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      Zion Williamson Is Finally Feeling Like Himself Again

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      Injuries have hampered the N.B.A. career of the Pelicans’ Williamson, but a grueling summer of early morning workouts has him back on track.MIAMI — At the start of the summer, as he waded into an off-season workout program that he hoped would build his body back into dynamic shape, Zion Williamson began setting his alarm for 4:30 a.m.For the first week or so, those early wake-up calls were unpleasant. Sure, he knew the forms of torture that awaited him in South Florida, where his personal team had set up shop: 400-meter sprints on the track, rep after rep in the weight room. But rolling out of bed before dawn?“Tough,” Williamson said. “But after that first week and a half, it was satisfying. Like, there was a purpose behind it. I would see 4:30 on my phone, and I knew it was time to go to work.”In the process, Williamson became a big nap guy. Ahead of his nightly workouts, he would sleep through the afternoon. There were times, he said, when he wound up feeling detached from the world, as if he had missed everything that had happened that day.For someone used to being the center of attention, the summer was a reprieve in a way — a chance to recalibrate his mind and restore his confidence. Now, armed with a new five-year contract extension worth about $190 million, Williamson is back with the New Orleans Pelicans, back as one of the presumptive faces of the N.B.A., and back to face the same question that has shadowed him since the team made him the top overall pick in the 2019 draft: Can he stay on the court?Since his days at Duke, when his dunks vaporized defenders, and through his celebrated debut with the Pelicans, when he scored on seven straight possessions after returning from knee surgery, Williamson, 22, has tantalized fans with his potential. So big. So powerful. And so seemingly susceptible to injury.Williamson is back to flexing his muscle (literally and figuratively) after a summer of tough workouts.Gerald Herbert/Associated PressA 6-foot-6 forward entering his fourth season, Williamson has appeared in just 85 games. After making his first All-Star team in 2020-21, he missed all of last season with a broken right foot. But Williamson considers it progress — for good reason — that he no longer thinks about his foot or the surgery he had on it. In fact, he said, he forgets that he broke it in the first place.“It’s only when someone mentions it,” he said, “and I’m like, Oh, yeah, I did break my foot.”Sure enough, there is cautious optimism in New Orleans, where the Pelicans showed themselves to be a resilient bunch without Williamson last season. In February, CJ McCollum was the centerpiece Pelicans acquisition in a big trade with the Portland Trail Blazers that helped jolt the franchise forward. The Pelicans closed the regular season by winning 13 of their final 23 games, and then defeated the San Antonio Spurs and the Los Angeles Clippers in the play-in tournament to make the playoffs.“I think we got a taste of what it can be like if we stay healthy and do the right things,” McCollum said.Even though the Pelicans lost to the top-seeded Phoenix Suns in the first round of the playoffs, they pushed the series to six games, and several first-year players — Herbert Jones, Jose Alvarado, Trey Murphy III — played important minutes.“It was massive,” said Larry Nance Jr., a veteran forward who came to New Orleans as a part of the deal for McCollum. “When I was young, I didn’t get that type of experience. Now that they’ve been there, they’re just going to hunger for that level of basketball even more.”After spending part of the season quietly rehabilitating at Nike’s facilities outside Portland, Ore. — which caused no small amount of agita for fans wondering about his whereabouts — Williamson returned to New Orleans for the Pelicans’ late-season run. He enjoyed watching his teammates succeed, he said, especially after he had gone through so many of his own struggles.“It definitely mentally matured me beyond my age,” Williamson said of last season. “It made me accept that certain things are going to happen. I can’t control everything. So control what I can control.”At the start of training camp last month, Nance was immediately struck by what he described as Williamson’s “gravity,” by his ability to pull defenders into his orbit whenever he had the ball. His presence makes life easier for his teammates, Nance said, as long as they “learn to move around him.”Few players have that sort of outsize effect on opponents, Nance said. He cited “super superstars” like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, both of whom Nance played alongside earlier in his career, along with Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks.“It’s the freaks,” Nance said. “You know who they are.”Asked what separates those players from everyone else, Nance said: “They do what they want with the ball. They’re a threat to score. They’re a threat to pass. They’re a threat to dunk on three guys’ heads if you don’t give them the defensive respect they deserve.”In recent weeks, Nance has regularly matched up with Williamson at practice, a role that Nance said he embraced. He wanted to make Williamson work for baskets. He wanted to be physical with him. He wanted to help prepare him for the regular season.“The only thing I want from him is to see him become the Zion Williamson he wants to become, and I think I can help him with that,” Nance said. “Honestly, there are times when we’re like, ‘Are you sure he didn’t play last year?’ You can see his timing coming back, his handle coming back.”Williamson has played in just 85 games over the past three seasons, but he has looked strong during the preseason.Michael Reaves/Getty ImagesIn a preseason game against the Heat on Wednesday, Williamson offered up a bit of everything — some highlights, some rust and another injury. In the process of cramming 11 points and 4 assists into 11 minutes of playing time, he rolled his left ankle on a drive to the basket in the second quarter.With a noticeable limp, Williamson remained on the court for several more minutes. And he produced, shoveling a pass to McCollum for a 3-pointer before sizing up Nikola Jovic, a 19-year-old forward for the Heat who, on a subsequent possession, found himself defending Williamson on the perimeter. Williamson treated Jovic as if he were a soggy paper towel, busting through him for a layup while drawing a foul. Williamson soon left the game and did not return for the second half.At a Miami-area high school the next day, he was a spectator at an afternoon practice as he received treatment on his ankle. It was another setback — albeit a minor one — in a young career full of them. His availability for the Pelicans’ season opener against the Nets on Wednesday is uncertain.“A little sore,” he said. “Just kind of turned it over a little bit.”Ankle injury aside, Williamson said, he is honing his timing and his rhythm. He said that he could get to his preferred spots on the court, but that finishing around the rim was a work in progress.“Shots that I usually kiss off the glass, I just sometimes feel like I don’t have the right touch,” he said. “With some shots, it’s there. But that’ll come with time.”For a player long accustomed to imposing his will, and using his size and strength to hammer dunks, draw defenders and create for teammates, Williamson has had to develop in new ways over the past year and a half, by being resourceful and patient and determined.It was the only way he could get back to being himself again. More

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      This Is What Life After the N.B.A. Looks Like

