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      in Golf

      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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      in Basket

      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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      in Tennis

      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

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      ‘New Year, New Me’ Actually Might Work for the Chicago Bulls

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      The Bulls reinvented themselves and have risen to the top of the N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference, despite a virus outbreak and injuries that have tested them.About a month before training camp last fall, the Chicago Bulls began meeting up in their city, which would become a new home for most of them.They got together for workouts they didn’t have to do. They played five-on-five. They hung out. With only three players who had been with the team during the previous off-season, there were a lot of introductions to make.“Everybody that came here was very excited for this project to work,” said Nikola Vucevic, one of the longer-tenured members of the Bulls, having joined the team at the trade deadline in March 2021. “There was a very positive energy going into it. I think that helped a lot. Also, we had guys that were still trying to prove themselves.”Those workouts built team chemistry, and the Bulls surprised people — Vucevic included — with how quickly they started winning. And when injuries and coronavirus infections depleted their roster, they had a foundation that allowed them to adapt.This season has demanded that teams be pliable, given how the pandemic has disrupted it. A virus outbreak during a wave of the Omicron variant in December meant that the Bulls were missing 10 players at one point — and once they emerged from that setback, they began losing key players to injury. Despite all that, the Bulls (37-21) are well positioned for the run up to the playoffs after All-Star Weekend.“We’re not able to see us at our full potential since the beginning of the year,” said Zach LaVine, Chicago’s two-time All-Star guard and the longest-tenured Bull. “Even then we were working out the kinks, getting to know each other.”He added: “We’re still at the top of our conference and we’ve been doing a patch job.”Zach LaVine has been with the Bulls since the 2017-18 season.Grant Halverson/Getty ImagesThe Miami Heat, who have dealt with their own virus and injury issues, are tied with the Bulls for the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. It has been more than a decade since the Bulls were truly considered contenders in the East. They have missed the playoffs for the past four seasons, and two years ago they tried to shake up their front office in hopes of changing their fortunes.They traded for Vucevic last season, and he became the first part of their remodel. Only the third-year guard Coby White and LaVine remain from the team that began last season.DeMar DeRozan became their marquee free-agent signing, a player who had been written off because of his preference for midrange jumpers over 3-pointers.The Bulls traded for Lonzo Ball in the off-season, and paid a small price — the forfeiture of a second-round draft pick — for tampering to get him. They signed Alex Caruso, who comes off the bench for a defensive jolt, in free agency as well. And they drafted Ayo Dosunmu, a Chicago native who had spent three years at the University of Illinois.Critics wondered if this group would actually work, and how.Bulls Coach Billy Donovan said the players’ time together before training camp “really helped our team.” For Vucevic that meant reconnecting with DeRozan, with whom he’d played at the University of Southern California. It meant getting to know others he’d played against in the N.B.A.“It’s one of the great things about team sports,” Vucevic said. “You meet so many people and you never know who you’re going to build friendships with.”Lonzo Ball playing against Philadelphia in November. He is currently recovering from a knee injury.Jonathan Daniel/Getty ImagesThe Bulls started the season 6-1 and went on a nine-game winning streak in late December and early January after their Omicron wave had passed.Ball’s outlet passes, LaVine’s dunks and DeRozan’s buzzer-beaters were just part of the fun. Their up-tempo offense, fueled by DeRozan, LaVine and, eventually, Vucevic, was balanced by a clear defensive identity, led by guards Ball and Caruso.“They look like they’re having fun playing basketball together,” said Joakim Noah, who played for the Bulls from 2007 to 2016, including seven straight trips to the playoffs. “When you look around the league you realize you can probably count that on one hand.”Friendships might seem like a small thing on a professional sports team, but discord can derail even the most talented teams.“I think when you have a lot of guys built into the foundation as if we’re one household, one family, when you have guys going in and out it’s much easier to plug guys in,” Dosunmu said.DeRozan was out for almost two weeks after testing positive for the coronavirus in December. LaVine has missed 11 games, most of them because of a lingering knee injury, though he also played with back spasms earlier this month. Ball has been out since Jan. 15 with a knee injury.Caruso missed 13 games in December and January with a foot injury. In the second game after he returned, he fractured his wrist after a hard foul by Milwaukee’s Grayson Allen. Caruso has not played since, but he has been on the bench, helping younger players learn from what he sees.“We have a strong-minded group,” Vucevic said. “A group of fighters. When we’re going through it, we just talked about how we can’t feel sorry for ourselves because nobody’s going to feel sorry for us.”They have stayed afloat by beating lesser teams, but the league’s better ones have proved a tougher challenge. So far they are winless against Miami, Milwaukee, Golden State, Philadelphia, Memphis and Phoenix. They have only two wins against teams currently in the top four in their conferences — they beat the Jazz and Cavaliers once each.“We understand that we are a good team, we are not yet at the level of the best teams, and we still have a lot of work to do,” Vucevic said, adding, “We have to wait to get full to be able to do that, but all of this is a good test for us to get to there.”After shootaround Friday at Chicago’s practice facility, Ball hopped through a drill as he worked on rehabbing his knee. Nearby, Caruso watched a scrimmage. LaVine practiced shooting free throws and then spoke to reporters.“We get healthy and we do what we’re supposed to do, I don’t see anybody better than us in the East,” LaVine said. “That’s my opinion. Competition-wise, you step on the line you go throw the ball up, I don’t think anybody’s better than us.”That night LaVine played 37 minutes and winced as he landed on his feet after a dunk. The Bulls announced Monday that he would be out until the All-Star break because of that lingering knee injury.DeMar DeRozan defending against San Antonio’s Doug McDermott in February.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressSince returning from his coronavirus-related absence, DeRozan has offered some consistency. He’s scored at least 35 points in the team’s last six games — losses to Phoenix and Philadelphia, followed by four wins over pesky but less-accomplished teams.After Saturday’s home win over the Oklahoma City Thunder, DeRozan spoke wistfully about what it might feel like when the Bulls are all healthy again.“It’s like a dream I dream about every night,” DeRozan said as he looked into the distance.Outside the United Center, the winter Chicago air was biting cold just a few hours before the city would be dusted with snow.“Being on a sunny beautiful island, that’s how I picture it when we get back healthy,” DeRozan said. “We’re going to get there. It sucks right now, but we got to weather it. It’s going to come.” More

