Swiatek rises to 17th; Djokovic, Nadal 1-2
James wins his fourth title
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla, Oct 12, (AP) The ultimate anguish. The ultimate joy. This season, for LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers, had it all. And it ended in the only fashion that they deemed would be acceptable, with them back atop the basketball world.
For the first time since Kobe Bryant’s fifth and final title a decade ago, the Lakers are NBA champions. James had 28 points, 14 rebounds and 10 assists, and the Lakers beat the Miami Heat 106-93 on Sunday night to win the NBA Finals in six games.
“Our organization wants their respect. Laker Nation wants their respect,” James said. “And I want my damn respect, too.”
Anthony Davis had 19 points and 15 rebounds for the Lakers, who dealt with the enormous anguish that followed the death of the iconic Bryant in January and all the challenges that came with leaving home for three months to play at Walt Disney World in a bubble designed to keep inhabitants safe from the coronavirus.
It would be, James predicted, the toughest title to ever win.
“We have a PhD in adversity, I’ll tell you that much,” Lakers coach Frank Vogel said. “We’ve been through a lot.”
They made the clincher look easy. James won his fourth title, doing it with a third different franchise – and against the Heat franchise that showed him how to become a champion.
Bam Adebayo had 25 points and 10 rebounds for Miami, who got 12 points from Jimmy Butler – the player who,
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in his first Heat season, got the team back to title contention. Rajon Rondo scored 19 points for the Lakers, who put together the elite talents of James and Davis with this moment in mind.
And Davis, as white and gold confetti coated the floor around him, spent his first moments as an NBA champion thinking of Bryant.
With that, the league’s bubble chapter, put together after a 4-1/2-month suspension of play that started March 11 because of the coronavirus pandemic and came with a promise that it would raise awareness to the problems of racial injustice and police brutality, is over. So, too, is a season that saw the league and China get into political sparring, the death on Jan 1 of commissioner
PARIS, Oct 12, (AP): French Open champion Iga Swiatek joined the Top 20 for the first time Monday by rising 37 spots in the WTA rankings to a career-best No. 17.
Rafael Nadal’s 6-0, 6-2, 7-5 victory over Novak Djokovic on Sunday for a 13th championship at Roland Garros and 20th Grand Slam trophy in all – tying Roger Federer’s record for men – did not change the top of the ATP rankings.
Djokovic, who won the Australian Open in February for his 17th major title, is still No. 1, with Nadal at No. 2, followed by US Open champion Dominic Thiem and Federer.
The 19-year-old Swiatek entered the French Open at No. 54 and became the lowest-ranked female champion at the clay-court Grand Slam tournament since the WTA computer rankings began in 1975.
Her 6-4, 6-1 victory over Sofia Kenin on Saturday gave Swiatek the first tour-level title of any sort in her professional career and made her Poland’s first Grand Slam singles champion.
Kenin’s run to the final – the first time she made it to the quarter-finals on clay anywhere – allowed her to move up two places to No. 4, matching her career high. The 21-year-old American went 16-2 in Grand Slam matches in 2020, winning her first such trophy at the Australian Open in February.
emeritus David Stern – the man who did so much to make the league what it is – and then the shock on Jan 26 that came with the news that Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven
The top three in the women’s rankings remained as they were before the French Open, with Ash Barty at No. 1, Simona Halep at No. 2, and Naomi Osaka at No. 3. Serena Williams is No. 10.
When competition resumed in August after a hiatus of about five months because of the coronavirus pandemic, the tours decided to allow players to use either their 2019 or 2020 results at any given tournament for rankings purposes, so Barty wasn’t hurt by sitting out the French Open a year after winning it.
Osaka also sat out the trip to Paris this time, opting
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to rest and recover after her championship at the US Open last month.
Halep did compete at the French Open, but her 6-1, 6-2 loss to Swiatek in the fourth round didn’t affect the three-time major champion’s ranking.
In the ATP, Argentina’s Diego Schwartzman, who reached his first Grand Slam semifinal before losing to Nadal, cracked the Top 10 for the first time, jumping to No. 8 from No. 14.
Russia’s Andrey Rublev also made his Top 10 debut Monday, using a second consecutive major quarterfinal appearance to go to No. 10 from No. 12.
other died in a helicopter crash.
The Lakers said they were playing the rest of the season in his memory.
They delivered what Bryant did five times for LA – a ring, and the clincher
was emphatic.
Game 6 was over by halftime, the Lakers taking a 64-36 lead into the break. The Heat never led and couldn’t shoot from anywhere: 35% from 2-point range in the half, 33% from 3-point range and even an uncharacteristic 42% from the line, not like any of it really mattered. The Lakers were getting everything they wanted and then some, outscoring Miami 36-16 in the second quarter and doing all that with James making just one shot in the period.
Rondo, now a two-time champion and the first to win NBA rings as a player in the cities of Boston and Los Angeles – the franchises now tied with 17 titles apiece – was 6 for 6 in the half, the first time he’d done that since November 2007. The Lakers’ lead was 46-32 with 5:00 left in the half, and they outscored Miami 18-4 from there until intermission.
The 28-point halftime lead was the second-biggest in NBA Finals history, topped only by the Celtics leading the Lakers 79-49 on May 27, 1985.
True to form, the Heat – a No. 5 seed in the Eastern Conference that finished with a losing record last season, a team that embraced the challenge of the bubble like none other – didn’t stop playing, not even when the deficit got to 36 in the third quarter.
A 23-8 run by Miami got the Heat to 90-69 with 8:37 left. But the outcome was never in doubt, and before long confetti was blasted into the air as the Lakers’ celebration formally and officially began.
Lakers’ Davis did not wear the gold-painted sneakers that he had for Game 5; instead, he went with redand-black ones Sunday. Among the ring-winners: Dion Waiters, who began this season with the Heat; 19-yearold Talen Horton-Tucker (he turns 20, Nov 25) and Kostas Antetokounmpo – the brother of two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks.
Heat’s Goran Dragic (torn left plantar fascia) checked in late in the first quarter, his first appearance since Game 1 of the series. “I just wanted to be out there to help my team as much as possible. It is what it is. The Lakers were better,” an emotional Dragic said. Jae Crowder had 12 points and Duncan Robinson had 10 for the Heat.
John Salley and Robert Horry were, until Sunday, the only players to win championships with three different franchises. James (Miami, Cleveland) and Danny Green (San Antonio, Toronto) added their names to that list with this title.
Miami led the NBA with 94 games played this season – 30 more than Minnesota, who played the fewest in the NBA. The Heat finished with 1,247 3-pointers this season, including playoffs, 290 more than any other year in team history.