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Giannis Antetokounmpo came back from injury, but the Suns beat the Bucks, 118-105.PHOENIX — Giannis Antetokounmpo writhed on the court, eyes clenched, dreams ostensibly dashed, in Game 4 of the N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference finals last week against the Atlanta Hawks. More
Comments made by Nichols that were caught on tape caused tremendous upheaval within ESPN over the past year. Nichols, who is white, suggested that a Black colleague, Maria Taylor, had been selected for a marquee job because of her race.When a sideline reporter first appeared on ABC’s broadcast of the N.B.A. finals on Tuesday night, it was not Rachel Nichols, an abrupt change announced by ESPN earlier in the day. It was an attempt to stanch a yearlong scandal that has spilled into public view about the company’s handling of conflicts centered around race. More
Legends are made in the N.B.A. finals, which begin Tuesday. Basketball players who have come through in high-stakes moments like this explain how they did it.They are the moments dreamed about in childhood while on an empty playground. An imaginary game clock dwindles. A couple of dribbles are taken. A game-winning shot is launched. More
Milwaukee was playing without its injured star, Giannis Antetokounmpo. The Bucks will face the Phoenix Suns in the finals.The Milwaukee Bucks advanced to their first N.B.A. finals since 1974 after defeating the Atlanta Hawks, 118-107, in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals Saturday night to take the series, four games to two. They will face the Phoenix Suns in the N.B.A. finals starting Tuesday. More
This will be the first trip to the finals for the Suns’ veteran leader, Chris Paul, who scored 41 points in the series-clinching Game 6 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers.The Phoenix Suns, after missing the playoffs for 10 consecutive seasons, are headed to the N.B.A. finals for the first time since 1993. More
Injuries to stars have dominated and reshaped the playoffs, raising questions about the legitimacy of winning it all this year in a weakened field.The Milwaukee Bucks were in the midst of a comeback on Tuesday against the Atlanta Hawks, who were without their best player, Trae Young. With the Bucks up two games to one in the best-of-seven Eastern Conference finals series, a win would have put the franchise on the brink of making its first N.B.A. finals since 1974. More
For the third straight playoff series, Los Angeles spotted an opponent two wins and then roared back in Game 3. In each previous series, they kept winning and advanced.The Los Angeles Clippers are the first team in N.B.A. history to erase multiple 2-0 series deficits in the same postseason. Their players, so impressed by the adjustments that their coach, Tyronn Lue, has been making to facilitate those comebacks, have started calling him Bill Belichick.“Yeah, right,” Lue said late Thursday, laughing at the comparisons to Belichick, who has coached the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl titles.Lue knows the Clippers remain seven wins from the first N.B.A. championship in franchise history, but on Thursday they managed to add another entry to their improbable run of Game 3 recoveries — and this time they did it without their best player. With Kawhi Leonard reduced to spectator status, watching from a Staples Center suite as he nursed a worrisome right knee sprain, Los Angeles ground out a 106-92 victory over the Phoenix Suns to slice the Suns’ lead in the best-of-seven Western Conference finals to 2-1.While none of the Clippers got too carried away with one win, given the specter of Leonard’s uncertain availability for the rest of the series, the performance provided the feel of an actual trend that began with the Clippers’ momentous Game 3 win in Dallas and continued with a similar escape against the Utah Jazz in the next round.Paul George scored 27 points in Game 3.Robert Hanashiro/USA Today Sports, via ReutersIn the first round, Dallas had won the first two games as the road team and opened a 30-11 lead in Game 3 before the Clippers rallied for a win that probably saved their season.This week, after the Clippers dropped the first two games in Phoenix while the Suns’ Chris Paul was isolated from his team in the league’s health and safety protocols, Los Angeles needed a similar turning point. With Paul making his return Thursday night, the Suns, with Paul in and Leonard out, seemed set up perfectly to bring a halt to the Clippers’ Game 3 joy.Then Lue intervened, as he had in the Dallas series (when he made the 6-foot-8 Nicolas Batum his starting center) and then the Utah