As the high school boys’ basketball playoffs begin this week, these are the players who have reached or exceeded expectations to be at the top of their game during the regular season.
Let’s offer a salute for rising up:
Jason Crowe Jr., Inglewood: In each of his four seasons, Crowe has gotten better. Already the state’s all-time scoring leader with more than 4,000 points, he’s learned to draw fouls with his aggressiveness and increased strength instead of relying on three-point shooting. He leads the state, averaging 43.8 points.
Christian Collins, St. John Bosco: The best uncommitted player in California has been a model of consistency. The 6-foot-9 senior remains focused and hungry with each game, raising his skills and intensity to be a prime MVP candidate.
Kaiden Bailey, Santa Margarita: The Georgia Tech commit has truly become an outstanding point guard, ready to score if needed and pass if needed. When he went scoreless against St. John Bosco, he found another way to contribute with eight assists. The ability to recognize what is required will be key to his future success.
Joe Sterling, Harvard-Westlake: His three-point shooting skills are fantastic. The Texas commit is also learning to use his strength inside when needed. He faced adversity at the end of the regular season when his team lost three out of four games, so let’s see how he responds in the Open Division playoffs.
Brandon McCoy, Sierra Canyon: Give McCoy credit. He’s gotten better in his senior year even though he was already a top college prospect. Maybe it’s because he’s healthy. He’s jumping better and has become more explosive and versatile for the No. 1 team in California.
Cherif Millogo, St. Francis: Few knew what kind of influence the 7-4 center would have after transferring from Boston and missing a year because of a knee injury. He’s been a breath of fresh air. His skills are tremendous, along with his smiles and friendliness to fans and teammates alike.
Kevin Keshishyan, Los Altos: A 6-7 junior, Keshishyan entered this week averaging 20.4 points and 8.2 rebounds, proving his summer development was no fluke.
Eli Garner, Damien: It’s his fourth year playing on varsity and his best. He’s a scorer, rebounder and defender. Whatever coach Mike LeDuc asks of him, he delivers.
Devin Wright, Redondo Union: The son of former 12-year NBA player Dorell Wright has come on strong with big games against quality opponents, signaling the Sea Hawks have a fourth option to join SJ Madison, Chris Sanders and Chace Holley.
Gene Roebuck, La Mirada: The junior guard is averaging 22.4 points and kept his team competitive against one of the toughest schedules this season.
Maxwell Scott, Corona del Mar: A junior guard, Scott is close to automatic from three-point range when left open. He’s helped the Sea Kings reach the Open Division playoffs for the first time in school history.
NaVorro Bowman Jr., Sherman Oaks Notre Dame: He’s stamped as the best guard from the class of 2027. His shooting and scoring skills are elite. His strength keeps growing.
Will Conroy Jr., Village Christian: As a freshman, Conroy leads his team in scoring at 27.5 points a game and leads his team when games are close, showing poise beyond his age at 15 years old.
Jaden Bailes, JSerra: The transfer from San Diego St. Augustine keeps performing big in big games by making clutch shots.
Dylan McCord of Thousand Oaks has been one of the top three-point shooters this season.
(McCord family)
Dylan McCord, Thousand Oaks: The senior guard has made 113 threes while averaging 22.5 points. He set a school record with 10 threes in a single game.
Kamrynn Nathan, Elsinore: The junior guard is averaging nearly 25.2 points a game for the only unbeaten team left in the Southern Section.
Ethan Hill, Brentwood: Only a sophomore, he looks like a 6-7 football player yet can throw around his body in basketball. Once he gets the ball inside, the options are either watch him score or foul him.
Phillip Reed, Palisades: The freshman guard will be the player to watch as the Dolphins go for a City Section Open Division championship. His scoring skills and ability to find open teammates will be key to the Dolphins’ development.
Richie Ramirez, Mater Dei: He’s been an important addition as a junior guard, averaging 22.5 points a game.
Cayman Martin, Crespi: He played junior varsity last season as a sophomore after moving from Japan and has been a revelation with each game.
MILAN — After injuries and stumbles, Madison Chock and Evan Bates earned their first Olympic medal Friday, but it wasn’t expected to be this color.
The three-time world champions settled for silver in their fourth Olympics together, falling 1.43 points behind France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. Cizeron has won back-to-back Olympic titles with different partners after climbing the podium in Beijing with Gabriella Papadakis.
While Chock and Bates, who have skated together for 15 years and got married in 2024, Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron shot to the top of the sport after just 11 months together. When the winning score was announced, Cizeron hugged his coach and covered his face while crying. Chock and Bates, sitting next to the kiss-and-cry in white arm chairs reserved for the current leaders, clapped politely.
They wanted this gold medal as a perfect ending to their accomplished career.
