INDIANAPOLIS — There isn’t too much scoring in the NBA — 70-point games and record-breaking team offenses be damned.

The players don’t like to see what happened to Joel Embiid, or even Tyrese Haliburton, but they support the spirit of a league requirement for games played to determine eligibility for awards like MVP.

Clippers or Celtics? Joker, Embiid or even … LeBron? And who wants to be NBA commissioner Adam Silver for a day?

The Athletic again put on its collective hard hat, grabbed a lunch pail and jumped head first into All-Star media day, a savage, unruly affair in which players sit up on a dais, behind a gate, having questions shouted at them by YouTube influencers, goofballs on top of other goofballs’ shoulders, rappers, WNBA players and, yes, traditional reporters.

From the practice court at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, Joe Vardon, Sam Amick, David Aldridge and Mike Vorkunov spoke to 18 players, most of them All-Stars, a couple from the Skills Challenge, 3-Point or Slam Dunk contests, and one second gentleman, to canvas them on who’s the NBA’s best player, the best team and what about the league needs to change.

Not everyone polled answered every question, but they all had plenty of ideas:

Who is the best player in the league?

Nikola Jokić, Joel Embiid — 3
Luka…

LAS VEGAS — This week, the NBA will descend upon Las Vegas in full force. Even for a city used to spectacle, it’s bringing something novel along with it. For the first time in decades, the league will hold real, live, actual — yes, they count — regular-season games in Sin City. It is a step into the breach unlike any other for the NBA.

Professional basketball has come to Vegas before. There have been exhibition games, the 2007 NBA All-Star Game, NBA Summer League, even a few Utah Jazz games in the 1980s, a playoff game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Portland Trail Blazers in 1992, the NBA G League Ignite franchise since 2020 and, for the last six seasons, WNBA games. But the NBA has never put a product on display quite like the one it will on Thursday afternoon when the NBA In-Season Tournament semifinals tip off at T-Mobile Arena.

While it is a seminal moment for the league and the city, it is also one open to much conjecture and forecasting. NBA commissioner Adam Silver has tiptoed around expansion in recent years, and Las Vegas has come up as a potential home for a new franchise. This week will likely do little to silence those rumblings.

In July, Silver called Vegas “our 31st franchise;” now, everyone is waiting to see if Vegas will actually be the league’s…

DENVER — Kevin Love’s wife Kate gave birth to the couple’s first child over the weekend. Love, the Miami Heat’s starting power forward, did not fly with the organization to Denver for Game 5 of the NBA Finals so he could be there for the birth of his daughter, but traveled on his own late Saturday night to rejoin the Heat and resume his effort to be a part of the second team in history to come from a 3-1 deficit to win in the finals.

“When you have a special moment like that, you’re obviously very happy no matter what situation you’re in,” Heat center Bam Adebayo said of Love. “To see the joy on his face for him having his baby, obviously, his wife is healthy and everybody is healthy throughout, that’s the blessing that you get. That’s the blessing he probably needed. That’s great news for all of us that we probably needed.”

Life indeed goes on, even while history hangs over the heads of both teams. The Nuggets are looking for the first NBA title in the franchise’s 47 seasons in the league, and they’ve only lost once since the middle of the Western Conference finals when they were tied 2-2 with the Phoenix Suns.

Denver is at home, where it has lost just once this postseason (to Miami in Game 2) and can celebrate in an unrivaled state of euphoria…