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      What To Know About The Biggest W.N.B.A. Free-Agency Moves

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Biggest W.N.B.A. Free-Agency MovesCandace Parker is not the only one leaving Los Angeles, but Diana Taurasi is staying in Phoenix. W.N.B.A. free agency kicked off Monday with a shuffling of stars.Candace Parker, who had been with the Los Angeles Sparks since she was drafted in 2008, headlined Monday’s free-agency moves by signing with the Chicago Sky.Credit…Chris O’Meara/Associated PressFeb. 1, 2021, 6:34 p.m. ETA landmark collective bargaining agreement before last season increased top-tier W.N.B.A. salaries to $215,000 from about $117,500. But though the new pay scale was in effect ahead of the 2020 season in Florida, it’s only this year that a number of the league’s biggest stars are unrestricted free agents and in a position to cash in.Free agents were officially able to sign new contracts on Monday, and many did. Here is a breakdown of some of the biggest free-agency moves so far:Candace Parker to the Chicago SkyParker, who won the league’s Defensive Player of the Year Award with the Los Angeles Sparks last season, is moving on to be closer to her roots. A Naperville, Ill., native, she signed with the Chicago Sky on Monday.“This was a very difficult decision for Candace to make as Los Angeles is her home now,” Boris Lelchitski, Parker’s agent, said in an email on Monday.Although Parker and her 11-year-old daughter, Lailaa, have made Los Angeles home, Illinois is where Parker got her start. “It was just a decision based on where she thought she could most enjoy writing the last few chapters of her amazing career,” Lelchitski said.Parker had been with the Sparks since she was drafted No. 1 over all out of Tennessee in 2008.This is big get for James Wade, the head coach and general manager of the Sky, who has made two postseason appearances in two seasons with Chicago.“It’s an incredible story of a homecoming between a team striving to become a championship organization and one of the best players in basketball,” Wade said in a statement announcing the signing.Chicago immediately becomes a contender with Parker, a two-time Most Valuable Player Award winner, alongside young, athletic players like guard Diamond DeShields and forward Gabby Williams. Adding Parker as an option for the assist machine Courtney Vandersloot could mean trouble for post defenders.Alysha Clark to the Washington MysticsAlysha Clark averaged a career-high 10 points per game last season with the Seattle Storm.Credit…Octavio Jones for The New York TimesClark was a key factor for the Seattle Storm in their 2018 and 2020 runs to a W.N.B.A. championship. A nine-year veteran, she shot 55.8 percent from the field on the way to a career-high 10 points per game last season.Mike Thibault, Washington’s head coach and general manager, had sought Clark through free agency and trades with Seattle in the past. “We’ve offered them a trade at one point,” Thibault told reporters during a video conference call on Monday. “They were smart and didn’t do it.”With the Mystics, Clark looks forward to being challenged to become a more complete player before calling it a career. “It’s not that I have to be fancy in anything that I’m doing,” Clark told reporters on Monday. “I just want to be as well rounded and reach my full potential before I decide to hang them up.”Clark’s biggest asset is her ability to guard every position. It has been a staple of her game that has caught the attention of her peers.“She’s strong. She’s physical. It’s like having a little bodyguard wherever I go,” Phoenix guard Diana Taurasi said of Clark last season.Diana Taurasi Returns to the Phoenix MercuryDiana Taurasi, right, has been with the Phoenix Mercury since she was drafted No. 1 over all in 2004.Credit…Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressTaurasi, who has missed significant time over the past three seasons because of a lingering back injury, has re-signed with Phoenix.“Diana has given her entire career to our organization and community, and we don’t take for granted her unrivaled impact on basketball,” Mercury General Manager Jim Pitman said in a statement on Monday. He added that the team was confident that she had “more All-W.N.B.A. days ahead of her.”Taurasi has been with the Mercury since they took her with the top pick in 2004.Taurasi’s return, keeping her alongside the 2020 free-agent acquisition Skylar Diggins-Smith, bodes well for the future of the Mercury. Diggins-Smith electrified fans with a game-winning buzzer beater against the Connecticut Sun last season after Phoenix had blown a double-digit lead.