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      This Time, the Cavaliers’ Revival Has Nothing to Do With LeBron James

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      Two All-Stars, a surprising rookie and savvy trades have Cleveland among the best teams in the Eastern Conference. “Everybody is doing something,” one veteran said.For most of the last two decades, the Cleveland Cavaliers could be defined by two things: LeBron James or irrelevance.James, a hometown hero, breathed new life into the city upon being drafted in 2003, and made the Cavaliers a must-see attraction. And then he devastated the fan base by leaving for Miami in 2010, before returning like Odysseus in 2014 and delivering one of the most storied championships in N.B.A. history in 2016. Two years later, he left again, leaving the franchise without a clear path forward.“Everybody felt a little bit weird after that year,” said Cedi Osman, a fifth-year guard for Cleveland.The Cavaliers were starting from scratch and staring into the abyss. They had past-their-prime veterans and no track record of luring top free agents. But a funny thing has happened. Fast forward through some quality draft picks, a savvy trade and a key player’s unexpected resurgence, and there is a basketball renaissance in Cleveland.Four seasons after James’s exit to the Los Angeles Lakers, the Cavaliers have confounded expectations to become one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference with one of the best defenses in the N.B.A. For the first time since James left in 2018, the Cavaliers will be represented in the All-Star Game, which is this weekend in Cleveland. Rajon Rondo, the veteran point guard traded to Cleveland from the Lakers last month, said the Cavaliers this season have “a chance to do something special.”Their status as a contender was cemented last week when they acquired Caris LeVert, a 27-year-old swingman and Ohio native, from the Indiana Pacers. LeVert told reporters the team seemed to have “such positive energy everywhere.”Positive energy has been in short supply in recent years. Over the past three seasons, the Cavaliers went 60-159. The rebuilding process post-James, helmed by General Manager Koby Altman, has been bumpy.Cleveland is on its fourth head coach in four years. One of them, John Beilein, apologized to his team of mostly Black players in 2020 for calling them “thugs” in a film session. He resigned later that year midseason with a dismal 14-40 record.N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver chose Jarrett Allen, center, to replace James Harden in the All-Star Game as Harden recovers from an injury.Chris Szagola/Associated PressThere was also the trade for Andre Drummond, a slow and expensive center who rebounded well but didn’t fit with the team’s quick perimeter guards, and the extension for another center, Larry Nance Jr., who never quite lived up to a contract worth more than $40 million.“We’ve taken some time and had to be really patient through some difficult times to get to where we are,” Coach J.B. Bickerstaff, who replaced Beilein, said during a news conference last week. “And when you’re talking about legacy, I think those are discussions that you have after the season or, you know, two years from now when you can look back at a total body of work and see what you’ve truly done.”The core for the Cavaliers’ resurgence has come through the draft. Point guard Darius Garland, selected with the fifth pick in 2019, was a highly-touted but risky pick given that he played in only five games at Vanderbilt because of a knee injury. The Cavaliers had drafted point guard Collin Sexton only the year before, which made the selection of Garland raise some eyebrows.The team instead started Garland and Sexton as one of the more dynamic backcourts in the N.B.A. Now, in only his third year, the 22-year-old Garland is averaging 20.1 points and 8 assists per game as a deft floor general and earned an All-Star berth. (Sexton sustained a season-ending knee injury in early November.)With his passing skills and ability to create space for himself in the paint, Garland has outplayed at least two players drafted ahead of him (RJ Barrett and De’Andre Hunter), while the No. 1 pick from that draft, Zion Williamson, hasn’t taken the floor this season because of a foot injury.Brandon Knight, who was Garland’s teammate briefly during Garland’s rookie year in Cleveland, described him as “super, super, super unselfish.”