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      This Is What Life After the N.B.A. Looks Like

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      Johnny Davis knew the end was near.During the summer of 1985, Davis was gearing up for his 10th N.B.A. season when he noticed something about his familiar quickness — namely, that it was missing.Davis was just 29 at the time. But the hard mileage of a productive basketball career had worn him down.“I was getting by with experience more so than I was with athletic talent,” said Davis, a versatile guard in his prime. “It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t the same player.”Davis was fortunate in the sense that he had time to prepare for retirement — “I wasn’t caught off guard at all,” he said — but he still had to confront the big question: What now?As N.B.A. teams trim their rosters before the season begins this month, a new batch of players will find themselves asking that same question. There is always an end in professional sports: Athletes become former athletes; All-Stars become “Isn’t he that guy?” And while there are perks of reaching the highest level, no one avoids the fundamental challenge of ascension: coming down.“The day you leave the N.B.A., now they tell you to start over again,” said Quentin Richardson, a guard whose 13-year playing career ended in 2013 when he was just 33.While some players have the luxury of leaving the game on their own terms, most have that decision made for them by the effects of age and injury, their careers punctuated by the wait for another contract offer that never materializes.“The sport generally leaves you,” Davis, 66, said. “And now you’re in this place where you have to move on from something that you have done your whole life. And sometimes that means you have to re-identify who you are.”Pau Gasol: ‘Now it’s someone else’s turn’Pau Gasol had many highs and lows over an 18-year N.B.A. career. But he said retiring was a “celebratory moment.”Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesPau Gasol wanted to gather his thoughts.After playing basketball for Spain at the Tokyo Olympics, he returned to his Spanish mountain cottage last August to spend time with his wife, Cat McDonnell, and their young daughter, Ellie. Gasol went for quiet walks, and as he contemplated the past — his 18 seasons in the N.B.A., his title runs alongside Kobe Bryant — he found peace.A few weeks later, Gasol announced his retirement at Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona’s famed opera house. He had just turned 41.“It was not a sad moment,” he said. “It was a celebratory moment.”Gasol had a long career, one that familiarized him with impermanence. He starred for the Memphis Grizzlies. He won two championships with the Los Angeles Lakers. He became more of a mentor with the Chicago Bulls and the San Antonio Spurs, then spent his final months in the N.B.A. laboring with a foot injury. He adapted to the evolution of his role.“I’m not saying it’s easy,” he said. “There are times when you still feel like you should start or play significant minutes. But life moves on, and now it’s someone else’s turn.”Gasol won two championships on the Los Angeles Lakers with Kobe Bryant, front, in 2009 and 2010.Kevin Kolczynski/ReutersBefore the Tokyo Olympics, he won a Spanish league championship in his final season with F.C. Barcelona, the club that had given him his professional start. “It was kind of romantic,” he said.Gasol, now 42, has since kept busy with his foundation that focuses on childhood obesity and as a member of the International Olympic Committee, a consultant for the Golden State Warriors and a W.N.B.A. investor. He also squeezes in the occasional round of golf.Of course, there are days when he misses playing basketball. So he copes by reading books about personal fulfillment and retirement, some of them geared toward people in their 60s. He also keeps in touch with Dr. William D. Parham, the director of mental health and wellness for the N.B.A. players’ union.“I’ve talked to him several times to help me weather this,” Gasol said. “You have to understand that nothing will ever really compare to the thrill of playing.”Mario West: Knowing When to Move OnMario West spent several seasons in the N.B.A. Now, he helps players cope with the worries of moving on.NBPAMario West, 38, spends most of the N.B.A. season in locker rooms making connections with players by getting personal.He might mention how in 2009 Shannon Brown, then a Lakers guard, famously pinned one of his layup attempts to the backboard. (“I’ve been a meme,” West said.) Or how he played in the Philippines and the Dominican Republic after a few seasons in the N.B.A. Or how injuries changed his plans.Now, as the director of Off the Court, an N.B.A. players’ union program, West counsels players on life after basketball. Most of them are not stars. Most worry about surviving training camp, about extending their careers. West was like that. So he gives his cellphone number to each player he meets.“If guys call me at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., I’m going to pick up,” he said.Yes, even some professional athletes go into life-crisis mode in the middle of the night, when the house quiets and the internal voices of worry and insecurity get loud. Their financial concerns may not be relatable to the average person, but late-night stomach knots are a human experience.West, left, playing in the N.B.A. playoffs for the Atlanta Hawks in 2010. He spent three seasons with the Hawks.Grant Halverson/Getty Images“I answer every phone call,” West said. “We want to be the 411 and the 911.”West often works with Deborah Murman, the director of the union’s career development program, who helps players cultivate outside interests.“I like to say that it’s much easier to walk away from something when you have something you’re walking toward,” Murman said.West’s professional career ended in 2015, when he was 31. He still plays pickup basketball in Atlanta, where he lives with his family. He has two young sons, and he wants to stay in shape for as long as possible.“I remember dunking on my dad when I was 14, and he never played me again,” West said.In his own way, West’s father knew when it was time to move on.Jamal Crawford: ‘I Had Emotional Days’Jamal Crawford won the Sixth Man of the Year Award three times over a two-decade career.Cassy Athena/Getty ImagesEven now, Jamal Crawford has trouble making sense of why his playing career ended.He thinks back to the 2017-18 season, when he came off the bench and helped the Minnesota Timberwolves reach the playoffs for the first time since 2004. Crawford’s N.B.A. peers named him the teammate of the year — then he went unsigned for months as a free agent.Sure, he had some mileage. He was 38 and coming off his 18th N.B.A. season, but he was healthy. When an offer finally did surface, it was with the Phoenix Suns the day before the 2018-19 season. He signed up for one year as a role player on one of the league’s worst and youngest teams.“You found beauty in the fact that you were helping guys learn to be professionals,” he said.Crawford thought he set himself up well for a new deal that summer by ending the season with high-scoring games. He thought wrong. The next season started without him.“I had emotional days where I’d wake up and be like, ‘Man, I can’t believe I’m not getting a call,’ ” he said.His agent was, in fact, fielding calls — several teams had reached out to gauge his interest in joining a front office or a coaching staff in 2019-20 — but Crawford still wanted to play. He was mystified: Had his late-season scoring binge worked against him? Were teams concerned that he would be unwilling to accept a limited role?Crawford scored 51 points in one of his final N.B.A. games.Tony Gutierrez/Associated PressHe was still unemployed when the coronavirus pandemic forced the N.B.A. to halt play for several months in March 2020. When the season resumed that July, he joined the Nets and injured his hamstring in his first game. His season was finished. And though he didn’t know it, so was his career.Over the next two years, as he made his desire to play again known on social media and TV, he stumbled into a new vocation and passion: coaching his son J.J.’s youth basketball team in Seattle.