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      Clippers Beat Suns in Game 3, Continuing a Playoff Trend

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      For the third straight playoff series, Los Angeles spotted an opponent two wins and then roared back in Game 3. In each previous series, they kept winning and advanced.The Los Angeles Clippers are the first team in N.B.A. history to erase multiple 2-0 series deficits in the same postseason. Their players, so impressed by the adjustments that their coach, Tyronn Lue, has been making to facilitate those comebacks, have started calling him Bill Belichick.“Yeah, right,” Lue said late Thursday, laughing at the comparisons to Belichick, who has coached the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl titles.Lue knows the Clippers remain seven wins from the first N.B.A. championship in franchise history, but on Thursday they managed to add another entry to their improbable run of Game 3 recoveries — and this time they did it without their best player. With Kawhi Leonard reduced to spectator status, watching from a Staples Center suite as he nursed a worrisome right knee sprain, Los Angeles ground out a 106-92 victory over the Phoenix Suns to slice the Suns’ lead in the best-of-seven Western Conference finals to 2-1.While none of the Clippers got too carried away with one win, given the specter of Leonard’s uncertain availability for the rest of the series, the performance provided the feel of an actual trend that began with the Clippers’ momentous Game 3 win in Dallas and continued with a similar escape against the Utah Jazz in the next round.Paul George scored 27 points in Game 3.Robert Hanashiro/USA Today Sports, via ReutersIn the first round, Dallas had won the first two games as the road team and opened a 30-11 lead in Game 3 before the Clippers rallied for a win that probably saved their season.This week, after the Clippers dropped the first two games in Phoenix while the Suns’ Chris Paul was isolated from his team in the league’s health and safety protocols, Los Angeles needed a similar turning point. With Paul making his return Thursday night, the Suns, with Paul in and Leonard out, seemed set up perfectly to bring a halt to the Clippers’ Game 3 joy.Then Lue intervened, as he had in the Dallas series (when he made the 6-foot-8 Nicolas Batum his starting center) and then the Utah series (when he unleashed the reserve guard Terance Mann, with Leonard out, and Mann responded by scoring a career-high 39 points in a closeout victory in Game 6).On Thursday, Lue again started the 6-foot-5 Mann to send some size at the rusty Paul, but he also handed key roles to Patrick Beverley and Ivica Zubac (15 points and 16 rebounds) after pulling both from the starting lineup in the Dallas series. Assigning Mann to Paul and directing Beverley to hound the Suns’ Devin Booker helped a weary Paul George stay just fresh enough to register 27 points, 15 rebounds and 8 assists. It was an encouraging rebound for George, whose two late missed free throws in Game 2 in Phoenix created the opening for the Suns to steal a 104-103 victory on Deandre Ayton’s dunk in the final second. In Game 3, George’s half-court bank shot at the third-quarter buzzer freshened up his 9-for-26 shooting line considerably and crucially nudged the Clippers’ lead to 80-69, giving them the fourth-quarter edge that led to the Suns’ first loss since May 27.“I thought we did a great job of moving on,” George said. “I moved on. I know I have to be better.”That was a safe assumption with Paul returning from his 10-day isolation from the Suns. Before his sudden exile, Paul, 36, had played the best series of his career in a second-round sweep over the Denver Nuggets — clinching only the second trip to the conference finals in Paul’s 16-season career. He also surely wanted to make a showy return to Los Angeles, where he had spent six fruitless seasons with the Clippers before departing in 2017.Paul and the Suns still have an opportunity to lead their franchise into the N.B.A. finals for the first time since 1993. Leonard’s injury makes this the third straight round in which the Suns have faced a compromised opponent, after the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers (Anthony Davis) and then the Nuggets (Jamal Murray) were weakened by the loss of key players.Yet Paul and Booker combined to shoot 10 for 40 from the field in Game 3, with Booker forced to wear a plastic face shield after a Game 2 clash with Beverley left him with a broken nose. The Suns also lost Cameron Payne, who starred in Game 2 (29 points, 9 assists, 0 turnovers) while filling in for Paul, when he injured his left ankle in the first half. For once in a postseason marked by serious injury issues in both conferences, Phoenix looked a bit banged up heading into Saturday’s Game 4.Booker insisted that his nose was “fine, honestly” after doctors deemed it broken in three places, and he dismissed suggestions that the mask had affected his shooting. I checked in with one of Booker’s former Suns teammates, Jamal Crawford, after Crawford took to Twitter during Booker’s 5-for-21 shooting struggles to describe his own experience with a face shield as “the best defense” he had ever seen.Devin Booker wore a mask to protect his broken nose but refused to blame it for his 5-for-21 shooting performance.Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press“The mask challenge is real,” Crawford said. “First off, you can only see straight ahead, nothing on the sides. And even shooting, your depth perception is not quite right. A shot you shoot long may be short, and vice versa. It’s tough to get in a rhythm.”Crawford recalled ditching the mask after a quarter and taking his chances with an exposed nose because “the frustration of wearing it was too much.” The Suns coach, Monty Williams, not surprisingly, implored his players to blame the defeat on nothing apart from their failure to match what he termed the Clippers’ “desperation.”To hear Lue’s players tell it, that pluck stemmed as much from him as despair. Whether the Clippers can win Game 4 and give their third successive comeback attempt from a 2-0 deficit a significant jolt most likely depends on how well Paul and Booker can bounce back from their shaky reunion. But the Clippers said they were convinced Lue would have a plan for that.“I think it’s special, just the relationship I have with T-Lue, and the relationship T-Lue has with every individual on this team in general,” George said. He credited a late-night phone call with Lue shortly after the team landed in Los Angeles after the painful Game 2 defeat with helping him bounce back.But does that make him the next Belichick?“I’m nowhere near him,” Lue said.Was he bold enough to believe that the Clippers, after going 0-6 in Game 1s and Game 2s, can make it back to 2-2 again even without Leonard?“I don’t like it, I’ll tell you that,” Lue said of his team’s habit of digging early holes. “But we’ve been a resilient team all season long.” More

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      Lakers Eliminated from Playoffs With Game 6 Loss to Suns

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      The Los Angeles Lakers, the defending N.B.A. champions led by LeBron James, struggled with injuries all season.The Los Angeles Lakers’ brief reign is over.The Phoenix Suns eliminated the Lakers from the N.B.A. playoffs on Thursday night with a 113-100 victory in Game 6 of their first-round series, ending LeBron James’s hopes of hauling the Lakers to back-to-back championships.It is the first time that James, 36, has exited the playoffs in the first round — and it was a young, up-and-coming team that hastened his departure.The second-seeded Suns, who are making their first postseason appearance since 2010, leaned on the inside-outside combination of Devin Booker, 24, and Deandre Ayton, 22, throughout the series.“I just know they wanted to be in these types of games,” Monty Williams, the Suns’ coach, said before Thursday’s game. “And I think they haven’t run from the moment, run from situations.”Both players, Williams said, got a taste of the spotlight last season, when the Suns won eight straight games in the league’s bubble — a run that left Phoenix short of qualifying for the postseason but made the team’s young core eager to achieve more.The Suns will now face the Denver Nuggets in the conference semifinals. The Nuggets eliminated the Portland Trail Blazers on Thursday.Devin Booker led the suns with 47 points.Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe Lakers, who were hindered by injuries throughout the regular season, seemed to come unglued against the Suns after Anthony Davis, their All-Star power forward, strained his groin before halftime of Game 4. The Suns went on to win that game and then crushed the Lakers on Tuesday in Game 5 to seize momentum.Frank Vogel, the Lakers’ coach, said before Thursday’s game that Davis “very much” wanted to play. Davis tried: He was in the starting lineup but was running gingerly from the tip and appeared to aggravate his injury while trying to block one of Booker’s layups early in the first quarter. Davis promptly went to the bench and never returned to the game.The Suns, meanwhile, were volcanic, shooting 10 of 13 from beyond the 3-point line in the first quarter en route to a 22-point lead heading into the second. Booker finished with 47 points and shot 8 of 10 from 3-point range.Since joining the Lakers before the start of the 2018-19 season, James has experienced highs and lows. His first season with the team unraveled when he injured his groin on Christmas Day, and the Lakers missed the playoffs. Last season, he engineered a resurgence, joining Davis to lead the Lakers to their 17th championship. For James, the run was a crowning achievement: his first title with the Lakers, and his fourth overall with three teams.As expected, the Lakers entered this season with big goals but struggled. After a strong start that seemed to position him as a candidate to win his fifth N.B.A. Most Valuable Player Award (and his first since 2013), James missed a total of 26 games after he sprained his ankle in March. And Davis, who has been hobbled by injuries throughout his career, was sidelined for about two months with a calf strain.The result was that the Lakers, who had been considered among the preseason favorites to win another title, were seldom whole, and they limped into the playoffs as the No. 7 seed in the West.Still, the Lakers were not an ideal first-round matchup for the Suns — and the task became even more challenging for Phoenix when Chris Paul, the team’s starting point guard and veteran leader, injured his right shoulder in the first game of the series. Paul played through the pain, though, and was terrific in Phoenix’s Game 4 win, a turning point for a franchise on the rise. More

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      The Lakers Weren’t Ready for the Moment. Devin Booker Was.

