LeBron James’ choice to sign with the Philadelphia 76ers this week closed the book on one of the more persistent storylines of this year’s NBA offseason: the possibility that James could reunite with former teammate Kyrie Irving, potentially reshaping the Dallas Mavericks’ roster in the process. With that scenario now off the table, attention has shifted to what comes next for Irving, Klay Thompson and a Mavericks front office already in the middle of a broader organizational overhaul.

A reunion that never materialized

For weeks, one thread running through James’ prolonged free agency search involved his relationship with Irving, his former Cleveland Cavaliers teammate and 2016 championship co-star. According to ESPN senior writer Vincent Goodwill, James had explored the idea of bringing Irving back to Cleveland as part of his free agency decision. “League sources said James had been angling for former teammate Irving to join him in Cleveland, but the Dallas Mavericks have had no interest in engaging the Cavaliers in a trade, and Irving is believed to be comfortable where he is,” Goodwill reported.

That resistance from Dallas effectively ended any realistic path toward a Irving-James reunion before James ultimately chose Philadelphia over both Cleveland and a possible return to Miami. Fox Sports later characterized the outcome plainly, noting that with LeBron heading to Philadelphia, a Kyrie Irving trade scenario tied to James is now off the board entirely.

Kyrie Irving remains part of Dallas’ plans

Despite persistent trade chatter throughout the summer, multiple reports indicate the Mavericks have consistently kept Irving out of any deal discussions. According to NBA insider Marc Stein, teams calling Dallas about Irving have been told directly that he is not available, a stance that has remained unchanged even as the front office fielded offers on several other veterans. Stein reported that Daniel Gafford, Klay Thompson and P.J. Washington have instead been identified as the Mavericks’ most available players this offseason.

Irving, who is working back from knee surgery in March 2025, remains central to Dallas’ plans heading into the new season, according to ESPN’s Bobby Marks, who described Irving as firmly in the team’s long-term outlook as he continues his recovery. That stands in contrast to the uncertainty surrounding several of his current teammates, whose roles appear more fluid under the franchise’s new leadership.

Klay Thompson’s future in Dallas grows murkier

Thompson, who signed with the Mavericks in 2025 to team up with Irving and Luka Doncic, is now viewed as one of the more likely veterans to be moved before the season begins. According to Stein’s reporting, Dallas would prefer to trade Thompson rather than negotiate a buyout, and the team has been seeking a first-round pick in any deal involving the 36-year-old guard.

Thompson’s production dipped significantly last season, a factor likely influencing his standing on the roster. He averaged 11.7 points, 2.1 rebounds and 1.4 assists in 21.7 minutes across 69 games, all career lows, while shooting 38.3% from three-point range. Despite the decline in output, Thompson passed a notable milestone in January, moving into fourth place on the NBA’s all-time made three-pointers list, a testament to his standing as one of the league’s most accomplished shooters even as his role has diminished.

A franchise in transition

The uncertainty surrounding Thompson, Gafford and Washington comes amid a broader reshaping of the Mavericks’ front office and coaching staff. Dallas hired Masai Ujiri, the executive who built Toronto’s 2019 championship roster, as president of basketball operations earlier this year. Ujiri has since brought in general manager Mike Schmitz, known for his work evaluating draft prospects, and head coach Dusty May, fresh off leading Michigan to an NCAA championship.

According to ESPN’s Bobby Marks, the front office’s priority this offseason has centered on collecting assets and building around reigning Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg, selected by Dallas in the 2025 draft, along with 2026 first-round pick Morez Johnson Jr. That youth-focused build has put several of the roster’s more veteran, higher-salaried players, including Thompson, in position to be moved as the front office reshapes the roster around its younger core.

What LeBron’s decision changes — and what it doesn’t

With James now set to begin his 24th NBA season in Philadelphia rather than Cleveland, the specific trade pressure that had been tied to a potential Irving reunion is gone. That removes one significant variable from Dallas’ offseason calculus, but it does not resolve the underlying questions facing the roster. Thompson’s trade market, Gafford’s availability, and Washington’s standing remain active storylines independent of anything James decided.

Meanwhile, James himself will begin building chemistry with a new Philadelphia core that includes Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey and Jaylen Brown, a roster the 76ers hope can finally deliver a championship after a 43-year title drought for the franchise. Whether Philadelphia’s roster construction shifts further in the coming weeks, potentially involving Dallas veterans in some capacity, remains an open question league-wide as teams continue reshaping their rosters heading into the new season.

For now, the most immediate outcome of James’ decision is clarity rather than upheaval: Irving stays in Dallas, Thompson’s trade market continues independent of any LeBron-driven scenario, and the Mavericks’ rebuild under Ujiri and May proceeds largely as it was already trending before James made his choice public.

