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      A Decade After Sacramento Showed Up for the Kings, the Kings Return the Favor

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      The surprising Kings are pushing Golden State in their first-round N.B.A. playoff matchup. Sacramento fans have waited a long time for a team that matched their fervor.The long-term fate of the Sacramento Kings was still unclear. In 2013, Mayor Kevin Johnson of Sacramento and N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern persuaded a new owner to buy the team, a last-minute change that kept it from moving to Seattle.But the Kings’ home was still a dumpy suburban stadium that no longer fit the modern N.B.A. Without a new arena, leaving would always be in the cards.A year later I flew to Sacramento as the City Council convened for a tense vote on whether the city should pay roughly half the cost, $255 million, for construction of a new downtown arena now known as the Golden 1 Center.Kings fans showed up in force, as they always do, despite the team having just skidded to its eighth consecutive losing season. They held aloft placards imploring the Council to say yes. Angry critics were also on hand, dead set against spending taxpayer funds on a sports team’s arena.The Council voted to allocate the money. The Kings stayed put, with the new owner, Vivek Ranadive, promising fans that the team was in it for the long haul. “This is your team, and it is here to stay!” he said.Nine years later, and after a league-record 16 seasons without being in the playoffs, Sacramento’s team is finally making waves in the N.B.A. postseason. Who knew it would take this long?And who could have guessed that the young and suddenly transformed Kings would be going toe to toe against dynastic Golden State, which now calls its home San Francisco, a city that has always viewed Sacramento as a cow town.The Kings of 2023 brim with fast-break speed and precision that conjure memories of Steph Curry and Klay Thompson a decade ago, at the start of a run that brought Golden State four N.B.A. championships and six N.B.A. finals appearances.Of course, the Kings look like the Warriors’ doppelgängers: They have been molded by Mike Brown, who was Steve Kerr’s consigliere for years at Golden State, poached by Sacramento last May.After calling a timeout when there wasn’t one left in Game 4 on Sunday, Stephen Curry was consoled by Golden State Coach Steve Kerr.Darren Yamashita/USA Today Sports, via Reuters ConIn playing the Warriors to a 2-2 series standoff so far, Sacramento has been so competitive and irritating that it pushed Draymond Green into giving a retaliatory stomp to Domantas Sabonis’s chest in a Game 2 loss from which Green was ejected (and for which he was suspended from Game 3, which the Warriors won).Game 4 — a 126-125 Warriors victory on Sunday that the Kings could have won on their final possession — was so tight that Kerr left Curry in for 43 of the game’s 48 minutes, including the entire fourth quarter. When was the last time Curry was so pressed in the first round?Kings fans have showed up with a fervor that matched that of Sabonis, Malik Monk and De’Aaron Fox. They rushed to defend home court, purchasing nearly every available seat at Golden 1 Center, then set out to invade on the road. At Chase Center, in San Francisco, the Warriors barred Kings fans from bringing in the clanging cowbells that hark back to Sacramento’s agrarian roots and became a sanctified symbol of the Kings’ success in the early 2000s.As the series heads back to Sacramento, think about how long Kings fans have waited to show up in the playoffs. Much has been made of the franchise’s streak of 16 seasons without a playoff appearance. But it has been 19 since the Kings came out on top in a playoff series and 21 seasons, since early in the George Bush the Younger administration, when the team was a genuine playoff threat.Ask Kings die-hards about the loss to the Lakers in seven games in the 2002 Western Conference finals, and you will soon see the bugging of eyes and curses aimed at Robert Horry, who is to Sacramento what Bucky Dent is to Boston. The fans possess two qualities in spades: remarkable loyalty and plenty of pent-up frustration.The crazy cool part of this Kings season is how stunningly surprising it has been.In the long, hard seasons after Ranadive saved the team, Sacramento kept journeying into the dark corners of the N.B.A. wilderness.The team churned through coaches and was run by a revolving door of upper management, which seemingly had no clue. (The decision to draft Marvin Bagley III over Luka Doncic with the No. 2 overall draft pick in 2018 characterized the head-scratching moves.)Critics frothed against Ranadive, claiming he was a meddling owner in over his head. The N.B.A.’s best practice says you hire basketball executives and let them choose the coach. The Kings did it the other way around.Among all the hoopla about the upstarts from California’s capital city, remember this: It was just last year when the Kings won only 30 games while losing 52, yet another season of frustration, and one that prompted the city’s largest newspaper to run an article with a headline that blared:“Basketball Hell: How Vivek Ranadive Turned Sacramento Kings Into N.B.A.’s Biggest Losers.”Now, the series heads back to the Kings’ home arena for what promises to be a madhouse Game 5 on Wednesday night, the vision conjured at that City Council meeting all those years ago finally fulfilled.Now, the only hell connected to the Kings is the one they are giving the Warriors. More

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      NHL and NBA Playoffs Give New York Fans a Lot to Celebrate

