This was Jalen Brunson’s moment. Donte DiVincenzo would make sure of that.

The two New York Knicks sat in front of reporters following Brunson’s Game 1 blowup against the Indiana Pacers, a 43-point performance that has become run of the mill for the All-Star point guard. These days, a Brunson scoring outburst is about as rare as a Tom Thibodeau broken blood vessel.

Brunson has now gone for 40 points in four consecutive playoff games. The only other players in league history to accomplish the same feat are Jerry West, who had a six-game streak, Michael Jordan (four) and Bernard King (four).

As a reporter listed off Brunson’s impressive company, DiVincenzo noted one standout and interrupted.

“Michael Jordan,” he said excitedly, turning to Brunson as a wide smile overpowered his cheeks.

Brunson looked at his buddy as if DiVincenzo were teasing him about a 0 of 20 dud.

“If you know my friends,” Brunson said the next day, “You should know that they’re all a——-. … Usually, they’re all sarcastic and so I just tried to stop him before he kept going.”

The best of friends show kindness only behind each other’s backs. And behind Brunson’s is a shrine of accomplishments that is exciting DiVincenzo more by the second.

Brunson is the first player in NBA history with 40 points and five assists in four consecutive playoff games. He’s just the second guy ever, behind only West, with five straight playoff games of 39-plus.

He’s averaging 36.6 points during the postseason, which leads the NBA, to go with 8.6 assists. The only player to have those numbers for a postseason run was Russell Westbrook, who did it in 2016-17 on far less efficient shooting and in only five games, four of which his team lost.

“I’m so proud of him, just knowing what type of person he is,” DiVincenzo said of Brunson. “He doesn’t take praise and accolades and all that stuff. He doesn’t take it well. He’s always trying to get better. He always knows there’s going to be more doubters, more things to improve on. That’s his beauty as a person.”

The Pacers, who trail the Knicks 1-0 in their second-round series, are witnessing the basketball beauty.

Indiana tossed various defenders at Brunson in Game 1, a 121-117 New York victory. The long, physical Aaron Nesmith manned him to start. Andrew Nembhard, a hard-nosed guard, took over later. Point guard TJ McConnell, who Josh Hart so affectionately referred to as “an annoying little s—” earlier this week, squared up Brunson, as well.

None of it led to much success.

Brunson’s 43 points came on 14-of-26 shooting; he sank all 14 of his free throws. The Pacers were one of the worst fouling culprits during the regular season. It showed.

These are the types of shots the Knicks can expect from Brunson in this series. Indiana’s defenders notoriously stick to potential shooters who line the perimeter. It prevents 3-point attempts, which the Pacers rarely give up. And it funnels drivers into center Myles Turner, one of the league’s premier rim protectors. But it also leaves the middle open.

No one allowed more shots in the paint during the regular season than Indiana did. The trend continued into Game 1, including for Brunson. Fifteen of his shots were inside the paint, many of them in the floater range that Brunson can feast from while neutralizing Turner’s shot-blocking.

Brunson may have gotten hot during the previous series when the Knicks downed the Philadelphia 76ers in six games, but it wasn’t because Philly gave him the middle.

The Sixers surrounded him with long defenders, many of whom collapsed onto him whenever he neared the hoop. Eventually, he figured it out, going for 39 points in Game 3, 47 in Game 4, 40 in Game 5 and 41 in the clinching Game 6.

Few people have reached these numbers — not that Brunson would boast about himself any more than his friends would to his face.

“I understand what’s going on, so it’s definitely obviously pretty cool, and it makes it better to know that it comes off a win most importantly, but honestly no matter what the situation was, whether it was positive or negative, I have to come back and be better,” Brunson said. “Last series, the first two games I was awful, and for me, I do have to be better, so I have to put that in the back of my mind. This is the same thing.”

