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      Naomi Osaka Is Talking to the Media Again, but on Her Own Terms

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      The tennis superstar is guest-editing Racquet magazine and has written a cover essay for Time. What’s left for traditional sports journalism?In early May, a couple of weeks before she tweeted that she wouldn’t appear at a required news conference at the French Open, Naomi Osaka was on a Zoom call with a writer for Racquet magazine who was trying to gain insight into the athlete’s inner life.Ms. Osaka said she’d gone to the protests in Minneapolis last year and had been moved by what she saw.“It was a bit of an eye opener,” she said of the experience, “because I’ve never had time to go out and do anything physically.”Ms. Osaka ignited a furious debate over the role of the tennis media with her announcement that she’d pay a $15,000 fine rather than attend a news conference that she said was bad for her mental health. Her decision, and the response from tennis officials, ended with her withdrawal from the French Open. The British tennis writer Andrew Castle called her decision “a very dangerous precedent” that would be “hugely destructive and a massive commercial blow to everyone in the sport.”If the freak-out over the cancellation of an inevitably boring news conference seemed a bit oversized, it was because Ms. Osaka didn’t just open a new conversation about mental health in sports. She touched a raw nerve in the intertwined businesses of sports and media: the ever-growing, irresistible power of the star. We journalists are touchy about retaining what is often pathetically minimal access to athletes. The media was once the main way that sports stars found fame, glory and lucrative endorsements, and a glossy profile can still play a role in elevating an obscure player. But the rise of social media and of a widening array of new outlets has produced a power shift, as my colleague Lindsay Crouse wrote in June, “redistributing leverage among public figures, the journalists and publications that cover them.”Ms. Osaka walked into the middle of that dynamic during the French Open. While tennis news conferences can be quite weird — some local journalist in the room amuses the traveling press by confusing one Russian player for another, or asks a particularly off-the-wall question — the mood is usually pretty sedate. Most players roll with them without complaint. And Ms. Osaka wasn’t being grilled about her personal life or her mental health. She was bothered by questions about her performance on clay courts. Another recent question concerned what she planned to wear to the Met Gala, a high-society Manhattan event of which she is a co-chair.She has become the best-paid woman in sports, earning about $60 million last year according to Forbes, and almost universally positive coverage hasn’t hurt her ability to build a portfolio that includes swimwear and skin care lines, two Nike sneakers and the Naomi Osaka bowl at Sweetgreen. And she drew broad and favorable coverage when she provoked a tournament into taking a day off to make a statement on police killings of Black Americans. She has a cover essay in the next issue of Time that is conciliatory toward the media even as it expands on her statements about mental health, a person familiar with it said.“The press is a willing accomplice to what most of these athletes are trying to accomplish,” said the Tennis Channel commentator Brett Haber.Ms. Osaka at the Australian Open. She set off a debate about the media’s role with her announcement at the French Open that she’d rather pay a fine than attend a news conference.Mackenzie Sweetnam/Getty ImagesI have an impulse to defend the need for athletes to give news conferences, on the principle that what Naomi Osaka does today, Joe Biden will do tomorrow. But there’s an additional layer that muddies the media’s position, which is that athletes are only talking to us because they’re under contract. “I’m just here so I won’t get fined,” the running back Marshawn Lynch groused repeatedly in a video Ms. Osaka also posted. There’s something a bit compromising in athletes appearing at a news conference not because they need, or even respect, the power of journalism but because a corporation is paying them to sit on the dais and reluctantly have no comment.Enterprising reporters can still get insight from news conferences, and many athletes don’t share Ms. Osaka’s stress about them. “It’s like pretty easygoing,” the Polish tennis player Iga Swiatek said last week. But while independent journalists can still deliver everything from breakthrough investigations to commentary, the role of journalism as a mere conduit for athletes’ words doesn’t make that much sense anymore. Ms. Osaka “could do a press conference on Instagram live if she wanted,” her agent, Stuart Duguid, told me.The ritual is “a relic of an era when they needed the press — when the press were the accepted conduit between athletes and the public,” a Guardian sportswriter, Jonathan Liew, said in an interview.But the Osaka story has broader resonance because sports, and the media that covers them, are often leading indicators of the direction in which we’re all headed. In 2007, Hillary Clinton’s top spokesman, Howard Wolfson, told me he was preoccupied with Major League Baseball’s site, MLB.com, and how the league had created a media entity that it totally controlled. Why couldn’t a politician and her campaign do the same, he wondered? It didn’t quite work for her, but by 2008, Barack Obama was producing videos far more compelling than anything the networks were making. In 2016, the Trump Show was the best thing on TV, syndicated to your local cable network.The assault on the independent sports media reached its peak with the 2014 introduction of The Players’ Tribune, with the promise of giving players their own voice. But that effort pretty much fizzled, selling to an Israeli media company in 2019. Though it occasionally published powerful essays, it mostly had that sterile quality of a glorified news release.Athletes’ more successful ventures into media have avoided taking on journalism directly. The model is the Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James, who has spent a decade building a media company that has done deals for TV shows and movies with HBO, Netflix, Warner Brothers and others. And at its best, these platforms can elicit more than you’d get at a news conference. Mr. James built his company, in part, on the insight that athletes would open up to one another, and “didn’t want to be asked questions that everyone should know the answers to,” said Josh Pyatt, the co-head of WME Sports, who has been at the center of building media companies for athletes.On a recent episode of “The Shop,” produced for HBO by Mr. James, the quarterback Tom Brady acknowledged the wooden quality of many athletes’ comments to the press.