@thl3t1c C&P for people who don't support CONTENT CREATORZ

non basketball but supposed to be amazing

https://theathletic.com/721275/2018/12/18/

lol the title alone is very good

The Passion of Mike Piazza: How the midlife crisis of a baseball Hall of Famer led to the demise of a 100-year-old Italian soccer club

By Robert Andrew Powell 227
When​ Mike Piazza arrived​ in Reggio​ Emilia,​ he was greeted​ as a hero.

It​ was June 18, 2016.​ Everyone​ remembers​​ the exact date. Piazza had just purchased a controlling interest in A.C. Reggiana 1919, the Italian city’s soccer club. Few locals had heard of him. Even fewer understood his Hall of Fame career catching for the Mets, Dodgers, and three other teams in the American sport of baseball. “When I learned he was the new owner, I went out and bought his autobiography,” says Jacopo Della Porta, a reporter for La Gazzetta di Reggio. “I think I’m the only one here who has read it.” Piazza was obviously rich. His U.S. citizenship gave him a certain baseline allure. Above all, it was his stated plan to return Reggiana to the top flight of Italian soccer that inspired several thousand fans to squeeze into a public square to see him in person.

Reggiana had languished in Serie C, the Italian third division, since the turn of the century. For a club that has known glory—Carlo Ancelotti coached the team into Serie A, in 1996—the long spell of mediocrity has been dispiriting, even embarrassing. Piazza declared, in translated English, that the club was back in solid financial shape. He said he was in Italy for the long haul, invested in the community, and committed to Reggiana’s success. At the rally, smoke from ignited flares swirled around him. Maroon flags waved. Ultras raised their scarves and chanted songs and reached out to shake Piazza’s hand. “Dai c’andom!” Piazza shouted. “Come on!”

Two years later, A.C. Reggiana no longer exists. The club is bankrupt. A court-appointed accountant is distributing its assets.

In what should have been Reggiana’s centennial season, a different team, not owned by Piazza, now represents the city, down in Serie D, which is only semi-pro. The mayor of Reggio Emilia accuses Piazza of “disrespecting” his town. Those ultras who initially cheered Piazza painted death threats on the walls of the team’s headquarters.

When it all ended last summer, Piazza and his family fled Reggio Emilia so abruptly that the fans—along with team, staff, and even the players—felt blindsided. “They ghosted us,” says Sonya Kondratenko, an American who handled social media for the second and final year Piazza owned the team.

Piazza thought he had embarked on a romantic new chapter of his life. He believed he would stay in Italy for the next three decades, running Reggiana and eventually handing the club down to his children. His wife, Alicia, who never wanted him to buy a soccer team, to whom Piazza handed control of the club after a disastrous first year, and who many in Reggio Emilia blame for the club’s implosion, saw the possibility of a different ending. As they stepped off the stage in the plaza, she pulled her husband aside.

“Either we’re going to have the best experience ever,” she told him, “or we’re going to get rolled.”

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Reggio Emilia is a small city about an hour’s train ride south of Milan. Nestled in Italy’s “Food Valley” alongside Parma, Bologna, and Modena, Reggio Emilia is known for its pumpkin tortellini and its namesake cheese, Parmigiano Reggiano. The tricolor national flag first flew in Reggio Emilia, in 1797, its creation celebrated in a museum in the old town center. The headquarters of fashion house Max Mara sit not far from a new train station designed by Santiago Calatrava. Locals are well-educated; Reggio Emilia is known around the world for its progressive schools. They’re also wealthy, though they tend not to flaunt it. The city has a history with communism and retains a collectivist ethos. “We work,” one resident tells me, summing up the city’s view of itself.

The Piazzas, for the two years they ran Reggiana, lived in a rented villa outside the city. They spent their summers in South Florida, where they’ve kept a home for more than a decade. I visited them in Florida in August, arriving as the sun set on Sunset Island II, a triangle of extremely expensive homes connected by a short bridge to Miami Beach.

“This interview’s going to be wet,” Mike said soon after I arrived. He stepped toward a bar in the living room and smiled. “I hope that’s okay with you.”

Mike poured me a glass of Grande Alberone Quintus, a red blend. Alicia sipped a chardonnay. My crystal glass was etched with the letter P in a curled script. Mike cupped his glass in his fingers as if it didn’t have a stem or a base.

“We do this every night,” Mike said, popping a chunk of cheese into his mouth as he settled into a striped Louis XIV chair. Behind him glimmered a swimming pool, and then the calm waters of Biscayne Bay. Alicia sat opposite Mike, near a tray of vegetables.

“It’s a tragedy,” Mike said of his soccer-team ownership. “Like an opera.”

“It was fucking hell,” said Alicia.

After retiring, Mike slipped into the languid life of ex-athletes in Florida. I’d seen pictures of Mike and Alicia appraising paintings at Art Basel. They hosted a benefit for the National Italian American Foundation at their waterfront house. He smoked cigars and golfed with Mario Lemieux and Michael Jordan and James Pallotta, the American owner of Italian soccer club Roma. He golfed a bit more than he cared to, actually.

“I think we got to a point in Miami where we got a little too melancholy,” Mike said. “Maybe that was part of it what fueled what I was doing. I wanted to do something different. And I wanted to do something interesting, and I wanted to do something creative.”

Piazza, who recently turned 50, came of age during the best days of the North American Soccer League. Growing up in Pennsylvania, he was a fan of the Philadelphia Fury, and also the indoor Fever. After he retired from baseball, his appreciation for soccer blossomed. He sat in the stands in Genoa in 2012 when the U.S. men’s national team defeated Italy for the first time. He and a friend flew to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup—“a bucket list sort of thing.” He loved how, unlike baseball, soccer is truly global, played and watched in every country. He began to think that owning a soccer team might be the most interesting thing someone in his position could do.

“I was retired when my second daughter was born,” he said. “And it’s my kids—I would never trade them for the world—but I remember thinking, ‘Here I am, I used to be hitting home runs in front of 43,000 people, and now I’ve got shit under my fingernails from changing diapers.’ There is nothing you will ever do after you retire that will give you the same buzz as playing. I’m sorry. I was able to recognize that and rationalize it and come to a point in my mind where you know maybe it”—buying a soccer team—“was like this super rebound.”

First, he looked at the Premier League. Everton. He flew into London and took a train up to Liverpool, visiting the port city for the first time. Eventually, he concluded the numbers would never work. He dropped down a league to investigate Reading, and also Leeds United. (“I’ve always liked Leeds. It’s weird.”) He pivoted back to the Americas, meeting with the president of Liga MX to discuss maybe buying Las Monarcas de Morelia. (“That would have been crazy.”) Then he investigated his options in Italy. That country seemed like the best fit.

There was the chance to actually live in Italy. Mike’s maternal grandparents are from Sicily. (Piazza translates as “public square;” the welcome rally in Reggio Emilia was held in Piazza Prampolini.) He didn’t visit his homeland until he was in his 30s, but when he did, he felt Italian. He loved the food, the wine. He identified with the people. Also, the soccer landscape appeared much more open.

“I believe that Italian soccer clubs are the most undervalued assets in sports,” says Joe Tacopina, the American owner of Venezia FC. Tacopina was also part of the initial group of Americans that bought Roma, in 2011. “This worldwide club, one of the best-known teams on the planet. And we paid just 110 million euros. For the whole club! For Roma! You can spend that much on just one good midfielder!”

Piazza first wanted to buy Parma, a Serie A club then in bankruptcy. Ultimately he felt Parma carried too much debt for him to absorb. Reggiana looked more attractive. Despite being in Serie C, the team’s passionate fans bought an unusually high number of season tickets. Reggiana also played in a top-flight stadium shared with Serie A club Sassuolo. Unlike a Premier League team, or a team already in Serie A, this was a club he could buy cheap and build.

Alicia, who refers to Mike’s ownership dream as “his midlife crisis,” offered up a counter argument.

“Who the fuck ever heard of Reggio Emilia?” she asked. “It’s not Venice. It’s not Rome. My girlfriend said, and you can quote this—and this really depressed me. She said, ‘Honey, you bought into Pittsburgh.’ Like, it wasn’t the New York Yankees. It wasn’t the Mets. It wasn’t the Dodgers. You bought Pittsburgh!”

In their Miami living room, Mike tried to interject but she stopped him.

“And imagine what that feels like, after spending 10 million euros. You bought Pittsburgh!”

“It’s not easy for an American to come to Italy and try to do business in Italian soccer,” says Gaël Genevier, a midfielder and the Reggiana team captain during Piazza’s ownership. “It’s a jungle. And when you have money, it’s even worse. Mike had a big wallet, he was American, and he didn’t know the soccer in Italy. And I think that’s why he had a lot of problems.”

Soon after Piazza bought Reggiana, he set out to raise the visibility of the club. He gifted Jimmy Kimmel a maroon jersey, on air. The New York Times flew over a reporter for a feature story. On Sports Illustrated’s “Planet Fútbol” podcast, Piazza talked about market discipline, about having a financial plan, about sticking to the plan for the long haul.

“When I took over the club I had a meeting with all the staff,” he told host Grant Wahl. “I said, if you don’t believe we can get to Serie A in five years, then I respectfully ask you to leave right now.”

Turns out, that’s not how it works in Italy. Piazza was free to fire anyone, but whoever he did fire still had to be paid, often for years. Contribute, they call it. In the three months between Piazza’s purchase of Reggiana and the moment he actually took over operations, the number of people employed by the club ballooned. The sporting director he inherited collected a bigger salary than the sporting director of Lazio, in Serie A—and for three years, guaranteed, no matter what. The players’ contracts were exceptionally generous for the Italian third division. The team captain told Piazza so. “They were attractive contracts for even B, one level up,” Genevier says. Piazza was overpaying for everything.

The year before Piazza bought Reggiana, the club finished in seventh place in its division, with operational costs of around 500,000 euros. In Piazza’s first season with the club, Reggiana finished in fifth place, but at a cost to Piazza of more than six million euros.

“When the auditors told us that, it was deafening to our ears,” recalled Alicia. “I turned to Mike and said, ‘What the fuck did you just do?!”

Mike decided he could no longer work with the front office he’d inherited. He also cut ties with his original partner, an Italian he knew from Miami. Looking around for someone who could protect his interests, he didn’t see many options.

“Alicia became the only one I could trust,” Mike said. “I basically took the budget and I turned to her and went, ‘Help. I don’t know what to do.’”

From that point on, Alicia Piazza took charge of Reggiana. And she started making changes.

Alicia Piazza began modeling in her teens and kept at it for a decade. After appearing in Playboy—Miss October, 1995—she saved some lives on the TV show “Baywatch” before showcasing a Broyhill dinette set as one of Barker’s Beauties on “The Price is Right.” She earned a master’s degree in psychology while in Miami. For more than a decade, she had seen herself primarily as a mom to their three kids.

Suddenly, she was vice president of AC Reggiana 1919.

Cost-cutting became her priority, in a way that felt personal. Every dime squandered was a direct hit to the family’s net worth. She ordered the drivers for youth team buses to stop dropping off players at their houses, to save on gas. She ordered the players to wash their own uniforms. (“I don’t think she realized that in Italy not everyone has a washing machine,” says Kondratenko, the American who handled social media for Reggiana.) She typed angry texts, calling employees she fired “conmen” and “frauds” and “liars.” The salutation of one text Alicia shared with me, sent to the team’s former sporting director: “Fuck off, loser.”

“I was the bitch,” she admitted. “I was the bad guy. And I’m sure I have a lot of enemies, and I’m sure you heard a lot of bad things about me and I don’t give a shit. I ripped the mask off so many faces.”

The Piazzas put their Miami Beach house on the market in January. Alicia sent a general email asking if anyone in the front office might want to buy it, asking price $18.5 million. She encouraged a friend of hers in Parma—the one who compared Reggio Emilia to Pittsburgh—to design a jewelry line to celebrate Reggiana’s 100th anniversary. The whole office sat in meetings to decide which rings and bracelets in the collection worked best. “I always thought the club would never fold before the anniversary, just because of all the time she put in on the jewelry,” says Kondratenko. Deviating from her mission to cut costs, Alicia renovated the players’ locker room, adding new tile and an extra toilet. One day, Kondratenko was pulled from her regular work assignments to shuttle Brande Roderick—a Playmate, a “Baywatch” lifeguard, and Alicia’s close friend—to the train station.

“My life plan is not to be doing errands for Playmates,” Kondratenko tells me.

The clear goal in the second season was for Reggiana to earn promotion to Serie B. New sporting director Ted Philipakos, an American who came over from Venezia FC, upgraded Reggiana’s quality on the pitch. He also found a new coach in Greece, where Philipakos holds dual citizenship and retains connections in the sport. They agreed on terms. The coach flew up to Reggio Emilia with his staff, ready to sign his contract and get started. Only after he arrived did the Piazzas balk at the compensation. Alicia offered to pay him and his staff 15,000 euros less than the original offer, a relatively small sum. After the coach protested, she floated a smaller cut of 7,500 euros. The coach flew back to Athens, on principle.

When Mike named Alicia the club vice president, he stepped back a bit. “He likes to stay above the fray,” she said. “It’s not like he’s a pussy or he needs his wife. It’s the way he’s comfortable. He’s always been like that.” In her newly elevated role as Reggiana’s “first lady,” she became a bit of a media sensation. She gave interviews at the team headquarters. She answered questions at restaurants when reporters approached her table, filming. “Alicia always talked down about Reggiana being a peasant team in a peasant town,” says Kondratenko. “She thinks these people have no class, but in some aspects they were super impressed with Alicia. She has money, she’s from the U.S., she has a Chanel bag and a Gucci bag.”

The influential magazine Sportweek invited Alicia to sit for a long interview. It’s her understanding that she was the first club vice president ever to be formally interviewed, and the first woman at any level in Italian soccer.

“I knew we had to get our story out about the stadium,” she said. “And I was feeling there was a conspiracy and I was feeling something (dark) in this underbelly.”

When Reggiana rose to Serie A in 1993, the club and the government of Reggio Emilia recognized the need for a home stadium worthy of the top flight. Locals funded much of the new stadium themselves, purchasing season tickets years into the future to cover construction costs. But Reggiana lasted only two campaigns in Serie A. The club itself went bankrupt. Ownership of the stadium reverted to the city, and the mayor put it up for auction. A billionaire named Giorgio Squinzi bought it, cheap.

Squinzi is the head of Mapei, a conglomerate that sells paint and adhesives. He also owns Sassuolo, a Serie A club which now plays its home games in Reggio Emilia, in the stadium Reggiana built, which Squinzi renamed after his company. Reggiana still played there, too, though they had to pay rent. In a development that Alicia noted on Instagram, the rent almost doubled in the short time between when Mike bought the club and when he actually took over its operation. That’s what Alicia wanted to talk about with Sportweek publisher Andrea Monti.

“He’s balding but he’s powerful and he’s become sexy,” she said of Monti. “He apparently never comes into these interviews, but he comes in and shakes my hand. Everyone thinks it’s because I’m cute, I know. But I was hungover and I was not cute that day. He crosses his legs and he stays for 45 minutes. Then he says this to me, which I will never forget:

“‘Reggio is a strange town and it’s run by the politicians. Don’t you wonder why that town has the (Calatrava) train station? There’s a lot of money there but it’s all controlled by Squinzi. But I think you, my dear, are going to give him a run for the money.’”

From that meeting on, Alicia vowed “not to give fucking Mapei another dime,” she said. “And let me tell you, that was the point where it was like, ‘Alicia sank the company.’”

On March 8th, reportedly at Alicia’s urging, Mike Piazza held a press conference to address Reggiana’s growing debt to Mapei. “It was the worst day of my life,” says Kondratenko, who recorded the press conference in a video that went viral, not just in Italy but around the world. Piazza sat at a table, Alicia silently on his right, an interpreter to his left. Ads for Riunite wine and Parmigiano Reggiano flashed and dissolved on a screen in front of his microphone. “We’re invested in this community,” he said in his opening. “I’ve moved my family here, my children here, to be part of this community.” He slapped the table, hard. “And we deserve respect!”

While Mike spoke in English, he showed impressive fluency in Italian hand gestures.

“We are not going to be PUSHED AROUND by a multi-billion dollar corporation,” he continued. “The stadium was built for this team.” He tapped his index finger on the table three times. “By these PEOPLE!” He tapped a couple more times, furiously. His voice almost cracked when he said, “We’ve reached out in friendship to try to form a coalition with the mayor, with Mr. Squinzi, with Sassuolo, with Mapei, and we’ve gotten”—he slammed down a fist—“NOTHING!” His hand slashed the air with a karate chop. “NOTHING!” He pointed his index finger. “And I’m sick of it! I’m tired and sick of Reggiana being pushed around. I’m frustrated and I’m….” He inhaled a breath. “Ffffffffreakin’ pissed off!” He fell back in his chair and let the translator have at it. Alicia remained motionless.

This went on for more than 10 minutes. He said he isn’t a quitter, but he has his limit. If the rent wasn’t lowered to at least the league average for Serie C, he’d walk away.

“Probably that was the first step in an exit strategy,” says Gazzetta reporter Della Porta.

There was a period early in the second season, in the fall of 2017, when Alicia wasn’t there. She returned to Miami for a bit, to prepare their house for sale. Right after she left, in a development Reggiana supporters tell me is no coincidence, the play of the team dramatically improved. Reggiana strung together two unbeaten streaks of eight games each, vaulting the club from 15th place into second, tantalizingly close to automatic promotion to Serie B. Mike, who stayed in Italy, got hands-on with the team, pulling players aside for one-on-one interviews.