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A royal historian says Meghan Markle remains uncomfortable with the terms on which King Charles III appears willing to repair his relationship with Prince Harry, even as the monarch’s recent private reunion with the Sussex family in Gloucestershire signaled the most significant step yet toward reconciliation in years.

A quiet reunion after four years apart

Harry, Meghan and their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, met privately with King Charles and Queen Camilla on July 10 at Highgrove House, the king’s country residence in Gloucestershire, Buckingham Palace confirmed. The gathering marked the first time the whole family had come together since Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022, and the first time Charles had seen his grandchildren in person in more than four years.

The palace described the visit as strictly private and said no photographs would be released, a decision consistent with how the family has handled previous low-key meetings between Harry and his father. The reunion followed Harry’s earlier trip to Birmingham that week for an event marking the one-year countdown to the Invictus Games, the international sporting competition for wounded and ill service members that Harry founded. Notably absent from the Highgrove gathering were Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, a detail that drew its own round of commentary from royal watchers given the strained relationship between the two brothers.

Buckingham Palace’s confirmation of the meeting came after a difficult stretch for Harry on another front: the High Court dismissed his long-running lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Limited, the publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, in the same week.

Expert says reconciliation is happening on Charles’ terms

Royal historian Marlene Koenig, speaking to the Mirror, said the circumstances surrounding the Highgrove meeting suggest the king is choosing to manage any reconciliation with his son carefully and privately, rather than through public statements or media appearances. Koenig pointed to the fact that Buckingham Palace and the royal household appeared to control the narrative around the visit, with no details leaking beforehand, as evidence of that approach. She also said Harry’s desire to reconnect with his home country runs deeper than any lingering tension with Meghan, telling the outlet, “It is inevitable that Harry would want to spend more time in his homeland.”

According to Koenig, Meghan has not shared that same enthusiasm for reintegrating with royal life and its expectations, a dynamic she said has shaped how the couple has approached visits to the UK since stepping back from royal duties in 2020. Koenig also drew a comparison to past royal marriages that broke down, including those of King Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, and Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, suggesting the family has become more attentive to giving younger royals time to build relationships before marriage as a result of those earlier experiences.

Security concerns shaped the visit

The path to the Highgrove reunion was not straightforward. Ahead of the meeting, it remained publicly unclear whether Meghan and the children would join Harry in the UK at all, given his previously stated hesitation about bringing his family to Britain over security concerns. Harry has been engaged in a long-running dispute with the British government over the level of publicly funded protection he receives during UK visits, a fight that included a failed legal appeal in 2025 challenging the government’s decision to reduce his security detail after he and Meghan relocated to California.

According to Britain’s PA news agency, the family ultimately flew in from an undisclosed location in Europe for the Friday gathering, with plans reportedly shifting in the days beforehand. The Sussex family was believed to be staying at Althorp House, the Northamptonshire estate where Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, grew up and is buried, according to the Mirror.

A cautious, incremental thaw

British broadcaster Helena Chard told Fox News Digital that the king’s willingness to see his grandchildren reflects his personal priorities amid ongoing health challenges. Charles has been undergoing treatment since being diagnosed with a form of cancer in February 2024. Chard said the king’s medical situation has shaped how he weighs family relationships, telling the outlet, “family matters more than ever” despite years of public estrangement between father and son.

Royal commentators have also pointed to the broader pattern of contact between Harry and his father in recent years as evidence that any reconciliation remains gradual and largely private. The Highgrove meeting followed an earlier, lower-profile encounter between Harry and Charles over tea at Clarence House the previous September, itself described at the time as their first in-person meeting in roughly a year and a half.

Neither Buckingham Palace nor representatives for the Sussexes have offered public detail beyond confirming that the Highgrove meeting took place, and both sides have generally avoided commenting further on the substance of the visit. Royal watchers say that reticence is likely intentional, part of an approach aimed at keeping any reconciliation out of the public eye rather than turning it into a media narrative.

Whether the Highgrove reunion marks the beginning of more frequent contact between the king and the Sussex family, or remains an isolated gesture tied to Harry’s UK travel for Invictus Games events, remains to be seen. For now, commentary from royal historians like Koenig suggests the relationship continues to be shaped less by grand public gestures and more by cautious, incremental steps taken largely behind closed doors — with Meghan’s own comfort level with that process still, by these accounts, an open question.

Sunday’s New York Times Connections puzzle offered a relatively gentle challenge, according to solvers and puzzle trackers, with one weather-themed category proving the biggest stumbling block for players working through today’s grid. Here’s a full breakdown of today’s puzzle, along with hints for anyone still working through it before checking the answers.