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      All five professional winter season teams in the New York metropolitan area made the playoffs for the first time since 1994.For four consecutive days, people in sports jerseys of various colors moved in, out and around Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. For some, it was their destination. For others, it was a changing point. But for fans of five teams in two sports in one metropolitan area, it was a hub for that incomparable and captivating springtime buzz: the playoffs.Across the United States and Canada, many cities are hosting playoff games in professional basketball and hockey. But nowhere was the action more abundant than in the New York metropolitan area, where all five professional winter season teams were in the postseason.It was the first time the five local teams had been in the playoffs at the same time since 1994, the year Madison Square Garden was the pulsating star at the core of the sports universe. The Rangers and the Knicks traded nights at the Garden from April to June that spring, right through to the finals of the N.H.L. and N.B.A. playoffs, and the Rangers won the Stanley Cup. Along the way, all five teams played dates in that one arena during the playoffs.This year, by Sunday, three of the teams had played at the Garden, but all five — the Islanders in Nassau County, N.Y.; the Nets in Brooklyn; the Knicks and the Rangers in Manhattan; and the Devils in Newark, N.J. — competed somewhere in the relatively condensed metro area in first-round playoff games.“There’s a buzz in the area, for sure,” Islanders defenseman Ryan Pulock said after his team pounded the visiting Carolina Hurricanes, 5-1, on Friday.It was the first playoff game held at two-year-old UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., about a 35-minute ride from Penn Station on the Long Island Rail Road. The same night, basketball fans could ride that rail line (or the subway) to Penn Station, walk upstairs, and see the Knicks beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, 99-79, at the Garden in Game 3 of that series.The crowd and the building were ready for the moment, and Knicks guard Jalen Brunson called the atmosphere “unreal.”“Being in this environment, there is no other replica,” he said. “There is nothing that comes close to it.”Rangers fans flocked to New Jersey for the first two playoff games against the Devils.Bruce Bennett/Getty ImagesThese playoff runs for the New York area’s teams, which have been germinating for a couple of years, began on Thursday, when the Devils and the Rangers played in Newark for Game 2 of that series. Some fans from New York hopped on a New Jersey Transit train from Penn Station, including many Rangers fans who infiltrated the Prudential Center, home of the Devils. At the same time, barely 14 miles away, the Nets, who once shared an arena with the Devils in East Rutherford, N.J., hosted the Philadelphia 76ers at Barclays Center, and lost Game 3.The basketball playoffs continued in Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon, but they came to an end for the Nets, who were eliminated in a first-round sweep by the 76ers.But anyone looking for more playoff action could have taken the No. 2 train back to Penn Station to see the Rangers welcome the Devils in Game 3 on Saturday night at the Garden, where the Devils won in overtime, 2-1, cutting the Rangers’ lead in that series to 2-1. On Sunday, the Knicks beat the Cavaliers, 102-93, at the Garden to take a 3-1 lead in that series. At UBS Arena on Sunday, the Islanders lost to the Hurricanes, 5-2, and now trail in that series, 3-1.Eight playoff games in four arenas in four days involving five local teams: It’s a New York-New Jersey playoff bonanza.“It’s awesome for local fans,” Islanders winger Kyle Palmieri said. “I grew up as a local fan, and I watched all these teams.”He also played for two of them. Palmieri was born on Long Island, in Smithtown, N.Y., and moved with his family to Montvale, N.J., as a boy. He played for the Devils from 2015 until he was traded to the Islanders in 2021, just in time to participate in the Isles’ last game at the old Nassau Coliseum — a 3-2 overtime win against the Tampa Bay Lightning on June 23, 2021.Now, even with his focus on his own club’s series against Carolina, he can marvel at all the local teams playing at once.“It’s a special thing to have everyone involved,” he said. “It doesn’t happen too often.”More than 140,000 attendees were expected through Sunday’s playoff games. One of them was Lucas Whitehead, 27, a Canadian who was in the area to attend a conference at the United Nations. He bought an Islanders jersey and marveled at the atmosphere for the UBS Arena’s first playoff game.“The energy in here was like nothing I’ve seen before,” he said after Friday’s game. “I’ve been to a lot of arenas. We went to M.S.G. and the Prudential Center, and I’ve been to a lot in Canada. This was the craziest.”But the Garden came to life again on Saturday, for the Rangers-Devils game. The Rangers fans made their presence felt in Newark, but at home, when their team scores and the crowd sings their goal song and the walls vibrate, it can create a swell of momentum for the team.“It’s amazing — it’s one of the cooler experiences you’ll have,” Rangers center Mika Zibanejad said after practice on Friday, about two hours after the Knicks practiced at the same building in Westchester County, N.Y. “It’s hard to explain it to someone who’s not on the ice and doesn’t get to be part of it in that moment.”As the playoffs move into May, the number of local teams will dwindle. But there could be more excitement ahead. If the Rangers and the Islanders win their series, the two rivals, whose fan bases generally loathe each other, would meet in the second round, their first postseason encounter since the Rangers swept the Islanders in that fateful spring of ’94.That would suit Filip Chytil, the Rangers center who is originally from the Czech Republic. Before joining the Rangers in 2017, Chytil played one year professionally for the Czech team PSG Zlin and said its rivalry with H.C. Kometa Brno was fiery. But playing the Islanders in New York would be even more intense.“That would be great,” Chytil said Friday. “It’s a big ‘if’ at this moment. But we wouldn’t have to travel very much. Just take a bus.”Or, if the team prefers, there are plenty of trains in and out of Penn Station. More

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      Draymond Green’s Suspension Could Sink Golden State. Again.

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      The Golden State forward’s antics are a constant threat to his team’s championship hopes.This is the bargain the Golden State Warriors have made.They live with the threats Draymond Green sometimes poses to their championship aspirations because of the benefits they enjoy when he is at his best.His energy and determination can frustrate an opponent into big mistakes, and they can lift and embolden his teammates. But he also regularly barrels toward the line between playing hard and playing dirty, and the Warriors tolerate it because he can help them win titles. With his history of rough fouls and taunts, he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt when his behavior is in a gray area, and that can cost the Warriors dearly.Now it has, again.On Thursday night, Golden State will face the Sacramento Kings in Game 3 of a first-round N.B.A. playoff series the Kings lead, 2-0. The Warriors will have to try to save themselves from falling into a nearly insurmountable 3-0 deficit without Green, whom the league suspended for Game 3 after he stepped on the chest of Kings center Domantas Sabonis in Game 2 on Monday. Green was assessed a flagrant-2 foul and ejected with 7 minutes 3 seconds left in the fourth quarter.The N.B.A. made it clear that the suspension was more about Green’s “history of unsportsmanlike acts” than what he did to Sabonis, who precipitated the events by grabbing Green’s ankle while lying on the ground. In an interview with ESPN, Joe Dumars, an N.B.A. executive vice president responsible for player discipline, said the way Green taunted the Sacramento crowd afterward also factored into the decision. As the officials reviewed the play, Green yelled to a crowd that was yelling at him, while clapping and gesturing for the fans to keep going.The N.B.A. said Green’s taunting of the Kings fans factored into the decision to suspend him for Game 3.Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated PressThe suspension might not seem fair, but it’s not an outcome that should surprise Golden State or Green.When the Warriors were in the middle of their second annual unstoppable romp to the N.B.A. finals seven years ago, Green might have cost them a championship.The league has a points system that triggers automatic suspensions related to flagrant fouls. Players are assessed two points for a flagrant-2 foul, and one point for a flagrant-1. If they exceed three points during the postseason, they are suspended for one game.In 2016, Green was assessed a flagrant-1 foul for striking a Cavaliers player — LeBron James — in the groin. Green already had three points for flagrant fouls, so he was suspended for Game 5.“We thrive off of Draymond’s competitiveness and his edge and it’s been very important for us this year,” Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said at the time. “And maybe that same quality has led him to this point — just his competitiveness and his passion. And that’s all part of it.”Green watched the game from a suite at the baseball stadium next door in Oakland, Calif. His team had a 3-1 series lead at the time, but lost the finals to Cleveland.It was Green’s only playoff suspension until Tuesday, but his conduct has drawn scrutiny many times.Last season, Green was ejected from Game 1 of the Warriors’ second-round series against the Memphis Grizzlies for committing a flagrant-2 foul.“I am never going to change the way I play basketball,” Green said later during that series. “It’s gotten me this far. It’s gotten me three championships, four All-Stars, defensive player of the year. I’m not going to change now.”During Game 2, in Memphis, he took an elbow to the face and had to leave to get stitches. Fans jeered at him, and Green showed his middle fingers to the crowd as he left the game.In last year’s finals against Boston, Green showed how his on-court intensity can help his team and frustrate his opponents.“He’ll do whatever it takes to win,” said Celtics guard Jaylen Brown, who called some of Green’s conduct “illegal.” “He’ll pull you, he’ll grab you, he’ll try to muck the game up because that’s what he does for their team. It’s nothing to be surprised about. Nothing I’m surprised about. He raised his physicality to try to stop us, and we’ve got to raise ours.”Golden State seems willing to live with the risks of having Green on the team as long as he helps bring home championships. He has won four, including last season.John G Mabanglo/EPA, via ShutterstockSaid Stephen Curry, Green’s teammate, during that series: “You feel him in his presence, and the other team feels his presence and his intensity. And that is contagious for all of us.”The Warriors thrive on that energy. Boston fans chanted an expletive at Green, which he admitted rattled him a bit. But after the Warriors won the championship in Game 6 in Boston, Green’s teammates serenaded him with the same chant in the postgame locker room. Their faith in Green had won out again.The problem comes when he goes too far.It has happened in games. It also happened last fall during a practice, when he punched his own teammate, Jordan Poole, in the face. Green took time away from the team and apologized. Poole reacted like someone who just wanted the whole incident to go away.It’s all part of what keeps Green under a disciplinary microscope.This week’s suspension didn’t follow the N.B.A.’s typical method for policing flagrant fouls. Green paid for his reputation.Another player might not have been suspended for what he did. The league might have considered that Sabonis grabbed Green’s leg, instigating the interaction, and felt that being ejected from the game was sufficient punishment. Golden State lost the game, after all. The N.B.A. might have given another player the benefit of the doubt, figured that he really didn’t mean to harm anyone, that he was simply looking for a place to land his foot, as Green insisted after the game.“That’s a possibility, yes,” Dumars said in an interview with ESPN.Instead, the league made a decision that imperiled Golden State’s season.“Each time he’s messed up, my hope is he learns from it and becomes better,” Bob Myers, Golden State’s general manager and president of basketball operations, told reporters on Wednesday.So far, though, the Warriors have accepted that this is who Green is. With their actions, they have accepted that they will sometimes have to suffer the consequences of his behavior because the good with Green has outweighed the bad for them. Perhaps that will start to change, if the bad begins to outweigh the good.This result was a risk the Warriors have lived with for years. More

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      The Nuggets Are in the Playoffs Again. Hold the Champagne.

