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      Paul George, Victor Oladipo Talk Return From Injury as Playoffs Begin

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      Paul George is back for the Los Angeles Clippers; Victor Oladipo, for the Miami Heat. The road to return was long but has them back in time for the playoffs.For about a month after he was sidelined with a torn ligament in his right elbow, Paul George could do nothing but wait.He had been through serious injuries before, but the waiting process for this one, in December, was new to him.No activity for a few weeks. He couldn’t get back on the court for more than two months. His body, doctors told him, just needed rest.George would watch N.B.A. games at home with his fiancée, young daughters, newborn son. The children would watch sometimes, but mostly stayed occupied with their iPads while George focused on work.He would pay close enough attention to offer suggestions or words of encouragement to his Los Angeles Clippers teammates via text message. After a while, though, he felt an acute sense of regret.“Early on they did a great job of kind of rallying and keeping together and having a strong season, but as the season went on, they kind of hit a wall and ran out of gas,” George said. “It was very noticeable. It was tough. It was tough to watch that and not be able to help them. I think that was probably the hardest part for me — watching.”When George finally returned on March 29, he promptly scored 34 points to help the Clippers to a comeback win against the Utah Jazz.George is among an unusually large group of players with proven talent who were injured for a considerable part of the 2021-22 regular season. He and others sustained serious injuries, and watched their teams go on without them, while embarking on an often lonely road back. Like George, some of them are returning to their teams just in time for the playoffs and have a chance to change their team’s fortunes dramatically.Victor Oladipo said he had to be be his own “best friend” in motivating himself to push through the long recovery from a leg injury.Marta Lavandier/Associated Press“Having one of our best players back, one of the best players in the league, a guy who’s tremendous on both sides of the ball, does absolutely everything that we ask him and more,” Clippers guard Reggie Jackson said. “Just having him back, having more of our leaders back, you know, face of the franchise and one of the best players in the world, it just gives us more confidence.”George’s teammate Kawhi Leonard has been spotted shooting at the team’s practice facility, having missed the entire season while recovering from A.C.L. surgery. Denver’s Jamal Murray, who had the same surgery, has shown positive signs of recovery, though it is unclear if he will return.Center Brook Lopez returned to the Milwaukee Bucks on March 14 for the first time since the season opener. He had back surgery in December and was listed as “out indefinitely.”“I’ve been through injuries a few times. It’s always just made me appreciate basketball and love it even more,” Lopez told reporters after his first game back. “I try never to take my time on the court for granted, whether it’s practice, shootaround or a game.”He smiled brightly when asked about being back.“I missed it so much,” Lopez said.Miami Heat guard Victor Oladipo knows well the pangs of being away for so long. He had support from friends and family after injuries, but the road back still wasn’t easy.“It can get lonely at times,” Oladipo said. “You’ve got to be your own biggest fan. You’ve got to be your own motivation. You’ve got to self-motivate, you’ve got to talk to yourself, you’ve got to be your best friend.”Oladipo was an All-Star with the Indiana Pacers in 2017-18 and 2018-19. He ruptured his quadriceps tendon in January 2019 and had surgery shortly thereafter. A year later he returned to play but still didn’t feel right.“It feels like it’s you hindering you from being where you need to be,” Oladipo said. “Or that this is your norm and you can never get back to playing freely.”He said he realized soon after his surgery that it had been done incorrectly. He needed a second surgery in May of last year; he did not make his debut this season until last month.Oladipo spent about a month and a half in a cast after the second surgery before restarting the process of learning how to use his legs properly.When he could not be with the team for games, he would sometimes rent out a movie theater at the Brickell City Centre in Miami to watch games by himself, or with his assistant or manager.“The screen is so big, it makes you feel like you’re actually in the game,” Oladipo said.He watched critically, while sitting in the front row, trying to guess how the action would unfold. Sometimes he thought through what decisions he might make if he were the coach.“You want to help the team,” Oladipo said. “If the team is doing well, you want to be part of that. You’ve got to just focus on you and focus on doing the things that you can do in order to get healthy and get right so that you can affect winning and help them the best you can.”Unlike for Lopez and George, Oladipo’s role with the Heat going forward has not been fully established. He has played in only eight games since returning on March 7. On April 3 in Toronto, he scored 21 points.