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    Top N.B.A. Prospects Skip College, but Not Stardom

    The N.B.A.’s biggest stars often make their names during the N.C.A.A. tournament. But this year’s top draft picks may be players who found the spotlight elsewhere.As children, the twin brothers Amen and Ausar Thompson adopted their father’s favorite sports teams. That made them Cleveland Cavaliers fans, then Miami Heat fans, then Cavs fans again as they followed LeBron James’s journey through the N.B.A. But when it came to men’s college basketball, there was no wandering around. They rooted for Kentucky.When they were 12, they were especially attached to the Wildcats’ 2014-15 team, which had the twins Aaron and Andrew Harrison and entered the N.C.A.A. tournament with a 34-0 record. The team was so talent-laden that Devin Booker, a future All-N.B.A. guard, had to come off the bench.In the Harrisons, the Thompson twins saw a model for forming a ferocious college backcourt on their path toward their dream of playing in the N.B.A. They could even imagine that path threading through Lexington, Ky. That April, Amen cried when Wisconsin wrecked the Wildcats’ perfect season by beating Kentucky in the Final Four.But the Thompson twins, now 20, never went to Kentucky — or any college. Instead, they signed lucrative deals to play with Overtime Elite, a semiprofessional basketball league for N.B.A. prospects based in Atlanta. For the past two years, Amen and Ausar have been two of the program’s premier stars. They recently finished their final season by winning O.T.E.’s playoffs with their team, the City Reapers.“The games were so intense,” Ausar said, “it felt like the N.C.A.A. tournament. I feel like O.T.E. got the first March Madness of 2023.”Amen Thompson had been a fan of the University of Kentucky since he was a child, but the lure of O.T.E. took him away from the traditional college path to the pros.Adam Hagy/Overtime EliteWhen the first round of the Division I men’s basketball tournament tips off on Thursday, the brothers will be back home in Florida. They’re taking a week off before diving into training ahead of the 2023 N.B.A. draft in June, when they’re expected to be among the first 10 players picked. And they won’t be the only top-tier prospects missing out on the real March Madness.In some mock drafts, the top four predicted picks are Victor Wembanyama of France, Scoot Henderson of the N.B.A.’s G League Ignite and the Thompson twins. If those predictions are right, it would be the first time since 2001 — and only the second time in N.B.A. draft history — that a college basketball player wasn’t selected among the top four picks.“It really shows how many options are available to players now,” Ausar said. “There’s not just one way to make it to the league. You don’t have to do the same thing that everyone else is doing to get where you want to go.”During the N.B.A.’s so-called prep-to-pro generation, dozens of players were drafted out of high school, including Kevin Garnett in 1995 and Kobe Bryant in 1996. In 2001, three of the first four picks were plucked out of the high school ranks: Kwame Brown (No. 1), Tyson Chandler (No. 2) and Eddy Curry (No. 4). Pau Gasol, the No. 3 pick, was selected out of Spain. None of the projected top four picks in this year’s draft had even been born.While the prep-to-pro generation lasted only a decade before the N.B.A. added an age limit to the draft, these new alternative paths look more permanent. The N.B.A. has invested heavily in developing amateur talent, from its international N.B.A. Academy program with outposts in Australia, India, Mexico and Senegal, to the Ignite team, which is part of its developmental G League in the United States. O.T.E. is also well funded and backed by top N.B.A. players. And the N.B.A. may reopen the draft to high school players in 2024 as part of a new collective bargaining agreement that is being negotiated now.For the foreseeable future, most prospects will still come from N.C.A.A. Division I basketball, but the pool for the top of the draft may continue to tilt toward the alternatives.Drafts are notoriously difficult to predict, but one near certainty has emerged this year: Wembanyama will be the first pick. A 7-foot-3 center with an eight-foot wingspan and the ball-handling skills and shooting range of a guard, Wembanyama is considered a generational talent. His grandfather and his mother were professional basketball players in France, and he has been involved in French developmental leagues since he was 7.Victor Wembanyama of France is widely expected to be the No. 1 pick in June’s draft because of his unusual combination of size and guard-like skills.James Hill for The New York Times“I’m going to miss France, for sure,” he told The New York Times in October. “But I’ve worked all my life for this, so I’m really just thankful and grateful.”Wembanyama’s route to the N.B.A. was most likely never going to include a pit stop at an American college. But the roster of his current team, Metropolitans 92 in France’s top league, includes five former Division I players. Although the team was composed primarily to help develop and showcase Wembanyama’s N.B.A. skills, it has made a surprising push to second place. Wembanyama — who is averaging 21.7, 9.3 rebounds and 3.2 blocks a game — is why.In October, Wembanyama got his first taste of playing pro basketball in America when Metropolitans 92 faced off against the G League Ignite team in a two-game exhibition series in Henderson, Nev., where the Ignite play their home games. In the first game, Wembanyama finished with 37 points, 5 blocks, 4 rebounds and 1 steal. Henderson, an aggressive guard, scored 28 points and added 9 assists, 5 rebounds and 2 steals en route to an Ignite win. But in the second game, the collision between the draft’s top two prospects took an all-too-literal turn when they ran into each other near the 3-point line.Henderson left the game with a knee injury, and he has been hobbled by other injuries this season, but he has been a force on the court. In 19 games with Ignite, he has averaged 16.5 points, 6.8 assists and 5.3 rebounds per game.Growing up in Georgia as a two-sport athlete, Henderson had only one rooting interest at the college level: football. He could have played for any college basketball team in the country and considered signing with Georgia or Auburn before ultimately inking a two-year, $1 million deal with Ignite.