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      DENVER — It was 1976, 39 years before the arrival of Nikola Jokic, when the Denver Nuggets had their last best chance to win a championship.Hair was big, shorts were small. The ball was red, white and blue. The Nuggets had the American Basketball Association’s best record, again, and a roster with three future Hall of Famers.But the New York Nets had Julius Erving, who led them to an upset in the finals. As the fans at the Nassau Coliseum rushed the court, the announcer shouted, “It’s pandemonium!” Because it was the 1970s, and of course he did.Not to worry, Nuggets fans. There would be more chances. Oh, so many chances.The Nuggets are up to their 38th postseason chance now. No current team in major American pro sports has been to the playoffs so many times without winning a championship, according to Elias Sports Bureau.That might make the Nuggets the best franchise to never win it all.There are sadder teams in American sports, some with longer championship droughts and in decaying cities that could use more luck than Denver. For most of their titleless years, the Nuggets were good, and they were fun. They just cannot get the ending right.The next best chance for the Nuggets comes now, eight years after the Denver arrival of Jokic, the two-time reigning most valuable player. Behind the 6-foot-11-inch human Swiss Army knife, the Nuggets earned the No. 1 seed in the N.B.A.’s Western Conference for the first time.Rocky, the team mascot, has been a well-known part of the Nuggets since 1990. These days, though, the most beloved Nugget is Nikola Jokic. Theo Stroomer for The New York TimesMaybe this is the year. A city awaits.For now, the ghosts of “almost” are everywhere.They are in Lot C next to the football stadium. They are at the downtown performing arts center at 13th and Champa.And they are in the current arena, near the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, where 19th-century miners set off the Colorado gold rush that would shape a city and a state and, one day, give a basketball team its name: Nuggets.A Miner With a PickaxStart in 1974, or 41 B.J. (Before Jokic). That’s when Carl Scheer arrived in Denver as general manager, with a friend and coach named Larry Brown. They came to invigorate a seven-year-old A.B.A. franchise called the Rockets.“Larry and I both felt that Denver was like a sleeping giant,” Scheer told a Denver magazine in 1979. “It was just beginning to shed its Old West, cowtown image.”The Rockets played downtown, at Auditorium Arena. It was part of a massive blond-brick complex completed in 1908, in time for that year’s Democratic convention. (William Jennings Bryan, if you must know, was on his way to losing the presidential election a third time.)The arena might be most famous as the site of Led Zeppelin’s first American concert in 1968. (A newspaper reviewer was not impressed by Robert Plant’s singing or John Bonham’s drumming.) Less famously, two nights later, the Rockets beat the Los Angeles Stars.The Nuggets were a middling American Basketball Association team in 1972 when they hosted Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the N.B.A.’s Milwaukee Bucks in an exhibition game. Four years later, the Nuggets were a powerful force in the N.B.A. Associated PressThe Rockets had some good players, like Spencer Haywood his rookie year, but went through five coaches in five seasons. By 1974, they needed a reboot. And the name had to go, if Denver hoped to ever play in the N.B.A. There already were Rockets, in Houston.Where to find a name? In the 1930s, Denver had a top amateur team called the Nuggets. That team eventually became part of the National Basketball League, which combined with the Basketball Association of America in 1949 to form the N.B.A. The Denver Nuggets were one of the 17 original N.B.A. teams — the worst one. They did not return for a second season.But in August 1974, Scheer unveiled a new/old name and a logo: a bearded cartoon miner holding a pickax in one hand and a basketball in the other. He wore tube socks and a prospector’s hat with a flipped-up brim sporting a “D.”The groovy new Nuggets struck gold. That first team went 65-19. It lost the division finals.But things moved fast, and the Nuggets moved up. In 1975 came a new home, McNichols Arena, named for a mayor. The first show was a Lawrence Welk concert; the best show was the Nuggets. They a-one and a-two’d their way to a 28-game home winning streak on their way to the league’s best record.They had Dan Issel, a charging, gaptoothed forward they called the Horse. They had the rookie David Thompson, a gravity-testing guard they soon called Skywalker, like the hero in “Star Wars.” They had Bobby Jones, the slick defensive forward with shooting touch. All three would go to basketball’s hall of fame.Denver hosted the 1976 A.B.A. All-Star Game, and Scheer created a slam-dunk contest. (“To take the pressure off the backboards and rims, we’re going to alternate sides,” the public-address announcer said, in perfect Barnum-ese.) Artis Gilmore, George Gervin, even Thompson couldn’t keep up with Dr. J.That spring, Erving led the Nets to an upset of the Nuggets in the last A.B.A. final.In 1976, the Nuggets had three future Hall of Fame players and the A.B.A.’s best record, but they were upset in the league finals by Julius Erving and the New York Nets. Weeks later, both franchises were invited to join the N.B.A. Manny Millan/Sports Illustrated via Getty ImagesIt would be hard to fathom that the Nuggets would never return to a league finals. That off-season, the summer of the nation’s bicentennial and Colorado’s centennial, the N.B.A. added four A.B.A. teams. Denver was the prize.They were 52-30 during their first N.B.A. season, including 36-5 at home. They lost their first playoff series. But they made the postseason 11 more times in the next 13 years.Every time, they fell short.“There are 22 teams in this league,” Scheer said in 1979, “and to be the champion you need good luck and good fortune. The most important thing is to stay competitive year after year, and then hope that you get luck and momentum going for you at the right time.”The right time never seemed to come.Issel, Several Other Guys, and IsselLot C is on the southwest corner of the second-generation football stadium that everyone still calls Mile High.There is no sign that McNichols Arena once squatted here. Big Mac, people called it, and it was kind of shaped like a burger.There is no foul line where Dr. J took off for his most momentous dunk in 1976, no marker stating that this was the home of the original Colorado Rockies (an N.H.L. franchise that left to become the New Jersey Devils), no hint of the sideline that Nuggets Coach Doug Moe patrolled for more than a decade in his disheveled, profanity-laced glory.There is no plaque commemorating the 1990 Final Four (U.N.L.V.) or the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993. Nothing to note all the big-name rock concerts, the indoor-soccer franchise (the original Avalanche), the arena-football team.Just pavement.But there is a view. Looking east from Lot C is the Denver skyline — the gold-domed state capitol, 17th Street’s “Wall Street of the Rockies” lined with towers built of oil money, the skyscraper on Broadway meant to evoke a cash register.The skyline looks nothing like the Lego-like one on the Nuggets’ rainbow-colored uniforms from the 1980s. Divisive at the time — Where is the miner?