“These are things we have seen daily, behind the scenes,” Chris Quinn, an assistant coach for the Heat, told reporters after the game, while filling in for Coach Erik Spoelstra, who was out because of coronavirus protocols. “It’s the hard work, it’s the grit, it’s the grind. Coming off what he came off injury wise, and for him to get to this point, it’s still part of the process of him becoming what he can be.”The Heat did not play Oladipo in their next two games, but he scored 40 points in the team’s regular-season finale on Sunday.“I’m still capable of doing a lot of good things out there, a lot of great things out there,” Oladipo said in an interview in late March. “Right now, I think my purpose for this team is to do whatever needs to be done in order for us to win.”Bucks center Brook Lopez said he tries not to take basketball for granted after enduring multiple injuries in his career.David Banks/Associated PressThe need for patience doesn’t end once a player returns from injury. Minutes restrictions and nights off are common after a long layoff.For George, that meant that during his second game back — an overtime loss to the Chicago Bulls — he couldn’t play at all in the overtime period.“He tries to lobby, but it’s not up to him,” Clippers Coach Tyronn Lue said of George’s minutes restriction. “Our medical staff is the best in the league, so we give them full responsibility, and allow the player to protect him from himself because he wants to play. All players want to play when they’re on the floor.”As George looks back on the months he spent without being able to play basketball, he acknowledges it was challenging to be forced to stay off the court. But overall he is comfortable with how it went.“I think that’s what made the process so good and that’s what made me feel mentally so great about it,” George said. “There was no low points. I listened to my body; my body was hurt. I knew I needed some time off.”There was a silver lining as well.“I think the positives I took away from it was extended time being with my family,” George said. “Being with my kids. My girl. It was just a lot of time that I got to spend that I don’t usually spend because I’m playing on the road.”The Clippers exceeded expectations without him. While across town the Lakers could not overcome losing LeBron James and Anthony Davis to injury for long stretches, the Clippers qualified for the play-in tournament without having George for most of the season and without having Leonard at all.While Oladipo and the Heat are locked into the top seed of the Eastern Conference playoffs, the Clippers, at No. 8 in the West, will have to fight through the play-in tournament to get either the seventh or eighth seed. They won four of the first five games after George returned. He will get to do a lot more than watch as their postseason begins. More

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      Playoff Makeovers May Upend the N.B.A. Championship Chase

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      Injured stars could return for the postseason, creating an undercurrent of unpredictability for their opponents.Stephen Curry appeared at a recent practice for the Golden State Warriors without a walking boot on his sprained left foot. In Los Angeles, the Clippers’ Kawhi Leonard, who has not played all season, was spotted by local reporters participating in shooting drills. And the Denver Nuggets’ Jamal Murray, also sidelined since last season, is again soaring for dunks, according to some impeccable sources: his own teammates.“Just a matter of time, I guess,” Nuggets guard Monte Morris told reporters recently, “so hopefully we can get him back and make that push.”Ahead of the start of the N.B.A. playoffs on Saturday, a slew of teams, many of them contenders, could be primed for makeovers. Golden State could stage an on-court reunion of its Big Three — Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green — for the first time in the playoffs since 2019. The Nuggets have left the door ajar for Murray’s long-awaited return from knee surgery. The Clippers only recently reintroduced Paul George to their starting lineup after he had been absent since December with a torn ligament in his elbow, and is it possible that Leonard, who injured his right knee last June, could make a surprise appearance in the coming weeks?The list goes on. Ja Morant, the All-Star point guard of the Memphis Grizzlies, just returned from injury over the weekend. And there are teams like the Nets, who now have the luxury of playing Kyrie Irving in home games, and the Milwaukee Bucks, the defending champions, who have been building Brook Lopez’s minutes after he missed 67 games with a bad back. Chris Paul of the Phoenix Suns is getting back into rhythm after missing a month with a thumb injury.What does it all mean? Potential headaches for opponents, and an undercurrent of unpredictability that will run through the early rounds of the postseason.Suns guard Chris Paul missed a month down the stretch because of a thumb injury. He averaged 12.7 points and 11.2 assists per game in his first six games back.Joe Rondone/USA Today Sports, via Reuters“I think it’s unusual that we’re waiting to hear about that from so many teams,” Stan Van Gundy, the former N.B.A. coach, said in a telephone interview, “and that guys could come back in the playoffs who either haven’t played all year or for a good part of the year.”Facing teams with stars who may or may not play creates a unique set of challenges for opposing coaches, said Eric Musselman, a former coach of the Warriors and the Sacramento Kings who now coaches the men’s basketball team at Arkansas. On the one hand, he said, you want to relay to your team that the injured player will be a threat if he actually appears in uniform.