“It was the craziest thing,” Crawford said, “because I never knew that I would want to coach.”He shuttles his son to weekend tournaments. He diagrams plays on his iPad. He said he could see himself coaching for years to come. He announced his retirement from the N.B.A. in March but showed he still had it in an adult league in July.“Honestly, I have more fun coaching than I do playing — and I still love playing, by the way,” Crawford said. “If you’re an elite athlete and in that space for so long, you’re always going to be competitive. It doesn’t turn off. So, you need to find a way to channel it.”Cole Aldrich: Happy With Life After BasketballCole Aldrich, right, with his wife, Britt Aldrich, and their son, thought he would be away from basketball for just a year. Then the coronavirus pandemic changed his plans.Nikki JilekCole Aldrich would be the first to tell you that his circumstances are odd, that little about his life in Minnesota makes sense.He often hits the roads near his home on a fancy gravel bike. He’s “far too involved” in the construction of his new home. When he was golfing last fall, a member of his playing group asked him what he did for work. Aldrich, 33, told him he was retired.“You wouldn’t believe the looks people give you when you tell them that,” Aldrich said.In his former life, Aldrich was one of the top picks in the 2010 N.B.A. draft and spent his first two seasons with the Oklahoma City Thunder. He bounced around the league as a backup center before signing a three-year deal with the Minnesota Timberwolves with $17 million guaranteed.Aldrich spent some time as a Knicks center in 2013.Barton Silverman/The New York Times“At that point, I felt like I could take a little bit of a deep breath,” he said.He was cut before the third year of the deal, then sprained his knee while playing in China. At home in Minnesota, his wife, Britt Aldrich, was pregnant with their first child. Cole thought he would take a year off before giving hoops another shot. But after his son was born and the coronavirus pandemic rocked the world, “an easy decision for me became even easier,” he said.It is a rare luxury, “retiring” in your early 30s with millions in the bank. But can this type of life — stay-at-home dad, part-time cyclist — last forever? Aldrich predicts that he will want another job at some point.“I want to go and have a career in some capacity,” he said. “But I don’t know what that looks like.”Many people are lucky if they can afford to stop working when they’re old enough to claim Social Security payments. But in the N.B.A. world, most careers are over before the player turns 30. Aldrich was done in the N.B.A. by 29 and had earned millions. His life is indeed odd in the big picture.Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles: ‘Is It Really Over?’Quentin Richardson, left, and Darius Miles, right, made the Los Angeles Clippers cool and exciting when they joined the team as rookies in 2000.Guillermo Hernandez Martinez/The Players’ TribuneDarius Miles had just finished high school. Quentin Richardson was 20 years old. They were Los Angeles Clippers rookies in the fall of 2000.Suddenly, the woeful Clippers were cool and exciting, if not yet particularly good.“We were like a college team playing against grown men,” Miles said.The players known as Q-Rich and D-Miles were fast and fun. Fans mirrored their signature celebration by tapping their fists on their foreheads. Then, after just two seasons, the Clippers traded Miles to the Cleveland Cavaliers for a more experienced player.All these years later, Miles and Richardson wonder what would have happened had the team kept them together. Miles, 40, hopscotched around the league before he played his final game in 2009. He became depressed and withdrew into a “cave” to cope.“Just losing your career, it’s one of the mental blocks that every player has,” Miles said. “Like, is it really over?”Richardson, 42, knew he was nearing the end when the Orlando Magic cut him before the start of the 2012-13 season. He sat by the phone for months, waiting for another offer. After a brief stint with the Knicks, he spent four years in the Pistons’ front office, but he did not feel as though his opinions were valued.“It was an experience that I would not like to experience again,” he said.Richardson and Miles reconnected in 2018. With Richardson acting as his editor, Miles spent months on an essay for The Players’ Tribune titled, “What the Hell Happened to Darius Miles?”Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles were drafted together by the Clippers in 2000.Chriss Pizzello/Associated PressHe wrote about growing up around drugs and violence in East St. Louis, Ill., and about “shady business deals” leaving him bankrupt. He wrote about the knee injuries that derailed his career and about being so depressed after his mother’s death that he holed up in her house for three years. And he wrote about the invitation from Richardson to move to his neighborhood in Florida.“Q kept hitting me up,” Miles said. “I had to let the storm pass until I could see sunshine.”Their chemistry birthed the podcast “Knuckleheads with Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles,” which offers a candid look at life in pro sports via interviews with current and former athletes and coaches.“Guys do want to talk, and they prefer it in this realm where they’re sitting across from us and they know they’re in a safe space,” Richardson said. “They know we’re going to look out for each other.”He said the N.B.A. and players’ union were helpful, too, as players transitioned into retirement.“They’re trying to make it as fail proof as possible,” Richardson said. “Obviously, things can still happen.”(In October 2021, Miles was one of 18 former players charged in an insurance fraud scheme. Miles, who has pleaded not guilty, declined to comment on the case through a publicist.)With their podcast, Miles and Richardson are figuring out their new lives, without straying too far from the game. For some players, that might be the best way to move forward.Miles said the podcast had helped give him purpose. “It’s the best doctor I got,” he said.Dave Bing and Johnny Davis: Charting a Path for OthersJohnny Davis is the chairman of the National Basketball Retired Players Association, which helps former players with health care and other post-basketball resources.Jacob Biba for The New York TimesGrowing up in Detroit in the 1960s, Davis had many Pistons stars to emulate whenever he hit the playground courts with friends.“One kid would want to be Jimmy Walker, and one would want to be Dave Bing,” Davis said. “I always wanted to be Dave Bing.”Today, Davis and Bing are connected in another way: Davis is the chairman of the National Basketball Retired Players Association. Bing, 78, co-founded the group in 1992 with four other former players — Oscar Robertson, Archie Clark, Dave Cowens and Dave DeBusschere.“We were at an All-Star Game where we talked about what we needed to try to do to help these players who were up in age,” Bing said. “Their health wasn’t all that good, and nobody seemed to care about them.”Dave Bing was introduced as part of the N.B.A.’s 75th anniversary team during the 2022 All-Star Game in February.Tim Nwachukwu/Getty ImagesThe N.B.A. was not always the lucrative colossus that it is today. In Bing’s era, many players made ends meet with off-season jobs. Bing worked for a bank, first as a teller and later as a branch manager.“The guys today don’t have to work and might not have to really worry about a second career,” he said. “But in the era I played in, you didn’t have a choice. You’re done at 34, and you’ve got your whole life in front of you.”In 1980, he started Bing Steel with four employees. The company grew into a multimillion-dollar conglomerate, which he ran for 28 years before he was elected mayor of Detroit in 2009.The retired players’ association helps players with health care, education, career counseling and financial services. But Scott Rochelle, the organization’s president and chief executive, avoids using the word “retirement.”“I’ve got two or three guys who will see me and run away because they see me as the grim reaper,” Rochelle said. “We look at it as a change of direction. You don’t retire at 35. You just change your purpose and find something else that drives you from day to day.” More

