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☆ The NBA Rookie Who Got Weird to Make His Free Throws
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-28 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Two months into his NBA career, San Antonio Spurs rookie Jeremy Sochan had a problem. Over his first 23 games, he’d shot 24 free throws and made just 11. Only four players in the league with at least 20 attempts had a worse percentage. Then Sochan found a fix—in the form of one of the stranger tactics to grace a professional basketball floor recently.

☆ Jayson Tatum Still Plays Like Kobe. He Got Better By Playing Beyond Kobe.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-22 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The NBA’s All-Star Game MVP award, named after Kobe Bryant, may be the only honor in the league that a player can win simply by wanting it more than anyone else. In Sunday night’s installment of the game, a defense-free affair in which players took turns bouncing passes to themselves off the backboards and launching increasingly long-range and low-percentage 3-pointers, Jayson Tatum of the Boston Celtics earned the trophy. His methods were straightforward: he shot his triples mostly from the arc, not the half-court stripe. His motivation was obvious, too.

☆ The Best Draft Prospect Since LeBron is Coming. NBA Teams Aren’t Tanking for Him.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-17 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The arrival next season of the most hyped NBA prospect since LeBron James was supposed to be foreshadowed by an all-time spectacle of futility in this one. Victor Wembanyama, a 7-foot-4 French teenager, launches one-legged 3-pointers and swallows opposing team’s shots whole. He is a functional certainty to be selected first in June’s draft. In other words, he is the type of future winner that teams have long considered to be worth losing for.

☆ The Most Patient All-Star in NBA History
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-15 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

A first selection to the All-Star Game is a momentous occasion for an NBA player. It signals admission to the league’s elite tier, confers peer-group respect and record-book status, gets teammates jumping around in celebration and has coaches making heartfelt speeches. A second selection, on the other hand, means a round of high-fives and a “Congrats.”Except in the case of Jrue Holiday.

☆ Trades Like the Kevin Durant Deal Never Happen. Here’s Why This One Did.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-11 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

After Mat Ishbia , the new owner of the Phoenix Suns and Mercury, officially took over the NBA and WNBA franchises this week, he held a press conference at which he described his vision for employee acquisition and retention, which he considered the backbone of his company, United Wholesale Mortgage. “We want to get the best people to join the Suns and Mercury ,” Ishbia said. “We want to train them, coach them to be the best version of themselves, and then treat them so well they never want to leave.”

☆ The Brooklyn Nets Trade Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The Brooklyn Nets have agreed to a blockbuster trade sending All-NBA forward Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns, completing the near-overnight teardown of the failed superteam that it built hoping to dominate the NBA for years. The deal, coming just days after Brooklyn traded Kyrie Irving to the Dallas Mavericks, shakes up the league hours ahead of Thursday afternoon’s trade deadline. The Suns are sending Brooklyn a trio of forwards in return—Cam Johnson, Jae Crowder and dynamic defender Mikal Bridges—in addition to four first-round picks and a pick swap in 2028. The Suns also receive forward T.J. Warren. The trade was first reported by ESPN and The Athletic.

☆ LeBron James Breaks the NBA’s All-Time Scoring Record
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-08 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The last time the NBA’s all-time scoring record changed hands was a little less than four decades ago, when Los Angeles Lakers center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar slung a skyhook over the Utah Jazz. Abdul-Jabbar’s 17th point of the night gave him the 31,421st of his career, moving him two past Wilt Chamberlain. On Tuesday night in Los Angeles, with his 36th point against the Oklahoma City Thunder, LeBron James tallied the 38,388th of his own career and edged past Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA’s new scoring king. The historic bucket came on a step-back jump shot near the end of the third quarter as Abdul-Jabbar looked on. James raised his arms in celebration, and his family joined him on the floor for a mid-game ceremony alongside Abdul-Jabbar and NBA commissioner Adam Silver.

☆ The Brooklyn Nets Trade Kyrie Irving to the Dallas Mavericks
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-06 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

After four seasons in which Kyrie Irving was often absent, occasionally brilliant, and always mercurial, the Brooklyn Nets have traded the embattled All-Star guard to the Dallas Mavericks, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban confirmed. The deal comes days before Thursday’s trade deadline and days after Irving reportedly requested a trade away from Brooklyn. The Nets, who are also trading forward Markieff Morris, will receive no All-Star in return; Dallas is sending back forward Dorian Finney-Smith and guard Spencer Dinwiddie, along with one first-round draft pick and multiple second-rounders. The trade was first reported by the Athletic and ESPN.

☆ The New York Liberty Sign Breanna Stewart, and Build Their Superteam
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-01 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Breanna Stewart has done just about everything a basketball player can do. In college, at the University of Connecticut, she won four NCAA tournament championships in four years and was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player each time. With Team USA in the Olympics, she’s won two gold medals. Over six seasons with the Seattle Storm, she won two WNBA titles and an MVP award. Bringing a championship to a basketball-crazed city that hasn’t seen an NBA or WNBA title since 1973.