The Pacers trapped Brunson in moments, but he got rid of the ball quickly. They full-court pressured him, which the Knicks expected, especially since Indiana did the same against the Milwaukee Bucks in Round 1. The strategy is an attempt to tire out Brunson while also bogging down the Knicks offense. If it takes New York a few extra seconds to get into its first action, it won’t be as likely to score.

Yet, Brunson picking apart the Pacers in Game 1 wasn’t despite his team’s success.

The Knicks shot 53.7 percent from the field and 11 of 23 from 3. They dropped 121 points on only 98 possessions, an elite figure.

“The thing that’s impressive, it’s always within the context of winning and his teammates and that’s always the most important thing to him,” Thibodeau said. “And I love his mentality because his mentality is that he’s not satisfied.”

And now, he’s showing up on lists with Michael Jordan — even if he won’t acknowledge the accomplishment and even if he worries his friends will use it as pure jeer fuel.

“He knows what he’s doing but he doesn’t address it. He’s just trying to get better every single day,” DiVincenzo said. “Not being him and looking on the outside, I love it. I sure as hell love it. I will celebrate every day of the week. That’s who he is as a person, not just a basketball player.”

(Top photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

If there were any lingering doubts about the 2024 clique in the elite of women’s tennis, Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina have erased them in the past three weeks.

It’s a couple of days since Swiatek and Sabalenka produced one of the sport’s great matches on Saturday evening, in the final of the Madrid Open.

Swiatek’s 9-7 triumph in a third-set tiebreak left the world No 1 flat on her back on the red clay of the Caja Magica. It left Sabalenka, the world No 2, slumped in her chair, a towel over her head and face, the very recent memory of three championship points running through her brain.

She hadn’t lost them. Swiatek had mercilessly taken them from her.

This was two days after Sabalenka had toppled Rybakina in a semi-final duel, in another third-set tiebreak that required 12 points for the Belarusian to complete her grinding comeback, 1-6, 7-5, 7-6(5). And it was two weeks after Rybakina had knocked out Swiatek in a semi-final in Stuttgart that also went three sets — at a tournament Swiatek has owned for two years.

These women are thisclose right now, and they know it. In such rivalries, wonky measurables like who hits the more powerful forehand or finishes a higher percentage of points at the net don’t determine who wins and who loses as much as intangibles. It becomes a question of who can execute the best shots on the biggest points and, lately, all three of them have done it. In 2024, the top of women’s tennis is tighter than ever.

GO DEEPER

Tennis’ top women say the sport is broken. This is why

“It was more about, you know, who’s going to be less stressed and who’s going to be able to play with more freedom,” Swiatek said in the aftermath of Saturday’s mayhem.

“For most of the match, she played more, like, I felt like some decisions were pretty… how to say it… like, courageous. I was sometimes, you know, a little bit back. So at the end, I just wanted to not do that and to also be courageous.”

This was that rare, special tennis where both players play at their peak at the same time, for long stretches, with a title on the line. A little while after the sting of the initial disappointment, Sabalenka knew what everyone watching did — that she played about as good a match as she could, that nearly every point was a coin-flip, that she had been part of one of the greatest women’s finals ever.

“She just played a little bit better on those key moments,” Sabalenka said. “That’s it.”

Men’s tennis went through nearly 20 years of three guys winning just about everything — Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, with Andy Murray making it a four-way battle during a chunk of the 2010s.

If she can figure out her serve, Coco Gauff could be crashing the current three-way battle at the top before too long. She’s actually world No 3, one place ahead of Rybakina, but hasn’t managed to hit this trio’s heights consistently since winning the U.S. Open by beating Sabalenka last September; in 2024, the other three have forged past her.

It’s been a while since women’s tennis had something like this.

Serena Williams had some worthy adversaries over the years for certain periods — her sister Venus, Justine Henin, Kim Clijsters, Victoria Azarenka — but a sustained troika at the top never really evolved. Since 2017, 18 different women have won 24 Grand Slam titles. The repeat champions – Simona Halep, Naomi Osaka, Ashleigh Barty and Swiatek — have never played the same opponent twice in a Grand Slam final.

