TURIN, Italy — Olé, olé olé olé, Sinner, Sinner.

Olé, olé olé olé, Sinner, Sinner.

Jannik Sinner is trying to speak, but his own name is resounding too loudly across the Inalpi Arena in Turin. Lit up on billboards, written on placards, chanted across the aisles. Sinner, the first Italian to achieve the men’s world No. 1 ranking, isn’t just the featured attraction of the ATP Tour Finals tournament in his home country: He is the tournament, on the court and off it.

There he is on billboards in the train station. There he is on banners hanging from light poles. There he is — well, not him, a character of him — on GialappaShow, a satirical comedy programme in the vein of Saturday Night Live, which does skits playing off Sinner’s poodle of red hair and his meticulously even manner of speaking.

And there he is on the court, blowing away basically everyone who isn’t Carlos Alcaraz as he has done most of the year, slaloming into the semifinals with three wins from three and the noise of around 12,000 fans about his ears on every point.

Three years ago, despite flashes of brilliance, Sinner had kind of stagnated in tennis no man’s land.

Two years ago, he was a work in progress who fell short of making the season-ending Tour Finals here in Turin, the city that was supposed to be his northern Italian playground.

A year ago he lost in the final to Novak Djokovic but beat him along the way, hinting loudly at what might be coming. Alcaraz said he was the next No. 1.

This year, he fulfilled that prophecy: he is world No. 1 and maybe the most popular athlete in Italy — a country that doesn’t have a lot of sport oxygen left once soccer sucks on the hose.

“It’s different,” Sinner said on Tuesday of competing on home soil for the first time in nearly a year.

“I never take these chances for granted.”

Italy has a long and illustrious conveyor belt of soccer stars. Major figures in other sports, especially ones who can penetrate the consciousness of people who barely pay attention to sports, are far more rare. But the country does have a way of rallying mightily around its Olympic champions and standouts in other sports.

For years, motorcyclist Valentino Rossi and then swimmer Federica Pellegrini were all the rage. People who have never clicked into a ski binding know all about Sofia Goggia, the Olympic downhill champion in 2018. Sinner is the latest of their number, and perhaps the most adored. Inter Milan played Napoli Sunday in a showdown of two of Italy’s biggest soccer clubs. The match drew 1.7million television viewers in Italy. Sinner’s match against Alex de Minaur of Australia, hardly a glamor matchup, drew 2.27million.

Tennis stars in their homeland are always a featured attraction, but maybe because he is the first Italian No. 1, or maybe because of that unmistakable mop of red hair, Sinner in Italy seems a different order of magnitude. As his steady, subdued demeanor anchors his game of grace and fury, one of those oddball alchemical pairings of a star and a nation catalyzes match after match.

Young and old alike are on board for the ride. He is what the Italians refer to as “fuoriclasse”, which roughly translates as out of this world, or world-class. He is one of the “predestinato”, predestined, as it were, for greatness.

“He’s young, but he’s not young in the way he plays,” said Turin native Federico Vangha, who was sipping on Aperol spritzes on Tuesday evening with his girlfriend, another mad Sinner fan named Monica Merlo.

Sinner walks duck-footed and does not appear to own a comb nor a hair dryer. His transformation from no-one’s idea of a Gucci model into, well, a Gucci model also makes him different. When he isn’t playing tennis, he’s now pitching: Gucci, Head, Nike, Rolex, La Roche-Posay, the pharmaceutical company, internet service provider Fastweb, Enervit, a nutrition company, and Pigna, a paper products company. The deal with Nike is $158million (£125.2million) over ten years; the annual value of his off-court deals is around $15m (£11.9m).

He also has a deal with pasta company De Cecco, and Italian coffee magnate Lavazza. During changeovers, his opponents don’t even get a break. Video screens play commercial after commercial, Sinner drinking an espresso or pushing Intesa Sanpaolo, the financial giant.

The madness started with the “Carota Boys”, the group of young men who seemingly will spare no expense to travel to a Sinner match wearing a carrot costume in honor of that flaming red hair. At his matches this week, the crowd has been littered with fans wearing fluorescent orange. Their shirts glow in the blue light of the Inalpi Arena, as the carrot and fox emojis — his other symbol — burn orange across every social media platform.

Jannik Sinner with his trophy for being year-end world No. 1. (Valerio Pennicino / Getty Images)

Italian players who aren’t even in the tournament show up to watch is matches. Lorenzo Sonego, Sinner’s Davis Cup teammate, was courtside the other night.

