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      Miami Sinks the Thunder With Record Night at the Free-Throw Line

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      The Heat were 40 for 40 on free throws, winning the game on Jimmy Butler’s 35th point (and 23rd free throw) of the game.What’s the most exciting play in basketball? A posterizing dunk? A block swatted 10 rows into the stands? A sweet-swishing 3-pointer from downtown?Chances are you didn’t say, “Consistent free-throw shooting.”But the humble free throw had its moment Tuesday night in Miami when the Heat set an N.B.A. record, taking and making 40 free throws without a miss.The Heat were led by an in-the-zone Jimmy Butler, who made 23 of 23 from the stripe. No other Miami player had more than six. Their opponents, the Oklahoma City Thunder, were comparative bricklayers, shooting 14 for 21.Every one of those 40 Heat freebies was needed. Miami won, 112-111. The deciding point, which came with 12 seconds left, was, of course, a Butler free throw.Butler ended with 35 points, yet needed only six field goals (on 17 shots) to reach that total.The Heat broke a record that was held by two teams. The Utah Jazz shot 39 for 39 in 1982 (Danny Schayes was 14 for 14), tying a mark first set by the 1953 Fort Wayne Pistons (the Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University graduate and eventual convicted point shaver Jack Molinas was 11 for 11).There have been a couple of close calls. In 2000, the Indiana Pacers were 40 for 41 (Jermaine O’Neal missed one). In 1950, the Washington Capitols were 44 for 45. Dick O’Keefe missed his only free throw, and the team folded before the season was over. Those two things were not related, probably.In terms of free throws made, 40 is far from the record. That was set by the Phoenix Suns in 1990 when they shot 61 for 80. Though Suns fans were treated to a free-throw bonanza that night, the success rate was a pedestrian .763.Before you dismiss the Heat’s feat on Tuesday, consider that free throws are far from gimmes. N.B.A. teams this season are making about 78 of every 100 free throws. But that still leaves 22 that miss.In perhaps the worst team performance ever, the Detroit Pistons somehow shot 3 for 17 in a 2017 game (they were also 3 for 23 from 3-point range and lost to the Pelicans by 23). The expansion Toronto Raptors hold the “record,” with a .000 free-throw percentage in a game in 1996. But it comes with an asterisk: They were somehow awarded only three total free-throw attempts in the game.The individual record 0-fer goes to the legendarily poor free-throw-shooting Shaquille O’Neal, who was 0 for 11 in a 2000 game with the Los Angeles Lakers. But worse still, perhaps, was Chris Dudley’s horrifying 1-for-18 effort in 1990 with the Nets. In a promotion between quarters, a blindfolded spectator made the same number of free throws as Dudley did all game.As for Butler, his 23-for-23 mark on Tuesday was oh-so-close to the individual record. James Harden was 24 for 24 in December 2019. Adrian Dantley of the Jazz was an agonizing 28 for 29 in 1984.Dantley is also near the top when it comes to total free throws made in a game. He had games with 26, 27 and 28 free throws made in the 1980s, although none of them were perfect. Bob Cousy was 30 for 31 in a 1953 four-overtime playoff game.Dantley’s 28 tied the regular-season record, which was set by Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors, who made 28 of 32 free throws in a game in March 1962 game against the Knicks that was played in Hershey, Pa. The feat was scandalously overlooked at the time, as fans and journalists focused on some other statistic. Something about 100 points. More

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      World’s sexiest fan Ivana Knoll shows off peachy bum as she boasts of ONE BILLION hits on her Instagram since World Cup

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      IVANA KNOLL looked stunning as she showed off her peachy bum watching Miami Heat over the weekend.The World Cup’s sexiest supporter showed she is not only a huge football fan, but loves the basketball too.
      Ivana Knoll watched Miami Heat’s defeat to Brooklyn NetsCredit: Instagram / @knolldoll
      The model showed off her peachy bum courtsideCredit: Instagram / @knolldoll
      Ivana rose to fame with her World Cup exploitsCredit: Getty
      The former Miss Croatia has had one billion Instagram impressions over the last monthCredit: Splash
      Ivana has since been seen partying with Drake and Jamie FoxxCredit: PA
      The former Miss Croatia jetted to Miami following her time in the Qatar sun and has been seen partying with the likes of Jamie Foxx.
      On Sunday she visited the FTX Arena to watch Miami Heat take on the Brooklyn Nets in the NBA.
      Naturally, Ivana was cheering on the Heat and dressed in a no.22 jersey which bore Jimmy Butler’s name on the back.
      She accessorised her look with a Miami Heat cap and red leggings which were a staple of her wardrobe at the World Cup.
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      The tight-fitting leggings allowed Ivana to show off her peachy bum and she posed for photos courtside.
