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    Victor Wembanyama Prepares to Become ‘Genuine’ Face of the N.B.A.

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    As the N.B.A. confronts a fast-approaching time without LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, the 21-year-old Spurs star has embraced the idea that he is the league’s future.One day last summer, Harrison Barnes, a longtime N.B.A. veteran, was finishing up an off-season workout with Victor Wembanyama, his 7-foot-4, then-20-year-old San Antonio Spurs teammate and one of the league’s most dazzling young stars.Barnes was new to the team — he had recently been traded from the Sacramento Kings — and new to Wembanyama. But he was already beginning to understand that Wembanyama was precocious in more than one way.In the N.B.A., many teams track shooting percentages and shots made in games and at practice as a way of gauging their players’ progress. The Spurs had a chart that tracked both, but ranked players based on makes. Barnes told Wembanyama that metric felt insufficient. Wembanyama pondered Barnes’s concern. Then he got to work.He picked up a marker and started to sketch out some thoughts on a white board. He wondered if a graph might be better than a chart and if it should include week-to-week changes. Wembanyama plotted ideas for three theoretical players, whom he labeled A, B and C. At one point, Barnes heard the word “coefficients.”“He was really trying to wrap his mind around like, ‘How do you get better at that?’” Barnes said. “How do you chart what progress is?”That day, Barnes saw into Wembanyama’s psyche — the sincere search for knowledge and human connection that he’s carried with him through the early part of his N.B.A. career. It leads to the kind of authenticity that marketers crave, and fans are drawn to.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

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      Why Did Adrian Wojnarowski Take a 99% Pay Cut? To Save the Team He Loves.

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      One Wednesday last month, Adrian Wojnarowski made the three-hour drive from his home in northern New Jersey to Pennsylvania to see his St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team play at Bucknell. Wojnarowski is the St. Bonaventure general manager, but until recently he made his very public living by breaking news stories about the N.B.A. and then talking about them on ESPN. He was recognized by the first person he saw at Bucknell, a school official who pronounced himself a “big fan.” More encounters followed. At halftime, he tried to catch up with a childhood friend who was attending the game. Their conversation proceeded fitfully, interrupted by strangers introducing themselves and asking for selfies. Wojnarowski was invariably obliging. “I’ve become his photographer,” the friend told me.By then, St. Bonaventure’s Bonnies were ahead, 38-16. The rout underway was not entirely unexpected. Though Bucknell’s undergraduate enrollment of 3,900 makes it twice as large as St. Bonaventure, the Bonnies play in the Atlantic 10, a more competitive conference than Bucknell’s Patriot League, which includes similarly sized schools like Lafayette and Holy Cross. A successful Atlantic 10 team should be able to win this matchup, even in Bucknell’s home gym.And St. Bonaventure is successful, especially considering its size, which limits everything from alumni fund-raising to the amenities it can afford to provide to students. Back in 1970, it reached the N.C.A.A.’s Final Four; of the 99 schools that have achieved this feat, it is the smallest. And since 2007, when Mark Schmidt became head coach, the team has won two regular-season titles and two conference tournaments.But in 2021, the N.C.A.A. abandoned most of its restrictions against compensation for student athletes. This has transformed college recruiting largely into a matter of how much a team and its outside supporters are willing to pay. In 2022, the Bonnies reached the semifinals of the postseason National Invitation Tournament by beating Colorado, Oklahoma and Virginia. Four of their five starters announced their intention to return. Then the offers of name, image and likeness payments started pouring in. Such payments, known as N.I.L., allow college athletes to make money from product endorsements, donations from wealthy alumni, even contributions from ordinary fans. Within days, those four starters were all gone, off to larger state schools whose teams are often highly ranked. “I’ve never seen a good team with bad players,” Schmidt muses now. “And in order to get good players, you need money.” That’s where Wojnarowski comes in.At his old job, the one that paid him $7.3 million annually, his mobile phone buzzed with texts from morning until deep into night. Some of them came from N.B.A. owners. Some came from general managers, head coaches or sources in the league office. Others came from college coaches or agents. Occasionally he would hear from one of basketball’s top players — Russell Westbrook, say, or Donovan Mitchell. Some texts were more important than others. When Wojnarowski was expecting an especially crucial one, a confirmation of a trade or a major free-agent signing, he wouldn’t leave his house or hotel room.For more than a decade, as an ESPN reporter and podcaster (and as a columnist at Yahoo before that), he was so determined to beat every other reporter to every bit of N.B.A. news that he made it a priority to take overnight flights because news usually doesn’t happen overnight. In recent years, as the pressure for him to break stories intensified, he stopped driving anywhere more than a few minutes away and relied on a car service — he didn’t want to be on a highway and risk losing an exclusive when a source had news to break. Whenever he had a scoop, he would post it on Twitter and Instagram for his millions of followers. Wojnarowski is universally referred to as Woj, and those postings became known among even casual basketball fans as Woj Bombs. Almost immediately, they would appear across the ESPN networks, featured on the crawl at the bottom of the screen: according to Woj … Woj reports … sources told ESPN’s Woj.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