“What I say versus what I think are two totally different things,” said Mr. Brady, who co-founded another media company, Religion of Sports, with Michael Strahan, the former New York Giant and current “Good Morning America” host. “Ninety percent of what I say is probably not what I’m thinking.”Who wants that? But somewhere between the compulsory news conference and the glory days of Sports Illustrated, there’s space for a new independent sports journalism, one that reckons with the power athletes now wield on their own platforms but also retains a degree of journalistic independence that most of the athlete-owned media companies don’t attempt.That, at least, is the thinking behind Racquet, a gorgeous print tennis quarterly that started in 2016 with literary ambitions (the first issue included not one but two reconsiderations of the novelist David Foster Wallace) and has an ambitious, diverse roster of writers. Its next issue, due in August, will be guest edited by Ms. Osaka. It includes the interview with her (by Thessaly La Force, who is also a features director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine); an essay on the Japanese discovery, through Ms. Osaka, a Japanese citizen, of the Black Lives Matter movement; and a photo essay on the tennis culture in Ms. Osaka’s father’s native Haiti.An illustration for Racquet magazine that accompanies an interview with Ms. Osaka.Photo illustration by Johanna Goodman/Getty Images for Racquet MagazineA tennis media that revolves around daily news cycles is “still living in an age where pulling quotes from a presser makes a headline, makes a story,” said Caitlin Thompson, a former college tennis player and veteran journalist who is Racquet’s publisher and co-founder, with David Shaftel. “They’re not operating in a world where an athlete can reach more people and be more attuned to the larger cultural and social contexts than they are.”Racquet has tried to straddle those worlds. Its contributors include Andrea Petkovic, a top German player (and another Foster Wallace fan), and the Greek player Stefanos Tsitsipas, who is also a photographer. But it also published a tough investigation of allegations of domestic abuse against the German tennis star Alexander Zverev. And Thompson said that younger players “understand what we’re doing because they’re children of the internet — they’re all Gen Z.” The Australian Nick Kyrgios, for instance, has a “context in which he wants to be seen, which is this kid playing Call of Duty between matches and being more into the Celtics than the men’s tour,” Ms. Thompson said. (The August Racquet issue also explores Ms. Osaka’s medium of choice, manga.)Ms. Osaka skipped Wimbledon, but she’s expected to be back for the Tokyo Olympics this summer. And the Racquet issue offers a bit of the texture of a young star’s strange life — between hotel rooms and tennis courts — that you would be hard-pressed to find at a news conference.Ms. Osaka sometimes describes herself as shy, but she told Racquet: “Tennis is a thing that I’m least shy about. At the end of the day, even if I don’t win that match, I know that I have played better than 99 percent of the population, so there’s not anything to be shy about.” More

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      Was The NBA Season Too Much Too Soon After the Bubble?

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      A rash of injuries leads LeBron James to question the league’s packed schedule.The Los Angeles Lakers will not play another game until October, but LeBron James was apparently not ready to stop dunking. Fresh off the maiden first-round playoff exit of his career, James responded to a cresting wave of injuries sustained by marquee stars with a social media scolding of the N.B.A.In response to a sobering bulletin about the Los Angeles Clippers’ Kawhi Leonard, who is out indefinitely after sustaining a knee sprain in the Clippers’ second-round series against the Utah Jazz, James took to Twitter. He offered commiserations to fans about the record-setting eight current All-Stars who have missed at least one game this postseason — and criticized league officials for not doing more in this pandemic season to “protect the well being of the players.”By more he meant less: James said he issued clear warnings about the increased injury risk attached to wedging a 72-game regular season between Dec. 22 and May 16, with the playoffs timed to end right before the Tokyo Olympics, compared with starting in mid-January and possibly playing fewer games. The 2019-20 season, remember, strayed into October and spawned the shortest off-season in league history after a four-month interruption imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.