Pep Guardiola bought himself a Boston Celtics hoodie, flipped his baseball cap backwards and took his courtside seat in the TD Garden arena for the opening game in the best-of-seven NBA Finals.

“He sat right by me,” Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca says. “I talked to him a lot.”

It wasn’t like pulling teeth, which is how Guardiola describes facing Pagliuca’s Serie A team, Atalanta. The Manchester City manager has likened playing against them to an agonising appointment with the dentist because opposite number Gian Piero Gasperini never allows his opponents to sit comfortably.

Guardiola and Pagliuca could have swapped more stories about Italian football.

The City manager used to play for Brescia, Atalanta’s biggest rivals, and he could have told Pagliuca about the time his Brescia came back from 3-1 down against the Bergamo side to draw 3-3 in 2001; the lore of the Roberto Baggio goals and the sending-off of his old coach Carlo Mazzone, who made a legendary run under the Atalanta end to give some abuse back after Brescia’s equaliser.

“We just had a conversation about Atalanta,” Pagliuca says. “About how he respected the organisation and we respect what he’s done. Our (the Celtics) coach, Joe Mazzulla, is a huge football fan.”

Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola is in Boston to support the Celtics in the #NBAFinals

🎥 @ESPNFC pic.twitter.com/fdvKW2GINu

— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) June 7, 2024

Mazzulla had been Guardiola’s guest at the City Football Academy last spring and was a spectator for a 1-0 win against Brentford at the Etihad. This was him returning the favour. “Joe studies football strategy and applies how it impacts basketball strategy,” Pagliuca says.

In the warm-ups before Game One against the Dallas Mavericks, Mazzulla and Guardiola discussed strategy on the court. Their gestures were classic air-chess. If I move here, what reaction does it provoke? How should our rest defence look when playing this kind of attack?

“Joe has really pushed the up-tempo style, trying to get as many shots off as possible,” Pagliuca elaborates. “We’re getting shots off quicker and we’ve also increased our offensive rebound capabilities.

“Many coaches, as they do in soccer, take a more defensive approach, saying the best thing to do is run back quickly after a shot is missed because you don’t want to give up an easy basket. But we have various guys crashing the boards and that’s been very successful. When we do the math, we come out on top, because every time we get an extra couple of points by crashing the boards, that makes up for some times when we wouldn’t be back on a fast break.”

“We’ve grown to have a great relationship… I like to think that we make each other better.”

– Joe Mazzulla on his relationship with Pep Guardiola pic.twitter.com/fjViOst05G

— NBA (@NBA) June 8, 2024

Covering off those fast breaks and maintaining offensive pressure was one of the learnings Mazzulla took from his conversations with Guardiola. “That’s something Pep has been helping me with: spacing,” Mazzulla explained. “It’s crucial in transitions how you move the players.”

Mazzulla also talks to Gasperini, as much as a Rhode Islander and Piedmontese can make themselves understood. “They met in Boston,” Pagliuca reveals. “The biggest similarities are in their very creative approach to the game.”

The Celtics went on to win their first NBA championship since 2008. No one could say they didn’t deserve it. They had the best regular-season record in the NBA, the best home record and were one game away from the best on-the-road record. They won 12 of 14 games in the first three rounds of post-season play, then saw off Dallas in five in the finals.

When asked about majority owner Wyc Grousbeck’s decision to put the team up for sale shortly after they had won their 18th NBA title, Pagliuca pointed The Athletic to a statement in which he said: “I hope to be part of the Celtics moving forward and will be a proud participant in the bidding process that has been announced today.”

In attendance for Game Three in Dallas was Ademola Lookman, Atalanta’s hat-trick hero from the Europa League final three weeks earlier. “He jumped on a plane and flew out with a friend of his on the Nigeria team,” Pagliuca recalls. “I got him tickets and he sat with us.”