“I’ll never say, ‘This guy might be out of sync,’ or, ‘He’s going to be rusty,’” Musselman said. “It’s always: ‘This guy is an All-Star, he’s been working out, and he’s in playoff shape.’ You need to be ready for anything.”On the other hand, Musselman said, you need to guard against a letdown in focus and intensity if that player winds up sitting out. Uncertainty, in its own way, can create a competitive advantage.So even if the Nuggets decide not to play Murray in the playoffs, or the Nets officially pull the plug on Ben Simmons and his balky back, it might behoove those teams to keep that information to themselves, Van Gundy said. There is no harm, he said, in leaving opponents guessing. Force them to concoct multiple game plans. Make them plan for something that will never happen.“I’m going to want to add to your preparation time,” said Van Gundy, now an analyst for TNT and Turner Sports.Van Gundy cited the Orlando Magic’s 2009 playoff run when they faced the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Kevin Garnett, the Celtics’ star center, had been sidelined for several weeks with an injured knee, and Van Gundy, who was the Magic’s coach at the time, said he knew there was “virtually no chance” that Garnett would make an appearance in the series. But Garnett was still a presence on Orlando’s scouting report, and the team still studied film of him.Jamal Murray has yet to play this season after injuring his knee last year, but he could be a difference-maker for the Nuggets in the playoffs.Ethan Mito/Clarkson Creative/Getty Images“If he came back, we didn’t want to lose a game in a seven-game series because we got caught by surprise,” Van Gundy said.Over the coming days and weeks, opposing coaches will overprepare for the possibility that long-injured stars could return, said Brendan Suhr, a former longtime N.B.A. assistant. And if one does?“I’m immediately going to trap him,” Suhr said. “I’m going to try to do stuff he’s not used to seeing. I would make it very difficult for him. Because his workouts, especially his noncontact workouts, were very soft — coming off pick-and-rolls, getting into rhythm, making shots. And now I’m going to force him to make very tough, under-pressure decisions.”At the other end of the court, make that player defend. “Especially if he’s coming back from a leg injury,” Suhr said.With all that in mind, teams with stars on the mend must weigh the delicate calculus about whether to bring them back at all — and if so, when. Will they be ineffective? Susceptible to further harm? Van Gundy recalled a conversation he had with Tyronn Lue, the coach of the Clippers, last month, before George returned to the team’s lineup on March 29.“He was talking about how there would be a cutoff point in terms of bringing Paul George back,” Van Gundy said. “If he couldn’t get in X amount of regular-season games, he wouldn’t want to play him in the playoffs.”There are, of course, cautionary tales from playoffs past. Consider Golden State’s tortured postseason experience in 2019, when Kevin Durant, who was then one of the team’s stars, strained his right calf in the Western Conference semifinals. After missing nine straight games, he returned for Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals against the Toronto Raptors and ruptured his right Achilles’ tendon. The Warriors lost the series, and Durant missed the entire 2019-20 season after signing with the Nets.Michael Malone, the coach of the Nuggets, told reporters this month that Murray “wants to be back” and that the team was “keeping hope alive.” Nikola Jokic, the Nuggets’ do-everything center and a favorite to repeat as the league’s most valuable player, sounded more cautious about the situation.The Grizzlies have been fearsome with and without Ja Morant, center, who is expected to return for the playoffs.Petre Thomas/USA Today Sports, via Reuters“I told him, ‘If you’re not 100 percent ready to go, don’t come back,’” Jokic said. “It’s stupid. You’re going to get injured. I mean, if you’re not 100 percent ready to go, especially for the playoffs …”His voice trailed off.After getting past the Garnett-less Celtics in 2009, the Magic advanced to the N.B.A. finals that year against the Los Angeles Lakers. Ahead of Game 1, Van Gundy decided to activate Jameer Nelson, his starting point guard. Nelson had missed the previous four months with a torn labrum in his right shoulder. Van Gundy opted to bring him off the bench against the Lakers.“He was our leader, and he was having an All-Star year until he got hurt,” Van Gundy recalled.And because Nelson was returning from a shoulder injury, that meant that he had been able to run and stay in relatively decent shape during his long layoff.“That’s a little different than if you’ve got a knee injury and you’re limited in what you can do,” Van Gundy said.Still, even with Nelson back in the rotation, the Magic lost the series in five games. Van Gundy has never regretted the move.“You want to go into the biggest games with your best people,” he said. More

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      At the Masters, Tiger Woods Will Take Some Ice With That