“They all didn’t wanna listen to me about the start of the season,” James wrote. “I knew exactly what would happen.”Self-serving? Yes. Vague? Yes again. There was an undeniable whiff of convenience to James’s remarks, as a rationalization for the swift end to the Lakers’ title defense, along with a lack of clarity. James did not specify to whom, when or where those warnings were registered. He was also surely aware that the 2020-21 schedule was mutually agreed upon by league officials and the National Basketball Players Association, and that starting later, as James had hoped, very likely would have cost both parties significant television revenue by falling shy of the 72-game threshold.Yet the soliloquy, above all, amounted to a loud and powerful “told you so” from James that drowned out the disclaimers. It carried more bite than his recent blasts about the N.B.A.’s decision to stage an All-Star Game in Atlanta in March, followed by protests against the playoff play-in tournament that his Lakers, after long-term injuries felled both James and Anthony Davis, had to win to make the playoffs after slipping to No. 7 in the West.Beyond the uncomfortable spotlight he brought to a dampened N.B.A. postseason increasingly known for who isn’t able to play, James said what so many of his fellow players have surely been thinking — using his biggest-in-the-game megaphone. The rant highlighted a prime concern in front offices and among medical staffs throughout the league: What cost, present and future, did the stacking of two pandemic seasons with such a short turnaround impose?The players’ union agreed to that timeline after learning that the N.B.A.’s television partners pushed for it. The players, who essentially split annual profits and losses evenly with team owners, were told that starting in December rather than January would result in a difference of roughly $500 million in revenue, after last season’s shortfall of $1.5 billion. No less important to the league office was the opportunity to wrap this season up in time to return to its usual October-through-June arc in 2021-22.In retrospect? It was a giant ask. The physical and mental toll of last season’s restart in the Florida bubble, combined so soon with the rigors of a season in home markets governed by strict Covid-19 protocols and daily testing that ate into rest and recovery time, had teams fearful from the start of a spate of soft-tissue injuries. Player stress and training time lost, with fewer practices and a second-half crush of games to make up earlier postponements, only increased those fears.As the number of injured stars became a dominant second-half story line, whether truly a byproduct of the compressed schedule or purely bad luck in some instances as seen with the ankle injuries sustained by James and the Nets’ Kyrie Irving, more questions surfaced. One of the biggest: How will the franchise cornerstones who shoulder such demanding loads rebound next season?“I don’t know if people do get the question you asked,” the Philadelphia 76ers coach, Doc Rivers, told me. “There’s so much stress on those guys. Some guys log heavier minutes — they have to do more.”Joel Embiid after falling hard in the fourth quarter of Game 5 against the Atlanta Hawks. Embiid has been playing through a meniscus tear in his right knee.Bill Streicher/USA Today Sports, via ReutersRivers’s All-Star center, Joel Embiid, is one of those guys. Embiid has been playing through a small meniscus tear in his right knee and, after a roaring start to Philadelphia’s second-round series against Atlanta, was unable to prevent the top-seeded Sixers from falling into a 3-2 deficit entering a Game 6 on the road.Those eight All-Stars who have missed at least one playoff game include Embiid. The number will swell to nine if Phoenix’s Chris Paul, who this week entered the league’s health and safety protocols, has to miss any of the upcoming Western Conference finals.As I’ve been writing since April, there is little charm to be celebrated from the uncharacteristically wide-open nature of these playoffs when the suspense largely stems from game- and series-changing absentees.“Injury rates were virtually the same this season as they were during 2019-20, while starter-level and All-Star players missed games due to injury at similar rates as the last three seasons,” said Mike Bass, an N.B.A. spokesman, citing the league’s internal data. “While injuries are an unfortunate reality of our game, we recognize the enormous sacrifices N.B.A. players and teams have made to play through this pandemic.”While true that one of the sport’s eternal struggles is conclusively attributing an injury to overuse, and that no one on the outside can conclusively say a 60-game schedule would have kept stars safer than 72 games, internal data that isn’t made public has obvious limitations. Thanks to James’s blasts, much more attention has been placed on the numbers dispensed by the Elias Sports Bureau. It heaped the loudest pressure yet on the league to prove that 72 games across five months before the playoffs, even with reduced travel, wasn’t an injury accelerant.Kevin Durant uncorked a performance for the ages (49 points in 48 minutes) on Tuesday to haul the Nets to the brink of the Eastern Conference finals despite Irving’s absence and James Harden’s limited effectiveness on an injured right hamstring. Hours after the Clippers and Suns lost Leonard and Paul on a wretched Wednesday, Atlanta tried to bring the focus back to basketball with its remarkable Game 5 comeback against the 76ers — or, depending on your perspective, Philadelphia’s unfathomable fold.These are the things we should be dissecting. The Leonard-less Clippers’ Game 5 win in Utah, inspired by Paul George right after the Sixers squandered a 26-point lead to the Hawks, was another.Over and over, sadly, injuries have changed the conversation. They affect every postseason, true, but the intrusions have seemingly been a constant since March 20, when James (high ankle sprain after Atlanta’s Solomon Hill collided with him) and Charlotte’s newly named Rookie of the Year Award winner LaMelo Ball (fractured wrist after crashing to the floor) were hurt on the same day.Elias circulated last week that this season’s 27 All-Stars combined to miss a higher rate of games (13.7 games per player and 19 percent overall) than in any previous season. Michele Roberts, the executive director of the players’ union, declined to comment on Wednesday when asked if James had indeed raised his concerns about such developments in consultation with union officials before the season.“I speak for the health of all our players and I hate to see this many injuries this time of the year,” James said as part of his rim-shaking social media post.On this occasion, and this topic, they were comments heard — and felt — by an entire league. More