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      Boston Celtics Players ‘Shocked’ by Coach Ime Udoka’s Suspension

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      Boston’s Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown said they had not spoken to Coach Ime Udoka since the team announced his full-season suspension on Thursday.CANTON, Mass. — Jayson Tatum of the Boston Celtics said he was preparing for the start of training camp last week when he learned that Ime Udoka, the team’s head coach, could have been facing a lengthy suspension. But Tatum was not privy to any inside information, he said. So, how did he learn the news?“On Twitter,” he said. “Like everybody else.”Tatum was among the Celtics players who, on Monday, spoke publicly for the first time since the team announced Thursday that it had suspended Udoka for the 2022-23 N.B.A. season for unspecified “violations of team policies.” One by one, the players appeared on a dais for the team’s media day and, facing a bank of cameras and reporters, said they knew little about what had led to Udoka’s punishment.Marcus Smart: “It’s been hell for us. Just caught by surprise. No one really knows anything, so we’re just in the wind like everybody else. Last couple of days have been confusing.”Jaylen Brown: “Nobody really has any of the information.”Grant Williams: “I don’t know the facts.”For the players, Udoka’s absence — along with the secretive nature of the investigation into his misconduct — has been a troubling development as they try to reorient themselves for another crack at a championship run after losing to Golden State in the N.B.A. finals last season.One person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly about it said Udoka had an inappropriate relationship with a female team employee. Another person who had been briefed said that Udoka’s violations involved one woman.Boston’s Jaylen Brown, left, is in his seventh season with the Celtics. He was the team’s second-leading scorer last season, Udoka’s first as head coach.Ezra Shaw/Getty Images“As far as initial reactions, I think we were all shocked at what was going on — a little confused,” Brown said. “But a lot of the information wasn’t being shared with us, or with members of the team, so I can’t really comment on it.”A Celtics spokesman declined to say how many violations there were.In a news conference last week, Wyc Grousbeck, the team’s majority owner, cited “privacy reasons” in declining to elaborate on the nature of Udoka’s misconduct. The Celtics’ decision to suspend Udoka came after a monthslong investigation by an independent law firm, Grousbeck said.On Monday, Tatum, Brown and Smart were among the team’s high-profile players who indicated that they did not know about the investigation while it was happening. In fact, Smart said, Udoka had recently visited him and a couple of teammates in Los Angeles. Smart was asked if anything about Udoka’s behavior struck him as unusual while he was in California.“Not to me,” he said. “I think that’s why we got so caught off guard, because it just seemed so normal.”Vague reports about Udoka’s situation emerged on social media Wednesday. At a team meeting the following day, few details were shared with players, Tatum said.“There wasn’t any more information that we found out than the things you guys heard,” Tatum said, adding: “It’s hard for me to answer if things were handled the right way or if they weren’t because, I guess for a lot of reasons, I don’t know all the details. I just don’t know.”Tatum and Brown, the team’s top two scorers last season, both said they had not spoken with Udoka since he was suspended. “It’s a lot to process,” Tatum said.Joe Mazzulla, 34, whom the Celtics hired as an assistant in 2019, will be the team’s interim head coach this season. Brad Stevens, the Celtics’ president of basketball operations and Udoka’s predecessor, said last week that Mazzulla was the best choice for the role “by a long shot.” Mazzulla, who played college basketball at West Virginia, was previously the head coach at Fairmont State, a Division II college in West Virginia.As a college player, Mazzulla twice pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges, according to multiple news reports at the time — first, when he was accused of scuffling with police at a Pittsburgh Pirates game, and later after he was accused of grabbing a woman at a bar.“Listen, I’ve made mistakes,” Mazzulla said Monday. “I’m not perfect. I’ve hurt people, and I’ve had to use the situations I put myself in as a younger man to learn from and become a better person. That’s what I’ve tried to focus on: How can I re-create my identity as a person? How can I rely on my faith? And how can I just have a positive impact on the people around me?”Brown, who was the subject of trade rumors in the off-season after Kevin Durant asked to be moved from the Nets, was among the players who offered Mazzulla a public vote of confidence.