      Unfortunately for Ivana Miami lost 102-101 but her post did gain 275,000 likes on Instagram in a matter of hours.
      The model’s fame has skyrocketed following her trip to Doha, having gained 2.6million Instagram followers in December alone.
      Earlier this week Ivana revealed she was close to one billion impressions on the platform last month, which highlights how popular her posts are.
      Most read in Football
      She now has 3.6m Instagram followers and regularly treats her fans to revealing pics.
      Ivana even shared a photo she took alongside rapper Drake at Leonardo DiCaprio’s celeb-packed party. More

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      NBA Has Sharp Rise in 50-Point Games

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      Donovan Mitchell’s 71 points in a game this week was the top mark since 2006, but a rise in offense (and a lack of defense) has made high-scoring games a routine affair.We don’t know who will do it, and we don’t know exactly when it will happen. But we do know that somebody sometime soon will score 50 points in an N.B.A. game. And then it will happen again. And again and again and again.The headlines have started to sound familiar. Giannis Antetokounmpo scored 55 on Jan. 3. Klay Thompson scored 54 and Donovan Mitchell scored 71 on Jan. 2. Luka Doncic scored 50 and 60 and 51. Pascal Siakam and Darius Garland have 50-point games this season. Lauri Markkanen just missed, with a 49-point game on Thursday. Who’s next? Kevon Looney?An event that was a rarity as little as a decade ago is now becoming commonplace, and this season in particular, players are going off for 50 or more regularly.Ten years ago, in 2012-13, only three players had 50-point games. Going back through the ’90s, ’80s and ’70s, the number of 50-point games per season was almost uniformly in the single digits.But lately, 50-point games have taken off, with an average of nearly 20 over the previous four seasons. So far this year, with a little less than half of the season complete, there have been 14.So what’s going on?To start with, teams as a whole are scoring more. The average N.B.A. team has scored 113.8 points a game this year, the highest total since 1970. Ten years ago the average was 98.1. The pace of games has also sped up, with teams averaging nearly 100 possessions every 48 minutes over the past five seasons, which had not been done since the 1980s. More possession, more shots, more points for everyone.Luka Doncic’s dominant performance against the Knicks last week included 60 points, 21 rebounds and 10 assists.Tim Heitman/Getty ImagesA lot of that offense has been driven by a drastic increase in 3-pointers. In the late 1990s, teams made an average of four to six 3s per game. Ten years ago, they made 7.2. In 2017-18, the total passed 10 for the first time, and this season the average is 12.2, off 34.3 attempts.In eight of the 14 50-point games this season, the player made at least six 3s, with Thompson and Garland sinking 10 each. (Shout-out to Antetokounmpo for scoring 55 while shooting 0-for-3 from 3.)Golden State Coach Steve Kerr this week pointed to 3-point shooting and pace as key factors in the surge of 50-point performances. He also blamed defense.“Transition defense is at an all-time low in this league,” he said. “Every single night on League Pass, you see five guys standing there, somebody shoots, somebody runs long, and everybody goes: ‘Oh, the guy’s laying it up down there.’“We do it, every team does it. I think the game has gotten really loose and the players are so talented, it’s made for a lot of big scoring nights.”Saddiq Bey, a third-year player for the Detroit Pistons, has averaged 14.2 points a game in his career thus far, but he had 51 in a win over the Orlando Magic last season.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressThe 14 games this season were accomplished by 10 different players, and the trend over the past few years has wrapped in players with far smaller profiles than that of Antetokounmpo or Doncic. Detroit’s Saddiq Bey had 51 points last March. Fred VanVleet of the Raptors did it in 2021, and T.J. Warren had 53 points in a game for Indiana in 2020.In the past, 50-point games were typically the reserve of the greats. Wilt Chamberlain had 118 of them (one of them, of course, reaching 100 points). Next are Michael Jordan with 31 and Kobe Bryant with 25.Though some less expected names are popping for 50 these days, the big names are actually doing it less often than the Chamberlains and Jordans and Bryants. Among active players, James Harden has 23, LeBron James has 14 and Damian Lillard has 12. Of the players who scored 50 this season, Stephen Curry is tops with 11 career 50-point games.As you might expect, with 50-point games up so much, so are games in the 40-to-49-point range. Ten years ago, there were only 33 such games. In recent seasons there have typically been about 100. But this season there are already 76.A single player scoring 40 points in an N.B.A. game? Ho-hum. More

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      Texas Longhorns Fire Basketball Coach After Domestic Assault Charge

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      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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      The Best N.B.A. Rebounding Training: Battling 14 Siblings

