A pair of playoff teams suffered potentially season-altering injuries , a couple of coaches are gone, a team president, too, and before the close of business the NBA’s biggest star took to Twitter to give the league another headache.
This news, first reported by The Athletic, was stunning: Paul, days removed from a 25-point, 10-assist per game effort in a four-game sweep of Denver, was out.
Will the NBA adapt its protocols to allow for a vaccinated player to return sooner? Suns coach Monty Williams shed little light on Paul’s status but with the Western Conference Finals set to tip off as early as Sunday, Paul’s availability looms large.
Let’s be clear: “mutually agree to part ways” is the term the Mavericks chose to describe the split from the team’s president of basketball operations, who had been the top basketball exec in Dallas for the last 16 years and a member of the organization for 24.
He helped build Dallas’s championship team in 2011 but he wasn’t able to put the pieces around Dirk Nowitzki to win another playoff series, much less a championship, in the years after.
Leonard, who dissected Utah on his way to a 31-point performance in Game 4, would miss a pivotal Game 5 with a knee injury—with no guarantees he would return during this series.
So that’s it? Van Gundy gets one season? One pandemic-shortened, limited training camp, virtually no practice time season? It was no secret that Van Gundy, a notorious taskmaster, was struggling to connect with the Pelicans’ young players, particularly Brandon Ingram.
The Wizards made the John Wall-Russell Westbrook swap just before training camp, were devastated by COVID issues in January, endured multiple long losing streaks … and still rallied in the final weeks of the season to make the playoffs.
If there’s one person that know about the body and how it works all year round it’s ME! I speak for the health of all our players and I hate to see this many injuries this time of the year.
After last season, which for the Lakers concluded in mid-October, James was under the impression that the following season wouldn’t begin until January, and the Lakers star was irritated by the late December start, sources familiar with James’s thinking told SI.
It projected a difference of $500 million in total revenue between starting the season in late December versus early January.
And judging by the union’s decision to agree to a December start, the vast majority of players didn’t want to do that.
And if James felt strongly about starting the season later, the time to voice that opinion was before the season, not as it is winding down.