Lookman, right, with Nigeria team-mate Joe Aribo and Celtics player Jayson Tatum (Instagram/Ademola Lookman)

For Pagliuca, also co-chairman of Bain Capital, it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that, within the space of a month, his two sports teams made memories that will last lifetimes. That’s spacing of a different kind; less strategic, more future nostalgic. “I’m still in shock. I still don’t know if it happened,” Pagliuca says, still trying to process it.

It’s poetic in a way: a Celtics co-owner watching his other investment, Atalanta, in Dublin of all places, ending a 61-year wait for a trophy. “It’s magical. I felt like the Ted Lasso of Italy,” he laughs. “I thought I was part of a movie.” A feel-good story.

Atalanta had lost their previous three cup finals under Gasperini, including the Coppa Italia just the week before. It was, in some respects, a little like the Celtics not getting it done in the 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2023 Eastern Conference finals (the NBA semi-finals). People wondered whether this core set of players could run it back and go that extra mile or whether they were destined to remain unfulfilled. After all, Atalanta were playing the team of the moment, Xabi Alonso’s Bundesliga-winning Bayer Leverkusen, a team then undefeated all season across 51 games in three competitions.

But, in the end, Gasperini got his due, as did veterans such as Berat Djimsiti, Hans Hateboer and the injured Marten de Roon, as did the doubted Charles de Ketelaere, Gianluca Scamacca and Lookman, whose hat-trick was the first in any European final since 1975.

Lookman was determined not to be on the losing side this time around. Pagliuca asked Celtics shooting guard Jaylen Brown to send him a video before Nigeria’s Africa Cup of Nations final appearance in February to put him in the right mindset. But the Ivory Coast prevailed that day. In Dublin, however, it was a different story for Lookman and for Atalanta.

“You don’t often get to be a part of a movie with a happy ending like that,” Pagliuca appreciates. “After that, we went back to the hotel, sang songs and had meals with the families. I don’t think the players went to bed until…” Pagliuca pauses. “They didn’t go to bed. They just got on the plane at 8am the next morning…”

Pagliuca, far left, celebrates with the Atalanta squad and staff after their win against Leverkusen in Dublin (Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)

Also on the flight home was the Percassi family.

Pagliuca would not have bought Atalanta without them.

Antonio Percassi, Atalanta’s snowy-haired president, played for the club in the 1970s. He then became a very successful entrepreneur, working on the franchising of brands including Starbucks in Italy as well as building e-commerce platforms for the likes of Gucci. His son, Luca, Atalanta’s chief executive, was briefly a footballer, too, moving to Chelsea in the 1990s along with Sam Dalla Bona, before going into the family business. Pagliuca compares leaning on their expertise to hiring former Celtics player Danny Ainge as that team’s general manager in 2003.

“They had sought us out actually, because they felt like the Celtics-NBA-global experience could help them,” Pagliuca says. He flew to Bergamo and got working on a deal to buy a majority stake in the club. Pagliuca felt it vital to retain the Percassis’ know-how. They took him out to dinner at Da Vittorio, the three-Michelin-star restaurant in nearby Brusaporto, and the rest is history.

“I have pictures of me sitting behind a huge vat of the special spaghetti (the legendary Paccheri) in the copper pan,” Pagliuca recalls.

Most new owners want to put their own stamp on a team. Look at Chelsea, a club Pagliuca bid for shortly after taking over Atalanta. The executive leadership team, coach and squad are completely different from what Todd Boehly and Clearlake inherited just over two years ago. Today’s Chelsea is unrecognisable from the version that won the Champions League in May 2021. Results have, unsurprisingly, deteriorated.

Pagliuca took a different approach at Atalanta. He leaned on the Percassis and stood by the in-demand Gasperini, who attracted interest from Napoli this summer but has stayed. Gasperini recently didn’t deny rumours that one of the reasons he is the longest-serving coach in Serie A is the percentage he gets at Atalanta from the sales of players he develops.

(Chris Ricco/Getty Images)

“We didn’t want to tweak things too much because, as they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just add to it. And we’ve stuck to that,” Pagliuca says.