“Playing with Ignite allowed me to get the grown-man bump,” Henderson said. “I’m going up against guys who have been up in the league and want to get back up again. They know pro basketball inside and out. They know all the angles. I wouldn’t have learned how to play against guys like these if I’d gone to college.”Henderson has three sisters who played Division I basketball, but none of them made the N.C.A.A. tournament. He said he’s never filled out a bracket, but he always enjoys watching the games. He even remembers jumping around in his living room when Villanova’s Kris Jenkins hit a buzzer-beating, game-winning shot in the 2016 national championship against North Carolina. But he joked that his only regret about college now is that he didn’t get a chance to play for the back-to-back national champion Georgia football team.Scoot Henderson in action during the Rising Stars Game as part of the N.B.A.’s All-Star Weekend in February.Alex Goodlett/Getty Images“This is the future, man,” Henderson said. “Coming to the N.B.A. from overseas. Coming to the N.B.A. from O.T.E. Coming to the N.B.A. from Ignite. All the guys at the top this year bet on themselves and took their own paths. I commend everybody for doing their own thing.”Ignite’s regular-season schedule doesn’t end until the second weekend of the N.C.A.A. tournament, but the team has shut Henderson down so that he can focus on training for the draft. He said he’ll tune into the tournament when he can — partly to enjoy the games and partly to scout the other top prospects who will be playing in it.With his season wrapped up, Henderson will move back to Georgia, where his family owns a gym, Next Play 360. That will put him just a 25-minute drive away from the Thompson twins, who will be training at O.T.E. in hopes of overtaking him in the draft order.“I like that we get to train before everyone else,” Amen said. “Some of the guys playing are going to be our competition next year, and I get to see what they do. We’re not rooting for any teams, but I hope we get to watch some good basketball.” More

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    Texas Longhorns Fire Basketball Coach After Domestic Assault Charge

    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

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    Sedona Prince Has a Good Feeling About the Next Era

    For many, the basketball player’s TikTok was a before-and-after marker of how society talks about modern women’s sports. For Prince, there’s much to celebrate, more to be done and a W.N.B.A. roster spot to secure.The New York Times Sports department is revisiting the subjects of some compelling articles from the last year or so. In March, we covered Sedona Prince’s video and the way it challenged the disparities between the men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments. Here is an update.Sedona Prince sees her life in eras.There was the injury era, when she snapped her tibia and fibula just before the start of her freshman year of college; her practice-player era, when she mastered the playing style of future opponents; her “crazy” era, when she found her footing on and off the court as a college student; her depression era, when she was finally cleared to play and immediately injured herself again; her N.C.A.A. tournament era, when she was suddenly under the national spotlight for exposing gross disparities between men’s and women’s basketball; and her name, image and likeness era, when she learned how to monetize her work.These days, Prince is in what she calls her rebuilding era. And she’s only 22.A 6-foot-7 forward, Prince became a centerpiece for the University of Oregon women’s basketball program with her towering ability to find the open shot alongside Sabrina Ionescu, Ruthy Hebard and Satou Sabally. But in the course of defining herself on the court, she also helped to redefine the role of a college athlete.“I’m in a place now where I’m allowing myself to look back and trying to reminisce on all these times and process them because in the moment I couldn’t. It all happened way too fast; it was all happening at once,” Prince said in a recent interview from Los Angeles.Prince graduated from Oregon in the spring with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences with a focus in business and economics. She opted into her fifth season this fall and began to pursue a master’s degree, but during a practice before the season opener, she tore a ligament in her elbow, ending her season and college career at Oregon.“I wanted to keep playing; I love this team,” Prince said. “But I knew there’s no way I can keep playing. I have to take care of myself.”Still young in her career, Prince knows how to prioritize herself. All of her so-called eras have taught her as much. As one of the pioneering athletes of the N.I.L. era, Prince said she knew she could take the financial and professional risk of leaving college basketball to rehabilitate and pursue a coveted spot on a W.N.B.A. roster.