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      In Woods’s improbable quest for a sixth green jacket, his recuperation regimen may be more important than any read of any green.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods stood in the glorious sunlight of a Georgia spring one afternoon this past week, a lingering dose of warmth before the frigid, hellish hours ahead.“Lots of treatments, lots of ice, lots of ice baths, just basically freezing myself to death,” Woods said of his plans before his next tee shot at Augusta National Golf Club. “That’s just part of the deal.”Rare is the athlete whose medical history has been more scrutinized and documented — by doctors, as well as by plenty of armchair experts in tournament galleries, living rooms and the news media — over the decades. But with Woods pursuing his sixth Masters Tournament title not even 14 months after a car wreck made a leg amputation a possibility, the 46-year-old golfer’s recuperation regimen may be more important than any read of any green.“If he can walk around here in 72 holes, he’ll contend,” said Fred Couples, the 1992 Masters winner who practiced with Woods before the tournament opened on Thursday. “He’s too good. He’s too good.”Couples was perhaps overly optimistic when he spoke on Monday. Woods shot a spectacular 71 on Thursday and a 74 on Friday to put his score at one over par headed into the weekend. Taken together, the rounds, up and down as they were, were remarkable showings of the ferocity and grit that helped Woods to dominate his sport for years. But those pre-cut outings were expected to be the least taxing.Woods spoke throughout the week about how he had little concern for his golfing skill, even as he openly worried about the wear and tear on a body that had its easiest days long ago.So he and his team must spend the hours between rounds trying to achieve dueling ambitions: reducing the swelling that comes with traipsing around the topographical nightmare that is Augusta, and keeping Woods’s surgically rebuilt limb “mobile and warmed up, activated and explosive for the next day,” as he put it.“Most sports, if you’re not feeling very good, you got a teammate to pass it off to, and they can kind of shoulder the load, or in football, one day a week,” Woods said. “Here we’ve got four straight days, and there’s no one that’s going to shoulder the load besides me. I’ve got to figure out a way to do it.”Woods stretches his injured right leg as he waits to tee off on the 8th hole.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAccording to Woods, he has not taken a day off from his rehabilitation efforts since he emerged from the three months in bed that followed his one-car wreck near Los Angeles in February 2021. The crash left him with open fractures of the tibia and the fibula in his right leg, and it led surgeons to add rods, plates and screws to his leg.The subsequent recovery has required trade-offs and gambles and, in something that is not new for Woods, unshakable confidence in his own talents, thrown off as they might be.Some changes appear somewhat easier to accept than others, like new shoes to help with stability on the course. But experts have also developed protocols for before and after rounds — “after I go ahead and break it out there, they go ahead and repair it at night,” Woods said on Friday — that have dramatically expanded the timeline that comes with playing.Those approaches, which may stretch for hours, have left Woods with less time for, say, hitting a thousand balls a day and refining, again, the nuances of his game.“It gets agonizing and teasing because of simple things that I would normally just go do that would take now a couple hours here and a couple hours there to prep and then wind down,” he said. “So, activity time, to do what I want to do, it adds more time on both sides of it.”The goal, he has said, was to build up the stamina that powered him and every other winner at Augusta, to give enough relief to make competitive golf more of a possibility than a pipe dream.But the strategies can only dull, not extinguish, the pain, which Woods said is present “each and every day.”He insists, though, that pain is not a problem. By his account, he did not have any unexpected physical setbacks in his first days back at Augusta.The question for Woods — and for everyone else left standing in the field at Augusta — is how long a leg already refashioned can hold up under such protracted duress. The course, lengthened this year, now stands at 7,510 yards, the longest in the history of the tournament, which was first played in 1934. Woods’s predictions have only gone so far.“I expected to be sore and not feel my best, for sure,” Woods said on Friday. “It’s the combination. I can walk this golf course — I can put on tennis shoes and go for a walk, that’s not a problem. But going ballistically at shots and hitting shot shapes off of uneven lies, that puts a whole new challenge to it.”He soon trudged off, presumably for another night of ice. More

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      Not Even LeBron James Could Save the Lakers

