Mr. Cuban has mostly expressed annoyance that it takes away from fan parking. Now he is changing his tune.“Cuban probably wants to imitate what has worked, have the ownership control he doesn’t have in Victory Park, and push it to a new level with casino and resort integration,” said Robert Sroka, a professor of sport administration at Georgia State University and a sport venue development consultant.Mr. Cuban has publicly said he wants to build a resort destination in Dallas with Sands.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesLast year Mr. Cuban told The Dallas Morning News of his intention to team up with Sands on just that, a new arena and casino complex.“Partnering with the Sands Corporation, literally there’s no reason we can’t build a huge resort destination in the city proper of Dallas,” he said.A piece of a destination like that would mean a lot more money for Mr. Cuban than the sums generated by game tickets and arena concessions. The plan, however, faces a significant hurdle — besides acquiring land, obtaining financing when interest rates are high and receiving construction approvals. Almost all forms of gambling are illegal in Texas, and there is no clear sign of that changing.A bill that would legalize sports betting passed the Texas House this year, but Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, refused to bring it up for discussion in the Senate. Even if such a bill passed the Senate, Texas residents would still need to vote on it.A bill allowing casinos faced even fiercer opposition, particularly from influential conservative religious leaders, and never made it out of the House. And while sports betting, if it is legalized in Texas, can be lucrative for teams, it is really a casino bill that needs to pass if Mr. Cuban’s vision of a sports and gambling destination is to be realized. The Sands, which has a number of casinos in Macau and Singapore but currently none in the United States, has hired dozens of lobbyists to get one passed in recent years.Mr. Cuban owns about three-quarters of the Mavericks, with the rest held by a handful of minority owners. After the sale he will own about a quarter, and the Adelson and Dumont families nearly three-quarters, with the rest spread among some minority owners, according to two people familiar with the terms, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose them publicly.Some people believe the reported $3.5 billion valuation that Mr. Cuban is selling at is less than he could have received if the Mavericks had gone on the open market. Just last week, for instance, a small share of the Indiana Pacers was bought at a reported valuation of $3.47 billion. Indianapolis is a much smaller market than Dallas, and minority stakes are typically discounted. So, the thinking goes, the sale of a majority stake in the Mavericks should’ve been for much higher.But the sale to the Adelson and Dumont families includes an unusual stipulation: Mr. Cuban will continue to run the basketball operations of the team.Officially, Patrick Dumont, the son-in-law of Miriam Adelson and the late Sheldon Adelson, will be what the N.B.A. calls the team’s governor and vote on leaguewide matters. But Mr. Cuban will run its basketball operations. The bet, then, seems to be this: Mr. Cuban will earn billions from a team he paid $285 million for two decades ago; he will continue to participate in the part of team ownership he likes the most; and if the Adelsons and Las Vegas Sands can muscle through a new arena and casino complex, one day his quarter of the team might be worth as much as the three-quarters he used to own.This could also help make up for money Mr. Cuban expects to lose on the team’s local media rights agreement. The holder of those rights, Diamond Sports Groups, is going through bankruptcy.“I think a new arena, real estate area and hopefully a future resort casino can replace what we lose in media, and fund current and future Mavs,” Mr. Cuban said in an email to a local television station last month.Over a thousand miles west of Dallas, the sale has thrown the race to own an N.B.A. franchise in Las Vegas wide open, since the Adelson family was widely presumed to be a front-runner if the city got a team.Officially, there is no guarantee there will ever be an N.B.A. team in Las Vegas, but the league is widely expected to soon expand to 32 teams from 30. This summer, Adam Silver, its commissioner, said the league would turn to the issue of expansion after it completed new media agreements, sometime in 2024. He said it was not certain the league would expand, but named Las Vegas and Seattle as cities that would be considered.“A lot is happening behind the scenes,” said Steve Sisolak, a former governor of Nevada. “A lot of groups that have interest. It remains to be seen who is a front-runner.”Currently, the only arena in Las Vegas that has close to the required facilities for an N.B.A. team is the T-Mobile Center, which is co-owned by the arena developer AEG and MGM Resorts International, with Bill Foley, the owner of the N.H.L.’s Las Vegas Golden Knights, holding a minority share.But Oak View Group, another arena developer and operator, has announced plans for a $10 billion resort south of the Strip that would include an arena an N.B.A. team could play in. Intriguingly, the land that arena would be built on is owned by Scott Goldstein, the son of Rob Goldstein, the chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands. Sands is not currently involved in that project.Susan Beachy More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Basket

