3:21 AM ET On the eve of opening weekend for the NBA playoffs, members of the Phoenix Suns organization gathered together to pop bottles of champagne. They might as well have been on ice for a decade. For the first time since 2010, the Suns are back in the postseason, thanks in large part to

9:13 PM ET LOS ANGELES — There are a lot of things different inside Staples Center, and all NBA arenas, this season. Cardboard fan cutouts, masks for the 7,000 fans allowed in for the LA Clippers 113-103 loss to the Dallas Mavericks Saturday afternoon to take a 1-0 lead in their best-of-7 Western Conference first-round

9:56 PM ET LOS ANGELES — Friends since their high school days, former USA Basketball teammates and NBA Players Association leadership members together, LeBron James and Chris Paul are about to meet in the playoffs for the first time in their storied careers. “It’s going to be comparable to playing against [Rajon] Rondo in a

3:39 AM ET SAN FRANCISCO — After the Golden State Warriors failed to qualify for the postseason for the second consecutive season, forward Draymond Green acknowledged the organization is “a ways away” from getting back into title contention after a disappointing 117-112 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday night in the final play-in game

10:05 AM ET Two 6-foot-9 Florida twins ranked among the top 15 high school juniors in the country — Matt and Ryan Bewley — are signing with Overtime Elite, the league announced Friday, marking the first prep underclassmen to sign contracts with an American professional basketball league. Matt, who is ranked No. 3 by ESPN

7:46 PM ET Tim BontempsESPN Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid and Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry are the finalists for this year’s NBA Most Valuable Player award. The top three vote-getters for each of the NBA’s major end-of-season awards — MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, Rookie of the

3:59 PM ET ESPN News Services The NBA fined Atlanta Hawks interim coach Nate McMillan $25,000 on Thursday for making comments Wednesday “asserting bias by the NBA relating to the 2020-21 Playoffs,” the league announced. On Wednesday in a Zoom call with the media, McMillan, whose Hawks play the Knicks in the first round of

1:30 AM ET LOS ANGELES — By all accounts, the play-in tournament has been a resounding success for the NBA this year. It created exciting new scenarios toward the end of the regular season and mostly stemmed the widespread tanking which had made a mockery of the final month of play for the 14 teams

4:55 AM ET US Monastir’s Ater Majok was only five years old when his family fled Sudan during its second civil war, and is using the Basketball Africa League as a continental homecoming of sorts. The power forward, who was raised in Australia but represents Lebanon internationally [he was given citizenship for his performances with

3:54 AM ET The Golden State Warriors were disappointed after losing a 103-100 heartbreaker to LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers on Wednesday night in L.A., but they weren’t broken. Despite letting a chance to become the No. 7 seed in the Western Conference playoffs slip away, the Warriors remain buoyed by how well