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      Johnny Davis knew the end was near.During the summer of 1985, Davis was gearing up for his 10th N.B.A. season when he noticed something about his familiar quickness — namely, that it was missing.Davis was just 29 at the time. But the hard mileage of a productive basketball career had worn him down.“I was getting by with experience more so than I was with athletic talent,” said Davis, a versatile guard in his prime. “It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t the same player.”Davis was fortunate in the sense that he had time to prepare for retirement — “I wasn’t caught off guard at all,” he said — but he still had to confront the big question: What now?As N.B.A. teams trim their rosters before the season begins this month, a new batch of players will find themselves asking that same question. There is always an end in professional sports: Athletes become former athletes; All-Stars become “Isn’t he that guy?” And while there are perks of reaching the highest level, no one avoids the fundamental challenge of ascension: coming down.“The day you leave the N.B.A., now they tell you to start over again,” said Quentin Richardson, a guard whose 13-year playing career ended in 2013 when he was just 33.While some players have the luxury of leaving the game on their own terms, most have that decision made for them by the effects of age and injury, their careers punctuated by the wait for another contract offer that never materializes.“The sport generally leaves you,” Davis, 66, said. “And now you’re in this place where you have to move on from something that you have done your whole life. And sometimes that means you have to re-identify who you are.”Pau Gasol: ‘Now it’s someone else’s turn’Pau Gasol had many highs and lows over an 18-year N.B.A. career. But he said retiring was a “celebratory moment.”Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesPau Gasol wanted to gather his thoughts.After playing basketball for Spain at the Tokyo Olympics, he returned to his Spanish mountain cottage last August to spend time with his wife, Cat McDonnell, and their young daughter, Ellie. Gasol went for quiet walks, and as he contemplated the past — his 18 seasons in the N.B.A., his title runs alongside Kobe Bryant — he found peace.A few weeks later, Gasol announced his retirement at Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona’s famed opera house. He had just turned 41.“It was not a sad moment,” he said. “It was a celebratory moment.”Gasol had a long career, one that familiarized him with impermanence. He starred for the Memphis Grizzlies. He won two championships with the Los Angeles Lakers. He became more of a mentor with the Chicago Bulls and the San Antonio Spurs, then spent his final months in the N.B.A. laboring with a foot injury. He adapted to the evolution of his role.“I’m not saying it’s easy,” he said. “There are times when you still feel like you should start or play significant minutes. But life moves on, and now it’s someone else’s turn.”Gasol won two championships on the Los Angeles Lakers with Kobe Bryant, front, in 2009 and 2010.Kevin Kolczynski/ReutersBefore the Tokyo Olympics, he won a Spanish league championship in his final season with F.C. Barcelona, the club that had given him his professional start. “It was kind of romantic,” he said.Gasol, now 42, has since kept busy with his foundation that focuses on childhood obesity and as a member of the International Olympic Committee, a consultant for the Golden State Warriors and a W.N.B.A. investor. He also squeezes in the occasional round of golf.Of course, there are days when he misses playing basketball. So he copes by reading books about personal fulfillment and retirement, some of them geared toward people in their 60s. He also keeps in touch with Dr. William D. Parham, the director of mental health and wellness for the N.B.A. players’ union.“I’ve talked to him several times to help me weather this,” Gasol said. “You have to understand that nothing will ever really compare to the thrill of playing.”Mario West: Knowing When to Move OnMario West spent several seasons in the N.B.A. Now, he helps players cope with the worries of moving on.NBPAMario West, 38, spends most of the N.B.A. season in locker rooms making connections with players by getting personal.He might mention how in 2009 Shannon Brown, then a Lakers guard, famously pinned one of his layup attempts to the backboard. (“I’ve been a meme,” West said.) Or how he played in the Philippines and the Dominican Republic after a few seasons in the N.B.A. Or how injuries changed his plans.Now, as the director of Off the Court, an N.B.A. players’ union program, West counsels players on life after basketball. Most of them are not stars. Most worry about surviving training camp, about extending their careers. West was like that. So he gives his cellphone number to each player he meets.“If guys call me at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., I’m going to pick up,” he said.Yes, even some professional athletes go into life-crisis mode in the middle of the night, when the house quiets and the internal voices of worry and insecurity get loud. Their financial concerns may not be relatable to the average person, but late-night stomach knots are a human experience.West, left, playing in the N.B.A. playoffs for the Atlanta Hawks in 2010. He spent three seasons with the Hawks.Grant Halverson/Getty Images“I answer every phone call,” West said. “We want to be the 411 and the 911.”West often works with Deborah Murman, the director of the union’s career development program, who helps players cultivate outside interests.“I like to say that it’s much easier to walk away from something when you have something you’re walking toward,” Murman said.West’s professional career ended in 2015, when he was 31. He still plays pickup basketball in Atlanta, where he lives with his family. He has two young sons, and he wants to stay in shape for as long as possible.“I remember dunking on my dad when I was 14, and he never played me again,” West said.In his own way, West’s father knew when it was time to move on.Jamal Crawford: ‘I Had Emotional Days’Jamal Crawford won the Sixth Man of the Year Award three times over a two-decade career.Cassy Athena/Getty ImagesEven now, Jamal Crawford has trouble making sense of why his playing career ended.He thinks back to the 2017-18 season, when he came off the bench and helped the Minnesota Timberwolves reach the playoffs for the first time since 2004. Crawford’s N.B.A. peers named him the teammate of the year — then he went unsigned for months as a free agent.Sure, he had some mileage. He was 38 and coming off his 18th N.B.A. season, but he was healthy. When an offer finally did surface, it was with the Phoenix Suns the day before the 2018-19 season. He signed up for one year as a role player on one of the league’s worst and youngest teams.“You found beauty in the fact that you were helping guys learn to be professionals,” he said.Crawford thought he set himself up well for a new deal that summer by ending the season with high-scoring games. He thought wrong. The next season started without him.“I had emotional days where I’d wake up and be like, ‘Man, I can’t believe I’m not getting a call,’ ” he said.His agent was, in fact, fielding calls — several teams had reached out to gauge his interest in joining a front office or a coaching staff in 2019-20 — but Crawford still wanted to play. He was mystified: Had his late-season scoring binge worked against him? Were teams concerned that he would be unwilling to accept a limited role?Crawford scored 51 points in one of his final N.B.A. games.Tony Gutierrez/Associated PressHe was still unemployed when the coronavirus pandemic forced the N.B.A. to halt play for several months in March 2020. When the season resumed that July, he joined the Nets and injured his hamstring in his first game. His season was finished. And though he didn’t know it, so was his career.Over the next two years, as he made his desire to play again known on social media and TV, he stumbled into a new vocation and passion: coaching his son J.J.’s youth basketball team in Seattle.“It was the craziest thing,” Crawford said, “because I never knew that I would want to coach.”He shuttles his son to weekend tournaments. He diagrams plays on his iPad. He said he could see himself coaching for years to come. He announced his retirement from the N.B.A. in March but showed he still had it in an adult league in July.