Atalanta seemed at their zenith when Pagliuca bought in. They’d finished third three times in a row and came within minutes of reaching a Champions League semi-final. Revenue from that competition, a fertile academy and a brilliantly executed player-trading model were allowing the Percassis to invest further in Atalanta’s youth system and turn the Stadio Atleti Azzurri d’Italia into the Gewiss Stadium, a football ground that increasingly has the feel of a leafy villa or long-life spa.

“A big reason to do the investment is you really want to pick (a) fantastic management team and partners, so it made sense to do the deal because the Percassis were incredible operators and really shared the same kind of philosophy that we had about trying to win and doing it sustainably,” Pagliuca says, “because if you don’t do it in a sustainable way, you see many of these clubs fall by the wayside.”

Udinese, for instance, have seen platforms such as Wyscout blunt their edge in scouting and Red Bull’s multi-club network eclipse what they tried to do with Watford in England and Spain’s Granada as sister teams. They were never able to extend two-to-three-year cycles of punching above their weight into the prolonged seven/eight-year stretch Atalanta are now on.

And here’s the thing, this is Atalanta’s weight now.

Between Europa League prize-winning money, Champions League qualification and new partners coming on board, the club brought in close to €200million last year. Divyank Turakhia, an Indian billionaire, has followed Arctos, who have a stake in Paris Saint-Germain, in joining the ownership group. Mazzulla, according to Pagliuca, “is actually an investor in Atalanta”. They are a big club disguised by the history and tradition of a small one.

“In terms of the sustainability of Atalanta, I think that with the way we are capitalised and the success we’ve had, and now Champions League and the increased revenues, you can see us holding onto players longer than in the past,” Pagliuca says.

(Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

He’s talking about the likes of Teun Koopmeiners, who is in the middle of a stand-off over his desire to leave for Juventus at a time when Atalanta are financially stronger than ever. Atalanta are not the Celtics of Italian football (that’s Juventus). They’re big-city adjacent (Milan is less than an hour’s drive away) in an ever more congested football region (Lombardy), which has upwardly mobile clubs in Monza (still owned by the Berlusconi family) and Como (controlled by the Hartonos, billionaire brothers from Indonesia). And yet Atalanta have positioned themselves firmly in Italian football’s elite.

As work on the Gewiss Stadium reaches completion, Atalanta are able, in Pagliuca’s words, “to focus on the football operation”. They don’t need to budget, like the Milan clubs or Roma do, for a new ground.

The bigger, more modern Gewiss won’t be transformative like a new San Siro or Olimpico, but “it’s another piece and it helps in all aspects with getting promotions, with our fan amenities, ticket retention, so it ratchets through every aspect of the organisation. Sponsors love to come. We have the relationship with Da Vittorio (that three-Michelin-star restaurant nearby). It’s a lot better food than in any other stadium in the United States and probably in Italy as well.”

As for Serie A’s faltering domestic TV deal, once the main driver of revenue growth and now the biggest lagging differentiator between it and England’s Premier League, Pagliuca points out: “The league is getting more sophisticated. The international rights are up with the exception of the U.S. and the deal that they cut with some revenue-sharing could be as good as the last deal… If you take the long-term view and the streaming wars are over, the technology is going to increase the amount of money that goes through television, the amount of viewers, the amount of fans, which increases the revenues for all these teams.”

In the meantime, Atalanta just have to keep doing what they do best and optimise it, starting with the European Super Cup tomorrow (Wednesday) against Real Madrid in Polish capital Warsaw, where they’ll be without Scamacca, Giorgio Scalvini, Nicolo Zaniolo and Koopmeiners.

Every year, Gasperini gets asked if this could be the year Atalanta challenge for the Serie A title. He then reminds his interlocutors that they’ve lost context. But is it so outlandish to suggest as much in a league that’s had four different winners in five seasons and in light of the scale of investment Atalanta have received and the winning feeling a new trophy brings?

