A new pro league is paying teenagers six figures to quit high school for basketball.

A profile.

When the Arlee Warriors cleared an astonishing path to the state basketball championship, they brought healing to the community.

On the early NBA days of the league’s newest champion.

How a Zoom call with Tamika Catchings affirmed everything.

On the lost pickup basketball games in D.C. between Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor, then both still in college, during the summer of 1957.

For Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, the work is just getting started.

Kobe Bryant in twilight.

One year after a 14-year-old basketball player was killed by a stray bullet on a playground court in Queens, his friends and family still don’t have answers—only enduring anguish and a familiar feeling of grief.

In high school, I started to become like a local legend. A hood celebrity, if you will. And you really gotta understand how poppin’ New York City basketball was at that time. I’m playing against Stephon Marbury, Skip 2 My Lou, Alimoe (rest in peace), all these guys who would become household names, they were just kids from around the way. Man, even Cam’ron was super nice!!!

I knew all these guys from when we was little kids playing church basketball, and now all of a sudden we got Jay-Z, Puff, Dame Dash — all these guys are showing up to our games. That’s how insane New York City basketball was at that time.

Just before his first NBA game, an 18-year-old LeBron James was asked about the pressure of controlling the combined fortunes of a city, major corporations, and the league. “I can handle it,” he said.

Against all odds, it really was a refuge of competence, normalcy and transcendent play. But the outside world has a way of sneaking in.

“His life with the virus would be his witness, his public testimony. Performance as life, and life as performance.”

For a rebellious, Korean-American teen like myself who was awkwardly trying to situate himself, without much success, Jackson’s writing, with its rap and jazz references and its relentless, engaging voice, provided a vision of Black agency that felt almost illicit.

It starts with something small, and you ignore it. I remember when Jrue and I first started dating, right after college, and one of the women on my club team made a passing comment about him. “Jrue is the whitest black guy I know.”

On Feb. 5, 2019, Maya Moore made an announcement on The Players' Tribune that would upend the WNBA: She would be sitting out the 2019 season to focus on "the people in my family, as well as on investing my time in some ministry dreams that have been stirring in my heart for many years." It was a stunning declaration. This was Maya Moore, in her prime.

The two poets correspond about basketball, life, and living.

Reexamining the murder of James Jordan.

A conversation with the former player, and new coach, about basketball, Beijing, and being understood.

The story of one of the great final acts in sports history.

Stare at the game long enough and the distance between everything—players, league, game, court, self, other—begins to collapse. Everything becomes a metaphor for everything else, the league and your life each generating infinite layers of meaning for the other.

Stories of African Americans playing in a city that has struggled with racism

On the owner’s 20-year evolution from disruptive force to formidable constant.

On the life and legacy of David Stern.

He sawed out the bottom. Nailed the crate to the telephone pole out in front of the house. New hoop. ... I’d be out there shooting until 10 at night. That’s when I started getting really good. The pole was round so you couldn’t bank the ball in. And you weren’t getting a friendly bounce on a square rim. You had to hit it dead-on, wet.