“There are always less options for women — there’s less freedom,” she said. “There’s always that thing of like, oh, God, how am I going to support myself?”But getting to this point was far from linear. If every generation has its disrupters, Prince is chief among her peers. In one 38-second video, she lifted the curtain on a problem that was long talked about but that nobody had made so visually and abundantly clear.In 2021, Prince showed the glaring differences between what the N.C.A.A. had provided for workout facilities for the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments: The men, anchored in Indianpolis because of the pandemic, were provided an expansive ballroom filled with free weights, hand weights and machine weights. The women, based in San Antonio, had a stand with hand weights.Within days, Prince’s posts had been seen more than 13 million times on TikTok and Twitter, a number the N.C.A.A. could not ignore, despite its attempts to explain away some of the differences. The women’s workout room was eventually beefed up.“I had no idea what it would do, honestly,” Prince said. “Looking back, I wish I would have spoken up more. But I did all I could as a 19-year-old kid. I was figuring it out.”CNN and “Good Morning America” called. All of a sudden, Prince thought, “I’m now an activist.”Prince at an ESPN awards show in July. She said she would continue to use her platform for change. “It’s our duty as athletes.”Leon Bennett/Getty Images“I’ve always been about activism, but this was a stage that I had never been on,” she recalled. She also had to balance speaking up while not insulting the N.C.A.A.“I had no idea if I had broken the rules. There’s this constant fear of student-athletes — they are this reigning governing body and really scary people that we never get to see or hear,” Prince said. “I thought, have I just lost my college career?”Hardly. Five months later, an independent report detailed the structural gender inequities between the two tournaments. The 114-page report compared Prince’s video to “the contemporary equivalent of ‘the shot heard round the world.’”Many look at Prince’s TikTok as a before-and-after marker of how society talks about women’s sports. But for Prince, there is still much work to be done — it all comes down to a lack of respect.“It’s the worst part of it,” Prince said. “Every single time we go places, it’s just less and it’s just disrespect, and so we’re trained to think that, oh, this is normal. This is what we deserve.”Even for Prince, who quickly established herself as a leader in her sport, she often finds herself second-guessing her worth.“There are times where it’s like I have to pull myself out of that mentality of like, this is what it’s always been, this is what I deserve as a woman in sport, I’m just going to get less because we get less viewership,” Prince said. “And it’s like, no, that’s not, that’s not true. So I have to constantly check myself of like, Hey, you know, this is not correct. This is not right.”Prince said she would continue to use her platform for change. “It’s our duty as athletes,” she said. “When you feel like you should talk about something, you probably should. So when I have a platform, I’m like, OK, I should probably talk about this. And then I can see the ripple effects after that, which is the coolest part of it and see it’s actually working.” More

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    With Suns Deal, Mat Ishbia Is Close to His Basketball Dream

    Mat Ishbia was a walk on at Michigan State 20 years ago before he became a wealthy businessman. His $4 billion deal to buy the Phoenix Suns could help him live his sports dream.At times, Jason Richardson may have regretted playing alongside his friend Mat Ishbia on the Michigan State men’s basketball team.“Mat was always the upbeat, the positive teammate that I hated to guard,” Richardson said, laughing. He added: “He’d get coach mad at us.”Ishbia was the shortest player, but he had boundless energy. When he ran the scout team, Coach Tom Izzo would sometimes yell at the starters.“Hey, if Mat can make you do this … ”“Why can’t you cover Mat?”Said Richardson: “We’re like, man, ‘Mat, chill out, man.’ Nope. He took his job seriously.”Richardson and Ishbia were freshmen during the 1999-2000 season, when Michigan State won an N.C.A.A. Division I championship. Four players from that team went on to play in the N.B.A., including Richardson, while Ishbia took his competitive fire to a desk job at his father’s small mortgage-lending company, United Wholesale Mortgage. Ishbia is now its billionaire chief executive overseeing thousands of employees, including a few of his old teammates.Ishbia, left, at a Michigan State during the 2000 N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament. Four players from that team went on to the N.B.A.Getty ImagesOn Tuesday, Ishbia agreed to purchase a majority stake in the N.B.A.’s Phoenix Suns and the W.N.B.A.’s Phoenix Mercury, including the entire share of Robert Sarver, the disgraced majority owner. The teams were valued at $4 billion as part of the deal. Ishbia’s brother, Justin Ishbia, will be a major investor, and they are expected to bring in smaller investors.While Ishbia has long dreamed of owning a professional sports team, this opportunity arose only because of a yearslong scandal in the Suns organization with lingering effects that could prove daunting to whoever takes over. Sarver was pressured to sell the teams in September after an N.B.A. investigation by an independent law firm found toxic behavior by Sarver for years, from using racist slurs for Black people to treating female employees inequitably. Other employees, some of whom are no longer with the teams, were also found to have behaved inappropriately.If the N.B.A. approves the sale, Ishbia will become one of the youngest controlling owners in all of American professional sports at 42 years old. His mission will be to reboot the workplace culture of the Suns, while also bringing the franchise its first championship. The Mercury, who have won three championships, are trying to move forward after spending much of the year worrying about their star center Brittney Griner. She spent nearly 10 months detained in Russia on drug charges until she was released in a prisoner swap this month. The U.S. State Department said she had been “wrongfully detained.”The Phoenix Mercury had an up and down season this year while they were without Brittney Griner, who was detained in Russia on drug charges for nearly 10 months.