“That’s a tricky question,” Pagliuca says. “The goal is always to maximise the potential. Winning the Europa League and being in the Champions League, that’s all part of that. And if you take your eye off the ball, that can go away very quickly. So we have to perform and we do that through the academy, the scouting, the stats, the investing and an incredible management team in the Percassis.

“That’s the basic strategy and beyond that, you know, you’re always one injury away from losing an NBA championship or Serie A. Even the best teams are never a lock to win it in Serie A. Look at Napoli. I thought they would dominate this year (the reigning champions finished 10th, 41 points off the title). So the philosophy is similar to the Celtics. It’s to field a team that can win and hopefully you take advantage of that when the breaks come our way.”

That’s what happened for him since May in the Europa League and then the NBA; that rare unbottleable synergy of simultaneous success.

“I don’t know if it’ll ever happen again,” Pagliuca acknowledges. “I just have to be grateful that I was able to be a part of that with all the great people at the Celtics and all the great people at Atalanta.”

(Top photo: Nicolo Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Houston Astros slugger Yordan Alvarez inflicted some physical and financial damage on the Tampa Bay Rays and their stadium Tuesday night. 

The 27-year-old All-Star hit a ball so hard, so far it smashed into the jumbotron at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, causing the massive screen to glitch and bug out, according to multiple reports. 

The Astros held on to beat the Rays 3-2, and Alvarez went hitless in the game. 

Alvarez previously inflicted similar damage to his team’s jumbotron at Minute Maid Park in Houston in 2019. 

At 6-foot-5, 237 pounds, Alvarez has been one of baseball’s most feared hitters since 2019. Over the last four seasons, Alvarez has blasted 126 home runs, third-most in the American League in that span. He is a .298 career hitter with a .978 OPS and 22.2 WAR.

This year, he’s batting .308 with 25 home runs, 64 RBIs, a .957 OPS and a 3.9 WAR in 113 games. He ranks in the 97th percentile in average bat speed and the 95th percentile in average exit velocity in the majors in 2024, according to Baseball Savant, 

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SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN — Now for the question you know you’ve been dying to ask for three weeks about the Team USA men’s basketball “Avengers”: With their gold-medal mission accomplished, which players on this star-studded squad are going to join forces on an NBA team down the road?

With the national team’s rich history of such things, it’s only natural to wonder. The Miami Heat-les trio of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh that teamed up in 2010 had USAB roots, as they grew close while playing together in the 2006 FIBA World Cup in Japan and Beijing Olympics in 2008.

The Golden State Warriors dynasty had a similar story, with Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala and Stephen Curry bonding in Turkey at the FIBA World Cup in 2010 then finding a way to come together six years later (Iguodala and Durant were also together on the 2012 Olympic team in London). Just last week, longtime NBA veteran and ESPN commentator Kendrick Perkins claimed that James Harden, while playing for Team USA at the London Olympics, was strongly encouraged by his superstar teammates to leave his sixth-man role with the Oklahoma City Thunder that summer and pursue a more worthy role elsewhere (he would be the centerpiece of the Houston Rockets by that October).

But the tricky part about this phenomenon, and the thing that makes it so hard to handicap whether we’ll see a super team spawned out of the Paris Games, is that you’d need telepathic powers to figure out if any of these All-Stars are truly thinking about playing together down the road. This sort of process isn’t typically linear, with other developments needing to unfold on each player’s respective NBA squad before those Team USA connections come into play. What’s more, the freedom that comes with free agency, more often than not, plays a part.

Yet when it comes to the relationships that appear to have grown these past four weeks — from Las Vegas to Abu Dhabi, London, Lille and the City of Light — there are a few worth highlighting and monitoring.

But the thing to remember, and the factor that always plays a pivotal part when stars decide to align, is that it all starts with the competitive status of their current team. To that end, we begin with two legends in advanced age who have eight NBA championships between them but whose teams were home by the end of April.

LeBron and Steph

This one gets top billing because of what went down at the February trade deadline, when we learned Curry’s Warriors made an unsuccessful bid to the Lakers for LeBron. That sort of breadcrumb, one that was so fascinating to consider after all the years they’d spent as rivals during all those Cavs-Warriors NBA Finals face-offs, tells you two things that still remain relevant.