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      Memphis Grizzlies center Steven Adams is great at snagging his team’s missed shots. His childhood may be the secret to his muscle.MEMPHIS — Steven Adams once thought he was destined for farming life, back when he was just an exceptionally tall boy finding his way around Rotorua, a rural town on New Zealand’s North Island known for its thermal pools.He valued hard work, family and consistency. (As the youngest of at least a dozen siblings, he had no choice but to work with others.) Then one of his youth basketball coaches bought him a pair of size 16 sneakers at a flea market. He wore them everywhere.These days, Adams, 29, has a high-profile and well-paid occupation, as a 6-foot-11 center for the Grizzlies — and as one of the N.B.A.’s most prized teammates. He plays defense. He curses. He rebounds. He curses. He cracks jokes. He curses.“Funniest person I’ve ever met,” said David Roddy, a first-year forward.In the process, Adams has endeared himself to a young team with championship hopes as one of the best teams in the Western Conference. A former sidekick to the likes of Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant in Oklahoma City, Adams is now a one-man team-building operation in Memphis, where Ja Morant, one of the league’s most precocious stars, counts himself among the beneficiaries of Adams’s lunch-pail labor.“I feel like a lot of the stuff he does for us goes unnoticed,” Morant said, “and it’s time for people to start watching him.”Adams has been a good complement to Ja Morant, left, one of the N.B.A.’s most dynamic young stars.Jim Dedmon/USA Today Sports, via ReutersWith his sleeve of tattoos, bushy beard and mop of hair that extends to the back of his jersey, Adams would look right at home aboard a large fishing vessel. Instead, he leads the N.B.A. in offensive rebounds by a wide margin — a statistic that teammates and coaches value, since offensive rebounds create extra shots — while applying his self-styled brand of leadership.It was on display during the Grizzlies’ season-opening win over the Knicks. In the middle of a late timeout, Adams stole a towel from the shooting guard John Konchar so that he could hand it to Morant, who apparently had a sweaty brow and — let’s be honest — was likely to play a more important role down the stretch. Konchar, who finished with 12 points, was left to stare at his empty hand.After a recent practice, Konchar recalled the first time he met Adams, who came to the Grizzlies in a trade with the New Orleans Pelicans before the start of last season.“I didn’t really know what to expect,” Konchar said. “I mean, he’s 7-feet tall and looks kind of scary.”Konchar proceeded to rattle through Adams’s many fine attributes: his comedic timing, his taste in music, his size and strength, his uncanny gift for collecting errant shots. As he was wrapping up his interview, Konchar spotted Adams.“Steve-O!” Konchar shouted. “I said so many nice things about you.”Adams glanced over his shoulder just long enough to inform Konchar that he was full of it.Said Roddy: “Honestly, he’s taken all the younger guys under his wing. And I’m just trying to learn from him as much as possible.”So much of Adams’s approach as a basketball player is rooted in his childhood. He had a large family. By Adams’s count, his father, Sid, had 14 children, though some of his siblings think the number is higher. Adams also coped with tragedy and loss. And while he loved to have fun, he also knew when to be serious.“Families are tough to run,” Adams said in an interview. “You have to be open and honest. You can’t be overly kind, either. It can’t be encouragement all the time. No, dude, you need to tell them when they’re messing up. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”He went on: “Usually, honesty is quite ugly, and people don’t like it. But it’s important in the N.B.A. because you need immediate results. We play games every other day, so you need to get at the root of the problem.”Sure enough, the interconnected themes of family, community and, yes, teamwork run throughout Adams’s 2018 autobiography, “My Life, My Fight: Rising Up From New Zealand to the OKC Thunder.” Adams is proud of the book.“Threw some words together, didn’t I?” he said.He writes about playing sports as a boy and about getting pushed around by his older sisters. (One of them, Valerie Adams, is a two-time Olympic champion in the shot put who recently retired after winning the bronze medal at the Tokyo Games in 2021.) He writes about struggling with the loss of his father, who died of cancer when Steven was 13, and finding basketball through the help of local coaches who guided him to camps and provided him with opportunities.He also writes about feeling isolated at Notre Dame Preparatory School in Fitchburg, Mass., where he spent a postgraduate season before enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh. By then, Adams writes, he had gotten used to having a “tight-knit community” around him — friends who were “always willing to help out with anything.” Without that sense of community, Adams suffered.So being a part of one — and even helping to create one — was something he prioritized when he joined the Thunder as the No. 12 pick in the 2013 N.B.A. draft. On a playoff-ready team led by Durant and Westbrook, Adams was happy to do the blue-collar work that came naturally to him: block shots and set screens, rebound and defend.Adams averaged more than 20 rebounds per game over three recent Memphis victories.Dennis Schneidler/USA Today Sports, via ReutersIf he was a good teammate, Adams also irritated opponents. As a first-year player, Adams fouled out of three straight games. Vince Carter and Nate Robinson took swings at him. Later, in a heated game against Golden State during the 2016 Western Conference finals, Draymond Green kicked him in the groin.At the time, Adams wondered why so many players seemed to react so aggressively toward him. He theorized that a lot of them were only children. Here, again, he cites being a part of a big family growing up. As he writes in his book, “The trick was to annoy your siblings as much as you could without being caught by your household ref.” The ref, in that instance, was one of his parents.With the Grizzlies, Adams has been on a tear. Ahead of their game against the Charlotte Hornets on Wednesday night, Adams had averaged 11.7 points and 20.3 rebounds in three straight wins — and no, that is not a typo. He had 21 rebounds against the Pelicans on Saturday, which seemed like a big deal until he grabbed 23 against the Sacramento Kings the next day.