“When they play well, we play well, and that’s what you need from your best players” Mercury Coach Sandy Brondello said of her backcourt duo of Taurasi and Diggins-Smith during a postgame media session in September.But the chemistry is still building, as was evident during the 2020 playoffs when Phoenix lost to the Minnesota Lynx, 80-79, despite having possession in the waning seconds of the game.Chelsea Gray to the Las Vegas AcesChelsea Gray celebrated after scoring a 3-point basket in front of Washington Mystics.Credit…Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressGray’s move to Las Vegas from the Sparks began last off-season. As a restricted free agent then, Gray wanted to test the waters. A California native, she knew being close to family was one of her priorities, so if she wasn’t going to remain in Los Angeles for the long term, Las Vegas was the next best option. The media company Uninterrupted posted a video on Monday documenting Gray’s trip to Vegas last off-season. The 25-minute video showed how Gray and the Sparks worked out a one-year deal for the 2020 season so she’d be eligible for the maximum contract in 2021, per the new collective bargaining agreement.The video concluded with the announcement that Gray had signed a deal with the Las Vegas Aces this time around. Despite making deep playoff runs in 2019 and 2020, the Aces lacked experience at the guard position. Gray has proved to be more than capable as a floor general for a team with frontcourt talent.Instead of Parker and Nneka Ogwumike, who had been central players for the Sparks, Gray will now facilitate an offense with A’ja Wilson, the reigning M.V.P., and Liz Cambage, who is expected to be back this season after receiving a medical exemption last year because of the pandemic.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Is the Salary Cap a Myth?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn Pro FootballIs the Salary Cap a Myth?A Super Bowl matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers should not be fiscally possible on paper, but here we are.Important role players, like Chiefs receiver Sammy Watkins, right, signed one-year contracts made possible because quarterback Patrick Mahomes will be paid the bulk of his 10-year, $477 million contract in 2023 and beyond.Credit…Jamie Squire/Getty ImagesJan. 28, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETKansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes’s listed base salary for the 2020 season is $825,000, a princely sum for ordinary folks but $85,000 less than the base salary of his teammate James Winchester, a valuable but obscure long snapper.Tom Brady’s 2020 base salary of $15 million for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is more in line with expectations for an N.F.L. quarterback, if not for a six-time Super Bowl champion and era-defining player. For example, Jimmy Garoppolo, Brady’s backup when they played for the New England Patriots, earned a base salary of $23.8 million for an injury-plagued and disappointing 2020 season for the San Francisco 49ers, while Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Derek Carr had a base salary of $18.9 million for another season of his established late-model family sedan caliber play.This season’s Super Bowl matchup should not be fiscally possible on paper. The N.F.L.’s salary cap was supposed to have torn the Chiefs’ roster apart after their Super Bowl victory last season; Mahomes’s performance would command a contract that by itself had the potential to force the team into receivership. Similarly, the Buccaneers’ star-studded lineup of Brady, Rob Gronkowski, Ndamukong Suh, Antonio Brown and Jason Pierre-Paul — each a market-setter at his position at some point in his career — should be so prohibitively expensive as to force the team to fill the lower half of its roster with temps and interns.The fact that the Chiefs and the Buccaneers kept their rosters intact appears to support the popular theory that the salary cap is a myth, a fiction used by franchises as an excuse to cut unwanted veterans, pinch pennies and fall short of expectations. The cap is in fact very real, but its arcane rules about bonuses, incentives and proration make N.F.L. cap management more like sorcery than an art or a science. And the voodoo economics the Chiefs and the Buccaneers are dabbling in could someday come with a steep price.Mahomes, as you may recall, signed a reported 10-year, $477 million contract extension in July. It was the sort of contract that would force a mortgage lender to accept a plea bargain — full of deferred bonuses, staggered guarantees and balloon payments designed to forestall Mahomes’s biggest paydays until 2023 and beyond. As a result, his 2020 compensation (base salary plus bonuses) counted for just $5.34 million against the salary cap, which allowed the Chiefs to re-sign important players like the Pro Bowl defensive tackle Chris Jones despite little apparent maneuvering room in their theoretical budget. Even Mahomes’s future compensation will come mostly in the form of bonuses instead of salary, allowing for further feats of accounting magical realism.Mahomes can afford to wait on his $40-plus million paydays because he is in high demand as an advertising pitchman, and successful quarterbacks are all but guaranteed long, lucrative careers. Brady is also a brand unto himself (and, as the spouse of an international celebrity, Gisele Bündchen, he brings in his household’s second income), but he has taken the opposite approach throughout his career by accepting short contracts full of guaranteed money. Lesser quarterbacks earn more than Brady in any given year, but he is always near the top of the N.F.L.’s wage earners and rarely more than a year away from another renegotiation and raise.Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady is always near the top of the N.F.L.’s highest paid players in part because of the strength of his brand.Credit…Scott Eisen/Getty ImagesThe Brady and Mahomes situations illustrate that salary cap alchemy typically boils down to compensating the superstar quarterback first, then fitting the rest of the budget around him. With a relatively affordable Brady in the fold, the Buccaneers could extend one-year offers to Brown, Gronkowski and Suh, veterans willing to sign for less than their market value to join forces with Brady and pursue a championship.Similarly, important role players like Sammy Watkins and Bashaud Breeland, who re-signed with the Chiefs, and Le’Veon Bell, who signed as a free agent, were given one-year contracts made possible because Mahomes is being paid in tomorrow bucks. The appeal of a likely Super Bowl run couldn’t have hurt, either.Even the cleverest cap model can backfire if a team cannot use success to sustain success. The Saints used reverse mortgage “die broke” tactics to pay Drew Brees through many years of Super Bowl near misses. With Brees’s retirement imminent, the Saints are so deep in deferred cap debt (an estimated $112 million) that they may be forced to pad their 2021 roster with season-ticket holders. The Philadelphia Eagles and the Los Angeles Rams overpaid quarterbacks Carson Wentz and Jared Goff (plus other top veterans) after trips to the Super Bowl in the 2017 and 2018 seasons. The Eagles are now facing an existential crisis, while the Rams are subsisting on the cap equivalent of maxed-out credit cards.After the Super Bowl, a long list of in-house free agents (including starters like Lavonte David, Shaquil Barrett and Chris Godwin, plus the aforementioned mercenaries) will be vying for the Buccaneers’ very limited cap space while Brady, who turns 44 in August, prepares to once again plays chess with his own mortality. Even with all of their finagling, the Chiefs will enter the off-season an estimated $18 million over the cap, meaning that next season’s Chiefs probably won’t be as good as this season’s Chiefs. Both teams in this Super Bowl needed to get there to justify their efforts to stay one step ahead of the collection agency.There is much more to “salary cap-enomics” than finding innovative ways to squeeze a Mahomes or a Brady into a budget — from extending in-house contracts before valued veterans reach free agency to avoiding spending sprees at positions like running back, where talent is plentiful and replaceable. Mostly, however, there’s no mystery to cap management, just the question of whether a team chooses to pay for its Super Bowl run today, tomorrow or by tacking almost a half-billion dollars onto the back end. Age and deferred debt eventually catch up to everyone. Even Tom Brady. Someday. Probably.All cap data comes from OverTheCap.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Liberty Enter Free Agency ‘Absolutely’ Ready for Big Changes

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Liberty Enter Free Agency ‘Absolutely’ Ready for Big ChangesSabrina Ionescu’s ankle injury derailed the Liberty’s high hopes for her rookie year, but the team is again aiming to contend next season. This is how it can do it.Liberty General Manager Jonathan Kolb said the team is in position to capitalize on free agents’ desire to come to New York and join the young roster.Credit…Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressJan. 15, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETAt first glance, the Liberty aren’t anywhere near contending in the W.N.B.A.They finished 2-20 during the bubble season in Bradenton, Fla., last year, and the numbers don’t get any more encouraging below that top line. The Liberty’s offensive efficiency, 87.3 points per 100 possessions, ranked at the bottom of the league — by a lot. The gap between the Liberty and the Atlanta Dream, ranked 11th of the 12 teams, was larger than the gap between Atlanta and the No. 1 team, the Seattle Storm.In years past, the off-season wouldn’t offer much hope for a team in the Liberty’s position, with the league’s best players locked into long-term contracts and few free agents expected to make big moves. But that kind of off-season is no longer the standard under the collective bargaining agreement signed last January. Last year, many big names, including Skylar Diggins-Smith and Tina Charles, moved to new teams: Diggins-Smith to Phoenix from Dallas and Charles to Washington from the Liberty.The timetable for a W.N.B.A. team to turn itself into a winner is significantly shorter under the new rules, which include a much higher max salary and fewer core designations — the league’s equivalent of the N.F.L.’s franchise tag.So for the Liberty’s general manager, Jonathan Kolb, that means this off-season is more than just a chance to improve at the margins. A winter that can both define the Liberty’s rebuild and catapult the team into the playoffs is within reach.