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    How to Sit Courtside at Madison Square Garden

    Close to the action at a Knicks game, a writer gets some advice from Kenan Thompson of “Saturday Night Live.”Madison Square Garden went very quiet when my face appeared on the giant screen above center court. The silence was noticeable. A few seconds earlier, Kenan Thompson’s face had brought down the house.It wasn’t like anyone gasped or got angry — no one seemed taken aback. It was just that no one knew who the hell I was. And why should they? I’m not famous. I had no right to be up there in the first place.Still, it was hard not to take it personally. Eighteen thousand people — New Yorkers, no less — had decided to silence their cheers. Eighteen thousand people had agreed, as one, to reject me.The chyron below my face on the GardenVision screen read: “Actor.” That hurt, because I no longer think of myself as just an actor. It also hurt because the subhead read: “‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow.’” Solid movie — I mean no disrespect — but it’s just that I die within the first three minutes.At 4:45 p.m. that day, my manager, Harry, sent me a text: “Is boyfriend still here?”I thought he wanted to hang out with us, which I didn’t feel like doing, so I considered lying. I let my typing bubbles go … and I let them go away. Harry texted again: “I have two extra courtside tickets to the Knicks game.” Honesty is the way, etc.I’ve done my fair share of sitting courtside. I know that sitting courtside is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I can’t think of a more annoying fact, but I’ll come clean: I’ve sat courtside upward of 30 times. What can I say? I’m a good guest.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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    Annie Hamilton’s Courtside Adventure at Madison Square Garden

    For a fleeting moment, she was the queen of Madison Square Garden.Madison Square Garden went very quiet when my face appeared on the giant screen above center court. The silence was noticeable. A few seconds earlier, Kenan Thompson’s face had brought down the house.It wasn’t like anyone gasped or got angry — no one seemed taken aback. It was just that no one knew who the hell I was. And why should they? I’m not famous. I had no right to be up there in the first place.Still, it was hard not to take it personally. Eighteen thousand people — New Yorkers, no less — had decided to silence their cheers. Eighteen thousand people had agreed, as one, to reject me.The chyron below my face on the GardenVision screen read: “Actor.” That hurt, because I no longer think of myself as just an actor. It also hurt because the subhead read: “‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow.’” Solid movie — I mean no disrespect — but it’s just that I die within the first three minutes.At 4:45 p.m. that day, my manager, Harry, sent me a text: “Is boyfriend still here?”I thought he wanted to hang out with us, which I didn’t feel like doing, so I considered lying. I let my typing bubbles go … and I let them go away. Harry texted again: “I have two extra courtside tickets to the Knicks game.” Honesty is the way, etc.I’ve done my fair share of sitting courtside. I know that sitting courtside is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I can’t think of a more annoying fact, but I’ll come clean: I’ve sat courtside upward of 30 times. What can I say? I’m a good guest.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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    Lefty Driesell, Basketball Coach Who Put Maryland on the Map, Dies at 92

    He built Maryland into a national powerhouse and became the first coach to win more than 100 games at each of four major college programs.Lefty Driesell, the Hall of Fame coach who built nationally prominent basketball teams at the University of Maryland in the 1970s, and who at his retirement in 2003 was the nation’s fourth-winningest N.C.A.A. Division I men’s coach, died on Saturday at his home in Virginia Beach. He was 92.His death was announced by the university.Driesell (pronounced drih-ZELL) was the first coach to win more than 100 games at each of four major college programs. Over five decades, his teams won a total of 786 games.He coached at Maryland from 1969 until October 1986, posting a 348-159 overall record in College Park. His Terps reached eight N.C.A.A. postseason tournaments, won the 1972 National Invitation Tournament championship and captured an Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championship in 1984. They finished high in The Associated Press’s national college basketball rankings of the early 1970s.He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018.Driesell was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2018.Maddie Meyer/Getty ImagesAcross Davidson, Maryland, James Madison and Georgia State, Driesell had an overall record of 786-394. He coached James Madison to four consecutive appearances in the N.I.T. and led the team to the N.C.A.A. national tournament in 1994.He closed out his coaching career at Georgia State, where he was head coach from 1997 to 2003. He led the team to a huge upset of Wisconsin in the opening round of the 2001 N.C.A.A. tournament.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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    My Rick Pitino Story

    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

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

    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

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    Why Some Korean Basketball Players Love the Bank Shot

    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

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

    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

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

    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