“I believe in Joe,” Brown said. “Joe believes in me. I’ve had conversations with him. I don’t think he sees a limit on my game. I think he’s coming in excited, so I’m optimistic.”Joe Mazzulla, who had been an assistant coach for the Celtics since 2019, will be the interim head coach during Udoka’s suspension this season.Paul Rutherford/USA Today Sports, via ReutersMalcolm Brogdon, a veteran guard who was traded to the Celtics from the Indiana Pacers in July, said he was struck by Mazzulla’s self-discipline. Over the summer, Brogdon said, Mazzulla often beat the players to the team’s training center to lift weights each morning.One day, Mazzulla noticed that Brogdon was using a balloon to do breathing exercises. Mazzulla told Brogdon that he was a fan of breathing exercises, too.“He started explaining the theories behind them and the psychology of it,” Brogdon said. “So he’s a guy that’s paying attention to everything.”Still, Mazzulla acknowledged some of the realities of the situation: that people throughout the Celtics organization need time to “feel and heal,” that he never anticipated being in this position and that he likely will need to learn on the job.The players, too, seem aware of the challenges ahead of them.“Everything that we started to build,” Smart said, “is starting over in a sense.” More

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      Ime Udoka, Boston Celtics Coach, Suspended for 2022-23 Season

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      The team said Udoka violated unspecified team policies. He led Boston to the N.B.A. finals last season, his first as a head coach.The Boston Celtics on Thursday suspended Coach Ime Udoka for the 2022-23 season for unspecified “violations of team policies,” just months after he led the team to the N.B.A. finals in his first year in the role.A person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly about it said Udoka had an inappropriate relationship with a female team employee that was considered a violation of the team’s organizational guidelines.The Celtics have not said who would fill Udoka’s post during his suspension. In a statement announcing the punishment, the team said that a decision about Udoka’s future in Boston would be “made at a later date.” Wyc Grousbeck, the Celtics’ majority owner, declined to comment. A Celtics spokesperson also declined to comment.Udoka spent nine seasons as an assistant coach with the San Antonio Spurs, the Philadelphia 76ers and the Nets before the Celtics hired him to his first head coaching role in June 2021. The Celtics lost to Golden State in the N.B.A. finals this June.News of a possible suspension for Udoka was first reported late Wednesday. The reports touched off a firestorm, with many people on social media posting the names and pictures of women who work for the Celtics and speculating whether they were involved in the situation.In a statement to ESPN, Udoka said he accepted the team’s decision. “I want to apologize to our players, fans, the Celtics organization and my family for letting them down. I am sorry for putting the team in this difficult situation.”He said he would have no further comment.Udoka’s suspension comes during a challenging month for the N.B.A.On Tuesday, Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards was fined $40,000 for making homophobic remarks in a post on Instagram, where he has more than 1 million followers.Last week, the N.B.A. said an investigation had unearthed a yearslong pattern of inappropriate behavior by Robert Sarver, the majority owner of the Phoenix Suns and the W.N.B.A.’s Phoenix Mercury. The investigation’s report said Sarver had used racial slurs and treated female employees unfairly, among other findings, over more than a decade. N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver fined Sarver $10 million — the maximum permitted — and suspended him for a year. But amid backlash about the perceived leniency of the punishment, Sarver announced Wednesday that he planned to sell both teams.The Suns and the Celtics are scheduled to host media days for the 2022-23 season Monday.Udoka, who is from Portland, Ore., had a peripatetic career as a basketball player, bouncing around overseas before he latched on with the Portland Trail Blazers for the 2006-7 season as their starting small forward. Over the next four seasons he played with San Antonio and the Sacramento Kings.Last summer, he was part of a wave of Black coaches hired to head coaching roles, including several who, like him, had been assistants for many years. The N.B.A. has long been criticized for having mostly white head coaches in a league with mostly Black players.In mid-January, Boston had a 21-22 record and was seemingly bound for an underwhelming season. But the Celtics won 28 of their final 35 games to close out the regular season and earn the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference. They swept the Nets in the first round of the playoffs, then eliminated the Milwaukee Bucks, who were the defending champions. In the Eastern Conference finals, Boston beat the Miami Heat.The trip to the N.B.A. finals was Boston’s first appearance since 2010. Udoka came in fourth in voting for the Coach of the Year Award. Will Hardy, who was Udoka’s top assistant last season, was recently hired as the Utah Jazz’s new coach.Tania Ganguli More