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesRichardson, who played for the Suns from 2008 to 2010, expressed confidence in Ishbia’s ability to handle the organization’s challenges.“Mat’s going to run it totally different,” said Richardson, who remains close to Ishbia. “It’s going to be upbeat. It’s going to be a family atmosphere. It’s going to be a team atmosphere. He’s going to do things to make that franchise valuable and successful.”Building capitalAfter graduating from Michigan State’s business school in 2003, Ishbia started working for United Wholesale Mortgage, which his father, Jeff Ishbia, founded in 1986 as a side business.“I went there with the concept that I was gonna be there for six months, a year,” Ishbia told Forbes last year. “No one likes mortgages. I don’t like them still.”He described it slightly differently last month in an interview on HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel”: “I learned that one, I could compete. Two, I could take all the things I learned from Izzo and, like, outwork everybody and be successful, and I saw the opportunity. And I’ve loved mortgages ever since.”The company had about a dozen employees when Ishbia started, according to a company bio. In 2013, Ishbia was named chief executive. Soon, the company was reporting more than $1 billion in mortgage sales. The company reported $107.7 billion in mortgage loans for 2019.Last month, U.W.M. passed Rocket Mortgage as the largest mortgage lender in the country. Rocket Mortgage was founded by Dan Gilbert, who owns the N.B.A.’s Cleveland Cavaliers.Dan Gilbert, who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, founded Rocket Mortgage, a chief competitor for Ishbia’s company.Tony Dejak/Associated PressGuy Cecala, the executive chair of Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry newsletter, said that Ishbia and Gilbert were considered “mavericks” in the mortgage industry.“They’re very competitive with one another in mortgage lending and outside the mortgage-lending realm,” Cecala said.The two mortgage companies have publicly feuded. Earlier this year, Ishbia criticized Gilbert, in a post on LinkedIn, for reducing Rocket’s work force. Last year, U.W.M. announced that it would no longer work with brokers who also do business with Rocket Mortgage and another competitor, a decision that led to a pending legal challenge.When pressed about the decision on CNBC last year, Ishbia said it wasn’t about exclusivity. He suggested that the competitors were operating in a “gray area” he didn’t want to be part of. Gilbert was unavailable for comment.As Ishbia’s wealth grew through the mortgage business, he was active politically, donating to both Democrats and Republicans.He donated to the primary campaign of Alex Lasry, a Democrat, in this year’s Wisconsin Senate race. Lasry is the son of Marc Lasry, who owns the N.B.A.’s Milwaukee Bucks, and is a Bucks executive. Ishbia also supported both Republicans in the 2020 Senate runoffs in Georgia, including an incumbent, Kelly Loeffler, who owned the W.N.B.A.’s Atlanta Dream. Loeffler was in an open feud with her team’s mostly Black players, who backed her Democratic opponent after she disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement. She lost to that opponent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who is Black, and she later sold the Dream.Ishbia has also given back to his alma mater. Last year, he pledged $32 million to Michigan State. On “Real Sports,” he said an additional $14 million would go toward the $95 million salary of the school’s football coach, Mel Tucker.Two years ago, Izzo connected Ishbia with Dick Vitale, the college basketball broadcaster, who also raises money for pediatric cancer research. Vitale said Ishbia offered him $1 million during their first conversation, and then he and his brother, Justin, followed up with further seven-figure donations.“Shocked the heck out of me,” Vitale said. “Are you kidding me? That is so rare. I wish I could get more entertainers and more athletes, more financially successful people to join me in my quest. But it’s not that easy.”Huddles, chants and mortgagesEvery so often, Ishbia will bring his three children, ages 8, 9 and 11, to the office. They’ll come to U.W.M.’s senior leadership meetings toting notepads.“It’s cute to look over and, you know, watch when they write things down,” said Melinda Wilner, who has been U.W.M.’s chief operating officer since 2015.Ishbia’s father sits on U.W.M.’s board of directors and still comes to some company meetings.“He instilled a strong work ethic in Mat for sure, and his brother,” said Sarah DeCiantis, U.W.M.’s chief marketing officer.When asked who Ishbia’s biggest influences are, DeCiantis didn’t hesitate.“His dad, his mom and Tom Izzo,” she said.Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo, center, with the team Ishbia played on that won the N.C.A.A. championship in 2000.Brian Gadbery/NCAA Photos via Getty ImagesIzzo, she said, taught Ishbia how to hold people accountable and motivate them. Ishbia was a student coach under Izzo for his final season. The “Real Sports” segment last month showed that U.W.M. has borrowed some elements of sports culture for its workplace, like team huddles broken by chants.Izzo once visited on a Thursday and was told that Thursdays were Ishbia’s day to walk around visiting employees. He often asks executives for lists of people who have been performing well so he can call with his appreciation.He uses Izzo’s lessons on managing people with a younger set as well: his children’s sports teams. Blake Kolo, a close friend and an executive with U.W.M., whose children play on the same teams as Ishbia’s, said Ishbia’s one rule is to be positive.