“Honestly, I have more fun coaching than I do playing — and I still love playing, by the way,” Crawford said. “If you’re an elite athlete and in that space for so long, you’re always going to be competitive. It doesn’t turn off. So, you need to find a way to channel it.”Cole Aldrich: Happy With Life After BasketballCole Aldrich, right, with his wife, Britt Aldrich, and their son, thought he would be away from basketball for just a year. Then the coronavirus pandemic changed his plans.Nikki JilekCole Aldrich would be the first to tell you that his circumstances are odd, that little about his life in Minnesota makes sense.He often hits the roads near his home on a fancy gravel bike. He’s “far too involved” in the construction of his new home. When he was golfing last fall, a member of his playing group asked him what he did for work. Aldrich, 33, told him he was retired.“You wouldn’t believe the looks people give you when you tell them that,” Aldrich said.In his former life, Aldrich was one of the top picks in the 2010 N.B.A. draft and spent his first two seasons with the Oklahoma City Thunder. He bounced around the league as a backup center before signing a three-year deal with the Minnesota Timberwolves with $17 million guaranteed.Aldrich spent some time as a Knicks center in 2013.Barton Silverman/The New York Times“At that point, I felt like I could take a little bit of a deep breath,” he said.He was cut before the third year of the deal, then sprained his knee while playing in China. At home in Minnesota, his wife, Britt Aldrich, was pregnant with their first child. Cole thought he would take a year off before giving hoops another shot. But after his son was born and the coronavirus pandemic rocked the world, “an easy decision for me became even easier,” he said.It is a rare luxury, “retiring” in your early 30s with millions in the bank. But can this type of life — stay-at-home dad, part-time cyclist — last forever? Aldrich predicts that he will want another job at some point.“I want to go and have a career in some capacity,” he said. “But I don’t know what that looks like.”Many people are lucky if they can afford to stop working when they’re old enough to claim Social Security payments. But in the N.B.A. world, most careers are over before the player turns 30. Aldrich was done in the N.B.A. by 29 and had earned millions. His life is indeed odd in the big picture.Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles: ‘Is It Really Over?’Quentin Richardson, left, and Darius Miles, right, made the Los Angeles Clippers cool and exciting when they joined the team as rookies in 2000.Guillermo Hernandez Martinez/The Players’ TribuneDarius Miles had just finished high school. Quentin Richardson was 20 years old. They were Los Angeles Clippers rookies in the fall of 2000.Suddenly, the woeful Clippers were cool and exciting, if not yet particularly good.“We were like a college team playing against grown men,” Miles said.The players known as Q-Rich and D-Miles were fast and fun. Fans mirrored their signature celebration by tapping their fists on their foreheads. Then, after just two seasons, the Clippers traded Miles to the Cleveland Cavaliers for a more experienced player.All these years later, Miles and Richardson wonder what would have happened had the team kept them together. Miles, 40, hopscotched around the league before he played his final game in 2009. He became depressed and withdrew into a “cave” to cope.“Just losing your career, it’s one of the mental blocks that every player has,” Miles said. “Like, is it really over?”Richardson, 42, knew he was nearing the end when the Orlando Magic cut him before the start of the 2012-13 season. He sat by the phone for months, waiting for another offer. After a brief stint with the Knicks, he spent four years in the Pistons’ front office, but he did not feel as though his opinions were valued.“It was an experience that I would not like to experience again,” he said.Richardson and Miles reconnected in 2018. With Richardson acting as his editor, Miles spent months on an essay for The Players’ Tribune titled, “What the Hell Happened to Darius Miles?”Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles were drafted together by the Clippers in 2000.Chriss Pizzello/Associated PressHe wrote about growing up around drugs and violence in East St. Louis, Ill., and about “shady business deals” leaving him bankrupt. He wrote about the knee injuries that derailed his career and about being so depressed after his mother’s death that he holed up in her house for three years. And he wrote about the invitation from Richardson to move to his neighborhood in Florida.“Q kept hitting me up,” Miles said. “I had to let the storm pass until I could see sunshine.”Their chemistry birthed the podcast “Knuckleheads with Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles,” which offers a candid look at life in pro sports via interviews with current and former athletes and coaches.“Guys do want to talk, and they prefer it in this realm where they’re sitting across from us and they know they’re in a safe space,” Richardson said. “They know we’re going to look out for each other.”He said the N.B.A. and players’ union were helpful, too, as players transitioned into retirement.“They’re trying to make it as fail proof as possible,” Richardson said. “Obviously, things can still happen.”(In October 2021, Miles was one of 18 former players charged in an insurance fraud scheme. Miles, who has pleaded not guilty, declined to comment on the case through a publicist.)With their podcast, Miles and Richardson are figuring out their new lives, without straying too far from the game. For some players, that might be the best way to move forward.Miles said the podcast had helped give him purpose. “It’s the best doctor I got,” he said.Dave Bing and Johnny Davis: Charting a Path for OthersJohnny Davis is the chairman of the National Basketball Retired Players Association, which helps former players with health care and other post-basketball resources.Jacob Biba for The New York TimesGrowing up in Detroit in the 1960s, Davis had many Pistons stars to emulate whenever he hit the playground courts with friends.“One kid would want to be Jimmy Walker, and one would want to be Dave Bing,” Davis said. “I always wanted to be Dave Bing.”Today, Davis and Bing are connected in another way: Davis is the chairman of the National Basketball Retired Players Association. Bing, 78, co-founded the group in 1992 with four other former players — Oscar Robertson, Archie Clark, Dave Cowens and Dave DeBusschere.“We were at an All-Star Game where we talked about what we needed to try to do to help these players who were up in age,” Bing said. “Their health wasn’t all that good, and nobody seemed to care about them.”Dave Bing was introduced as part of the N.B.A.’s 75th anniversary team during the 2022 All-Star Game in February.Tim Nwachukwu/Getty ImagesThe N.B.A. was not always the lucrative colossus that it is today. In Bing’s era, many players made ends meet with off-season jobs. Bing worked for a bank, first as a teller and later as a branch manager.“The guys today don’t have to work and might not have to really worry about a second career,” he said. “But in the era I played in, you didn’t have a choice. You’re done at 34, and you’ve got your whole life in front of you.”In 1980, he started Bing Steel with four employees. The company grew into a multimillion-dollar conglomerate, which he ran for 28 years before he was elected mayor of Detroit in 2009.The retired players’ association helps players with health care, education, career counseling and financial services. But Scott Rochelle, the organization’s president and chief executive, avoids using the word “retirement.”“I’ve got two or three guys who will see me and run away because they see me as the grim reaper,” Rochelle said. “We look at it as a change of direction. You don’t retire at 35. You just change your purpose and find something else that drives you from day to day.” More

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      Liberty Reflect on a Season of Changes