Swiatek, Rybakina and Sabalenka are also waiting on that. The only time two of them have met in a final was at the Australian Open last year, with Sabalenka prevailing over Rybakina, again in three sets, in arguably the highest-quality women’s final we’d seen before Saturday in the Spanish capital.

Sabalenka has a 6-3 career win-loss record against Rybakina (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Maybe that is about to change. Judging from what happened on Saturday, and what has been happening for most of the last two years, there’s a decent chance it will.

“We push each other,” Rybakina said after her loss to Sabalenka, a match in which she was a forehand sitter in the front of the court away from likely locking it up. “We push each other to improve.”

This dynamic will be familiar to fans of that Big Three/Four era in the men’s game, which turned into what tennis writer Matthew Willis accurately coined an ouroboros, each meeting between them, and the different stylistic and psychological battles therein, taking the players involved to greater and greater heights, further and further away from the rest of the field.

This all could last 10 minutes, or 10 years. Sabalenka, who is from Belarus but largely lives in the U.S. city of Miami, Florida, turned 26 on Sunday; Rybakina, Russian by birth, Kazakh by nationality, is 24; Swiatek, the first true great from Poland is 22. (Gauff is 20, and improving every year.)

Injuries, the strain of a relentless schedule, a new crop of young talent, a back-in-form Osaka… many things could render this triangular rivalry obsolete very quickly. It may not even fully develop, with Swiatek having streaked ahead in rankings and titles, collecting 18 in a three-year period in which Sabalenka has four and Rybakina six.

GO DEEPER

Iga Swiatek’s 100 weeks as world No 1: The streak, the slams, the bagels

At the moment though, there is something irresistible about the dynamic between these three athletes, who all bring something different onto the court at first glance, but also subtly carry many of each others’ strengths.

The grass suits Rybakina over Swiatek and, marginally, Sabalenka (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Sabalenka comes with brute force and unmatched intensity, but also a quickly improving net game and the capacity to swipe a match away that she shares with Swiatek.

Swiatek speeds across the court and through her matches with that frightening efficiency, displaying an innate versatility that the others are still trying to acquire — but her prodigious topspin disguises the sheer speed and force of groundstrokes usually attributed to Sabalenka.

Rybakina’s elegant, effortless power and at times gossamer touch make her glazed-eye calm seem less titanium than Swiatek’s focus, but in reality, like her tactical nous, it is just as immovable.

Where this all goes over the next several weeks as the tour moves to Rome and then Paris for the last and biggest clay events of the year, and then shifts to Wimbledon’s grass, is anyone’s guess. 

Madrid, where the harder court and the altitude make the ball fly, figured to favor Sabalenka and Rybakina, who are power players, over Swiatek, but she remains queen of the clay. This made that title a key triumph for the Pole — the lone big event on clay she had never won.

Now tennis moves to the slower, more traditional clay courts at the Italian Open and the French Open, which she favors. She’s won at Roland Garros three times in four years. That could spell trouble for her foes.

Conditions in Rome and Paris suit Swiatek (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

Then again, Rybakina is the defending champion in Rome. Her breakout win came against Serena Williams in Paris in 2021; Sabalenka was a point away from the French Open final last year before tightening in the crucial moments. She doesn’t do that very often anymore. 

After the clay, comes the grass. Swiatek is still a novice on the surface and is the first one to say so. She has said that, at some point in her career, she will dedicate more time to growing more comfortable with its speed and low bounces, but she has not done it yet.

Rybakina won Wimbledon in 2022. Sabalenka frittered away a lead in the semifinals there last year. Her power is a lot to handle anywhere. On grass, it can overwhelm.