“If you join the team — it doesn’t matter if you’re a parent or a kid — we’re OK with so much, but you just can’t be negative,” Kolo said.Chasing sports ownershipKolo recalled a flight home from the Bahamas nearly a decade ago with Ishbia and a small group of friends. Ishbia asked everyone about their goals for the next year.Some did not know, but he gave them all a chance to share before it was his turn.“My goal that will always remain on my list is to be an owner of a sports team,” Kolo remembered Ishbia saying. “You know, that’s a long-term goal. That’s not my 12-month goal.”At the time, Ishbia was a wealthy man, but he didn’t have the fortune required to buy a team. Then, U.W.M. went public in 2021.Ishbia, center, took United Wholesale Mortgage public in 2021, which helped him gain the capital to seriously contend to buy professional sports teams.Business Wire, via Associated PressIshbia was part of a bid to buy the N.F.L.’s Denver Broncos this year, joining a group that included Alec Gores, who invested in U.W.M. and is the older brother of Tom Gores, the Detroit Pistons owner. Ishbia also had been mentioned as a possible suitor for the Washington Commanders in recent months.Richardson said he never expected Ishbia to buy a team so far from Michigan, where U.W.M. is based. “But that just shows you how bad he wanted to own the franchise and be a part of the N.B.A. team and help a franchise win a championship,” he said.According to a person close to Ishbia, he spent time in Phoenix as he researched the team and the market and became excited by what he saw as a strong opportunity to win. Ishbia plans to continue living in the Detroit area, the person said.The Mercury won W.N.B.A. championships in 2007, 2009 and 2014. The Suns have never won a championship, but they have been to the N.B.A. finals three times, including in 2021. They have been one of the league’s best teams for the past three seasons, led by guard Devin Booker, who grew up in Michigan.“I 100 percent know Mat Ishbia wanted to get a team to win a championship,” Izzo said. “Period.”Phoenix Suns guards Chris Paul, left, and Devin Booker, right, have helped the team find success over the past several seasons, including a trip to the N.B.A. finals in 2021.Matt York/Associated PressIzzo also teased, “He’s an athletically driven guy, that’s body isn’t as athletically driven.”Ishbia’s sale must be approved by three-fourths of the N.B.A.’s board of governors, which includes a representative from each of the league’s 30 teams. Before the vote, the league will vet his finances, conduct a background check and have a small advisory group of owners assess whether Ishbia’s ownership group would be a beneficial partner.Deals can fall through. In August 2011, Alex Meruelo, a California-based pizza-chain owner and real estate magnate, agreed to to buy a majority stake in the Atlanta Hawks. The league office had concerns about his finances, and about three months later Meruelo said that the sale was off by mutual agreement.But if Ishbia’s deal is approved, those who know him best say that he will bring a new energy to an organization in sore need of a reset.“You got to win pretty quick in sports, you know, or everybody’s mad at you,” Izzo said.He thinks Ishbia’s tenure with the Suns and Mercury will be similar to his time leading U.W.M. — that he’ll demand short-term success, and have a long-term vision and that he’ll be very hands on with the organization.“He’s a pit bull,” Izzo said. “With a very warm heart.”Sheelagh McNeill More

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    A Tough Start in Texas Turned Jimmy Butler Into an NBA All-Star

    Butler is impossible to miss as the fiercely competitive star of the Miami Heat. But he got his start at a small junior college in Texas after bigger schools overlooked him.TYLER, Texas — Jimmy Butler and Joe Fulce knew enough to find a basketball hoop that was a safe distance from anyone else who happened to be working out at Wagstaff Gymnasium. Sometimes, they would play to 11. Sometimes, the player with the ball would be permitted only one dribble. Sometimes, they’d go for hours. The rules? Depended on the day. As for calling fouls?“Had to be a straight hack,” said Fulce, an all-American forward who would try to use his long arms to neutralize Butler’s strength.At Tyler Junior College, a leafy two-year school about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, Fulce was among the teammates who came to understand how seriously Butler treated the combative art of one-on-one basketball. It was the most pure distillation of his competitive drive.“If you ask him to play one-on-one and you’re not really ready to play one-on-one with him, don’t do it,” Fulce said, “because it’ll mess up your relationship with him.”Before he went to Marquette and then entered the N.B.A. as a late first-round draft pick, before he famously eviscerated teammates at a practice in Minnesota and then fashioned the N.B.A.’s Covid-era bubble into his personal stage with the Miami Heat, Butler spent one season at Tyler that set the foundation for everything that followed.