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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

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      The N.B.A.’s Play-In Tournament Isn’t the Problem

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      Though stars like LeBron James and Luka Doncic have complained about the pre-playoff hurdle, the stress of the play-in matters less than injuries and the compressed season.The Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James, who lashed out about the All-Star Game staged in Atlanta in March, has a new source of league office ire. James said on Sunday that the forces behind the N.B.A.’s forthcoming playoff play-in tournament “should be fired.”Weeks before James voiced his displeasure, it was Mark Cuban, after voting for the play-in as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who blasted the concept as an “enormous mistake.”I say they’re both wrong, and see the race to set up the N.B.A.’s play-in round from May 18 to 21 as the most invigorating aspect of a dour, draining, pandemic-skewed season.The idea here, though, is not to dwell on James or Cuban, two of the league’s most outspoken figures. They were offering emotional reactions to their teams’ increasingly unpleasant circumstances in the standings. Both surely know how self-serving it sounded to attack the play-in format only after their teams faced an acute risk of having to participate in it.Zoom in on what’s happening among the top 11 teams in each conference, and you will see that the format change is doing its job — and promisingly so. More teams are playing more games that mean something than we’re accustomed to with just under two weeks left in the regular season. A system that gives the No. 9 or 10 seed a last-ditch pathway into the playoffs — but only if one of those teams can win two play-in games in a row — has spawned new levels of jockeying for seeding position. That’s good for the game at large, even if it has, in Year 1, complicated matters for the injury-ravaged defending champions in Los Angeles.Adam Silver, in his seven-plus years as commissioner, has emphasized finding ways to make the regular season matter more. He has also sought to discourage teams from shifting into the familiar late-season mode of resting veterans and focusing on youth development to foster losing and improve draft position, better known as tanking. The combination of the play-in and changes to the lottery odds starting in the 2018-19 season is making a difference on both fronts. Before the 2019 draft, the team with the lowest winning percentage had the highest odds to get the No. 1 pick. The three worst teams now share an equal shot at the top spot.Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks said he didn’t “see the point” of playing the whole season if a play-in tournament could keep a team out of the playoffs.Nelson Chenault/USA Today Sports, via ReutersEntering Tuesday’s play, 24 of the league’s 30 teams were still in playoff contention because of the added play-in slots, although the chances seemed unrealistic for Chicago in the East and Sacramento in the West. In both conferences, in addition to the usual grappling for the No. 1 seed, there are fevered races to secure a top-six seed and avoid the play-in round, as well as crowded races to clinch a spot in the 7-to-10 range to extend the season.The play-in scenario calls for the No. 7 seed in each conference to play one game against No. 8 at home, with No. 9 playing No. 10 at home. The winner of 7 vs. 8 claims the No. 7 seed. The loser of that game plays the winner of 9 vs. 10 at home for the No. 8 seed, with the loser of 9 vs. 10 eliminated. The seventh- and eighth-seeded teams in each conference thus have to win just once to clinch a playoff berth. No. 9 or No. 10 must win two games in a row to advance.The Mavericks’ Luka Doncic lamented last month that he didn’t “see the point” of playing an entire season if “maybe you lose two in a row and you’re out of the playoffs.” That was what prompted Cuban’s “enormous mistake” comment, but on Monday he said that he had “no problem” with the play-in and that he welcomed the competitive boost it could lend to a standard 82-game season. Cuban’s dismay, he said both last month and Monday, is contained to this season because of the stress it heaps on already stressed teams. He contended that additional games with seeding implications compound the burden on teams chafing from cramming 72 regular-season games into five months while coping with daily coronavirus testing and extensive league health and safety demands.But the benefits, at least for fans, have been plentiful. There is a newfound incentive for teams to finish no lower than sixth, both to avoid the play-in and to gain several days of additional rest before the first round of the playoffs. The seeding scramble also features highly watchable players vying for play-in berths: Washington’s duo of Bradley Beal and Russell Westbrook, New Orleans’s Zion Williamson, Charlotte’s LaMelo Ball and, most of all, Golden State’s scorching hot Stephen Curry. The prospect of stars like Curry, Portland’s Damian Lillard and maybe even Williamson headlining bonus high-stakes broadcasts presumably excites network executives as much as the possibility of an early Lakers exit scares them.In Washington’s case, Beal and Westbrook have been at the forefront of a 13-3 surge that has enabled the Wizards to overcome a 17-32 start and compete for something after a coronavirus outbreak in January essentially shut down the franchise for two weeks. As a counter to Cuban’s complaint, San Antonio’s bid to stay alive for a playoff berth despite a second-half scheduling crunch has been boosted by the play-in path. The Spurs must play 40 games in 67 days in the season’s second half, but they have clung to 10th in the West, ahead of Williamson’s Pelicans.Young players like New Orleans’s Zion Williamson, left, and Charlotte’s LaMelo Ball, right, have added intrigue to the races for lower seeds.Derick Hingle/Associated PressTanking has not been eradicated by the play-in chases, but there is certainly less of it. The numbing regular-season discourse about individual awards (and little else) has been mercifully balanced by a heightened focus on the playoff ladders and how meaningful, just to give one example, Boston’s regular-season finale against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on May 16 could be. Even fears that adding play-in berths would lead more teams to stand pat and thus chill the trade market proved mostly unfounded; deadline day on March 25 delivered a record number of trades (16).The most compelling argument against the play-in tournament is the one Cuban raised — that this wasn’t the season for such experimentation. I suppose, for some, it’s a step too far after the tight turnaround from last season, which carried into October, and all the virus-related demands that cut into players’ rest, rehabilitation and practice time.Yet the bulk of the additional stress is a byproduct of the league’s decision, in conjunction with the players’ union, to start this