The roots of everything that the Suns are now — a winning team, a franchise with championship hopes — date to 2015, when Phoenix made Devin Booker the 13th overall pick of the N.B.A. draft. For his first couple of seasons in Phoenix, he played in relative anonymity. The Suns were a terrible team. The […]

Lauren Ash grew up in a baseball household in Belleville, Ontario, a two-hour drive from Toronto. When the Blue Jays won their first World Series, in 1992, a 9-year-old Ash became a lifelong fan. She moved to the city at 18, and sitting in the 500-level at SkyDome with friends became a ritual. Getting the […]

“I still feel he’s going even to another level,” Manager Aaron Boone said of Taillon, who is only nine starts removed from his second Tommy John surgery, in 2019 while with Pittsburgh. “I keep being so encouraged by what we’re seeing.” The Yankees’ starting rotation, which came into the season with several question marks, did […]

LIVERPOOL, England — The goals arrived just as the nerves were fraying and the anxiety mounting, just as the 10,000 fans inside Anfield for the first time in a long time were recalling that watching soccer, live and in the flesh, is not how memory might have made it seem. It is not all celebration […]

“As a Knicks fan, you’re signing up for basically insanity,” Baker said. “The beginning of the year, as a Knicks fan, you’re like, ‘Yo, we’re going to the finals.’ You have no rhyme or reason to say that. You have no player that’s going to take you to the finals, but you just go in […]

VERCELLI, Italy — Sit with Giovanni Pellielo for a while and the stories start to pile up. Stories about his trapshooting triumphs and the asthma that once threatened his life and a faith so deep that he once built a church in his home. Tales of his visit to the Vatican, where the pope reassured […]

The N.B.A.’s play-in tournament nearly fell flat with a series of blowout games until LeBron James and Stephen Curry rescued the postseason appetizer experiment with a dynamic one-off between the Los Angeles Lakers and Curry’s Golden State. Now, the real games are here, with the Knicks and the Nets both earning a seat at the […]

TORONTO — Canada’s two most populous cities, Montreal and Toronto, are separated by 335 miles and by language, culture and politics. But hockey has always pulled them together, except at playoff time. The Canadiens and the Maple Leafs have played in 15 N.H.L. postseason series going back to 1918 and five times in the Stanley […]

At the beginning of May, just a few days after the N.F.L. draft, the N.F.L. Players Association hosted a conference call for hundreds of rookies and their agents. The call was ostensibly to welcome the players to the league and explain their benefits as union members. But during the discussion, J.C. Tretter, the union’s president, […]

And there’s no need to dive in headfirst. Hannah Finchamp, a member of the 2020 U.S. Olympic mountain biking team, recommends starting slow and working up to more challenging trails. “You don’t want to spend your whole ride afraid! Start with the fire roads and smoother trails; you can increase the difficulty as you feel […]