“It was the first time,” Butler said, “that someone actually took a chance on me.”By now, Butler has cemented his reputation as one of the league’s best two-way players, a six-time All-Star with an eight-figure salary who has positioned Miami as a perennial title contender. In his spare time, he works as a global pitchman for a low-calorie beer and drinks expensive coffee.Butler is a six-time All-Star and led the Miami Heat to the N.B.A. finals in 2020. Michael Dwyer/Associated PressThough the Heat have been uneven so far this season — they were 2-3 ahead of their game against Golden State on Thursday — Butler, 33, figures to have them in the mix again. He knows better than most that a strong finish is more important than a tough start.At Tyler, there are reminders of the year he spent there. Outside the gym is the “Jimmy Butler Lobby,” replete with a trophy case that includes photographs, magazine covers, his old jersey and a box of Corn Flakes with his image on it.But back when he arrived at the school in the summer of 2007, he seemed acutely aware of what was at stake: his future.As for his past? He could not go back. Even now, he has no interest in rehashing his childhood outside of Houston. On only a couple of occasions has he spoken about how his mother kicked him out of the house when he was 13, about how he survived by couch-surfing for several years before a friend’s family took him in.“I’m not personally going to talk about his business,” Fulce said, “but if you take everything away from somebody and you have to learn what that feels like at a young age, that would drive anybody to be like, ‘Yo, I’ll never go back to where I was.’ And a lot of people will never understand what that’s like because they can’t even imagine it.”Joe Fulce, right, said he told Marquette that he wouldn’t join the men’s basketball team unless Butler came, too.John Dunn for The New York TimesButler spent three seasons at Marquette before he was selected with the final pick of the first round of the 2011 N.B.A. draft.John Dunn for The New York TimesComing out of Tomball High School, Butler had a scholarship offer from Centenary, a small college in Louisiana that has since transitioned to Division III, and a partial offer from Quinnipiac. One afternoon, he got a phone call from Mike Marquis, the longtime coach at Tyler, who had heard about Butler from a Houston-area scout named Alan Branch.“He thought Jimmy was a better player than had been reported,” Marquis said. “So, we raced down and picked him up and brought him in for a visit. It didn’t take long to realize he had something special about him, just the way he carried himself.”On his daylong visit to Tyler, Butler toured the campus, asked lots of questions and participated in an open gym. He said in an interview that he had no biases about the quality of play at the junior college level — “I didn’t really have any offers, so how could I have preconceptions about anything?” he asked — but he came away impressed.“Those guys were really good,” Butler said, “and I don’t think I’d ever played worse.”Mike Marquis, who coaches the men’s basketball team at Tyler Junior College, said Butler would spend hours in the gym.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesStill, Marquis loved his attitude and his potential, and Butler signed his scholarship papers that day. At the first team meeting, a phone rang from one of the lockers, which was a violation of team rules. Butler was among those who could have identified the guilty party but no one gave him up, and Marquis had the team run sprint after sprint.“We were some loyal dudes,” Fulce said.It was, in its own way, a sign of early togetherness.“I think that rallied them more than any sort of team-building exercise we could have done,” Marquis said.The team lived at Bateman Hall, a red brick building that also housed the men’s soccer team. The players attended class, ate at Whataburger and roamed the aisles at Dollar General. They otherwise lived in the gym, Fulce said, and kept one another out of trouble. Ricky Williams, the team manager, enforced curfew as if it were the most important thing in the world.“Oh, my goodness, Ricky,” Fulce said. “If you didn’t get into a fight with Ricky, then you wasn’t trying to live.”Fulce got the sense from Butler that he was determined to absorb everything he could from everyone around him. Each day was an opportunity to learn and improve. In the preseason, Marquis said, Butler would come to practice early and stay late so that he could spend hours — yes, hours — working on his footwork.“All that pivoting,” Marquis said, “which is the sort of stuff he uses nightly now.”Tyler had a terrific season behind Butler, Fulce and Jamie Vanderbeken, a forward who would go on to play at Iowa State. Known as the “Three J’s,” they led the team to a 24-4 record ahead of a regional tournament game against Panola College, a team that Tyler defeated by 27 points the previous week.Playing at the Wagstaff Gymnasium at Tyler Junior College.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesButler spent one season, 2007-8, at Tyler Junior College. He scored 43 points in his final game, a triple-overtime loss.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesA trophy case in the Jimmy Butler Lobby at Tyler’s gym includes a cereal box with a photo of Butler, who was part of the U.S. men’s national team in 2016.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesFulce heard rumblings during warm-ups that a scout from the San Antonio Spurs was in the building — it was an indication, he said, that he and his teammates were on the right track — and they put on a show. In a game that went to triple overtime, Butler scored 43 points and collected 10 rebounds in a 123-121 loss that ended Tyler’s season.“It was Joseph Fulce’s fault and it was Jamie Vanderbeken’s fault because they fouled out of the game,” Butler said. “Joe fouled out at like halftime. And then Jamie fouled out two minutes after halftime. Two of our top-three scorers were gone.”Butler’s memory was rusty: Fulce and Vanderbeken both fouled out in the first overtime.“We actually argued about this a couple of weeks ago, and that was the first time we’d ever talked about the game,” said Fulce, a former college assistant who now runs his own player-development company. “I was like, ‘Bro, I didn’t foul out in the first half!’”After the season, Butler was weighing several Division I offers, including one from Kentucky. Fulce, who had already committed to Marquette, called Buzz Williams, the team’s new coach, and urged him to sign Butler.“If you don’t take Jimmy, I’m not coming,” Fulce recalled telling Williams.A week later, Butler and Fulce made their way to a McDonald’s near campus so that they could use the restaurant’s fax machine. Butler fed his national letter of intent to attend Marquette into the machine.“He really didn’t know what was coming next,” Fulce said. More