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      The team that was built to be unbeatable just kept losing.On Jan. 25, the Los Angeles Lakers went to Brooklyn to face the Nets and displayed a joyfulness that was unusual for them this season.Their top stars LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook were all healthy — one of only 21 times this season that happened. It was Davis’s first game back from a knee injury. It was James’s only appearance in New York City. He had been suspended for the team’s November visit to Madison Square Garden, his favorite place to play.On back-to-back Nets possessions, James stole the ball and raced the other way as the crowd murmured in anticipation. They erupted into cheers each time James dunked.After the second one, James grinned. He laughed with Michael Strahan, the former N.F.L. star, who was sitting courtside, and jogged back to the Lakers’ bench still smiling.“The more minutes that we log, we continue to see how dynamic we can be,” James said after that game.The Lakers were in eighth place in the Western Conference, and the night offered hope. At the time it felt inconceivable that a team built to be an unbeatable superteam might get stuck in the play-in tournament, but the Lakers had plenty of time to rise in the standings. Many assumed they could still be dangerous in any playoff situation.Back then, few expected what would actually happen.The Lakers were eliminated from playoff contention by the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday, even though James had the second-highest point average of his 19-year career this season. On Friday, James was ruled out for the final two games of the season because of a lingering ankle injury that had already kept him out of the three previous games. The Lakers are likely to finish 11th in the Western Conference, a spectacular failure for a team that expected to compete for a championship this season.This season was challenging for many teams, as the N.B.A. attempted a return to normal with the coronavirus pandemic still happening and with high-profile injuries afflicting many teams. But no team in the league will finish the season with as large a chasm between expectations and reality as the Lakers did.“It’s obviously disappointing on many levels,” Westbrook said. “But there ain’t much you can do about it at this point.”Westbrook was introduced with superstar fanfare in August, as Rob Pelinka, the Lakers’ president of basketball operations, declared that he gave them a chance to win the franchise’s 18th championship. But his arrival didn’t come without questions.Russell Westbrook was booed and jeered, both at home and on the road, because of his shooting struggles.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesHow, for example, would a player who needs the ball in his hands to be productive fit with James, one of the best offensive facilitators ever? Was it wise for the Lakers to get older — by signing a slew of over-30 veterans — when they had already been plagued by health issues that often come with age?Preseasons don’t always foretell the regular season, but the Lakers went winless in theirs.When they stumbled at the start of the season, there was an easy way for the team to explain their situation: It happens. Superstars don’t always jell right away.The pandemic offered an excuse — it made continuity nearly impossible for any team in the first few months of the season.Pandemic disruptions reached their apex during the Omicron wave in November and December, during which dozens of players entered the league’s health and safety protocols.The N.B.A.’s testing system wasn’t perfect and James suffered because of it — he flew home from Sacramento on a quarantine plane because of a false-positive coronavirus test result before a game against the Kings. It was the 12th game out of the Lakers’ first 23 that James had missed.A few weeks later, a coronavirus outbreak spread through the team, even sidelining Lakers Coach Frank Vogel for six games.Many teams, though, were hit even harder than the Lakers, including the Chicago Bulls, who had 10 players in health and safety protocols at once in December, and had to postpone two games.Injuries offered another explanation for the Lakers’ stumbles. James and Davis missed more than 60 games combined — not an unexpected outcome, given their recent histories. Davis said he was “disappointed that we haven’t had a chance to have a full team.”“Not sure how good we could have been,” he said. “With myself personally, two unfortunate injuries that kept me out for a while. That just came to be part of the season. As one of the leaders on the team, especially on the defensive end of the floor where guys need me to be out there, sucks for me, sucks for our team, our organization.”But this season, injuries throttled many teams.The Miami Heat lost Jimmy Butler for nearly a month. The Phoenix Suns lost Chris Paul for a month. The Los Angeles Clippers spent all season without Kawhi Leonard and lost their other star, Paul George, for three months.While those teams found ways to adapt and keep themselves in the playoff conversation anyway, the Lakers couldn’t.James and Anthony Davis (3) missed more than 60 games combined because of injuries this season.Gary A. Vasquez/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThis was in part owing to a roster that was thinner than it should have been because of the resources dedicated to Westbrook.To acquire Westbrook, the Lakers traded away young role players in Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Kyle Kuzma. They declined to re-sign Alex Caruso, who went on to be an important defensive piece for the Bulls.The Lakers’ defense was among the bottom third in the N.B.A. this season, as they have given up 112.8 points for every 100 possessions. The only team that has given up more fast-break points per game is Houston.The Lakers also struggled to defend inside the paint, a symptom of their complicated big-man