      Team’s Sale Reflects Growing Links Between Pro Sports and Gambling

      by

      The proposed purchase of the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks by a casino operator is the latest sign of how fully leagues have embraced the gaming world.For years, professional sports organizations like the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball prohibited liquor companies from buying advertising in locations in stadiums and arenas that could be seen on television, in deference to efforts to curb drunken driving.But in 2009, during the depths of the worst recession since the Great Depression, those same leagues found themselves scrambling for cash as their biggest sponsors — automakers, banks and others — cut back on marketing. Suddenly, they began signing multimillion-dollar deals with companies that made rum, tequila, vodka and other hard liquor, and the advertising was displayed for all to see.It was a sign of how justifications can change seemingly overnight, especially when money is involved. The sports world was reminded of that last week when Miriam Adelson and her trust sold $2 billion worth of shares in the Sands Corporation, a casino operator, to buy a professional sports team, which turned out to be the Dallas Mavericks. (The purchase still needs to be approved by the league’s board of governors before becoming official.)“The Adelson and Dumont families are honored to have the opportunity to be stewards of this great franchise,” they said in a statement.For decades, most major professional leagues largely kept the gaming world at arm’s length. They barred players, referees and owners from gambling on sports, to insulate game results from any hint of impropriety, a stance that dated back at least a century to the famed Black Sox scandal of 1919.Some leagues likewise forbid owners from holding stakes in casinos. In one instance, Dan Rooney, the principal owner of the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers, had to buy out his brothers’ stake in the team because the brothers owned racetracks in New York and Florida. The N.B.A. had no such rule and has had owners with ties to casinos, including Tilman Fertitta, the current owner of the Houston Rockets.The N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, long opposed the broad legalization of sports gambling.Adam Hunger/Associated Press“If gambling is permitted freely on sporting events, normal incidents of the game such as bad snaps, dropped passes, turnovers, penalties and play calling inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust and accusations of point-shaving or game fixing,” the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, said in 2012.Yet at a time when sports gambling — once done only in casino meccas like Las Vegas or through bookies — has been legalized in dozens of states, the leagues’ former approach seems quaint. While restrictions remain on players, referees and owners wagering on their own sports, gambling has otherwise been embraced by the mainstream sports establishment.They have removed restrictions on casinos and sports books advertising in stadiums and on television. Some stadiums, like FedEx Field in Landover, Md., the home of the N.F.L.’s Washington Commanders, have sports books inside. Sports wagering companies now plaster their names on sign boards in stadiums and buy TV commercials during games, including the Super Bowl, with all manner of promotions to woo new customers.The leagues have also done an about-face on operating in the home of sports wagering, Las Vegas, which was for years off limits. Now the National Hockey League, the Women’s National Basketball Association and the N.F.L. have teams in the city. Last month, Major League Baseball’s owners unanimously approved allowing the A’s to leave Oakland and head to Las Vegas. The N.B.A., which has held All-Star games, summer leagues and a new in-season tournament in Las Vegas, could add an expansion team in the city in the coming years, which would give every major pro sport a team in a locale the leagues once shunned.“The leagues are constantly re-evaluating their business as laws change, social mores change and different companies and categories become bigger,” said Marc Ganis, a consultant to numerous teams and leagues. “That includes look at ownership rules, sponsorships and advertising.”The N.F.L.’s embrace of Las Vegas has perhaps been most surprising, given the league’s conservative reputation. The Raiders won approval to move to the city in 2017. The league has held the Pro Bowl and college draft on The Strip. And in February, the league’s marquee event — the Super Bowl — will be played in Las Vegas, removing perhaps the last vestige of any distance between it and the city.The Super Bowl in February will be held at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.Kirby Lee/Usa Today Sports Via Reuters ConThe leagues’ reassessment has been both practical and strategic. The biggest break came in 2018 after the Supreme Court ruled that a law that prohibited sports gambling in most of the country was unconstitutional. Dozens of states quickly approved legalizing sports wagering, dwarfing the amount spent in Las Vegas. The N.F.L. now allows owners to hold stakes in casinos that have no sports betting, though it restricts owners from having more than a 5 percent stake in casinos that allow sports betting.“Las Vegas is acceptable not so much because of us but because gambling is almost everywhere now,” said Michael Green, a historian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “The Strip is as legit as any large business.”At the same time, Las Vegas’s image as a desert oasis with casinos and nightclubs under the thumb of the mob changed dramatically in the 1990s, when The Strip was turned into an urban theme park where parents could bring their children. Many visitors come now as much to see shows like U2 at the Sphere or the latest extravaganza by Cirque du Soleil as they do to visit the casinos.And while Las Vegas is relatively small, with a population of about 2.5 million in the region, it has been able to support teams like the Raiders and the Golden Knights of the N.H.L. because the city is a year-round destination, drawing roughly 40 million tourists annually.“There’s a whole new demographic being exposed to sports gambling by visiting Las Vegas,” said Jay Kornegay, the vice president of the Race and Sports Book Operations at Westgate Resorts.Mr. Green noted that the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the Mob Museum, which both opened in 2012, also gave the city a glean of sophistication it had lacked. He recalled how just 20 years ago, the N.F.L. blocked Las Vegas from buying ads during the Super Bowl, a decision that now seems antiquated.“Remind me,” he said, “where’s the next Super Bowl?”Kevin Draper More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Basket

