Tag: nytimes.com

SAN ANTONIO — In no particular order, the San Antonio Spurs are dealing with incidents of possible assault, of getting over the biggest meltdown in NBA Finals history and of being on the brink of elimination. It’s a lot to unpack. Victor Wembanyama had eggs thrown at him outside the team hotel in New York…

When OG Anunoby soared into the lane and tipped in a prayer, he also might have tipped the NBA Finals MVP race. Anunoby, a 500-to-1 bet before the playoffs, is now a 2-to-1 (+200) contender on BetMGM after his Game 4 tip-in put the Knicks one win away from a title. His odds were as…

The Bounce Newsletter  | This is The Athletic’s daily NBA newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Bounce directly in your inbox. The next time we speak to each other, we may have a new NBA champion. The Knicks are on the cusp of breaking their 53-year championship drought. It would be the first “double” in league history,…

NEW YORK — Nobody wanted to leave. The one thing I will remember most about being in Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night is not the New York Knicks’ comeback itself, or even the tip-in by OG Anunoby, but the communal joy in the immediate aftermath of the Knicks’ stunning 29-point rally to beat the…

“Decline and re-sign.” Get accustomed to that phrase, because you’re going to be hearing it a lot in the coming weeks. Multiple teams will decline their options on players for next season, making them free agents, only to re-up the same players on longer-term deals … for annual dollar amounts that are more helpful with…

The league-wide noise connecting Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo to Miami has been loud for weeks, if not months, now. The Heat were aggressive in trying to land Antetokounmpo at the February trade deadline, when league sources say they thought a deal would get done before the Bucks ultimately backed away. This time around, with league sources…

Jalen Brunson is soaring through the air, trying to destroy Victor Wembanyama. The Spurs’ star punches Brunson in the face, sending him crashing to the ground. Eventually, OG Anunoby smashes Wembanyama in the face with a guitar. No flagrant foul was called, not even retroactively. That’s because this isn’t the NBA Finals. This is the…

OG Anunoby’s tip-in basket lifted the New York Knicks to a Game 4 victory Wednesday night and capped the largest comeback in NBA Finals history. But the veteran forward’s heroics never would have been possible without San Antonio Spurs guard De’Aaron Fox first giving the Knicks an opening. Rather than dribble the ball and bleed time…

I’ve been evaluating NBA Draft prospects professionally for more than a decade, first at CBS Sports and now at The Athletic. So let’s re-heat a project I did last season, assessing where the best prospects in the 2026 NBA Draft would rank if I were slotting them compared to every other draftee I’ve evaluated since 2015.…

Gale Reed was sitting there during the comeback Wednesday night, right there in the same row with Bill Bradley and his daughter and Earl Monroe and his wife. Her late husband, Willis, had told her all about the time he limped through the Madison Square Garden tunnel to face Wilt Chamberlain in Game 7 of…