Everyone else, including the other seven competitors, are the supporting cast, even Alcaraz.

“Exactly what I expected here in Turin,” De Minaur said in a news conference after Sinner beat him 6-3, 6-4 on Sunday. “Great atmosphere.”

Taylor Fritz said the Italian faithful were a lot to deal with, but not too much. He’s had some run-ins with some raucous crowds pulling for their own, especially facing Frenchmen at the French Open. That wasn’t this.

“Fun match to play,” he said, even though he lost in straight sets.

Ubiquity carries a cost, especially at home. Sinner has given up hope of going out for a cup of coffee or a meal this week. There’s always a horde of fans outside the players’ hotel in the middle of the city. He wouldn’t get very far. Better to stay in and rest. At least that’s what he tells himself, as fans queue up to get a glimpse of a man who is a hero to them for his person as much as his tennis.

“It’s important that he’s No. 1 but it’s who he is,” said Francesco Baccarani, a 12-year-old player who arrived at the Sinner-Fritz match wearing a red, white and green headdress. “He’s the example for all of us kids for how we want to play.”

GO DEEPER

Sinner confirmed as year-end world No. 1 after Alcaraz’s Shanghai loss

Sinner is only 23. This could go on for a long time, especially with the ATP close to another five-year deal with Italy’s tennis federation that would keep the tour’s richest event in the country through 2029.

Angelo Binaghi, the president of Italy’s tennis federation, the FITP, said in an interview in Turin that Sinner took something that was already happening — a growth in interest in tennis — and made it explode. His rise has coincided with expansion of a free-to-air tennis channel in Italy, SuperTennis, which has even begun carrying the U.S. Open. Conveniently enough, Sinner won that, and lots of less advantaged Italians who might not have been able to pay for television were able to see it.

Now Binaghi has another problem — accessibility. There aren’t enough tennis schools and clinics to accommodate all the children who want to play, and building new courts and facilities is going to take time.

“The bureaucracy,” he said, falling back on the notorious Italian lament. “It’s very difficult.”

Still, Sinner is the answer to Italian tennis prayers in other ways. A few years back, it appeared Matteo Berrettini and his hammer-like serve might have a shot at the pinnacle. He made the Wimbledon final in 2021.

Danillo Baccarani, Francesco’s father, said that the Berrettini power game doesn’t appeal to Italian tennis sensibilities the way Sinner’s does. Here, the tennis hero is Nicola Pietrangeli, the star of the 1950s and 1960s known for his stylish and instinctive play.

“Sinner is more close to someone like (Roger) Federer,” Baccarani said.

And what about the idea that Sinner is somehow less Italian, because he comes from the mountains of San Candido in northeastern Italy near the Austrian border that is closer culturally to its neighbor than to Rome? Sinner’s first language is German.

“A stupid idea,” Baccarani said.

Sinner has managed to turn this into something of an advantage. With the retirement of Dominic Thiem, Austria is without a tennis star. The country has staked some claims to Sinner.

All the hoopla is a something of a goof to him.

“I’m just a 23-year-old man who just plays tennis,” he said in a news conference earlier this week. He walks outside, he sees a massive version of himself on a billboard. He turns on the television, he’s hawking coffee. His father was a chef. His mother a restaurant worker. He was supposed to become a skier.

Jannik Sinner has assumed the mantle of Italy’s most-beloved sportsperson, at least outside of football. (Tallio Puglia / Getty Images)

“I try to get used to it,” he said.  “I’m just trying to play some good tennis.”

Other than some other hotshot besides Alcaraz coming along, there is one thing that could send the Sinner train off course. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is seeking a ban of one or two years in its appeal of his doping case, which it submitted to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in September.

Earlier this year, Sinner twice tested positive for clostebol, an anabolic steroid. Three tribunals convened by the tennis anti-doping authorities accepted his explanation that the substance inadvertently ended up in his system after his physiotherapist used it to treat a cut on his own finger, then gave Sinner a massage. WADA, too, accepts this explanation but believes he should bear some responsibility for the actions of his support team.

Clostebol has become a problem in Italian sport, with numerous athletes in different disciplines testing positive as a result of using healing creams. Memories linger of the doping scandal at Juventus of the 1990s, which went to the highest level of the Old Lady of Turin before Italy’s Supreme Court acquitted the club.