season on Dec. 22 and play 72 games in a compressed period. The rising concern among teams’ medical staffs about increased injury risk because of game density and scheduling logjams caused by game postponements would probably have manifested with or without the play-in wrinkle.As for suggestions that the East and West No. 7 seeds deserve more protection than the play-in system affords, based on their season-long body of work, let’s push back. The lowest seed to win a championship since the league adopted a 16-team playoff format in 1983-84 was sixth-seeded Houston in 1994-95 — when the Rockets were defending champions and traded for Clyde Drexler at midseason. The playoffs do not revolve around No. 7 seeds. If they can’t win one play-in game at home, when given two chances, how much playoff damage were they going to do, anyway?What no one envisioned was three of the four teams that reached last season’s conference finals tumbling into play-in territory, which is why the issue has caused so much angst. Miami (No. 6) and Boston (No. 7) in the East, among the teams that have been hit hardest by Covid-19 disruptions, might have to go the play-in route just to get back to the playoffs. The Lakers began the season as overwhelming championship favorites and duly started 21-6, but their subsequent struggles have played out in the most daunting way. James and Anthony Davis, as we warned, have not been able to make seamless returns from their long-term injuries.The Lakers will not look capable of a lengthy playoff run, even if they can avoid the indignity of a play-in game or two, until the health of their two stars improves. For all the attention on James’s harsh critique of the play-in games, he said something else on Sunday to suggest he had a firm grasp of the Lakers’ larger seeding plight.“If I’m not 100 percent, or close to 100 percent, it don’t matter where we land,” James said.The Scoop @TheSteinLineCorner ThreeA reader writes in with the hottest of hot takes: Stephen Curry isn’t that good.Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle, via Associated PressYou ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.(Questions may be condensed or lightly edited for clarity.)Q: To answer the question posed by last week’s newsletter, Russell Westbrook is not appreciated because he does not win. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson could have averaged 15 points, 15 rebounds and 15 assists per game every season if that was their goal. Westbrook is a pretty amazing player, and a deserved All-Star, but teams looking to win it all don’t seem to be interested in him. — Noel MacDonald (Petaluma, Calif.)Stein: This is a popular sentiment about Westbrook, and there are some minds he will probably never change until he is part of a championship team, no matter what he achieves statistically.That Westbrook has been traded twice since winning the league’s Most Valuable Player Award in 2016-17 only amplifies the argument. Yet when Westbrook has gotten triple-doubles, his teams have won handily, so I would dispute the blanket statement that Westbrook “does not win.”Westbrook has 178 career triple-doubles in the regular season and a 134-44 record in those games, good for a winning percentage of .753. That equates to a 62-20 record in a typical season.Oklahoma City, Houston and Washington, then, have clearly benefited from his triple-doubles. Detractors are bound to say Westbrook could be chasing them in every game and hurting his team when he doesn’t achieve them, but I don’t think Westbrook is motivated by triple-doubles above all else. Teammates probably wouldn’t respect him the way they do if that were happening.All of these layers, and everything we covered last week, are why I’m so curious to see the reaction when Westbrook breaks Oscar Robertson’s career record for triple-doubles (181). Maybe this will be the moment that the league at large stops to appreciate someone who plays as ridiculously hard as Westbrook does, season after season after season, even if his résumé lacks a championship. Or maybe not.Q: Stephen Curry is great, but he’s the third-best Warrior ever. He’s not better than Rick Barry, and he’s not better than Wilt Chamberlain. Unless Curry adds another dimension to his game, he will not crack the top 10 or 15 all time. — @michaelbookit from TwitterStein: This is another bold opinion (or you were just trying to get a Twitter rise out of me). Whether or not I can persuade you to reconsider your stance, I strongly disagree.Chamberlain’s greatest successes as a player were as a 76er and as a Laker. Although the statistics he posted as a Warrior remain difficult to fathom, like the 50.4 points per game he averaged as a Philadelphia Warrior in 1961-62, his time in the Bay Area lasted less than three seasons. The Warriors even missed the playoffs in Wilt’s first San Francisco season.Barry has long been one of the game’s underappreciated stars, and his all-around excellence in leading Golden State to an unforeseen championship in 1975 cemented him as one of the game’s greats, but Curry’s résumé has it all. Three championships, five consecutive trips to the N.B.A. finals, back-to-back M.V.P. awards, longevity with one franchise, massive popularity with fans and seemingly limitless shooting range that changed the game — Curry really has no peer here.Q: I have assumed that teams that qualified for the playoff play-in round but did not advance further would not be considered teams that reached the playoffs this season. Then on Friday, according to the league’s official standings, Philadelphia was shown to have clinched a playoff berth when the 76ers had 10 games left on their schedule — but only an 8½-game lead over No. 7 Miami. Didn’t that mean that the Sixers conceivably could have still slipped to seventh?— Jeff Pucillo (Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.)Stein: You are correct that teams that get to the play-in round will not be considered playoff teams unless they win the last playoff spot in each conference.The standings, though, did not convey the full picture of Philadelphia’s situation. The Sixers clinched a playoff berth as of Friday because No. 6 Boston and No. 7 Miami still had two games against each other — and the results of those forthcoming games, no matter what they are, will ensure that either the Celtics or the Heat can’t catch the Sixers.Numbers GameThe Sixers are 32-6 when Ben Simmons, center, and Joel Embiid play together.Darren Abate/Associated Press57It’s not your imagination: Major blowouts have been increasingly common this season. A record six games in April were decided by margins of at least 40 points, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, and Indiana promptly drubbed Oklahoma City by 57 points, 152-95, on Saturday, the first day of May.50When Utah scored 154 points in a 49-point rout of Sacramento last week, it was the eighth time over the past two seasons that an N.B.A. team had scored as many as 150 points in a non-overtime game. Over the prior 20 seasons, from 1999-2000 to 2018-19, it happened only four times, according to Elias.32-6Philadelphia is 32-6 