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      The Problem With Chelsea (Hint: It May Not Be the Manager)

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      Six days after spending more in a single transfer window than any club in history, Chelsea’s new owners fired the team’s coach, Thomas Tuchel. Now what?The caveat, right from the start, was experience. The consortium, fronted by Todd Boehly and bankrolled by the private equity firm Clearlake, had the money. That much was plain. They had, after all, paid $2.8 billion to buy Chelsea in a frantic, opaque auction, making it the most expensive acquisition in the history of sports.They had expertise in the business, too, or some form of it: Neither Boehly nor Mark Walter, a comparatively late addition to the ownership group, was a sporting neophyte. Both own a slice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and that investment, in recent years, has proved a relatively adroit one.No, the only thing that could be held against the new owners, the only thing that gave Chelsea’s fans pause for thought as they considered what a post-Roman Abramovich future might bring, was that none of them — Boehly, Clearlake, Walter or Hansjorg Wyss, the octogenarian Swiss billionaire who had brought the group together — knew the first thing about English soccer.Three months in, those doubts have been overcome. Scarcely 100 days have elapsed since the group took official control of Chelsea. In that time, it lavished more than $300 million on new signings — more than any club had ever spent in a single transfer window — and then, with the ink still drying on the last couple of contracts, decided to fire its manager only a half-dozen games into the season.If they carry on like this, Chelsea’s new owners will fit into the Premier League’s hyperbolic soap opera just fine.Todd Boehly and his partners have been remaking Chelsea all summer. Change has not been cheap.David Cliff/Associated PressFrom the outside, Chelsea’s decision to part company with Thomas Tuchel in the early hours of Wednesday felt distinctly, comfortingly familiar. The team had lost the previous evening in its opening Champions League engagement against Dinamo Zagreb. That defeat came on the back of a stuttering start to the Premier League campaign that has left Chelsea in sixth, just 5 points behind first-place Arsenal but already smarting from losses to Leeds United and Southampton.This was, then, the new Chelsea behaving precisely as the old Chelsea always had, with a short-termism so ruthless it almost qualified as proud. Spending an unimaginable sum of money to furnish a manager with the team he desired only to dismiss the manager at the first hint of trouble? Roman would be proud.Internally, the picture was a little more nuanced. Tuchel’s brief reign — he was in place for only 19 months — had hit its peak early, in the uncanny valley of lockdown soccer, when he took a team that had been struggling to qualify for the Champions League under his predecessor, Frank Lampard, and turned it into the champion of Europe in four months. Rarely, if ever, has a coach had such an immediate, spectacular effect.The 49-year-old Tuchel, though, failed to build on that starburst. He was presented, a year ago, with the $111 million signing of Romelu Lukaku, theoretically the player who could catapult Chelsea to a first Premier League title since 2017. It did not quite work out like that. Lukaku was allowed to leave the club this summer on loan.Though Tuchel steered the team to two domestic cup finals in his first full campaign — losing both on penalties against Liverpool — and handled with poise and dignity the geopolitical storm that engulfed the club in the wake of the British government’s decision to sanction Abramovich, Chelsea’s season petered out, with the German’s side eventually finishing 19 points behind Manchester City.Tuchel in better days. Last year.Susana Vera/Pool Via ReutersThat malaise had not gone unnoticed by the club’s newly installed hierarchy. Nor had Tuchel’s demeanor over the summer, which grew more detached, more disaffected with every passing week.In July, he bemoaned that his players’ “level of commitment, physically and mentally,” was insufficient. By August, he described them as “not tough enough.” On Tuesday, after losing in Zagreb, that had metastasized into admitting that “everything was missing” from his team’s performance.Those public complaints betrayed a growing unease in private. Tuchel had come to be known at Chelsea as a gregarious, warm, affable sort — at a club with plenty of managers to compare him to, he fared well — but a number of players felt he had become more truculent, more distant in recent months, particularly with those he did not consider his most reliable lieutenants.Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the co-founder of Clearlake, noticed the same thing. As they attempted to retool the squad this summer, they had sought Tuchel’s counsel frequently, asking the manager — in the absence of a technical director — to direct them to his preferred targets.That was not a role that Tuchel relished particularly; he was far happier to be left alone to coach. As the transfer window gathered pace, Boehly and Eghbali found that Tuchel had a tendency to prove difficult to contact at critical junctures. Whatever relationship they had been able to establish in their few weeks working together began to fracture and fray.Kalidou Koulibaly and the rest of Chelsea’s players, new and old, opened the Champions League with a loss on Tuesday.Antonio Bronic/ReutersAs the relatively curt statement released by the club to announce his departure suggested, Boehly and Eghbali did not feel they had acted rashly. They had, instead, reached the decision to part company with Tuchel even before defeat in Zagreb. The travails of the early part of the season were supporting evidence for their conclusion, rather than the thrust of their case.For all the mitigating circumstances, though — and while the owners have been swift to identify Graham Potter, the intelligent, affable and talented Brighton manager, as Tuchel’s likely replacement — it does feel as if his dismissal fits a pattern.Boehly has taken on the role of interim sporting director with vigor and determination. Those at the club have been stunned by his work ethic, and he has made an effort to establish a rapport with many of the game’s most influential agents, inviting some of them to watch games from his box at the club’s stadium.In some cases, that has borne fruit. Chelsea spent a lot of money this summer, but it spent much of it well. Wesley Fofana may have been expensive, but he is also one of the most promising defenders in world soccer. Raheem Sterling has for years been one of the Premier League’s most devastating attacking players.The deals that did not come off tell a story too, though. There was the offer for Romeo Lavia, a player who had made just a handful of appearances for Southampton since moving from Manchester City in July; Chelsea offered to pay at least double what he had cost in August.Then there was an attempt to sign Edson Álvarez, a Mexican midfielder at the Dutch club Ajax, which bubbled to the surface as the transfer window was closing. The approach came so late, in fact, that Ajax was able to use it as proof that Chelsea was not spending to any plan, but rather for the sake of it — an argument that worked sufficiently well for Álvarez to decide to remain in Amsterdam.As they reached the (entirely artificial) watershed of their 100th day in charge of the club, Boehly and Eghbali reportedly spent considerable time contemplating the sort of culture they wanted to establish at Chelsea.They wanted to shift away from the urgency and the uncertainty of the Abramovich years and build something more sustainable, they decided, and they felt that Tuchel was not the right sort of figure to oversee that change. He was better suited, they determined, to the old ways, when nothing lasted forever, and Chelsea’s manager lived each day as if it could be the last.And yet here we are: Six games into the season, six days after the end of the transfer window, Chelsea has fired its manager on the back of a few poor performances and because of rumblings of discontent among the playing squad. Perhaps this will be the last hurrah of the old Chelsea, the final break with the past. Or perhaps a culture, once embedded, is not an easy thing to change, no matter how much money and ambition you have. More