Then it’s back to Paris and Roland Garros for the Olympics, and then on to the hard courts in North America, which should favor Sabalenka, the two-time defending champion on the Australian Open’s hard courts and a U.S. Open finalist last year… though Swiatek is the only one of the three to have won at Flushing Meadows, in 2022.

Swiatek, Rybakina and Sabalenka get asked about this second Big Three stuff a lot these days. Usually, they try to shrug it off. That other Big Three have won 66 Grand Slams and may not be done yet. They are on seven. There’s a long way to go, but it’s where they hope this is all headed.

“I’m really happy to be one of these Big Three,” Sabalenka said Saturday night, when she had come second and was trying to grasp a silver lining.

“It’s really motivating me a lot to keep working and to keep improving myself just so I stay there, and then kind of, like, you know, just be there and get as many wins against them as I can.”

(Top photos: Daniel Pockett; Quality Sport Images; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

The napkin upon which Lionel Messi’s first Barcelona agreement was informally written has gone on sale at auction.

Bonhams — a privately owned, London-based international auction house — are running the auction until May 17, with a starting price of £220,000 ($274.55k), on behalf of Argentine player agent Horacio Gaggioli.

The agreement was reached on December 14, 2000, with Barcelona director Carles Rexach desperate for the club to sign Messi, then aged 13.

Messi had impressed during his two-week trial with Barcelona in September 2000, but the club was initially reluctant to sign such a young, non-European player.

Rexach became concerned that the Catalan club would miss out on the signing of Messi, who had returned to his home city of Rosario in Argentina.

Gaggioli told The Athletic last year that he had informed Rexach in December 2000 that if they could not commit to signing Messi — the teenager would be offered to other clubs, including Real Madrid.

Rexach invited Gaggioli to dinner in Barcelona to make a final decision over Messi, but there was one problem: Rexach did not have time to draw up or print out a contract but needed the relevant signatures on a document that would later become legally binding.

His solution was to take a napkin and write down contractual words which would then be signed by the relevant parties, to signal a legal commitment.

The napkin read: “In Barcelona, on December 14, 2000, and in the presence of the gentleman (the agent, Josep Maria) Minguella and Horacio (Gaggioli), Carles Rexach, technical secretary of FCB, commits under his responsibility, despite the opinion of others who are against signing Lionel Messi, as long as the agreed fees are maintained.”

Rexach signed the napkin along with football agents, Minguella — who had worked on multiple Barca deals in the past, including Diego Maradona — and Gaggioli.

“This is one of the most thrilling items I have ever handled,” Ian Ehling, head of fine books and manuscripts at Bonhams New York said. “Yes, it’s a paper napkin, but it’s the famous napkin that was at the inception of Lionel Messi’s career.

“It changed the life of Messi, the future of FC Barcelona, and was instrumental in giving some of the most glorious moments of football to billions of fans around the globe.”

Messi made his Barcelona debut in 2004 and scored 672 goals for the club in 778 appearances before leaving in 2021 (Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images)

Commenting on the event years later, Gaggioli called it a “marvellous moment”.

“That napkin broke the deadlock,” he added.

“My lawyers looked at it. The napkin had everything: my name, his name, the date. It’s notarised. It was a legal document.

“It’ll be a part of me for the rest of my life. The napkin will always be at my side. I live in Andorra and I’ve kept the napkin in a safe inside a bank.”

On Wednesday, Minguella told Catalunya Radio that the napkin had been in his office for years and that he had offered Barcelona the chance to display it in the club’s museum.

He claims he did not receive a response from Barcelona and that he will now ask lawyers to discover who is the legal owner of the napkin and how anyone can prove that they legally own it to put it for sale.

Minguella has insisted he does not wish to profit from the napkin, but that he would prefer to see it in Barcelona’s museum or that if it is sold, for the money to go to the club’s foundation.

GO DEEPER

Lionel Messi: The evolution of the greatest footballer of all time

GO DEEPER

‘A thuggish flamingo’: Why China turned on Lionel Messi

(Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)