“There’s no craft or science behind it,” Grizzlies Coach Taylor Jenkins said. “He just puts himself in the right spots, reads his teammates and has a knack for the ball. It’s as simple as that.”Adams described some of the subtle differences between offensive and defensive rebounding. On offense, he said, he felt as though he could be on “the attack,” with greater freedom to pursue the ball. On defense, he has more responsibilities. For example, he may be in the middle of a defensive rotation when a shot goes up and he has to find someone to box out.In either case, he knows he has a job to do, which is to help his team. In many ways, it is all he has ever known. More

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      Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Brings His Friends on Ride to NBA Stardom

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      Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard, is having a career season as one of the N.B.A.’s top scorers. He’s had a little help from his childhood friends.Mark Daigneault thought he had his first day in Hamilton, Ontario, all mapped out: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the star guard he coaches on the Oklahoma City Thunder, would make his morning rounds to shoot hoops and lift weights, and Daigneault would ride along.There was only one problem.“I don’t have room in my car,” Gilgeous-Alexander told him, “because I pick up all my friends.”Sure enough, once Daigneault hopped out of his Uber at Gilgeous-Alexander’s preferred gym in nearby Burlington, Daigneault found him working on his shooting as several young men in matching Thunder T-shirts rebounded for him.Gilgeous-Alexander soon introduced Daigneault to his “super close homies,” five childhood friends whose coordinated outfits that morning were no coincidence. They knew Daigneault was in town.“We wanted to make a good impression,” said Sunday Kong, a former high school teammate.In Oklahoma City, Gilgeous-Alexander, 24, has established himself as one of the N.B.A.’s most dynamic players. On a young team with promise, he ranks among the league leaders in scoring, averaging a career-best 31.4 points a game, while shooting 50.5 percent from the field — supercharged numbers that hint at his abilities as a 6-foot-6 guard who can absorb contact at the rim and create space on the perimeter.Gilgeous-Alexander is averaging a career-best 31.4 points per game while making about half of his shots. That puts him among the N.B.A.’s elite scorers.Garett Fisbeck/Associated PressBack home in Hamilton, a small city about 40 miles southwest of Toronto, five of Gilgeous-Alexander’s pals — a crew that also includes Mark Castillanes and Maurice Montoya, two of his best friends since elementary school, and Vincent Chu, who sat next to him in ninth-grade homeroom — practically fall off their couches whenever he crosses up a defender.“Anytime I see him do something on the court, I’m like, ‘Hey, we practiced that!’ ” said Devanté Campbell, who played youth soccer with Gilgeous-Alexander.Gilgeous-Alexander is always trying to improve, said Daigneault, now in his third season as the Thunder’s coach. That makes him an ideal fit for Oklahoma City — the same place where a young Russell Westbrook became a triple-double machine, Kevin Durant honed his perimeter game and James Harden crafted his step-back jumper. Each summer, Gilgeous-Alexander devises his own to-do list.“Shai’s got every resource available to him,” Daigneault said. “If he wanted to hire a staff and move to Hawaii in the off-season, he could do it. Instead, he parks himself in Hamilton and works with friends who have been in his life forever.”In Gilgeous-Alexander’s self-styled basketball lab, where a sneaker salesman and a restaurant manager throw defensive traps at him, and a college student and an aspiring doctor feed him passes, he prepares for his future by returning to his past.“Those guys give me a sense of home,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “They give me back a piece of myself that feels like so long ago.”‘I’ve got to get better’Before he was getting buckets at Madison Square Garden and walking the runways at fashion week in Paris, Gilgeous-Alexander was someone else: the new kid at Regina Mundi Catholic Elementary School.After moving to Hamilton from Toronto when he was 11, Gilgeous-Alexander met Montoya and Castillanes on his first day of sixth grade. Castillanes recalled showing him around.“Kind of quiet,” Castillanes said. “But once you got to know him, he became himself.”Gilgeous-Alexander impressed on the basketball court, Castillanes said, by being able to dribble and make layups with both hands. But as an undersized ninth-grader at St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, Gilgeous-Alexander was cut from the equivalent of the junior varsity and wound up on a team of other freshmen.