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“If Book shoots it, I expect it to go in,” Chris Paul said after Phoenix took a 2-0 lead over Milwaukee in the N.B.A. Finals.PHOENIX — Devin Booker grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich., as a devoted Detroit Pistons fan. He keyed on Ben Wallace’s energy, Chauncey Billups’ steadiness, Rasheed Wallace’s tenacity and Tayshaun Prince’s versatility. 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
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
Paul, the Phoenix Suns guard, could miss at least a part of the Western Conference finals.After leading the Phoenix Suns into the Western Conference finals, Chris Paul is in danger of missing at least part of the series after entering the N.B.A.’s coronavirus health and safety protocols.How soon Paul can return to the Suns was not immediately known. The Suns announced Wednesday that Paul was “currently out” because of the protocols and that they would next provide an update about his status on Saturday.Among the factors that will determine how long Paul, 36, will be away from the Suns are his vaccination status and whether he tested positive for the coronavirus. Players who test positive are typically placed in isolation for 10 days, but isolation time, depending on the circumstances, can be reduced if a player is vaccinated.The team did not say why Paul was in the protocol. It could mean that he tested positive, but it also could just indicate that he was in close contact with someone who did. The N.B.A. announced Wednesday afternoon that one player tested positive for the virus within the past week but, as per usual, did not name the player. It’s not clear whether Paul has been vaccinated.The prospect of Phoenix’s losing Paul, after landing a spot in the conference finals on Sunday by completing a four-game sweep of the Denver Nuggets, was the latest blow to an N.B.A. postseason rocked by a string of health-related absences for star players.With the Los Angeles Clippers announcing on Wednesday that forward Kawhi Leonard would be out indefinitely with a sprained right knee, Leonard was poised to become the eighth All-Star to miss at least one playoff game this year because of injury. That is the most in league history, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Leonard hurt his knee in the fourth quarter of the Clippers’ Game 4 victory against the Utah Jazz.The seven other All-Stars on that list: the Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Davis, Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, Boston’s Jaylen Brown, Utah’s Donovan Mitchell and Mike Conley, and the Nets’ James Harden and Kyrie Irving. The Clippers said Leonard would miss Wednesday night’s Game 5 against the Jazz. Paul would be the ninth All-Star to miss time this postseason if he is not cleared to rejoin the Suns before the conference finals, which will begin Sunday or Tuesday.Paul secured just the second trip to the conference finals of his 16-year career with perhaps the best series of his career. He averaged 25.5 points per game, shot 62.7 percent from the field and committed just five turnovers against 41 assists in the four games against Denver.Paul’s only previous appearance in the N.B.A.’s final four came with the Houston Rockets in 2018 and was marred by a series-turning injury. A hamstring issue sidelined him for the final two games against Golden State after Houston had taken a 3-2 series lead. Golden State capitalized on Paul’s absence to win those two games without Paul and went on to win its third championship in four years.A shoulder injury plagued Paul through the first several games of the Suns’ first-round series against the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers. But Paul recovered to help the Suns capitalize on Davis’s limited availability and eliminate the Lakers in six games, the earliest playoff exit in LeBron James’s career.When asked about the shoulder after the Suns’ sweep of the Nuggets, Paul said, “I’m good now.”The N.B.A. began the season in December in each team’s home market rather than in another restricted-access bubble environment like the one it engineered last summer in Florida to complete the 2019-20 season because of the pandemic. During the first half of the regular season, the league postponed 31 games because of coronavirus intrusions that left at least one team in each matchup without the minimum of eight players in uniform. But all 30 teams managed to complete their 72-game regular seasons in May, and Commissioner Adam Silver told Time magazine in April that more than 70 percent of the league’s players had received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine.The N.B.A. has issued weekly updates on the number of positive coronavirus tests leaguewide and, before Wednesday, had announced three successive weeks with zero positive tests since the playoffs began on May 22. More