      Why Some Korean Basketball Players Love the Bank Shot

      by

      Banked free throws, an unorthodox technique, have a cult following in the Korean Basketball League.As the basketball player steps to the free-throw line, the crowd watches in hushed anticipation. With one sweeping motion, he bounces the ball off the backboard and through the net.Wait, he banked it in? On purpose?The fans erupt in celebration. The shot is no fluke — just another free throw, South Korean style.The free throw is supposed to be an easy point after a foul: a direct, unguarded shot 15 feet from the backboard. But there’s an art to it. The ball, most players and fans would say, should leave the fingers gracefully, make a wide arc, avoid the rim — and “splash” straight into the net, as the N.B.A. sharpshooter Steph Curry called it.With the help of analytics, other shots have evolved in pro basketball. But not the free throw, and over the past 30 years, its success rate in the N.B.A. has barely budged from around 77.The shot’s stagnation stems from the mockery that awaits any variation to the “nothing but net” technique in the United States. Bank shots — bouncing the ball off the glass before it falls through the net — are derided as amateurish for anything but layups.But a devoted group of players in the Korean Basketball League, or K.B.L., have embraced the unorthodox technique.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Basket

      Johnny Green, Jumpin’ Knicks All-Star, Dies at 89

      by

      An All-Star forward — and an all-American at Michigan State — he was known as Jumpin’ Johnny, able to soar over taller opponents for 14 seasons in the N.B.A.Johnny Green, an All-Star forward for the Knicks in the 1960s who gained acclaim for his leaping ability and rebounding prowess through 14 National Basketball Association seasons, died on Thursday in Huntington, N.Y. He was 89.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son Johnny Jr., who said his father had had heart and kidney problems for about a year.Jumpin’ Johnny, as he came to be known, was 6-foot-5 and about 200 pounds, but he often bested taller and huskier frontline opponents, snaring rebounds, blocking shots and hitting short-range baskets.He was durable as well; he avoided serious injuries and had some of his best seasons late in his career. He played in the N.B.A. until he was 39, retiring after the 1972-73 season.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Basket

      Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Seeks to Nullify His Purchase of Toronto House