“We knew he was a good athlete, he won a lot of things,” says Genevier. “His Italian wasn’t very good—he spoke in English and the translator translated everything to the players—but he was very, very positive inside the locker room. I remember the players were very happy after each speech of Mike’s. He was the president but he was like a player.”

Without the Greek coach they’d failed to sign, the team was forced to use a Frankenstein’s monster for a manager: One man, who had his coaching license but no experience in Serie C, became the titular leader, while two coaches from the youth teams—both lacking the proper licenses—picked the rosters and the tactics and ran the training sessions.

Somehow it worked. Mike witnessed away victories over Santarcangelo and AlbinoLeffe. Before kickoff, he’d shake hands with the ultras and give his pep talks in the locker room. He followed the action closely.

“When that ball went into the net, I felt like I was playing again,” Mike said. “I’ve never done cocaine, I’ve never done crystal meth, I’ve never done hard drugs, or any drugs for that matter besides aspirin. But let me tell you, that was fucking intoxicating.”

Reggiana finished the regular season in fourth place in their division. The team could still rise to Serie B by winning a playoff tournament. In the quarterfinals, Reggiana matched up against Siena, a strong club, for a home-and-home series. Reggiana won the opener, 2-1. In the second leg, down in Tuscany, Siena held a 1-0 lead deep into the second half. The tie in aggregate meant Siena would advance thanks to that club’s better regular-season finish. But in the first minute of stoppage time, Reggiana scored. In his box, Piazza leapt from his seat.

“Mike was into these games,” says Philipakos. “Obviously he had a lot of money on the line—that was a factor. But the raw emotion wasn’t just about protecting his investment. It was about competition. He was very engaged. When we equalized in stoppage time, he exploded. What followed minutes later was visible heartbreak.”

What followed was decried as “unjust” by Reggio Emilia mayor Luca Vecci. In the sixth minute of stoppage time, a Siena midfielder lofted a ball into the Reggiana box. In the scramble, a Siena player pushed over one of Reggiana’s defenders. Somehow, the referee called a hand ball on the toppled fullback. Yes, the ball briefly touches the player’s arm, but he was on his back from the fall, and he fell because he’d just been bodychecked. Still. Penalty. Siena converted in the 109th minute, with the last kick of the game. Reggiana lost the series. No promotion. Ultras stormed the pitch, looking for blood. Even the mayor ran to midfield.

“It was horrible,” says Genevier, the team captain. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve played more than 300 games in Italy and this one was really the worst one.”

The next day, Mike Piazza posted a message on the official Reggiana website:

“Last night I could not comment because I had to go home with my children. I regret that they had to witness such corruption and incompetence. I’m deeply disgusted and angry. I’m really sorry for our fans, they do not deserve this. It’s really a sad day for Italy and for Italian football. I will never understand how some dirty and corrupt individuals managed to make something so beautiful so repugnant and ugly. I’m sick.”

Two days after the Siena loss, the Piazzas appeared to have emotionally recovered. They hosted a thank-you rally in a small, old stadium near the center of Reggio Emilia. The ultras turned out, as always. Flares burned, flags waved. Smoke floated around Mike, just as it had two years earlier at his grand arrival. The players trooped out in their jerseys, Genevier holding the hand of his young son. The Piazzas stood in front of them. Mike spoke first, in little snippets followed by pauses for translation.

“I want to thank the first lady,” he said, turning to Alicia. She curtseyed in her orange dress. The fans chanted her name. “I’m just going to tell you how much work she has done in the office behind the scenes. And it’s true when I tell you the only reason we’re here today after this beautiful season is because of Alicia. She convinced me to go on. So we all owe a debt of gratitude to her. Grazie!”

Mike kissed her. The ultras continued chanting her name. A female fan stepped onto the grass to offer Alicia a bouquet of white flowers.

“These guys played their asses off and they played with so much heart and determination,” Mike continued, turning to the players. “And it’s really sad the way it ended. But that doesn’t change the effort and the drive and the love they applied.”

Mike held up his fists over his head, a signal of strength and resolve. “I salute this team,” he concluded. “God bless! Enjoy the summer! Well done.”

Everyone left the rally thinking the mission continued. The team would stay together, the Piazzas would remain as owners.

“From my perspective, we had righted the ship,” says Philipakos. “If not for a totally absurd referee’s decision maybe we’d be in Serie B right now. We still had all these great things in place. The key players weren’t going to go anywhere. Most of the starters were under contract. We could have hit the ground running, and should have been a really strong favorite for promotion.”

The rally took place on June 5th. Mike flew to New York to throw out the first pitch before a Mets-Yankees game. Alicia stayed in Italy. On June 8th, a Friday, she invited the front office to lunch at a neighborhood café. Everyone shared a spread of cured meats, cheeses, and fresh pasta. Corks popped off wine bottles. It felt upbeat and celebratory. Alicia told them that with the season over, they should all consider themselves on vacation.

She meant more than that. On Monday, a chain and lock hung on the front door to the offices. Zip ties secured the gates to the parking lot. The Piazzas were gone. The players didn’t know what to do. Should they find new teams? Kondratenko says she didn’t know any more than the players. Should she fly back to the States?

“I woke up to a thousand WhatsApp messages asking what was going on,” she recalls. “I couldn’t take a coffee because so many people were coming up to me asking for information.”

On the 13th of June, on the team website, Mike Piazza announced that he’d put the team up for sale. Alicia issued her own statement: “Unfortunately, Reggiana has been under attack from negative forces since Mike’s arrival. … The suspicious loss in Siena was the final blow. We are generous but we are not crazy.”

One week later, the Piazzas returned to Reggio Emilia and were spotted at the team offices. More than a hundred ultras marched into the office parking lot, chanting and demanding answers. Carabinieri—national police aligned with the military—showed up for the Piazzas’ safety. The police advised the Americans to avoid the front door of the complex and exit through the back. Mike assured them it wouldn’t be necessary—he had always enjoyed a good relationship with the fans.

The carabinieri informed him that the relationship had changed. The Piazzas slipped out the back door, under police escort.

At their house in Miami, drinking wine, both Piazzas told me the end was inevitable. The plane was in a nosedive when they entered the cockpit—when they first arrived in Reggio Emilia—and they knew it immediately. They hung on for two full seasons, at great personal expense, only to get robbed in the playoffs against Siena.

“And we had enough!” Alicia shouted. “And they’re like, ‘Well, let’s sign up for next year and lose another four million euros altogether.’ Who’s losing the four million? We are! We’re losing the four million and not you. So we each took a pill”—she’s speaking figuratively—“we said, ‘Romeo and Juliet did this, we’re going to kill ourselves before you fucking get to kill us.’”

The Piazzas and their Italian attorneys initially tried to sell the club to a group of Reggio Emilia businessmen. When a deadline for fielding a team in Serie C passed, the businessmen opted to simply start up their own, new team, with the mayor’s blessing. Reggio Audace—“Bold”—play down in Serie D, with a roster of amateurs and unpaid professionals. The president of the new team tells me he’s still friends with the Piazzas. He wants them to grant him the official Reggiana name, now that they are done with soccer in the city. The Piazzas have said they will probably turn over the name, once the dissolution is complete.

In the public square where Mike made his initial arrival, there’s a small sign stating that it was there, in the same plaza, that Reggiana was founded 100 years ago. The square is ringed with restaurants and shops, including the official Reggiana team store. Piazza still owns the store, technically. When I was there in August, team jerseys remained for sale even though the team itself no longer existed. One T-shirt featured the “C’mon!’ phrase that Piazza cried out at his introduction. A poster of Piazza, from his days in baseball, had been taken down. No one wanted to see it anymore.

“Maybe it could have been different,” Mike told me in Miami Beach. “If I could re-engineer the whole thing I’d go back and save a lot of the money that was squandered. I’d put in my own people, people that knew what we’re doing. But that’s what we learn! We learn those lessons the hard way! There’s a lot of shoulda, coulda, woulda, but I don’t regret doing it.”

I can still see why it was attractive. In the States, Mike Piazza is a former great. A legend. In Reggio Emilia, with Reggiana, his role was active. Running a soccer team in Italy: It really is a romantic idea. He wasn’t simply a rich guy drinking wine on an endless vineyard tour. He wasn’t merely eating incredible food or lounging in a seaside cabana. He was living. He had an identity beyond his days of baseball, which by now are well behind him. “I need to have a project,” he once told Kondratenko. “I don’t want to just play golf all the time.”

I can also see why Alicia wanted out: She never wanted in. “I’m free,” she told me. Instead of sinking more of the family’s cash into a soccer team, they can spend that money weekending in Barcelona, or how about London? “My kids will be fluent in Italian and maybe also French,” she said. “I’m happy.” She didn’t want the soccer project the way Mike wanted it. But then, she’s never hit a home run in front of 43,000 people.

The Piazzas returned to Italy in late August. “I’m surprised they did this,” says Gian Marco Regnani, a calcio blogger in Reggio Emilia. “They’re the enemy.” The family rented the same villa outside of town from when they owned the team. Recently they moved closer to Parma, where the kids go to school. The Piazzas told me their status as outsiders might have been a central problem. They had the ability to pack up and fly away, while for everyone else Reggio Emilia is home.

“I always had a feeling that they were going to leave,” says Regnani. “I never thought they were going to be here forever.”

When I spoke with the Piazzas in Miami, Mike was careful to stress that he had not bankrupted Reggiana. He and Alicia were “dissolving” the club, he said. They were “executing a soft landing.” But they didn’t “bankrupt” a 100-year-old soccer team and civic institution, he insisted.

That was in August. On December 4th, the Piazzas asked a judge to declare the club bankrupt. On December 5th, the judge granted the request. More than 100 creditors, including Mapei, are currently carving up the Reggiana carcass.

In October, Mike flew to Scotland for a week on the Old Course at St. Andrews. In November, he posted a picture from a golf course in Tuscany.

I’ve spoken to him a couple times, at length, since he returned to Italy. The last time we talked, we discussed Reggiana for a while, naturally, but the team and its problems and his brief time running the club seemed like a closed chapter. We talked about Donald Trump and how being an American abroad has given Piazza a wider perspective on immigration. We talked about the Mets for a bit. He told me he’s started getting into rugby on TV. And also Formula 1. He said he doesn’t like to watch Italian soccer anymore. Not even Serie A. “I just don’t,” he said. “Or I think I’m just too hurt to care.”

the wife's quotes are completely out of control

lmao i can hear her

Alicia, who refers to Mike’s ownership dream as “his midlife crisis,” offered up a counter argument.

“Who the fuck ever heard of Reggio Emilia?” she asked. “It’s not Venice. It’s not Rome. My girlfriend said, and you can quote this—and this really depressed me. She said, ‘Honey, you bought into Pittsburgh.’ Like, it wasn’t the New York Yankees. It wasn’t the Mets. It wasn’t the Dodgers. You bought Pittsburgh!”

In their Miami living room, Mike tried to interject but she stopped him.

“And imagine what that feels like, after spending 10 million euros. You bought Pittsburgh!”

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‘The board man gets paid’: An oral history of Kawhi Leonard’s college days

By Jayson Jenks 42
This is my new favorite quote: “The board man gets paid.”

According to former teammates, coaches and managers, Kawhi Leonard didn’t say much during his two seasons (2009-11) at San Diego State. But he did say that, all the time, and it is wonderful: “The board man gets paid.” It says so much about who Leonard was and still is, and it absolutely belongs on a T-shirt.

This is the story about his two years at San Diego State, during which the Aztecs went 59-12 and made the NCAA Tournament both seasons under coach Steve Fisher.

Tim Shelton, forward: He was probably one of the hardest recruits that you’d ever deal with who was that talented. (California’s Mr. Basketball in 2009.) He wasn’t going to text you, he wasn’t going to pick up the phone and talk to you. He just wouldn’t do it.

Justin Hutson, assistant coach: I wouldn’t say hard. I would say different. You couldn’t get him on the phone. Once a week, I’d just have to go up there to his high school (100 miles away in Riverside, Calif.), and I’d make sure he was there first.

Shelton: And it’s part of why the Pac-12 teams didn’t put in extra effort. They were like, “He’s kind of a four-man, and, shoot, we can’t call him and talk to him. He must not want to talk to us.”

DJ Gay, guard: I took Kawhi on his official visit. Honestly, the only thing he wanted to do was get in the gym. We were like, “Kawhi, what do you want to do?” And he was like, “Let’s go work out. Let’s go get some shots up. Let’s play.”

Shelton: We had open gym and were playing. We stopped in between games and introduced ourselves as a team and just chopped it up a little bit more with his mom than him. He introduced himself, “I’m Kawhi. Hey, what’s up.” But if you tried to talk to him, he was like, “It’s cool, everything’s cool, so far it’s cool, it’s nice.” But then he just grabbed the ball and went to shoot. Even during his visit, I’m telling you.

Gay: I think we started up our day playing two-on-two and finished our day getting shots up. That’s just what he wanted to do. He wanted to work. I honestly had no idea what to expect when he left. He didn’t say much. He just wanted to hoop. I had no idea if we were getting him or not. I told coach Fisher: “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you. He didn’t say much.”

Dave Velasquez, assistant coach: My favorite story about Kawhi is when he got to San Diego State his freshman year. He had a math class at 8 a.m. and a writing class at 10 a.m. It was Monday through Thursday, and it was really tough. Our job was to make sure the freshmen were up for that 8 a.m. class. So we were always knocking on their dorm room at 7:30. When we had to find Kawhi for his 8 a.m. class, he was rebounding by himself.

Gay: By far the hardest worker I’ve ever come across, I’ve ever known.

Alex Jamerson, manager: I’ve never seen anyone, ever, work harder in my whole life.

Jamerson: I would show up early to our arena to get things set up for practice. I’m thinking, “Oh, I’m going to be the first guy in the arena just to get things set up,” and I walk out to bring the balls out and he’s already got one or two with him shooting in the dark in the arena. All by himself.

John Van Houten, manager: We used to have to break into the volleyball gym.

Shelton: This was before they had all these swipe cards. We had just one key that we would share to get into that gym. When you didn’t have the key available, you could put the finger under the door at Peterson Gym, and if you knew how to wiggle it right, you could push the latch up and unlock the door.

Van Houten: At first, you could get in and you had access to the lights, you had access to the hoops and everything was good. And then they started cracking down, so we started breaking in, but the lightbox would be locked.

Shelton: So Kawhi had a lamp, and on different occasions, Kawhi would be in there late and the lightbox would be locked, so he’d bring a lamp in there. He’d put his finger under the door and unlatch it and he’d go in there and shoot with just his lamp.

Van Houten: And that’s when they got a new locking mechanism on the doors. And that’s when I got a key to an LDS church, a Mormon church, and they had a full court. … He was gonna find a way to work.

Jason Deutchman, guard: We lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament my senior year on a Thursday. I took the rest of the weekend off and then I was like, “I’m going to go start training on that Monday.” I remember going in that very first night, three days after we had lost — and he was already there.

Coach Velasquez: We had Saturday morning conditioning, so not only would he be running hard and be in the front, but everybody else would go home after. He would go to the gym.

Gay: There were several times I tried beating him in the gym, but no matter how early I got there, he was already there. Or I tried to stay late, but it got to the point that I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Coach Hutson: Knowing Kawhi, he probably just stayed until somebody left. I’m serious.

(Chris Carlson / AP)
Gay: The most he talked was on the hard court, and Kawhi was not afraid to let you know that you weren’t going to score on him, that you couldn’t get past him or that he would score on you. Every time the ball went through the net, he just said, “Bucket. Bucket.” That was it.

Tyrone Shelley, guard: Most people say it like, “Oh, I’m about to get buckets on you.” He was just like, “Buckets. Layup.” Just one word.

Shelton: He’d be like, “You’re not scoring. You’re not doing anything.” Or he’d be like, “No, no, no.” He’d just move his feet and say, “No.”

Gay: You couldn’t score on him, so that’s what he would say: “Nope, nope, nope.” And when he would score on you: “Bucket. Bucket.”

LaBradford Franklin, guard: If he was grabbing a rebound, he’d say, “Give me that” or “Board man” or “Board man gets paid.”

Coach Hutson: If I heard it once, I heard it 50 times. “Board man. I’m a board man.” That’s what he said. Absolutely. “I’m a board man. Yeah, I’m a board man. Board man gets paid.” He spoke in phrases like that.

Shelley: Instead of saying, “We need to walk to the store” or “Let’s go to the store,” he’d just say, “I’m up.” When he leaves, he just says, “I’m up.”

Shelton: If he joked, it would be like one or two comments, and he’d go like, “Yeeee.” He’d make more sounds than he actually talked.

Franklin: What stood out to me about Kawhi was everyone else wanted to score or shoot threes, but he wanted to get every rebound. And one of the quotes he always said was, “Board man gets paid.” The rebounder man, he gets paid. And it’s true. He would say that every day. He would take pride in that. If you think about it, defense and rebounding, those are the two things you might not want to do. That’s not the pretty stuff. But he took pride in that. He cared. (And led the Mountain West Conference in rebounding two years in a row.)

Shelton: Guys coming from high school have trouble with help-side defense. Kawhi made a comment to coach Hutson, who was the defensive coach at the time, and he was like, “I don’t get it, coach. Why can’t they just stay in front of their man like I do? Like, why do I have to play help side?” That was his only comment I ever heard him make about defense: “They should just be able to stay in front of their man like I do.”