“I wasn’t hurt by it,” he said. “It was more a feeling of, I’m not good enough, so I’ve got to get better.”From left, Sunday Kong, Maurice Montoya, Vincent Chu and Devanté Campbell on the outdoor court at Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School, Gilgeous-Alexander’s former high school in Hamilton, Ontario.Cole Burston for The New York TimesIn his spare time, Gilgeous-Alexander would hoop with Montoya and Castillanes at their Filipino basketball league — the start of a basketball odyssey. Gilgeous-Alexander spent his sophomore year at Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School on Hamilton’s west side before he transferred again, this time to Hamilton Heights Christian Academy in Chattanooga, Tenn., as he sought better competition.Gilgeous-Alexander eventually landed at the University of Kentucky, where John Calipari, the team’s coach, knew he needed to be tough on him. Otherwise, Calipari was going to hear about it — from Gilgeous-Alexander’s mother, Charmaine Gilgeous, a former Olympic runner for Antigua and Barbuda.“When he played well, she would call me and say, ‘Don’t you let up on him,’” Calipari said.Gilgeous-Alexander had arrived at Kentucky with a hitch in his jump shot — Calipari compared it to Charles Barkley’s herky-jerky golf swing — and spent the early weeks of the season mostly coming off the bench. By the middle of January, he was blossoming as a starter. By June, he was the 11th overall pick in the 2018 N.B.A. draft, headed to the Los Angeles Clippers.Gilgeous-Alexander played so well as a rookie that the Thunder put him on their wish list. That summer, when the All-Star Paul George wanted to be traded to the Clippers from Oklahoma City, the Thunder insisted that Gilgeous-Alexander be included in the deal.Now in his fourth season with the Thunder, Gilgeous-Alexander is the face of a franchise that should come equipped with training wheels. Although Chet Holmgren, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2022 draft, is out for the season with a foot injury, the Thunder have a core that includes Josh Giddey, 20, and Luguentz Dort, 23. Even amid his emergence, Gilgeous-Alexander has never sought to separate himself from his teammates.“I might have sworn at Lu before,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, “but me and Lu lived together, and we’re like brothers so it doesn’t count.”Luguentz Dort, left, and Gilgeous-Alexander bonded as teammates and roommates in Oklahoma City.Alonzo Adams/USA Today Sports, via ReutersGilgeous-Alexander and Dort, who are also teammates on the Canadian men’s national basketball team, are candid about their bromance. When Gilgeous-Alexander was vaccinated against the coronavirus, Dort held his hand. (Gilgeous-Alexander is afraid of needles.) When they were roommates, Dort accepted the perils of sharing space with someone who was recently voted GQ magazine’s Most Stylish Man of the Year.“I don’t want to say his clothes are everywhere,” Dort said. “But he has a lot of clothes — clothes that have a lot of volume to them.”But while life in the N.B.A. is rewarding — Gilgeous-Alexander is in the first year of a five-year contract extension worth about $180 million — it can also be disorienting. So he dodges complacency as if it were a traffic cone, supplementing his time with the team by working with Olin Simplis, a high-profile skills coach.And, of course, he heads to Hamilton at the start of each off-season to work out with friends who neither expect nor ask for anything in return.‘Just something that friends do’After his first season in Oklahoma City, Gilgeous-Alexander wanted to make his summers more structured. So he hit up his buddies: Would they help him out five mornings a week?“It wasn’t even something that needed to be said,” said Campbell, who works full-time at a Kids Foot Locker and assists with a girls’ basketball league. “It was just something that friends do: If we want to see this guy grow and succeed, we need to be there for him no matter what.”Last summer, Gilgeous-Alexander would text his friends a few minutes before 7 a.m. to let them know that he was leaving his house — his hoops-centric version of flashing the Bat-Signal.“You get that text, and you know you have about 15 minutes to get ready,” said Chu, a student at Toronto Metropolitan University.Gilgeous-Alexander’s friends help him with shooting and passing drills during the summer in Ontario.Cole Burston for The New York TimesGilgeous-Alexander would retrieve his friends, one by one, in his pale brown Mercedes-Benz G-Class. Castillanes was typically the first stop.“He always got the front seat,” Chu said.Once assembled, they often had enough time during the ride to Burlington to cram in a homespun version of “Carpool Karaoke.” In June, Jack Harlow’s album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” was on repeat. By July, they were tearing through Burna Boy’s latest tracks.“It’s a refreshing start to the day to see all your friends,” Chu said, “even when you’re mad tired.”At the gym, they would warm up and stretch, then Gilgeous-Alexander would polish his shooting for about an hour as his friends rebounded for him. He usually filled the second hour with drills — footwork, defense, passing — before transitioning into half-court games of 3-on-3 with a lopsided feel.“Shai takes all the shots,” Campbell said.His court work complete, Gilgeous-Alexander would drop his friends off so he could lift weights — in another buddy’s two-car garage. Nem Ilic, 27, who describes his work as “athlete development,” spent last summer building Gilgeous-Alexander’s lower body: lunges in the garage, weighted sled pushes in the cul-de-sac out front. (The neighbors always knew when Gilgeous-Alexander was around.)