— they are now the N.B.A.’s coolest throwbacks, evoking the go-go era of Moe’s high-scoring teams.Caramia Casias and Carter Beller wear Nuggets gear inspired by the 1980s versions of the Nuggets jersey.Theo Stroomer for The New York TimesTheo Stroomer for The New York TimesAll nine of Moe’s teams, through the 1980s, made the playoffs. In 1982-83, they averaged 123.2 points per game despite making only 24 3-pointers. The next season, they played the highest-scoring game in league history.“No one believes that we had zero plays on offense, but Doug would just scream at you, ‘Don’t hold the ball!’” Bill Hanzlik, who played on those teams, said. “It was pass, move, cut. That style of ball was fast, up and down, and we dominated at home. Fans really loved it.”Great players came and went. Alex English arrived to become the team’s career leading scorer. Thompson was traded amid headlines of cocaine addiction. Kiki Vandeweghe was traded for Fat Lever, Calvin Natt and Wayne Cooper. Through it all was Issel, the Horse, the best-known Denver athlete before Elway got rolling in the stadium next door.“The Nuggets were as popular as the Broncos,” said Vic Lombardi, who grew up in Denver, was a Nuggets ball boy in the 1980s and became a local sportscaster and radio personality. “They were just as successful, just as competitive and got just as much attention.”The teams shared a habit of being great to watch but not good enough to win in the end. The Broncos rattled the old stadium in the fall, aspirations crumbling in January. The Nuggets raced down the court on cold winter nights, their hopes melting in the spring.In 1990, they finished 43-39. Things seemed fine, in a Groundhog Day kind of way.But the Nuggets fired Moe — the start of 12 coaching changes in 15 years. If you believe in sports jinxes, Moe’s firing might be one.Or if you believe in phantoms, consider the gutting of the old Auditorium Arena about the same time.The interior was turned into the lavish Buell Theater. And on the same snowy November Friday night that the theater opened to rave reviews with “The Phantom of the Opera,” the Nuggets were at McNichols, opening the season with the first of 58 losses — 120 losses over a two-year stretch. They were more cursed than Carlotta.Dikembe Mutombo was a bright spot for the Nuggets in the 1990s, when the long-stable franchise had eight coaching changes and a string of forgettable seasons. Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE, via Getty ImagesThe rest of the 1990s did not go well. The skyline jersey was ditched. There was an anthem flap, a brief Dikembe Mutombo-led resurrection, and eight coaching changes that began and ended with Issel.But the 1990s were great for other Denver sports. A top N.H.L. team came gift-wrapped from Quebec, was christened the Avalanche and immediately won a Stanley Cup — the first major championship for the city. The Broncos and Elway finally won a Super Bowl, then another. The expansion Rockies arrived and attracted big crowds at a gem called Coors Field.And in 2001, early in a seventh-straight losing season for the Nuggets, Issel called a postgame heckler a “Mexican piece of (expletive)” and soon skulked away.Denver was rolling, without the sad little Nuggets.Jokic Is Here. What Can Go Wrong?Nikola Jokic was 4 when Pepsi Center opened in 1999. (Named then for a canned beverage, it is now Ball Arena, named for a canning company.) It went up on the west edge of downtown, near Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway, named for the original mining-camp settlement along Cherry Creek.The lane that leads to Ball Arena is called Chopper Circle, for the longtime Nuggets trainer Chopper Travaglini. That’s how popular the Nuggets were: even the trainer had streets named for him. He also opened a sports bar that is still there.Theo Stroomer for The New York TimesTheo Stroomer for The New York TimesInside the arena, in the rafters, the Nuggets are represented on one end, the Avalanche on the other.The Avs, as they’re called, have three Stanley Cup banners, including one from their first season in Denver and one from last season. They hope to repeat this spring.The Nuggets have no championship banners, but nine division championships and a lot of retired numbers: Issel, Thompson, English, Lever and Mutombo among them. And there is a banner for Moe, marking his 432 victories.George Karl was hired as the coach in 2005. He led the Nuggets on a Moe-like run of nine consecutive postseasons, the first six with Carmelo Anthony. They were good, fun to watch and almost always lost in the first round.Karl’s last team, 10 years ago, had a mishmash of talent that somehow got to 57 wins, a franchise high in the N.B.A., and were 38-3 at home. Only in hindsight does a first-round upset by the Warriors, with kids named Curry, Thompson and Green making their first playoff appearances, make any sense. Karl was fired.Karl fell in love with Denver as a visiting A.B.A. player in the 1970s — the oil-booming downtown, the vociferous fans, the fast-paced style of the early Nuggets, even their logo and colors. He still lives in Denver, and fans revere him, despite years of almosts and not quites.“Fans do get anxious, they do get angry, they do get fanatical,” Karl said. “But they have a lot of respect and love for the game of basketball here in Denver.”A year after Karl’s firing, in 2014, the Nuggets used a second-round draft choice, the 41st overall, on a 19-year-old from Serbia named Nikola Jokic. He was 6-foot-11 and played in the Adriatic League.Draft experts shrugged. Nuggets fans barely noticed. Jokic quietly joined Denver in 2015, the same time as another new coach, Michael Malone.Jokic made the all-rookie team and eased into superstardom — his game and humility draw comparisons to Tim Duncan — and by 2019, he had ARRIVED, in all caps. He was a do-everything All-Star leading the Nuggets to the Western Conference’s No. 2 seed. (They lost in the second round.)In 2021, Nikola Jokic became the first Nuggets player to win the league M.V.P. This year, he could be the first N.B.A. player since Larry Bird to win it three times in a row. Dustin Bradford/Getty ImagesMomentum has been building since. In 2020 came an unexpected playoff run. (Denver lost to the Lakers, again, in the conference finals.) In 2021, Jokic was named the league’s most valuable player, the first in Nuggets history. (The team lost in the conference semifinals.) In 2022, he was M.V.P. again. (The Nuggets lost in the first round.)This season, Jokic nearly averaged a triple-double — double figures in points (24.5), rebounds (11.8) and assists (9.8). The team that revolves around him has gelled, especially guard Jamal Murray and forwards Michael Porter, Jr., and Aaron Gordon, all in their mid-20s.And now, for the first time since joining the N.B.A. in 1976, the Nuggets will have the top seed in the Western Conference playoffs — home-court advantage for every round before what would be their first-ever N.B.A. finals.Not since that last year in the A.B.A., that first year in McNichols Arena, right after Lawrence Welk opened a squatty little paradise since paved into a parking lot, have they been so well positioned for a postseason.Expectations are tempered. These are the Nuggets, after all. No basketball team spoils the promise of spring quite like them.But Lombardi, the ball boy turned sportscaster, is adamant.“If the Denver Nuggets win a championship,” Lombardi said, “I contend it would produce the largest downtown parade this city has ever seen.”Could it be in 2023? Jokic is 28. The Nuggets are the best team never to win a title. There is gold to be mined, if they can finally discover it.The Nuggets share a city and an arena with the N.H.L.’s Avalanche, who won a Stanley Cup in their first season in Colorado in 1996 and their third championship last season. The Nuggets, with a far deeper history, are still looking for their first title. Theo Stroomer for The New York Times More