this season when Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons are both in uniform. The 76ers’ .842 winning percentage in those games shows the team’s tremendous potential when the two stars are healthy, but their 38 games together mean Embiid and Simmons have been available as a duo for only 58 percent of Philadelphia’s schedule.8Of Utah’s 18 losses this season, eight were inflicted by three teams: Phoenix, Washington and lowly Minnesota. The Suns and Timberwolves went 3-0 against the Jazz, who also absorbed a 2-0 season sweep from the Wizards. In another quirk, Sacramento is 10-1 against Denver (3-0), Dallas (3-0), Boston (2-0) and the Los Angeles Lakers (2-1). The Kings are 17-36 against the rest of the league and will most likely soon miss the playoffs for the 15th consecutive season.96Golden State’s Stephen Curry sank 96 3-pointers in April to establish a league record for a single month. It was not until the ninth season of existence for the 3-point line in the N.B.A. that a player reached that total over 82 regular-season games; Boston’s Danny Ainge (148), Denver’s Michael Adams (139), Seattle’s Dale Ellis (107) and Ainge’s Celtics teammate Larry Bird (98) were the first to get there, in 1987-88.Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. More

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      Vanessa Bryant Uses Her Platform to Battle the Powerful

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      Through social media and a lawsuit, she is trying to hold law enforcement to account in ways that are uncommon for women, and especially for women of color.For years, under the power dynamics of Los Angeles policing, many victims who have accused powerful law enforcement institutions of wrongdoing have found their charges batted aside or buried in bureaucratic inertia.But in recent months the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has faced a new, potent adversary: Vanessa Bryant.By leveraging her wealth and celebrity, Bryant, 38, is flipping the usual script. Through social media posts and a lawsuit, she is holding authorities to account in ways that are uncommon for women, and especially for women of color. And she has done it all while she navigates her grief after the deaths of her 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and her husband, Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers star, who were killed in a helicopter crash near Calabasas, Calif., in January 2020.She filed the suit in September against the Sheriff’s Department, four deputies, the county and its fire department for invasion of privacy and negligence after deputies used personal cellphones to take pictures of the site that included the remains of her husband, their daughter and the seven others who died.In mid-March, Vanessa Bryant shared an amended complaint and the names of the four accused deputies — Joey Cruz, Rafael Mejia, Michael Russell and Raul Versales — to her more than 14 million Instagram followers. County lawyers had tried to keep the identities of the deputies hidden, arguing, in part, that they could be the target of hackers. It was an odd argument, considering that the lawyers had said the images had been deleted. A federal judge sided with Bryant.In the month since Bryant shared the names of the deputies, the call for law enforcement accountability has remained at the forefront of public debate through the murder trail of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd.Bryant’s public campaign against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a high-profile but long-troubled institution, has caught the attention of community activists and legal experts who are accustomed to families, especially those of color, silently hoping for but not receiving what they would consider justice. Vanessa Bryant is Mexican-American, and her husband was Black.“She has the ability to speak out and highlight what have been deep-seated and pervasive problems in the Sheriff’s Department around corruption, secrecy and lack of accountability,” said Priscilla Ocen, a member of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Civilian Oversight Commission and a professor at Loyola Law School. “She has the means. She has the visibility and, importantly, she has the protection that is afforded based on her wealth and celebrity in ways that families in East Los Angeles or Compton just don’t.”Bryant, through her lawyer, declined to comment for this article. She has also filed a wrongful-death suit against Island Express Helicopters, the company that operated the helicopter that crashed.“Transparency promotes accountability,” said Luis Li, one of Bryant’s lawyers. “We look forward to presenting Mrs. Bryant’s case in open court.”The Sheriff’s Department, in response to a request for comment, referred to a tweet from Sheriff Alex Villanueva: “We will refrain from trying this case in the media and will wait for the appropriate venue. Our hearts go out to all the families affected by this tragedy.”The department released a statement last fall that said, “As a result of the swift actions we took under extraordinary circumstances, no pictures made it into the public arena.”The sheriff had assured Bryant that deputies had secured the crash scene to ensure her privacy, according to Bryant’s suit.The Los Angeles Times reported in February 2020 that a citizen filed a complaint after a deputy showed graphic photos of the crash victims at a bar. Instead of the complaint starting a formal inquiry, according to the suit, the deputies were told “that if they came clean and deleted the photos, they would not face any discipline.”The suit stated that Bryant “privately sought information from the Sheriff’s Department and Fire Department to assess whether she should brace for her loved ones’ remains to surface on the internet.”Firefighters worked the scene of a helicopter crash.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressShe asked if the photos had been secured and how far they had ventured. According to the suit, each department “refused to respond to all but one of Mrs. Bryant’s questions and asserted they had no legal obligation to assist.”The suit stated that Cruz, then a deputy trainee, received copies of the photos from Mejia. Cruz is accused of showing them to his niece at his mother’s house, while making a crude remark about the images of the bodies, and of showing the images at a restaurant in Norwalk, Calif., where he could be seen zooming in and out of the pictures on a security camera.“Many of us are on the receiving end of police mistreatment and we just have to swallow those indignities,” said Jody Armour, a professor at the University of Southern California, whose father, Fred, used criminal law he taught himself in prison to be released after a significant portion of his sentence. “Grin and bear it, because we don’t have the social kind of capital to be taken as seriously as she’s being taken.”Law enforcement officials, Ocen said, typically shape the narratives that filter out of debated interactions. As a result, public opinion is often split about whom to sympathize with. Not in this case, she said.