rotation.During their championship season two years ago, the Lakers used JaVale McGee and Dwight Howard as their primary centers, occasionally asking Davis and James to fill the role. This season they brought back Howard, two years older and less effective. They signed DeAndre Jordan, 33, who proved past his prime as well.They didn’t have the assets at the trade deadline to make a move that didn’t hamstring them further. Westbrook’s contract will become more attractive to other teams next year when he is on its last year, assuming he picks up his player option for the 2022-23 season.As clear as it was that the Lakers’ roster was not working, it was even more clear that a fix would not come soon.They were losing to the league’s bottom-dwelling teams. The best teams were beating up on them, too. Young playoff teams like the Grizzlies and Timberwolves were mocking them, with Westbrook’s poor shooting a regular target.“This was the season that we just didn’t get it done,” Lakers forward Carmelo Anthony said. “We had the tools. Some things was out of our control. Some things we could control, some things we couldn’t. We didn’t get it done. We can’t make excuses about it. We just didn’t get it done.”In the past nine years, the Lakers have missed the playoffs seven times. It is a previously unthinkable stretch for a franchise that was once used to competing for, if not always winning, championships.This is a franchise that expects adding superstars will save them, and sometimes they do. This season that equation didn’t work. More

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      Lakers Eliminated From Playoff Contention

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      The loss to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday sealed their fate. It’s the second time the Lakers will miss the postseason since LeBron James joined the team in 2018.The Los Angeles Lakers’ last glimmer of hope for this season is gone.With LeBron James watching from the bench, the Lakers lost to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night, ending their chances of making the playoffs. A win by the San Antonio Spurs over the Denver Nuggets earlier in the evening made the Suns game a mathematical must-win for the Lakers to stay in contention for the postseason.The Lakers lost seven consecutive games beginning in late March, allowing the Spurs to eclipse them for the 10th-best record in the Western Conference and a spot in the N.B.A.’s play-in tournament, which will decide the seventh and eighth seeds in the playoffs that begin April 16.During the Lakers’ seven-game slide, James and Anthony Davis played together only once, highlighting a problem they have faced all season.Davis returned April 1 after missing 18 games because of a right mid-foot sprain. James has been managing soreness in his left ankle, which has caused him to miss five of the team’s last seven games.Since the league’s All-Star break in mid-February, the Lakers have the second-worst record in the West, having won only four games. Only Portland has been worse.This marks the seventh time in the past nine years that the Lakers have missed the playoffs, a once-unthinkable stretch for the organization. Before the 2013-14 season, the Lakers had missed the playoffs only five times since the franchise’s inception in Minnesota in 1948.Anthony Davis had 21 points and 13 rebounds for the Lakers in the loss on Tuesday.Rick Scuteri/Associated PressIt is also the second time James has missed the playoffs since joining the Lakers in 2018, when he came to Los Angeles following eight consecutive appearances in the N.B.A. finals with Miami and Cleveland.During his first season with the Lakers, James joined a young team that featured Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, Kyle Kuzma, Alex Caruso and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope — all players who went on to be productive elsewhere.James injured his groin in a Christmas Day game that season and played in just 55 games. The Lakers went 37-45 and finished 10th in the West, which, before the advent of the play-in tournament, gave them no postseason hopes.They traded for Davis that summer and immediately won a championship in 2020, when the league finished its season in a bubble environment at Walt Disney World in Florida because of the pandemic.Last season, which was shortened because of the pandemic, Davis was injured and played in only 36 of the 72 games. The Lakers went 42-30 and lost to the Suns in the first round as the seventh seed.In the off-season, the Lakers looked to make themselves into championship contenders again. They traded young role players to the Washington Wizards for the aging nine-time All-Star point guard Russell Westbrook, whose $44 million salary made him the highest-paid player on the team this season. They hoped Westbrook’s playmaking ability would help the Lakers when they were without James, who typically runs the Lakers’ offense.“I’m coming to a championship-caliber team and my job is to make sure that I’m able to make his game easier for him,” Westbrook said at his introductory news conference when asked about how he would fit with James. “And I’ll find ways to do that throughout the game.”As the season began, very little went according to plan.James missed 11 of the Lakers’ first 19 games because of injuries, the first suspension of his career and a false-positive coronavirus test.Davis has played in only 40 games this season, missing several weeks with two different injuries — first a knee injury then the foot sprain.Westbrook has struggled to find his footing. That led to Lakers Coach Frank Vogel, who has experimented with lineups all season, moving away from Westbrook in the closing minutes of games.Westbrook’s 18.4 points per game are his lowest average since the 2009-10 season, his second year in the N.B.A. His rebounds per game (7.5) and assists per game (7.1) also dropped sharply from last season.Still, with James in contention for the league’s scoring title, the Lakers had the ninth-best record in the West at the All-Star break, and a chance to force their way into the playoffs. But they couldn’t make the necessary late-season push. More

