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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

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      The NBA Courts That Come From Midwestern Roots and Woods

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      Connor Sports, in the tiny mill town of Amasa, Mich., is one of the leading makers of hardwood floors for top professional and college teams.Los Angeles Clippers fans are being wowed this season by the bells and whistles in the team’s new $2 billion home, the Intuit Dome. They can watch replays on the world’s largest double-sided scoreboard, sit in a 51-row section reserved for die-hard supporters and buy a jersey in the 5,000-square-foot team store.But for all of that, most of their attention will be focused on the court, whose construction is a tale all on its own.It begins 2,200 miles away from Los Angeles, in the tiny mill town of Amasa, Mich. There, Connor Sports, one of the leading makers of hardwood courts, spent about a year procuring trees and building the court, a process that involved dozens of logs, hundreds of workers and thousands of hours. At the company’s plant amid the forests of the Upper Peninsula, workers traversing a maze of conveyors, saws and other machinery dried, cut, planed and shaved strips of wood during the two 10-hour shifts that run six days a week.Almost all of the courts from Connor Sports are made from northern hard maple wood.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe company builds about 800 courts a year, for N.B.A. and college teams as well as high schools around the country.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe company builds about 800 courts a year, with most of them destined for high school gymnasiums and recreational centers in all 50 states and beyond. Almost all are made with northern hard maple, a dense, durable wood harvested from forests above the 35th parallel, a standard set by the Maple Flooring Manufacturers Association, an industry group whose members make most of the hardwood floors in the United States.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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      Bob Love, Rugged, High-Scoring All-Star for Chicago Bulls, Dies at 81

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      Love was a cornerstone of the franchise’s success in the early 1970s. He struggled with a stutter that he overcame only after his playing days were over.Bob Love, a cornerstone player for the ascendant Chicago Bulls during the first half of the 1970s who overcame an enervating stutter after his playing days to work for the team as a motivational speaker, died on Monday in Chicago. He was 81.The Bulls announced his death, saying the cause was cancer.Love’s stuttering, which traced to a childhood in rural, segregated Louisiana, was so inhibiting that he seldom did interviews with reporters during his 11 seasons in the N.B.A., despite leading the Bulls in points per game or total points scored for seven straight seasons.“The reporters had deadlines — they couldn’t hang around all night for me to spit something out,” Love told The New York Times in 2002.Nicknamed Butterbean in high school because of his fondness for butter beans, Love even struggled to get words out in huddles during timeouts. A teammate, Norm Van Lier, often spoke up for him.A 6-foot-8 forward, Love averaged a career-high 25.8 points per game during the 1971-72 season, utilizing a smooth jump shot arched high over his head. He appeared in three All-Star games and twice was voted second-team all-league. But he was a complete player, three times named second-team all-league defense. And he was the Bulls’ third all-time leading scorer, behind Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls’ owner, said in an interview for this obituary that Love was “a tenacious defender who set high standards for competitiveness and toughness.” 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