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      Gus Williams, Guard Who Led Seattle to an N.B.A. Title, Dies at 71

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      Undersized but speedy and known as the Wizard for his acrobatics, he was a high scorer who in 1979 starred in a series that brought the SuperSonics their only crown.Gus Williams, an eyeblink-quick guard known for his volume scoring and electric on-court style who in 1979 helped the Seattle SuperSonics win their only National Basketball League championship, died on Wednesday. He was 71.His death was announced in a statement by the University of Southern California, his alma mater. The university did not cite a cause or say where he died but noted that Johnson had a stroke five years ago.Known for his springy, improvisational play and relentless drive, Williams, a two-time All-Star, was a standout, if an underrated one, during an 11-season career. That career included stints with the Golden State Warriors, the Washington Bullets and the Atlanta Hawks in addition to his six seasons with the Sonics, who moved to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder in 2008.Unusual for his era, Williams was a point guard known more for scoring than for dishing assists. On defense, he stymied opponents who dared try to dribble past him — in a 1978 game against the New Jersey Nets, he tallied 10 steals, making him one of only 24 players to break into double digits in that category in a single game.Though undersized by N.B.A. standards at 6-foot-2 and 175 pounds, Williams nevertheless did a lot of damage in and around the paint with attacking, acrobatic drives to the hoop. He also had a lethal midrange jump shot.Williams in action in Game 5 of the 1979 Finals. Though undersized by N.B.A. standards at 6-foot-2, he was known for doing damage around the hoop. James Drake/Sports Illustrated, via Getty ImagesWe 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

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      Unrivaled Charts a New Path for Women’s Basketball

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      When Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty steps onto the court on Friday night, she will not have a thunderous crowd of 19,000 fans behind her, as she often does when she tips off at Barclays Center.Instead, she will be playing in front of just 850 fans on a soundstage near Miami.But organizers of Unrivaled, a new 3-on-3 women’s basketball league, are banking that thousands more will tune in from home, drawn by a condensed format, some of the best players in the world and a made-for-TV approach that aims to bring viewers close to the action.“The content piece and the TV piece of this is huge for us,” said Napheesa Collier, a forward for the Minnesota Lynx who founded the league with Stewart. “We want to make it the most interactive, fun and exciting experience we can for people.”Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty, right, is one of six players on the Mist, one of the Unrivaled league’s six teams.Unrivaled LeagueIn addition to packaging the game in a digestible format, the league is also firmly centered around its athletes, providing equity stakes, child care, on-site therapeutic services and, for many players, a higher salary for the eight-week competition than they will make in the five-month Women’s National Basketball Association season.“Success can be a bunch of different things, but most importantly it’s making sure the player experience was the best one possible,” Stewart said. She added, “The red carpet is rolled out.”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

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      Texas Man Is Charged With Stalking Caitlin Clark

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      Prosecutors said the man had sent “sexually violent” messages to the Indiana Fever star and had traveled to Indianapolis to be closer to her.A Texas man who prosecutors say sent a series of threatening and sexually explicit messages to the basketball star Caitlin Clark and traveled to Indiana to be closer to her has been charged with stalking.The man, Michael T. Lewis, 55, was arrested on Sunday after investigators discovered that he had sent messages from an IP address in Indianapolis and that he was staying at a hotel near the Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the home of Ms. Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever of the W.N.B.A., the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office said on Monday.Ms. Clark, 22, told a lieutenant from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office on Saturday that she had been “very fearful” since she learned of Mr. Lewis’s posts on X and that she had “altered her public appearances and patterns of movement” because she feared for her safety, according to court documents.Ms Clark said that she did not know Mr. Lewis and had never responded to any of his messages or posts.Prosecutors said Mr. Lewis had stalked her from Dec. 16 until Jan. 11. Court documents described the messages as “sexually violent” and said that they had “actually caused Caitlin Clark to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated or threatened.”Mr. Lewis traveled to Indianapolis “with the intent to be in proximity to the victim,” court documents said.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

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      Greg Gumbel, Who Called N.F.L. and N.C.A.A. Games, Dies at 78

