The NBA has closed its investigation into Josh Giddey’s alleged relationship with a minor, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. 

Giddey, the sixth overall pick of the Oklahoma City Thunder in the 2021 NBA Draft, was not charged after the Newport Beach Police Department in California announced in January it was unable to find criminal activity. 

“No charges have been filed against Josh Giddey. Our detectives have reviewed all of the available information regarding allegations circulating on social media and were unable to corroborate any criminal activity related to Mr. Giddey,” a spokesperson for the Newport Beach Police said in an email to Fox News Digital at the time. 

ESPN says the league closed its investigation for the same reason. 

Rumors that Giddey was in a relationship with a minor exploded on social media in November after video and photos circulated. It got to the point police and the NBA decided to investigate. 

THUNDER STAR JOSH GIDDEY AVOIDS CHARGES FROM ALLEGED RELATIONSHIP WITH MINOR

Giddey, 21, was seen hugging a female rumored to be 15 in one photo, while another had a caption that said, “just f—ed josh giddy.”

Josh Giddey of the Oklahoma City Thunder celebrates a basket against the San Antonio Spurs during the second half of an NBA In-Season Tournament game at Paycom Center Nov. 14, 2023, in Oklahoma City, Okla. (Joshua Gateley/Getty Images)

Many wondered what the Thunder would do. But head coach Mark Daigneault kept Giddey on the floor based on the information the team had received. Giddey didn’t address any questions regarding the situation.

Oklahoma City became the top seed in the Western Conference this season, though they fell to the Dallas Mavericks in the second round of the NBA Playoffs. 

Josh Giddey (3) of the Oklahoma City Thunder controls the ball against the Phoenix Suns during the first half at Footprint Center Nov. 12, 2023, in Phoenix, Ariz.  (Kelsey Grant/Getty Images)

Giddey averaged 12.3 points, 6.4 rebounds and 4.8 assists this season. 

Fox News’ Ryan Morik contributed to this report.

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The women’s national soccer team hasn’t won an Olympic championship in 12 years, its longest drought ever. Yet for Emma Hayes, the woman tasked to get the U.S. back to the top of the medal podium, memories of the 2012 tournament have little to do with gold medals.

The Games were played in England that year and Hayes’ father, Sid, became enamored with the Americans. So much so that when Hayes took the head coaching job with the Chelsea women’s team that same summer, he urged her to remake the English game in the U.S. model.

She did, hoisting 16 trophies. So with little left to win in England, Hayes became a candidate for the U.S. coaching job when it came open last year — and that led to another conversation with her father just before he died in September.

This time he urged her to remake the American team in the Chelsea model.

“I have a 23-minute voice note, my last conversation with my father, and it was all about 2012,” Hayes said Thursday, midway through her first official day as coach of the national team. “At the end of it he goes, ‘You’re going to take it, won’t you?’

“I almost talked to him like I had the job, even though I didn’t, because I wanted him to go with that thought. By the time October rolled around and I interviewed for the job, I just thought I could hear him in my head the whole time. ‘You’ve got to do it.’ ”

She did, although she had to wait for her contract at Chelsea to run out, which it did last weekend with Hayes winning her fifth straight Women’s Super League title. Now she has less than 10 weeks to prepare the U.S. for another Summer Games, this one in France, where it will face the best field in Olympic history.

Her work will begin in earnest next week when Hayes gathers her first U.S. team in suburban Denver for training camp and the first of two friendlies with South Korea. After that, the she’ll have to choose her 18-player team for Paris.

And after her success in England, she says the challenges of her new job have re-energized her.

“Working at Chelsea took my whole life for the past 12 years and I really wanted a change,” said Hayes, 47, who will reportedly earn close to $2 million a year with the USWNT, making her the best-paid women’s soccer coach in history. “Just driving into the same workplace six days a week, the game every three days, the intensity of all of those things. I couldn’t do that again. Not at this moment in time.

“There’s a different ebb and flow to international football. You don’t get many opportunities to go to an Olympics in your life.”