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      Booker, the Phoenix Suns’ All-Star guard, is already showing the poise and determination of a playoff regular in his first postseason.The roots of everything that the Suns are now — a winning team, a franchise with championship hopes — date to 2015, when Phoenix made Devin Booker the 13th overall pick of the N.B.A. draft. For his first couple of seasons in Phoenix, he played in relative anonymity. The Suns were a terrible team. The closest Booker got to the playoffs was watching other players celebrate big wins on television.Still, he kept refining his craft as change swirled around him. The franchise kept tinkering and building. By the start of last season, none of the teammates he had as a rookie remained on the roster. He made his first All-Star team, then helped the Suns close out their season a few months later with eight straight wins in the bubble environment at Walt Disney World — a run that cemented their identity as a young, tough-minded team but was not enough to make the playoffs.Booker had to wait a little longer for his first trip to the postseason. On Sunday afternoon, the Suns opened the doors of their arena to nearly 12,000 fans for Game 1 of their first-round series against the Los Angeles Lakers. The Suns were among the teams that were able to increase their arena capacity for the start of the playoffs, and Coach Monty Williams said he found it jarring in the best way possible.“When I came out and saw that many people and heard the noise, I was like, ‘Holy smokes, this is pretty cool,’ ” he said. “I had to get myself under control emotionally because I hadn’t been in that environment in a long time.”If everything about the experience was new to Booker, he did a good job of hiding it in the Suns’ 99-90 win. He was dominant in an almost effortless way, outshining the title-tested luminaries with whom he shared the court. Booker has been on the cusp of emerging as one of the league’s brightest young stars for several years, but perhaps he needed to lead the Suns to a playoff win — against the Lakers, no less — to solidify his arrival.“Honestly,” he said, “it’s a little different. The intensity is different. The physicality is different.”It was only one game, of course, and it is worth remembering that the Lakers lost a pair of playoff series openers — to the Trail Blazers in the first round and to the Rockets in the conference semifinals — before crushing both Portland and Houston on their march to last season’s finals victory.But the big stage did not seem to affect the 24-year-old Booker. If anything, he embraced it.In the game’s early stages, he quickly passed out of a double-team, a decision that led to an open shot for a teammate. It was a small but significant moment: Booker seemed determined not to force much of anything. Instead, he was going to trust his teammates and bank on the slow, methodical process that had put the Suns in this position in the first place, as the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference.Suns Coach Monty Williams, middle, talked with Booker and forward Jae Crowder during the second half.Christian Petersen/Getty Images“Book has this reputation as a scorer, but he’s an unbelievably good passer,” Williams said, adding: “When he sees the double-team, he gets out of it. That’s who he is, and he probably doesn’t get enough credit for his willingness to pass.”Make no mistake: Booker scored, too. He spun through small crowds of defenders. He pulled up from the 3-point line. He finished with a game-high 34 points while shooting 13 of 26 from the field. He also had 8 assists and 7 rebounds, stamping the playoffs with his presence.The only player who may have been more impressive was his teammate, Deandre Ayton, the third-year center and 2018 No. 1 overall pick. He had 21 points and 16 rebounds while defending (and outplaying) the Lakers’ Anthony Davis, who was limited to 13 points and 7 rebounds. Davis took the blame for the Lakers’ loss. Booker described the 22-year-old Ayton’s performance as “next level.”“You could see it in his face pregame, that he was ready to go,” Booker said.There is an enormous disparity in experience in this best-of-seven series, and for one game, at least, it did not matter. While it was postseason game No. 1 for Booker and Ayton, it was postseason game No. 261 for the Lakers’ LeBron James, who first went to the playoffs when Booker was in the fourth grade.James, who sprained his ankle in March and wound up missing 26 games, had a muted opener against the Suns, scoring 18 points and attempting just 13 field goals. As a team, the Lakers shot poorly from the 3-point line and were outrebounded.It was an afternoon that, in some ways, typified their season. Because of injuries, the Lakers have seldom been whole. The defending champions, they limped into the playoffs as the conference’s No. 7 seed. Still, their struggles did not seem to matter to the oddsmakers who, before the start of the series, were favoring them to eliminate the Suns. Respect is hard won.Lebron James had 18 points in the loss.Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressOn Sunday, bodies collided and tempers flared. The Suns’ Chris Paul, one of the few players on the team with plentiful postseason experience, injured his right shoulder but played through apparent pain. (Paul is expected to play in Game 2 on Tuesday night.) Cameron Payne, his teammate, was ejected for throwing an elbow — and the ball — at the Lakers’ Alex Caruso.Aside from that kerfuffle, however, the Suns kept their composure. They never trailed in the second half, a surprisingly mature effort. Williams often tells his players that there are moments when “preparation meets opportunity,” and Booker seized his own. In fact, he had been preparing for Sunday’s game for years.He could have cited the summer mornings when he was a teenager and he would run sprints while wearing a weighted vest under the watchful and demanding eye of his father, Melvin, a former N.B.A. player. Or the YouTube videos of stars that he would parse. Or his first few seasons in Phoenix, which were not much fun. The past, though, was prelude. Booker said he could sense “something inside” of him before Sunday’s game. It was hard to define.“I was ready for it,” he said. More

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      Devin Booker Is Coming Into His Own With the Suns

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The NBA SeasonThis Is for Stephen Curry’s CriticsAre the Knicks Back?A Year of Kobe and LeBronMarc Stein’s Fearless PredictionsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storymarc stein on basketballDevin Booker Is Coming Into His Own With the SunsBooker, the 24-year-old Phoenix Suns guard, learned to lead while his team was losing dozens of games a year. Now the Suns are winning, and that comes with new demands.Devin Booker, front right, is coming into his own as the leader of the Phoenix Suns. They are off to a 5-2 start.Credit…Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesJan. 6, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETWith about a week to go before the Phoenix Suns’ first game of the N.B.A. restart in July, Devin Booker was bubbling with confidence. Unruffled by a four-month interruption of his best season as a pro, Booker brushed off a reminder that the Suns held the second-worst record of the 22 teams invited to Walt Disney World.“I’m ready right now,” Booker said that day. “I’m right there.”Booker quickly proved it. He had spent the two prior months training with his father, the former N.B.A. guard Melvin Booker, at a private gym in Phoenix. He then averaged 30.5 points, 6.0 assists and 4.9 rebounds to lead the Bubble Suns to an 8-0 record in seeding games, leaving them just a half-game shy of bumping the Memphis Grizzlies out of a play-in series with the Portland Trail Blazers for the final playoff spot in the Western Conference. Phoenix was six games out of the No. 8 slot in the West going into the restart. No one expected the Suns to get as close to the playoffs as they did.The problem: Phoenix’s two-week surge in the bubble was the most sustained team success for Booker since he jumped to the N.B.A. as the 13th pick in the 2015 draft after one season at Kentucky, where his 38-1 Wildcats were so deep that Booker didn’t start. In the N.B.A., he has known mostly despair in the desert beyond his individual statistics, a struggle Booker hasn’t denied.“I always say it’s my toughest adjustment to the N.B.A. — how to deal with the losing and still remaining a leader,” Booker said before his bubble run.Whether or not Booker and the Suns can finally leave losing behind remains one of the loudest questions in the N.B.A., but the early signs are promising — especially now that they have Chris Paul. The Suns responded to their bubble breakthrough by trading for the 35-year-old Paul, absorbing the two seasons and nearly $86 million left on his contract. The idea was that Paul’s veteran know-how, combined with Booker’s scoring prowess and Deandre Ayton’s potential as an interior anchor, would give Phoenix the three-star backbone needed to secure a playoff spot in the hypercompetitive West.The Suns are betting on the veteran savvy of Chris Paul, right, and Devin Booker’s offensive skills to finally push the team back to the playoffs.Credit…Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesWhile precious little has played out as predicted in the embryonic days of the league’s 75th season — just take a quick scan through the Eastern Conference standings — Phoenix is an exception. The Suns are off to a notable 5-2 start as they try to live up to the billing of a team widely expected to bust out of a 10-year playoff drought.Booker has had a bumpy start to the season, stumbling to a league-high total of 37 turnovers to sully his robust per-game averages (21.1 points, 4.1 rebounds and 4.4 assists). The Suns nonetheless won five of their first six games, earned a top-five defensive rating and responded to their poorest showing with some grit after falling behind the Los Angeles Clippers by 31 points at home Sunday night.Blowouts have become commonplace across the league during the season’s uneven