series (when he unleashed the reserve guard Terance Mann, with Leonard out, and Mann responded by scoring a career-high 39 points in a closeout victory in Game 6).On Thursday, Lue again started the 6-foot-5 Mann to send some size at the rusty Paul, but he also handed key roles to Patrick Beverley and Ivica Zubac (15 points and 16 rebounds) after pulling both from the starting lineup in the Dallas series. Assigning Mann to Paul and directing Beverley to hound the Suns’ Devin Booker helped a weary Paul George stay just fresh enough to register 27 points, 15 rebounds and 8 assists. It was an encouraging rebound for George, whose two late missed free throws in Game 2 in Phoenix created the opening for the Suns to steal a 104-103 victory on Deandre Ayton’s dunk in the final second. In Game 3, George’s half-court bank shot at the third-quarter buzzer freshened up his 9-for-26 shooting line considerably and crucially nudged the Clippers’ lead to 80-69, giving them the fourth-quarter edge that led to the Suns’ first loss since May 27.“I thought we did a great job of moving on,” George said. “I moved on. I know I have to be better.”That was a safe assumption with Paul returning from his 10-day isolation from the Suns. Before his sudden exile, Paul, 36, had played the best series of his career in a second-round sweep over the Denver Nuggets — clinching only the second trip to the conference finals in Paul’s 16-season career. He also surely wanted to make a showy return to Los Angeles, where he had spent six fruitless seasons with the Clippers before departing in 2017.Paul and the Suns still have an opportunity to lead their franchise into the N.B.A. finals for the first time since 1993. Leonard’s injury makes this the third straight round in which the Suns have faced a compromised opponent, after the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers (Anthony Davis) and then the Nuggets (Jamal Murray) were weakened by the loss of key players.Yet Paul and Booker combined to shoot 10 for 40 from the field in Game 3, with Booker forced to wear a plastic face shield after a Game 2 clash with Beverley left him with a broken nose. The Suns also lost Cameron Payne, who starred in Game 2 (29 points, 9 assists, 0 turnovers) while filling in for Paul, when he injured his left ankle in the first half. For once in a postseason marked by serious injury issues in both conferences, Phoenix looked a bit banged up heading into Saturday’s Game 4.Booker insisted that his nose was “fine, honestly” after doctors deemed it broken in three places, and he dismissed suggestions that the mask had affected his shooting. I checked in with one of Booker’s former Suns teammates, Jamal Crawford, after Crawford took to Twitter during Booker’s 5-for-21 shooting struggles to describe his own experience with a face shield as “the best defense” he had ever seen.Devin Booker wore a mask to protect his broken nose but refused to blame it for his 5-for-21 shooting performance.Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press“The mask challenge is real,” Crawford said. “First off, you can only see straight ahead, nothing on the sides. And even shooting, your depth perception is not quite right. A shot you shoot long may be short, and vice versa. It’s tough to get in a rhythm.”Crawford recalled ditching the mask after a quarter and taking his chances with an exposed nose because “the frustration of wearing it was too much.” The Suns coach, Monty Williams, not surprisingly, implored his players to blame the defeat on nothing apart from their failure to match what he termed the Clippers’ “desperation.”To hear Lue’s players tell it, that pluck stemmed as much from him as despair. Whether the Clippers can win Game 4 and give their third successive comeback attempt from a 2-0 deficit a significant jolt most likely depends on how well Paul and Booker can bounce back from their shaky reunion. But the Clippers said they were convinced Lue would have a plan for that.“I think it’s special, just the relationship I have with T-Lue, and the relationship T-Lue has with every individual on this team in general,” George said. He credited a late-night phone call with Lue shortly after the team landed in Los Angeles after the painful Game 2 defeat with helping him bounce back.But does that make him the next Belichick?“I’m nowhere near him,” Lue said.Was he bold enough to believe that the Clippers, after going 0-6 in Game 1s and Game 2s, can make it back to 2-2 again even without Leonard?“I don’t like it, I’ll tell you that,” Lue said of his team’s habit of digging early holes. “But we’ve been a resilient team all season long.” More
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