Hayes, who was born in London, arrived in New York to start her new job Wednesday and immediately took a walk around Central Park. She’s no stranger to the city or the park, having taken her first coaching job with the Long Island Lady Riders of the USL-W League. The team went 11-3-0 and Hayes, just 25, was named the league’s coach of the year.

She would quickly move on to Iona University and the Chicago Red Stars, which then played in the WPL, before returning to England with Chelsea in 2012. But, she said, she always planned on coming back to the U.S.

“My journey has been bottom up. So I have such an appreciation, not just of the landscape, but of my journey,” she said. “We all have dreams. But it’s not often your dreams become a reality. And I always grew up with that notion, this whole American dream concept, that you can come to the country — and as a woman coming from England, trust me, I never felt more supported than I did when I worked in the U.S. — and work my way up through the system to be now be the head coach of your national team.

“I will give absolutely everything I’ve got to make sure I uphold the traditions of of this team.”

Although next week’s training camp will be her first in charge, she said the transition from Chelsea to the national team began months ago with late nights watching NWSL games from England and in regular conversations with Twila Kilgore, the U.S. team’s interim coach.

“I feel like I’ve been able quietly get to know the job without being in the job. And I think that’s really helped,” she said. “I’ve been preparing. All the camp preparation is done, all the sessions are planned, the June schedule is planned out in terms of our meetings. So everybody is clear on what’s going on.”

Hayes said she also plans on meeting privately with every player, giving them a chance to get to know their new coach just as the new coach will get to know each player.

“I want to build trust,” she said. “I want to come from a place where trust is the foundation. I want to build a family in their environment that everybody looks after each other within that. And I recognize the program’s history.

“I have admired so many things that the players have done over the years to advocate, not just for themselves, but for the things and causes that matter most. I don’t want to change those things, but I also want to make sure everybody understands that everything we do, we have to ask ourselves ‘is this helping the team win?’ That’s what my focus will be.”

A focus on getting the team back to the kind of play that made her father a fan, which won’t be easy, Hayes concedes. Not only has the U.S. gone 12 years without an Olympic title, but it bowed out of last summer’s World Cup in the round of 16, its earliest exit ever in a major world championship

“What we saw last summer is how that gap has been closed,” Hayes said. “Sometimes you need something like that as a reminder that what got you here won’t get you there. It’s an opportunity now to to evolve. In world football, especially in Europe, there’s a lot of investment. Teams are at a certain level now that they weren’t four years ago.

“I’m never going to tell anyone to not dream about winning. So go for it,” she added. “But we have to go step by step. If we can perform at our best level, then we have a chance of doing things. But we’ve got work to do.”

It was perplexing last summer when ESPN fired NBA Finals game analysts Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson. It was part of the network’s layoffs that Disney seemingly goes through every couple of years, sort of like an NFL team pruning the books to provide room for future million-dollar spends.

The Van Gundy salary dump particularly did not make sense, as he was maybe the best game analyst in sports with his gym-rat mentality and “Inside the NBA” quirkiness.

In the wake of those moves, ESPN is not nearly as good as it was. With the venerable play-by-player Mike Breen, the Hall of Famer Doris Burke and an on-the-rise JJ Redick, in theory, ESPN should provide an excellent listen, but it takes time to develop NBA Finals-level chemistry.

Breen, Burke and Redick don’t have it. With just four months under their belt together, they don’t come across like a team that should be advancing past the second round. But they will.

Tuesday night, Breen, Burke and Redick will be in Boston to call the Eastern Conference finals before the main event next month, the NBA Finals. Suddenly, the future of what was a stalwart, steady booth for ESPN is again in doubt, as the current group lacks humor and flow. Hopefully, they will acknowledge the Indiana Pacers in this series.

On Sunday, from start to finish, ESPN turned its production of Game 7 of the Pacers-New York Knicks series into a Knicks home broadcast by showing “First Take” host Stephen A. Smith walking into the arena as if he were a player and then having him deliver a Knicks pregame pep talk. During the game, Breen and company focused too much on the Knicks and not enough on the all-time shooting performance by the Pacers. After ESPN showed the best of itself Friday with its Scottie Scheffler arrest coverage, the contrast of Sunday’s NBA performance was embarrassing.