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      The sportscaster combined play-by-play excitement with a knack for precision in his decades as a sports broadcaster calling N.F.L. and N.C.A.A. games for CBS.Greg Gumbel, the sports broadcaster who called some of the biggest football and college basketball games on two networks during a career that spanned five decades, has died. He was 78.His family confirmed his death on Friday afternoon in a social media post from CBS Sports, where Mr. Gumbel had worked since 1989. He had been diagnosed with cancer.For decades, Mr. Gumbel served as a play-by-play announcer for CBS’s National Football League coverage. In 2001, he became the first Black sportscaster in that role covering a Super Bowl. He also covered the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball tournament for the network and had spent four years reporting on the American Football Conference for NBC Sports.He got his first chance as an announcer in the early 1970s, when a boss at the NBC affiliate in Chicago, Channel 5, told him that he wanted to broadcast a high school basketball game every Saturday, as Mr. Gumbel recalled in an interview with the sportscaster Kenny McReynolds published in 2021.“He said, ‘I have this idea, and I want you to take it and run with it,’” Mr. Gumbel said in the interview. “We introduced our audience to a lot of guys who went on to become famous.”Mr. Gumbel’s career took off in the 1980s, when he began to cover the National Basketball Association. He called his first N.F.L. game in 1988.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

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      Jerry West Was the N.B.A.’s Tortured Genius

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      Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pocket, you used to have to turn a dial. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be on, ready to guide you toward enlightenment. In a stroke of deluxe good fortune, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by to be the enlightenment. He was the search […] More

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      NBA Star Luka Doncic Debuts Foundation Focused on Youth Basketball

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      The N.B.A. star is worried that for too many youth basketball players, the sport is no longer fun. He’s trying to find ways to change that.Luka Doncic was 13 when he moved from his native Slovenia to Spain to play for Real Madrid. He didn’t know English or Spanish, but he could speak basketball fluently, and the expectations of a storied professional organization hung over him.But it was fun for him, even with that pressure, the same way it is now that he has become one of the N.B.A.’s brightest stars, playing for the Dallas Mavericks.He has noticed that it’s not like that for many players in youth programs around the world, a number of whom have quit basketball while still in adolescence.“The kids are, I think, a little bit stressed,” Doncic said in an interview.So this year, his foundation, which debuts this week with a focus on making sports an enriching part of children’s lives, hired a research organization called Nonfiction to study youth basketball in the Balkans and the United States. Over five months, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of coaches, players, parents, trainers and other basketball experts. They also surveyed more than 1,200 parents of youth basketball players and immersed themselves in eight basketball camps and training centers. They collected letters from children who wrote about the sport’s importance to them.The researchers found that youth programs in the Balkans focused on the team more than the individual. They also found that when Yugoslavia dissolved in the early 1990s, much of the government support for basketball in that region disappeared. The corporations that filled the void through sponsorships sometimes put pressure on teams to win, which led some coaches to pay less attention to player development and emphasize winning over everything else.A research organization hired by Doncic’s foundation collected letters from children saying how much basketball means to them.The Luka Doncic FoundationWe 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

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      Dick Van Arsdale, 81, One of First Identical Twins in the N.B.A., Dies

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      A three-time All-Star, he played for the Knicks and the Phoenix Suns. For one season, he and Tom Van Arsdale were hard-to-tell-apart teammates.Dick Van Arsdale, a three-time All-Star who, with his brother, Tom, was half of the first set of identical twins to play in the N.B.A. after starring and confusing opponents and teammates alike in high school and at Indiana University, died on Monday at his home in Phoenix. He was 81.Tom Van Arsdale said the cause was heart and kidney failure.While the Van Arsdales had remarkably similar statistical careers, Dick was considered the slightly better player, if only by the measure of superior pro teams. He played for the New York Knicks and the Phoenix Suns during 12 N.B.A. seasons, making the playoffs four times, while Tom suited up for five teams, none of which made the playoffs during the same span.Blonde and blue-eyed, the Van Arsdale twins were the stereotypical picture of their rural Indiana roots, but on the basketball court neither was a precise positional fit at 6 feet 5 inches: not fast enough for the backcourt, not big enough for the frontcourt.Dick, who began his pro career as a forward and switched to guard, was nonetheless a rugged defender while averaging a career 16.4 points per game, exceeding 20 three times during his years in Phoenix.Van Arsdale had played three seasons with the Knicks when, in 1968, he joined the newly formed Suns, an expansion team whose general manager, Jerry Colangelo, had selected him first. Van Arsdale scored the franchise’s first points and became an organization fixture, known as the original Sun. He served as interim coach during the 1986-87 season, then as a front-office executive and later a television analyst.“We couldn’t find a better player on or off the floor to build our team,” Colangelo told The Arizona Republic in 1970. “If I could field five Vans, what I’d lack in height and rebounding, I’d offset with fight and desire.”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