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      The NBA Was Redesigned for Drama, and It’s Working

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      The last day of the regular season saw flashes of brilliance from the best teams, punches thrown and disappointing defeats.The N.B.A.’s Western Conference has been a confusing mash of disarray this season, with few teams seeming capable of separating themselves and the rest mired in a chaos borne of some combination of injuries, disillusion and malaise.The drama reached its apogee during a two-and-a-half-hour period on Sunday afternoon. Seven games between West foes tipped off simultaneously and determined half the postseason seeding, including which teams could rest for a week and which could be knocked out in the play-in tournament before the playoffs even start. There were blowouts, shenanigans and punches thrown.It was one of the most exciting days of the season, and highlighted part of N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver’s ethos: that change, though it may come at a cost, can be good.Kyle Anderson and Rudy Gobert had to be separated after a heated altercation during a timeout. pic.twitter.com/HVuPNdjrxs— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) April 9, 2023
      The world of sports is an obstinate and unyielding realm, where tradition reigns. Two years ago, Silver met resistance when he introduced the play-in tournament, in which the teams seeded seventh through 10th compete for the last two of eight playoff spots in each conference.Luka Doncic of the Mavericks argued that it was unfair for teams to play a whole season to land among the top eight seeds just to face elimination in the play-in tournament. The Lakers star LeBron James said whoever came up with it should be fired.But two weeks ago, Silver said all but four of the league’s 30 teams still had a chance to make the playoffs. On Saturday afternoon, with two days of games left, the N.B.A. posted a dizzying, color-coded graphic on Twitter with 64 scenarios for the final West seedings.Did any team really want to face the Warriors, the defending champions?How dangerous could the Clippers be once Kawhi Leonard locked in, and if Paul George was healthy?A team with James and Anthony Davis is fearsome no matter its record, and their Lakers have excelled since the trade deadline.On the other hand, Sacramento (No. 3) and Denver (No. 1) haven’t inspired fear in conference opponents this year. The Kings, who are in the playoffs for the first time since 2006, were well aware that some teams hoped to face them in the first round.“If I’m another team, I’m targeting us, too,” Kings Coach Mike Brown told reporters last week. He paused and shrugged. “I would target us too. And we’re the only ones that can change that narrative.”None of this intrigue would have been possible without the play-in tournament.This is an era when player injuries have concerned teams enough that they have been cautious by occasionally resting them. The league tried to address the wear and tear on players’ bodies several years ago by reducing the number of back-to-back games on the schedule. Adding games with a play-in tournament seemed counterintuitive to that.It’s undeniable, though, that it made the end of the season more intriguing. With more teams in the playoff hunt, that left fewer teams willing to coast for more favorable draft positioning.The Golden State Warriors beat the Portland Trail Blazers by 56 points on Sunday. Klay Thompson had six 3-pointers in the win.Craig Mitchelldyer/Associated Press“It makes it more exciting and it keeps things really interesting all the way down the stretch,” Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said recently, adding: “I’m watching all of it for sure.”There are certain lulls in the 82-game season during which stakes are hard to manufacture. The last month of the season is often one of those times. Added interest during the regular season could help the league as it looks toward its next media rights deals after the 2024-25 season.Every team played on Sunday. The slot at 1 p.m. Eastern time offered a slate of mostly meaningless Eastern Conference games. At 3:30 p.m. the real drama began.Golden State (No. 6) dismantled the Portland Trail Blazers by 56 points, but it was only the team’s 11th road win. At about the same time, the Dallas Mavericks, with no chance to make the playoffs, lost to the San Antonio Spurs by 21 points. At the trade deadline, the Mavericks had acquired Kyrie Irving from the Nets to play with Doncic and seemed to be a championship contender. And yet there they were, ending the season by losing to a 22-win team while under investigation for tanking.The Lakers finished the season with an emphatic win over the Utah Jazz to claim the seventh seed.The Lakers had spent most of the season floundering, with injuries further hampering a mismatched roster that struggled to flow. They improved at the trade deadline, but by that point they needed a furious rally to give themselves even a chance at the playoffs. Finishing with the seventh-best record in the West was an accomplishment, but one that took a lot out of them.Their reward is another game on Tuesday, in the play-in, when their stars could use some time to heal from their bumps and bruises.The Suns, settled in the fourth seed, sat their stars on Sunday, but the Clippers played their stars as they fought for better seeding.Rick Scuteri/Associated PressThe Lakers’ opponent Tuesday, the Minnesota Timberwolves (No. 8), had the most dramatic day. They had spent all season trying to adjust to adding center Rudy Gobert, for whom they had traded away a treasure trove of assets last summer. On Sunday night, during the second quarter of their game against the New Orleans Pelicans, Gobert punched his teammate Kyle Anderson during a verbal altercation. A few minutes earlier, Timberwolves forward Jaden McDaniels broke his right hand by punching a wall.McDaniels is out indefinitely, and Minnesota suspended Gobert for the play-in game against the Lakers. It’s not the kind of drama the N.B.A. wants, but it did have people talking. It also showed another example of how much can go wrong with a blockbuster trade for a star.Then there were the Suns and the Clippers. The Clippers were playing to stay out of the play-in tournament and the only way to ensure that was to win — even if that meant facing a star-studded Phoenix team in the first round.“I’m not a fan of the play-in, me personally, because we didn’t make it last year and we fought so hard to get a top-eight seed,” Clippers Coach Ty Lue said last week. “You don’t make it, it’s tough. But we knew today was a big game to stay away from that.”The play-in tournament is not the last break with tradition Silver will oversee. This month the league and the players’ union agreed to add an in-season tournament to the regular season. It will add more games, but could also add drama. This weekend’s theatrics may be taken as evidence that it doesn’t hurt to try. More

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      The Celtics Won’t Have Inexperience to Blame if They Don’t Win This Year