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      Even LeBron James Isn’t Eternal

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      At 36, with his team’s future in doubt, James faces basketball mortality.His season was not finished — not yet, anyway — when LeBron James grabbed a seat at the far end of the Los Angeles Lakers’ bench on Tuesday night in Phoenix. He would occasionally approach a teammate or an assistant so that he could lean in close for a one-sided conversation. But he otherwise seemed resigned to the reality of the situation.The Lakers were getting routed by the Suns in Game 6 of their first-round playoff series, and James — such an indomitable force throughout his 18-year-old career, but now facing an early summer — was oddly powerless to stop it.Perhaps there was hope, in some distant corner of Lakerland, that he could muster more of his familiar magic to help the team avoid elimination two days later in Los Angeles. Instead, the Lakers were bound for more of the same: more offensive fireworks from the Suns, more disappointment, more questions about their future.The surprise was not so much that the second-seeded Suns won the best-of-seven series, clinching a trip to the Western Conference semifinals with their 113-100 victory in Game 6 on Thursday night. Rather, it was the way in which they did it — by winning the final two games of the series against the defending N.B.A. champions so convincingly.For the Lakers, it was a gloomy coda to their brief reign atop the league.“It’s been draining,” James said, referring to the past 18 months. “Mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally draining.”Devin Booker of the Suns is one of the younger players threatening James’s throne.Harry How/Getty ImagesBy any objective measure, the Lakers faced their share of obstacles. Their run to last season’s championship came in the middle of a pandemic and stretched into October. The 2020-21 season started about two months later. Despite the short break, the Lakers got off to a strong start, going 21-6 before injuries slowed them down. They eventually slipped into the playoffs as a No. 7 seed, and only after playing their way in.“I just think the whole thing was a challenge, to play all the way into October and start the season as quickly as we did,” Coach Frank Vogel said. “It was going to be an uphill battle.”There is a big “what if,” of course: What if Anthony Davis, the Lakers’ All-Star power forward, had remained healthy against the Suns? The Lakers had a 2-1 series lead when Davis strained his groin in Game 4. Sensing weakness, the Suns pounced to even the series. Davis was in street clothes for Game 5, which the Suns won by 30 points, and then spent only 5 minutes 25 seconds on the court in Game 6 before he left in pain, done for the night and for the season.Davis is extraordinarily talented and helped fuel the Lakers’ championship, but nobody is accusing him of being the sturdiest player in the league. Prone to injuries for much of his career, he missed about two months this season with a calf strain, and his problems in the playoffs cost the Lakers at the worst time.“We had the pieces,” Davis said. “We just couldn’t stay healthy. A lot of that is on me.”James, 36, was not immune to injury, either. He sprained his right ankle in March and missed a total of 26 games before the playoffs. On Thursday, he tried to tow the Lakers back from a 29-point deficit, helping cut it to 10 in the fourth quarter. He finished with 29 points, 9 rebounds and 7 assists, but acknowledged that his ankle was still bothering him. He said he was looking forward to a full off-season.“It’s going to work wonders for me,” he said, indicating that he would not play in the Olympics.The brightest star in the series was the Suns’ Devin Booker, who, at 24, has officially arrived as one of the league’s premier players. On Thursday, he scored 47 points and shot 8 of 10 from beyond the 3-point line. When James made his first trip to the playoffs, with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2006, Booker was 9 years old. After Thursday’s game, James autographed his jersey and gave it to him.“I love everything about D-Book,” James said. “He continues to make the jump.”While the Suns go about preparing for the Denver Nuggets in the next round, the Lakers will begin the hard work of addressing where they go from here.Just five players — James, Davis, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Kyle Kuzma and Marc Gasol — are under contract for next season, and Montrezl Harrell has a player option. (In a contractual quirk, the Lakers also owe Luol Deng, who last played for the Lakers in 2017, $5 million.) The big earners, though, are James, Davis and Caldwell-Pope, who, combined, are due nearly $90 million — a sum that, because of salary-cap restrictions, will limit the Lakers’ ability to make significant moves in free agency. The Lakers are unlikely to undergo any extreme makeovers. And they could wind up paying a hefty luxury tax if they re-sign some of their own free agents.James said he had faith in Rob Pelinka, the team’s general manager.“I will have some input,” James said, “but he always asks my input.”No one is about to feel sorry for the Lakers. Davis forced his way to Los Angeles. James is starring in a major motion picture this summer. And the Lakers, with all the inherent advantages as a big-market franchise, won it all last fall. So spare the tears.But the road does seem a bit uncertain for them, and for James in particular. One of the game’s great competitors, he was the sixth-oldest player in the league this season. (Worth noting: The two oldest players, Udonis Haslem and Anderson Varejao, combined to appear in six games and score 17 points.) In two of the last three seasons, James sustained serious injuries after avoiding them for most of his career. No athlete is immortal.Now James is fighting the inevitable effects of age while trying to ward off a group of up-and-comers like Booker — “Young guns,” James called them — who are determined to seize their rightful share of the stage. Perhaps they already have. James was asked whether their presence would motivate him to come back stronger.“I don’t need motivation from anybody in this league,” he said. “I motivate myself.” 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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      N.B.A. Playoffs: Anthony Davis Leads Lakers Past the Suns