Coach Hutson: We would talk about rotations and how to help. I would get him on it about. He was respectful, but he would be very frustrated and say, “Why can’t everybody just guard their own man?” Those were exactly his words. “Why can’t everybody just guard their own man?”

Kelvin Davis, guard: In his mind, everyone should be doing what he was doing. But he didn’t realize everybody couldn’t do what he did. He was a walking nightmare.

Gay: In practice, he would tell us, “Don’t help, I don’t need help, I got it, I don’t need help.” That’s just how he was. That was his mentality. “I don’t need help; why do you need help?” But then it made us better because it challenged us: If Kawhi doesn’t need help, I don’t need help, either. And we turned out to be one of the best defensive teams in all of America that year.

Shelton: He didn’t say much. But he would tell you if you were fouling him in practice. He’d be like, “They fouling me, coach.”

Coach Velasquez: There’s one thing we always laugh about as a staff, and it would always happen at practice. He would drive in there, and he’s big and people would be hitting him all the time. At practice, you don’t really call that. I can’t tell you how many times he would look over and go, “But they fouling me. But they fouling me.”

“Kawhi, you’ve got to kick that.”

“But they fouling me.” It was over and over. In games, he wouldn’t really have a lot of dialogue with refs, but you’d definitely hear, “but they fouling me,” two or three times a game.

Shelley: There was no backtalk. Unless he was getting fouled.

Coach Hutson: There was a certain time I wanted everybody to lock and trail in practice. I was very clear that there are times you don’t have to trail on the baseline; there are times you can cheat the screen and shortcut and get there. But right now we’re going to work on lock and trailing. I was very clear that this was the way we were going to do it. And I remember Kawhi just takes his own route. I made everybody run, and he was upset about it. He was definitely pissed about it. A man of few words, but every once in a while he said something.

Van Houten: The coolest part about Kawhi: He plays mini hoop. In every house I’ve ever been to, he always had a mini hoop. You can only play with your left hand. You can’t play with your right hand. That’s a really cool thing because he’s working on his game even when he’s just at the house.

Franklin: He had a Nerf goal on the back of the door in his apartment, and he would just shoot. Friends would come over, playing 2K, and he would challenge us to a free-throw contest.

Van Houten: He’d come over to my house and he’d watch Michael Jordan highlights. We called them “Mike highs” … I mean, like four or five hours at a time.

Coach Velasquez: We’d be done with the game and he’d be on his phone watching Jordan on YouTube. Right away. He wasn’t texting. He was watching Jordan on YouTube. He’d watch it all day, every day.

Shelton: You would see him watching that stuff. But he still wouldn’t talk about it.

Coach Velasquez: Coach Fisher had a no-cellphone policy at team dinners, but Kawhi would have his phone on his lap watching Jordan highlights. He would really study his moves.

Franklin: On his phone, his background was Michael Jordan. … He would always say, “I’m Mike. You like LeBron, you like Kobe? Yeah, they’re cool, but I’m Mike. I want to be the best, the greatest.” And from how he carried himself, we knew he was serious. We knew that’s what he really wanted.

(Lenny Ignelzi / AP)
Van Houten: The only thing we’d give him shit for was his hands. Like, “Damn, you make that iPhone plus look like an iPhone 5.” Or like, “Damn, it should be a cheat code to play with those hands.”

Deutchman: There were definitely a few jokes about self-pleasure techniques. (His hands) could be helpful or harmful, depending on your perspective. With those, he could probably do a lot more damage with yourself if you get a little too much into it, considering the size of your hands.

Franklin: I’d always get on him about his braids. Like after a practice or after a long road trip, we’re all sweating, and it would look like he just got out of bed with his hair. But he didn’t care at all.

Gay: I used to call him an Avatar. A freakish Avatar, that’s what he was in college. Long limbs, long body, could run like the wind.

Franklin: From what I can remember, if it wasn’t Michael Jordan highlights, he was watching an episode of the Martin Lawrence show. He could be entertained with that. He’s so low-maintenance. Low maintenance, high production.

Shelley: I don’t remember him going to any parties except for one, and he was just kind of off in the corner hanging out until we left.

Shelton: He would be with the team and kick it and party a little bit because it was San Diego and we were winning. But he’d still be the first person up, and he’d be in the gym shooting.

Gay: I used to tell him that I had an unblockable step-back. It took him a while, but he finally started blocking my step-back. And that’s when I was like, “This is just ridiculous.” I was just like, “Yeah, my time is over.”

Coach Velasquez: I’ll never forget when we played at Cal. He remembered that Cal didn’t think he was good enough. He heard that the head coach at the time, Mike Montgomery, didn’t think he was good enough. He made it his personal mission to go out there and want to destroy Cal. They had a really good team. Allen Crabbe was there. They had a squad. But Kawhi went up there at Cal, and you knew when he walked on the floor that game, they had no chance. It was ridiculous.

Shelton: We played at Fresno State against Paul George, and that was when Paul George was getting some hype. I remember Kawhi watching his clips and us doing the scouting report. Now, he never said anything that he was going to lock him up or that he wasn’t any good. He was just like, “OK.”

Franklin: We were playing against Jimmer and BYU in the tournament. He screamed to coach Fisher, “Let me guard him.” At that time, Jimmer was killing everybody in the country. He was Jimmer Fredette. Kawhi had no business taking that challenge or saying that he was better than Jimmer then, but he did it.

Coach Velasquez: (Coach Fisher) would always say, “Kawhi paid the bills.” Kawhi rebounded. Kawhi was the best defender on the floor. Kawhi ran the hardest in transition. Kawhi always did all the little things that helped your team win.

Shelton: He says the most by his actions. He’s probably the only person that I know, that I’ve met, that I’ve seen, that speaks that loudly through his actions. People are like, “Kawhi’s quiet.” I’m like, “No, he’s not. Have you seen him work? Have you seen the dude work out? Do you know what his routine is over the summer?”

Van Houten: He always found a way. If he wants to become the greatest, he’s going to find a way. If he wants to get in a gym and work out, he’s going to find a way.

Franklin: To this day, I apply everything I learned from him. He was the hardest worker. While we were going to class, he would hold his couple papers for the class in his hand and in his backpack he had his sports gear: his shoes, the ball. He was always in the gym. At night, in the day. You could definitely learn from him. That work ethic can be applied to anything. That was the most craziest thing I saw.

Coach Hutson: I was fortunate enough to be around a genius. He had a genius work ethic.

(Top photo: Harry How / Getty Images)

What did you think of this story?

MEH

SOLID

AWESOME
Jayson Jenks is a features writer for the Athletic Seattle. Jayson joined The Athletic after covering the Seahawks for four seasons for the Seattle Times. Follow Jayson on Twitter @JaysonJenks.
42 COMMENTS
Add a comment...
Anmol K.
Jun 3, 11:25am
12 likes
Kawhi is a future HoF.
Rick M.
Jun 3, 11:38am
38 likes
Wow what an awesome story. I can’t recall ESPN ever doing a story like this. I want someone in the media to ask Kawhi about “The Board Man Gets Paid!”
Breanna S.
Jun 3, 11:59am
21 likes
He's like Kobe with a Tim Duncan personality.
J S.
Jun 3, 1:25pm
15 likes
Tim Duncan seems normal by comparison
Frankie C.
23h ago
6 likes
He's better than Kobe, though
Scott E.
19h ago
Tim Duncan would never have exited San Antonio the way Kawhi did.

Keep in mind I mostly sided with Kawhi. But still.
Nick Z.
Jun 3, 12:00pm
3 likes
A+ effort
Baskar G.
Jun 3, 12:08pm
4 likes
Mad genius
Paul D.
Jun 3, 12:40pm
9 likes
As a former basketball Aztec myself, I am so proud of Kawhi. His game is beautiful.
Ansar H.
Jun 3, 12:47pm
5 likes
Omg what a story - the board man gets paid!!!!!!!!
Marcus G.
Jun 3, 1:14pm
8 likes
"If he joked, it would be like one or two comments, and he’d go like, “Yeeee.” He’d make more sounds than he actually talked."

Kawhi is a living, breathing meme
Myles S.
Jun 3, 1:35pm
31 likes
These oral history pieces are probably my favorite feature The Athletic does.
Greg B.
Jun 3, 2:02pm
1 like
@Myles S. Totally. More please.
Ned R.
Jun 3, 1:46pm
2 likes
Great story with insight into Kawhi.
Beta 3.
Jun 3, 2:13pm
3 likes
Fantastic work Jayson. What an interesting read.
Emet L.
Jun 3, 2:14pm
8 likes
I still can’t get over Dame Lillard using his friend’s Netflix account when he was in the NBA
David R.
Jun 3, 2:19pm
5 likes
This is one of the most hilarious and revealing stories I’ve read about a basketball player. Kawhi is such an enigma, and I felt like I had no idea what made him tick, but this story really opens a door on him. Very impressive guy. I was at that Cal game and I remember him wrecking us. I only hope the dubs find a way to stop him because his inner determination is obviously EPIC.
Jordan T.
Jun 3, 2:41pm
2 likes
Kawhi is deadass the Terminator lol
Mark G.
23h ago
1 like
Needed this insight into Kawhi...good story!
Adam A.
23h ago
1 like
Wish I started at SDSU in 2010 instead of 2011 so I could watch kawhi
Kenneth C.
23h ago
6 likes
The NBA can definitely benefit from more guys like Kawhi who just walks the walk. The league is filled with prima donnas that put their personal agendas before team goals. They can say they care about winning more than anything else but what they care is how much it goes in their pockets.
Seth F.
23h ago
2 likes
In terms of body control and the ability to be a dominant (and game altering) force on defense, I absolutely feel he’s Jordan-esque. Also ‘Board Man Gets Paid’ shirts on Breaking T in 3...2.....
Frankie C.
23h ago
5 likes
I honestly cannot believe that nobody really talked about this guy in college. It's not like he was just ok, and would be a solid role player, or was at a mid major and barely played against good teams. SDSU was a legit top 10-15 team those 2 years & they were beating good squads, yet we heard more about Fischer, because he also coached the Fab 5, than we did about Kawhi. How crazy is that?
Alex N.
19h ago
@Frankie C. That 2010-11 team was pretty stacked. Lot of good seniors on that squad that went on to have pro careers overseas. They definitely had the talent to go all the way that year.
Adam G.
23h ago
2 likes
"Why can't they just guard their man like I do?" Hahaha, made me laugh. I know that feeling, but on a much, much muuuuuuch smaller scale at work.
Colin G.
23h ago
6 likes
I thought it would be impossible for me to like Kawhi after he killed my Sixers, but you gotta respect him after reading a story like this.
Norman L.
23h ago
5 likes
This article is everything. What an absolute joy to read.
Cheers,
Zaid T.
23h ago
2 likes
The “board man gets paid” motto really showed last night vs GSW. Plenty of possessions where he recovered an offensive rebound.

Good to know!
Alex C.
23h ago
7 likes
As a special education teacher, I wholeheartedly believe that Kawhi is a little autistic or something, which is really really cool. I'd love for him to open up and hear more of his story.
Jeremy G.
13h ago
3 likes
I came here to say, this article makes me wonder if Kawhi is on the spectrum. Barely talks, extremely insanely focused, repeats the same habits over and over, makes more sounds than words.
Young K.
21h ago
1 like
What a killer robot Kawhi is!
Forrest B.
20h ago
Wow, what this article shows me is how well researched the clippers are with Kawhi. This year they've talked about being a black top team, a team that works, a team that doesn't want drama, Doc comparing Kawhi to Jordan. It's crazy.
Dan M.
12h ago
If the Clips get Kawhi and KD ... gulp. Dynasty probably over in the Bay.
Jeff J.
18h ago
2 likes
As an SDSU grad I feel so blessed and proud of guys like Kawhi because San Diego State will never be a power 5 school where these kinds of guys are on a regular basis. There are a lot of very good players in lots of sports to come out of SDSU, Kawhi, Tony Gwynn, Marshall Faulk, and it feels good to in some small way be a part of that.
Gary F.
15h ago
He seems like a genuinely nice guy. Very easy to hang out with
Will O.
12h ago
KAWHI SO SERIOUS?!
Danny M.
12h ago
I watched him at SDSU. That 34-3 team was so good and I was bummed that he left after the 2011 season because I really thought they had a very good chance to win the NCAA tourney. That said, I’ve followed his NBA career and hope him continues to work hard and win more titles. He’s the reason I watch pro basketball again. Thanks KL.
Dan M.
12h ago
1 like
Man oh man. What a great story. I am an Aztec alum ... and a life long Warrior fan ... talk about being conflicted.

What I can say, is that Aztecs love Kawhi. LOVE HIM.

There’s a whole lot of pride, and happiness, for all his success.

There is tremendous gratitude to him- during his sophomore (last) season on The Mesa, we had the greatest team we had ever had, and likely ever will, have.

It was like we were Duke, North Carolina or Kansas for a season. I really believe we were one of the 2-3 best teams in the nation that season - we grabbed the highest #2 seed in the tournament that season, so they had us as #5 overall going in. We won our first 2 games in tournament history, I was blessed to be in Tucson for both. I was “fighting them back” as the clock ran out to beat Temple to go to our first sweet 16.

We lost to eventual national champion UConn the next week, some very questionable calls in an incredible game that went down to the final possession. I have no doubt we clobber Arizona the next game, as UConn did, to go to our first and only Final 4. So close.

Kawhi was the difference. Even though he was so raw, could barely shoot a lick... I had never seen such a force of nature before, his effort, his attitude, his intense desire to win. An absolute demon on the boards and defensively. He was surrounded by an incredibly long, athletic, talented team that defended as well as just about any team I’ve ever seen in college basketball. What a incredible season that really put SDSU on the national basketball map for a run of 4-5 years.

Of course, despite Aztec nation’s claimed that he wasn’t ready to come out for the draft. Needed one more season in college. He thought differently. We all know how that has turned out. Nobody was going to deny Kawhi.

There are some incredible Kawhi stories I’ve read and heard about him that speak to his ridiculous work ethic, his focus and single-mindedness to be the best, and a spotlight on what he cares about- his mom, his close friends and family ... and basketball.

I wish that Paul George anecdote had gone somewhere

A guy I did community service with smoked a blunt with Kawhi in college

Oh man, I thought the "yeeeee" anecdote posted in the Finals thread was a joke. What a guy!

Alex C.
23h ago
7 likes
As a special education teacher, I wholeheartedly believe that Kawhi is a little autistic or something, which is really really cool. I'd love for him to open up and hear more of his story.

im not comfortable diagnosing ppl but there is something to this.

his flat affect, difficulty reading social cues, intense interests, repetitive behaviors

had that exact thought when i read this

same over here tbh

This oral history of college Kawhi is crazier than people think... pic.twitter.com/FUyiOIQYjE

— Amir Blumenfeld (@jakeandamir) June 4, 2019

the family business stuff makes a lot of sense in that context, too.

honestly i feel bad making/laughing at jokes around his behavior (kawhi is a robot/the terminator, the laugh meme) now.

re: the family business and the initial tweet you copied, i was like--hard for him to open up about anything since it's very unlikely that he's diagnosed.

yeah that too

A guy I did community service with smoked a blunt with Kawhi in college

― brimstead, Tuesday, June 4, 2019 5:56 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

siick

his flat affect, difficulty reading social cues, intense interests, repetitive behaviors

― be the 2 chainz you want 2 see in the world (m bison), Tuesday, June 4, 2019 9:46 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean

I have no idea if he autistic but it's interesting how in different ways some great players today are upending traditional views of the "mentality" that was assumed you need to be great, basically like the sports talk guys that jack off over the MJ/Kobe aggressive, macho sociopathy (Butler is maybe the best example of that today tho not on the same level of great)....but Kawhi's remote, flat aspect or the Curry/Klay's semi woke chill Cali vibes....or, less appealingly, KD or Kyrie's passive aggressive needy bitchiness

otm

like so many things, after 1 person dominates a field (in reality or just in public's consciousness of that field) you get this hindsight "ohh THIS is what made him/her so great" which is prob ok on its own but there's a tendency to draw the conclusion "therefore anyone who wants to dominate in the future must have this same quality/set of qualities"

anyone have a WSJ membership?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nba-finals-have-never-seen-a-coach-like-nick-nurse-11559905200

(i don't have a membership, but https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox and/or https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome seem to work)

OAKLAND, Calif. — The easiest way to understand the differences between the coaches of the two best teams in the NBA is through Dennis Rodman.

Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr played with Rodman on the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. They won three NBA championships together. They also happened to be teammates with Michael Jordan.

Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse came to know Rodman as the owner, general manager and coach of the Brighton Bears of the British Basketball League when he signed him as a one-game publicity stunt to sell tickets for a team that’s now defunct.

So they have taken slightly different roads to the NBA Finals. But now the Raptors are two wins from the title. That’s how close Nurse is to being maybe the most improbable coach of any championship team in NBA history.

The people in his position are usually longtime NBA coaches, former NBA players or both. Nurse is neither.

He’s a first-year NBA head coach at the age of 51. He spent his formative years in a country where basketball is a niche sport compared to snooker. He is the author of a self-published manual called “The Black Book of Shooting.” He is the guy who brings his guitar on road trips to strum Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. Nurse has been creative and inventive during the Finals, and that’s in part because of his peripatetic background.