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      Boston has star players, a deep bench and recent N.B.A. finals experience. What the team won’t have, if it loses in the playoffs, will be excuses.Jayson Tatum made no guarantees for the second half of the Boston Celtics’ season but of one thing he was certain. “Have we gotten better from last year?” Tatum told reporters during the N.B.A.’s All-Star Weekend in Salt Lake City. “Yeah, a lot better.”Tatum had every reason to be brimming with confidence. His stock has never been higher — as signified by the reveal of his own signature shoe this week. In the basketball world, this is an indication that Tatum has graduated from N.B.A. star to N.B.A. star. He would go on to win the Most Valuable Player Award in the charade known as the All-Star Game, a cherry on top of the already M.V.P.-caliber season he is having.He is also the best player on the best team in the N.B.A., with the weight of championship expectations on his shoulders and those of his fellow All-Star and teammate Jaylen Brown. This would be an enviable position for most teams. But the pressure is exponentially higher in a city home to a ravenous fan base and a franchise with long history of winning championships.When asked about the Celtics operating as an established power rather than an underdog, Tatum had already consulted the Pro Athlete Cliché Handbook.“No pressure,” Tatum said. “We feel like we’ve been, if not the best, one of the best teams all season. The goal has always been the same: win a championship. So, you know, just do the right things. Don’t skip any steps. Take it one day at a time.”For Boston’s remaining 23 regular-season games and a presumed deep playoff run, the scrutiny will be much higher than that placed on last year’s young, upstart team. The Celtics (42-17) have the burden of having lots of ways to fail and only one way to be considered a success.Joe Mazzulla became the Celtics’ permanent coach last week after having assumed the role on an interim basis.Charles Krupa/Associated Press“Our environment will change,” Celtics Coach Joe Mazzulla said in a news conference. “And so we have to make sure we don’t.”Last week, Mazzulla had the interim tag removed from his title. He had been thrust into the role right before training camp when last year’s coach, Ime Udoka, was suspended for unspecified violations of team policies. The suspension came as a shock since the Celtics were an ascendant franchise coming off a finals run in a league where continuity is at a premium. Almost as surprising was that Brad Stevens, the team’s president of basketball operations and Udoka’s predecessor, handed the keys to Mazzulla, who had been a Celtics assistant for three years but never an N.B.A. head coach.All Mazzulla had to do was lead the Celtics to a championship. No training wheels. No emotional victories. Just victories.His presence created an odd and unusual dynamic. For much of the season, Udoka was still technically slated to come back in 2023-24 regardless of how Mazzulla did. But Mazzulla got the Celtics off to a blistering 18-4 start, quieting questions about whether his lack of experience would hinder an elite team. Eventually, the Celtics rewarded Mazzulla with what might be considered gold in N.B.A. coaching: security.“The East is terrific. Obviously, the West is loaded up,” Stevens said on a conference call last week. “It’s going to be really hard to win.” He added that it would be hard to coach while “looking behind you and looking over your shoulder.”Mazzulla may not be looking over his shoulder anymore, but the Celtics should be because teams are gaining on them. Since the hot start, the team has looked merely above average at 23-13, rather than world beating. They’re now only a half-game ahead of the Milwaukee Bucks (41-17) for the N.B.A.’s best record and the East’s top seed. Mazzulla has been criticized for not calling timeouts at crucial junctures in games. Over the last 15 games, the Celtics have had a below average offense. During the 18-4 stretch to start the season, the Celtics had not just the best offense in the N.B.A., but one of the best offenses in league history. The good news for Boston is that its defense has steadily improved while its offense has declined.The Celtics should receive a boost after the All-Star break, in the great gift of health. The starting lineup that took the team deep in last year’s playoffs — Tatum, Brown, Marcus Smart, Al Horford and Robert Williams III — has played only 29 minutes together this season. That unit is expected to be at full strength for the last stretch of the season.But even with injuries, the team is deep enough to contend. Derrick White, the sixth-year guard, has been a revelation during his first full season in Boston. In eight February games stepping in for the injured Smart, White averaged 21.1 points, 5.0 rebounds and 6.8 assists per game. Malcolm Brogdon, whom the Celtics acquired in an off-season trade with Indiana, has been a reliable contributor and one of the best 3-point shooters in the league. Brogdon and White would likely be starters on most N.B.A. teams. That the Celtics expect to use them as reserves is a luxury. In one of their last games before the All-Star break, the Celtics nearly knocked off the Bucks on the road despite missing almost all of their top players.Derrick White, right, filled in for his injured teammate Marcus Smart, showing the Celtics’ depth.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe talent is there for the Celtics to win the championship. They are loaded with playmakers, elite shooting and top-notch defenders who can play multiple positions. They can counter Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid and Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo with a steady rotation of mobile forwards, including Horford. Their division-rival Nets imploded at the deadline and traded away their remaining stars, sending Kyrie Irving to Dallas and Kevin Durant to Phoenix.But lots of teams enter the playoffs with talent, as Boston did last year. Now, the Celtics, as Brown noted, should be better prepared for a grueling playoff run after last year’s finals against Golden State, when the team made sloppy, uncharacteristic mistakes and lost the series in six games.“I think this year we got a little bit more experience,” Brown told reporters. “So I think that will carry over into the finals.”Anecdotal evidence suggests continuity and experience are crucial for N.B.A. teams to win championships, and that playoff failures are necessary steppingstones to immortality. Michael Jordan and the 1990s Chicago Bulls suffered through the Bad Boys Pistons teams before starting their reign. Ditto the Miami Heat, who lost deep in previous playoffs before winning their championships in 2006 and 2012. It’s extremely rare for young teams to win championships, though Magic Johnson was a crucial part of the Los Angeles Lakers championship run during his rookie season in 1980 and Tim Duncan led the San Antonio Spurs to a ring in 1999 in his second.Some teams never quite get there, even with experience and talent — like LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers in the late 2000s. The jury is still out on the Phoenix Suns, who lost in the second round last year after coming within two games of winning the 2021 championship.This is the Celtics’ best chance to win a championship since 2008, their last title run. If they don’t raise the trophy this season, or at least make the finals, they won’t be able to say it’s because of a lack of talent or experience. It’ll be something intangible.Being in that place means the franchise must meet lofty ambitions. But it’s better than not having them at all. More

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      LeBron James Keeps the World Watching