Sinner’s verdict is unlikely to come until 2025 and, even in Turin, it gets lost in the noise from point to set to, thus far at least, the inevitable conclusion.

Gioco, partita, incontro, Sinner.

And the olés strike up again.

(Top photos: Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton)

(Additional reporting: James Horncastle)

As the Denver Broncos prepared to make their third-round pick in the NFL Draft in April, they were ecstatic to see Jonah Elliss’ name still on the board.

Denver coach Sean Payton said earlier this season that the team had a second-round grade on the pass rusher out of the University of Utah. They believed he had the tools to be a Year 1 contributor on the edge, a need enhanced by a spring injury to the prior year’s third-round pick, Drew Sanders.

There was only one problem. Selecting two picks ahead of the Broncos were the Atlanta Falcons. Their general manager is Terry Fontenot, who previously worked in the front office of the New Orleans Saints during nearly all of Payton’s 16 seasons as the team’s head coach. And on Atlanta’s roster was a linebacker named Kaden Elliss, Jonah’s brother and a seventh-round pick of Payton, Fontenot and the Saints in 2019.

“I turned to George (Paton, Denver’s general manager) and I said, ‘Terry’s going to draft the brother; I know it,’” Payton said this week. “They drafted another player and then we were excited, obviously, to make our selection.

The Falcons selected Washington outside linebacker Bralen Trice, who suffered a season-ending ACL injury in the preseason, with the 74th pick. Two picks later, the Broncos took Jonah Elliss.

Payton’s phone immediately buzzed with a text message. It was Kaden.

“I won’t tell you what it said,” Payton said with a laugh, “but I would say the exposure with Kaden really helped us understand the football mindset as it pertained to the next pick.”

Kaden Elliss didn’t spill many details of the exchange, either.

“(I was) just, ‘You got a good one,’” the Falcons linebacker said. “Other things were said, but it is what it is. I’m just so excited he’s in Denver and with Sean (and) a good staff out there. We’ve got family out west so it’s a good spot.”

Two weeks after the draft, the NFL’s schedule was released and a date for an Elliss family reunion was born. On Sunday, when the Falcons visit the Broncos in a matchup of two teams trying to take another step toward the playoffs, Kaden and Jonah will face each other in the NFL for the first time. Both play defense — Kaden as a starting inside linebacker who leads the Falcons with 88 tackles; Jonah as an outside linebacker who has carved a role in the pass-rush rotation and has two sacks — so there won’t be any direct clashes between the two brothers.

Unless …

“We may find a way to sneak in a special teams matchup,” Kaden said.

Atlanta linebacker Kaden Elliss leads the Falcons with 88 tackles through 10 games. (Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)

The brothers are two of five Elliss family members who have reached the NFL. Christian Elliss is linebacker for the New England Patriots and Noah Elliss is a defensive tackle who spent time during the past two seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles and is a free agent. Along with Kaden and Jonah, they are believed to be the only set of four brothers to have played in the NFL. Jonah said Friday he wouldn’t be surprised to see Elijah Elliss, a freshman defensive end at Utah, join the family’s NFL fraternity in the coming years.

“Can’t help but know an Elliss,” Falcons coach Raheem Morris said this week. “There’s a million of them.”

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Their father, Luther Elliss, played 10 seasons in the league as a defensive tackle. The first nine came with the Detroit Lions, who drafted him in the first round in 1995 after an All-American college career at Utah. He played his final season, in 2004, with the Broncos, a fitting career end for someone who grew up in Mancos, Colo. Elliss later became a team chaplain for the Broncos, a role he filled during the team’s Super Bowl season in 2015.

This 1 pm slate is actually very funny because I just watched Elliss 55 try to sack Dak and then watched Elliss 52 try to cover Justice Hill and then I saw Elliss 53 step up to tackle Tony Pollard.

— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) November 3, 2024

During Elliss’ lone season with the Broncos, it wasn’t rare to see the family’s full-sized van pull up to the team’s facility. Luther and his wife Rebecca have 12 children, seven of whom were adopted. With a family that size, competition was inevitable. Sometimes the fiercest races were the ones to the dinner table.

“We’d make up games. We’d play every game under the sun, every sport,” Kaden said. “Sometimes it was football. Sometimes it was soccer or random games we made up.”