start, an early oddity widely attributed to most teams’ playing without fans in the arenas to motivate them and an abbreviated training camp and preseason. Headed for another one of those routs after a shoddy first half, Phoenix instead rallied to within one point in the fourth quarter before the Clippers pulled out a 112-107 victory.Paul has also had some spotty moments offensively as he and Booker work to establish the backcourt chemistry that Booker had with Paul’s predecessor, Ricky Rubio, but the Suns already have the look of a more well-rounded team. The arrival of the rugged forward Jae Crowder in free agency, on top of Paul’s leadership, has quickly convinced one veteran scout whose view I trust that these Suns are “the real deal defensively.” Phoenix also has benefited from the continued improvement of the defensive specialist Mikal Bridges and the sharpshooting Cam Johnson, whose selection at No. 11 over all in the 2019 draft by Minnesota on the Suns’ behalf earned Phoenix serious scorn.It’s the sort of response Suns Coach Monty Williams was hoping for even before he knew that Phoenix would be able to trade for Paul. Williams told me it was his “messed-up coaching mind-set” that made him find more good than heartbreak in the Suns’ coming so close to a playoff berth in August before falling short.“I was glad our players got a chance to experience that kind of success,” Williams said. “But to miss the playoffs by half a game, I was thankful for that, too, because I hope our players understand now that every single game counts.”Left to right: Mikal Bridges, Chris Paul, Devin Booker, Deandre Ayton and Jae Crowder. The Suns have the same record as the champion Los Angeles Lakers.Credit…Ron Chenoy/USA Today Sports, via ReutersWilliams’s authoritative presence on the bench, after he coached Paul in New Orleans, was one of the primary lures in persuading Paul to push for the trade that sent him to Phoenix from Oklahoma City in November. Yet Paul insisted recently that the lure of playing beside Booker was just as strong; he scoffed at suggestions that he was brought in to provide all of the guidance.“I’m not James Naismith, by no means,” Paul said at his introductory Suns news conference, referring to the sport’s inventor.The reality is that Paul’s outsize personality tends to soak up much of the oxygen in any room or gym he occupies, but Booker’s talent is such that the Suns don’t want him deferring. Surrounded by more help than he has ever had, Booker will face higher-than-ever expectations. He earned his first All-Star selection last season as an injury replacement chosen by the league after Portland’s Damian Lillard went down.“I think it’s going to fuel him,” Williams said of Booker’s taste of bubble success. “I hate talking for players, but just knowing him and his competitiveness, I think it’s going to spur him on.“Book’s a winner,” Williams continued. “He plays winning basketball. He’s got a high I.Q. We’ll talk about stuff, and he’s completing my sentences because he knows where I’m going.”Both coach and player know, though, that Williams’s proclamations can only be validated by the standings. The Suns have the league’s second-longest active playoff drought at 10 seasons and counting, behind only Sacramento’s 14 years in a row, and would be wise not to overreact to two prosperous weeks after the highs and lows of summer camp.“It’s not an easy league,” Booker said.Corner ThreeWhen was the last time you heard “Jump” by Kris Kross outside of an N.B.A. game?Credit…Andy Clayton-King/Associated PressYou ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.(Questions may be lightly edited or condensed for clarity.)Q: In the next collective bargaining agreement, trade kickers should be a two-way street. If a superstar requests a trade prior to the completion of his contract, there should be a trade kicker that the player is required to pay. — @MrBrianBlair from TwitterStein: James Harden’s desire to be traded away from the Houston Rockets, and the Harden-centric chaos initiated by his refusal to report to training camp on time, has clearly made this a touchy topic. And I get it: Harden’s determination to leave quickly became a full-on sideshow.What you’re suggesting, though creative, is far too punitive for most players.Trade kickers are negotiated bonuses that players get if they are traded, meaning not all players have them in their contracts. I can’t co-sign making players pay a fee when they demand a trade — not when you account for how many more advantages teams hold over them in controlling contracts.Players are routinely traded without having any say, while first-round draft picks are subject to a rookie pay scale that often doesn’t reflect their value. And players generally have to clear restricted free agency — which affords contract-matching rights to the incumbent team — before making it to unrestricted free agency.There is no one-size-fits-all rule to apply here, because every situation is different. If a player asks to be traded according to league guidelines (in other words, without making it public) and performs professionally afterward, it’s