Nurse is both a rookie coach and someone who’s been a coach for nearly 30 years. He coached a college team below the NCAA level. He coached G-League teams in Des Moines, Iowa and Edinburg, Texas. He even coached in the obscure breeding ground of basketball talent known as Great Britain.

His list of coaching stops reads like a British train schedule: Derby and Birmingham—neither of which is pronounced the way you think—Manchester, Brighton and London. Nurse was in the British Basketball League, which sounds like an oxymoron, more than twice as long as he’s been in the NBA. And he’s done crazier things than beating the Warriors. The year he took a BBL team to the EuroLeague was the equivalent of Nurse coaching the Raptors to the Stanley Cup.

But all that experience in what Nurse acknowledges were some “pretty remote places” has proven to be incredibly useful now.

“I feel really comfortable out there,” he said in an interview this season. “I’m digging back into some archives. It’s playing out on an NBA court: things that I’ve gone through hundreds of times before.”

When he unleashed an unconventional box-and-one defense on Stephen Curry in the NBA Finals, for example, people around the league struggled to remember the last time they’d seen one. Apparently they had not seen a G-League game between the Iowa Energy and Bakersfield Jam in January 2011.

Nurse was desperate that night. Bakersfield guard Trey Johnson had torched Iowa for 31 points the night before, and Nurse decided to do everything in his power to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. The strategy that he unveiled to stop him? A box-and-one for the entire game. He treated Trey Johnson as if he were Stephen Curry. Johnson had his worst scoring performance of the season. Iowa won. Nurse’s idea worked.

“If things work,” he said, “I don’t care if I go out there and four guys stand on their head.”

That game was a long time ago in a place very far away from the NBA Finals. But in an interview before Game 4, Nurse still remembered everything about it.

“That’s right! Big-time box-and-one on Trey for the whole game,” Nurse said. “That was a great win. That was one of the greatest wins.”

Nurse landed across the pond after two years as an assistant at South Dakota and four years as a starter at Northern Iowa, where he boasted about holding “seven school records all under the three-point shooting category.” As a coach, he realized his teams could learn from his shooting prowess. So he produced a 31-page, spiral-bound manual that explained his art in exhaustive detail. There were even bullet-pointed lists of drills in which every bullet was a tiny basketball.

“Everyone knows that good shooting in basketball is important,” wrote Nick Nurse, the author.

Another thing in basketball that he knew was important was the ability to adapt on the fly. And the insane format of the BBL playoffs gave Nurse plenty of experience preparing teams to radically shift course on a nightly basis. He once turned the Birmingham Bullets from a fast-break team into a slow-down offense in the hours between a Saturday evening semi and a Sunday afternoon final. His players had no problem with it. They promptly knocked off the mighty London Towers. “He used to do all of his coaching before we stepped out on the court,” the Bullets’ Clive Allen said.

Nurse’s teams traveled in mini-buses that he didn’t have the proper license to drive. His experiments unfolded in local rec centers where he waited for badminton matches and indoor soccer to finish before taking the court. And not wasting a second was so crucial that Nurse fined anyone who was late £1 a minute. This bothered Allen so much that he once paid for his 20-minute delay in pennies.

When those practices finally began, Nurse was always keeping score. If he was displeased with the shooting, he subbed himself in and started draining threes. If he thought his players weren’t intense enough, he subbed himself in and started fouling.

He was determined to not let his complete lack of resources stop him from implementing NBA strategies. Nurse modeled the Birmingham Bullets on whatever VHS tapes he could find of the mid-1990s Chicago Bulls. They were watching film with occasional cameos from Steve Kerr.

“When Phil Jackson was doing his thing with the triangle offense,” said Nigel Lloyd, one of his former players, “we ran the triangle offense.”
As coach of the Iowa Energy in 2011, Nick Nurse used a box-and-one defense against the Bakersfield Jam. Photo: Otto Kitsinger/NBAE/Getty Images

With the Brighton Bears, where he was also the owner and general manager, Nurse found someone else who knew Jackson’s offense intimately. This person had actually played in Jackson’s offense. His name was Dennis Rodman.

Rodman was coming off an appearance on the reality show “Celebrity Big Brother” and wasn’t exactly in peak shape. He was 44. He hadn’t played in the NBA for years. He’d spent the past few weeks smoking cigars. He was also Nurse’s opportunity to sell extra tickets while improving his offense.

Rodman arrived in a white limo and delayed the game by insisting on taking a shower. The ticket part of Nurse’s plan worked: the tiny arena was sold out. The offense also worked, as Rodman helped the Bears beat the Guildford Heat. What didn’t work was the whole part about following BBL rules. Nurse’s team had to forfeit a week later for playing too many Americans.

“Whilst the BBL were delighted to see that Dennis Rodman took part in BBL Competitions and that U.K. fans have had the opportunity to see him play,” the league said, “they will not tolerate a clear breach of BBL Regulations.”

Nurse’s time in a country that has never been confused for a basketball hotbed keeps coming back to him. He even took his son to his old stomping grounds last summer. They saw the Rolling Stones at Old Trafford and went to “King Lear” at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. “We covered about 360 years of British culture in 48 hours,” he said.

But he would soon experience one last bit of whiplash. When the Nurses came back to North America, the Raptors announced their new head coach: the world’s leading expert on British basketball.

Write to Ben Cohen at b✧✧.co✧✧✧@w✧✧.c✧✧ and Joshua Robinson at jos✧✧✧.robin✧✧✧@w✧✧.c✧✧

cool thanks!

dang sick extension

anybody got that ESPN+ and could hook this up?
https://www.espn.com/nba/insider/story/_/id/26970552/klay-thompson-injury-force-warriors-rethink-next-season

Kevin Pelton
ESPN Staff Writer
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What does Klay Thompson's ACL injury mean for his future and the Golden State Warriors?

The disappointment of the Warriors falling short in their quest for a third consecutive championship was overshadowed by the news late Thursday night that Thompson tore the ACL in his left knee when he landed awkwardly after being fouled on a transition dunk attempt.

Thompson will now head into unrestricted free agency for the first time in his career while rehabbing the injury and facing an uncertain timeline for his return during the 2019-20 season, much like teammate Kevin Durant, who suffered a ruptured Achilles during Game 5 of the NBA Finals. How will that impact Thompson and how can Golden State replace him in the short term?

How much time can Thompson be expected to miss?
Though Durant's Achilles injury produces greater fear than the relatively more common ACL tear, the reality is ACL rehab has typically taken longer in recent years. As teams have become more conservative bringing their players back after surgery, no NBA player has returned to action in fewer than 10 ½ months since J.J. Hickson in 2014. (Hickson returned after just 7 ½ months.)

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An 11-month timetable has been typical for ACL injuries in that span, with some rehab processes taking even longer. Most notably, Kristaps Porzingis ended up missing the entire 2018-19 season after tearing his ACL in February 2018, meaning he wasn't considered ready to return some 14 months after the injury.

With that in mind, the Warriors -- or another team with whom Thompson signs -- have to be prepared for him to miss the duration of the 2019-20 regular season before potentially attempting to return in the playoffs.

How does that affect Thompson's free agency?
Unlike Durant, Thompson does not have a player option, meaning he's headed for free agency this summer no matter what. Although Thompson's maximum salary is less than Durant's -- he's still in the bracket for players with 7-9 years of experience, projected for a 2019-20 maximum of $32.7 million as compared to $38.15 million for players like Durant with 10 or more years of experience -- a max deal for him surely carries somewhat more risk because Thompson has not historically been as elite a player as Durant.

Thompson's best leverage in free agency is his importance to Golden State, which would be shy of max-level cap space even in the unlikely scenario where both Durant and Thompson sign elsewhere. That would make it virtually impossible for the Warriors to replace both players in free agency. Given everything Thompson has meant to Golden State's run of three championships in five consecutive trips to the NBA Finals, it seems unthinkable the Warriors would risk letting him walk in free agency.

One possibility is Golden State offering Thompson a five-year max deal that no other team could match, but with some partial guarantees that would offer the Warriors cap relief in a worst-case scenario should Thompson deal with more injuries in the future. Joel Embiid's 2017 extension with the Philadelphia 76ers could be a model for such an offer.

How might Golden State replace Thompson?
One way or another, the Warriors will find themselves needing to fill in for Thompson and Durant in 2019-20 -- perhaps for just a single season (or part of it), but perhaps permanently if either or both players head elsewhere.

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Assuming Thompson re-signs, Golden State would likely be limited to the taxpayer midlevel exception (projected at $5.7 million) to add free agents for more than the veterans minimum. And the Warriors would somehow need to find new starters at both shooting guard and small forward -- or at least someone capable of playing big minutes at small forward if veteran Andre Iguodala starts there, given Iguodala's age.

If Durant signs elsewhere, Thompson's injury could add urgency to Golden State's pursuit of a sign-and-trade deal that would create a trade exception in the amount of Durant's 2019-20 salary to trade for more expensive players. Convincing the team that lands Durant to do a sign-and-trade rather than signing him outright using cap space would probably require the Warriors parting with draft picks, something they've been reluctant to do during their championship run.

Alternatively, I suppose it's possible that Golden State might look at next season as a one-year break from the emotionally and physically draining pursuit of championships. The Warriors could regroup in 2020-21 with Thompson and/or Durant back on the court, hoping to use next season to develop younger alternatives such as 2018 first-round pick Jacob Evans and reserve Alfonzo McKinnie for depth purposes.

But that prospect seems unlikely with the core of the team save Draymond Green (29) in their 30s. Each year of late-prime Stephen Curry is too valuable to let go to waste. A step-back season also would be a tough way to open a pricey new arena in San Francisco.

Adding salary via a Durant sign-and-trade would hit Golden State's pocketbook hard, what with the team potentially entering the repeater tax next season. That means that each additional dollar the Warriors spend would cost a minimum of $2.50 more in luxury taxes. That's the price the Warriors have to pay to keep this championship core together, though their move to the more profitable Chase Center will help offset the tax bill.

Golden State's front office won't have much time to lament the NBA Finals loss and heartbreaking injuries to Durant and Thompson. With the NBA draft a week away and free agency a week and a half after that, the Warriors must soon get to work figuring out how to replace two of the league's best players.

thx!

Can i get a c+p here plz?
https://theathletic.com/1029629/2019/06/15/their-longtime-trade-target-has-gone-elsewhere-so-what-do-the-celtics-do-now/

After years of meticulous planning, calculated maneuvers and intelligent team-building, a steady stream of frustrations over the past year has now pushed the Celtics into an offseason of deep uncertainty. The latest setback struck Saturday night, when the Lakers reached a trade agreement to acquire Anthony Davis for Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, Josh Hart and three first-round picks, including the fourth overall selection in next week’s draft. Boston had positioned itself to pursue Davis over the past several years but now must move on to the reality that the superstar center will play alongside LeBron James instead.

Could the Celtics have topped Los Angeles’ offer? The answer depends on whom you ask. The Lakers surrendered two promising former lottery picks, a solid rotation piece and a whole lot of draft equity. Based on early indications, the Celtics were wary of throwing all their assets – including Jayson Tatum – on the table knowing Davis could be just a one-year rental. His agent, Rich Paul, made it clear throughout the process that his client preferred other destinations such as the Lakers and Knicks and did not want to land in Boston. If the Celtics still had the promise of a future with Kyrie Irving to flaunt, they could have been more willing to roll the dice on Davis, believing that the talent on their roster would eventually help convince him to stay. But recent signs have suggested the Celtics are likely to lose Irving, and selling Davis on the team’s future would have been difficult without the All-Star guard. Giving up a package headlined by Tatum and the future Grizzlies first-round pick could have been franchise-crippling if it only yielded a one-year rental. At some point, the Celtics needed to decide what type of risk they were willing to take. Without Irving, they might not have been able to build a championship-caliber squad even with Davis around.

There’s risk in standing pat, too. In the suddenly wide open NBA landscape, Boston with Davis would have had at least a small chance of raising a banner next season. Now that he’s off the trade market and Irving appears headed elsewhere too, it’s difficult to envision another path for the Celtics to build a legitimate contender quickly. They could pivot toward a youthful rebuild around Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart. They could straddle the present and future while Gordon Hayward and possibly Al Horford remain on the team. They could try to fortify their roster with a non-Davis star – somebody such as Bradley Beal or even an unforeseen option.

Yet nothing stands out as an obvious way to pry open the contention window again. The Celtics still have enough talent to be good – maybe even very good – but this ownership group has always wanted more than that. With a championship-or-bust mindset, the Celtics, without Irving, do not have a championship team. They do have three first-round picks to dangle on the trade market if they want to bolster the roster around their current core.

Will that core include Horford? Though the Celtics have called keeping him a priority, his future now stands out as a question mark. The star center has a $30.1 million player option for the upcoming season but could turn it down and enter free agency. Such a move wouldn’t necessarily spell an end to Horford’s time with the Celtics because he could ink a long-term deal to stay with the organization. But, at age 33, he might realistically find a better opportunity to win a ring somewhere else. Assuming Irving walks, the Celtics would be left with a core of Hayward, Tatum, Brown and Smart – not a bad group by any means, but not what anybody had in mind this time last summer. Boston’s future, though still promising, looks murkier than it has in years.

The list of disappointments from this season alone is a long one:

After entering the season as favorites to capture the Eastern Conference, the Celtics won just 48 games before falling to the Bucks in the second round of the playoffs.
Hayward never returned to All-Star form during his first season after a devastating ankle injury. Several of his young teammates – including Tatum, Brown and Terry Rozier – either regressed or failed to show progress amid complicated team dynamics.
Players all seemed frustrated by the failure to find consistent chemistry. The coaching staff never maximized the roster’s talent. The season brought enough headaches that Irving, who verbally committed to re-signing in Boston in October, now appears to be a goner.
At the onset of this season, the Celtics thought their first-round pick from the Sacramento Kings would land somewhere in the top five. Instead, the Kings exceeded all preseason expectations; the pick they conveyed to Boston landed 14th at the very end of what is considered a thin lottery.
The Lakers, meanwhile, were fortunate enough to vault to fourth in the lottery, then used that pick as one of the centerpieces to a Davis trade. How lucky did the Lakers get on lottery night? Their chance of landing a top-four pick was 9.4 percent.
So many of the failures are intertwined. The Celtics now must pivot from Plan A – pairing Irving and Davis – to whatever path they will choose next. They should still field a competitive team regardless, just not the annual contender the organization dreamed about building.

One winner in all this is Tatum, who should finally be free from the trade rumors that dogged him over the first two seasons of his career. With no more huge fish left on the trade market, the Celtics should comfortably move forward with the 21-year-old wing as a franchise cornerstone. Tatum has shown immense potential but must iron out some of the bad habits that limited his impact as a second-year pro. He needs to cut out some inefficient midrange jumpers and grow stronger going to the rim. He should work on his 3-point versatility to reach the volume of all the best shooters. He has stated he wants to emerge as an All-Star and now has his chance – in Boston – to show he can do it. If Irving departs, Tatum will have more freedom but also more pressure to emerge alongside Brown as one of the NBA’s top wing duos.

For the Celtics, the future is now. It’s just not exactly the future the organization dreamed of for so many years.

thx!

can yall pls spot me this piece on goga

https://theathletic.com/1029373/2019/06/20/vecenie-dont-forget-about-goga-bitadze-my-top-international-player-in-the-2019-nba-draft-class/

Yesterday, a photo Zion Williamson’s media session went viral, with hundreds of media members huddled around his tiny podium. Next to that madhouse, the player with the podium next to Williamson’s looked on in the foreground of the photo, seemingly wondering what kind of world he’d stepped into.

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter

Fletcher Mackel
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@FletcherWDSU
NBA draft prospect Gogo Bitazde got slotted next to @Zionwilliamson at @NBA draft media day.

Unfortunately he’s a bit overshadowed.

Gogo actually a guy I’ve heard @PelicansNBA have interest in.

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11:52 AM - Jun 19, 2019
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That player was Goga Bitadze, an international player from the Republic of Georgia who was also invited to the combine, as he’s expected to be selected somewhere in the top-15. Obviously, I don’t blame anyone in the media for being much more rabid about getting set up for the Williamson media session. Zion is the story this week, and in general, the international class has not been discussed in particularly glowing terms for this year’s crop of prospects.

That’s the narrative, at least. However, I do think this crop of international players has gone underrated. It’s gotten much better throughout the season, and has an interesting mix of production, upside, and fit in the modern NBA. Two players — Goga Bitadze and Sekou Doumbouya — have a chance to be picked in the lottery, with Doumbouya expected to be taken there. Luka Samanic will likely be selected somewhere in the first round, with his range expected to be anywhere from 19 to 35. Deividas Sirvydis could hear his name called in the top-40, with four others in Marcos Louzada Silva (“Didi”), Yovel Zoosman, Adam Mokoka and Joshua Obiesie having a chance to be picked.

While most executives see Doumbouya as the top prospect from the international class, I slightly differ and wanted to write about why. While I think it’s close, I actually give a slight edge to Bitadze as the top international in this class — something I never saw coming when the season started. Bitadze has been something of a known asset for the last few years due to his high-level production in Europe as a teenager. However, I had serious concerns about his frame and mobility then that made me concerned about his modern fit in the NBA. He also played with a high level of emotion that sometimes had negative effects on his play. I had him at No. 44 on my big board entering the year.