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      At the U.S. Open, Data Analysts Are Just as Busy as the Players

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      A new era of data analysis has given players deeper insights into their opponents’ games and a strategic advantage.For the data analysts working with the top tier of American tennis players, the busiest time of year begins with United States Open qualifying. They will spend 15-hour days creating and curating a trove of quantitative data and video clips.They will churn out match statistics and about 200 scouting reports for nearly 70 players over the three-week competition. The ultimate goal: provide players and coaches with more granular insights into each point and, in the process, give them a strategic advantage.“Players will always get their match tagged, broken up into how a point starts and how a point ends, and back to them within 24 hours,” said Geoffrey Russell, who works for the United States Tennis Association as senior manager for Team U.S.A.’s professional players. “We’ll also do bespoke projects for coaches who ask us to break down certain things even further.”During this year’s Open, Russell will collaborate with a team of eight data analysts. Their efforts speak to growing interest and investment in tennis analytics, and represent one of many ways the sport is employing the in-depth data analysis long used by professional teams in baseball and basketball.In tennis, it’s been more a data evolution than revolution, a gradual search for new, objective performance measures. That’s largely resulted in a combination of statistics and video highlights that build a more sophisticated picture of how individual players compete and, as a result, guide some match strategy and development.Tennis lags behind other sports in analytics, but it has gained significant momentum over the last several years. Better technology means more opportunities to capture and analyze more data points efficiently.National governing bodies like the United States Tennis Association collect shot-level data. New metrics in the tennis lexicon include steals (when players fall behind in a point yet manage to win it) and balance of power (how much time players spend on attack versus how much time opponents spend there). And there’s more attention paid to how points develop.The strategy coach Craig O’Shannessy said that from 1991 to 2012 tennis analytics “was very primitive.” Then, in 2015, rally length appeared in tournament data. Analysis of that data revealed much shorter rally lengths than expected, driving curiosity and greater respect for analytics.Andy Murray and his coach, Ivan Lendl, during a practice in June. Toby Melville/Reuters“There has been a gradual acceptance of new data points in our sport that matter most to winning and losing matches,” he said. “So, we’re definitely going down a road where we’re improving.”Still, even with new metrics and keen interest in analytics from top players like Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, tennis has not fully embraced analytics, especially since the data requires time-consuming analysis and sometimes calls into question conventional thinking about how to compete and train.“The challenge at the moment is that coaches are looking at the numbers, but not always looking at them in the right way,” said Warren Pretorius, founder of Tennis Analytics, which provides players and coaches with match analytics. “They’re taking bits and pieces of match stats to support their theories.”So which new data points provide the most meaningful insights? It depends on the player. That speaks to another big tennis analytics challenge: What translates to more wins varies widely based on a player’s strengths, weaknesses and tendencies under pressure.“What we try to do is help athletes gain clarity about what their identity is,” said David Ramos, the U.S.T.A.’s director of coaching education and performance analytics. “How do they want to be playing in the most important points? How do they define a good performance if they don’t win a match? It’s definitely about the game style and personalizing the K.P.I. [key performance indicators] for a particular player.”To provide new insights and help process all the information, there are data-oriented companies eager to service players, coaches, broadcasters and fans. The U.S.T.A. works with companies like TennisViz, SwingVision, Hawk-Eye, Dartfish, Kinexon and IBM to generate meaningful data.The player Mackenzie McDonald of the United States calls himself a “big numbers guy” and finds the scouting reports provided by the U.S.T.A. helpful. At a recent U.S. Open tuneup tournament, he used data about his opponent’s preferred placement for first and second serves to his advantage. He also looks at the hot and cold plays metric (patterns that increase or decrease players’ chances of winning points).“You have to build a story for your opponent,” said McDonald, 27, who is ranked No. 77 in the world and will be playing in the Open. “It’s not x’s and o’s. It’s more like this is what can happen. This is what this guy likes. And these are the tools you can use.”Some top players add strategy coaches to their team for data analysis. O’Shannessy worked with Djokovic’s team from 2017-19, helping the former No. 1 player in the world understand his game better through analytics.O’Shannessy said that sometimes Djokovic asked simple questions, like whether he should hit a backhand or move around for a forehand when the ball landed in a specific spot. O’Shannessy then presented data for winners and forcing errors that came from the right side of the court versus the left side.“He was so good at absorbing all of this information and not rejecting it,” said O’Shannessy, who is also director of Brain Game Tennis, a strategy and analytics website. “His openness and willingness to just ask questions, anything to find an advantage, was key. His talking about it in the tennis world gave it a lot of legitimacy.”When the U.S. Open starts, McDonald will review the scouting reports provided by the U.S.T.A.“I think you’ve got to keep things as simple as possible,” he said. “You’ve got to keep some human element and instinct. Bottom line for me is I only look at a couple different areas.”Mat Cloer, who coached McDonald and is associate head coach for the University of Florida men’s tennis team, added: “It comes back to understanding the player you’re working with and how they absorb information. What information do you need to provide? That’s where the art of coaching comes into play.“If used properly, analytics can be game changing and eye opening.” More