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      in Tennis

      Comebacks for Wawrinka and Thiem Will Have to Be Continued

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      Once ranked as high as No. 3, the rusty tennis stars used a low-level Challenger event to get back to action after injuries. It was harder than it seemed.Tennis’s minor leagues are still a major challenge. The latest evidence arrived on Tuesday in Marbella, Spain, where Stan Wawrinka and Dominic Thiem, two of the game’s biggest achievers, launched a dual comeback at a low-level Challenger Tour event.Neither had played in far too long, and neither won a set against players ranked outside the top 100, with Wawrinka losing, 6-2, 6-4, to Elias Ymer of Sweden, and Thiem following them to the main stadium and losing, 6-3, 6-4, to Pedro Cachin of Argentina.“These guys, even on the challenger tour, their level is extremely high, and as you well know the difference between being 150 or being 50 in the world, there’s not a huge difference in tennis level,” said Daniel Vallverdu, Wawrinka’s coach. “Most of it is mental and luck.”It was indeed a reality check for Wawrinka and Thiem, who once were ranked as high as No. 3 and are among the precious few to have made a splash in an era otherwise dominated by Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer.Thiem, 28, won the 2020 U.S. Open, becoming the first player outside the Big Three to win a Grand Slam singles title in four years. Wawrinka, who turned 37 on Monday, has won three Grand Slam singles titles, joining Andy Murray as the only man outside the Big Three to have won multiple major singles titles in the last 20 years.But Thiem and Wawrinka are both far from their peaks, and Tuesday’s quick exits were a reminder of how far each has to go. Wawrinka had not played a match for nearly a year; Thiem for nearly nine months.It showed.“Rusty would be the word,” said Mark Petchey, the former ATP player who has coached Murray. “Challengers are a rough place.”It is rare to see a star like Wawrinka or Thiem at this level, but hardly unprecedented. Andre Agassi dropped down and played two Challenger events at the end of the 1997 season when his ranking had fallen to No. 141. He used the experience as a building block to reconstruct his career, eventually returning to No. 1. His longevity was a model for this generation of enduring champions.In his autobiography, “Open,” Agassi wrote that a tour official had likened his Challenger appearances to Bruce Springsteen playing a corner bar.“What’s wrong with Springsteen playing a corner bar?” Agassi wrote.Nothing at all, as long as the corner bar is packed with fans thrilled by their good fortune. Tuesday’s vibe in Marbella was far from electric, with the stands in the main Manolo Santana Stadium less than half full for both Wawrinka’s and Thiem’s matches. On average, only about 4,000 viewers were watching the livestream made available by the tour, but those numbers underplay the significance of Wawrinka and Thiem returning to action.At different phases of their careers, with nine years between them, they are in similarly gray areas when it comes to their futures.Wawrinka, suffering from long-term pain in his left foot, finally decided that he could take no more and underwent two surgeries, the first in March 2021 and then a second, more significant procedure in June that involved work on his Achilles’ tendon. Thiem, who takes particularly aggressive cuts at his groundstrokes, injured his right wrist during a grass-court tournament on the Spanish island of Mallorca in June but did not resort to surgery, opting instead for immobilization with a splint and extensive rehabilitation.Dominic Thiem in his first match in nine months in Marbella, Spain.Antonio Paz/EPA, via ShutterstockHe has repeatedly delayed his comeback, finally choosing to return on the red clay that remains his favorite surface. But one of Thiem’s strengths has been his ability to thrive in extended rallies, and on Tuesday his baseline game kept breaking down. He lost the first five games to the 228th-ranked Cachin before recovering and making it a match, but the frustration was audible down the stretch as he lectured himself, gesticulated between points and remained unable to break Cachin’s serve down the stretch.Wawrinka was sluggish at the start as well, misfiring with his signature one-handed backhand. He briefly found his range early in the second set, going up two service breaks against the 131st-ranked Ymer. But Ymer, far quicker around the clay, reeled Wawrinka in by sweeping the last five games.