“He scores a lot, but he also gets a lot of guys involved,” Knight, 30, said. “When you get guys involved and you get guys feeling good about themselves and feeling good about touching the basketball, I think it trickles down.”When a team isn’t traditionally attractive for free agents, hitting on high draft picks is crucial. Cleveland drafted Isaac Okoro fifth in 2020, and he has become a reliable defender and open-floor finisher. The draftee with the highest ceiling might be Evan Mobley, who was picked at No. 3 in last year’s draft. Mobley, 20, is averaging 14.7 points and 8 rebounds per game and is a contender to win the Rookie of the Year Award.Isaac Okoro, ground, has become a reliable defender and finisher in his second year. The Cavaliers drafted him with the fifth overall pick in 2020.Nick Wosika/USA Today Sports, via ReutersOne of Cleveland’s best moves was the trade for Jarrett Allen last season, part of a four-team deal that landed James Harden with Allen’s former team, the Nets. The 23-year-old Allen — a strong rebounder and finisher around the rim — is now one of the best centers in the N.B.A. and was selected as an injury replacement for Harden in this year’s All-Star Game. The Nets have a worse record than the Cavaliers and traded Harden to the Philadelphia 76ers last week. They’ve looked very much like a team that could use Allen.But this year’s success for Cleveland is not just because of the young players. Kevin Love, a five-time All-Star and the only James-era holdover besides Osman, has battled injuries for most of Cleveland’s rebuilding process. Love, a power forward, signed a four-year $120 million extension to remain in Cleveland entering the 2018-19 season, after James left the second time. Before this season, it looked like a mistake for Altman. When Love did play, his body language was sour. On multiple occasions, he openly showed displeasure with teammates.Deng Adel, who played 19 games for the Cavaliers in the year after James left for the Lakers, said the early stages of rebuilding were “kind of tough” for Love.“For the most part, he was still definitely a good teammate,” said Adel, who now plays for the Boston Celtics’ G League affiliate. He added: “It kind of gets frustrating, especially for where he’s at in his career. You know, you could kind of tell he kind of wants to win.”After the trade for Allen and the drafting of Mobley, it seemed that there wouldn’t be room for Love. But in the summer, his agent put a stop to chatter that Love would try to negotiate a buyout. Instead, Love came back to training and told reporters he would be a “positive force.” Now, this year is among the best in his eight seasons in Cleveland. He’s averaging 14.2 points and 7.3 rebounds per game off the bench and shooting 39.2 percent from 3. Love is fitting in instead of fitting out, just as James once publicly preached for him to do.“He’s a great mentor for us — for young players and especially the way he’s playing this year,” Osman said. “I mean, we’re really looking up to him. Offensively. Defensively. He’s crafty. He’s trying to help us. You know, everybody is doing something.”Kevin Love, center, is in his eighth season with Cleveland, and playing some of his best basketball in years off the bench.Ken Blaze/USA Today Sports, via ReutersMentorship has also come from other sources. The veteran point guard Ricky Rubio came to Cleveland in a trade from Minnesota in the off-season and helped the team get off to a fast start with his steady hand in setting up the offense. But, in December, a knee injury ended his season, and he was traded in the deal for LeVert. Rondo has filled Rubio’s role.If the Cavaliers make a deep run this postseason, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. They have dynamic scorers (Garland, Allen), quality veterans with championship experience (Love, Rondo), and complementary shot-creators (Okoro, Osman). Especially this year, where there is no clear-cut favorite for the title, the Cavaliers have a real chance of making the N.B.A. finals. And they seem to enjoy playing with one another.“A lot of times you can’t predict this type of stuff, man,” Knight said. “So the ingredients just work and there’s really not an answer for it.”He added, “When you get a group of guys that are just unselfish and don’t care about which guy’s getting the points, all those type of things, I think it just works out.”Of course, the Cavaliers still have a lot of work to do. The Eastern Conference is tightly packed and one losing streak could mean being exiled to the play-in tournament — and, perhaps, out of the playoffs. But this year has been an undeniable step forward. If nothing else, Cleveland is shooting for something bigger, to be defined by more than a past association with LeBron James.“We’re trying to build something,” Osman said. “It’s all about these Cavs right now.” More