But over the last year, Bitadze has done everything in his power to quell those worries. He started the year dominant for his parent club, Mega Bemax, averaging 20.2 points, eight rebounds, and 2.6 blocks per game in Adriatic League play while shooting 60 percent from the field and 40 percent from 3. The Adriatic League is considered a strong one, but it’s not the highest level and its relative lack of athleticism didn’t do much to show how Bitadze had grown athletically. So in December, Bitadze was loaned to Budocnost VOLI, another Adriatic League team. However, the transfer allowed Bitadze the ability to compete in the Euroleague, the highest level of competition in Europe.

While with Budocnost, Bitadze continued his run of terrific play. He averaged 12.1 points, 6.4 rebounds and 2.3 blocks in 23 minutes of action per game. While those numbers don’t necessarily jump out to an American audience, it’s worth considering where they ranked in the competition. Bitadze only played 13 games and thus didn’t qualify for statistical leads in categories, but his numbers would have ranked in the top-20 in scoring, fifth in rebounding, and first in blocked shots. Given that, it’s no surprise that he won the Euroleague Rising Star award. But he also continued his strong play in the Adriatic League, and was named MVP there.

These awards certainly don’t equal what Doncic did in Euroleague, but beyond him they’ve likely only been matched in the last five years from a teenage production standpoint by Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokic. So why is Bitadze not held in that same esteem?

Well, the big difference those two players have versus Bitadze is that they can act as offensive initiators, whereas that’s not his game. The team that takes the Georgian center will instead get a player who is an absolute monster in ball-screen scenarios as a screen setter and roller, in addition to a potentially elite rim protector. It’s a somewhat limited role, but it’s a role he’s been devastatingly effective in overseas. Let’s start on offense, where you can get a feel for his talent.

There are just so many positives. First and foremost, he’s a terrific screen setter. He makes contact and gets his guard space. Additionally, he has a great feel for how the on-ball defender is going to attack the guard, with smart instincts for when to flip screens, or do little maneuvers like sticking out his posterior to create a last-second impediment for a defender. Those little tools of the trade that make fans yell for illegal screens? Bitadze has got all of them in his game as a teenager.

Combined with that, his sense of timing on rolls is spectacular. He knows exactly when to end his screen and start his roll. He’ll slip, or he’ll stick a screen hard. After that, his ability to find the open area is superb. He’s great at rolling into the short roll area if that’s where he sees the soft spot, or he can go all the way to the basket and present as a lob threat. Don’t underestimate his hands here, or the way he presents a big target by spreading his limbs out for ball-handlers either. Bitadze’s ability to catch below his waist is critical for being able to handle pocket passes when those are the ones that are available. Bitadze is going to enter the NBA as a useful screen and roll big man for any guard.

Where Bitadze has potential to really differentiate himself as one of the best screen and roll big men in the game, though, is with the jump shot. He hit 40 percent of his 90 3-point attempts this season, with most of those shots coming above the break in pick-and-pop scenarios. As we’ve seen with someone like Brook Lopez this season, the ability to consistently hit above-the-break 3-point shots is critical to a team’s offense now from the center position. It completely warps the way defenses have to play the opposing team, and creates a ton of space for primary initiators to drive into the paint with. Giannis Antetokounmpo’s forthcoming MVP and Eric Bledsoe’s resurgent 2019 were not accidents: both players were terrific, but the space they had to move was critical.

His percentage is a small sample, after he shot 21 percent from 3 in 2017-18, but there’s reason to believe in him as a 3-point shooter early in his career. Everything mechanically is sound. He needs to keep repping jump shots and getting consistent with his footwork and the cleanliness of his release, but there’s reason to believe he will shoot it. This is far from what concerns me about Bitadze offensively long term.

The more concerning bit is his vision and passing. The 7-footer regularly misses kick-out passing reads for open 3s in favor of contested shots at the basket. He’s not super comfortable making the cross corner kick-out read after a short roll, instead looking to finish at the basket himself. He’s comfortable with dribble-hand-off settings and can put the ball on the deck once or twice going toward the basket, but he’s not going to be able to pick out players all over the court. It’s the idea of passing up a good shot for a great one, and it’s one that often comes up at the next level when guards get doubled and centers have to act as safety valve options that make quick decisions to release the pressure in 4-on-3 settings. That part of his game just isn’t quite there yet.

This is the thing that ultimately kind of limits him as an offensive weapon to merely an awesome pick-and-roll big. There are different thoughts around the league on how developable this skill is, with some executives believing that players pick this up as they get more experienced with the game (Clint Capela with Houston would be an example of this development positively). Bitadze certainly displays a high feel in these scenarios. But others are more skeptical that there will be a high level of growth here.

That’s okay, though, because Bitadze’s defensively ability figures to make him valuable, at the very least around the basket. His ability to protect the rim is extremely high level in Europe due to his sense of timing and desire to contest everything. He’s a smart rotator from the weak side, knowing what shots he can get to. In fact, whereas many consider Jaxson Hayes to be the best rim protector in the class, I’d humbly suggest that folks reconsider Bitadze in that conversation.

Bitadze is very real threat to block shots when you go inside the paint. He’s smart at playing gap defense between the ball, the basket, and the man he’s supposed to be guarding. But the downside to his activity can be fouling problems. Bitadze fouled 3.8 times per 23.4 minutes, which can artificially limit the amount of time he can spend on the floor. This remains a very real question about him: can he do his job protecting the rim while also staying on the floor for 28-30 minutes a night? This is also, at times, where you’ll still see his emotion get the better of him. For the most part, he’s done a good job of taking that fire he plays with and using it positively. But it’ll still come out in frustration after a few repeated foul calls.

As you can see a bit of in the clip above, Bitadze has also improved his movement skills quite a bit. His strong awareness helps, and I think there’s a chance he’s a liability out in space at times against the quickest guards. He’ll need to prove at the next level that he can play out on the floor in high-stakes situations when he might get attacked repeatedly. I don’t think you’re going to want to play much switch coverage in ball-screen scenarios with him on the floor, but I’m not convinced that he gets attacked repeatedly out there if you do that, either. He can be a legitimate positive on defense if you can play long, athletic players around him that filter players toward him around the hoop.

To put it all together, I see a player in Bitadze who, as long as foul issues don’t overwhelm him, is going to be among the most NBA-ready players in this class. In many ways, despite their age gap not being very large, Doumbouya is something of the antithesis of that. While his upside is rather large due to his athleticism and skill set, I think it’s going to take Doumbouya a couple of years to come into his own on the NBA level. His consistency in the French league for Limoges just isn’t quite there yet.

Doumbouya certainly has the higher ceiling, but at the end of the day, a draft pick’s value is not necessarily about who is going to be the best player 10 years down the road. Rather, a draft pick’s value is solely determined based upon how much value the team that selects the player derives from him, either based off of production or what it receives in a trade. And while I do see Doumbouya as becoming a successful NBA player in his 20s, I also have a real concern that he might be a guy who is better for his second team than his first team, given how impatient NBA organizations can be with their rookies.

It’s also worth noting my own personal biases as an evaluator, as I do tend to default a bit more toward production and polish than unfinished products, particularly when drafting outside of the elite tiers of the draft. I have both Bitadze and Doumbouya in my fourth tier, with Bitadze at No. 8 and Doumbouya at No. 10. Now, I do think Bitadze is a bit more scheme dependent, whereas you can see Doumbouya working just about anywhere. You have to be a team that’s willing to play more drop coverage in pick-and-roll as opposed to switching with your 5 man at all. But with teams beginning to utilize more zone-like, help-heavy schemes that keep the center in the middle of the paint on defense, more roads are opening up for Bitadze to find success at the next level.

Ultimately, I feel confident in Bitadze turning into a starting quality center due to the overall polish of his skillset and the upside that he’s shown over the last year with his body and his shooting ability. He’s not only my No. 1 international player in this class, but also my top center, as I believe in his rim protection giving him defensive value in the right scheme, and his offensive skill set being better than Hayes’ both now and into the future.

Bitadze might not exactly be well known by the media, yet, and he might not be the story this week. But I’m betting that if you give it a couple of years, they’ll know all about him.

ty cad

https://theathletic.com/1041885/2019/06/23/10-free-agents-the-spurs-could-should-will-target-this-offseason/

please and thank you

SAN ANTONIO – The question was simple, and Gregg Popovich provided a simple answer that today can be used as insight to what the Spurs could be seeking when free agency kicks off at the end of this month.

What was the decision to bring veteran Dante Cunningham onboard after the two sides agreed to a one-year, roughly $2.4 million deal last year?

“He’s veteran,” Popovich said during Spurs media day before last season. “He’s a pro. He plays aggressively. He can play some defense; he can score; he’s been with other programs; and he’ll add another player that’s been around and understand how this works.”

Cunningham, 32, certainly provided his fair share of moments for the Spurs. His best outing, on the stat sheet, came on Nov. 19 when he scored 19 points on 7-of-7 shooting (5-for-5 on 3-pointers), seven rebounds and three assists in a loss to the New Orleans Pelicans.

Popovich praised his defensive efforts in the thrilling Oct. 22 overtime win over the Los Angeles Lakers when Cunningham, before fouling out, secured a game-high 12 rebounds and did his best to help slow down LeBron James. And against those same Pelicans, Cunningham also had a 15-point, seven-rebound outing in the Nov. 3 contest.

In the first 22 games of the season, Cunningham, who was signed to be a role player off the bench, started 18 times, averaging 22.5 minutes for the Spurs.

“We didn’t expect him to be playing all these minutes and he’s taking advantage of the opportunity,” Popovich said after that Nov. 3 game against the Pelicans. “I think he’s been really good for us. He sets the tone defensively. LaMarcus (Aldridge) goes under the bucket, and Dante is picking people up who are really good shooters, or good one-on-one players, and he’s done a great job.”

So, at Cunningham’s price tag, it fair to say the Spurs got a good deal for what he was able to provide when he got extended opportunities. But Cunningham isn’t expected back next season, and the Spurs will have to look to replace his role off the bench.

Unless a significant transaction occurs, the Spurs will be likely operating over the salary cap but not into luxury territory. Hence, they will be able to use the $9.2 million non-taxpayer mid-level exception to add one or multiple players and have the veteran’s minimum slot as well.

If Popovich’s explanation of Cunningham’s signing last season serves as criteria, here are 10 players who could fit the Spurs next season:

Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports
(Soobum Im / USA Today)
Trevor Ariza
After completing a successful stint with the Houston Rockets, Ariza chased the money last offseason and signed a one-year, $15 million deal with the Phoenix Suns. He provided leadership, but the fit wasn’t right on the court.

In 26 games, Ariza averaged 9.9 points and shot 37.9 percent from the field (36 percent from 3) before he was traded to the Washington Wizards last December. He performed better with the Wizards, averaging 14.1 points, 5.3 rebounds and 3.8 assists in 43 games.

The days of Ariza, 33, earning $15 million per season are over. He’s more of a mid-level player now and could be a stable fit for the Spurs — who, league sources told The Athletic, were interested in his services when he became available last season.

The Spurs could offer Ariza the full mid-level or persuade him to take a bit less and use the remaining money to sign another veteran. Ariza is still a good defender who can stretch the floor by hitting the 3. And, as Popovich said of Cunningham, he’s been around and understands how it all works.

If Rudy Gay departs in free agency, perhaps Ariza can help fill the void off the bench. And if Gay returns, nothing wrong with having a similar wing in the second unit or maybe a starter at moments of the season when the Spurs are grappling with injuries.

Jeff Green
Speaking of the Wizards, forward Jeff Green will be another free agent worth keeping an eye on. Green played last season on a one-year vet minimum valued at roughly $2.3 million, a deal similar to Cunningham’s. Perhaps he would be interested in taking another minimum deal with the Spurs.

Green, 32, averaged 12.3 points and 4.0 rebounds in 77 games with the Wizards last season. He’s known as a locker-room guy and as someone who can provide some big outings at times. The thing is, don’t expect Green to be consistent when it comes to those outings.

“He’s always been such an enigma that you don’t know what you’re going to get night to night,” one Eastern Conference scout said. “But I can also see him being a little Spur-ish in his skill set. I just don’t know if he’ll have the night-to-night focus that Pop would like.”

But the Spurs wouldn’t need Green to come up big every game. If they can live with the type of player he is — a scorer and someone who loves to play but is perfectly fine being a role player — maybe this could be a beautiful one-year partnership.

Wesley Matthews
Here is a name the Spurs flirted with through the buyout market. Matthews said Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan attempted to recruit him to the Spurs before he selected the Indiana Pacers.

Word around the league is the Pacers will not attempt to bring back Matthews, allowing the veteran guard to sign with any team he desires.

Though there were signs of slippage, Matthews is still respected as a solid 3-and-D wing. If he can accept a secondary role, Matthews could provide the Spurs with another 3-point threat who can stretch the floor for Aldridge, his former teammate in Portland.

It might take more than the vet minimum to get Matthews to San Antonio. If the Spurs decide to split the mid-level money between two players, maybe they could persuade Matthews with the right deal.

But if the two recruiters made any traction with Matthews months ago, it shouldn’t take much to get Matthews to sign with the Spurs.

Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports
(Jeff Hanisch / USA Today)
Wayne Ellington
Of the players mentioned so far, Ellington is probably the perfect Spur. Ellington can shoot, is a better defender than what he’s given credit for and is a reliable team defender.

With the Detroit Pistons, Ellington was charged with the task of defending multiple positions, and some of the assignments were bigger than Ellington. But the University of North Carolina product held his own and competed.

After he was traded by the Miami Heat and waived by the Phoenix Suns, Ellington signed with the Pistons, where he finished the season averaging 12 points and shot 37.3 percent on 3-pointers. What makes Ellington stand out the most when it comes to potential free-agent targets are his character and team-first mindset.

“He’s that 1,000 percent,” a league exec said when discussing Ellington. “He would fit what is known as the Spurs’ culture. He would embrace it. He wouldn’t mind being coached hard by Pop because he’s going to play the right way.”

Jonathon Simmons
“His best days were there,” the league exec said. “Maybe they can rekindle that.”

Simmons’ rights are now with the Washington Wizards after he was traded on draft night by the Philadelphia 76ers. Many around the NBA expected Simmons, who is scheduled to make roughly $5.7 million next season, to be waived by next month, but that all changed Thursday.

As of now, the feeling is the Wizards will keep Simmons around. Should that change, he’s guaranteed only $1 million next season if he’s waived.

Would the Spurs be interested in a possible reunion if Simmons’ time with the Wizards is short-lived?

If he becomes available, Simmons will most likely be grouped with the second or third wave of free agents. Should the Spurs miss out on some bigger targets, maybe Simmons is still around and decides to return on a one-year deal, hoping to have a productive season and make up lost revenue next summer.

Though he didn’t show much of it in Philly, Simmons is still a capable defender who can create his own shot and get into the lane. The Spurs do need more 3-point shooting, but Popovich always loves a player willing to compete and defend. And the Spurs should know how to incorporate Simmons better than any other team, as the Houston native developed under their watch before he departed in 2017.

Rondae Hollis-Jefferson
In one of the earlier news items of the week, ESPN.com reported the Brooklyn Nets did not extend Hollis-Jefferson his $3.9 million qualifying offer. He will now become an unrestricted free agent.

League sources have informed The Athletic that Hollis-Jefferson will explore his options and has not pinpointed any potential suitors. Though nothing is official, the Spurs should consider the former University of Arizona standout.

It’s known the Spurs like to get in-depth intel on players they are considering for their program. Sean Marks, the former Spurs GM and current Nets GM, should be able to provide all the insight needed about Hollis-Jefferson’s potential fit.

On the court, Hollis-Jefferson is praised for his defense and has good size at 6-foot-7. He can provide energy off the bench and would be reliable in transition with his athleticism. The problem …

“No offense to speak of,” a scout said. “He’s supposed to be a three, but he can’t put the ball in the hole.”

And here is what will be the issue for Hollis-Jefferson.

In his four-year career, he shot 44.4 percent from the field and 22.3 percent from beyond the arc. Where he makes up for his shooting woes is through his reputation of playing hard. Again, the Spurs admire players who will compete, but whether Hollis-Jefferson provides enough offense will be one of the questions the team will consider if it explores a signing.

Paul Millsap
The Nuggets will need to decide on Millsap soon, as he has a team option worth $30 million for next season.

Millsap averaged 12.6 points and 7.2 rebounds for the second-seeded Nuggets, who eliminated the Spurs from the postseason. Those numbers aren’t terrible, but the price to bring Millsap back to the Mile High City might be a bit too much.

Millsap is one of the better frontcourt defenders, and he’s not afraid to shoot the 3. If he’s in a lineup with Aldridge, he could see plenty of opportunities from beyond the arc.

The question: How much would it cost to add Millsap? He should have a fair share of suitors capable of paying him more than the mid-level exception. But if Millsap has an interest in the Spurs, this is a potential addition that could be intriguing.

Stanley Johnson
Since the trade deadline, Johnson’s name has always been linked to the Spurs. Assistant GM Brian Wright was in Detroit’s front office when Johnson was drafted eighth overall in 2015.

Some are still trying to understand what Johnson, who’s 6-foot-7, is at this level. A guard? Small forward? He’s not the best shooter and is a streaky scorer, but he is also known as a good defender when he wants to compete. The good, or bad depending on perspective: Johnson just turned 23 last month.

Usually, teams will still attempt to develop a player of that age and mold him into something that fits their needs. Whether Johnson will go along with the plan has been the question many league execs have asked when discussing his services.

The talent is there, though. The Spurs might need to do a little convincing — not much — and if Johnson buys in, he could be a quiet steal when it’s all said and done.

Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports
Could Amir Johnson, right, be on the Spurs’ radar this offseason? (Steve Mitchell / USA Today)
Amir Johnson
Speaking of Johnsons, don’t forget about Amir. Johnson’s time with the Sixers, like that of Simmons, appears complete.

After agreeing to re-sign with Philly on a one-year deal last summer, Johnson played in only 51 games and his minutes dipped from 15.9 to 10.4 per game. As a reserve, Johnson averaged 3.9 points and 2.9 rebounds.

There has always been some intrigue with the Spurs and Johnson. The team inquired about signing Johnson since his days in Toronto and have kept a close eye on him while he played with the Boston Celtics, league sources told The Athletic. But the time to add Johnson, 32, never seemed to align until now.

Off the bench, Johnson would provide another vet who could serve as an energy guy — play defense, set screens, rebound, convert a few putbacks and call it a day. He’s also close with DeRozan and Gay, as the trio played together with the Raptors.

Robin Lopez
This would be a connection-based signing. The connection here is Aldridge, who played with Lopez in Portland. Aldridge loved playing with Lopez, who has always been respected around the NBA as a serviceable big man.

“I like him (with the Spurs) a lot,” the Eastern Conference scout said.

Lopez is a good paint protector and underrated passer, and some look at him as a better rebounder than his brother, Brook, especially on the offensive end. With the Spurs, Lopez would be able to once again play next to Aldridge at times and do what he does best — defend, pass, rebound and set screens.

Lopez, 31, shouldn’t cost too much and could be the right vet-minimum candidate for the Spurs, who need more frontline help with only Aldridge, Jakob Poeltl and youngster Chimezie Metu as the big men currently on the roster for next season.

Dang thanks

Spurs have a complete roster already and that full MLE should get them a decent vet. Ariza, wes matthews, or Jeff green would fit some me needs on the wing. they lacked for defense last year but not cool with people who can’t hit outside shots given their personnel.

Millsap seems like a fantasy unless they trade Aldridge

plz and thank you
https://theathletic.com/1066708/2019/07/08/the-good-and-bad-of-al-horfords-fit-with-joel-embiid-and-ben-simmons/

Over the course of the 76ers-Celtics battles of the past couple years, Sixers fans have grown quite familiar with Al Horford’s game. You likely know what to expect the 12-year veteran — who surprised the league when free agency opened by agreeing to a four-year deal with Philadelphia — to bring to his new team.

But Horford’s new role figures to be very different than it was with Boston. Specifically, he’ll play quite a bit of power forward next to Joel Embiid. That raises important questions: Does the 33-year-old provide enough spacing at the four, next to Embiid? Is Horford capable of attacking closeouts off the dribble? Can he defend sleek fours nightly?

Then there’s the other part of Horford’s role — his minutes at center, when Embiid is on the bench. How will Horford’s time at the five change things for Ben Simmons?

Let’s dive into the film and see how Horford fits with Philadelphia’s young cornerstones.

The Horford-Embiid pairing

As Rich Hofmann broke down last week, the Sixers will likely stagger Embiid and Horford’s minutes some, but the new duo will still have to share the floor for a minimum of around 15 minutes per night. That won’t be an entirely new challenge for Horford, who has played power forward throughout his career. But he’s never shared the floor with a high-volume post-up player like Embiid.

Ensuring proper post-spacing for Embiid is paramount, and in that sense, Horford is not the perfect fit. While accuracy has never been an issue with Horford’s shot, there’s some concern over whether he has a quick-enough release to get his shot off over scrambling defenders, and the ability to blow by those defenders off the dribble. Without those things, opponents will simply double-team off of Horford and bet that they can recover.

The former is a legitimate concern, as Horford attempted only one 3-pointer with a defender within four feet of him all of last season, per NBA.com. That number sounds scarier than it is — for reference, Dario Saric only attempted 24 such shots in 2017-18 — but Horford’s slow release could still cause problems.

Being adept at both putting the ball on the deck and attacking the rim should help Horford compensate. Underrated in this sense, he’s often able to leave defenders in the dust and glide in for tough finishes.

Horford’s ability to pump fake and go should keep the Sixers’ offense flowing, and mitigates the damage of his tendency to opt out against tight contests. Horford is also a smart, controlled passer out of these situations, and a good finisher.

Again, though, the fit here is imperfect. Embiid’s previous partners at power forward — Saric, Ersan Ilyasova, Tobias Harris — are more prolific from 3 than Horford. The Sixers have to hope that Horford’s driving ability, along with some increased willingness to shoot, will hold things together.

Horford’s fit on the defensive end next to Embiid is much clearer. With Horford’s size, mobility and intelligence, the Sixers are poised to be a top five defensive team this coming season.

His ability to defend fours against small-ball lineups might concern some. Whom does Horford defend when the Clippers play Paul George at power forward? How about when Boston plays Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum and Gordon Hayward in the same lineup?

For my money, Horford is switchable enough to stay afloat against those lineups, even though it’s not ideal. Chasing players like Hayward or George will be difficult, but Horford is excellent at surviving in isolations.

Many good teams are going to throw small-ball lineups with dynamic perimeter scorers at the four at Philadelphia. A lot hinges on Horford’s ability to guard — and punish — them on the offensive end. It’s a battle we’ll track all year; my bet is Horford handles it decently well.

The Horford-Embiid pairing will have its challenges on both ends, but I think it will be a fruitful partnership. Horford has hinted a few times that he prefers playing power forward over center, and he certainly has the skills to do it. The defensive upside is incredible, and with any increased willingness to shoot, the offense should flow just fine.

The Horford-Simmons pairing

In recent years, the Sixers have coveted players like Horford — stretch bigs with the ability to play the four or five. They loved that dynamic with Ilyasova in 2017-18, and tried to replicate it with Mike Muscala this past year, but it didn’t work out. Now, they’ve got Horford.

Much of the value in having a stretch five — and perhaps the reason Philadelphia has targeted this type of player — comes in how much it helps Simmons. For starters, it opens things up tremendously in transition. Many teams try to form a shell at the free-throw line to impede Simmons in the open floor. But with Horford, they’ll have to think twice. He’ll be able to waltz into trailing 3s should teams have their big men stationed at the free-throw line, as Embiid does here.

Horford’s threat in pick-and-pops will help Simmons to operate more in pick-and-rolls, as bigs can’t play drop coverages against Horford. It would also open things up for Simmons to play as the roll man with guards, with Horford spacing the floor in the corner.

Defensively, lineups with Horford and Simmons offer a ton of versatility, and the Sixers will be able to switch everything, if they want. The team has always hemorrhaged points on defense when Embiid sits, but that should no longer be the case.

With Horford as the de facto backup center, we’re going to learn a lot about Simmons. Over the past two years, the Sixers have always remained solid when Embiid plays without Simmons, but they disintegrate when Simmons plays without Embiid. Much of that could be blamed on the Sixers’ dreadful backup-center play over the past two seasons. With Horford in the fold, Simmons no longer has that excuse. If the on/off numbers tell the same story this year, it will not be a good look for Simmons.

All things considered, Horford’s fit with Embiid seems less than perfect, but his fit with Simmons — with Horford as the backup center, at least — should be tremendous. The oversized lineups with limited shooting will have their challenges. But with Horford’s unselfishness and intelligence, along with an uptick in attempts from 3, the upside is enormous.

thanks. that kind of reinforces my thoughts on Horf in Philly; a lot depends on Simmons being able to step up to 20/10 territory

anyone have WSJ?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kevin-durants-new-headspace-11568119028

Kevin Durant’s New Headspace
The Nets new star is focused on his recovery and elated to be coming to Brooklyn—so can everyone stop worrying about whether or not he’s happy? “We talk about mental health a lot. We only talk about it when it comes to players. We need to talk about it when it comes to executives, media, fans.”
By J.R. Moehringer
Sept. 10, 2019 8:37 am ET

“Some days I hate the NBA,” Kevin Durant says wearily.

He’s facedown on a padded table, wearing dark workout shorts, a weathered gray DMX T-shirt, a Washington Redskins fleece draped over his shoulders. A physical therapist leans over him, wafting circulation-boosting lasers up and down his surgically repaired right calf.

“Some days I hate the circus of the NBA,” he says. “Some days I hate that the players let the NBA business, the fame that comes with the business, alter their minds about the game. Sometimes I don’t like being around the executives and politics that come with it. I hate that.”

Since June 10, when Durant crumpled to the floor with a ruptured Achilles, halting Game 5 of the NBA Finals and casting a pall over the rest of the series, it’s been The Question: Will the two-time Finals MVP, 2014 league MVP, four-time scoring leader, ever be the same? But listen to him for just a few minutes: He won’t. He’s already a different person.

The change is more than cosmetic, more than simply leaving the Golden State Warriors and signing a four-year $164 million deal with the Brooklyn Nets. It’s more than dropping his longtime number, 35, which possessed enormous symbolism. (A beloved youth coach and mentor was shot and killed at 35 years old.) The change feels elemental, as if Durant’s brush with basketball mortality made him see how fast it all might go away, how fast it will go away (he turns 31 this month), and it scared him, or matured him, or made him think.

And he was already a thinker. “I’ve always been on a search,” he says.

Producer Brian Grazer, a creative partner, says Durant is one of the most original, idiosyncratic minds you’re likely to meet in the world of sports. Grazer recalls a talk Durant gave at a Google retreat in Sicily. During the Q&A someone asked what made Durant so great. Coolly, Durant replied: “Paranoia.”

But all this is guesswork, and Durant hates the way people are forever guessing about his psyche, which is another reason he hates the NBA. So here’s another guess: Maybe he’s not changed, or not merely changed—maybe he’s also dead tired. He sounds tired, looks tired, with good reason. His 12-year NBA career has featured outsize doses of drama, scandal, injuries, gutting losses, fierce beefs, dramatic exits, emotional returns, burner accounts. Even his most devoted fans (Mom and Dad) say the ruptured Achilles and the yearlong layoff it will likely require might be a blessing. In every sense of the word, the man needs to heal.

The healing starts here, in this $24 million neo-brutalist mansion nailed to the side of a cliff above Beverly Hills. Level with the tops of the Santa Monica Mountains, eye-to-eye with the raptors that surf the swirly updrafts, this will be the setting for Phase One of Durant’s rebuild.

In some ways the place is mega-normal, just another stately pleasure dome of superstardom (seven bedrooms, 12 bathrooms; rent: $90,000 a month). But at moments there’s a weird vibe. The house feels like a chrysalis, or a crypt, depending on your point of view, and not simply because the front door is a giant sliding slab of stone. Whatever comes next for Durant—a compromised skill set, a comeback for the ages—it will be determined largely by what happens within these concrete walls, inside these unaccountably dark rooms, and this inescapable truth can really throw off the feng shui. Even the man installing the special low-resistance treadmill in the living room looks a little tense.

Team Durant’s plan is for him to hole up here all summer, then transition to his new home in New York City soon after Labor Day. He’s flying east tonight to look at a few places. Friends have urged him to consider Manhattan, but Dumbo, he thinks, might be more his speed. He wants high ceilings, a sick view, proximity to the Nets practice gym. He lives for a gym, prides himself on rolling out of bed straight into practice. “I don’t wear matching clothes…I don’t wash my face, I don’t brush my hair. I just come in there and go to work.”

This morning, however, the only plan he cares about is the rehab plan. He’s laser focused on this laser. Somehow he even tunes out the blaring big-screen TV across the room. While his friends stretch out on big leather couches, watching White Boy Rick, discussing the plot twists, Durant stretches out on the table, subdued, quiet. This is the flip side of his hatred for the NBA: an almost pious devotion to the game itself and anything that can help him play it at the highest level.

“Without basketball,” he says flatly, “I wouldn’t have done much on earth.” Wouldn’t have traveled the world, or met politicians, entrepreneurs, moguls, rappers, each of whom adds to his store of knowledge and advances his search. “I wouldn’t have seen stuff that I’ve seen, compared to my friends I grew up with. Wouldn’t have gone to India. Or Hawaii.”

His words are suddenly punctuated by bone-shuddering gunshots in surround sound. Someone in White Boy Rick’s world is never going to Mumbai.

The physical therapist, Dave Hancock, cuts the laser, repositions Durant. He rubs around the eight-inch surgical scar on the back of Durant’s calf, kneading the soft tissue to increase blood flow and improve collagen formation. He then manipulates other muscles and tendons in the lower leg to keep them engaged and energized.

Next, Hancock slips Durant’s leg into a boot and sends him outside, into a walled backyard. On metal crutches that look like medieval jousting lances, Durant does a circuit, paces before an outdoor bar decorated with the logo of his new team. Just shy of 7 feet, without a shred of fat, he always traverses earth differently from other humans. (“You can feel his height,” Grazer says.) But with crutches and a boot, his halting-flowing stride is a jarring mix of fragility and athletic grace. Like a baby deer performing the Martha Graham technique.

After the gingerly constitutional it’s time to slide into the infinity pool for one-minute cardio bursts. The infinity pool overlooks…infinity. Durant, however, shows no interest in the view. After easing into the silver-blue water he begins kicking, paddling, maneuvering a rubber ball. When he flags, Hancock nudges. Again. The 45-minute regimen leaves them both gasping.

Hancock hands Durant a basketball (black, Nets logo) and tells him to shoot. The hoop is at the far end of the pool. Floating backward, standing flamingo-style, talking, not talking, looking, not looking, no matter: Swish. Swish. Swish.

Grazer says he once asked Durant what it’s like to choke in a big game. I’ve never choked, Durant said. Everyone chokes, Grazer said. “[Durant] says, ‘I will always shoot the ball—choking is not shooting the ball. If I miss, it’s not my fault. It’s the environment. Or someone else’s fault.’ At first that sounded arrogant. But if you think about it, it makes sense. Choking is not shooting.”

Cardio over, summer sun directly overhead, Durant moves into the dark coolness of the house. A chef brings him a plate. Crispy black cod, parsnip-and-potato purée, chanterelle mushrooms, roasted fennel, followed by crème brûlée topped with fresh whipped cream and sliced strawberries. Durant takes two bites, sets the plate aside. He burrows into the couch recently abandoned by his friends. He has only a short time to rest and regroup. This morning’s regimen will be followed by another this afternoon. Two sessions, every day except Sunday, all summer.

Another athlete might complain about the monotony, says Hancock, who’s worked privately with Odell Beckham Jr., David Beckham, Daniel Craig, U2. But Durant attacks it with an all-consuming fire, which Hancock calls the hallmark of an elite athlete.

In fact, for Durant, rehab began nanoseconds after the injury. He heard the tendon pop, felt the leg turn to lead, knew exactly what lay ahead. He stayed cool, collected, even back in the locker room, surrounded by teammates and executives looking like mourners at his wake. Only when doctors started talking blood clots and other bad outcomes did Durant’s mind go “to a crazy place.”

His phone went crazy too. Calls and texts from everywhere. (Barack Obama: Speedy recovery.) Among the first was his mother, Wanda Durant, whom he immortalized as “the real MVP” in his 2014 MVP acceptance speech. She was watching the game at home in Maryland, in the house Durant bought her. She stepped out of the room for a moment, and when she came back she saw her phone fluttering. Fifteen texts?

She looked at the first. It was from a friend. It just said: Oh no.

Frantic, she rewound the game, pressed pause, put her face close to the screen, looked deep into her son’s frozen eyes, trying to see how bad it was.

It was bad.

She cried when he answered the phone. He told her it was OK, because that’s what the son of a single mother says. She said she was on her way, she’d be on a plane that night. He said no. The next day would be soon enough.

She was at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery 48 hours later, the last face he saw as they wheeled him into the operating room and one of the first he saw when he woke from the anesthesia. She then followed him to a suite at the Four Seasons, where she did all the things he couldn’t do for himself. “He was in the tub,” Wanda says, “and I was washing him, and we were talking, making sure his leg didn’t get wet and the bandage stayed dry, and he said: ‘Mom, it feels good to have you take care of me.’ And it just—”

She stops, overcome with emotion.

The moment was especially sweet because not long ago mother and son were on the outs. Wanda had been handling Durant’s financial affairs since he broke into the league, but in 2014 he decided to take control. It caused a rift, which took months, Durant says, to heal.

After several days Wanda went home, and Durant moved to a temporary apartment in SoHo. His father came. (Wayne Pratt wasn’t present for most of Durant’s childhood, but he’s now part of Durant’s small inner circle.) They ate vegetarian takeout, watched The Black Godfather, spent a whole afternoon together without once mentioning basketball, even though the NBA’s free agency period was days away. The basketball world was breathlessly waiting to hear which team Durant would choose, and Durant’s father was breathless too. But Durant was determined to keep his own counsel.

A far cry from three years ago, says Rich Kleiman, Durant’s manager, business partner and close friend. In the summer of 2016 he and Durant rented a palatial estate on Further Lane in the Hamptons and welcomed a procession of lobbying delegations from various teams, including a party of four stars from Golden State. This time around, shortly before the start of free agency, Kleiman met Durant for lunch at Cipriani, a chic restaurant in SoHo, and gave him one last overview of all the teams and all his options. Durant said: “All right. Well. I’m going with Brooklyn.” Just like that.

Kleiman was taken aback: For real? Yes, Durant said. End of discussion. (Looking back on both free-agency crossroads, Kleiman laughs. “The Hamptons and Cipriani? How bougie can you get?”)