“There’s universal sympathy, universal outrage for the conduct of the Sheriff’s Department in trivializing, minimizing and desecrating the memory of Kobe Bryant and their daughter,” Ocen said.Villanueva, the sheriff, announced an investigation into the sharing of the photos in March 2020, before the suit was filed, and asked the county’s Office of Inspector General to monitor it.“That was a sham,” said Max Huntsman, the inspector general.By that point, Huntsman said, his office had started an inquiry into Villanueva’s announcement that the photos were ordered to be deleted. Additional efforts to monitor the investigation were stymied by the Sheriff’s Department, which only offered him periodic, redacted updates, Huntsman said.“You can’t really rely on an organization to investigate itself when it’s the one that may have behaved improperly,” he said. “And when an elected official is the person who may have behaved improperly, then somebody else needs to investigate them if you want it to be at all credible and have real accountability.”The watchdog positions of the oversight committee and inspector general were created as checks in the aftermath of department scandals before Villanueva’s tenure as sheriff.Ocen and eight other civilians make up the commission, which recommends department improvements. But the group does not have the authority to force the department to adopt policies or discipline personnel. Recently, voters granted the commission the power to subpoena records.The relationship between the Sheriff’s Department and the committee and inspector general is adversarial. Two years ago, the Sheriff’s Department began a criminal investigation into whether Huntsman had illegally obtained internal records.The issues highlighted by Bryant’s suit represent a broader pattern within the Sheriff’s Department, Huntsman said. In December, his office released a 17-page report highlighting what it called “unlawful conduct” by the department, such as threatening county officials, failing to disclose the names of officers involved in shootings and not enforcing Covid-19 safety directives.A month earlier, the commission unanimously approved a resolution that condemned Villanueva’s leadership and called for his resignation.In February, Sheriff Alex Villanueva answered questions about Tiger Woods’s car crash.Allison Zaucha for The New York Times“I’m on record saying that I think he’s a criminal, and I’m on record as identifying a bunch of conduct by the Sheriff’s Department under his watch that is completely unlawful,” Huntsman said. “We have a rogue law enforcement agency as a result of what they’re doing, but that doesn’t mean he has to resign. He has to start following the law.”In September, Bryant took notice when Villanueva called on LeBron James to double the reward leading to information on a gunman who had ambushed and shot two deputies.In response, Bryant posted screenshots from a Twitter user onto her Instagram story that read: “He shouldn’t be challenging LeBron James to match a reward or ‘to step up to the plate.’ He couldn’t even ‘step up to the plate’ and hold his deputies accountable for photographing dead children.”The suits, including ones from the families of the crash’s victims, are ongoing. Some change has already occurred.In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed into law a bill making it a misdemeanor for law enforcement and emergency medical workers to take photos of scenes that do not involve their work. The bill, H.R. 2655, was introduced by Assemblyman Mike Gipson, Democrat of Carson, and violations carry fines of up to $1,000. Gipson named it the Kobe Bryant Bill.“Emergency medical workers not only have a responsibility to the victims, but also I believe to the family,” Gipson said. “There’s an obligation to protect the situation and not try to expose the family to further grief.”He added: “Hopefully this is a deterrent that will prevent this from happening again.” More

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      Injuries Are Raining on the N.B.A.’s Championship Parade

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      Pick a big-name N.B.A. star, and he’s probably been injured this season: LeBron, Giannis, LaMelo, A.D., K.D. and, now, Jamal Murray. What’s going on?Three-fourths of the N.B.A.’s regular season will be complete after Wednesday’s play, making this a natural time for you to press your favorite newsletter curator to pick a title favorite.It would be much easier to answer, sadly, if you could first tell me which of the league’s presumed championship contenders will be healthy in June or July.Prognostications didn’t seem all that daunting in December, when the Los Angeles Lakers looked like such a safe choice to back to repeat as champions, but it is a much more complex calculation at the quarter pole. The culprit: This grind of a season, marked by its numerous game postponements, endless health and safety protocols and arenas that were mostly empty for months, has been overtaken by injuries to marquee players.Late Monday, in the same game in which Stephen Curry supplanted Wilt Chamberlain as the leading scorer in Warriors history, Denver’s Jamal Murray crumpled to the floor in the final minute after a hard plant in the paint on his left leg. Tuesday morning’s grim diagnosis of a season-ending anterior cruciate ligament tear confirmed what many had feared in the moment.“Too many players getting hurt with this shortened season,” Josh Hart of the New Orleans Pelicans posted on Twitter after Murray went down.Sidelined himself by a recent thumb surgery, Hart inserted a face palm emoji into the tweet and added his hope that the league “not do this one again.”The Lakers have dealt with injuries to multiple players, most notably LeBron James, right, and Anthony Davis, second from right, but also Marc Gasol, left, and Kyle Kuzma, second from left.Elsa/Getty Images“This one” refers to a 72-game regular season stuffed between Dec. 22 and May 16 after the 2019-20 season did not end until October, because of the coronavirus pandemic’s interruption, and was followed by the shortest off-season in league history. The league and the players’ union agreed to that timeline, with a strong nudge from the N.B.A.’s television partners, which desperately wanted to start the 2020-21 season during the week of Christmas. The tight turnaround was expected to help maximize revenue after last season’s shortfall of $1.5 billion, and position the 2021-22 season to return to its usual October-through-June template. It was also designed so the league could finish the playoffs before the Tokyo Olympics in late July.But the rigors of last season’s finish in a bubble environment combined with a swift return to play this season and a compressed schedule because of the Olympics, prompted fears, like those voiced by Hart, of increased injury risk.It’s not clear that those factors are driving injuries this season, but many teams believe they are, even without supporting data. Multiple teams I’ve consulted asserted that this season’s combination of schedule density, travel demands and daily