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      Under a first-year coach, the young team dealt with injuries and inconsistency before losing in the first round of the W.N.B.A. playoffs to the reigning champion Chicago Sky.Two words echoed among the Liberty’s players in the days before the start of the W.N.B.A. season: “defense” and “identity.”They said they needed to get better on defense. (And they did do that.)They said they wanted to be known as a tough and winning team. (They won, but not as much as they had hoped.)Then two new words forced their way into the Liberty vocabulary during a season of injuries, comebacks and losses: “adversity” and “resilience.”“Being along for the ride through a lot of the adversity that we faced this season is something that I’ll definitely learn from,” Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu said.She continued: “It’s just helped me understand what it takes to win, and sometimes those wins weren’t pretty, but we found a way.”The Liberty’s season ended Tuesday with a first-round playoff loss to the Chicago Sky, the No. 2 seed and the league’s defending champions. The best-of-three series, like the Liberty’s season, showed the team’s promise, and its pitfalls. On Thursday, as several players and Coach Sandy Brondello reflected on the year, they praised one another for persevering but wished that they hadn’t needed to be so resilient.“We saw glimpses of just how great we can be regardless of what was going on, regardless of injury, regardless of record, regardless of just really any kind of obstacle that we were dealing with,” said Betnijah Laney, who missed most of the season because of a knee injury.She added: “And still being able to make that playoff push was really good for us. And just imagine if we had all of that the entire season where we would’ve ended up: We’d probably still be playing right now.”The Liberty opened the season with a tight win at home over the Connecticut Sun, then plunged into a seven-game losing streak. They lost both Laney and Jocelyn Willoughby to injuries during the streak, a blow for a team hoping to make its name on defense and toughness. Brondello said Laney, a 2021 All-Star, was the team’s toughest player and Willoughby was one of its best defenders. Other players were in and out of the lineup all season with a variety of maladies, including a concussion, a hamstring injury and a chin laceration.It was difficult to build chemistry, which is important for every team but especially a young one with a new head coach. Brondello was in her first season with the Liberty after eight seasons with the Phoenix Mercury, a veteran team that won a championship in her first season there in 2014. She said coaching the Liberty had required more teaching and patience, but she did not have to deal with anything that she had not seen before.Before the season, Brondello said she hoped to build a tough, defensive team with an “aggressive mentality.” The Liberty were that kind of team at times — when they went on a 13-0 run to seal a Game 1 playoff victory against the Sky in Chicago — but their inconsistency cost them. A 16-0 Sky run in the fourth quarter of the decisive Game 3 in Brooklyn pushed a victory out of reach.“They need to feel pressure,” Brondello said of her team’s young players, adding that she would look to add more experienced players during the off-season.“We’re just a few pieces off,” she said.Ionescu, 24, who was named to her first All-Star team this year, was the team’s top scorer with 17.4 points per game and led the Liberty with 6.3 assists per game. Forward Natasha Howard, a past defensive player of the year, led the Liberty in rebounds (7.3) and steals (1.3) per game. Ionescu, who had two triple-doubles this season, was just behind Howard with 7.1 rebounds per game. More

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      Liberty Guard Sabrina Ionescu’s Historic WNBA Season, By the Numbers

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      Ionescu, the All-Star Liberty guard, had a historic season in her third year that helped propel her team to the playoffs.After a serious ankle injury in her rookie season and a somewhat tentative second year, Sabrina Ionescu has in her third year hit the kind of heights everyone expected of her, and her Liberty are back in the W.N.B.A. playoffs.The No. 7 Liberty will face the No. 2 Chicago Sky — the defending champions — on Wednesday for Game 1 of a best-of-three series in the opening round.When the Liberty drafted Ionescu No. 1 overall in 2020, hopes were high. The team had been terrible for two seasons, but Ionescu had been a transcendent star at Oregon, where she had an N.C.A.A. record 26 triple-doubles. She seemed like the kind of player who could turn a team around almost by herself.In just her second game in the W.N.B.A., she fired in 33 points, including six 3-pointers, added 7 rebounds and 7 assists and had fans thrilled about the future.That future turned sour quickly when, in her third game, she went down with a severe ankle injury that would keep her out for the rest of the season.Without her, and without their veteran star Tina Charles, who had been traded away, the team was abysmal, finishing 2-20.Ionescu drove the Liberty’s offense this season, leading the team in scoring and assists.Sean D. Elliot/The Day, via Associated PressThe team bounced back in 2021 and sneaked into the playoffs, but it was a group effort led by Betnijah Laney, Natasha Howard (after a return from injury), Sami Whitcomb and Michaela Onyenwere, who was named the rookie of the year, that pushed them there. Although Ionescu played a full season, her scoring game fell a bit short of what might have been expected.Not that she didn’t help the team, but it was in a more supporting role: Though she was among the league’s assist leaders, she averaged just 11.7 points a game and dealt with lingering ankle pain. She was often the third or fourth scoring option.But in her third season, Ionescu has stepped forward, and she was named to her first All-Star team. She has improved in almost every category, playing more minutes, shooting at a higher percentage and increasing her rebounding, assists and steals numbers while reducing her turnovers.Notably, she has taken a more prominent role in the offense, shooting about 14 times a game to lead the team, up from just under 10 times a game last season, leading her to score a team-high 17.4 points a game. Playing in all 36 games helped her make the league’s top 10 in total points, assists and rebounds, the only player to do so. And her rebounding numbers are especially impressive since she is the Liberty’s main ballhandler.Ionescu also made history in her third season, becoming the first player ever to record a triple-double in three quarters and, separately, the first player ever to score at least 30 points as part of a triple-double. Those two triple-doubles brought her into a tie with Chicago’s Candace Parker for the most career triple-doubles, with three.Ionescu’s step forward, as well as having Howard available the whole season, helped the Liberty return to the playoffs and weather the loss of Laney for much of the season with a knee injury.Last season, the Liberty lost their single-elimination playoff game, 83-82, to the Phoenix Mercury. Ionescu had 14 points and 11 assists, but she missed a 30-foot desperation 3-pointer at the buzzer that would have won the game.Ionescu shot better from 3 this season than last season, good enough to be fifth in the league for 3-pointers made.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesThe team has a chance to rectify that in the opening round of the playoffs this year, which will be best of three instead of single elimination. But even with Laney’s return, the odds are long. Eight of the 12 W.N.B.A. teams make the playoffs, leaving room for teams that finished under .500, including the Liberty (16-20).A matchup against the strong Sky (26-10) with All-Stars such as Parker, Kahleah Copper, Courtney Vandersloot and Emma Meesseman, and with the first two games in Chicago, will be tough for the Liberty.The Liberty are one of the eight founding W.N.B.A. franchises and the only one still in its original city that has never won the W.N.B.A. title. Its last decade has been especially fallow, with just one trip to the semifinals or conference finals.Like any team, the Liberty will need to acquire talent, draft shrewdly and catch some breaks to step up to championship quality. But more than anything else, they will have to rely on Ionescu to continue playing at the stellar level she did this year. Or preferably, given that she is still only 24, to get even better. More

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      Does Soccer Still Need Headers?