Crowder does a little bit of everything for Phoenix. He’s a key defender, a 3-point specialist and if the need arises, a solid salsa dancer.The Phoenix Suns had a growing lead on Wednesday night when Aaron Gordon of the Denver Nuggets tried to move toward the 3-point line on an offensive possession. He definitely tried. The problem was Jae Crowder had blocked Gordon’s path with his 6-foot-6, 235-pound frame. There was shoving and arguing, then a flurry of whistles and a mild tussle appeared in danger of turning into a full-blown fracas.It was no surprise, of course, that Crowder, a forward who moonlights as the Suns’ resident enforcer, was in the middle of it. Crowder and Gordon were assessed technical fouls.“Honestly, it comes at me, I don’t seek it,” Crowder said of his extracurriculars. “Other teams just try to be physical with me, try to get me riled up. I don’t know if they know it, but I like that style of play. I like to trash talk. I like all of that because it definitely gets me going, and I think my team definitely feeds off it a little bit, the energy of it.”The Suns are roughing up the Nuggets — and Nikola Jokic, the N.B.A.’s freshly minted most valuable player — in their Western Conference semifinal series, cruising to a pair of lopsided wins ahead of Game 3 on Friday in Denver.And while the Suns are powered by their backcourt tandem of Devin Booker and Chris Paul, Crowder has added an extra layer of feistiness and playoff experience. Most of the time, he does his work in the game’s quiet corners: defending, rebounding, screening. But when the need arises, he will surface to hit a 3-pointer or get in the face of an opposing player. It was no accident that TNT stuck a microphone on him for its broadcast of the Suns’ 123-98 win in Game 2 in Phoenix.“Jae is never fazed by anything,” Paul said.Crowder does not lack for confidence and he has quickly made himself popular in Phoenix. Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesIn five straight playoff wins for the Suns, dating to the middle of their first-round series against the Los Angeles Lakers, Crowder has averaged 13.8 points and 5 rebounds a game while shooting 50 percent from the field and 46.2 percent from 3-point range. On Wednesday, he did not put up gaudy numbers — he scored 11 points — but picked his spots. He made the team’s first two field goals, then opened the second half with a 3-pointer that seemed to signal that a blowout was brewing.“That’s just how we try to play,” Crowder said. “We try to impose our will early.”The son of Corey Crowder, a former N.B.A. player for the Utah Jazz and the San Antonio Spurs, Crowder, 30, grew up outside of Atlanta (where he was a lightly recruited high school prospect). He attended two junior colleges before he landed at Marquette, where he was the Big East Player of the Year as a senior. His nomadic basketball life continued when the Cleveland Cavaliers traded him to the Dallas Mavericks shortly after they selected him with the 34th pick in the 2012 draft.Crowder has played for seven teams in nine seasons, though he may stick around in Phoenix for a while. He signed a three-year deal worth about $29 million as a free agent in November after leaving Miami, and his value is clear: He does a bit of everything, which includes defending multiple positions and stretching the floor as a 3-point threat. And for a young team with big goals, he provides a level of physicality that comes only with experience.Crowder struggled to keep his composure in the first three games against the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round. He recovered well to help his team win the series.Sean M. Haffey/Getty ImagesConsider the Suns’ series with the Lakers, which featured something of a telenovela starring Crowder and LeBron James. Through the first three games of the series, Crowder struggled with his jumper (which can happen), shooting 7 of 27 from the field, and James went straight at him in the latter stages of the Lakers’ Game 3 win as James’s teammates egged him on.Other players might have folded like origami. Instead, Crowder returned for Game 4 and scored 17 points — in front of a jeering crowd at Staples Center, no less — as the Suns evened the series.In the Suns’ closeout victory in Game 6, Crowder scored 18 points on 6 of 9 shooting from the 3-point line (he did not attempt any shots inside the arc). During a break in play with less than a minute remaining, Crowder salsa danced directly in front of James — a homage of sorts to a dance that James performs in a commercial for Mountain Dew — and was ejected. Crowder, who is seldom boring, sprinted to the locker room like Usain Bolt.Afterward, he posted a couple of photos of himself doing the salsa on his Instagram account (@Bossmann99), along with a caption: “AINT NO FUN WHEN THE RABBIT GOT THE GUN.” As if to make it abundantly clear that he had crafted the post himself, he signed it, “Big 99” — a reference to his uniform number.“I felt like we got disrespected a little bit in Game 3 or whatever,” Crowder said, “so I did what I had to do in the closing game.”While he pledged to do the salsa with fans in Phoenix if the Suns win the championship, Crowder said he was trying to exercise a bit more restraint with opposing players at this stage of the playoffs. He has already paid his share of fines.“I’ve got to be smart,” he said. “I can’t always bite the bait and keep giving money back to the league.”Against the Nuggets, the Suns are winning with balance. In both wins, all five starters have scored in double figures. They are passing the ball and operating as a collective whole, a high-speed machine with synchronized parts. Crowder is one among many, but important in his own way.“It makes the task that much more difficult for our opponent when everybody’s rolling,” Crowder said. More