Luther’s career served as a road map. Most of the Elliss boys didn’t play tackle football until eighth grade — Kaden snuck in seasons in fifth and seventh grade — but love for the sport that was baked into their collective upbringing grew quickly.

“My dad was obviously able to guide our work,” Kaden said. “So not only working hard but working smart, showing us where we needed to improve, what we needed to do if we wanted to make that step.”

GO DEEPER

Broncos rookie Jonah Elliss steadily improving his pass-rush plan

The matchup between the Broncos and Falcons on Sunday is full of familiar connections. Falcons safety Justin Simmons spent the first eight years in Denver after the team drafted him with a third-round pick in 2016. Thirty of his 31 career interceptions came in a Broncos uniform. He and his wife, Taryn Simmons, rooted themselves deeply into the Denver community through their work with the Justin Simmons Foundation, and the safety was named the team’s Walter Payton Man of the Year nominee three different times. He said this week he’ll be “a Bronco for life,” but his focus Sunday will be helping the Falcons get their seventh win.

“Practicing against him for years is one thing, but to get live bullets is going to be fun,” said Broncos wide receiver Courtland Sutton. “I jokingly told him, ‘Hey, bro, if you see me coming across the middle, just remember we’re friends.’”

Falcons offensive coordinator Zac Robinson, meanwhile, grew up in Denver. He was a Broncos fan whose family had season tickets. He later became a standout football player at Chatfield High School in the suburb of Littleton, Colo.

“Definitely, when I saw we were going to Denver, (my) family got excited,” Robinson said. “The atmosphere is tough to beat. Probably there and K.C. are the top two in the NFL. Looking forward to getting back home.”

Those returns will be special, but reunion games and homecomings happen every week in the NFL. A matchup of brothers, in one of their father’s home stadiums, with more than 30 family members on hand? Not so much.

“I played with one of my brothers in college, but this is obviously different,” said Broncos tight end Adam Trautman, whose locker is next to Jonah’s in Denver and who was previously a teammate of Kaden’s in New Orleans. “It was always competitive with me and my brother, and I’m sure that’s how they’re treating it, too.”

Broncos rookie Jonah Elliss (52) has 21 tackles and two sacks for Denver this season. (C. Morgan Engel / Getty Images)

The Elliss brothers aren’t taking Sunday’s opportunity for granted. But at the end of the day, it’s another competition in a never-ending string of them. Each year, usually during Fourth of July weekend, the family gathers for the Elliss Olympics, an event that spans multiple days and has a rotating list of competitions, from corn hole to board games. The event includes a trophy, emblazoned with the names of the winners, that resides at Luther and Rebecca’s home. Including spouses and close family friends, the competition can include more than three dozen participants.

Trash-talking is an inherent part of the spectacle. Jonah shared this week that he and his fiancée dominate the pickleball competition, a fact that rankled his older brother.

“I think the most someone scored on us in a game to 11 is three or four,” Jonah said. “We’re pretty good. We killed (Kaden). He did not like it.”

Most seem to agree, though, that Kaden sets the pace in the chirping department. So perhaps it’s no surprise the Falcons linebacker, who already owns a head-to-head NFL win over Christian when they met in 2022, delivered the parting words ahead of his matchup with Jonah.

“I’m 1-0,” he said of the Elliss matchups. “We’re going to make this 2-0 this week.”

(Top photos of Kaden and Jonah Elliss:
Todd Kirkland and Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)

Dyson Daniels went 3 of 16 against the New York Knicks last week. It was amazing.

Let me explain.

First, it was a career-high in shot attempts. Second, he took the 16th even after making just three of his first 15. And he did it with a minute left in a one-point game.

That shot missed, too, but that’s hardly the point. After two seasons in New Orleans, Daniels’ rep upon arriving in Atlanta this summer was that his confidence came and went, and if he missed a few shots, he’d start pulling the ball down and pass up shots entirely. Despite flashing amazing defensive talent, his inability to be a consistent threat on the offense was keeping him off the court.

It wasn’t just that he was shooting 31 percent from 3; it was that his microscopic 12 percent usage rate meant defenses could disregard him entirely. So far, in Atlanta, things are very different. Daniels took the rock with 70 seconds left against New York and made a hard, downhill drive for a pull-up floater that missed. Three makes on 16 attempts. And it didn’t stop him.

Daniels set another career high the next night by shooting 17 times. Two games later, he took 21 shots, scoring a career-high 28 points in Atlanta’s Trae Young-less upset of world champion Boston on the Celtics’ home court.