      by

      Irate investors looking for a bankrupt “crypto king” were regular visitors to the new Toronto-area home of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder.The six bedroom, 10,000 square-foot house on Lake Ontario that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a star player with the Oklahoma City Thunder, bought for just over 8.4 million Canadian dollars, or $6.1 million, should have been a dream home.But in May, two days after Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander, 25, moved into the house, near Toronto, with his partner, it became a nightmare, according to a lawsuit seeking to nullify the sale. A menacing visitor appeared looking for a previous occupant. The couple left the next day and haven’t returned.The young N.B.A. player’s house, described in the real estate listing as an “elegant, resort-like estate,” had been the home of Aiden Pleterski, a self-styled “crypto king” who declared bankruptcy in 2022, while owing 26.8 million Canadian dollars to more than 150 investment clients.Court records show that the home received a steady stream of angry visitors seeking to talk to Mr. Pleterski while he was living there and after he moved out.Last December, court documents show, Mr. Pleterski was kidnapped by one of his aggrieved investors and four other men, then beaten and tortured over three days.Testimony in the bankruptcy case reveals that Mr. Pleterski had a security guard to ward off angry investors and was eventually moved out of the house for his own safety. Another resident also fled, fearing for his safety after angry visitors continued to turn up every day.A holding company owned by Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander is now asking a court to reverse the purchase of the Burlington, Ontario, house because the seller did not disclose its link to Mr. Pleterski and the home’s potential security threat.Aiden Pleterski was beaten by his kidnappers, according to court records.CBC NewsCiting the kidnapping, the holding company, in its filing, said the people who had been showing up at the upscale home “were not making idle threats.”The property’s former owner, the head of a Toronto real estate company with holdings that include apartments, retirement homes and hotels, hid the information about alarming visitors from potential buyers because “any purchaser who could afford to spend in excess of $8 million on a luxury home would value privacy and would also in any case want no part of a property that had a history of threatening visits to the past two occupants.”Through his lawyer, Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander declined to comment.The Halton Regional Police, which has authority over Burlington, declined to provide any more information and a spokesman refused to say if Mr. Pleterski was the target of a criminal investigation.A banking analysis by a bankruptcy trustee shows that Mr. Pleterski was not the investment prodigy many of his investors believed him to be.It found that of the 41.6 million Canadian dollars he took in, just 1.6 percent of the money was actually invested. He used about 38 percent of the money to repay redemptions — supposed investment gains — to some clients and spent about the same percentage on private jet travel, a fleet of luxury cars, watches, including one costing more than $300,000, and a lease on the Burlington house.The trustee concluded that “the extravagant lifestyle that Pleterski lived, which was funded by his investors,” had “ultimately led to his bankruptcy.”During a sworn 2022 interview with lawyers for the trustee, Mr. Pleterski said he first became interested in cryptocurrency after using it to make purchases for video games and began trading it when he was still in high school.He started out with money from his family and his earnings as a part-time baseball umpire. His knowledge of trading and financial markets, he said, came from “YouTube videos, Google, quick Google searches.”The business, Mr. Pleterski said, operated through his personal bank accounts until December 2021, when he set up his company at the suggestion of a former landlord.His only record keeping, he said, consisted of his texts and WhatsApp messages with customers. While Mr. Pleterski did create spreadsheets for a handful of customers who demanded them, he acknowledged that the investment return they showed was just “a general ballpark figure” he came up with after looking at his bank accounts.The home that Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander bought was located between Toronto, where he was born, and Hamilton, Ontario, where he was raised. It came fully furnished and included a gym, three car garage and a home theater. The bedrooms, reached by an elevator, offered sweeping lake views, including the property’s private dock.In his lawsuit, Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander said that two days after he moved in a man appeared demanding to see someone he had never heard of — Mr. Pleterski. Rather than leave when told that no one by that name was there, the uninvited visitor looked around the property and then sat in his car in the driveway.Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander’s partner, Hailey Summers, called the nonemergency number for the police and was told that the agency “had received several reports about threats to the property, including that there was a threat to burn the home down,” the lawsuit said.In the spring of 2021, Mr. Pleterski agreed to lease-to-own the Burlington house from a company controlled by Ray Gupta, who also controls the Sunray Group real estate holding company in Toronto. But when Mr. Pleterski’s trading business began collapsing, he stopped making his monthly 45,000 Canadian dollar rent payments and moved to a hotel owned by Sunray, where he wasn’t charged rent.In a response to Mr. Gilgeous-Alexander’s complaint, Mr. Gupta’s company downplayed the frequency and potential danger brought by the uninvited visitors and argued that it had no obligation to disclose the persistence of the unwelcome guests.“Notwithstanding the fact that Aiden was abducted, any visit to the Property by an individual inquiring about its former occupant would be viewed as an entirely normal occurrence,” it said.But during a sworn interview for Mr. Pleterski’s bankruptcy case, Sandeep Gupta, Ray’s son, who handled all the dealings with Mr. Pleterski, painted a different picture.“People were coming up to the house every single day, looking for Aiden,” Mr. Gupta said.He said the unwanted visits continued when a Sunray employee moved in to keep the furnished home occupied and the employee asked for a security guard. “His wife refused to stay there,” Mr. Gupta said. “It was a very bad situation.” More