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      In Los Angeles, a star absorbs a few blows as he delivers shot after shot, leading the Lakers past the Suns.LOS ANGELES — It was not an especially pleasant night of basketball for Anthony Davis. Productive? Yes. Pleasant? No.The Lakers on Thursday were playing in front of a home playoff crowd for the first time since 2013, and Davis christened the festivities by picking up his first foul 15 seconds into the game. A few minutes later, his face got in the way of one of Deandre Ayton’s elbows.In the second quarter, Davis sprinted the length of the court to chase down Devin Booker and swat away his layup — only to wrench his left knee. Davis would later describe it as “hyperextended.” Whatever the official diagnosis, he used a heat wrap at halftime and then removed it so that he could continue with his now-familiar business of torching the Phoenix Suns.Davis, the Lakers’ All-Star power forward, has not been immune to injury. He missed about two months this season with a calf strain, and the Lakers have little chance of defending their N.B.A. championship without him. On Thursday, he was hobbling throughout the second half of the Lakers’ 109-95 win over the Suns in Game 3 of their first-round series, and Frank Vogel, the Lakers’ coach, kept turning to the members of his medical staff: Were they sure this was such a good idea?Davis after he took an elbow to the face from Deandre Ayton.Sean M. Haffey/Getty ImagesHis troubles mounted when he tried to block a Devin Booker shot.Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images“Maybe we should get him out,” Vogel recalled telling them. “And they’re saying, ‘He’s good to go. He’s safe. It’s just about playing through pain.’”Davis wound up collecting 34 points and 11 rebounds to help the Lakers take a 2-1 series lead over Phoenix ahead of Game 4 on Sunday afternoon, and the Suns — who earned the No. 2 seed with an enormously successful regular season — seem in danger of coming unglued. Chris Paul’s shoulder injury has rendered him a sad shadow of himself. His teammates are being thwarted by the Lakers’ defense, and their frustration is starting to show.Players from both teams spent the late stages of Thursday’s game barking at each other.“That’s playoff basketball,” Davis said. “Guys are going to chirp. Guys are going to talk.”But while the Lakers seemed to consume all the theatrics as fuel — Dennis Schröder, for example, did a series of push-ups after Booker knocked him to the court in the final minute — the Suns lost their composure. Booker was ejected for his flagrant foul on Schröder — Davis called it a “dirty play” — and the Suns’ Jae Crowder soon got tossed, too.The Lakers, of course, are only seven months removed from last season’s title run in the bubble, and few pundits were dismissing them ahead of their series with the Suns. Sure, they might have limped into the playoffs as the No. 7 seed after a disjointed season that was marred by injuries. But they still employ two of the best players on the planet. So what if LeBron James missed 26 games down the stretch because of a sprained ankle? So what if their lineup was seldom whole? So what if they lost 9 of 15 games in April?The doubts, murmurs and questions crept in, though, after their Game 1 loss in Phoenix. Davis, after being outplayed by Ayton, took the blame and vowed to be better. Before Game 2, he seemed uniquely determined to his teammates: quiet in a fearsome way. He delivered, scoring 34 points to help tie the series.On Thursday, the Lakers were leading by 3 at halftime when Davis (and James) went to work. After James scored the first two baskets of the third quarter by attacking creases in the lane, he fed Davis for a dunk. The Suns immediately called a timeout, but the Lakers’ run had the feel of storm clouds forming on the horizon.“Those two guys really reversed the whole course of the game,” Vogel said of Davis and James.Coming out of the timeout, Davis kept calling for the ball, and scoring, and limping, and rebounding, and scoring some more. He corralled a lob for another dunk. He faced up against Ayton and lofted a leaner over him. Davis scored 18 points in the third quarter alone, and some close observers of the Lakers were calling it the team’s best stretch of basketball of the season.“He’s just ultra-aggressive right now,” James said of Davis, adding: “When he’s aggressive, we’re all aggressive.”Jae Crowder and the Suns lost their cool, and LeBron James and the Lakers left with a 2-1 lead in the series.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressEven Davis’s mistakes came with thunderous flair. After cutting through the lane and catching a pass from James, Davis rose for an attempted dunk that caromed off the back of the rim with such force that the ball nearly grazed the video screen hanging above center court. Later, he lost one of his sneakers while drawing a foul. He otherwise remained intact.“Just a gutsy, tough performance from a great player,” Vogel said, “and we needed it.”Before joining the Lakers last season, Davis had been to the playoffs only twice, without ever taking his team past the second round. He was a great player — dominant, even — but he was not necessarily known as a winner, and his exit from New Orleans was a messy one.Davis went a long way toward repairing his reputation in the bubble, winning a championship with James while making important shots along the way. Now, he appears to be savoring the chance to make another title run, this time in arenas that are beginning to fill with fans.“We’re finding our groove at the right time,” he said. 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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      These N.B.A. Playoffs Burst 2020’s Bubble