France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron compete in the ice dance final at the Winter Olympics in Milan on Wednesday.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The three-time world champions and seven-time U.S. champions were in their fourth Olympics together. Bates was competing on this stage for the fifth time. On a team with only one other athlete with previous Olympic experience — 20-year-old Alysa Liu skated in Beijing as a teenager — Chock and Bates became the unofficial parents to their younger teammates, including Emilea Zingas and Vadym Kolesnik, who finished fifth, and 11th-place finishers Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko.
Chock and Bates were the steadiest contributors of this year’s team gold medal run, winning both dance programs to win the second consecutive team Olympic championship for the United States, but struggled in previous individual Olympic events. In 2018, Chock suffered an ankle injury during the warm-up before the short dance. In 2022, she slipped and had an uncharacteristic fall.
But they haven’t missed a podium since that stumble. They were undefeated this season, placing first for both the rhythm and free dance portions of every competition. Until the individual Olympic short dance.
Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron, who paired together last year only after Fournier Beaudry’s longtime skating partner was suspended for sexual assault allegations, inched ahead by 0.46 points after Monday’s rhythm dance. It was a reversal from the team event, where Chock and Bates swept both the rhythm and free dance portions and led the qualifying round 91.06-89.98 over the French pair.
After the rhythm dance score for Chock and Bates flashed across the screen, her eyebrows shot up in surprise. Their coach Patrice Lauzon’s mouth dropped open. He furrowed his brow and cocked his head in confusion. While Chock and Bates smiled and waved to the crowd, Lauzon, who is also on the coaching team for Fournier Beaudry and Cizeron, looked on with suspicion.
Chock and Bates did their best to leave no doubt Wednesday. Their enthralling matador and bull program set to “Paint it Black” eclipsed the season’s best they earned two days prior during the team event, but it wasn’t enough to earn elusive individual Olympic gold.
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” could only have been created by a true fan. The British filmmaker wanted to evoke her youthful experience reading Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel when she was 14, which she describes as “the most physical emotional connection I’ve ever had to anything.” Her bodice-ripping, visually sumptuous version, in theaters Friday, incorporates some essential literary elements, but also imagines what’s in between the lines of Brontë’s writing, including sultry moments between the protagonists.
“I’m fanatical about the book,” Fennell says. She’s speaking over Zoom alongside Margot Robbie, who stars as Catherine Earnshaw (and who also produced the film), and Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliff. “I’m as obsessive about Emily Brontë as everyone else. She gets inside you.”
The director, 40, recalls going to the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing in West Yorkshire, England, in 2025 and feeling completely at home. “I was like, ‘These are my chicks,’” Fennell says. “We all want to sleep in a coffin.” Robbie laughs, despite likely having heard the story before.
“We are, all of us, breathless, up against a rock,” Fennell continues, referencing a particularly evocative scene she imagined for her film. “I care so deeply about this that I couldn’t hope to ever make a perfect adaptation because I know my own limits.”
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the movie “Wuthering Heights.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
What she could do is make a film that recalled the visceral feeling of reading the novel as a teen. “That would mean it had a certain amount of wish fulfillment,” she admits. The novel is famously austere, with mere glimmers of physical intimacy. “The Gothic, to me, is emotional and it’s about the world reflecting everyone’s interior landscape. This is my personal fan tribute to this work.”
“Wuthering Heights” marks the third collaboration between Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, and Fennell. Robbie, 35, produced Fennell’s 2020 feature debut “Promising Young Woman,” which earned Fennell the Oscar for original screenplay, and 2023’s class-envy thriller “Saltburn.” Her style is confrontational and seemingly fearless, often provoking hugely divergent reactions from critics and fans. She’s a filmmaker who goes full-on.
Despite their history, however, Robbie had never acted in one of Fennell’s films.
“When I read this script, I did find I was putting myself in Cathy’s shoes and reading the lines and thinking, ‘How would I play it?’” Robbie says. “I do that often when reading scripts, but my heart sank when thinking about the casting. So I threw my hat in the ring.”
Margot Robbie in the movie “Wuthering Heights.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
“It’s a bit like asking your friend to date you,” Fennell chimes in. “It’s taking something a step in a different direction. You don’t want to be the person who blows up the thing that you have that works so well. But I was desperate for Margot to play Cathy. I was so relieved that it was her who made the first move.”
Fennell did make the first move with Elordi, 28, recently Oscar-nominated for his monster in Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein.”
“Emerald texted me and said, ‘Do you want to be Heathcliff?’” Elordi recalls. “That was it. I said, ‘Yeah.’ And then when she gave the screenplay, I read it and wept. That’s how you dream of making movies.”
Not only did Elordi look like the version of Heathcliff on the cover of Fennell’s edition of the novel, but she had witnessed his potential for the role while making “Saltburn.”