“Absolutely,” Kolb said of whether the Liberty could expect a drastic change in 2021. “For the history of the league, up through last season, teams really improved via the draft. And you go back and look: Trades really weren’t much of a thing.”Salary Cap: Stick with the rookies.But a byproduct of the new C.B.A. is pressure on general managers. The max salary jumped 80 percent to $215,000 from $119,500, while the salary cap increased around $300,000, or about 30 percent. Suddenly, a status quo that had roughly 40 percent of the league earning a max salary couldn’t hold. Teams with multiple stars who could command max salaries as they completed their old deals spent big last off-season, setting themselves up to have to make difficult decisions this year and beyond.The Liberty, however, are overstocked with cap-friendly rookie contracts. The team is building around Sabrina Ionescu, last year’s top overall pick. A team that played seven rookies last season has similarly cost-effective young pieces up and down the roster as well.“The rookies will mature as players, and they’re going to be more ready to step in and be more efficient,” Kolb said. “And in terms of the system, I mean, of course, we will change things up. We’ve been deep diving into doing an autopsy of our season, and looking at all of it, offensively and defensively. And so I think it will be a combination of personnel and improvements.”Guards: Count on Sabrina Ionescu and Kia Nurse.Sabrina Ionescu reacted to a play from the bench wearing a medical boot last season.Credit…Julio Aguilar/Getty ImagesOne place the Liberty appear set is at the point guard position. Though Ionescu played only three games before an ankle injury ended her season, she quickly displayed the evolved offensive repertoire that turned her Oregon team into a juggernaut, and her 33-point effort against the Dallas Wings served notice that her production translates to the next level. When Ionescu went down, Layshia Clarendon, a former All-Star, took over point guard duties and provided veteran leadership. With Clarendon running the offense, the Liberty proved they could play at the speed Coach Walt Hopkins preaches, finishing second in the league in pace.Ionescu’s return will give the Liberty even more options. Her pick-and-roll skills juiced the offense at Oregon, where she collaborated with rolling bigs like Ruthy Hebard (now with the Chicago Sky) and Satou Sabally (now with Dallas).It is easy to picture the team around Ionescu taking form. Kia Nurse, whose season-long shooting slump in 2020 came after her breakthrough All-Star 2019 season, seems likely to return to form. The perimeter looks that Hopkins’s system generates should be more fruitful with the sharpshooting of Rebecca Allen of Australia and Marine Johannes of France, both of whom opted out of the 2020 season over concerns about traveling to the United States during the pandemic.Bigs: Natasha Howard or Nneka Ogwumike?The team’s primary center from last year, Amanda Zahui B., is a free agent. Kiah Stokes, who recently signed an extension with the Liberty, is efficient around the rim but struggled from 3-point range for a team that gave everyone the green light to shoot from deep.The market ahead offers multiple ways to address this deficiency, while potentially pairing the younger Ionescu with a veteran big with championship experience. Natasha Howard, who was a bench player on Minnesota Lynx championship teams and then a vital part of the Seattle Storm title winners in 2018 and 2020, is a free agent. She shot 35 percent from 3-point range last year, while feasting on interior defenders worn down from trying to stop Breanna Stewart. But Howard was the fourth offensive option in Seattle, after Stewart, Sue Bird and Jewell Loyd, and she could decide to join the Liberty and become more of a focal point. She averaged only 7.5 shot attempts per game in 2020.Then there’s Nneka Ogwumike, the longtime Los Angeles Sparks forward. Like Howard, she is a free agent, and like Howard, she was relatively low on the pecking order in Sparks Coach Derek Fisher’s offense last year, averaging a career-low 9.3 shot attempts per game. She’s also the president of the W.N.B.A. players’ union and, with a move to New York, would find herself a subway ride away from its headquarters.While Seattle and Los Angeles have given Howard and Ogwumike core designations, that only guarantees compensation for the