Daniels’ defense has drawn all the attention in the early season, and deservedly so. But the underrated part of his breakout season has been the confidence he’s played with on offense, shrugging off misses and coming back to let it rip on the next trip. The record scratches from New Orleans are a thing of the past.

Hawks coach Quin Snyder talked about this topic and how it applied to Daniels before the season. It’s worked out almost exactly as he said then.

“I think a lot of it is situational,” Snyder said. “Usually guys are more confident when they can anticipate that they’re going to have a shot. If you get the ball and then you want to decide, (in) that moment, your conscious mind takes you out of rhythm. Especially for younger guys, if they’re concerned about whether the ball is going to go in or not, that’s not the best thing. It’s more than a green light. It’s understanding situational shooting, knowing that it’s not only a green light but you have to take that shot. It’s important for you to shoot that whether you make or miss.”

Snyder has seen a version of this movie before, coincidentally, with another young Australian who was reluctant to shoot. He had Joe Ingles in Utah when Ingles was a gun-shy rookie; Ingles didn’t shoot more than five times until the 15th game of the season and finished with a 12.9 usage rate. Three years later, he launched 464 3s for a team that went to the second round of the playoffs.

Ingles saw all the flashes from Daniels this summer with the Australian national team when both were preparing for the Olympics. It’s no surprise to him that Daniels is thriving under Snyder.

“The last few summers, we would see the talent, the IQ, the defensive ability and all those different things,” Ingles said. “Then this summer he played a lot (in the Olympics), guarded the best player every time, and offensively would show the poise and playmaking. I was really impressed. And he’s a really good kid who works his ass off.

“Knowing Quin, he will unlock some offensive ability and potential, for sure. He did it with me, he’s done it with a lot of the players I’ve been around. He makes you want to run through a wall for him. For me, coming over (to the NBA) at 27 and doing what he was able to do with me, he was a huge part of that, and I think he’ll give that to Dyson.”

We should talk about the defense too. Daniels has been a terror on that end, leading the league in deflections and steals by staggering margins while adding size and physicality on the wing at 6-foot-8. To put in perspective just how much of a pest he’s been, Alex Caruso led the league last year with 3.7 deflections per game. Daniels is averaging 7.6.

Go through the clips of all his thievery and you’ll see he’s earned his steals in an impressive variety of ways — overplaying passing lanes, deflecting his own man’s passes with “high hands” and using a karate-chop strip move, for instance.

He’s also straight-up embarrassed a few guys by picking their dribble at midcourt. Like this:

Daniels has 23 steals in his last four games; only three other players have that many all season. Suffice to say Atlanta has never had a wing defender like this before, and while it hasn’t impacted the overall results on that end (the Hawks, as ever, are 26th in defense), the team’s stats are much better in Daniels’ on-court minutes, even though most of them are shared with Young.

More importantly, Daniels has also warmed up to the “Great Barrier Thief” nickname recently. We need to make this stick, people!

As long as Daniels keeps letting it rip with confidence on the offensive end, the Hawks can benefit from his awesome turnover creation on defense. He has a great shot of being named to the All-Defense team and will likely be a strong contender for Most Improved Player, too, making him arguably the most significant emerging player from the season’s opening weeks.

Daniels is the most important one, but here are nine other names you need to know from the season’s first few weeks:

Wahoowa! While several Memphis players warrant mentioning here as the back half of the roster has helped keep the Grizzlies afloat amid myriad injuries, Huff stands out. A lightly regarded two-way signing before the season, he’s already gained a promotion to the main roster following a series of eruptions off the bench, even earning a start in Wednesday’s game against the Los Angeles Lakers.

Huff isn’t a post threat, but he makes an offensive impact in two entirely different ways. First, he’s a rim-runner who gets out in transition and can finish lobs, specializing in reverse dunks like in the clip below.

JAY HUFF SIGNATURE REVERSE SLAM pic.twitter.com/Z0r31y5x1s

— eric (@EricTweetsNBA) November 14, 2024

However, he also doubles as a half-court 3-point threat, having made 43.8 percent from distance so far this year. Huff gets them up, too, jacking 48 attempts in his 185 minutes. The 7-foot-1 center also offers rim protection, with a stellar 11.6 percent block rate and, notably, a dramatically reduced foul rate from his previous stops in the NBA.