1. Curry had given a thumbs-up to the idea, which reflects a level of comfort between the two even before they worked so beautifully together en route to Olympic gold.
2. The Warriors clearly had intel suggesting this was a pitch worth making. At the time, James was approaching his (possible) free agency, and there seemed to be enough questions as to whether he’d want to stay in Laker Land that it led to a conversation between Golden State owner Joe Lacob and the Lakers’ Jeanie Buss.

James signaled he’d rather stay put, and the whole idea died on the vine as a result. But he would go on to sign a two-year, $101.4 million deal, one that includes a player option in the second year and a no-trade clause. Point being, the same Warriors-Lakers dynamics could be there again this upcoming season — especially if the Lakers are struggling in the kind of way that makes James rethink his strategy in these final few years. As a relevant sidenote, Team USA/Warriors coach Steve Kerr seemed to click with James all the way through as well.

There’s one massive problem with that plan, though: Bronny James now plays for the Lakers. It’s hard to imagine LeBron wanting to go anywhere now that his son is wearing the purple and gold. So, could the 36-year-old Curry become so fed up with the diminished help around him in Warriors World that he heads for the exits and somehow pairs up with the 39-year-old James and fellow Team USA star, 31-year-old Anthony Davis?

It seems unlikely, what with Curry’s stated goal of playing his entire career with the Warriors. But he’s a competitor of the highest order, one who just saw his team say goodbye this summer to his beloved backcourt mate, Klay Thompson, this summer while failing in its pursuits of Paul George and Lauri Markkanen. With that backdrop, it’s worth a reminder that he made this ominous comment to Yahoo! Sports’ Vincent Goodwill while at Team USA’s Las Vegas training camp in early July.

“It’s always been my goal, and I’m saying that sitting in this chair right now,” Curry said about retiring with the Warriors. “But like you said, life, and especially life in the NBA, it is a wild environment, and things change quickly.”

In terms of Curry’s contract, he has two seasons left ($55.8 million and $59.6 million) and is eligible to add one more year on an extension this summer. Warriors general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. made it clear what the organization wants, telling our Anthony Slater that Curry can have “whatever he wants” and that he is “pretty confident he will be a Warrior for life.”

Again, it’s nearly impossible to see how these kinds of superstar pairings might get manifested in advance. There’s the Father Time factor to consider as well, as there’s no way of knowing how long James or Curry can stay elite enough to make these sorts of power plays worthwhile.

But this much we know: Curry and James played beautifully together in the Olympics, with James (who was named MVP) consistent throughout and Curry becoming an American hoops hero by saving Team USA in those last two spectacular games.

The fact that they clearly enjoyed each other’s company — constantly goofing around at practices and celebrating with such joy together after the biggest of wins — is of equal importance.

When it was over, after Curry put France to bed with that 3-point flurry and said “Nuit, Nuit” before closing the door, James decided to post the picture that perfectly captured their shared spirit.

KD and Steph

The news conference after the Team USA gold-medal game — with Kerr, Curry and Kevin Durant all raving about one another on the same podium — was the kind of thing I never could have imagined five years ago. It happened from start to finish, with Durant and Curry sharing a mutual admiration society news conference at the start of the Olympics as well.

When Durant left Golden State for Brooklyn in free agency, there was a fair amount of shared baggage from their three years spent together. You don’t have to be Dr. Phil to figure that out, as Durant came very close to winning three consecutive championships — within a torn Achilles tendon, in fact — yet chose to head for the exits. But feelings evolve over time, and Curry and Durant spent the entire Team USA journey sharing the kind of deep reverence that was there during the best of times in their Warriors days.

On Curry’s side, it was notable the first-time Olympian would routinely reference Durant’s three gold medals (now four) and standing as the best Team USA player of all time. Durant, in turn, spoke glowingly about who Curry was, and remains, both on and off the floor.