teams should the players force their way out. That was how Charles and Diggins-Smith landed with new teams last season. A lineup of Ionescu and either Howard or Ogwumike, with the other returning Liberty players like Nurse and Allen, would be the framework for a true contender.Draft: Keep the pick — or cash it in?And the Liberty have the luxury of free agency coming before a draft, expected to take place in April, in which they again hold the top overall pick. That pick is a primary asset the Liberty can use to put the finishing touches on an off-season with a big free-agent signing or in a trade to acquire a second star to play alongside Ionescu.Kolb did not mention any free-agent targets, but he did indicate that he hoped most of the Liberty’s team-building work would be concluded before the draft. Then again, if the right players cannot be recruited this winter, it just means running the same play again in 2022, when players like Stewart and Jonquel Jones of the Connecticut Sun could hit the free-agent market.“I think the most exciting thing is, we’re in position to do something,” Kolb said. “We’re positioned cap-wise, flexibility-wise, that if they’re interested in coming to New York, we’re in a position to capitalize on it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Quarterback Keeper? Jets, Browns and Bears Face Contract Decisions

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrend WatchQuarterback Keeper? Jets, Browns and Bears Face Contract DecisionsSam Darnold, Baker Mayfield and Mitchell Trubisky have all been marginally impressive at times. But is that enough for their teams to sign them to salary-cap-straining contracts?Jets quarterback Sam Darnold, right, and Baker Mayfield of the Cleveland Browns have each made their teams’ decisions about extending their contracts trickier by playing well — but not that well — over the last few weeks.Credit…Bill Kostroun/Associated PressDec. 30, 2020, 3:00 a.m. ETThe most pivotal decision an N.F.L. team must make is often not drafting the right quarterback but determining the right thing to do with the quarterback it drafted a few years ago.The Jets and Sam Darnold are reaching a crossroads. The Cleveland Browns and Chicago Bears are facing similar decisions with Baker Mayfield and Mitchell Trubisky. Should these teams offer their marginally impressive, often disappointing young starters budget-burdening contracts or send them away and start over again?There is no middle ground. If there exists a compensation package for a former first-round quarterback that lands somewhere between nine-figure golden handcuffs and bus fare out of town, N.F.L. front offices have yet to discover it.Darnold, Mayfield and Trubisky have all made their teams’ decisions trickier by playing well — but not that well — over the past few weeks. Darnold has led the Jets to back-to-back victories. Mayfield threw 10 touchdowns and just one interception in a four-game stretch that ended when a coronavirus outbreak left him throwing to scout-team wide receivers in Sunday’s loss to the Jets. Trubisky has completed over 70 percent of his passes and thrown six touchdowns while leading the Bears to three straight victories, albeit against a trio of scuffling opponents.All three quarterbacks could be showing signs of improvement at the end of their third (Darnold and Mayfield) and fourth (Trubisky) N.F.L. seasons. Or their warm streaks may simply be random fluctuations caused by the quality of their opponents, some lucky bounces and heavily tempered expectations.Trubisky is just a few weeks removed from being benched in favor of Nick Foles. Mayfield behaved as if he were his own internet troll at times last year and struggled against quality defenses early in this season. Darnold is graded on the Jets curve: Showing up and trying his hardest guarantees at least a C-plus.The contracts of first-round draft picks come with built-in fifth-year team options: The player gets a hefty raise (Darnold’s base salary, for example, would jump from roughly $920,000 in 2021 to around $25 million in 2022), while the team gets an extra year of evaluation/procrastination. So the Jets and the Browns could delay their final decisions on Darnold and Mayfield until 2022. But exercising a quarterback’s fifth-year option is like asking a fiancé to postpone the wedding until they finish graduate school: perhaps prudent, but an undeniable sign of one’s true feelings.Team politics also typically play a large role in determining a young quarterback’s fate. Newly hired coaches are rarely eager to repair the prospect who helped get the last coach fired.The Chicago Bears famously traded up in the 2017 N.F.L. draft to select Mitchell Trubisky, center, when Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson were still on the board.Credit…Steve Mitchell/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe next Jets head coach is likely to approach undoing Adam Gase’s handiwork the way Batman defuses one of The