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      The confined, roiled 2020 N.B.A. playoffs reflected their times. So, too, do this year’s celebratory games.Last August, as the N.B.A. began its 2020 postseason in the confined bubble of Walt Disney World in Florida, the coronavirus pandemic raged, a vaccine was nothing but a dream and the battle for racial justice stood firmly at the forefront of every game.That was then, and this is now: The playoffs are back, but this time set against a much different backdrop. Vaccines have softened the pandemic’s blow, allowing America to reopen and N.B.A. fans to attend games in numbers that, while still limited, would have shocked last summer.Black Lives Matter slogans are not painted on the courts or stitched on jerseys. Players no longer lock arms and kneel during the playing of the national anthem.Last year’s N.B.A. postseason reflected the tension, tenor and tone of society. The league’s players, 75 percent of whom are Black, sparked a movement that spread to other sports when they boycotted games to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wis. These days, as the 2021 playoffs get off the ground, shootings continue without such stoppages.The tinderbox days of the bubble seem like forever ago.This postseason is more about moving forward and sloughing off, however tentatively, the raw pain of the last year. It’s about welcoming new possibilities. It’s about basketball, the pure sport and entertainment of it.And so far, after the first few days of action, it can’t get much better.It began with the so-called play-in tournament, an innovation first tried in the Florida bubble, which gives the league’s middle-of-the-pack teams a shot at making the playoffs.The tournament, held last week, gave us Jayson Tatum leading his Boston Celtics over the Washington Wizards, sinking every shot imaginable as he went for a cool 50 points.It gave us another unforgettable duel between the two players and two teams that have defined basketball in the 21st century. That the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers and the Golden State Warriors struggled through injury-filled seasons hardly mattered. Wednesday’s matchup was LeBron James against Steph Curry in a game with real meaning — even if it wasn’t the N.B.A. finals, where they met four times before.It ended like poetry, with James squaring his shoulders, setting his feet and nailing a 34-foot jumper with seconds on the shot clock and less than a minute left in the game. That he did so over the outstretched arms of Curry, his longtime nemesis, added to the moment’s indelible heft.Friday night, reeling from the heartbreak loss to the Lakers, there was Curry again, only this time his Warriors were playing on their home court, in their still new arena in downtown San Francisco. Roughly 7,500 fans were on hand, the largest, most boisterous crowd at Chase Center this season.Many lament that Steph Curry, left, will not be a part of a playoff run but what would the N.B.A. be without the emergence of fresh talent like Ja Morant, right?Jed Jacobsohn/Associated PressAnd this time, they played against the league’s youngest team, the Memphis Grizzlies, with everything on the line. The winner would advance to the playoffs. The loser, to vacation.Curry claims to be 33. Maybe he’s fooling us. Coming off an M.V.P.-caliber regular season in which he led a hobbled, patchwork team to the league’s most improved record, he barely took a breather. True, there were signs of fatigue. His slow walk during breaks in action. The occasional slump of his shoulders. The slight hint of bewilderment in his face as he endured another night of battering from swarming defenders.And yet he scored 39 points and willed his team from a 17-point deficit to force an overtime.The narrative, so said almost every pundit, would belong to Curry and the Warriors in the end. Ja Morant had other ideas. Memphis’s 21-year-old, catlike point guard outdueled Curry. Normally underwhelming from long range, Morant made five of his 10 3-point attempts. And when it counted most, in the last two minutes of overtime, he showed why he is one of the brightest young stars in the league, ready to emerge from the shadow of Zion Williamson, who was taken one spot ahead of Morant in the 2019 N.B.A. draft. Morant finessed his way past the Warriors’ defense in the last gasps of overtime and sank a pair of deft push shots to seal a Memphis win, 117-112.Many lament that Curry, global icon, will not be a part of a playoff run. Many still grouse about the play-in tournament, claiming it is unfair or that it cheapens the regular season. Remember when James said, seemingly only partly in jest, that the N.B.A. official who drew up the tournament should be fired? Considering the feast the games provided as an appetizer to the main course — and, of course, the high television ratings — the criticism seems silly now.Sure, we don’t have Curry and the Warriors in the playoffs, but what fun is sport without surprises and novelty? What would the N.B.A. be without the steady emergence of fresh talent like Morant and his cast of young Grizzlies teammates, who now must prove themselves anew in their first-round playoff series against the Utah Jazz, holders of the league’s best record, which began Sunday night?Last year, the N.B.A. reflected the mood of our society. Angered, standing up in the face of worry and fear.But if our sports are to be a mirror, they must also mirror our hope and joy and celebrate new genius.That’s what we’re seeing now: an N.B.A. still wary about the troubles of the past year but ready to do what it does best. Ready, as the playoffs of 2021 get underway, to put on a show. More

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      In the NBA Playoffs, The Scariest Teams Are Lower Seeds

