In the NBA, it’s already next season.

The offseason, technically, might have lasted for only about an hour. The Boston Celtics won the NBA Finals on Monday night, and when the clock rolled over to Tuesday morning, teams — in many cases — could start talking to their own free agents.

The on-court games are over, for now. Let the off-court games begin.

“This is a business,” Miami Heat President Pat Riley said when his team’s season ended last month, “as much as it is anything else.”

The champion Celtics and Jayson Tatum can agree on an extension that will be worth a record $315 million, though that record is probably going to get smashed annually over the next few years. There’s an Olympics that will have tons of NBA representation. The Los Angeles Lakers and Cleveland Cavaliers still need to hire head coaches.

LeBron James, who plays (for now at least) for the Lakers and used to play for the Cavs, can be a free agent. His oldest son Bronny James may be about to enter the league as a rookie, there’s a draft that starts on June 26, and the Atlanta Hawks hold the No. 1 selection — the Timberwolves are set to pick 27th and 37th overall — in what will be one of countless dominoes to fall this summer.

“I really enjoy our process that we’ve built out and the people that we’ve done it with,” Hawks general manager Landry Fields said. “At the end of the day, you all will be the judge of whether that was the right pick or not. For me, it’s more looking at where are we at, what was our process, how are we assessing this current player and just rolling with it.”

The new rule, part of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, saying that teams can talk to their own free agents before the June 30 start of free agency means that some deals can be agreed to — but not announced — even earlier than usual. Deals cannot be signed until July 6, in most cases. The penalties for rule-breakers on those fronts will be severe: fines of up to $2 million, forfeiting of draft picks and suspension of team personnel involved in violations are among the NBA’s options.

Some players will get a few million this summer. Some will get many millions. The creativity of teams and their salary-cap gurus will be tested this summer, as always.

“You have to put a pencil to the bottom line,” Riley said. “And then also you have to pencil in what the cost is going to be in the collateral damage of going over the first apron, the second apron and then the repeater tax.”

Meanwhile, the NBA is going to secure billions before long. Billions and billions. The biggest deal — series of deals, really — in league history is likely about to close, that being the new media rights packages that the league has been negotiating for some time.

The current deals with ABC-ESPN and Turner Sports expire after next season and the NBA has been talking with NBC, ESPN and Amazon, among other networks and platforms, about what comes next. The numbers are staggering: 11 years and more than $70 billion is the expectation, both dwarfing the current nine-year, $24 billion deal.

“The global nature definitely factors into the discussions,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said. “As all of the media companies, even the traditional ones, move towards streaming and have primary or adjacent streaming platforms. Those platforms are increasingly global. And their ability to reach our fans around the world is a critical component of these discussions.”

It’s a mix of everything right now, some contracts that will extend for a decade, some that won’t last past the end of Summer League in Las Vegas next month. There are big questions: Will Golden State keep its core together? Will San Antonio take a big swing to place more talent around rookie of the year Victor Wembanyam? Where will James go? Will Miami give Jimmy Butler the extension he seeks? Will Donovan Mitchell stay in Cleveland? And on and on and on.

The only real certainties are these: There are 29 teams chasing the Celtics, and everyone is looking to get better. It starts with the draft, then free agency, and plenty of people around the NBA think this will be a summer filled with trades, as well.

“Good players are really hard to find; like, super hard to find,” Oklahoma City general manager Sam Presti said. “Guys that can play consistently in the NBA and be in the NBA for more than three years … that’s actually harder than it sounds.”

Welcome to next season, already in progress.

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Even as “Reservation Dogs” and “Dark Winds” have brought Native American stories to television, Indigenous films have remained scarce. But Erica Tremblay, who is a member of the Seneca Cayuga Nation, always wanted to be a feature film director, whether she was working in strip clubs or producing corporate content videos, directing documentaries, or working as a writer and story editor.

“This was always the dream,” says Tremblay, about her first film, “Fancy Dance,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is now getting a theatrical release on June 21 and will begin streaming on Apple TV+ on June 28. “All those experiences gave me the skills I needed to make this movie.”

“Fancy Dance” stars Lily Gladstone in her first film since “Killers of the Flower Moon” as Jax, who is desperately searching for her missing sister, Tawi. Complicated and quick to anger, Jax is not only caring for her teen niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) but she’s using her as an accomplice for various crimes. Jax’s family dynamics are equally complicated: her half-brother JJ (Ryan Begy) is with the tribal police; her White father, Frank (Shea Whigham) left the reservation years ago after Jax’s mother died and remarried a White woman, Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski), who has a savior complex.  

It’s a quiet movie packed with emotions, a character study with thriller elements and an unflinching look at modern life on the reservation. “We deserve characters that are complicated and represent the full breadth of humanity,” says Tremblay. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Does the presence of more Native stories like “Reservation Dogs” free you up to tell different types of stories? 