“Guys in my position, you usually have to work your way up from high school to college to the pros,” Ilic said. “And I have a unique timeline. It went straight to Shai.”In their own way, the friends are a part of it all.A poster of Gilgeous-Alexander is seen on the doors of Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School.Cole Burston for The New York Times“I think the N.B.A. is so crazy that he wants to come here and feel grounded,” Chu said, “and we’re all so grounded up here that we want to hear about N.B.A. life.”They can see Gilgeous-Alexander’s progress — and feel it, too, whenever they try to defend him on those early summer mornings.“I want to say it’s never really that much of a fun time,” Campbell said.They have busy lives of their own. Montoya, for example, manages a Hamilton-area restaurant. Castillanes recently relocated to Oklahoma City after Gilgeous-Alexander asked him if he would help manage his day-to-day life. And Kong works in public health while he prepares for medical school.“You know how they say commitment will pay off if you improve by 1 percent every day? It’s something you see in real time with Shai,” Kong said. “And it’s something I can apply to my own life.” More

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      Turning Sports Statistics Into Riveting Cinema

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      Jon Bois and his collaborators specialize in documentaries about seemingly unremarkable teams. Then he wields charts and graphs to spellbinding effect.Toward the end of “The History of the Atlanta Falcons” (2021), a seven-part, nearly seven-hour documentary, the writer-director Jon Bois describes a surprise 82-yard interception return by the Falcons cornerback Robert Alford, executed with just minutes left in the first half of Super Bowl LI, in 2017, as “one of the very most impactful individual plays in all of N.F.L. history.”Almost any other filmmaker would have been content to leave it at that. But Bois shows his work. On the sports statistics website pro-football-reference.com, Bois explains, there is a metric called expected points that “estimates how many points an offense should be expected to score on a drive before a particular play and after that play.” Subtract one from the other, and you determine the play’s overall impact. Alford’s interception return resulted in negative seven points for the New England Patriots on a drive that should have earned them three, for a differential of 10.7. Bois pulls up a chart graphing the differential “of all 8,982 individual plays in Super Bowl history.” The Alford touchdown, we can plainly see, ranks as the third biggest of all-time.This was not an exaggeration for rhetorical effect. When Bois says that a play is “one of the very most impactful,” he means it.Bois is the poet laureate of sports statistics. His documentaries, including the acclaimed “The History of the Seattle Mariners” (2020) and the recent Charlotte Bobcats-themed “The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts” (both streaming on his YouTube channel, Secret Base) are packed with charts, graphs and diagrams scrupulously plotting wins, losses, points, home runs and field goals with a rigor that borders on scientific.“I was one of the weird kids who actually liked high school algebra,” Bois said recently in a video interview. “And as I grew up, I just loved the statistical side of sports. The ability to condense sports into a bar graph or a pie chart or a scatter plot — in a way, you can watch a thousand games in 10 seconds. It’s like a little time warp.”A longtime sportswriter and editor with SB Nation, the respected sports-industry blog owned by Vox Media, Bois, 40, has emerged as a singular voice in documentary film — in part, he explained, because of the style he “stumbled into” as a result of his “limited technical abilities.” A self-taught video editor without a background in motion graphics, Bois, unusually, makes most of his video work within the satellite imaging app Google Earth, importing images directly onto Google’s 3-D environments and using the satellite maps as a kind of virtual sandbox. It looks a little like a PowerPoint presentation ported into a street-view map, with huge blocks of text floating above pixelated renderings of roads and baseball stadiums.Bois and his collaborators work in the Google Earth app, using pixelated images of stadiums and other sites.via Jon BoisThe style is unmistakable. The camera seems to float in the air above graphs and charts, and, as Bois or one of his collaborators narrates, we’re treated to old photographs, quotes from newspaper clippings and the occasional grainy clip of archival game footage. And all of it is scored to mellow, synth-laden yacht rock and smooth jazz. It’s as if Ken Burns had adapted “Moneyball” with a soundtrack by Steely Dan.“In an era of impersonal and interchangeable internet content, Bois has a signature all his own,” said Jordan Cronk, a film critic and founder of the Acropolis Cinema, a screening series in Los Angeles. “Unlike other journalists who have tried their hand at filmmaking, Bois found a cutting-edge form for pop-encyclopedic explorations of sports history, combining a YouTuber’s flair for storytelling with a tradition of hyper-analytic essay cinema.”Bois acknowledged that “for better or worse, it doesn’t look or sound like anything else out there.” And to him, it’s most important “not to be better than anybody, but to be different from everybody.”No less unique are the kinds of stories Bois and his regular co-writer and producer Alex Rubenstein choose to tell. The teams, players and seasons they focus on are not typically well-known, lacking the obvious drama of underdog success or rags-to-riches glory. The Mariners, Falcons and Bobcats are not perennial favorites or inspirational fodder. Their lore is esoteric and offbeat.