One by one the Dallas Mavericks crammed into a nondescript training room in the Minneapolis Target Center, some still dripping in sweat in their road white uniforms. Almost to a man they stayed silent. What was there to say? One minute they had been in the throes of a mid-January win over the Minnesota Timberwolves. The next, J.J. Barea, the team’s emotional heartbeat, was limping off the floor in the fourth quarter with a flat-footed gait – the hallmark of a ruptured Achilles, basketball’s grim reaper.



After the final buzzer sounded, they had arrived to find him sprawled on the training table, his right leg too withered for him to reach the showers without assistance. They squeezed his shoulder, patted him on the head. The official diagnosis would come the next day, back home in Dallas, but no one in that room needed the ensuing MRI to understand something awful had happened. The only confirmation they required lay before them on that table, crying through a...