“Obviously looking at it from the outside it looks different, but for me and for Stan this match is a huge step in the right direction,” Vallverdu said by telephone. “The goal in the last six to eight weeks was to get back on court and to be able to do that without thinking about the body or any injuries. The fact he’s able to play a professional tennis match again is a huge step considering where he was about three months ago where from our perspective we didn’t even know if he would be able to play again.”Wawrinka has said he did not want to end his career with an injury, similar to what Federer, his friend and Swiss compatriot, has said as he tries to work his way back at age 40 from his latest knee surgery and long layoff. For now, the only major winner in this golden era who has bid farewell, however informally, is Juan Martin del Potro. Even Andy Murray, with an artificial hip joint, plays on and has rehired Ivan Lendl as his coach to help him get the most out of his remaining years.“I think for someone like Stan, the fact that the other guys are still around is definitely a factor,” Vallverdu said. “I think if one or two of them quit, it will have a bit of a domino effect.” Wawrinka only resumed practicing on a court at the end of February, and, with the pandemic hiatus on tour in 2020, he has played few matches over the last three seasons. His next stop will be the Monte Carlo Masters, where he has a wild card and where the field, featuring most of the top 10, will be significantly stronger than in Marbella. Thiem plans to be there, too, after playing in next week’s tournament in Marrakesh, Morocco.But evaluating their comebacks will take quite a bit longer. They need competition. They need the confidence that their bodies and shots will hold up on the points that matter most. More

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      Ahead of French Open, an Injury Interrupts Nadal’s Surge

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      Two days after the end of his 20-match win streak to start the season, Nadal said a rib injury would keep him out for four to six weeks, a timeline that would disrupt his clay-court season.SAN DIEGO — Rafael Nadal, the 21-time Grand Slam tournament singles champion, announced Tuesday that he had a stress fracture in his rib cage and would not play for “four to six weeks.”Such injuries can be slow to heal and difficult to treat. Nadal, 35 and back up to No. 3 in the ATP Tour rankings after an outstanding start to the season, appears certain to miss a significant chunk of the clay-court season, including next month’s Monte-Carlo Masters and Barcelona Open.Nadal is the most successful clay-court player in history, and 13 of his record 21 major titles have come at the French Open, which begins May 22.“This is not good news, and I did not expect this,” Nadal said in Spanish on Tuesday in a social media post. “I am downbeat and sad because after such a great start to the season, I was coming to a very important part of the year with very good feelings and results. But hey, I have always had this spirit to fight and to overcome and what I will do is have patience and work hard during my recovery.”Nadal said he injured the rib during his grueling three-set victory on Saturday in the semifinals of the BNP Paribas Open over Carlos Alcaraz, his 18-year-old Spanish compatriot. Nadal struggled to breathe without pain during the latter stages of that match, played in blustery conditions in Indian Wells, Calif. He was treated on the court but, still unclear on the severity of his injury, he chose to play in Sunday’s final against Taylor Fritz of the United States.Fritz, 24, defeated Nadal 6-3, 7-6 (5) to win the most significant title of his career. Nadal was clearly diminished: serving at slower speeds than usual. He took a medical timeout off court after the first set and was treated on the court late in the second, wincing as he lay on his stomach during a changeover and a tour trainer worked on him. But Nadal still came within two points of forcing a decisive third set.He underwent medical tests upon returning to Spain on Monday and is now back in an all-too-familiar mode: rehabilitating an injury. Nadal has dealt with injuries throughout his remarkable career and missed most of the second half of the 2021 season because of a chronic foot condition after losing to Novak Djokovic in the semifinals of the French Open. He caught the coronavirus in December but recovered quickly and won his first 20 singles matches of the season, including the Australian Open title.But this is a new type of injury for Nadal, one that could recur and, according to the retired orthopedic surgeon Bill Mallon, could require longer than four to six weeks to heal. “You can’t put your rib in a cast,” Mallon said.Treatment options are limited, though some patients use bone stimulator devices, which use electrical or ultrasonic impulses to try to speed healing, said Nicholas DiNubile, an American orthopedic surgeon. Nadal has never played in the French Open without competing in a preliminary event on clay. But it could be a race against the clock to compete in early May in the Madrid Open or Italian Open.Before announcing the injury, Nadal had withdrawn from this week’s Miami Open, a Masters 1000 event on a hardcourt. Djokovic, back at No. 1, will also miss it because of the United States’ travel ban on unvaccinated foreigners. But Fritz, the rising American star who played Sunday’s final despite a right ankle injury, is expected to play.“With treatment and a late start, he should be good to go,” Paul Annacone, one of his coaches, said Tuesday. More