The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

Every day brings new shocks. US president Donald Trump has this week intensified his widening conflicts with the American federal court system and some of the nation’s most prestigious universities.

Harvard and other universities have been targeted by Trump with threats of withholding billions of research and development funds that had been appropriated by Congress. At the beginning of the week, Harvard defied the president.

In a letter to the university president over the weekend, the Trump administration wrote that “the United States has invested in Harvard University’s operations because of the value to the country of scholarly discovery and academic excellence. But an investment is not an entitlement. Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”.

The university fired back on Tuesday, saying “the administration’s demands made clear that the intention is not to address issues in a cooperative and constructive manner. The majority of this administration’s concerns represent attempts at direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard”.

In other words, Trump is saying “no more woke”.

How about if we take a break from the curious monotony of so much strife and incivility? Let’s focus instead on the diverting world of basketball in the US.

Many basketball loyalists claim hoops as the quintessential American sport. According to commonly accepted legend, it was launched in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian-born physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts. Naismith was reportedly looking for something to keep his students occupied during the harsh Northeast American winters at the local YMCA.

College basketball in the US basically hogs the sports spotlight during the month of March, and there is always the hope and expectation that some hopeless underdog will knock off a top-seeded behemoth in the early stages of the annual tournament.

Not this year. The Final Four teams in the men’s tournament were four regional number one seeds; there were no significant upsets in the tournament’s late stages. The University of Florida won the title, but once perennial power Duke was dumped in the semifinal game, the tourney lost some of its lustre.

Of more interest was the women’s tournament. Here, one number two seed prevailed in the Final Four among three more one-seeds. That was the University of Connecticut, coached for the past 40 years by Geno Auriemma. He holds the NCAA basketball records for wins and winning percentage. Auriemma also has the most NCAA Division I basketball championships – for men or women.

The UConn Huskies are the most successful women’s basketball program in American history, having won an overall record 12 NCAA Division I National Championships and a women’s record four in a row, from 2013 through 2016, plus over 50 conference regular season and tournament championships. UConn, whose star Paige Bueckers was the first pick in this week’s WNBA draft, had drifted into marginal irrelevance recently, having not won a national title for ten years. They’re back.

The WNBA was founded in 1996 and substantially subsidized by the men’s NBA for decades. In recent years, as women’s professional sports have experienced a worldwide surge in interest led by soccer and basketball, the WNBA has begun to develop what seems like a sustainable fan base and financial viability.

All of this hoops hoopla has merely set the stage for the main event -- the NBA playoffs. The NBA would be the premier pro sports league in the world – aside from world number one soccer, of course – were it not for the NFL, which has perfected marketing to such a degree that it is the unchallenged American television programming leader and has been for years.

The NBA began operations under a different name in 1945. Of its original 11 teams, only the New York Knicks and Boston Celtics remain eight decades and many league realignments later. Three cities represented back at the beginning – Pittsburgh, St Louis and Providence, Rhode Island – no longer have teams in the league.

And this year’s two top seeds, the Cleveland Cavaliers (founded as an expansion team in 1970) and the Oklahoma City Thunder (relocated from Seattle in 2008) are relative newcomers. Both teams basically led their respective divisions from the beginning of the season, when Cleveland ran off 15 straight wins to open its title challenge. The Thunder are led by likely league MVP and point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

Both teams are emblems of good management and wise patience and persistence. They offer a stark contrast to this year’s most disappointing team, the Philadelphia 76ers, who fiddled around for nearly a decade trying to build a powerhouse by earning high draft choices and losing a lot of games.

The payoff of this “process” was supposed to happen in the past several years. This season, the 76ers added veteran star Paul George to a roster with 2023 league MVP Joel Embiid and 2024 all-star Tyrese Maxey. Injuries and internal turmoil have produced instead the league’s fifth-worst record. Ironically, this year’s high lottery pick will go to Oklahoma City if the Sixers happen fall to seventh or below in the league’s May 12 draft lottery.

The Thunder have not only this year’s best record. They have accumulated literally dozens of future draft choices through sagacious trades. Many of their unheralded starters were drafted by the team. This is acknowledged to be the smartest front office in the sport.

Since their owner finally settled on the first general manager (Koby Altman) he ever rewarded with a second contract, the Cavaliers have shown that Philadelphia’s “process” can work. Patiently drafting and resigning top-five draft choices over several years, together with wise and opportunistic trading, the Cavs may have built the best overall starting lineup in the league.

But the real Cleveland story is that this is by far their best team that doesn’t feature LeBron James, the franchise’s first overall pick in the 2003 draft and possibly the best-ever basketball player. James, now approaching the age of 40 and still an all-star, began the season playing on the Los Angeles Lakers with his own son.

The Lakers have a long history of acquiring megastars in trades with other, less illustrious teams. This year saw the most recent example, as the Lakers somehow pulled off arguably the most stunning trade in league history a few days before the February deadline. They acquired megastar Luka Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks for all-star center Anthony Davis and just one first-round pick.

The Lakers thus have their next face of the franchise for a time in the near future when James retires to become a media mogul. The Mavs’ front office is still forced to defend trading away a really significant star like Dončić, just as he seemed to be reaching his prime.

This was not the first such heist pulled off by the league’s most glamorous franchise. Here, with the year of the deal, are the Hall of Famers acquired in the most notable Lakers trades:

• Kobe Bryant from the Charlotte Hornets (1996). Bryant led the Lakers to five titles in ten years.

• Received a first-round draft pick in 1979 that the Lakers used to select Magic Johnson, who led the team to five championships in the 1980s.

• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from the Milwaukee Bucks (1975). Kareem won five titles and retired as the all-time NBA scorer – until James surpassed him in February 2023.

• Wilt Chamberlain from the Philadelphia 76ers (1972). While his Lakers years were not his best, he did win a title and led the team to the longest winning streak in NBA history.

• Acquiring Doncic from the Mavericks earlier this year. (LeBron James had arrived as a free agent.)

Speaking of trades, the other big one this season saw the Miami Heat send talismanic but moody Jimmy Butler to the Golden State Warriors in a deal between two relatively recent champions who underachieved to only qualified this year for the league’s post-season play-in scheme that determines who will be seeded (7) and (8) for the real playoffs. The Warriors and Orlando Magic advanced on Tuesday to earn seventh seeds.

These play-in games only set the stage for the regular playoff schedule which begins on Saturday. Perhaps these professional playoffs will see more upsets and near-misses than did either the men’s or women’s collegiate tournaments. We’ll see.