“We realized no one in a thousand years would do a movie on the history of the Mariners or the history of the Falcons,” Bois said. “Those stories would not get tackled like they deserve to.”Bois’s level of exacting detail can be overwhelming and, in the course of generous running times, occasionally exhausting. But his work isn’t for stats nerds who want to geek out on numbers. In fact, his approach has the opposite effect: The films’ depth makes them more accessible. You don’t have to know anything about the Mariners to enjoy his nearly four-hour documentary about them. You don’t even have to know anything about baseball.“He manages to use statistics not as background support for dramatic entertainment but the most foregrounded and visually stimulating element in his narratives,” said Jake Cole, a film critic with Slant Magazine.“No one in a thousand years would do a movie on the history of the Mariners or the history of the Falcons,” Bois acknowledged. Lila Barth for The New York TimesAs Bois put it, he and Rubenstein are “making sports documentaries for people who don’t watch sports.”“I find it not only a great honor but also a hell of a lot of fun to be able to bring this cool, weird, often stupid world of sports to somebody who otherwise didn’t get the invite,” Bois said. Essential to that experience is getting swept up in the vicarious thrill of an unfamiliar team and its mundane drama. Bois and Rubenstein manage to compress decades of often tumultuous history into a few hours of densely packed nonfiction, describing the dramatic account of an obscure team’s rise and fall (or fall and further fall) on a momentous scale. After watching one of their films, you inevitably feel an intimate connection with the subject: You know every heartbreaking Bobcats loss and every hard-won Mariners victory. It’s a gratifying entrée into a world ordinarily reserved for homegrown fans.Bois doesn’t necessarily come to these stories as a fan himself. His latest, “The People You’re Paying to Be in Shorts,” is about the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats, a short-lived team that was somewhat infamous among basketball fans for its record-breaking awfulness and that broke N.B.A. records for losing streaks before reclaiming its previous name, the Hornets, in 2014. (The team had been the Charlotte Hornets from 1988 to 2002.)But Bois was quick to admit that he is no expert on the N.B.A. To pull off this comprehensive look at a truly lousy season, he brought on the producer Seth Rosenthal, who specializes in basketball, and spent countless hours poring over old copies of the Charlotte Observer, reading “every single thing they wrote about the Bobcats” during that period. “I realized that I didn’t have to be an expert in basketball,” Bois said. “But I can randomly be the world’s foremost expert in this one season of one team,” he added, using an expletive for the abysmal Bobcats.The result is a documentary that makes you root for this wonderful assortment of oddballs despite recognizing how amazingly terrible they are. He gets into the nitty-gritty of contract negotiations, career field goal percentages and N.B.A. draft lottery odds in a way that makes the numbers utterly riveting, and he finds the cosmic beauty in the contrast between the worst team in league history and their principal owner, Michael Jordan, the greatest player of all time. It’s not just that you wind up knowing more about an obscure team. You wind up moved by them.“I operate by the general theory that there is always a story,” Bois said. “I could throw a dart at any season of any team — the 2005 Timberwolves, the 1987 Astros, whoever, and I could find something. There’s always something there no matter what.”He paused a moment. “Although,” he reconsidered, “the weirder and more awful the team is, the better.” More

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      Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert Talks, Criticism, Covid and Donovan Mitchell

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      Gobert had a dominant run in Utah, but now he and the Minnesota Timberwolves are struggling to find their fit together. He hears the chatter — and ignores it.Rudy Gobert, the Minnesota Timberwolves center and French basketball star, rode the same wave of emotions as many of his French compatriots during the men’s World Cup final this month. Angst. Hope. Agony.When it ended, with France losing to Argentina in penalty kicks, he reached out to his friend, the 24-year-old French star Kylian Mbappé, who had scored three goals in the championship match.“I was really proud of him,” Gobert said. “He showed the world who he is. He’s only getting better and better. That’s what I told him.”Gobert thought Mbappé must have felt like he did after he lost to Spain in the EuroBasket final with the French national team three months ago.“Obviously, it’s not as watched as the soccer World Cup, but it’s the same feeling when you lose, when you’re so close to being on top and lose in the final,” Gobert said. “So just got to use that pain to just keep getting better.”Gobert, a three-time N.B.A. defensive player of the year, has been going through a challenging period of his own.This summer, the Utah Jazz traded him to Minnesota, which bet its future on Gobert’s ability to help the franchise win its first championship. The Timberwolves gave the Jazz four draft picks, four players and the right to swap picks in 2026.