Durant says his decision-making process was as simple on the inside as it looked from the outside. Brooklyn was the right fit; he just knew. He didn’t even speak to the Nets before his decision, he says. He didn’t need a PowerPoint. He’s always felt big love as a visiting player at Barclays Center, he says, and he wondered what it might be like if he were on the home team. Plus, the Nets offered the opportunity to join his “best friend in the league,” Kyrie Irving.

Of course, Durant says, he was conflicted about leaving the Bay Area. “I came in there wanting to be part of a group, wanting to be part of a family, and definitely felt accepted,” he says. “But I’ll never be one of those guys. I didn’t get drafted there.… Steph Curry, obviously drafted there. Andre Iguodala, won the first Finals, first championship. Klay Thompson, drafted there. Draymond Green, drafted there. And the rest of the guys kind of rehabilitated their careers there. So me? Shit, how you going to rehabilitate me? What you going to teach me? How can you alter anything in my basketball life? I got an MVP already. I got scoring titles.”

That he stood out, stood apart from the group, felt preordained. “Some days I hate the circus of the NBA,” Durant says. “Some days I hate that the players let the NBA business, the fame that comes with the business, alter their minds about the game.”

“As time went on,” he says, “I started to realize I’m just different from the rest of the guys. It’s not a bad thing. Just my circumstances and how I came up in the league. And on top of that, the media always looked at it like KD and the Warriors. So it’s like nobody could get a full acceptance of me there.”

He scoffs at rumors that his public disagreement with Green, in the final moments of a game last November, was determinative. (Durant scolded Green for not passing him the ball; Green then berated Durant, repeatedly calling him a bitch.) It was “a bullshit argument,” he says, “that meant nothing. Absolutely nothing. We were good before it. We were great.”

And great, he insists, after.

But there was also this: From a strictly competitive, strategic standpoint, Durant had come to fear that Golden State had hit a ceiling.

“The motion offense we run in Golden State, it only works to a certain point,” he says. “We can totally rely on only our system for maybe the first two rounds. Then the next two rounds we’re going to have to mix in individual play. We’ve got to throw teams off, because they’re smarter in that round of playoffs. So now I had to dive into my bag, deep, to create stuff on my own, off the dribble, isos, pick-and-rolls, more so than let the offense create my points for me.” He wanted to go someplace where he’d be free to hone that sort of improvisational game throughout the regular season.

His tenure in the Bay Area was great, he says, but because of media speculation, fan anxiety, “it didn’t feel as great as it could have been. We talk about mental health a lot,” Durant says. “We only talk about it when it comes to players. We need to talk about it when it comes to executives, media, fans.”

A small detail, perhaps telling: He hasn’t been back to the Bay Area since June, since the injury, and he has no plans to return. His staff cleaned out his apartment in San Francisco, packed up the furniture, the memorabilia, including the MVP trophies that sat on the mantel. He doesn’t know when he’ll return again.

Meaningful? Merely logistical? People want to know. Desperately. Durant knows they want to know. Breakups represent change, and change represents death—naturally people obsess. Some still need clarity on Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, the Beatles. What the hell did Yoko do?

Durant has a Ph.D. in this phenomenon. When he left the Oklahoma City Thunder for Golden State, reaction was intense. Overnight he went from icon to traitor. The memory still pains him.

“People coming to my house and spray-painting on the for sale signs around my neighborhood,” he recalls. “People making videos in front of my house and burning my jerseys and calling me all types of crazy names.”

At his first game in Oklahoma City as a visitor—February 2017—fans yowled for blood and brandished cupcakes, because Durant was supposedly soft. “Such a venomous toxic feeling when I walked into that arena,” he says. “And just the organization, the trainers and equipment managers, those dudes is pissed off at me? Ain’t talking to me? I’m like, Yo, this is where we going with this? Because I left a team and went to play with another team?”

His mother recalls one particularly appalling piece of video: a Thunder fan firing bullets into a No. 35 jersey. Bullets—after she and Durant and half his extended family relocated to Oklahoma, after they embraced the community, after Durant gave a million dollars to tornado victims.

“I’ll never be attached to that city again because of that,” Durant says. “I eventually wanted to come back to that city and be part of that community and organization, but I don’t trust nobody there. That shit must have been fake, what they was doing. The organization, the GM, I ain’t talked to none of those people, even had a nice exchange with those people, since I left.”

Though fans in Toronto roared with pleasure and glee the moment he ruptured his Achilles, he doesn’t view that behavior in the same light. On the contrary, it tickled him. Torontonians knew he was playing the best basketball of his life. “They was terrified that I was on the floor,” he says, suppressing a smile. “You could feel it the second I walked out there.”

Does this same largesse extend to Toronto’s über booster, Drake, who trash-talked the Warriors and practically ran the floor on every fast break, thus irking half a continent? It does, it does. “That’s my brother. I view him as, like, blood.” If you get upset about how Drake roots for his hometown team, he adds, “You need to reevaluate yourself.”
Durant’s own clothing and jewelry, David Yurman chain, $3,500, David Yurman, 114 Prince Street, New York. . Hair, Eric Adams; grooming, Tasha Reiko Brown; manicure, Ashlie Johnson. Photo: Mario Sorrenti for WSJ. Magazine, Styling by Sydney Rose Thomas

No, what Durant doesn’t like, what unnerves him, is when raw hatred poses as fandom. “We talk about mental health a lot. We only talk about it when it comes to players. We need to talk about it when it comes to executives, media, fans.”

As with the ruptured Achilles, however, the bitter parting with Oklahoma City brought hidden boons. “It made me realize how big this whole shit is,” he says. The “shit,” he says, is “the machine,” a great big invisible generator of narratives, programmed by the powers that be to gin up controversy, conflict, whatever keeps people dialed in. He’s learned—he’s learning—to free himself from the machine, to separate the game he loves from the noise and nonsense surrounding it.

Though he can sound stressed when discussing this stuff, though he can look downhearted, beard askew, doleful eyes fixed on the ground, Durant wants people to know he’s happy. More, he wants them to please for the love of God stop asking if he’s happy.

Maybe it’s a function of his introversion. Maybe it’s his resting facial expression, which is that of a man who just found a parking ticket on his windshield. Whatever the reason, observers often think Durant is bummed, or numb, when in fact he’s just pleasantly idling in neutral. “People are always like, Are you happy? It’s like, Yo, what the f— does that mean right now?… That was the whole thing this year: Is KD happy where he is?”

Such a highly personal question, he complains. More, an unanswerable question. And whenever he tries to answer it, earnestly, honestly, no one’s satisfied, which makes them unhappy, which then makes him unhappy.

Indeed, right after he announced his deal with Brooklyn, a typical story dominated one or two news cycles. Warriors execs, behind the scenes, supposedly saying Durant wasn’t happy enough after winning two titles: Nothing’s good enough for this guy.

False, Durant says. “It’s very rare in our lives when we envision and picture something and it comes together the perfect way you envision it. [Winning a title] was the only time in my life that happened, and that summer was the most exhilarating time. Every day I woke up I just felt so good about myself, so good about life.… That was a defining moment in my life—not just my basketball life.”

This is the one thing that doesn’t change about Durant. He still tries earnestly, honestly to correct the record, give real answers, put the truth out there. He doesn’t measure his words, doesn’t care if he says it wrong or contradicts himself. (Case in point: He’s spoken forgivingly about Oklahoma City in the past. But he’s not feeling that right now, and he’s not the least bit concerned if the paradox throws you.)

What matters more than continuity, more than happiness, more than titles—more than anything—is the search. Durant is one of the few NBA players who speaks of the game as a vehicle for gaining wisdom.

The rapper Q-Tip recently sent Durant an old black-and-white clip of Bruce Lee, which Durant devoured. Lee put it so beautifully, telling an interviewer about the secret of martial arts. “All types of knowledge,” Lee says, “ultimately mean self-knowledge.” The more you know about martial arts, the more you know about yourself, and the more you can then express yourself with your body—especially in “combat.” On any given night he has things to express. Angry things, scary things, joyful things, about his story.

He grew up in the roughest parts of Prince George’s County, Maryland. No money, no father. Lost a cherished aunt and a coach at a tender age. Lost friends to gun violence. Survived a bare, lonely two-room apartment, just his mom and brother, and now inhabits this ridiculous American schloss. Every step of that remarkable journey has left a mark, reshaped his soul. He wants to tell you how, wants to tell the world, and he does so with his beautiful game, a sui generis hybrid of length and strength, violence and accuracy and grace.

Laurene Powell Jobs, who helped Durant establish a multimillion-dollar program in Prince George’s County to help college-bound kids ready themselves—scholastically, emotionally, financially—says Durant is “a deeply integrated individual,” which makes him rare among all people, let alone celebrities. Integrated people, she says, “keep all the knowledge of their experience and bring it to their current awareness.… They use it as a source of knowledge, of power, and want to effect change that’s informed by their experience.”

If basketball isn’t available, Durant finds expression through other means. Photography, music, art. He dabbles, or dives deep, depending. But he’s discovered a true passion for business. He seeks out founders, leaders, CEOs and applies what he learns from them to the empire he’s building with Kleiman. Under the rubric of 35 Ventures—headquartered in New York City, staff of 15—they manage Durant’s lucrative endorsement deals, oversee an equity partnership with luxury audio company Master & Dynamic and create an eclectic investment portfolio (technology, hospitality, media) tailored to their shared interests.

They also generate a lot of content. Just this year they produced a documentary about the San Quentin Warriors, a hoops team inside the maximum security prison; launched a six-episode series on ESPN called The Boardroom about the business of sports, along with related digital shorts; and began filming a scripted show called Swagger, loosely based on Durant’s days playing youth basketball, with Grazer as a co-producer.

Through the Kevin Durant Charity Foundation they also help groups that take innovative approaches to fighting homelessness and easing hunger, and they do dazzling refurbishments of basketball courts in low-income neighborhoods around the world.

Above all, Durant expresses himself through social media. Instagram is one of his main portals to the world. It’s an introvert’s utopia, he says, a place to engage with people from a safe distance. Never mind the grief it’s caused him in the past. (In recent years, at times using fake accounts, he’s clashed with online critics, including at least one who still had a curfew.) He checks his direct messages twice daily, and though they number in the hundreds, he methodically works his way through, chatting with all sorts of folks about all sorts of subjects. Recently he conducted a two-week-long dialogue with a total stranger, a young man who detailed his many struggles and mental woes, ad nauseam, all of which Durant found fascinating.

He’ll also talk shop with anyone. The other day a middle school student reached out. “She’s like, I started to play at the free throw line, but I’m not very comfortable there, so I don’t really know what to do when I get inside the zone. It was such a nice-ass question. She blew my mind.”

He often parachutes into young people’s comments, doles out praise, congratulates them on a great game, a big win, “just encouraging them, letting them know they’re nice, and keep going. That shit does a lot for me. That’s why I like the Gram. A lot of young grass-roots basketball players, I build relationships through Instagram, so when we see each other it’s love.”

He recalls having a drink with E-40, rapper, philosopher, who claims authorship of several everyday phrases, including “You feel me?” E-40 made a toast: I’m not above you, I’m not below you—I’m right beside you. “I’m like, That’s the approach I take with everybody!”

Maybe that utopian vision of the world will now come true. Maybe Durant’s unfiltered dialogue with humanity will reach new levels of intimacy and respect and mutual understanding. Just as the injury changed Durant, or accelerated changes already in process, maybe it will alter public perception. The knocks—that he was soft, that introvert was a fancy word for selfish—seemed to evaporate the moment he gave up his body for Golden State. Starting Game 5 with a strained calf, risking and then incurring catastrophic injury, seemed to instantly restore the hero status he enjoyed early in his career.

Or maybe the machine has other plans for his narrative.

It’s almost time for the afternoon session with Hancock. First, though, a quick interview with a film crew making a documentary about basketball in Prince George’s County. Time suddenly seems like the infinity pool. No edges, no horizon. Talking about the past, working on the future, hobbled in an uncertain present.

Durant says he’s decided to wear No. 7 in Brooklyn because it stands for completion in the Bible. (God rested on the seventh day after creating Heaven and Earth.) Clearly the completion of his career is on his mind. In which case, what next?

Kids, he says, maybe.

How many?

He throws out numbers. Maybe five. Maybe one.

First he needs to find a woman who can handle this crazy life.

He used to think that wasn’t such a tall order. But, as with so many things, his thinking on that has evolved.

“I thought this life was pretty simple,” he says. “But it’s not as simple as I thought it was.”

thanks!

kd and kyrie on the same team, good times lol

U want me to see you, I see u my son. Now go flourish with that clout u received

— Kevin Durant (@KDTrey5) September 10, 2019

these guys are walking contradictions but i kinda love it.

dont forget deandre jordan is on that team too lol

jordan has had some episodes of flightiness but seems like a good guy to be around is well liked etc kyrie and kd are such grumpuses

anyone got access to pelton's trade grades on the murray deal?

Grades for the Dejounte Murray trade: https://t.co/uVJGuWXspX (ESPN+)

— Kevin Pelton (@kpelton) June 30, 2022

How will Dejounte Murray fit alongside Trae Young with the Atlanta Hawks?

The Hawks made the biggest addition of the NBA offseason to date on Wednesday, sending three first-round picks -- two of them unprotected, per ESPN's Zach Lowe -- and a pick swap to the San Antonio Spurs in exchange for Murray, chosen as an NBA All-Star for the first time last season at age 25.

Having played point guard in San Antonio, Murray will be an interesting fit next to Young in the Atlanta backcourt. An All-Defensive second-team pick in 2017-18, Murray will undoubtedly be an upgrade at that end of the court for a Hawks team that ranked 26th in defensive rating last season -- worst of anyone to make the playoffs.

On the other side, the Spurs are dealing Murray at the peak of his value with two years remaining on his inexpensive contract. San Antonio's roster is now built around six first-round picks from the past three drafts, including three this year, with more on the way.

Let's break down what this trade means for both teams.
The deal

Hawks get:
Dejounte Murray

Spurs get:
Danilo Gallinari
2023 first-round pick (via Charlotte Hornets)
2025 first-round pick
2027 first-round pick
Future pick swap with Atlanta

Atlanta Hawks: C

Adding Murray will surely revive the age-old question of how the Hawks can utilize Young's shooting without constantly having the ball in his hands. Young's 8.7 minutes per game time of possession ranked third highest in the NBA, per Second Spectrum tracking on NBA Advanced Stats; and the 3,730 pick-and-rolls he ran, according to Second Spectrum, were 11% more than the next-highest player (Luka Doncic).

Building a heliocentric offense around Young has produced great regular-season results for Atlanta, which ranked second behind the Utah Jazz in offensive rating in 2021-22. Come playoff time, however, Young struggled as the primary option against the aggressive defense of the Miami Heat, averaging just 15.4 points per game on 32% shooting with more turnovers (31) than assists (30).

Given Young powered the Hawks' surprising run to the Eastern Conference finals in 2020-21, the question isn't whether he can succeed in the playoffs. It's whether putting so much offensive responsibility in his hands maximizes his value to Atlanta against the best defenses. Enter Murray, another high-volume ball handler who ranked sixth overall in pick-and-rolls (2,608) and seventh in time of possession (7.4 MPG).

When pairings like this have succeeded, it's typically because both players are also off-ball threats. Think Chris Paul with either James Harden in Houston (at least the first season) or Devin Booker in Phoenix. That doesn't describe Murray, a 33% career 3-point shooter who is better in catch-and-shoot situations (36% last season, per Second Spectrum) but still below average.

It also hasn't described Young, who has the shooting chops to succeed in that role (he hit a sizzling 45% of his catch-and-shoot 3s in 2021-22, 11th among players with at least 50 such attempts) but rarely plays it. He took just 86 catch-and-shoot 3s all season. The 83% of Young's field goals that were unassisted last season was fourth highest among players who made at least 250, per NBA Advanced Stats. Murray again wasn't far behind at 73% (11th in that group).

The obvious comparison when we talk about Young being more of an off-ball threat is Stephen Curry, the deep-shooting, undersized guard who has always been a reference point for Young. As Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr recently pointed out on the Lowe Post, that's possible partly because Curry played shooting guard his first two years at Davidson, requiring him to work on the movement necessary to get open without the ball. Unlike Curry, Young has always had the ball in his hands as he developed.

Ultimately, the comparison is unfair because Curry's combination of ballhandling and ability to wreck a defense with off-ball movement is unparalleled throughout NBA history. The Hawks don't need Young to be Curry. They just need Young to be active enough to keep defenses engaged and allow Murray room to operate with the ball in his hands.

There are two clear wins from this deal for Atlanta.

The first is defensively. Although Murray hasn't quite reached his All-Defensive peak since returning from an ACL tear in the 2018 preseason, he generates steals at a high rate and is an excellent defensive rebounder for a guard. Murray is capable of taking on the tougher defensive assignment in the backcourt, allowing Young to hide on less threatening opponents.

Additionally, the Hawks should have more hope of surviving the minutes Young spends on the bench, allowing him to get more rest. After finding a successful formula for the second unit built around Bogdan Bogdanovic in the second half of the 2020-21 season, Atlanta again struggled to score without Young last season. The team's offensive rating dropped by 10 points per 100 possessions with Young on the bench.

To some extent, I think those issues are inevitable with an offense built so much around a single player, but the Hawks will have an All-Star point guard on the court at all times now and (hopefully) won't be as reliant on Young.