Jacob Elordi in the movie “Wuthering Heights.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
“Felix is a character who does something awful in every scene,” Fennell explains of Elordi’s charismatic rich boy in “Saltburn.” “But it needed somebody who could make everyone in the audience forget that. And Jacob was the only person who came in and did that. Heathcliff is an extreme antihero. He’s cruel and he’s violent and he’s relentless and he’s vengeful and he’s spiteful. Jacob has a sensitivity and tenderness and groundedness that makes us forgive all that.”
Fennell knew the film hinged on the casting of Cathy and Heathcliff, two iconic literary characters who have been portrayed by a multitude of actors over the years, including Laurence Olivier, Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes. It’s been broadly debated whether the novel actually is a love story between the snobbish Cathy and the glowering Heathcliff. For some, it’s a tale of toxic fixation, for others a revenge plot or a tragedy. But Fennell’s version is undeniably a big-screen romance.
“We were looking for outsized charisma and outsized talent, people like Burton and Taylor,” director Emerald Fennell says. “A combination of actors who are explosively brilliant. And it’s these two.”
(Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)
“We were looking for outsized charisma and outsized talent, people like Burton and Taylor,” Fennell says of the classic onscreen pairing of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, famously tumultuous. “A combination of actors who are explosively brilliant. And it’s these two.”
“That’s the coolest thing to say,” Elordi says, covering his face with his hands. “This after years of hearing nothing,” he quips. (Fennell says she is sparing with praise.)
“Wuthering Heights” reunites several of Fennell’s repeat collaborators. Actor Alison Oliver, who appeared in “Saltburn,” plays Isabella Linton, Edgar’s ward who becomes a problematic fixation for Heathcliff, and the filmmaker reteamed with cinematographer Linus Sandgren, production designer Suzie Davies and editor Victoria Boydell. Fennell also brought in new faces, including Hong Chau as Nelly Dean, Cathy’s companion, and Shazad Latif as wealthy businessman Edgar Linton. She and Robbie aimed to create a creatively safe set.
“It’s very exposing, especially for the actors,” Fennell says of making an audacious film like this. “You need to be able to forget that and feel that you have the ability to make mistakes and try something different.”
Fennell’s direction was often unexpected.
“I remember she prepped us for the long table scene and said, ‘It needs to come to life,’” Elordi says. “Heathcliff was brooding but she said, ‘What if he wasn’t brooding?’ All of a sudden there was this electricity at the table. As an actor, that pushes me out of my comfort zone. And every time it works.”
“What I like about working with Emerald is: I like going too far,” Robbie agrees. “My instinct is to go really hard and then have someone tell me to pull it back. She rarely tells me to pull it back. She wants the maximalist version and I relish that. She would say, ‘Now you’re in a sensible period film.’ And then she’d say ‘Now do it like you’re Ursula the sea witch.’”
That was the take that made the final cut. “Part of it is there,” Fennell confirms. “Usually I use only a little moment of something but that’s the crucial one. Because we’re all so crazy in life, aren’t we?”
“And Cathy so is Ursula the sea witch,” Robbie says.
“She’s such a little sea witch,” Fennell agrees.
Fennell’s reimagining of “Wuthering Heights” amps up the existing emotions in the novel. She abridges its plot, removing the second-generation narrative that bookends Brontë’s writing. The torment of Cathy’s abusive brother shifts to the hands of her father, played by Martin Clunes.
Meanwhile, the longing between Cathy and Heathcliff, who can’t be together due to his lowly station and her spiteful decision to marry the wealthy Linton, accelerates dramatically into fervid sex scenes. The doomed couple erotically embrace on the Yorkshire Moors, in the back of a carriage and even inside her bedroom at Thrushcross Grange — all moments that are not part of the book.
Margot Robbie in the movie “Wuthering Heights.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
“They’re part of the book of my head,” Fennell says, adamantly. “I think they’re part of the book of all of our heads. With all the love and respect and adoration I have for the book, I also wanted to make my own version that I needed to see.”
“It is totally that wish fulfillment,” Robbie says. “And if you can’t have the wish fulfillment in movies, where are you going to get it?”
Fennell imbued the film with tactile visuals that evoke the sexual tension between Cathy and Heathcliff. There are close-ups of hands kneading dough, a snail sliming its way up a window and Cathy prodding a jellied fish with her finger. The director tested numerous fish before selecting the one that is seen onscreen.
“Why I love working with these guys so much is we’re all detail perverts,” Fennell says. “I am obsessed with every single thing. That fish that Margot fingered — I fingered about 50 different fish before then. Tiny fish, big fish, fake fish, jelly that was wet, jelly that was soft, jelly that was firm.”
“You think she’s joking but she’s not,” Robbie says.
“My finger smelled so bad the whole time that we were making this movie,” Fennell adds.
Ultimately, though, it was the best possible fish. “We did the takes with a couple of fish, but we all knew the right one when it happened,” Robbie says of the scene, which mirrors the sexual disappointment in Cathy’s marriage. “We all felt it in the same moment. Everyone went, ‘That’s it.’”