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      Liberty Reflect on a Season of Changes

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      Under a first-year coach, the young team dealt with injuries and inconsistency before losing in the first round of the W.N.B.A. playoffs to the reigning champion Chicago Sky.Two words echoed among the Liberty’s players in the days before the start of the W.N.B.A. season: “defense” and “identity.”They said they needed to get better on defense. (And they did do that.)They said they wanted to be known as a tough and winning team. (They won, but not as much as they had hoped.)Then two new words forced their way into the Liberty vocabulary during a season of injuries, comebacks and losses: “adversity” and “resilience.”“Being along for the ride through a lot of the adversity that we faced this season is something that I’ll definitely learn from,” Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu said.She continued: “It’s just helped me understand what it takes to win, and sometimes those wins weren’t pretty, but we found a way.”The Liberty’s season ended Tuesday with a first-round playoff loss to the Chicago Sky, the No. 2 seed and the league’s defending champions. The best-of-three series, like the Liberty’s season, showed the team’s promise, and its pitfalls. On Thursday, as several players and Coach Sandy Brondello reflected on the year, they praised one another for persevering but wished that they hadn’t needed to be so resilient.“We saw glimpses of just how great we can be regardless of what was going on, regardless of injury, regardless of record, regardless of just really any kind of obstacle that we were dealing with,” said Betnijah Laney, who missed most of the season because of a knee injury.She added: “And still being able to make that playoff push was really good for us. And just imagine if we had all of that the entire season where we would’ve ended up: We’d probably still be playing right now.”The Liberty opened the season with a tight win at home over the Connecticut Sun, then plunged into a seven-game losing streak. They lost both Laney and Jocelyn Willoughby to injuries during the streak, a blow for a team hoping to make its name on defense and toughness. Brondello said Laney, a 2021 All-Star, was the team’s toughest player and Willoughby was one of its best defenders. Other players were in and out of the lineup all season with a variety of maladies, including a concussion, a hamstring injury and a chin laceration.It was difficult to build chemistry, which is important for every team but especially a young one with a new head coach. Brondello was in her first season with the Liberty after eight seasons with the Phoenix Mercury, a veteran team that won a championship in her first season there in 2014. She said coaching the Liberty had required more teaching and patience, but she did not have to deal with anything that she had not seen before.Before the season, Brondello said she hoped to build a tough, defensive team with an “aggressive mentality.” The Liberty were that kind of team at times — when they went on a 13-0 run to seal a Game 1 playoff victory against the Sky in Chicago — but their inconsistency cost them. A 16-0 Sky run in the fourth quarter of the decisive Game 3 in Brooklyn pushed a victory out of reach.“They need to feel pressure,” Brondello said of her team’s young players, adding that she would look to add more experienced players during the off-season.“We’re just a few pieces off,” she said.Ionescu, 24, who was named to her first All-Star team this year, was the team’s top scorer with 17.4 points per game and led the Liberty with 6.3 assists per game. Forward Natasha Howard, a past defensive player of the year, led the Liberty in rebounds (7.3) and steals (1.3) per game. Ionescu, who had two triple-doubles this season, was just behind Howard with 7.1 rebounds per game. More

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

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

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      Brittney Griner’s Tearful WNBA Teammates Play On After Her Conviction