not some heinous basketball crime.The Los Angeles Clippers infamously traded Blake Griffin to Detroit in 2018 just six months after persuading him to sign a five-year, $171 million contract with promises of making him “a Clipper for life.” I’m not trying to suggest that we will throw newsletter support behind every trade demand, but the Griffin situation was a handy reminder that only certain stars wield ultimate power, even in the player empowerment era.It’s rare that trade demands are lodged before the later stages of a contract, closer to the player’s free agency. Don’t forget, furthermore, that no-trade clauses in the N.B.A. are difficult for players to obtain, requiring a minimum of eight years of service time and four with the same team.As for Harden, well, this is as messy as a trade request gets, so dismay with the brazen manner in which he appeared to be trying to force a trade last month is understandable. Harden’s status with the Rockets will be a distraction until he gets moved. But let’s not go overboard.Q: I was wondering if the N.B.A. or anyone associated with the league records the outcomes on jump balls. I know there aren’t that many jump balls in each individual game, but there are surely players who must have participated in numerous jump balls over time. Is there any way to figure out who ranks as the game’s Jump Ball King? — Richard Perry (New York)Stein: In this statistical age, given how much N.B.A. data is tracked on so many different sites, it’s a disheartening surprise to see that fresh jump ball data is not easy to find. It appears that this FanSided page, which has amassed individual data on jump ball winners from the 1996-97 season to 2016-17, is as thorough as it gets.This is not a difficult stat to track, so it’s unclear why more current results don’t appear on multiple sites. The reality, though, is that a jump ball king would be nearly impossible to identify, because 1996-97 was the first season that the N.B.A. began officially recording and archiving play-by-play data.So I’m afraid we’ll have to add this to the N.B.A.’s long list of statistical mysteries, which most prominently features the sad inability to know just how ferocious Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain truly were as shot-blockers. Blocks and steals did not become official box score stats until the 1973-74 season — and the limited game film from the league’s early years means that even enterprising researchers with time on their hands can’t just go back and do the math manually by studying old tapes.Q: How is Orlando allowing fans but not Miami? — @numberthirty6 from TwitterStein: In the few states where reduced crowds are allowed in N.B.A. arenas, it’s still a franchise-by-franchise choice on whether to let fans inside.In Florida, Orlando and Toronto (which has adopted Tampa, Fla., as its temporary home) have decided to admit fans. The Heat decided to wait.We’re seeing the same thing in Texas. Houston is letting a league-high 4,500 fans per game enter Toyota Center. Dallas and San Antonio have elected to keep their arenas closed to the public, with the Spurs announcing recently that they have pushed back plans to reopen their doors on Jan. 1 “because the Covid-19 numbers and data in our community continue to trend in the wrong direction.”Numbers GameThe Spurs’ Becky Hammon is one of six women who are assistant coaches in the N.B.A. this season.Credit…Ronald Cortes/Getty Images6After 11 women were on N.B.A. coaching staffs last season, that number is down to six this season. They are: Cleveland’s Lindsay Gottlieb, Dallas’s Jenny Boucek, Memphis’ Sonia Raman, New Orleans’s Teresa Weatherspoon, Sacramento’s Lindsey Harding and San Antonio’s Becky Hammon. When she took over for the ejected Gregg Popovich last week, Hammon became the first woman to serve as a head coach in an N.B.A. regular-season game.2Of the six other women who coached in the N.B.A. last season, two relinquished their posts to become head coaches at the college level. Kara Lawson left the Boston Celtics’ staff to take over as the women’s head coach at Duke, and Niele Ivey left the Grizzlies’ bench for the same role at Notre Dame. Two others — Toronto’s Brittni Donaldson and the Los Angeles Clippers’ Natalie Nakase — joined their franchise’s G League coaching staffs for this season.62.2Something to track: After shooting at least 72.4 percent from the free-throw line for five seasons in a row from 2014-15 to 2018-19, Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo is in the 60s for the second consecutive season. He shot 63.3 percent from the line last season and is off to a worrisome 62.2 percent start in the early stages of the new campaign.1,944The Cavaliers received permission last week from the Ohio Department of Health to expand their home crowds to nearly 2,000 fans — 1,944 to be exact — after crowds were limited to 300 for Cleveland’s first three home games.75Mark June 6 on your 2021 calendars: It’s the N.B.A.’s 75th birthday. The league was founded as the Basketball Association of America on June 6, 1946.Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More