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      LeBron James sat in the visitors locker room at Madison Square Garden with ice on his 38-year-old knees and 28 more points to his name after his Los Angeles Lakers beat the Knicks in overtime. James’s teammate Anthony Davis teased him about how close he was to breaking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s N.B.A. career scoring record, then about 90 points away.Suddenly, James remembered something. His mother, Gloria James, was set to go on vacation soon. She might miss his record-breaking game.He called her on speakerphone, with a dozen attentive reporters close by. He asked when she was leaving, reminding her every once in a while, lest she disclose too much, that reporters could hear the conversation. Eventually, he looked around, sheepishly, and said he would call her later.“I love you,” he said. Then, just before he ended the call, he added: “I love you more.”It was typical James: He brings you along for the ride, but on his terms, revealing what he wants to reveal and no more. It is perhaps the only way someone who has been so famous for most of his life could survive the machine of modern celebrity.As he has closed in on Abdul-Jabbar’s record of 38,387 points, the very idea of what it means to be a star has shifted since James scored his first two points on Oct. 29, 2003. And James has helped define that shift. He has risen above the din of social media celebrities and 24-hour news cycles, buoyed by the basketball fans who love him or love to hate him.James, at age 38, is closing in on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s N.B.A. career scoring record while playing with the energy of a much younger version of himself.Ashley Landis/Associated PressHe has been a selfie-snapping tour guide for this journey, with a portfolio that now extends well beyond the court. He has a production company and a show on HBO. He’s acted in a few movies and received some good reviews. His foundation has helped hundreds of students in his hometown Akron, Ohio, and a public school the foundation helps run there, the I Promise School, focuses on children who struggle academically. His opinions are covered as news, given far more weight than those of almost any other athlete.“Hopefully I made an impact enough so people appreciate what I did, and still appreciate what I did off the floor as well, even when I’m done,” James said in an interview. “But I don’t live for that. I live for my family, for my friends and my community that needs that voice.”Basketball Is the ‘Main Thing’In early 2002, James was a high school junior and on the cover of Sports Illustrated. News didn’t travel as quickly as it does now. Not everyone had cellphones, and the ones they had couldn’t livestream videos of whatever anyone did. Social media meant chat rooms on AOL or Yahoo. Facebook had yet to launch, and the deluge of social networking apps was years away.“Thank God I didn’t have social media; that’s all I can say,” James said in October when asked to reflect on his entry into the league.As a teenage star, he was spared the incessant gaze of social media and the bullying and harsh criticism that most likely would have come with it.But social media, in its many changing forms, has also helped people express their personalities and share their lives with others. It lets them define themselves — something particularly useful for public figures whose stories get told one way or another.James began thinking about that early in his career.His media and production firm, now called the SpringHill Company, made a documentary about James and his high school teammates titled “More Than a Game” in 2008. It also developed “The Shop,” an HBO show James sometimes appears on with celebrity guests, including the former President Barack Obama and the rapper Travis Scott, talking like friends in a barbershop.James has built a portfolio of movies and television shows that have expanded his influence beyond basketball.Coley Brown for The New York TimesJames likes to say that he always keeps “the main thing the main thing” — meaning that no matter what else is happening in his life, he prioritizes basketball. He honors the thing that created his fame.He led his teams to the N.B.A. finals in eight consecutive years and won championships with three different franchises. He was chosen for the league’s Most Valuable Player Award four times, and he has dished the fourth-most assists in N.B.A. history.James’s talent meant it didn’t take long for him to become the face of the N.B.A. He has mostly embraced that, capitalizing on an era when sports fandom was no longer about sitting down to watch a game so much as it was about catching small bites of the most compelling moments.“People’s interest in athletes moves very quickly, especially with the N.B.A. season,” said Omar Raja, who in 2014 founded House of Highlights, an Instagram account for viral sports moments, because he wanted to share clips of the Miami Heat during James’s time playing there with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.“LeBron’s Instagram stories would do as well as his poster dunks, and you were like, ‘This is crazy,’” Raja said.House of Highlights reposted two videos from James’s Instagram stories in May 2019. One showed James and a former teammate dancing in a yard. Another showed James and friends, including Russell Westbrook, smoking cigars. Both videos outperformed anything that happened in the playoffs.‘I Wish I Could Do Normal Things’James has used his fame to further business opportunities and build his financial portfolio. He has used it to both shield his children and prepare them for growing up in his shadow.He has used it for social activism, most notably in speaking about Black civil rights and racism. That began in 2012, when he and his Heat teammates wore hooded sweatshirts and posted a group photo on social media after the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager who was wearing a hoodie when he was shot and killed in Florida. The Heat decided to transfer some of their spotlight to the national conversation about racism that emerged.James wearing Eric Garner’s words “I Can’t Breathe” at a pregame warm up in 2014. Garner, a Black man, died after the police in New York put him a chokehold.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesBlack N.B.A. players have a long history of speaking out or demonstrating against racism and discrimination: Abdul-Jabbar and the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell were vocal about the racist dangers they faced in the 1960s and ’70s. But what made the actions of James and his teammates stand out was that the superstar athletes of the ’90s and early 2000s — Michael Jordan, most notably — had often shied away from overt activism.What James chooses to talk about (or not talk about) draws notice.In 2019, when a Houston Rockets executive angered the Chinese government by expressing support for Hong Kong, James was criticized for not speaking out against China’s human rights abuses. James said he did not know enough to talk about them, but some skeptics accused him of avoiding the subject to protect his financial interests in China.And in 2020, when protests swept the country after the police killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, both of whom were Black, the N.B.A. made social justice part of its ethos. James used many of his news conferences that season to discuss racism and police violence against Black people.The attention to James’s words separates him from others, as does the attention to his life.“I don’t want to say it ever becomes too much, but there are times when I wish I could do normal things,” James said Thursday while standing in an arena hallway in Indianapolis about an hour after the Lakers beat the Pacers there. A member of a camera crew that has been following him for the past few years filmed him as he spoke.“I wish I could just walk outside,” James said. “I wish I could just, like, walk into a movie theater and sit down and go to the concession stand and get popcorn. I wish I could just go to an amusement park just like regular people. I wish I could go to Target sometimes and walk into Starbucks and have my name on the cup just like regular people.”He added: “I’m not sitting here complaining about it, of course not. But it can be challenging at times.”James grew up without stable housing or much money, but his life now is not like most people’s because of the money he has made through basketball and business (he’s estimated to be worth more than $1 billion), and because of the extraordinary athletic feats he makes look so easy. Once in a while, as when he’s on the phone with his mother, he manages to come off like just another guy.James speaks at the opening ceremony for the I Promise School in Akron, Ohio, in 2018.Phil Long/Associated PressAnother example: In October 2018, during his first Lakers training camp, James gave up wine as part of a preseason diet regimen. He was asked if abstaining had affected his body.“Yeah, it made me want wine more,” James said, relatably. “But I feel great. I feel great. I did a two-week cleanse and gave up a lot of things for 14 days.”James had also quit gluten, dairy, artificial sugars and all alcohol for those two weeks, he said.What was left?“In life?” James said. “Air.”There to See HimThe past few seasons have been challenging for James on the court. He is playing as well as he ever has, but the Lakers have struggled since winning a championship in 2020.They missed the playoffs last season and are in 12th place in the Western Conference, though they have played better recently. James, his coaches and his teammates all insist that he spends more time thinking about how to get the Lakers into the playoffs than about breaking the scoring record.Still, Madison Square Garden, one of his favorite arenas, buzzed on Tuesday night. Because of him.Celebrities, fans and media came to watch him, just as they did when he was a constant in the N.B.A. finals.He taped a pregame interview with Michael Strahan courtside. Then he went through his pregame warm-up, shooting from different spots on the court, working against an assistant coach, who tried to defend him. He took a few seconds to dance near the 3-point line as he waited for someone to pass the ball back to him.He was in what he’s made into a comfortable place: the center of the basketball universe. More

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      This Isn’t Who the Lakers Are Supposed to Be. Right?