Joker’s time bombs: The safest bet is to just hurl everything into Gotham River. So if the Jets keep Darnold, it may be only as a lame-duck place holder while his rookie replacement learns the playbook. Under such circumstances, a trade or release could provide both the Jets and Darnold a much-needed fresh start.The Bears declined Trubisky’s fifth-year option last off-season, so he enters 2021 as a free agent, leaving the team with several expensive, suboptimal choices. Franchise tagging Trubisky would cost the Bears more than the nearly $32 million one-year salary that Dak Prescott earned from the Dallas Cowboys’ indecision this season. A long-term contract may cost around $118 million over four years, as indicated by Ryan Tannehill’s contract with the Tennessee Titans. The cap-strapped Bears would struggle to afford either choice, neither of which Trubisky has earned.Front-office politics could also play a role in the Bears’ decision. General Manager Ryan Pace famously traded a bundle of mid-round draft picks to the San Francisco 49ers in 2017 to select Trubisky when Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson were still on the board. An executive who admits such a huge mistake rarely gets the chance to make another one. All the more reason to pretend that Trubisky is a late-blooming Aaron Rodgers.Mayfield has outperformed Darnold and Trubisky, overcoming many youthful bad habits while leading the Browns to their first winning record since 2007. That makes the team’s next decision even more perilous. Mayfield appears to be in line for a contract in the $32 million to $40 million range per year, like those signed by Watson, Jared Goff and Carson Wentz in recent years. (Mahomes’s $500 million contract, like his entire career so far, belongs in its own category).The Eagles, of course, have benched Wentz in favor of the rookie Jalen Hurts. But Wentz’s huge contract will make trading him like trying to sell a Lamborghini with 48 remaining payments after it was hit by a train. And Goff is the football equivalent of a $40 hamburger. Watson has played well in hopeless circumstances, and not every mammoth quarterback contract brings instant regret. But if the Browns choose to overpay Mayfield for “good enough,” they are likely to get precisely what they bargained for.It’s easy to suggest that any team that is not completely satisfied with its young quarterback’s development should cut bait and dip instead into next year’s deep pool of can’t-miss rookies. But Darnold, Trubisky, Mayfield, Wentz and Goff all came from similar can’t-miss pools. If selecting and developing a franchise quarterback were easy, multiple teams would not face this predicament each year.Ultimately, the Jets will probably trade or release Darnold; Mayfield should get Goff/Wentz money from the Browns; the Bears will find a solution to the Trubisky conundrum that makes sense only to the Bears; and everyone will wish they had selected Mahomes when they had the chance. The whole cycle will just begin anew next year when the Giants try to figure out what to do with Daniel Jones.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Diego Maradona Loved Basketball. Its Stars Loved Him, Too.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storymarc stein on basketballDiego Maradona Loved Basketball. Its Stars Loved Him, Too.Maradona, the Argentine soccer legend, was a big fan of his country’s biggest N.B.A. star, Manu Ginobili. But his fandom extended to Michael Jordan and, recently, Stephen Curry.Diego Maradona was a big fan of the N.B.A., from Michael Jordan to Manu Ginobili to Stephen Curry.Credit…Massimo Sambucetti/Associated PressBy More

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      The N.B.A. Slam Dunk Champion Cashes In

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      Derrick Jones Jr. of the Miami Heat poses for a portrait during the 2020 NBA All-Star weekend in Chicago.Credit…Jennifer Pottheiser/NBAE, via Getty ImagesSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe N.B.A. Slam Dunk Champion Cashes InDerrick Jones Jr. took The New York Times behind the scenes of his free agency to reveal all of the nerves, contemplation and, ultimately, joy.Derrick Jones Jr. of the Miami Heat poses for a portrait during the 2020 NBA All-Star weekend in Chicago.Credit…Jennifer Pottheiser/NBAE, via Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyBy More

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      N.B.A. Free Agency Frenzy: 5 Takeaways

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storymarc stein on basketballN.B.A. Free Agency Frenzy: 5 TakeawaysA player was traded three times, and the Lakers and Clippers jockeyed for each other’s stars. But Milwaukee is still waiting for a big decision from its biggest star: Giannis Antetokounmpo.Many of the N.B.A.’s off-season questions have been answered, but not the ones being asked about Giannis Antetokounmpo in Milwaukee.Credit…Harry How/Getty ImagesBy More