That package has proven especially effective on an up-tempo Memphis team that has leaned into its depth and pace to stay afloat. At age 26 and on his fourth team, Huff looks like a keeper as a backup center and is under contract for three years beyond this one.

Wahoowa! (This won’t be all Virginia guys, I promise.) You could pick multiple names from this Cavs squad rampaging through the schedule; Caris LeVert also has been a monster, most notably.

But for sheer out of nowhere-ness, we have to go with Jerome, who signed a minimum deal in Cleveland two summers ago and then missed all of last season after ankle surgery. I’m not sure what the Cavs’ hopes were for him this season, but I suspect “leading an undefeated team in PER” would be at the high end. Jerome is in his sixth season and has never played more than 48 games or 816 minutes in any of them, but that’s about to change dramatically.

One of the keys has been a deadly floater game; more than half his 2s have come between 3 and 16 feet, per Basketball-Reference.com, and he’s made nearly two-thirds of them. Add in an accurate 3-point shot (a scalding 57.7 percent so far) and top-notch reads as a passer (more than three dimes for every turnover), and he’s been a massive plus captaining the Cavs’ second unit.

Perhaps more shocking than the offensive output has been Jerome’s impact defensively. Despite his notorious slowness afoot, he’s pilfered 18 steals in just 211 minutes. That’s the league’s third-highest theft rate among players with at least 200 minutes, trailing only Daniels and Caruso.

I ran into a front-office executive at the Champions Classic who witnessed Powell’s 29-point second-half eruption in Oklahoma City on Monday, and he riddled me with this question: If they selected the teams today, would Powell make the Western Conference All-Star team?

Nooooorm has been that good, averaging 24.9 points per game with 50/49/83 shooting splits to help keep a limited Clippers offense functioning. In particular, he’s been devastating walking into 3s off the dribble.

Norman Powell stock continues to rise 📈

He helps lead the Clippers to a W with 31 points & 12 rebounds 🔥 pic.twitter.com/cOWo7n5bfC

— NBA TV (@NBATV) November 9, 2024

Never mind that he’s 31 and in his 10th season; Powell is having a career year and has been the Clippers’ go-to guy at times, with a 26.6 usage rate that nearly rivals teammate James Harden’s. And it’s not just the scoring: Powell is posting a career high assist percentage and has a steal in nine straight games.

Forgotten as the Pacers made an Eastern Conference finals run while he sat out injured last spring, the 2022 lottery pick has come back with a vengeance.

I was fortunate enough to be in Indy to witness Mathurin’s origin story, so to speak, when he replaced an injured Andrew Nembhard against the Celtics and finished with 30 points in a surprise win. While the Pacers’ offense has otherwise remained shockingly anemic in the early going, Mathurin has been a revelation. He’s averaged 24.0 points per game over his last seven contests while starting the most recent six.

An electric downhill driver, especially going left, Mathurin draws fouls for sport (10.1 free-throw attempts per 100 possessions), but he’s not just trying to scam trips to the line. He also has an accurate long-range game (46.5 percent on 3s thus far) to keep defenses honest and has enough pull-up game to be a true three-level threat.

Bennedict Mathurin helps us get within four late in the fourth quarter. he’s up to 23 points and 11 rebounds. pic.twitter.com/0y4tmDcD2i

— Indiana Pacers (@Pacers) November 14, 2024

The 6-6 guard also leads the team in rebounding, which is a wee bit of an indictment of the Pacers’ frontcourt, but a 12.3 percent rebound rate from a perimeter player is impressive on any level.

Nit-pickers will note Mathurin still has his shortcomings, being prone to ball-stopping, dribble blindness and periodic defensive lapses, but if he keeps scoring this efficiently and this often, it’s easy to look past those warts. Mathurin has been Indy’s best player in the early going, and one presumes he won’t be coming off the bench when Nembhard returns.

Guess who leads Golden State in 3-point attempt rate? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not Stephen Curry. Hield not only has the highest rate of attempts on the Warriors, but also leads the entire NBA in made 3s per 100 possessions with 7.5.

After being an afterthought in the Philadelphia 76ers’ offense late last season, Hield has been a prolific and accurate launcher for the Warriors, playing some of the best basketball of his career at 31. Nobody will complain as long as he’s making 46.7 percent of his 3s, which he’s done so far, in addition to knocking down 54.9 percent of his 2s. For good measure, he’s setting a career high in rebound rate too.