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    Tiffany Jackson, Texas Star Forward and W.N.B.A. Veteran, Dies at 37

    She was an All-American in college and spent nine years as a pro. “I don’t think I’ve seen a player as competitive,” her college coach said.Tiffany Jackson, an All-American forward for the University of Texas women’s basketball team who went on to play nine seasons in the W.N.B.A., died on Monday in Dallas. She was 37.The cause was cancer, the university said.Jackson noticed a lump in one of her breasts in 2015 while she was playing overseas in Israel during the W.N.B.A. off-season. She put off being tested until she returned to the United States and, even then, not until after the start of the season for the W.N.B.A.’s Tulsa Shock.“I didn’t let my teammates know until the playoffs,” she told ESPN in 2016, “because I knew I was going to have to go back to Dallas, after Game 2, win or lose, to start treatment. I ended up telling everybody via mass text, because I was afraid if I did it in person, I would just break down.”Jackson was a powerhouse player at the University of Texas, where she was the only women’s basketball player in the school’s history to score at least 1,000 points, grab 1,000 rebounds and have 300 steals and 150 blocks. She is ranked fifth overall in points with 1,197.“What made her stand out was her versatility,” Jody Conradt, who coached the Texas women’s team from 1976 to 2007, said in an interview. “She was 6-3, very mobile and could play multiple positions. But that was secondary to her competitiveness — I don’t think I’ve seen a player as competitive as Tiffany.”In her four years at Texas, Jackson averaged 15.6 points and 8.4 rebounds a game. As a freshman she helped lead the team to the Sweet 16 round of the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament in the 2003-4 season.Her 2004-5 season was her strongest: She averaged 18.3 points and 8.7 rebounds a game.Tiffany Jackson was born on April 26, 1985, in Longview, Texas. Her mother, Cassie Brooks, had played basketball for the University of New Mexico; her father, Marques Jackson, had been a tight end at the University of Tulsa.At Duncanville High School, near Dallas, Tiffany led the Pantherettes to a state title in 2003, scoring a team-high 16 points in the championship game, shortly after being named a McDonald’s All-American.Jackson was recruited vigorously by more than 60 colleges. One coach said that the school that signed her would become an instant championship contender.“That’s a big statement to make, and I feel good that people think that much of me,” Jackson told The Austin American-Statesman in 2003. “It makes me want to work harder to prove them right.”While the Longhorns never won a national title, Jackson’s star was undiminished. Drafted by the New York Liberty with the fifth overall pick in the 2007 W.N.B.A. draft, she played with the team until she was traded to the Tulsa Shock (now the Dallas Wings) in 2010. She played a final season with the Los Angeles Sparks in 2017.She averaged 6.2 points and 4.5 rebounds a game over her career. She was at her best in 2011, with career highs of 12.4 points and 8.4 rebounds a game.Jackson took off the 2012 season to give birth to her son, Marley. She sat out the 2016 season for breast cancer treatment, which included radiation and a mastectomy.“After that first month, never in my mind did I think I wasn’t going to play again,” she told USA Today in 2017. “So throughout my entire treatment, I was always working out. It was something that kept me going.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available.After retiring as a player in 2018, Jackson became an assistant coach for two seasons at the University of Texas. This year, she was named head coach of the women’s basketball team at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. She died before she could coach a game for the team. More

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    Pete Carril, Princeton’s Textbook Basketball Coach, Dies at 92

    Without athletic scholarships, he made outgunned teams winners by keeping them moving and unnerving opponents, leading to one of the biggest upsets in college basketball.Pete Carril, who coached men’s basketball at Princeton for 29 years and scared big-name opponents with his undersize, often underskilled scholars playing an old-fashioned textbook game, died on Monday. He was 92.His family announced the death in a statement posted on the Princeton Tigers’ website. It did not say where he died or give the cause of death.As the men’s head coach from 1967 to 1996, Carril (pronounced care-ILL) taught a thinking man’s basketball at Princeton. As an Ivy League member, Princeton could not offer athletic scholarships, and its academic demands were high, but Carril’s teams, almost invariably outmanned and overmatched, still won twice as often as they lost.His record at Princeton was 514-261, with 13 Ivy titles, 11 appearances in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s championship tournament, two in the National Invitation Tournament (his team won in 1975) and only one losing season. Fourteen of his Princeton teams led the nation in defense. In 1997, he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.He emphasized a deliberate off-the-ball offense that kept players passing the ball and setting screens until a shooter was open or someone broke free to the basket in a patented backdoor play. The scores were low, and no matter how much opponents prepared, they were frustrated and often lost their poise.