☆ Basketball’s Greatest Scorer Doesn’t Have a Go-to Move
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-01 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

In the next two weeks, barring injury or calamity, the Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James will score the 89 remaining points he needs to break Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time regular-season record. It is a testament to James’s versatility that not even those who know him best can guess how he will do so. He might stroke a 3-pointer; a few games ago, in a 46-point outburst against the crosstown Clippers, he made nine of them, his most in a single game. He might storm into the lane for a dunk; even though he recently turned 38 years old, he has rocked the rim 60 times this season.

☆ The Philadelphia Eagles Win the NFC Championship
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-30 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

PHILADELPHIA—The NFC Championship between the Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers was billed as a meeting of two of the best-built teams in the NFL, football machines that gain yards in a variety of ways and yield them hardly at all. Then the 49ers, after navigating a season in which one quarterback after another went down with injuries, lost the one who had somehow gotten them to the brink of the Super Bowl. The Eagles beat the 49ers 31-7 on the strength of an imposing defense and patient, ground-based offensive attack. They were unquestionably helped along by an injury to San Francisco quarterback Brock Purdy, the rookie who had risen from being the last player selected in last year’s draft to leading the 49ers’ title run.

☆ Basketball’s Best Passer Understands the Art of Letting Go
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-20 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Early in Wednesday night’s game against the Minnesota Timberwolves, Nikola Jokic caught a pass from his teammate, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Or, rather, Jokic touched the ball for a moment, hardly letting it come to rest before flipping it back again. A Minnesota defender had turned his head as Caldwell-Pope snuck to the rim; Jokic’s return-to-sender package met him there, and Caldwell-Pope laid it in. Alongside a retooled supporting cast, Jokic has averaged a career-high 9.9 assists per game. His distribution animates basketball’s second-best offense, an attack that has the Nuggets at the top of the Western Conference.

☆ The NBA’s Smartest Teams Are Letting Games Roll to a Halt
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-10 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

One of the most athletic and dynamic players in the NBA was, for the moment, doing nothing. Ja Morant leaned over and grabbed his shorts, his sneakers a few inches away from the basketball that his teammate John Konchar had just inbounded—which is to say, had just dropped to the floor like keys on a countertop. Morant’s Memphis Grizzlies led the Charlotte Hornets by 29 points, late in the third quarter of an early-January game, and he was content to let the ball sit there as long as he could. Twenty-six seconds of game clock ticked by before a Hornets defender jogged into the backcourt, forcing Morant to pick the ball up. Only then did the Grizzlies’ 24 seconds on the shot clock begin.

☆ The Forces That Shaped Donovan Mitchell’s 71-Point Night
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-04 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

In one sense, what Donovan Mitchell accomplished Monday night was truly rare. The Cleveland Cavaliers guard scored 71 points in an overtime win over the Chicago Bulls, the most in one game since Kobe Bryant scored 81 in 2006 and tied for the eighth-most in NBA history. The list of players who scored 70 points in a game features just seven people, one of whom—Wilt Chamberlain, still basketball’s statistical colossus—did so six times. “We were treated tonight to one of the greatest performances in the history of the NBA,” Mitchell’s coach, J.B. Bickerstaff, said after the game.

☆ The Brooklyn Nets Have Gotten Boring—and Brilliant
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-30 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Just before Christmas, the Brooklyn Nets’ Kevin Durant was asked about his team’s absence from the NBA’s holiday slate of games. Under normal circumstances, a club with two A-list stars and title aspirations would be a no-brainer inclusion. Durant acknowledged that the abnormality of the Nets’ last few months, and specifically his offseason trade request, likely had something to do with it. “I probably [am] responsible for us not playing on Christmas, with what went on this summer,” Durant said with a grin. We play on the 26th, that’s close enough.”

☆ The Brooklyn Nets Have Gotten Boring—And Brilliant
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-30 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

☆ Luka Doncic Authors the NBA’s Gaudiest Triple-Double: 60-21-10
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-28 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The big question, for the Dallas Mavericks, is a rhetorical one: What more can Luka Doncic do? The implied answer is “nothing.” The puzzle of the Mavericks’ season is that they tread water even while their 23-year-old point-forward and MVP candidate ascends. Tuesday night, though, Doncic seemed to take the question seriously, and in doing so authored a basketball masterpiece. In a 126-121 overtime win over the New York Knicks, Doncic scored 60 points, grabbed 21 rebounds and passed out 10 assists. The performance marked the first 60-20-10 game in NBA history, and just the second 60-point triple-double.