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      New rules, new science and new tactics are already beginning to push heading out of the game. But doing so could have unintended consequences.It would be futile to predict when, precisely, it will come. It is not possible, from the vantage point of now, of here, to identify a specific point, or an exact date, or even a broad time frame. All that can be said is that it will come, sooner or later. The days of heading in soccer are numbered.The ball, after all, is rolling. England’s Football Association has received permission from the IFAB, the arcane and faintly mysterious body that defines the Laws of the Game — capital L, capital G, always — to run a trial in which players under the age of 12 will not be allowed to head the ball in training. If it is successful, the change could become permanent within the next two years.This is not an attempt to introduce an absolute prohibition of heading, of course. It is simply an application to banish deliberate heading — presumably as opposed to accidental heading — from children’s soccer.Once players hit their teens, heading would still be gradually introduced to their repertoire of skills, albeit in a limited way: Since 2020, the F.A.’s guidelines have recommended that all players, including professionals, should be exposed to a maximum of 10 high-force headers a week in training. Heading would not be abolished, not officially.And yet that would, inevitably, be the effect. Young players nurtured without any exposure to or expertise in heading would be unlikely to place much emphasis on it, overnight, once it was permitted. They would have learned the game without it; there would be no real incentive to favor it. The skill would gradually fall into obsolescence, and then drift inexorably toward extinction.From a health perspective, that would not be a bad thing. In public, the F.A.’s line is that it wants to impose the moratorium while further research is done into links between heading and both Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (C.T.E.) and dementia. In private, it must surely recognize that it is not difficult to discern the general direction of travel.Major League Soccer recently learned of its first confirmed case of C.T.E. in a former player.Albert Cesare/The Cincinnati Enquirer, via Associated PressThe connection between heading and both conditions has been soccer’s tacit shame for at least two decades, if not longer. Jeff Astle, the former England striker, was ruled by a coroner to have died from an industrial disease, linked to the repeated heading of a soccer ball, as far back as 2002. He was posthumously found to have been suffering from C.T.E.In the years since, five members of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning side have confirmed they are suffering from dementia, drawing focus on to the issue. Only one of them, Bobby Charlton, remains alive.One study, in 2019, found that soccer players — with the exception of goalkeepers — are three and a half times more likely to suffer from neurodegenerative disease than the general population. Two years later, a similar piece of research found that defenders, in particular, have an even greater risk of developing dementia or a similar condition later in life. The more the subject is examined, the more likely it seems that minimizing how often players head the ball is in their long-term interests.Head Injuries and C.T.E. in SportsThe permanent damage caused by brain injuries to athletes can have devastating effects.C.T.E., Explained: The degenerative brain disease has come to be most often associated with N.F.L. players, but it has also been found in other athletes. Here’s what to know.Soccer: Scott Vermillion, who died in 2020, became the first U.S. professional soccer player with a public case of C.T.E., as concussion fears rise in the sport.Sledding: Brain injuries in sliding sports — often called “sledhead” — might be connected to a rash of suicides among bobsledders.Football: Demaryius Thomas had C.T.E. when he died in December at 33, but that diagnosis alone does not capture the role football had in the N.F.L. star’s quick decline.In a sporting sense, too, it is easy to believe that heading’s demise would be no great loss. The game appears, after all, to be moving beyond it organically. The percentage of headed goals is falling, thanks to the simultaneous rise in analytics — which, speaking extremely broadly, discourages (aerial) crossing as a low-probability action — and the stylistic hegemony of the school of Pep Guardiola.Sophisticated teams, now, do their best not to cross the ball; they most certainly do not heave it forward at any given opportunity. They dominate possession or they launch precise, surgical counterattacks, and they prefer to do the vast majority of it on the ground. The sport as a whole has followed in their wake, hewing ever more closely to Brian Clough’s rather gnarled maxim that if God had intended soccer to be played in the clouds, there would be substantially more grass up there.Top clubs, like Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, already do most of their best work on the ground.Logan Riely/Getty ImagesCertainly, it is more than possible to watch an elite game — in Spain, in particular, but in the Champions League or the Premier League or the Women’s Super League or wherever — and believe that the spectacle would not be diminished, or even notably altered, if heading was not only strictly forbidden, but had not, in fact, been invented.But that is to ignore the fact that soccer is defined not only by what happens, but by what might have happened, and by what did not happen. It is determined not only by presence but by absence. That is true of all sports, of course, but it is particularly true of soccer, the great game of scarcity.For much the same reasons that crossing has fallen from favor, so too has the idea of shooting from distance. Progressive coaches — either for aesthetic or for algorithmic reasons — encourage their players to wait until they have a heightened chance of scoring before actually shooting; as with headed goals, the number scored from outside the box is falling starkly, too.That, though, has had an unintended consequence. A team that knows its opponent really does not want to shoot from distance has no incentive to break its defensive line. There is no pressing need to close down the midfielder with the ball at their feet 25 yards from goal. They are not going to shoot, because the odds of scoring are low.And yet, by not shooting, the odds of finding the high-percentage chance are reduced, too. The defensive line does not break, so the gap — the slight misstep, the channel that briefly opens in the moment of transition from one state to another — does not come. Instead, the defense can dig into its trench, challenging the attack to score the perfect goal. It is not just the act of scoring from range that has diminished, it is the threat of it, too.The aerial game is one of threats, and possibility. Eliminating it would inherently change the game.Rob Carr/Getty ImagesThe same would be true of a soccer devoid of heading. It is not just that the way corners and free kicks are defended would be changed beyond recognition — no more crowding as many bodies as possible in or near the box — but the way that fullbacks deal with wide players, the positions that defensive lines take on the field, the whole