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in the movie “Wuthering Heights.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
The film’s aesthetic is bold and brash, featuring brilliantly hued red floors and walls designed to look like Cathy’s freckled skin. It lands somewhere between Disney fairy tale, ’80s romance paperback art and old Hollywood glamour. Atmospheric mist pours across every scene. The estate of Wuthering Heights is foreboding and dark, with rocks splintering through the walls, while Linton’s Thrushcross Grange bears a Victorian aesthetic, containing the outside world. “It’s nature coming in and nature being kept out,” Fennell says. “And it’s about what that means emotionally and metaphorically for the story and for these characters.”
There is purposefully no adherence to historical accuracy, particularly in the costumes. Designed by Jacqueline Durran, the wardrobe was elaborately wild to underscore emotional truths rather than period relevancy.
“You couldn’t not scream,” Robbie says about trying on each piece. “And then Emerald would come up with a platter of jewels and start decorating me like a Christmas tree.”
“There was so much screaming every day,” Fennell says. “I always want people to have permission to go too far, to do something that’s in bad taste, that’s not subtle. I’m really interested in pushing until that squeaking point where you’re like, ‘OK, that’s too far.’ It takes a lot of bravery to do that.”
Even Elordi joined in the excitement. “I was screaming at all the dresses,” he says. “Margot and Alison’s dressing rooms flanked me so I’d often get caught in the hallway.”
Although the world of the movie is heightened and beautifully garish, the romance is more grounded. You can feel how desperate Cathy and Heathcliff are for each other in their own twisted way, and despite their horrible machinations you want them to be together. The film ends differently from the novel, but it shares with it a sad inevitability.
Fennell inherently understood what makes these characters so desirable.
“I was led by my own feelings,” she says. “On set, we were all trying to find that thing that made us get goosebumps. One of the earliest scenes we shot was where Heathcliff breaks the chair to build Cathy a fire.”
To help a shivering Cathy, Heathcliff rises from his wooden seat, smashes it on the floor and tosses the pieces into the fireplace. It’s a moment of devotion from Heathcliff, but triggers a lustful response in Cathy.
“I looked around and all of these professionals, women and men, were agape. Everyone felt the same way as Cathy. That’s what I was looking for every day.”
“He actually broke the chair,” Robbie says. “Cathy’s reaction is my genuine reaction.”
Elordi understood the challenge of embodying such an iconic character, who has existed both on the page and on the screen for generations. He also didn’t want to let Fennell down.
“I knew how personal the story was to Emerald and I knew the screenplay that she had written was extremely good, but I was like ‘What makes you think I can do this?’” Elordi remembers. “I had a lot of nerves but I jumped into it. This is a director you’re really able to give everything to. The images that come from her head are so unique and singular. The first time I watched ‘Saltburn’ with her, I sat back and I realized I was in the presence of something truly great and original. To be able to investigate with her two times is a gift.”
Says Robbie, “My hope is always: There’s got to be one person that watches this movie and thinks ‘That’s my favorite of all time.’ I want to make a movie that is someone’s favorite movie of all time and I’ll know how much that means to them. That it might save them in whatever ways movies can save you.”
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” shudders with feeling. And however audiences perceive it, its maker has done exactly what she intended.
HOUSTON — Kevin Durant scored 26 points and Alperen Sengun added 22 to help the Houston Rockets to a 102-95 victory over the Clippers on Tuesday night.
Bennedict Mathurin had nine points and seven rebounds in 26 minutes in his first game for the Clippers since being traded from Indiana last week. Darius Garland, acquired in the trade that sent James Harden to Cleveland, remains out with a toe injury.
Houston led by six points at the start the fourth period and scored the first seven points of the quarter to extend its lead to 85-72 with 10 ½ minutes remaining. Kawhi Leonard made two free throws, but the Rockets scored the next four points to extend the lead.
The Rockets were up by 12 later in the fourth when Durant stole the ball from Brook Lopez, and Reed Sheppard made an off-balance three-pointer to make it 92-77 with about 6 ½ minutes to go.
Houston remained up by 15 about a minute later when Clippers coach Tyronn Lue cleared his bench.
Leonard led the Clippers (25-28) with 24 points after scoring 41 in a blowout win in December in the last meeting between the teams. The Clippers made 20 three-pointers in that 128-108 victory, but were just eight for 30 from long range on Tuesday.
Jabari Smith Jr. had 13 points and 11 rebounds and Amen Thompson added 16 points for the Rockets in his return after sitting out of Saturday’s win over Oklahoma City because of an illness.
A three-pointer by Jordan Miller cut the lead to two points late in the third before Sengun scored the last two baskets of the quarter to put the Rockets up 78-72 entering the fourth.