Yet while the Warriors are clearly on the prowl for another big-time star, and with a known commodity like Durant certainly fitting that bill, Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia emphatically insisted the 35-year-old wasn’t going anywhere in late June in response to speculation of a possible Durant departure.

NBA Draft night is the best. Everyone talking about the drama and storylines, some are right and some are just wrong.
My turn. Phoenix loves Kevin Durant and Kevin Durant loves Phoenix, and we are competing for a championship this year because we have the team to do it. Gotta…

— Mat Ishbia (@Mishbia15) June 26, 2024

But how might Ishbia feel if they fall short again? Or Durant, fellow Team USA member Devin Booker or Bradley Beal, for that matter? Only time will tell, but the Suns’ first-round loss to Minnesota in last season’s playoffs wasn’t the sort of start any of them envisioned in their first season together.

Booker and … Kerr?

When the gold-medal game news conference was nearing an end, after they all fielded several questions about Curry, Durant and James, Kerr grabbed the microphone and announced that he had one more thing on his mind.

“Devin Booker is an incredible basketball player,” said Kerr, who chose to start Booker for every Olympic game en route to him averaging 11.7 points (team-best 56.5 percent from 3) and 3.3 assists. “Nobody asked about him, (but) he was our unsung MVP. I just wanted to say that.”

Curry, in turn, posted Kerr’s quote on his Instagram story and added the caption, “Damn straight!!!” while tagging Booker’s account.

For someone like Kerr, who is typically bound by the NBA’s tampering rules that tend to suppress an opposing coach’s public enthusiasm for another team’s stars, the Team USA environment allows him to speak his mind in the kind of way that could aid a recruiting effort one day. That’s not to say it was his intent, as Kerr seemed deeply genuine about Booker’s contributions. Even still, it’s a pretty convenient way to show a star player like Booker the kind of love he’ll never forget.

What’s more, the truth about the Suns is that rival teams are monitoring the desires of Durant and Booker. The Rockets, to cite one example I reported in late June, are among those teams that have Booker on their wish list.

But again, Ishbia has pushed back hard on this premise that these Suns will fail and he’ll be forced to blow it up amid all that pressure from the unforgiving luxury tax. They’re more invested in Booker than anyone else, with his contract running four more seasons for a combined total of approximately $220 million, and the notion of him being available anytime soon seems very unlikely. To hear Booker tell it at Team USA’s Vegas training camp in early July, he’s every bit as invested in this Suns group as Ishbia.

“I mean, I’ve never seen an owner do something like that before,” Booker said when I asked him about Ishbia’s tweet about Durant. “It just shows you what type of guy Mat is. He’s all in (on) the group that we have. We believe in the group that we have and the talent that we have.

“It’s not easy to win (a title), so I think having that hurt together and that experience together in the playoffs is going to help us moving forward. …Boston went through it (before winning it all in June). Obviously the (Celtics’) addition of Jrue (Holiday last summer) helped out a lot. But yeah, moving forward, you know, you live and you learn, and I think experience is the best teacher.”

The rest

Truth be told, we could workshop these fascinating scenarios all day.

Anthony Edwards and Durant became fast friends who were dynamic together in Team USA’s second unit, so does that mean the 23-year-old Minnesota Timberwolves star might find a way to persuade his favorite player to force a trade to his (frigid) part of the country? Don’t count on it — from either side. After Minnesota’s run to the Western Conference finals last season, and with Edwards’ star on a meteoric rise, it’s so-far-so-good for him with his current core.

Joel Embiid was desperately in need of help a few months ago, but the Philadelphia 76ers are all set for their next push after landing George in free agency and re-signing Tyrese Maxey.

Could Heat big man Bam Adebayo — whose running mate, Jimmy Butler, can be a free agent next summer — find the help he so desperately needs among his Team USA pals? Perhaps, but there are no visible dots to connect just yet.

The list, fanciful though it might be, goes on.

Required Reading

(Top photo of Stephen Curry and LeBron James: Aris Messinis / AFP via Getty Images)