“Playing Princeton is kind of like going to the dentist,” said Jim Valvano, the North Carolina State coach who died in 1993 at 47. “You know that down the road it can make you better, but while it’s happening it can be very, very painful.”The New York Times sportswriter Bill Pennington wrote: “The most unsophisticated basketball fan could admire and understand a Pete Carril team at first glance. The most devoted hoops junkie could be spellbound by a Pete Carril team in motion. It was basketball not of talent, but of team. It may not be the way everybody should play, but it was the way everybody used to try to play.”In the N.C.A.A.’s annual tournament, Carril’s teams might lose to national powers but not before unnerving them and threatening an upset. In the first round alone, Princeton lost to Georgetown by 50-49 in 1989, Arkansas by 68-64 in 1990 and Villanova by 50-48 in 1991.Carril’s final college victory came on March 14, 1996, in Indianapolis, in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament against U.C.L.A., the defending champion. Thirteenth-seeded Princeton, 7 points behind with six minutes left, scored on — what else? — a backdoor with 3.9 seconds left and won. The next day, The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper, ran this headline across Page 1:“David 43, Goliath 41.”Carril said he was under no illusions: “If we played U.C.L.A. 100 times, they would win 99 times.” (The Tigers went on to defeat, 63-41, in the second round against Mississippi State.)Around the Princeton campus he was a revered, raspy-voiced figure in a well-worn sweater and baggy khakis (or, when he dressed formally, a bow tie). A colleague once described him as “a rumpled Lilliputian who would look as out of place in an Armani suit as he would in a Vera Wang gown.” And during games he was known for an animated coaching style.Every year at his first practice session, Carril made the same speech to his players.“I know about your academic load,” he said. “I know how tough it is to give up the time to play here, but let’s get one thing straight. In my book, there is no such thing as an Ivy League player. When you come out of that locker room and step across that white line, you are basketball players, period.”But he also told his players:“Princeton is a special place with some very special professors. It is something special to be taught by one of them. But you are not special just because you happen to go here.”Pedro José (later known as Peter Joseph) Carril was born on July 10, 1930, in Bethlehem, Pa. His father, an immigrant from Spain, worked for 40 years at the blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel and, his son said, never missed a day of work.In high school in Bethlehem, Pete was an all-state basketball player, and at Lafayette, where he played for Butch van Breda Kolff, he was a Little All-American. Then, for 12 years, he coached high school basketball in Pennsylvania while earning a master’s degree in education from Lehigh University in 1959.In the 1966-67 season, he coached Lehigh to an 11-12 record. Then, van Breda Kolff, who was coaching Princeton, left to coach the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association. Princeton considered Bobby Knight and Larry Brown as successors. Instead, it took Carril.He left college coaching after the 1995-96 season.“I’ve been dodging bullets for 30 years,” Carril said. “I find I’m not seeing as much. I used to think the kids felt my coaching was worth five points a game to them. Maybe it was, but I get the sense they don’t feel that way now. I think I make less of a difference.”The next year, he became an assistant coach of the Sacramento Kings of the N.B.A. under Coach Rick Adelman, spending most of his time breaking down game tapes. He remained with the team for most of the next decade, retiring in 2006, but three years later, at 78, he rejoined the Kings as a consultant.“Being an assistant doesn’t bother me at all,” he said. “The aggravation and the pain in your stomach and the headaches that you get when you see things that are done wrong or when you lose, or all those problems you have as a head coach, I’d had enough.”With Dan White he wrote “The Smart Take From the Strong: The Basketball Philosophy of Pete Carril” (1997). His coaching methods were even the subject of an academic paper by a Fordham University marketing professor, Francis Petit, titled, “What Executives Can Learn From Pete Carril.”Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Carril at Princeton in 2007. “People ask me, ‘How do you want to be remembered?’” he once said. “I tell them I don’t.”Aaron Houston for The New York TimesCarril was ambivalent about his success. He once said: “People ask me, ‘How do you want to be remembered?’ I tell them I don’t.”But he will be remembered, even though none of his teams gained the ultimate honor. He brushed that off, too.“Winning a national championship is not something you’re going to see us do at Princeton,” he said in his final years there. “I resigned myself to that years ago. What does it mean, anyway? When I’m dead, maybe two guys will walk past my grave, and one will say to the other: ‘Poor guy. Never won a national championship.’ And I won’t hear a word they say.”Frank Litsky, a longtime sportswriter for The Times, died in 2018. William McDonald contributed reporting. More