coronavirus testing that cuts into players’ rest time have increased injury risk.Teams are playing 3.6 games per week this season, compared to 3.42 per week last season, and taking 15 percent fewer flights, according to data provided by the league. An N.B.A. spokesman said, “The injury rate for this season is in line with data from the previous five seasons, including a 6 percent reduction from last season.”It is an eternal challenge for teams and those in the injury tracking business to conclusively attribute an injury to overuse. Some of this season’s most notable injuries, like LeBron James’s high ankle sprain after Atlanta’s Solomon Hill crashed into him, appeared to be freakish. The same holds for injuries sustained in hard falls by two of the league’s most prized rookies, Charlotte’s LaMelo Ball (wrist) and Golden State’s James Wiseman (knee). Hart injured his thumb when he banged his right hand on the rim on a dunk attempt.Yet there are too many high-profile names on injury reports to shake the sense of crisis. A look at the teams that held the league’s top eight records entering Tuesday’s play showed that only two — Utah and Phoenix — were not dealing with major injuries.Los Angeles LakersThe Lakers, after starting the season as prohibitive title favorites, enjoyed that status for maybe two months before losing Anthony Davis (Achilles’ tendon and calf) in February and James (ankle) in March. The Lakers were 5-7 in their last 12 games without either of their twin pillars entering Tuesday’s play.The Nets’ James Harden has been out with a hamstring injury, as Kevin Durant, second from left, was earlier this season.Corey Sipkin/Associated PressBrooklyn NetsThe Nets have been widely billed as the most potent offense in N.B.A. history since acquiring James Harden from the Houston Rockets on Jan. 14. The problem: They’ve scarcely had an opportunity to illustrate their true capabilities, because Harden, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving have logged only 186 minutes together across seven games. Durant, who missed 23 consecutive games because of a strained left hamstring, and Irving have been in the same starting lineup only 14 times — and Harden injured his hamstring as soon as Durant came back. The Nets have been winning and scoring freely all season despite the injuries and Irving’s absences for personal reasons, but it’s difficult to gauge this team’s ceiling when we still haven’t seen the full squad.Milwaukee BucksGiannis Antetokounmpo has missed five consecutive games and seven of the past 12 with left knee soreness. Coach Mike Budenholzer said on Sunday that there was no timetable for Antetokounmpo’s return, which was unsettling enough, but it is also the first time in that Antetokounmpo, who won the last two Most Valuable Player Awards, has been forced to sit out more than two consecutive games.Philadelphia 76ersNow that the star center Joel Embiid is back after missing 10 games with a bone bruise on his left knee, Philadelphia appears to be the most fortunate contender on a list all would prefer to avoid. Not that the 76ers plan to gloat — not with Embiid’s injury history or when the Sixers are still waiting for the newly acquired George Hill to make his debut after thumb surgery.Los Angeles ClippersThe Clippers’ Paul George was named the Western Conference player of the week on Monday, but he began this month with an admission that it would be a “day-to-day process” to cope with a toe injury on his right foot that sidelined him for seven consecutive games in February. The Clippers have also been without their starting center Serge Ibaka for the past 15 games because of a back injury, and the point guard Patrick Beverley is expected to miss at least a month after surgery on his fractured left hand last week.Paul George of the Los Angeles Clippers has come back from a toe injury with strong play, leading to player of the week honors recently.Jae C. Hong/Associated PressDenver NuggetsPerhaps sensing the Lakers’ vulnerability, Denver shed its reputation for caution when it comes to making trades by acquiring Aaron Gordon from Orlando at the trade deadline last month. The Nuggets won their first eight games with Gordon, collapsed in a home loss to Boston on Sunday in mystifying fashion, then watched in horror on Monday night in San Francisco as Murray — fresh off missing the previous four games with right knee soreness — sustained a catastrophic left knee injury that almost certainly changed the trajectory of Denver’s season.Murray was the fourth player to tear his A.C.L. this season, after the Nets’ Spencer Dinwiddie, Orlando’s Markelle Fultz and Washington’s Thomas Bryant. The N.B.A. has averaged roughly three A.C.L. tears per season since 2005-6, according to data maintained by Jeff Stotts on his In Street Clothes website.“We are still in the collecting phase regarding the effects of the compressed schedule at this point of the year,” Stotts said. “I am concerned we will see more soft-tissue injuries here in April. They appear to be on the rise from the rest of the season.”As a huge fan of playoff suspense, as opposed to postseasons in which one juggernaut is seen as untouchable, I would normally celebrate how wide open this championship chase looks heading into the regular-season stretch run. When so much of the uncertainty is tied to injury, it doesn’t feel right at all.The Scoop @TheSteinLineCorner ThreeMarc Stein has a collection of Buffalo Braves trading cards.Marc Stein for The New York TimesYou ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.(Questions may be lightly edited or condensed for clarity.)Q: Do you think Jeremy Lin’s high profile in speaking out against the rise in hate crimes affecting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders is hurting him with the N.B.A.? — Tom GardnerStein: I know Lin has many fans who are dismayed that he has not been signed by an N.B.A. team, not even on a 10-day contract, but I don’t think teams are holding his activism against him. It would be shameful if they are; Lin should be applauded and supported in his efforts to bring more attention to anti-Asian racism.Lin hasn’t played in the league since the 2018-19 season, and a more likely obstacle to his getting back to the N.B.A. are questions about his mobility at age 32. But even that is probably not the biggest issue. Many teams, especially when trying to fill a roster spot with player on a 10-day contract, are hesitant to bring in an established player for a limited role. Doing so invites daily questions about the player’s status — as the New Orleans Pelicans found out after Coach Stan Van Gundy benched Isaiah Thomas for two consecutive games in the midst of Thomas’s 10-day deal that expired Monday.The Los Angeles Clippers’ DeMarcus Cousins, another former All-Star who recently signed a 10-day deal, has faced the same challenge. Teams are wary about how players accustomed to major roles will adapt to playing limited minutes, and they know they are going to face heightened scrutiny from the news media about how a player like Thomas, Cousins or Lin is being used. It’s much easier for teams, like it