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      Injuries and illness dragged down the records of several teams, including the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers. That could mean early postseason exits for the season’s best.The N.B.A.’s play-in tournament nearly fell flat with a series of blowout games until LeBron James and Stephen Curry rescued the postseason appetizer experiment with a dynamic one-off between the Los Angeles Lakers and Curry’s Golden State.Now, the real games are here, with the Knicks and the Nets both earning a seat at the table.The championship is up for grabs after a truncated off-season and a somewhat sluggish and injury-filled regular season.In the Western Conference, neither of the two top seeds — the Utah Jazz or the Phoenix Suns — is favored to escape the conference with the defending-champion Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers lurking.In the Eastern Conference, the Nets are finally at full strength at the right time, Milwaukee and Philadelphia are revamped, looking to advance beyond past stumbles, and Jimmy Butler and his Heat — last season’s Eastern Conference champions — will try to prove that success last year was no fluke.Here’s a look at the matchups.Eastern ConferenceNo. 1 Philadelphia 76ersvs. No. 8 Washington WizardsPhiladelphia’s Joel Embiid is one of three finalists for the league’s Most Valuable Player Award.Matt Slocum/Associated PressThe Wizards have emerged as an Eastern Conference feel-good story to rival the Knicks. To seize the East’s final playoff berth, they rallied from a 17-32 start and a coronavirus outbreak that shut down the team for nearly two weeks.The problem: Washington’s reward is a first-round matchup with the best Philadelphia team since Allen Iverson led the 76ers to the N.B.A. finals in 2001. Joel Embiid is one of three finalists for the league’s Most Valuable Player Award, Ben Simmons ranks as one of the league’s most feared defenders and Coach Doc Rivers, in his first season with the Sixers, has this group primed to capitalize on an enticing playoff draw.The three teams best equipped to keep the Sixers out of the N.B.A. finals — Milwaukee, Miami and the Nets — are all on the other side of the bracket, meaning Philadelphia can face only one of them and not before the conference finals.The potency of Bradley Beal and the triple-double king Russell Westbrook in the Wizards’ backcourt might enable them to steal a game, but this is a series in which the Wizards could use Thomas Bryant, their rugged big man who sustained a season-ending knee injury in January. As good as Daniel Gafford has been since Washington acquired him from Chicago on trade deadline day in March, Gafford and a resurgent Robin Lopez will need help to cope with Embiid.No. 2 Brooklyn Netsvs. No. 7 Boston CelticsBoston’s challenge in facing the Nets is daunting, but Jayson Tatum gives the Celtics (some) hope.Bob Dechiara/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe Nets’ starters have not played together enough to be deemed invincible, but it will take a team at full strength to pose any serious challenge. The Celtics are not that team.Boston limped through the regular season with injuries to Kemba Walker, Marcus Smart and Evan Fournier, whom the Celtics traded for in March. Most significantly, Jaylen Brown and his 24.7 points and 6 rebounds per game are out for the season following his wrist surgery.Walker and the offensive virtuoso Jayson Tatum will have to play magnificently and carry the burden just to steal a game or two against a Nets defense that can be porous. The Nets finished with one of the most efficient offenses in N.B.A. history, scoring 117.3 points per 100 offensive possessions, and vied for the Eastern Conference’s top seed, despite piecing together rotations throughout the season.The most realistic result of this series is that the Nets will use the games as an opportunity to jell following a regular season in which Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving rarely all shared the court. Their real test won’t come until they meet healthier opponents down the playoff line.No. 3 Milwaukee Bucksvs. No. 6 Miami HeatJimmy Butler and the Miami Heat have a chance to show that their success last season was not a fluke.Bob Dechiara/USA Today Sports, via ReutersLast season, the Heat thumped the Bucks in the Eastern Conference semifinals, needing just five games to eliminate Giannis Antetokounmpo & Co. It was another disappointingly brief postseason appearance for Milwaukee, which has reoriented itself behind Antetokounmpo for another crack at its first trip to the N.B.A. finals since 1974 — and its first championship since 1971. Few contenders, if any, have gone about their business more quietly. Antetokounmpo went a long way toward ensuring a drama-free existence for the franchise by signing a huge contract extension before the start of the season, and the addition of Jrue Holiday has given the team some defensive-minded toughness.A season removed from an Eastern Conference championship (and a demolition of the Bucks in the process), the Heat have had their ups and downs. Jimmy Butler appeared in just 52 games because of injuries and illness, but he is a fearsome competitor — especially in the postseason. Duncan Robinson and Tyler Herro are constant perimeter threats, and the power forward Bam Adebayo is coming off the most productive regular season of his career. Slowing Antetokounmpo — who was limited by an ankle injury last season — will be the challenge.No. 4 New York Knicksvs. No. 5 Atlanta HawksTrae Young was Atlanta’s leading scorer this season, averaging 25.3 points per game.Brett Davis/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe Knicks and Hawks might be the most evenly matched teams in the first round. Each team has a marquee player who carried it to the postseason: Julius Randle for the Knicks, and Trae Young for the Hawks. Both teams played their best basketball in the second half of the season after an inconsistent first half. Both were among the slowest in terms of pace.All of that to say: This is a tossup. The Hawks do have a wild card in their favor: health. They’re getting some key players back, including Kris Dunn and De’Andre Hunter, who were out with injuries for most of the season. That could cause some headaches for the Knicks, who have mostly avoided the injury bug.The Knicks were elite defensively and have the weapons to contain Young. But offensively, the Knicks have had trouble finding consistent help for Randle. That being said, Randle played the best basketball of his season against the Atlanta. The Knicks won all three of their matchups.Western ConferenceNo. 