structure of the game.Those changes, in the sense of soccer as a sporting spectacle, are unlikely to be positive. Players may not head the ball as much as they used to, now, but they know they might have to head the ball just as much as their predecessors from a less civilized era. They cannot discount it, so they have to behave in such a way as to counteract it. The threat itself has value. Soccer is defined, still, by all the crosses that do not come.Removing that — either by edict or by lost habit — would have the effect of removing possibility from the game. It would reduce the theoretical options available to an attacking team, and in doing so it would make the sport more predictable, more one-dimensional. It would tilt the balance in favor of those who seeks to destroy, rather than those who try to create. Clough did not quite have it right. Soccer has always been a sport of air, just as much as earth.If heading is found — as seems likely — to endanger the long-term health of the players, of course, then that will have to change, and it would only be right to do so. No spectacle is worth such a terrible cost to those who provide it. The gains would outweigh the losses, a millionfold. But that is not the same as saying that nothing would be lost.The Great UnknownSpain led England with 10 minutes remaining on Wednesday and was out of the Euros within an hour.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe end, for Spain, will always lead back to the start. It was only a couple of weeks before the start of the European Championship when Jennifer Hermoso, the country’s most reliable source of cutting edge, was ruled out of the tournament with a knee injury. It was only a couple of days before everything began that Spain lost Alexia Putellas, the game’s finest player, too.Those are the mitigating circumstances in which Spain’s campaign at Euro 2022 will — and should — be judged, making its quarterfinal exit to the host, England, on Wednesday night somewhere in the region of a par finish for a nation stripped of two of its best players. Regret at what might have been should outweigh disappointment at what came to pass.The reward for succeeding in this tournament, as well as the garlands and the trophy and all of that business, will, most likely, take the shape of considerable pressure at next year’s World Cup; the country that triumphs in the next week will be expected to meet, and perhaps overcome, the challenge posed by the United States and Canada, the game’s reigning powers.Spain will be spared that, at least. And yet it should not be discounted: Despite its reduced horizons, it came within six minutes of dislodging England from a tournament it is hosting, after all. Should Hermoso be fit this time next year — or Amaiur Sarriegi have blossomed sufficiently that Hermoso’s presence is not missed — and Putellas, in particular, have recovered in time, it is not especially difficult to imagine a world in which this week was not an end at all.The emergence of players like Amaiur Sarriegi, 21, will give Spain hope ahead of next year’s World Cup.Bernadett Szabo/ReutersThe Expanding MiddleIn the space of, by a conservative estimate, 30 seconds, the Netherlands might have gone out of the European Championship three times. Had Daphne van Domselaar, the Dutch goalkeeper, reacted infinitesimally more slowly; had Ramona Bachmann of Switzerland made a slightly different choice; had the ball rolled this way and not that, the Netherlands, the reigning champion, might have fallen.The temptation, within any major tournament, is to examine the likely contenders in search of some broader theme, some sweeping narrative. As a rule, it is just below the surface that the tides and the currents are most apparent.So it is with Euro 2022. One of the game’s established powers will win it — England or France or Sweden or Germany — and claim primacy among the continent’s elite, for the time being at least. More significant, though, may be what is happening below them. Belgium and Austria, denizens of the second tier, both made the quarterfinals. Though it ended ultimately in collapse, there was a moment when it appeared a genuine possibility that Switzerland might join them.The Netherlands and Switzerland were closer than expected.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat feels like the calling card of this tournament, more than anything else. That the level of the finest teams in Europe, the ones with abundant investment and industrialized development programs, is screaming skyward has been well telegraphed and amply documented.That the continent’s middle class is expanding is easier to overlook, but it is no less important. Women’s soccer — like men’s soccer — should not just be the preserve of populous and wealthy nations. Strength in these matters always comes from depth. It is not just how high the elite can soar that makes games entertaining and tournaments compelling, but how broad the challenges they face along the way.CorrespondenceAn oldie but a goodie from Alfons Sola this week. “Have you ever thought about just calling it football and stop pretending like it’s soccer?” he wrote, despite (or possibly because of) spending five years living in New Jersey. “We all know calling it soccer is some kind of strange situation that exists in the United States, right?”Well, yes and no, Alfons. In England, for example, there is a venerable magazine called World Soccer. Many people start their Saturdays watching a show called Soccer A.M. If they choose to do so, they can then follow all of the day’s action on a program called Soccer Saturday.I often wonder whether their presenters are told quite as often as I am that the term soccer is an American abomination. Or, for that matter, whether someone like Matt Busby, the legendary manager of Manchester United, was met with sound and fury when he had the nerve to call his autobiography ‘Soccer At The Top’.Forgive me if we are traipsing down a familiar path, but as far as I know, “football” and “soccer” were largely interchangeable in England until some vague point in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Quite what changed to make people quite so angry about the very sight of one of those words, I’m not sure, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with increased American attention on the sport.Regardless, the furor over it has always struck me as odd (especially when we should be far more aggravated by the fact that the word is not, as America believes, “furor” but “furore”). Did you know the Italians call it calcio, like the thing you get in milk? That doesn’t even make any sense. More

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      Rafael Nadal Withdraws From Wimbledon Ahead of Semifinal Match