or not, to target players whose presence — and their subsequent release if things don’t work out — won’t cause a fuss.Lin tried to mitigate such thinking and prove his willingness to accept any N.B.A. role by spending nearly 45 days in the recent N.B.A. G League bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. He also posted strong shooting percentages in his stint with the Santa Cruz Warriors (50.5 percent from the field; 42.6 percent on 3-pointers) and still has a month to attract interest.Q: There is no doubt that the Lakers are at risk to slip further in the standings, but the answer to what’s wrong with them is simple: injuries. Your contention that the Lakers’ roster moves have not “panned out” is reactionary.As difficult as the Lakers’ last two months have been, they are much better equipped to withstand the absence of their two best players with Dennis Schröder, Montrezl Harrell and Marc Gasol on the roster. They have also maintained the league’s top-ranked defense without LeBron James and Anthony Davis, even though we hear so much about the lack of rim protection compared to last season’s Lakers.I’m obviously willing to concede that this season is in jeopardy, because the Clippers, Utah, Denver and Phoenix have all improved, but the culprit isn’t the roster construction. It’s the injuries. — Jordan Baldridge (New York)Stein: You assembled some strong counters to last week’s piece on the Lakers and the mounting factors that have complicated their title defense, but I think we actually agree more than we disagree.I would argue that Schröder, Harrell and Gasol have been more up and down than you suggest — and that the Lakers’ aggressive posture at the trade deadline and their subsequent rush to sign Andre Drummond and Ben McLemore back that up. But that was just one item on a long list meant to convey how much more challenging this season has become for the Lakers than they anticipated.You highlighted one of the bigger worries: The Lakers’ competition looks much tougher this season. Finishing fifth or sixth in the Western Conference is so daunting because it would likely mean a first-round matchup against the Clippers or Nuggets.An even bigger problem that I contend has been glossed over: We can’t just assume that the Lakers will bounce right back to being championship favorites as soon as James and Davis return to the lineup. Their injuries were significant setbacks that have to be managed cautiously, especially in the case of Davis, who has missed more than two dozen games already. He’s going to need some time to re-acclimate and restore belief in his body.Q: How about a newsletter story sometime on those Buffalo Braves cards you mentioned? Or a picture? — Paul QuintilianStein: I’m not sure that I should subject our loyal and patient readers to the full depths of my Buffalo Braves nerddom, but hopefully there is no harm, since you asked, in enclosing a picture (shown above) of the various Braves team sets and loose singles that I keep within arm’s reach on my desk whenever I need a dose of youthful inspiration.I’ve saved as much as I could from my youth but have also made a habit in adulthood of collecting Buffalo sports artifacts from the 1970s that I coveted but that eluded me at the time. Growing up is hard.Numbers GameChicago’s Zach LaVine scored 39 points in the first half against the Atlanta Hawks on Friday, and finished the game with 50.Brett Davis/USA Today Sports, via Reuters12.3I praised Ben Simmons for his sensational play in February (21 points, 7.9 rebounds and 7.8 assists per game for the month) because it was a tremendous response to nearly being traded to Houston in January for James Harden. But Simmons hasn’t been the same player since the All-Star break as Philadelphia grapples with the Nets and Milwaukee for the East’s No. 1 seed. In his last 15 games, Simmons averaged just 12.3 points, 7.3 rebounds and 6 assists per game — and his shooting in that span declined to 47 percent compared to 57.8 percent in 31 games before the All-Star break.5With 50 points in a loss to Atlanta on Friday night, Chicago’s Zach LaVine became the fifth player in franchise history to record at least one 50-point game, joining Jimmy Butler, Jamal Crawford, Chet Walker and a certain Michael Jordan. In his 13 seasons as a Bull, of course, Jordan scored at least 50 points in 38 regular-season games.30With 30 rebounds on Saturday night against Detroit, Portland’s Enes Kanter became just the fourth player to post a 30-rebound game since Dikembe Mutombo and Charles Barkley each had one in the 1996 calendar year. The only others to reach the 30 threshold in the 25 years since Mutombo and Barkley, according to Stathead: Dwight Howard (2017-18 season), Andrew Bynum (2011-12) and Kevin Love (2010-11).7Moves at the trade deadline nudged Dallas above Washington for the most international players in the league with seven: The Mavericks acquired Nicolo Melli (Italy) to join Luka Doncic (Slovenia), Josh Green (Australia), Maxi Kleber (Germany), Boban Marjanovic (Serbia), Kristaps Porzingis (Latvia) and Dwight Powell (Canada). The Wizards have six — Deni Avdija (Israel), Davis Bertans (Latvia), Isaac Bonga (Germany), Rui Hachimura (Japan), Alex Len (Ukraine) and Raul Neto (Brazil) — after sending Moe Wagner (Germany) to Boston last month as part of a three-team trade.10Jeremy Lin is the only player who finished in the top 10 in scoring in the N.B.A. G League’s recent six-week bubble who has not spent any time in the N.B.A. this season. Playing for the Santa Cruz Warriors, Lin was seventh in scoring at 19.8 points per game but is still waiting for a 10-day contract offer. The other two players on that list besides Lin who were not already contracted to N.B.A. teams when the bubble began — Henry Ellenson and Oshae Brissett — parlayed their G League stints into 10-day deals. At 32, Lin was also the only player among those 10 older than 24.Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. More

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      What’s Wrong With the Los Angeles Lakers