1 Utah Jazzvs. No. 8 Memphis GrizzliesUtah’s Jordan Clarkson is one of three finalists for the league’s Sixth Man of the Year Award. He averaged a career-high 18.4 points per game.Neville E. Guard/USA Today Sports, via ReutersWhat to make of the Utah Jazz? They were the best team in the N.B.A. and did not have a single top candidate for the Most Valuable Player Award. Donovan Mitchell, their young star in the midst of a career year, missed the final 16 games of the season because of an ankle injury. The Jazz went 10-6 in those games. Utah led the league in point differential, meaning the average margin of victory for their games. The team was dominant, in large part because of Rudy Gobert’s anchoring of the defense, and because of players like Joe Ingles and Jordan Clarkson picking up the slack with Mitchell absent.It’s unclear whether Mitchell will be able to return for the first round. But the biggest issue is that we’ve seen great regular seasons from the Jazz in the past two years, only for them to get bounced in the first round. But this is the best regular-season Jazz team since 1998-99.They’ll face Ja Morant and the Memphis Grizzlies, who overpowered Golden State in a play-in game on Friday night for the eighth seed. Morant, who won the Rookie of the Year Award last season, was relentless on Friday with 35 points. The Grizzlies are young and inexperienced, but they’re also fearless. That mind-set will give them their best chance against the Jazz.No. 2 Phoenix Sunsvs. No. 7 Los Angeles LakersLeBron James’s game-winning 3-pointer against Golden State in the play-in game, which gave the Lakers the seventh seed, signaled that he’s ready for the playoffs.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressThe Suns assembled their best regular season since 2006-7, motoring through a competitive conference to win their division. Just two seasons ago, they went 19-63 and were a laughingstock. But their talented young core, led by Devin Booker and Deandre Ayton, has begun to fulfill its potential, and the addition of Chris Paul in the off-season infused the team with leadership, desire and direction.The Suns’ reward for all their hard work? A first-round meeting with the defending champions. It doesn’t exactly seem fair that Phoenix has to christen its first trip to the postseason since 2010 by figuring out how to contend with LeBron James and Anthony Davis. (Welcome back to the playoffs!)The Lakers are an oddity as a No. 7 seed: Injuries to their stars hindered their season, and the roster was seldom whole. James, for example, appeared in just 45 games because of an ankle sprain. But if his game-sealing 3-pointer against Golden State in the play-in round is any indication, he could be rounding back into form — and the Suns could be in for a tough series.No. 3 Denver Nuggetsvs. No. 6 Portland Trail BlazersThe Trail Blazers are healthier than they were this time last season, but they will still need to rely on their All-Star guard Damian Lillard.Steve Dykes/Associated PressThe last time these teams met in the playoffs, the result was an epic seven-game clash that included a quadruple-overtime game before Portland exhaustingly outlasted Denver in the 2019 Western Conference semifinals.Both teams have sensational M.V.P. candidates — Denver’s Nikola Jokic and Portland’s Damian Lillard, stars looking to journey past the conference finals for the first time.Both also wavered through uneven stretches during the regular season. Denver was below .500 after the first 13 games of the season, and Portland often struggled while cycling through a series of injuries to key rotation players.But Portland will have the services of CJ McCollum and the former Nugget Jusuf Nurkic after each missed chunks of the regular season. The Nuggets will be without Jamal Murray, one of the breakout stars of last season’s playoffs, after he sustained a knee injury in April. Denver’s Monte Morris and Will Barton are also nursing recent injuries.Jokic should be able to find holes in Portland’s 29th-ranked defense. The Nuggets will look for Aaron Gordon, acquired in a March trade with Orlando, and Michael Porter Jr. to replace some of Murray’s scoring punch, and will need to pay attention to Lillard and McCollum on screens.No. 4 Los Angeles Clippersvs. No. 5 Dallas MavericksThe Clippers fell apart in last season’s playoffs, but they stand a good chance against the Dallas Mavericks this year.Mike Ehrmann/Getty ImagesWhen the Clippers lost their final two regular-season games to Houston and Oklahoma City, two of the league’s worst teams, it signaled to the rest of the N.B.A. that the Clippers wanted to get out of the Lakers’ side of the Western playoff bracket and delay a possible matchup until the conference finals. With the Clippers needing only a win over the Thunder to clinch the No. 3 seed, rest assured that they were equally motivated by the prospect of dropping to No. 4 and locking in a first-round series with Dallas.The state of the Clippers’ psyche remains a major curiosity after their second-round collapse against Denver last season, but no one questions their confidence in being able to beat the Mavericks for the second straight postseason. It’s a matchup they clearly relish; health is the greater uncertainty after they coped with myriad injuries this season.For all of the danger Dallas’ Luka Doncic poses, Clippers Coach Tyronn Lue has a variety of defensive options (Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and Marcus Morris for starters) to send at Doncic and make him work for his numbers. To have a chance, the Mavericks will need consistent production from Tim Hardaway Jr. and Jalen Brunson, and even more so from their big men who can stretch the floor with shooting — Maxi Kleber and Kristaps Porzingis. More