“The average fan might not understand what I bring to the table,” Gobert said, “but the G.M.s in the league do.”In Minnesota, Gobert joined his fellow big man Karl-Anthony Towns, and the team has struggled to adjust to its new makeup. The Timberwolves went on a five-game winning streak in November, but Towns has been out since he hurt his calf Nov. 28 and Gobert has missed a few games. Minnesota was 16-18 entering Wednesday’s game against New Orleans.Gobert recently sat down with The New York Times to discuss his transition to Minnesota; how he handles criticism; racism in Utah; and his relationship with his former Jazz teammate Donovan Mitchell, who was traded to Cleveland in September.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Gobert’s scoring is down this season, to 13.9 points per game from 15.6 per game last season in Utah.Chris Szagola/Associated PressWhat has it been like adjusting to playing with another center like Karl-Anthony Towns?I don’t really like to call him a center because I don’t think he’s a center. I think it’s more of a wing in a center’s body. But yeah, it’s been a fun process so far. Obviously, we knew there was going to be some ups and downs, and there is some ups and downs. But KAT has been a great teammate. He’s been a great human.People like to focus on the fact that it’s two big men that play together, but there is always a process of adjustment when a player like me joins another team. Building chemistry takes time.Is it hard when you’re going through that process and there are so many eyes on how it’s going?It’s not hard for me. I want to win, I’m a competitor, so it’s hard to lose. But at the same time, I’m able to understand the bigger picture and to understand that you got to go through pain to grow. I’ve said every time people ask me, it’s going to be some adversity. And when adversity hits, obviously everybody will have something to say. People are always going to have opinions.A lot of people celebrate my failures. It’s kind of like a mark of respect for me just to have people that just wait until I do something wrong or until my teams start losing. Then they become really, really loud. And when my teams do well it’s quiet again. You know, I kind of embrace that it’s part of the external noise that comes with all the success that we’ve had in Utah and over the last few years in my career.When did you first feel that people were celebrating your failures?Once I started to have success, when I started winning defensive player of the year, All-N.B.A., being an All-Star. When my team, when we started winning like 50 games and stuff. The people on social media are always the loudest. When I go outside, it’s usually all the interactions are positive.Social media is a different place, and the people that have a lot of frustration can put it out there. The fans are going to have opinions. I’m more talking about the media.A lot of people talk about Utah as being a difficult place for Black players, for Black people in general. Did you ever have experiences like that as a Black player when you were there?My family and I never had any bad experiences. I’ve always had a lot of love over there. But I can understand, for me being an N.B.A. player and for a young Black man that’s maybe the only Black guy in his school, treatment can be different. People talk about Utah, but it’s similar everywhere when there’s not a lot of diversity. It’s part of every society in the world that people that can be marginalized for being different color of skin, different religion. There’s always going to be kids at school that’s going to bully people for being different.Gobert has won three Defensive Player of the Year Awards.Alika Jenner/Getty ImagesYou went through a very strange experience a couple of years ago in Utah as the first N.B.A. player known to have tested positive for the coronavirus. You were blamed for spreading it within the league, even though no one really knew how it happened. How did that experience affect you?It was a really tough experience for me, dealing with all that, obviously, Covid, but also everything that came with it. Thanks to — yeah, it was a tough experience, but I think it made me grow.Did you say ‘thanks to media’?No, I stopped saying what I was going to say. But I remember a lot of things that happened. I won’t forget, you know. There was a lot of fear. There was a lot of narratives out there. I was a victim of that. But at the same time, a lot of people were going through some really tough moments. I had to get away from what people are saying about me. It was people that don’t even know me. And I know that when you have something like that that’s happening, people are really stressed out and it was tough for everyone.There was a lot of conversation about your relationship with Donovan Mitchell, at that time and afterward. How do you view how that relationship was?I think it was a tough situation for me, just like it was a tough situation for him. After that, we came back to have a lot of success as a team. As of today, Donovan is someone that I want to see him happy. I want to see him succeed. I want him and his family to be great. Things happen, and sometimes people can do things to you that can hurt you. A lot of times it’s out of fear, you know. So you just have to grow through that and see past that.You mentioned people will do things that hurt you. Do you mean Mitchell?I mean generally. That’s life. More