Hield is only playing 24.5 minutes a night in the Warriors’ egalitarian system, but he’s second on the team in scoring and PER and a big reason Golden State ranks third in the NBA in offensive efficiency — the Warriors were eighth each of the last two seasons. On the first season of a four-year deal that pays him an average of $9.4 million, he’s been one of the best signings of the 2024 offseason.

After missing most of last season because of a stress reaction and other issues, Eason has roared back to be arguably Houston’s most effective player in the first dozen games. Coming off the bench, he’s energized a Rockets second unit that has helped overcome blah output from the starting group en route to an 8-4 start. Units featuring Eason and partner in chaos Amen Thompson have outscored opponents by 17.6 points per 100 possessions so far, with a sterling 100.2 defensive rating.

What’s notable is that Eason is a more efficient version of his usual mayhem, shooting 62.8 percent on 2s after making fewer than half across his first two seasons. He’s doing it by getting all the way to the rim and finishing; watch here, for instance, as he sizes up Nic Batum and puts him on a poster Wednesday.

Tari Eason shows his athleticism with this one handed dunk to walk away with the Dunk of the Night. #NBAAfrica pic.twitter.com/Z1VptEMoIt

— NBA Africa (@NBA_Africa) November 14, 2024

Eason’s play, along with that of Thompson, could eventually force the Rockets into some difficult decisions on lineups and salaries. The two have been dramatically more effective than Houston’s starters, and Eason will be up for a contract extension after the season. For now, however, let’s enjoy the show.

Agbaji’s jump shot has always looked like a thing of beauty in pregame warm-ups, but in his third season, it’s finally translating to games. After making just 34.6 percent from 3 in his first two seasons in Utah and underwhelming in a late-season cameo after the trade deadline, he’s emerged as a solid starter in Toronto by knocking down 47.9 percent from distance in the early part of the season.

Accuracy is paramount for Agbaji since he’ll never be a high-usage player, but he’s also made an impact inside the arc by focusing more on transition and rim attempts and ditching the other stuff. He’s only taken two shots between 10 feet and the 3-point line all season but is shooting 64.4 percent at the rim.

On the third year of his rookie deal, Agbaji establishing himself as a 3-and-D guy would go a long way toward getting his deal extended this summer. His emergence has been much needed on a paper-thin Raptors roster reeling from other injuries at the wing.

While the rest of the Bucks’ bench has been a wasteland, Green has delivered in his role in the most pickup-legend way possible: by never taking a 2-point shot. His 53 3-point attempts without a 2 to start the season is an NBA record, (sorry, Garrison Mathews), one that finally came to an end when he missed a paint attempt Wednesday against Detroit.

Watching Green shoot, it’s hard to believe he’s so accurate. The undrafted guard from Northern Iowa tucks the ball all the way behind his head and then lets it rip, but the results speak for themselves. He shot 42.6 percent from 3 in the G League in 2022-23 and is at 42.7 percent for his NBA career to go with 92 percent from the line (he shot 90 percent in four college seasons). With a 50 percent mark from 3 this season on a team otherwise short on floor-spacing options, Green has established himself as an important piece as Milwaukee tries to recover from a woeful start.

He’s also important on another level — as a cost-controlled piece on a minimum deal for another season, something the tax-constrained Bucks desperately need on their books.

Lost in the insanity of Miami’s bizarre loss to Detroit on Tuesday was the play of Herro in nearly leading the Heat to an impossible comeback. Down nine in the final 90 seconds of regulation, he made three straight 3-pointers to send it to overtime, part of a 40-point eruption that included 10 made 3s.

That wasn’t an outlier, either. Through 10 games, Herro has been Miami’s best player, averaging 24.9 points on breathtaking shooting splits: 54.7 percent on 2s and 47.9 percent on nearly 10 3-point attempts a game. That adds up to scalding 66.8 true shooting percentage, a notable change for a player who historically has been middle of the pack on this measure.

In a related story, Herro has basically excised the long 2 from his shot diet. He took more than a quarter of his shots between 10 feet and the 3-point line in 2023-24; this season, that’s only 7 percent of his output, according to Basketball-Reference.com.

Here’s one middie he did make, though, a difficult leaner with 1.8 seconds left in overtime to tie the score Tuesday … a play forgotten in the craziness that happened immediately after.

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(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb/ The Athletic; Photos: Bart Young, Eric Espada / NBAE via Getty Images)