Native representation used to be either the violent warrior in a period piece or a model minority, the most perfect version of what a Native American is. But now we can have these nuanced characters. I have so many women like Jax in my life who are holding on to control where they can and doing the best to get by and provide safety to the best of their abilities. Jax will do whatever it takes, and sometimes she’s making decisions that you don’t agree with, but her intentions are coming from a place of love. 

But we wanted to give that same treatment to Frank — he isn’t an evil White man. He is trying his best in a world pitting two cultures against each other because of these colonial ways. Frank is a nuanced character who loves his children, but can’t quite show up for them the way they need him to.

Q: But Nancy is more rigid and undermines Frank’s efforts.

She still thinks she is doing the right thing. One of my favorite scenes is when Nancy gives Roki her old ballet slippers to make up for the fact that they are not taking Roki to dance at the powwow. She thinks she’s going to bond with this child over their love of dance, but Roki says, ‘You don’t understand. This isn’t about learning steps; this is a ceremonial community cultural gathering that cannot be replaced.’

Nancy has the opportunity to reach across and make a bridge to this child and say, ‘OK, Let’s go to the powwow this weekend. It’s just a couple of hours drive.’ But she’s terrified that if the child stays connected to her culture then they won’t be able to bond. 

I’m not saying that Nancy is evil, but even in my own experiences with non-native family members, I find that this fear that’s so rooted in White supremacy, which comes from a place of insecurity. How much better would it be if more bridges were built as opposed to people saying, ‘I don’t understand this and so I’m going to be rigid and just take control.’

There are all of these moments where Native people come into contact with these people who want to save Natives but in their very close-minded way. This isn’t violent genocide, but these very small things seep into a community and create very unsafe environments. 

We’re not trying to hit people over the head with these topics – ultimately, it’s a story about two Native women who persevere through a very traumatic experience by loving each other and supporting each other. But on the periphery, we have issues like the forced removal of children and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis. Hopefully, because we’re grounding it in this very human way people will recognize their roles in perpetuating the continued violence against Native peoples and find ways to build bridges and be better neighbors. 

Q: How did your experience in the sex industry shape the movie?

The strippers in the movie are human, because I’m drawing from my own experiences. I’ve always hated the portrayal of strip clubs and film and television and I love the idea of taking a place that hasn’t been accurately represented and shining a light on what it’s really like. I also chose to always shoot eye level with the dancers versus being down below because we’re not telling the story through the john’s eyes. We’re up with the women because they’re the ones who we’re focused on. And so just in changing the perspective changes the gaze. 

I worked with many dancers who had kids and were great moms and were providing for their families and doing the best that they could. Being a stripper is a job, and it’s a valid job. I wanted Tawi to be a stripper because just as librarians deserve to be found, strippers deserve to be found. You deserve justice if something bad has happened to you no matter where you come from or what your job is.

Q: You generally don’t spell out all the issues facing the women in this movie but let it play out organically. Was it difficult as a first-time director to keep a light touch with such serious topics?

As a director, it’s all about your voice and finding your vision. When you’re making a film about a community that hasn’t been told before, you have to remember that if you spend 30 minutes of the movie explaining all of these things you wouldn’t get to tell Jax’s story. So it’s up to the non-Native viewers to hang on tight and trust me, to keep going with the essential human elements and now they’re going to understand it in the end. So as the director, you have to trust the audience. 

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PINEHURST, N.C. — The temptation would be to refer to a change in the scorecard procedure as the “Jordan Rule,” only because Jordan Spieth was the most recent example. Players now have an additional 15 minutes to correct their scorecard before it is deemed to have been returned.

Players were informed at the U.S. Open of the change. The USGA adopted the amended definition of when a card is “returned” at the U.S. Women’s Open two weeks earlier. It now goes into effect on most major tours this week.

The PGA Tour said the goal was “minimizing penalties or disqualifications related to scorecard errors.”

Spieth was at Pinehurst No. 2 on the Sunday before the U.S. Open. He said Scott Langley, the USGA’s director of player relations, approached him and said: “This isn’t because of you. But this is what we’re doing here.”

The scorecard previously was considered “returned” when the player left the scoring area.

Spieth was battling stomach issues at Riviera when he made double bogey on the last hole for a 73, rushed up the hill to scoring, signed his card and hustled off to the bathroom. He inadvertently wrote down a 3 instead of a 4 on the par-3 fourth hole, and therefore signed for an incorrect score and was disqualified.

Under the new rule, he would have had 15 minutes to fix the mistake or for an official to find him and alert him to the error.

“For an honest mistake that I guess could be the difference in the tournament, I think it’s great,” Spieth said. “I don’t think it’s a skill of the game, especially at the professional level. If somebody plugged in a wrong score, they can go back and re-plug it in.”

As for the 15 minutes, there is a time stamp when a card is accepted, and the 15 minutes is not down to the second. It doesn’t happen very often, especially on the PGA Tour where scores are checked against a computer.

And there are exceptions. If a player stays in scoring for 15 minutes (Phil Mickelson was known to linger there), the scorecard would be considered returned when that player leaves the area. Also, the 15-minute rule could be affected by a playoff, or by tee times having to be posted immediately after a cut.

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