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      Repeating as N.B.A. champion is difficult — but the Lakers didn’t expect it to be this hard.The Los Angeles Lakers braced for a season of strain after the shortest off-season in league history.They did not anticipate this.The Lakers did not envision long stretches without both LeBron James and Anthony Davis, and a regular-season slog that is testing them in new ways after the rigors of being confined within the N.B.A.’s restricted-access campus at Walt Disney World for three months last summer. James, Davis and Co. began the 2020-21 season as overwhelming title favorites, having emerged from bubble life as N.B.A. champions, but factors that raise the degree of difficulty on the Lakers’ repeat bid are starting to stack up:Davis has missed the past 23 games because of persistent Achilles’ tendon discomfort and an adjacent calf strain. There is some hope within the organization that he will return to the lineup after the Lakers’ five-game Eastern Conference swing underway, but any injury that involves the Achilles’ tendon, no matter how purportedly mild, is going to spook people until Davis gets back on the floor. Achilles’ tendon injuries remain the most feared in the sport.James has missed the past nine games after sustaining a high-ankle sprain during a game against Atlanta on March 20. The reflex assumption, because this is James, is that he will return by month’s end and duly return to elite form. Given that James is 36, and in his 18th season, we should probably also acknowledge the possibility that his recovery won’t be seamless.Sunday’s 18-point loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, their Staples Center co-tenants, was the first in an 11-game stretch against teams in playoff or play-in positions. The Lakers were fifth in the Western Conference standings entering Tuesday, but there is mounting worry in Lakerland that a slip to sixth, seven or worse is getting more and more unavoidable. This is the first season that teams seeded seventh through 10th in each conference will be subjected to a new double-elimination playoff play-in round.The roster moves that looked so good in November, winning raves for the Lakers’ front office, haven’t panned out. Dennis Schröder and Montrezl Harrell have not proved capable of pinch-carrying the Lakers during the regular season when James and Davis are unavailable. I believed, as resolutely as the Lakers, that they would be, but Schröder and Harrell tend to be more concerned with their own scoring than anything else. When the Lakers explored the trade market for both last month, it seemed to confirm their own uncertainty about the fit.The Lakers’ recent signing of center Andre Drummond, right, has caused some friction with center Marc Gasol, who signed with the team as a free agent in November.Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesThe Lakers’ biggest triumph since Davis went down was signing the crown jewel of this season’s buyout market: Andre Drummond. Yet it must be noted that the Lakers were desperate to go all out for Drummond in part because of a sense that their frontline was lacking. Marc Gasol, signed as a free agent in November, hasn’t replaced Dwight Howard or JaVale McGee as convincingly as the front office had projected. Gasol has since publicly acknowledged his disappointment that the Lakers felt a need to bring in Drummond.Whether it’s the injuries, or the team’s middling 10-12 record since Davis last played on Feb. 14, or mounting pressure stemming from the Lakers’ woeful 3-point shooting (24th in the league), or other factors, this group does not appear to have the same chemistry as the Lakers did in the N.B.A. bubble. Maybe these Lakers can still get there, but there is clearly much to fix in the final 22 games of the regular season.Coach Frank Vogel insisted on Monday that the Lakers were “not looking at the standings at all,” but that is easier to say than uphold when the competition looks tougher than it did last season:— The Utah Jazz readily acknowledge that they can’t hush naysayers until the playoffs, but they have also won 22 consecutive home games and remain on pace to become the first team in league history to average 17 made 3-pointers per game.— The Denver Nuggets made a clear win-now upgrade at the trade deadline by adding Aaron Gordon to their core of Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. and, as of this Newsletter Tuesday, would have home-court advantage over the Lakers in a first-round series as the fourth seed.— Also: One of the most important players from the Lakers’ championship run — Rajon Rondo — is suddenly a member of the Clippers via trade. After his ineffectual stint as an Atlanta Hawk, skepticism persists that Rondo, at 35, will provide the offensive organization and playmaking that the Clippers badly need. Yet he has delivered often enough in the postseason that the Lakers are respectfully wary of his becoming Playoff Rondo one more time for the Los Angeles franchise still chasing its first championship.That assessment of the competition didn’t even mention the Phoenix Suns, who missed the playoffs for the past 10 seasons but have risen to No. 2 in the West by pairing Chris Paul in the backcourt with Devin Booker, or the three powerhouses in the East: Philadelphia, Milwaukee and a superstar-laden Nets squad coping with its own serious injury issues.James and Davis remain so feared as a duo that, for all the other legitimate concerns about these Lakers that we’ve listed, getting both back in coming weeks and keeping them upright throughout the playoffs would surely fix so much. I am likewise bullish on Drummond’s potential impact when he gets the chance to finally play with the two stars and, for the first time in his N.B.A. career, focus on a complementary role that emphasizes his rebounding and defense.My issue is assuming that James and Davis will heal in linear fashion that makes everything fine once they return. Ill-advised as it is to write off James in particular, after he led his teams to the N.B.A. finals in nine of the past 10 seasons, that’s a bold leap to make given the gravity of these injuries.When I published N.B.A. power rankings every Monday during the regular season for 15 years at ESPN, I occasionally sparred with angry readers who blamed The Committee of One, as I had dubbed myself, for jinxing their team with a ranking too lofty. Perhaps I should consider, along the same lines, some responsibility for the Lakers’ woes over the past two months, because Davis started missing games shortly after I devoted my Feb. 2 weekly dispatch to his partnership with James and how flawlessly they’ve meshed as teammates.Far more likely, though, than the Lakers getting derailed by a supposed newsletter jinx is the like-it-or-not reality that ill health threatens to be the Lakers’ undoing for the second time in James’s three seasons in Hollywood.Corner ThreeThe Charlotte Hornets of the 1990s were fun behind Larry Johnson, left, Muggsy Bogues, center, and Alonzo Mourning.Andrew D. Bernstein/Getty ImagesYou ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.