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      The 22-time Grand Slam champion tore a muscle in his abdomen earlier in the tournament. “I am very sad.”WIMBLEDON, England — In the end, after a day of contemplation and consideration for what mattered most, health prevailed over the temptations of yet another title.On Thursday evening, 24 hours after one of the gutsiest and most grueling efforts of his career, Rafael Nadal, the 22-time Grand Slam champion, pulled out of his semifinal match against Nick Kyrgios set for Friday.“I believe I can’t win two matches under these circumstances,” he said. “I can’t serve.”Nadal made the announcement at a news conference just after 2 p.m. Eastern in the main media conference room at the All England Club, explaining that he was withdrawing because of a tear in his abdominal muscle.“I was thinking the whole day about the decision,” he said. “I think it doesn’t make sense to go.”“I am very sad,” he said.Nadal, who entered the tournament halfway to a Grand Slam and with concerns about his chronically injured foot, said he began to feel soreness in his abdomen roughly one week ago. The pain grew worse, and it became clear that he had most likely torn the muscle early in his five-set win over Taylor Fritz in the quarterfinals Wednesday.In that match, Nadal took a medical timeout in the second set. From the stands, his father and other members of his family motioned for him to stop playing rather than risk further injury, but Nadal ignored their pleas and pulled off one of the more remarkable comeback wins of a career that has seen many of them.After the match, Nadal warned that he might not be able to play in the semifinal and that he planned to have a scan to determine the extent of the injury.“The decision at the end — all the decisions — are the player’s decision, but at the same time I need to know different opinions and I need to check everything the proper way, no? That is even something more important than win Wimbledon, that is the health,” he said. Still, few thought that Nadal, who has played through pain for so much of his career, would not at least try to play the semifinal.The withdrawal — the first from a Wimbledon semifinal in the modern era of tennis — was especially disappointing because Nadal’s game had been improving with each match, something he noted Thursday and after his win over Fritz, despite this being his first tournament on grass in three years.“I’m in the semifinals, so I am playing very well the last couple of days, especially yesterday, at the beginning of the match, playing at a very, very high level,” he said.With Nadal’s withdrawal, Kyrgios receives a pass to his first Grand Slam singles final. Kyrgios, 27, had never made a Grand Slam singles semifinal previously during a career filled with controversy.“Different players, different personalities,” Kyrgios wrote of Nadal in a post on Instagram after the announcement. “@rafaelnadal I hope your recovery goes well and we all hope to see you healthy soon 🗣🙏🏽 till next time.”Nadal had won the first two Grand Slams events of the year, the Australian Open and the French Open. The win against Fritz put him just nine wins away from a calendar-year Grand Slam, something no male player has pulled off since Rod Laver in 1969.The withdrawal is the latest blow for a tournament that has followed a rocky road since April, when organizers announced that they would bar Russian and Belarusian players from competing because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Organizers made the move amid intense pressure from Britain’s government and royal family, which is closely associated with the tournament and did not want Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, photographed carrying out her traditional duty of presenting a trophy to a Russian or Belarusian champion.No tournaments outside of Britain, including the U.S. Open, followed Wimbledon’s lead. The decision also sparked a battle with the men’s and women’s professional tours, which decided not to award any rankings points for victories at Wimbledon, turning the sport’s most prestigious tournament into something of an exhibition.The situation grew even more awkward Thursday when Elena Rybakina, who was born and raised in Russia but began representing Kazakhstan four years ago after its tennis federation offered to fund her development, qualified for the women’s final.Thursday evening, though, all else seemed to pale in comparison with the disappointment that Nadal wouldn’t be able to take the court for his showdown with Kyrgios, and if he had prevailed, a possible 60th match against Novak Djokovic.Nadal said the injury had caused discomfort for several days but the pain became severe in the fifth game of the match while he was leading 3-1. It got even worse a few games later as Fritz broke Nadal’s serve to pull ahead.Nadal said he then changed the way he served, slowing and shifting what is normally a violent twisting motion — the torque of his torso and the power of his legs — to serve at roughly 120 miles per hour. During lengthy segments of the match, Nadal struggled to serve at triple digits.Still, he resisted his family’s pleas for him to quit, wanting to finish what he started. He defended that decision Thursday even though it ultimately deprived the tournament of one of its semifinals.He called it the right decision “because I won the match. I finished the match. I won the match. I did the things I felt in every single moment.”Nadal with tape on his stomach after a medical timeout during his match against Taylor Fritz.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressHowever, his willingness to risk his health shifted Thursday, he said, when he saw and felt the extent of the tear. He reasoned that winning two more matches would be impossible and that trying would only make the injury worse and cause him to miss more matches this summer.“Very tough circumstances,” he said tightening his lips with that slight tilt of his head he so often does when conveying unfortunate news.He said he would not be able to compete for at least three or four weeks but he would be able to begin hitting from the baseline in as little as a week, then begin serving once he can do so without discomfort. That is important to Nadal, since his chronically injured foot often becomes a problem when he does not play for long periods. He can begin serving sometime after that, assuming he can play without pain.That timetable, he said, will not interfere with his normal summer schedule, which generally includes hardcourt tournaments in Canada and Cincinnati before the start of the U.S. Open in late August.As of now, Djokovic will not be able to play the U.S. Open because of his refusal to get vaccinated for Covid-19. U.S. policy currently prohibits unvaccinated foreigners from entering the country.In recent years, Djokovic has become obsessed with finishing his career with the most Grand Slam singles titles. He began the year tied with Nadal and Roger Federer at 20.Nadal then won the first two Grand Slams of the year to pull ahead in a race that he said he cared little about, something that was slightly hard to fathom given how competitive he is on the court.“As always, the most important thing is happiness more than any title, even if everybody knows how much effort I put to be here,” he said.He also said Thursday evening that he never gave consideration to the withdrawal ending his chance for the calendar year Grand Slam, a quest that Djokovic also has obsessed about and came within one match of pulling off last year when Nadal missed the second half of the year because of his ailing foot.“Never thought about the calendar slam,” he said. “I thought about my daily happiness.” More

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      Returning to Singles, Serena Williams Will Face an Unseeded Player