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      The Lakers have long been seen as a glamour franchise of big names and big wins. LeBron James is dominating. But the wins have been much harder to come by, for a while.LOS ANGELES — LeBron James fidgeted as he answered questions after a second consecutive frustrating Lakers loss in which he thought the referees had missed a potential game-altering foul call.He was terse and dismissed a question about scoring his 38,000th career point in the N.B.A., something only he and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have done. He was asked if he thought much about what the Lakers’ many losses in recent seasons meant to the franchise.“No,” James said. Then he turned and sped out of the locker room, into a rainy Los Angeles night.The gloom outside reflected the mood in the building.For decades, the Lakers defined themselves as one of the N.B.A.’s glamour franchises — a place the biggest stars went to play, win championships and achieve basketball immortality. Making the playoffs was an expectation, not an accomplishment.Then 10 years ago, two seismic events shook the franchise. On Feb. 18, 2013, Jerry Buss, who bought and revitalized the Lakers in 1979, died at age 80, leaving the franchise to a trust controlled by his six children, some of whom would wrestle for control of the team. Less than two months later, as he tried to drag the Lakers into the playoffs, Kobe Bryant tore an Achilles’ tendon, the first in a string of injuries that would spell the end of his 20-year career.Since then, the Lakers have gone through several discordant phases, from Bryant’s return and retirement to chaos in the executive ranks to a championship in 2020 that seemed proof of purple-and-gold exceptionalism, no matter the obstacles.But new obstacles have the Lakers once again facing the question of whether the excellence they spent decades building can return. For the second year in a row, James, 38, is having to produce herculean efforts to try to pull his injury-plagued team out of the bottom of the Western Conference standings.LeBron James is averaging nearly 30 points a game at the age of 38 as he tries to power the injured and struggling Lakers to the playoffs.Jae C. Hong/Associated Press“We’re going to figure this thing out,” said Lakers Coach Darvin Ham, the team’s fifth in the past 10 years. “We’ll definitely figure this thing out.”‘Kobe realized that he could not win’If success is measured by championships, the Lakers have still been one of the top teams in the N.B.A. during the past decade. They are one of the six teams to have won championships since the 2012-13 season.Broadening the measure to playoff or regular-season success, the Lakers become less impressive. With only two playoff appearances since the 2012-13 season, the Lakers are in the bottom third of the league. Only two teams have been to the playoffs fewer times in that span — the Knicks (once) and the Sacramento Kings (none).By contrast, between 1960-61, the team’s first season in Los Angeles after moving from Minnesota, and 2012-13, the Lakers had missed the playoffs just four times.Frank Vogel coached the Lakers to their only two recent playoff appearances, guiding them to the championship in 2020 then a first-round loss in 2021. The Lakers fired him in April after they missed the playoffs.Even though injuries and roster construction played major roles in the Lakers’ struggles in the 2021-22 season, Vogel became a casualty of heightened expectations with James on board. James’s arrival as a free agent in July 2018 marked the first time since Bryant retired two years earlier that the Lakers had a transcendent star.Bryant had spent his whole career with the Lakers and won five championships. So even after his Achilles’ tendon injury, the Lakers rewarded him with a two-year contract extension worth $48.5 million, giving him the highest salary in the league at the time. They were confident that he deserved it no matter what happened next.To announce Bryant’s return from injury in late 2013, the Lakers created a video with dramatic music and an image of his jersey being battered by weather until a lightning bolt finally tore it. The video closes with the jersey having been mended by unseen means and with the words: “The Legend Continues.”Bryant returned for six games in December, then fractured his knee and missed the rest of the 2013-14 season as the Lakers won just 27 games. He missed most of the next season as the team won only 21 games.“At some point, I think it’s obvious to everyone that Kobe realized that he could not win,” said Gary Vitti, who was the Lakers’ head athletic trainer for decades until Bryant retired. “And once he realized he couldn’t win, then a lot of the stress and the pressure sort of came off him and he really started having fun and being a lot happier around the game and his teammates.”Kobe Bryant, who died in 2020, spent his entire 20-year career with the Lakers, though the final few seasons were rough. He scored 60 points in his final game in April 2016.Harry How/Getty ImagesOpposing fans feted him everywhere he went. They cheered the first shot he made, even if it took him a while to get there. Coach Byron Scott, a former Lakers guard, led the team during Bryant’s loss-filled farewell tour, a franchise-low 17-win season.“Losing — it’s horrible,” Vitti said. “But if you put it all in the context, if you’re Kobe, you know, basically Kobe could do whatever he wanted out there. Byron took over and kind of fell on his sword for the team. He said, let’s send Kobe out the way he wants to go.”Said Metta Sandiford-Artest, who played for the Lakers on their 2010 championship team and again from 2015-17: “At that point, you just wanted to make it comfortable for Kobe. That’s it. Nothing else really matters at that point.” He added: “He deserved it.”‘Pieces for the future’All the losing gave the Lakers enviable draft positioning.With picks earned by their records in the final few years of Bryant’s career, the Lakers drafted or acquired several promising young players, like Julius Randle, Jordan Clarkson, D’Angelo Russell, Larry Nance Jr., Brandon Ingram and Ivica Zubac.Randle, Clarkson, Russell and Nance have said they learned from Bryant’s example. But his star power was such that they had to wait until he retired in April 2016 for the franchise to focus on their development.“It felt like a career-beginning training camp because it definitely was not the pieces at the time you needed to win,” Sandiford-Artest said. “There was more, you know, pieces for the future.”Those players would not be part of their future, except as trade chips to build the championship roster.In the gap between Bryant and James, Jeanie Buss, the controlling owner, overhauled the front office and thwarted a coup attempt by her older brothers as the team’s losses — and external criticism — mounted.In the summer of 2017, the Lakers signed Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who is represented by James’s agent and close friend, Rich Paul. That gave Paul an inside look at the organization a year before James became a free agent.Paul knew the situation wasn’t perfect, but few teams are. He advised James that signing with the Lakers could work, in part out of trust in Buss. James chose the Lakers and suddenly the drama of the past few seasons didn’t seem to matter.After missing the playoffs in James’s first season, when he dealt with a groin injury, the Lakers tried again. Magic Johnson, whom Buss had hired to run basketball operations and who had helped to recruit James, abruptly stepped down before the last game of the 2018-19 season. They traded several young players and draft picks to the New Orleans Pelicans for another Paul client: Anthony Davis. Rob Pelinka, the team’s vice president of basketball operations, said he consulted with James and Davis as he built the rest of the roster.The two stars were electrifying together. The rest of the team fit perfectly and charged through the coronavirus pandemic-interrupted season. When Bryant died suddenly in a helicopter crash in January 2020, James became the public face of the organization’s grief.Months later, James led the Lakers to the franchise’s 17th championship. Buss felt vindicated against those who had questioned her leadership.Jeanie Buss, the Lakers’ controlling owner, has faced criticism as the team has struggled. She oversaw the franchise’s 17th championship run, in 2020.Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesOnstage as the team celebrated the victory, James enveloped Buss in a long embrace. He told her they had accomplished what they set out to do.“I think the hug for that long a time was to really let it soak in,” Buss told the Los Angeles Times at the time. “He’s won several championships now, and he knows that those moments are to be cherished and to be recognized.”But it was only one championship. They would soon tumble from their pedestal.‘Things are going to get right’This season is Ham’s first season with the Lakers, and it began disastrously.The team lost its first five games, and 10 of its first 12. Ham benched Russell Westbrook in October after three starts. Westbrook had struggled in his first season in Los Angeles last year.James has been a bright spot. In his 20th season, he has been playing like he is still in his 20s. He’s had trouble enjoying the chase for Abdul-Jabbar’s career scoring record as losses and injuries have piled up this season.Ham has remained optimistic.“I get disappointed, but I don’t get discouraged or down on myself or the team,” he said in an interview. “Yeah, there’s moments in games we should have won, or different moments we should have played better, but at the end of the day working in the N.B.A. for one of the most, if not the most storied franchise, having a lot of great people I get to work with, great people I’m working for. It’s been fun.”The Lakers lack depth, but there is evidence lately that, with the right additions, they can contend for a championship if they have Davis, who had been playing like a candidate for the league’s Most Valuable Player Award before his foot injury in mid-December. The Lakers went on a five-game winning streak starting Dec. 30 and recently they nearly beat two contenders — the Mavericks and the 76ers.Lakers guard Russell Westbrook, left, has had a rocky tenure in Los Angeles, but has found success coming off the bench this year. Coach Darvin Ham, right, pulled Westbrook from the starting lineup after three games.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressThe trading deadline is Feb. 9, giving the Lakers until then to make a major move to get back on the championship track. But all of the trades of the last few years, particularly those for Davis and Westbrook, have left them with little flexibility and salary-cap space. They can’t trade any of their first-round picks until the 2027 selection, and have been reluctant to lose more draft assets.Ham said he has felt support from Pelinka and Buss, who signed Pelinka to a multiyear extension last year despite the team’s struggles. After a five-game road trip from Christmas to Jan. 2, Ham and Pelinka went to Buss’s office.“She gave me a big hug and told me: ‘Hang in there, you’re doing a phenomenal job and things are going to get right. We’re going to start winning consistently, but Darvin, we’re totally happy with what you’re doing and you and your staff are doing an excellent job,’” Ham said. “It was cool. It was really thoughtful.”Ham said the mood when he sees both Buss and Pelinka is light and full of smiles.“It’s not like a lack of an awareness, but just a gratefulness, a thankfulness to be in this together,” Ham said.He is being afforded patience, at least for now. More