(Questions may be lightly edited or condensed for clarity.)Q: I am a lifelong Nets fan. I’m 61 now and I clearly remember the team’s pre-N.B.A. years. Julius Erving was the greatest player to ever play for the Nets, and without him the franchise would not exist. But he sometimes seems to be forgotten in Brooklyn — and so is the A.B.A.The Nets recently posted a tweet indicating that James Harden was only the second Net in team history to record a triple-double that included 40 points, along with Vince Carter, but I was sure that had to be incorrect. I looked it up online and found that Erving did this twice in the A.B.A.My question: Does the N.B.A. count A.B.A. statistics? And if so, why don’t the Nets refer to them? Looking forward to your coverage soon of the first Nets championship in 45 years! — Dave Lederer (Sharon, Mass.)Stein: Love the enthusiasm for the A.B.A., Dave. But A.B.A. statistics were not (and most likely will never be) officially combined with N.B.A. statistics, so the Nets refer to their history only since 1976-77 when they make such announcements about milestones.This wonderful page maintained by Basketball Reference with multiple career scoring lists shows how Dr. J would be No. 8 and Dan Issel would be No. 11 if A.B.A. points were added to the damage they did in the N.B.A. Yet the list posted there is purely for discussion purposes, because the N.B.A. established its policy long ago, leaving Erving at No. 72 among N.B.A. scorers and Issel at No. 148. The four A.B.A. franchises that joined the league for the 1976-77 season (Denver, Indiana, San Antonio and the Nets) were treated more like expansion teams than merging teams.The A.B.A., of course, was way ahead of its time with the early adoption of the 3-pointer and the introduction of a slam dunk contest eight years before the N.B.A., and faster-paced play in general that I sadly didn’t get to see for myself. The merger season was the first that I could call myself a truly aware N.B.A. fan; 1977 Topps basketball cards with the electric green backs still weaken me when I come across them as does the Buffalo Braves set from that season that I keep on my desk.The recent death of Elgin Baylor had me venting anew about what a shame it is that Baylor’s offensive brilliance isn’t as appreciated as it should be because television footage from the 1960s and 1970s was not as widely distributed as it should have been, compared with, say, baseball footage from past eras. When I started covering the Los Angeles Clippers in February 1994, Baylor was the general manager and I told him that, to that point, I had scarcely seen five minutes of his playing career. This was years before the advent of NBA TV, of course, so the Clippers called N.B.A. Entertainment in Secaucus, N.J., to assemble a Baylor highlight reel on VHS tape for my edification.A.B.A. footage, as you can imagine, was even more scarce, though thankfully there’s a smattering on YouTube now. I can’t remember seeing any in my formative years as a basketball fan. The red, white and blue ball was all I knew.Q: ⁦‪More watchable than the Larry Johnson-Alonzo Mourning-Muggsy Bogues Hornets of the early 1990s? — @BBH821510 from TwitterStein: I got a few responses like this on Saturday when I tweeted about the Hornets losing Gordon Hayward for at least four weeks to a sprained right foot.Just for some fun, and perhaps in a bow to the hyperbolic nature of social media, I have been referring to Charlotte this season as the Most Watchable Hornets Ever. It’s my go-to hat tip to these Hornets given how entertaining they’ve been since drafting LaMelo Ball in November, signing Hayward in free agency and combining those two with Terry Rozier, whose player efficiency rating is at a career-best 17.7.The Hornets teams that featured Johnson, Mourning and Bogues are remembered with great fondness by Charlotte’s fans and duly respected here. Charlotte also had some strong teams in the back half of the 1990s, after trading away both Johnson and Mourning — but I think it actually helps my case if you have to rewind that far, to a time long before the N.B.A. League Pass era, to come up with a counter.Q: What happens when a team forfeits a draft pick as the Milwaukee Bucks did in the Bogdan Bogdanovic case? Will there still be 60 players selected in that draft? — Yul Bessori (Israel)Stein: No. The 2022 draft will have only 59 picks after the Bucks were docked their second-rounder for that year as punishment for what the league deemed impermissible contact with Bogdanovic before free agency began in November.Not long after Milwaukee reached an agreement with New Orleans on a trade for Jrue Holiday in November, ESPN reported that the Bucks would also acquire Bogdanovic, who was a restricted free agent, from Sacramento via sign-and-trade, with the Kings poised to land Donte DiVincenzo as part of the exchange. But free agency was still more than three days away at that point, prompting the N.B.A. to investigate how the Bucks had agreed on terms. Milwaukee was essentially forced to abandon its pursuit of Bogdanovic or risk more severe penalties.Bogdanovic ultimately signed a four-year, $72 million offer sheet from Atlanta, which Sacramento declined to match, causing the Kings to lose the restricted free agent without compensation. The Bucks, though, have rebounded from their missteps about as well as they could have hoped, persuading Giannis Antetokounmpo to sign a five-year contract extension worth $228 million in December even without landing Bogdanovic. Then on Sunday they announced that they had signed Holiday to an extension, reported to be for four years and worth up to $160 million.They also made a useful addition last month by acquiring P.J. Tucker in a trade with Houston, but questions persist about the dependability of the Bucks’ bench. Milwaukee’s other problem is the competition — at least at the top of the East. The Bucks have to be wondering, even after all of their moves, if they really have enough to beat out the Nets and Philadelphia for a spot in the N.B.A. finals.Numbers GameGolden State’s Stephen Curry is close to passing Wilt Chamberlain as the franchise’s career-scoring leader.Mary Holt/USA Today Sports, via ReutersUpdated entering Tuesday’s games.44League officials can only hope that the basketball public was too focused on the Final Four in men’s and women’s college basketball to pay close attention to the N.B.A. on Saturday, when a league-record three teams lost by at least 44 points on the same day: Oklahoma City (48 points to Portland), Orlando (46 points to Utah) and Detroit (44 points to the Knicks). This was just one day after Golden State trailed by as many as 61 points in a 53-point loss to Toronto.14The Raptors had won just one of their previous 14 games before blasting the Stephen Curry-less Warriors. Curry has missed six of Golden State’s past nine games with a tailbone contusion.130Curry needs 130 points to surpass Wilt Chamberlain (17,783) as the Warriors’ career-scoring leader. Getting there will make Curry the 10th player in league history to rank as a franchise leader in points and assists, joining Mike Conley (Grizzlies), Alex English (Nuggets), Kevin Garnett (Timberwolves), Michael Jordan (Bulls), LeBron James (Cavaliers), Oscar Robertson (Kings), Reggie Miller (Pacers), Isiah Thomas (Pistons), Dwyane Wade (Heat).20The Houston Rockets’ recent 20-game losing streak was twice as long as its worst stretch during the 14-68 season in 1982-83 that led to the drafting of Ralph Sampson. Those Rockets started 0-10 and never had a longer winless run after that. Houston’s 20 consecutive defeats this season marked the N.B.A.’s fifth such streak since 2000, according to Stathead. Philadelphia lost 28 consecutive games from the end of the 2014-15 season through the start of the 2015-16 season and 26 games in a row during the 2013-14 season; Cleveland lost 26 consecutive games in 2010-11 in its first season after LeBron James’s free-agent departure to Miami; and Charlotte lost 23 consecutive games in 2011-12.22Utah is a spotless 22-0 at home in 2021 after losing its first two home games of the season in December.Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. More