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      After a year away from singles, she risked drawing the world’s No. 1, Iga Swiatek, in the first round. Instead, she will face a player ranked 113th.In her first singles match in a year, Serena Williams could have faced one of the new leaders of the game that she once dominated.As an unseeded wild card at Wimbledon, Williams could have been drawn to play No. 1 Iga Swiatek, who has won six tournaments in a row. Or Coco Gauff, the 18-year-old American who is on the verge of breaking into the top 10 and just lost to Swiatek in the French Open final.But when Friday’s draw was done, Williams was spared an established threat in the first round. Instead, she will play Harmony Tan, an unseeded French 24-year-old who is ranked 113th and will be making her main-draw debut at Wimbledon.The match will almost certainly be played on Centre Court, where Williams has won seven Wimbledon singles titles, six women’s doubles titles and two Olympic gold medals when the All England Club staged the tennis event at the 2012 London Games.But though Tan will be stepping on to that famous patch of grass for the first time, Williams will also be in new territory. At age 40, she remains arguably the biggest star in women’s tennis (Naomi Osaka makes it a debate), but Williams has played very little tennis in the last three years and played none at all on tour for nearly a year until returning in Eastbourne this week for two doubles matches with Ons Jabeur.They won them both before Jabeur withdrew with a right knee injury as a precautionary move before Wimbledon, where unlike Williams, Jabeur is one of the leading favorites for the title despite never reaching a Grand Slam final.That is a reflection of Jabeur’s shotmaking talent and recent victory at the grass court tournament in Berlin, but it is also a reminder that the women’s game is in transition. The reigning Wimbledon women’s champion, Ashleigh Barty, sent shock waves through the sport by retiring in March at age 25, weary of the travel far from her home in Australia and lacking the drive to continue pushing for the biggest prizes.Iga Swiatek, celebrating her French Open victory, has won 35 straight matches going into Wimbledon.Thibault Camus/Associated PressSwiatek, a 21-year-old from Poland, has stepped convincingly into the gap, winning 35 straight matches, and she could make it 36 by defeating a Croatian qualifier, Jana Fett, in the first round of Wimbledon. But Swiatek has played little on grass at this early stage in her career and below her, the hierarchy on tour is constantly shifting.In winning her six straight titles, Swiatek beat six different players in the finals. Anett Kontaveit, seeded No. 2 at Wimbledon behind Swiatek, has lost in the first round in three of her last four tournaments and has not played a match on grass this season, attributing her recent struggles to her continuing recovery from Covid-19.This year’s Wimbledon, which begins Monday, will not offer a full-strength field for women or men. Wimbledon barred Russian and Belarusian players from competing, in part because of pressure from the British government after the invasion of Ukraine.The tours responded by stripping Wimbledon of ranking points for the first time, and despite extensive discussions, both sides held firm to their positions.Wimbledon has maintained its prize money at normal levels, and though there was speculation that players might skip the tournament because of the lack of points, that has not materialized. Of the highest ranked players, the only ones who will be absent are either injured, like Alexander Zverev, Leylah Fernandez and Osaka or barred, like Daniil Medvedev and Aryna Sabalenka.Wimbledon is the only major tennis tournament to bar the Russians and Belarusians, and the ban has excluded four of the top 40 men, including No. 1 Medvedev and No. 8 Andrey Rublev, both of Russia. But Novak Djokovic, who has won the last three editions of Wimbledon, and his longtime rival Rafael Nadal are both in the men’s field. So is Andy Murray, now unseeded and trying to recover from an abdominal injury after an encouraging run to the final on grass in Stuttgart.Roger Federer, an eight-time Wimbledon singles champion who is still recovering from knee surgery at age 40, will miss the tournament for the first time since 1997 (he won the boys title in 1998 before playing in the main draw in 1999).Djokovic, who has a good draw, will face Kwon Soon-woo of South Korea in the first round. Nadal, playing Wimbledon for the first time since 2019, will face Francisco Cerundolo of Argentina. Murray, the British star, will face James Duckworth of Australia.Wimbledon’s ban has excluded six of the top 40 women, including No. 6 Sabalenka, a Belarusian who was a Wimbledon semifinalist last year; No. 20 Victoria Azarenka, a former No. 1; and No. 34 Aliaksandra Sasnovich, who was Serena Williams’s most recent opponent at Wimbledon.Sasnovich advanced last year when Williams retired in the opening set of their first-round match after reinjuring her right hamstring in a slip on the fresh grass on Centre Court. Partly in response, Wimbledon, for the first time, allowed players to train on Centre Court before the tournament to wear in the grass and improve the footing during the early rounds.Williams, who has played more at Wimbledon than anyone in the women’s field, already knows her way around the grass, but she has been increasingly prone to injuries and will now have to try to find form in a hurry.Williams will face the unseeded Harmony Tan of France, who is ranked 113th in the world, in the first round at Wimbledon.Miguel Sierra/EPA, via ShutterstockTan, despite her world ranking, has the tools to create some doubt and trouble. She is an effective counterpuncher who likes to change pace with slices and drop shots and could force Williams to dig low and move more than she might like at the beginning of her comeback.Williams, with her first-strike power and deep experience, certainly looks like the favorite, but if she gets past Tan, she will quickly run into clearer threats. She could face No. 32 seed Sara Sorribes Tormo, a tenacious Spaniard, in the second round and could then face No. 6 Karolina Pliskova, who lost to Barty in last year’s Wimbledon final. Williams has never played Tan or Sorribes, and she has split her four previous matches with Pliskova, losing to her in the semifinals of the 2016 U.S. Open and quarterfinals of the 2019 Australian Open.Advance past the third round and Williams could face Gauff for the first time, in a match that would certainly generate major interest. But it seems most premature to start talking about the fourth round when Williams has played no singles at all in a year. This is the second longest break of her remarkable career, ranking only behind the 13-month break she took after winning the 2017 Australian Open when she was already two months pregnant with her daughter, Olympia.She looked understandably rusty and slow off the mark in the early stages of her doubles matches with Jabeur in Eastbourne, but she soon found her timing and came up with some trademark first serves under duress in both victories. Her ball striking when in position was often solid, but the trick will be putting herself in prime position in singles, where there is so much more court to cover and the potential for extended rallies if Williams cannot dominate with her serve and full-cut returns.The new wave of women’s players, led by Swiatek, have adapted to the power and generate plenty of it themselves. A deep Williams run would be quite an achievement, but if there is any Grand Slam where she could achieve it with so little preparation, it would be Wimbledon. More