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      Brittney Griner, the Phoenix Mercury star, was convicted on drug charges in Russia. Hours later, her teammates had a game. “Nobody even wanted to play today,” one said.UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Phoenix Mercury Coach Vanessa Nygaard and her coaching staff stood in the empty Mohegan Sun arena on Thursday, puzzled.The Mercury were set to take on the Connecticut Sun at 7 p.m., and her players were supposed to be on the court going through their normal pregame shoot-around, but no one showed up.Instead, the Mercury players were back in the locker room, glued to the television screen watching their teammate Brittney Griner’s conviction and sentencing on drug smuggling and possession charges earlier that day in a Russian court thousands of miles away. “It was like you’re waiting for a bomb to drop,” Mercury guard Diamond DeShields said.They watched with tear-filled eyes as Griner fought through her own tears and pleaded with a Russian court not to “end her life” for an “honest mistake.” Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony and fined 1 million rubles, or about $16,000. The sentence opens the door for Griner to be returned to the United States through a prisoner swap, but for the players, the news was still heartbreaking to hear.“And we’re still supposed to play this game,” Mercury guard Skylar Diggins-Smith said after the game, adding an expletive. “Nobody even wanted to play today. How are we even supposed to approach the game and approach the court with a clear mind when the whole group is crying before the game?”Phoenix Mercury guards Skylar Diggins-Smith, left, and Diamond DeShields said they had been emotional after Griner’s sentencing on Thursday. Kena Betancur/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNygaard said the team had eventually gone through a “version” of the shoot-around, but nothing about the day or game felt normal. The most atypical moment of the night for Nygaard happened moments before tipoff, as the lights dimmed and players, coaches and referees locked arms in solidarity for 42 seconds — matching the number of Griner’s jersey. Fans chanted “We are B.G.” and “Bring her home.”“I even linked arms with a referee, so you know you’re never going to see that again,” Nygaard said with a smile.Griner has been detained in Russia since Feb. 17 after customs officials said they found hashish oil, a cannabis derivative, in Griner’s luggage at an airport near Moscow when she was traveling to the country to play for UMMC Yekaterinburg, a professional women’s basketball team. Griner said during her trial on drug charges that the hashish oil, in a vape pen, had been packed by mistake. Players across the W.N.B.A. and other professional athletes have campaigned fiercely for her freedom. In May, the U.S. State Department said that it had determined that Griner was “wrongfully detained” and that its officials would work to free her. Experts have said a prisoner swap is the most likely path for Griner’s release; the White House recently said it had made a “substantial” proposal.In the meantime, Griner’s teammates and fans have continued their public campaign of support.As fans filled the arena on Thursday night, they were greeted by Connecticut Sun dancers and arena staff members wearing “We are BG” T-shirts. Griner’s purple and orange No. 42 Mercury jerseys filled the stands along with variations of clothing with messages calling for her freedom. Mercury players donned the “We are BG” shirts in pregame warm-ups, as did the Connecticut coaching staff and several Sun players. Sun point guard Jasmine Thomas, who has been out injured, wore a hooded sweatshirt with a picture of Griner on the front and her No. 42 on the back.Sharon White, a Sun fan and a season-ticket holder since 2002, was among those wearing Mercury colors. She was wearing a purple T-shirt that featured Griner’s name and number, which she said she wears to every game regardless of the opponent.“When I get home, I wash it and I wear it again, even when they’re not playing,” White said, adding that her friends often make fun of her for how much she wears the shirt. White said she had cried as she watched Griner’s verdict on Thursday.Sharon White, a Connecticut Sun fan, said she always wears a purple Brittney Griner T-shirt, no matter who is playing, as a sign of support.Kris Rhim for The New York Times“It just hurts — I love her as a player, and it’s just a sad situation,” White said, wiping tears from her eyes. She added: “She doesn’t need to be there. When she comes home, she doesn’t need to go back. I think none of our players should go over there.”Many W.N.B.A. players go overseas during the off-season to play for international teams to supplement their income. Griner was shown holding up a picture of her UMMC Yekaterinburg team photo from behind bars on Thursday.Among those in the picture were Jonquel Jones, the Sun forward who won the W.N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award last season. Jones, like Griner, has played for the Russian team for several years.Jones said she had never expected something like Griner’s detention to happen. After Griner’s arrest, Jones said she had learned that even cannabidiol oil, which she always carries with her to help with recovery from pain and injuries, was illegal in Russia.“My experiences over there have been so good,” Jones said. “Our team was top notch. They treated us like the professionals we are. We loved going over there because of that. So we just always felt safe. We never felt like anything would ever happen. So to see it happen to one of my teammates and be so close to it and understand that it could’ve been me, it puts it into perspective.”Jones said getting excited for Thursday’s game had been difficult; the moment of solidarity made her even more emotional.“It was like, ‘Dang, we did that, and now I got to go play basketball; my friend is still locked up overseas,’” Jones said. “So you just kind of go out there and do the best that you can do and not take the moment for granted, knowing that this is where she would want to be.”The Mercury lost the game, 77-64, with an 18-0 Sun run in the third and fourth quarters that put the game out of reach. Diggins was the game’s leading scorer, with 16 points, and Jones finished with 14. But for both sides, the numbers seemingly didn’t matter.“We’ll wake up tomorrow, and B.G. will still be in a Russian jail,” Nygaard said. “It’s day 169 or something tomorrow, and the clock continues, and we just want her to come home.” More