How Connections works

Connections, one of the Times’ most popular daily word games alongside Wordle, presents players with 16 words or short phrases that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four. Each group shares a connection — sometimes a straightforward category, other times a wordplay trick or shared cultural reference — and the puzzle rates each group by difficulty using color coding: yellow for the most straightforward group, followed by green, then blue, and finally purple for the trickiest and most conceptual connection. The game resets daily at midnight in each player’s local time zone.

Today’s category hints

For players who want a nudge before seeing the full solution, today’s puzzle broke down as follows. The yellow group centered on early childhood milestones — moments parents typically celebrate during a baby’s development. The green group involved once-common gadgets and formats that, while nostalgic, would no longer be considered cutting-edge technology today. The blue group gathered different expressions for rainy weather, ranging from familiar phrases to more old-fashioned or regional terms. The purple group, as usual the hardest of the four, hinged on multiple meanings of a single short word rather than a spelling trick, requiring players to think broadly about the many things that can be described as a “shell.”

Today’s Connections answers

With the hints out of the way, here is the complete solution to Sunday’s puzzle:

The yellow group — developmental milestones — consisted of CRAWLING, FIRST WORDS, ROLLING OVER and SOLID FOOD.

The green group — outdated or nostalgic technology — consisted of BLACKBERRY, DISCMAN, DVD PLAYER and PLASMA TV.

The blue group — ways to describe rain — consisted of APRIL SHOWERS, LIQUID SUNSHINE, SCOTCH MIST and WET WEATHER.

The purple group — things that can be called a “shell” — consisted of CARAPACE, GAS STATION, PASTRY CRUST and ROWING BOAT. The connection ties together a tortoise’s carapace, the Shell gas station brand, a pastry shell used in baking, and a rowing shell, the traditional term for a narrow racing boat.

A puzzle that rewarded pattern recognition

According to Forbes contributor Erik Kain, who tracks the puzzle’s daily difficulty rating through the Connections Bot scoring system, Sunday’s grid rated a 1 out of 5 on the difficulty scale, putting it among the easier puzzles the Times has published recently. Kain suggested solving the categories in the order yellow, green, blue and purple offered the smoothest path through the grid, noting the puzzle balanced simple verb-based groupings with trickier conceptual links that became clear only after ruling out the more obvious categories.

TechRadar’s Johnny Dee, who also covered the puzzle, said several of the entries caught him off guard before he worked out the connection, particularly the “shell” theme tying together unrelated-looking words. Describing his early confusion over one of the trickier entries, Dee wrote, “I thought CARAPACE was an Ecuadorian cyclist,” before realizing the word’s more literal meaning as a hard protective shell. He also noted that “liquid sunshine” struck him as an unusual way to describe rainy weather, despite it being one of several regional or colloquial synonyms grouped in the blue category.

Strategy for future puzzles

Puzzle trackers who cover Connections daily generally recommend a similar approach: start by identifying the group that feels most obvious, since locking in a confident answer early reduces the number of remaining words to sort through. From there, players are encouraged to look for structural patterns, such as words that could belong to multiple categories, before committing to their final guesses. Purple groups in particular tend to reward players who look past a word’s most literal or common meaning, since the Times frequently uses that slot for puzzles built around double meanings, wordplay or less obvious cultural references, as Sunday’s “shell” theme demonstrated.

A companion puzzle, Connections: Sports Edition

Sunday also brought a new installment of Connections: Sports Edition, a spinoff of the main puzzle launched by the Times for sports-focused solvers. According to Parade, puzzle number 671 organized its four groups around Ohio-based sports organizations, terms associated with boats, identifiers tied to America’s pastime — a common nickname for baseball — and hockey-related organizations. As with the standard Connections puzzle, the Sports Edition resets daily at midnight and uses the same yellow-green-blue-purple difficulty structure.

Part of a growing puzzle lineup

Connections has become one of several daily games the Times uses to drive its Games subscription business, alongside Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword and the newer Connections: Sports Edition. The core Connections puzzle debuted in 2023 and has since built a dedicated daily following, with solvers frequently sharing their results — without spoiling specific answers — using the game’s colored emoji grid, a format that mirrors the viral sharing behavior that helped make Wordle a cultural phenomenon in the years prior.

Players who want to track their performance over time, or who missed today’s puzzle and want to catch up, can access past Connections grids through a Times Games subscription, which also unlocks the full daily archive across the paper’s other word and logic puzzles.

For now, Sunday’s puzzle closes out as a comparatively easy one by recent standards, according to Forbes’ difficulty tracking, giving players a smoother path to a completed grid heading into the new week.

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