How ESPN got here and where it is going next is an intriguing broadcasting question. Especially with a framework agreement on a new TV deal with the NBA that is expected to keep the league’s biggest event on ESPN’s stage for the next dozen years.

Breen, who turns 63 on Wednesday, remains the anchor. However, in the playoffs, he is too often left trying to do it all on his own, not fully trusting in his new teammates.

With his familiar voice, Breen might be able to carry the trio late in close games, but he is not raising his partners’ levels. Evaluating what he has, he comes across as more of a shoot-first point guard, not only providing the play-by-play but often the analysis, too.

Post-Van Gundy and Jackson, ESPN had a seemingly workable plan. Breen’s good buddy Doc Rivers was available after being fired as the Philadelphia 76ers head coach. With Breen and Rivers, there would have figured to be some strong built-in chemistry.

With the history-making Burke, who will become the first female TV analyst on one of the traditional big-four league’s championships (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL), top ESPN executives Jimmy Pitaro, Burke Magnus and David Roberts had a succession figured out. Roberts even named heirs apparent, as Ryan Ruocco, Richard Jefferson and Redick were anointed the No. 2 team with an eye on calling the finals one day.

Though the NBA did not like Van Gundy’s criticism of its officiating — and complained about it to ESPN — there is no proof that the league ordered his banishment. One concern ESPN had, according to executives briefed on their decision-making, was that Van Gundy would jump back into coaching, which he had flirted with for years.

Mark Jackson, Jeff Van Gundy and Mike Breen talk before Game 2 of the 2022 Eastern Conference finals. The three called 15 NBA Finals together. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

Van Gundy, though, never left during his 16 seasons with the network, while Rivers’ stay at ESPN was almost as short as Bill Belichick’s run as “HC of the NYJ.”

While on the broadcasting job for ESPN, Rivers first started consulting with the Milwaukee Bucks in December, then left to become the team’s head coach in January, embarrassing ESPN after giving it a three-year commitment.

By the All-Star break, Redick, who turns 40 in June, was moved in. He has had an incredible broadcasting run, making many millions as a podcaster and gambling spokesperson and through his ESPN game and studio work.

But as evidenced by his latest venture, an inside-the-game podcast with LeBron James, Redick’s post-playing passion might mirror that of Rivers. His game analysis is more coach-like than conversational.

After a brief flirtation with the Charlotte Hornets’ coaching job, he is a top candidate to join James’ Los Angeles Lakers. Following Van Gundy’s departure, ESPN has a second analyst who could go through with the broadcasting crime that Van Gundy was charged with but never committed. Until if and when Redick leaves, he is on the call with Breen and Burke.

It doesn’t sound as if Breen, Burke and Redick dislike one another; they just don’t finish each other’s sentences. Heck, half the time it feels as if Burke and Redick barely start many of their own. It’s a lot of Breen.

Breen, Van Gundy and Jackson called 15 NBA Finals, which allowed them to develop a comfort level with one another and the audience. Breen’s “Bang!” receives the shine — and it is a strong signature call — but it is his rhythm for the action and his inflection at the right time over 48 minutes, denoting whenever something special happens, that stand out.

If you close your eyes and just listen to Breen’s emotion in his calls, you can tell where a play stands in excitement on a 1-to-10 scale. That is why, in crunchtime, ESPN should still be fine.

It’s when the booth needs to shine in light moments or blowouts that Van Gundy and Jackson are missed.

Jackson was far from perfect — last year, he inexplicably left Nikola Jokić off his All-Star ballot — but he had his schtick, most notably the phrase “Mama, there goes that man!” He could hit some 3s off the ball from Breen and Van Gundy.

Van Gundy’s dismissal, though, was a head-scratcher. With a headset on, he was always in triple-threat position: keen analysis, a looseness to say anything and humor.

Van Gundy has moved on and is now a senior consultant with the Boston Celtics. ESPN is still paying him. Maybe it could ask him to come back for a series or two.

(Top photo of JJ Redick, Doris Burke and Mike Breen: Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)