☆ The NBA’s Plan to Stop Runaway Offenses Is a Crackdown on Walking
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-27 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

With 10 seconds left in a late-November game against the Dallas Mavericks and his Golden State Warriors trailing by two, Stephen Curry faked a 3-pointer. Curry was called for traveling—and the Warriors lost. “I didn’t think it was a travel,” Curry said after the game. But so far this season, the protests of even the NBA’s superstars are going unheeded. After years in which it seemed that players could walk around the court unencumbered by dribbling, NBA referees are blowing the whistle much more often on traveling violations.

☆ ‘Batman’ Is There When the Celtics Need Him
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-23 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

By the seventh game of the Eastern Conference semifinal series last May, nobody could say Grant Williams hadn’t done his share. Despite severe disadvantages in height, weight and renown, the Boston Celtics’ third-year forward had spent much of the series matching up against the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo. For two weeks, he set his chest against the two-time MVP’s post-ups and planted his feet in the path of his drives. Then the team asked still more of Williams. “We all told him, ‘You have to shoot these shots,’” Boston assistant coach Ben Sullivan said.

☆ Luka Doncic Is Playing With His Back to the Basket and His Eye on the MVP
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-22 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Just over a minute into an early-December game against the Phoenix Suns, Luka Doncic dribbled behind a teammate’s screen. This routine action becomes, in the hands of the Dallas Mavericks’ 23-year-old dynamo, a drastic and multifaceted threat. Doncic might sling a pass across the span of an overanxious defense, to an unmarked teammate in the distant corner. That evening, Doncic went with another option, sticking his rump into Devin Booker and scooting him backward into the lane. By the time Doncic raised up for a 8-foot push shot, Booker could only smack his arm, tacking a free-throw onto the bucket.

☆ Mortgage-Lending Billionaire Mat Ishbia Reaches Agreement to Buy Phoenix Suns and Mercury
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-20 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Mat Ishbia is finalizing an agreement to buy a majority stake in the Phoenix Suns and the Phoenix Mercury. Mortgage-lending billionaire Mat Ishbia is finalizing an agreement to buy a majority stake in the National Basketball Association’s Phoenix Suns and the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Phoenix Mercury , according to a person familiar with the matter, in deal that values the teams at $4 billion amid a rapidly rising market in sports team valuations. Ishbia would buy control of the teams from Robert Sarver, who put the teams on the market after being suspended by the NBA for violating workplace standards. The deal will be subject to the approval of the league’s board of governors in a 75% majority vote.

☆ Mortgage-Lending Billionaire Mat Ishbia to Buy Phoenix Suns and Mercury
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-20 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Mat Ishbia is finalizing an agreement to buy a majority stake in the Phoenix Suns and the Phoenix Mercury. A group led by mortgage-lending billionaire Mat Ishbia has agreed to buy a majority stake in the National Basketball Association’s Phoenix Suns and the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Phoenix Mercury, in a deal that values the teams at $4 billion amid a rapidly rising market in sports team valuations. Ishbia would buy control of the teams from Robert Sarver, who put the teams on the market after being suspended by the NBA for violating workplace standards. The deal will be subject to the approval of the league’s board of governors in a 75% majority vote.

☆ Brittney Griner Says She Wants to Return to WNBA After Release From Russia
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-16 | by ( Joseph De Avila | Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Women’s basketball star Brittney Griner said she plans to restart her basketball career this season in her first public comments since she was released from a Russian penal colony. Her decision to return to the court after a harrowing foreign incarceration, announced in an Instagram post on Friday, sets up a comeback that has no precedent in U.S. sports.

☆ How the NBA’s Sorriest Franchise Built Its Next Great Offense
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-06 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

A Sacramento Kings win always ends the same way, with 1,000 watts of RGB lasers converging in a purple column. Installed at the Golden 1 Center before the season, the light shines up from the roof and dissipates somewhere past the Northern California stratosphere. The hope is that every Sacramento resident can see it—along with whatever extraterrestrials are passing by, Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé has joked. Less predictable but equally resplendent, for the “Beam Team,” are the scoring displays that occasion the postgame spectacles. “We played pretty good offensively,” first-year Kings coach Mike Brown said in a room-for-improvement tone after his club heaped 137 points atop the Detroit Pistons in a recent victory.

☆ They Helped LeBron James Set the NBA Scoring Record—With Just One Pass
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-02 | by ( Robert O'Connell | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Matt Ryan doesn’t remember the moment he was inducted into one of professional basketball’s most exclusive clubs. The last of them, a sideways-falling heave from the corner, forced overtime in what would become a much-needed L.A. win. But Ryan’s entrée into statistical immortality came in the second quarter, when he flipped a pass to LeBron James, who canned a 17-foot jumper. There have been 145 game-tying, at-the-horn shots in the past 20 NBA seasons, according to Stats Perform. Just 12 players, on the other hand, have recorded a single career assist to the man who will soon break Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time scoring record.

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