Despite Murray having one of the league's better contracts -- paying him like a midtier starting point guard ($16.6 million this season and $17.7 million in 2023-24) -- adding him will still be costly because Atlanta used Danilo Gallinari's partially guaranteed salary to match it rather than that of one of the team's core players, such as forward John Collins.

By waiving Gallinari today, the Hawks could have ducked the luxury tax this season. Instead, they'll start free agency over the projected tax line before filling out their roster. Atlanta will be hard-pressed to get out by the deadline because there's so little fat to trim. All eight players making more than $3.5 million this season will be part of the Hawks' rotation.

Although adding Murray is an upgrade for Atlanta, I'm not sure it puts the Hawks in the projected top half of the East playoff standings. I'd still have them behind the Boston Celtics, Heat, Milwaukee Bucks and Philadelphia 76ers, pending additional moves this offseason. And that's where you start to wonder about the price.

As Lowe argued, giving up three first-round picks for a player on a value contract makes sense if that player gets a team to a crucial new level. The Bucks surely don't regret shelling out even more swaps and picks for Jrue Holiday after Holiday immediately helped them win a championship. But there's more room here for the Hawks to second-guess this deal.

Giving up two unprotected picks has the benefit of providing Atlanta a little flexibility to trade additional first-rounders. The Hawks can, at the moment, trade their own picks in 2023 and 2029. The downside is there's no parachute if the Hawks' future goes worse than planned. (Say, by Murray leaving as an unrestricted free agent in 2024 because his low salary makes an extension unrealistic.) Even the pick swap in 2026 in between the two first-rounders is unprotected, per ESPN's Tim Bontemps.

Atlanta is betting big on Murray fitting with Young. For the team's future, that bet better be correct.

San Antonio Spurs: A

I understand if Spurs fans are disappointed about trading an All-Star who won't turn 26 until September and has two years left on his contract. However, the value San Antonio got in return would have been difficult to turn down. As Murray moved toward unrestricted free agency and either bumping up his salary near the max or heading elsewhere, his trade value would have diminished rapidly.

By pushing the two picks from the Hawks three years into the future, the Spurs both increased the chances of those having lottery upside and timed them to land just as San Antonio's remaining young core should start paying dividends. In addition, the Spurs will get an extra first-round pick as early as next year from the Hornets that Atlanta got in the Cam Reddish deal.

For now, San Antonio's best pick is probably the team's own in 2023. It's worth remembering that the Spurs' decades of success started when a gap season due to injuries (primarily star center David Robinson) was rewarded by winning the Tim Duncan sweepstakes. I don't think it's fair to say at this point that French center Victor Wembanyama or G League Ignite guard Scoot Henderson (the projected top two picks in the recent 2023 mock draft from ESPN's Jonathan Givony) are at that level, but San Antonio can hope for a similar outcome.

There is still young talent on hand, led by the duo of Keldon Johnson and Devin Vassell. Those young players will likely struggle with the increased offensive responsibility created by Murray's departure, but those growing pains could pay off in the long term. The Spurs also should be able to find minutes for all three of this year's first-round picks: guards Malaki Branham and Blake Wesley and forward Jeremy Sochan.

Pending a possible buyout for Gallinari, San Antonio could still create more than $25 million in cap space. That wouldn't be enough at the moment to make a max offer sheet to Suns center Deandre Ayton, but the Spurs could surely get there if they want to envision Ayton as the centerpiece of their rebuild. Alternatively, San Antonio could continue the slow build by using the room to take unwanted contracts from other teams.

in case anyone wants to read zach lowe's thoughts on the "five most interesting players of the 2022-2023 season"

article start

It's time for our last preseason tradition -- my five most intriguing players for the coming season. We don't pick superstars or rookies. The goal is to find young-ish X factors.

TYRESE HALIBURTON, INDIANA PACERS

Haliburton understands the franchise-defining wager Indiana placed trading Domantas Sabonis to the Sacramento Kings for him: that Haliburton could be more than a second banana whose passing genius and gregarious personality draw in everyone. The Pacers were betting Haliburton could be an All-Star -- a foundational offensive fulcrum.

"Sacramento was great," Haliburton says. "I wasn't ready to be a full-time point guard when I got there. Playing with [De'Aaron] Fox helped. But now, this is everything I ever wanted. I get to be the full-time guy. I love this."

The transition requires a recalibration of Haliburton's game, maybe of his basketball soul. He is wired to be unselfish. He reads defenses from two steps ahead and gets rid of the ball early.

"In the modern game, where guys love to hold the ball, he's an outlier," says Rick Carlisle, Indiana's coach.

Whipping the ball early empowers teammates, catches defenses midrotation and triggers ping-ping-ping passing sequences.

"There are a lot of guys who only pass if it equals an assist," Haliburton says. "That's not who I am."

Those sequences often end with the ball returning to Haliburton, and he's productive in that position as a knockdown shooter -- 43.5% on catch-and-shoot 3s -- and as a catch-and-go driver.

But the Pacers need him to score -- to sometimes hold the ball longer, take an extra dribble. Haliburton rarely gets to the rim or the line.

"This whole summer has been about challenging my mind and become more of an a--hole in a sense, offensively," Haliburton says.

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It's a tricky balance -- hunting points and free throws without sacrificing what makes Haliburton who he is. "I want to score more," Haliburton says, "but I also think I'm one of the best passers -- if not the best."

He entered camp 18 pounds heavier after working with Indiana's strength coaches, Carlisle says. (The Pacers hope the added muscle will help Haliburton navigate screens on defense and hold up better one-on-one.)

He spent the summer working with Drew Hanlen, the renowned skills trainer, on going left and absorbing contact.

Hanlen had interns smash Haliburton after one lefty dribble and pushed Haliburton to plow through the punishment. "There were entire days where literally all I did was take hesitation dribbles left and get hit," Haliburton says.

"I have plenty of videos of him throwing the ball against the wall," Hanlen adds.

Haliburton has a habit of picking up his dribble early, around the elbow, when he has a runway ahead. His intentions are good. Sometimes, he spots a pass. If the defense snuffs that, Haliburton toggles to his floater -- one of the league's best; he hit an incredible 59% on floater-range shots last season.

That accuracy will be almost impossible to sustain. Free throws and dump-off dunks are more efficient.

"We'd watch film, and [Hanlen] would say, 'You came off that screen thinking pass, and I'm tired of that,'" Haliburton says. "'Go score.'"

That mindset will help in one-on-one situations -- something Haliburton focused on this summer for the first time. "Naturally, I am not an iso guy," Haliburton says.

He will have to bail out possessions late in the clock. He also expects to face more switching defenses, and his ability to counter that is perhaps the most important big-picture question about Haliburton adapting to a first-option burden.

"Everybody wants to be the [Toronto] Raptors now, and I'm prepared for that," Haliburton says.

Haliburton can slice apart any defense that puts two defenders on the ball. He does not have the blow-away burst to consistently roast speedy bigs on switches:

But Haliburton compensates with craft. He was 41-of-98 on step-back 3s last season, and he leverages the threat of that shot with hesitation dribbles that get bigs lurching. He studied how former Pacers guard Victor Oladipo would give the ball up against switches, retreat near midcourt and get the ball back with space to rev up.

Haliburton will put in the work, and set the tone for the organization. He gets to know every staff member -- asks them questions about their families and jobs. Chad Buchanan, the Pacers' GM, first heard of Haliburton when his nephew was a manager at Iowa State University -- and told Buchanan of the star who treated everyone with respect. Buchanan began watching Haliburton. "His game grows on you," Buchanan says.

After the Utah Jazz walloped Sacramento by 49 points his rookie season, Haliburton put off his postgame lifting and asked two staffers to accompany him to the practice court. Haliburton stayed until he made 49 3s -- one for each point in the scoring margin -- from seven different spots, for a total of 343 triples. He got home around 1 a.m.

He brings the same commitment to his new team.

"I want to bring the Pacers back where they belong," Haliburton says.

ANTHONY EDWARDS, MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES
Edwards strutted into his first postseason as if the NBA's biggest stage had been waiting for him all along. He seized Minnesota's offense as Karl-Anthony Towns battled foul trouble, and he averaged 25 points -- including 40% shooting on 9.5 3s per game.

He hypnotized defenders with crossovers and hesitation moves before rising above them -- or zooming through them. He hunted Ja Morant and tracked Morant on defense. He looked fearless and unfazed in a way only stars do.

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"I was having even more fun than it looked like," Edwards says. "It was the best basketball experience of my life."

With few exceptions, even teams that invest big in frontcourt stars -- as the Wolves have done pairing Towns and Rudy Gobert -- need star-level perimeter creation to chase titles. Trading everything for Gobert at age 30 was a massive bet on Minnesota's barely 21-year-old phenom becoming that star ahead of the typical pace. (Last month, Edwards apologized for anti-gay comments he made in an Instagram video.)

Those nights where Edwards looks unstoppable obscure how much work remains. He has been a below-average shooter from almost every spot. Like any young scorer, Edwards has struggled at times as a distributor -- missing passing windows, holding the ball too long. (The Wolves' offense too often ground to a halt in Minnesota's first-round loss last season.) Edwards ranked in the bottom-half in efficiency among high-volume ball-handlers in pick-and-rolls and isolations, per Second Spectrum.

But the foundation is so strong, and Edwards seems to know the path forward -- including as a passer. "I gotta start seeing the help before it's in my face," he says. "And getting off the ball early, making advance passes."

Good things happen when Edwards makes the simple play. It jolts Minnesota's offense into gear, and gets Edwards the ball back with an advantage:

When he sees them, he can make all the pick-and-roll passes -- including cross-court lefty slingshots. A D'Angelo Russell-Gobert action on one side could shift into a full-speed Edwards-Towns pick-and-roll on the other -- perhaps an easier set of reads for Edwards. Gobert instantly becomes Minnesota's best screener by miles. He's an easy lob target for Edwards, who has had issues finding bigs on the pick-and-roll.

Edwards hit 36% on 177 step-back 3s -- the sixth-most attempts in the league; he'll drill triples over drop-back schemes. Mid-rangers will always be core to Edwards' game, but he wants to turn more ultra-long 2s -- those dreaded 21-footers -- into 3s, and burrow to the rim more. (Edwards has averaged four free throws per 36 minutes; that number should get much higher.)

Edwards had only 19 post touches last season; bully-ball would be a game-changing weapon as Edwards continues targeting small guards on switches.

"My post-ups will be a lot better," he promises. "I'm working on it now. That's all I can say."

Alongside Russell and Towns, the Wolves need Edwards to be an off-ball threat too. He hit 41% on catch-and-shoot 3s last season. Duplicate that, and defenses will stick more closely to him. Edwards can exploit that attention with backdoor cuts, and needs to be a more active off-ball mover. You see glimpses -- including an encouraging habit of running into catches:

Edwards has talked about being a stopper on defense, and has the tools to do it. He's fast and well-balanced, able to slide in sync with ball-handlers. He stays under control closing out on shooters, and can wall off almost anyone chest-to-chest. He is the rare wing who offers fearsome rim protection. "I love blocking shots," Edward says. "I might get dunked on, but I'm still coming for you."

(Speaking of dunks: I asked Edwards if he was sad he no longer has the chance to dunk on Gobert. "I'm happy he's on my team -- for his sake," Edwards quips.)

His focus and fundamentals can wane; he can ball-watch and lose his assignment. "My only problem off the ball is seeing my man," he says. "I just kind of forget I'm guarding somebody." He's so confident in his speed and leaping, he sometimes strays too far from shooters -- assuming he can recover.

Edwards is also, frankly, a bad rebounder who doesn't box out. That was a team-wide issue for Minnesota; they cannot count on Gobert to solve it alone.

But Edwards sees the game on defense. He calls out coverages. He has all the ingredients of the player Minnesota needs him to be. It's just a matter of harnessing them in time.

DE'ANDRE HUNTER, ATLANTA HAWKS
Hunter -- fresh off signing a four-year, $95 million extension -- is a textbook case of how hard it can be for young players to find their rhythm. Injuries short-circuited every stretch of momentum -- including Hunter's scorching start to the 2020-21 season.

He entered the league as an NCAA champion and No. 4 pick, with ambitions of Carmelo Anthony-style mid-range scoring. That role didn't exist in Trae Young's offense; the Hawks needed Hunter to become a spot-up threat. Meanwhile, Hunter jostled with other young guys eager to prove their scoring chops.

"It's really difficult to establish your game when you come in with a group of talented players," says Nate McMillan, Atlanta's coach.

Hunter has bounced between roles -- spot-up guy with sprinkles of one-on-one -- but never looked comfortable in either. He has been a stilted isolation player -- unable to power through defenders his size, not quick or deft enough with the ball to get by wings. The Hawks scored a ghastly 0.823 points last season when Hunter shot out of an isolation or dished to a teammate who fired -- 159th among 198 players who recorded at least 50 isos, per Second Spectrum. He hit just 39% on mid-rangers after nailing 54% in 23 games in 2020-21.

Hunter spent the offseason training with Chris Brickley, and worked on cleaning up his handle, says Ty Jerome, Hunter's college roommate who joined him in Brickley's gym. Hunter's dribble can get high and loose. "The best wing scorers, their handle is tight," Jerome says. "Dre focused on that."

He has done well posting up mismatches -- often after screening for Young and forcing switches. Atlanta scored almost 1.12 points per possession directly out of Young-Hunter pick-and-rolls -- 52nd among 457 pairings that ran at least 100 such actions, per Second Spectrum. Atlanta milked that play against the Miami Heat in the first round of last season's playoffs:

Hunter averaged 21 points in the series, and shot 61% on 2s. McMillan vows to feature Hunter's one-on-one game -- including to punish opponents who stash their weakest defenders on him.

"You can give Dre the ball and ask him to make plays," McMillan says. It injects stylistic variety, and nudges Young to move more off the ball.

It's easier for Atlanta to get to the Young-Hunter two-man game when Hunter slides to power forward. McMillan plans to use that alignment; Atlanta's backup power forward options are unproven. That setup also gives Hunter a speed advantage against bigger defenders.

But Hunter's main job is spotting up, and he hasn't been good enough. He drained 37.5% from deep last season, but attempted a career-low 3.7 per game. Hunter passed up too many open looks to drive into nothingness. Teams don't treat him as a dangerous shooter.

"He's gotta be a spread shooter," McMillan says.

The bigger problem is shaky decision-making. It's not enough to be a 3-and-D guy anymore. You have to catch, drive and make the right read with the floor in flux.

Hunter has 224 career assists and 201 turnovers. He misses open players, and makes passes too late:

(He has the same issue on pick-and-rolls. Hunter recorded assists on only 3.4% of his ball screens -- lowest among 227 players who ran at least 100 pick-and-rolls, per Second Spectrum. Hunter shot on 66% of those plays -- second-highest, behind only Dillon Brooks of the Memphis Grizzlies.)

He sometimes overthinks after catching a kickout pass -- pass-faking and jab-stepping at ghosts, gifting the defense time to reset.

"It has to be catch and go, or catch and shoot -- not catch and hold," McMillan says.

Decisive Hunter gets places:

He is a solid defender. He's best on bigger wings and stretch fours, and Dejounte Murray's arrival should push him there. Hunter often defended waterbug point guards so the Hawks could hide Young elsewhere; Murray will do that now.

One knock: Hunter's poor rebounding; the Hawks defense has been scattershot with Hunter as a small-ball power forward.

"We need him to improve his rebounding," McMillan says. "This is a big year for him in terms of maturing and establishing his identity."

If everything clicks, Hunter could be the superstar role player every contender needs. Jerome compares Hunter's NBA journey to his time at the University of Virginia -- where Hunter rose from redshirt freshmen to top-five pick.

"I've seen this movie," Jerome says. "When he puts it together, Dre could be one of the best players in the league."

OBI TOPPIN, NEW YORK KNICKS
Good things happen when Toppin plays, and the Knicks should be in the business of discovering why -- and whether that effect carries over against opposing starters. That success has come despite New York playing Toppin almost exclusively alongside rim-running centers -- marginalizing Toppin's skill as an explosive screen-and-dive guy. When Toppin bolts inside for lobs, he might bump into a center calling for a lob at the same time:

New York could solve this issue by playing Toppin at center or pairing him with Julius Randle, but they likely worry about torpedoing their defense and rebounding -- weak points in Toppin's game. Toppin somehow logged more minutes alongside Jericho Sims than Randle last season, and Tom Thibodeau, New York's head coach, has not seemed interested in exploring the Randle-Toppin duo much more. (I'd do it.)

Toppin has spent too much time chilling in the corners. You spot him bouncing on his toes, begging for some reason to get moving -- to get involved. But when the ball swung to him, he mostly refused open 3s.

"We all saw it -- he wasn't confident in his shot," Thibodeau says.

Defenders ignored him to muck up the paint:

The low-hanging fruit is Toppin becoming a better shooter, and he let it fly in New York's final 10 games when Randle was mostly out injured -- drilling 26-of-58 from deep. He honed that shot over the summer, and swears he's ready to fire.

"I'm super confident, and that's the only thing I needed," Toppin says. "I felt like I had a good shot. It was just about confidence. If I shoot and miss, just shoot the next one. I know that now."

"He got better and he didn't stop," Thibodeau says. "He's always in the gym."

Improved shooting would coax defenders closer to him -- unlocking what could be an explosive pump-and-drive game. Toppin is much more effective roasting defenders in rotation than beating them in static situations.

Even in tight half-court confines, Toppin's game can sing. He is a quick-twitch playmaker on dribble hand-offs and pindowns -- secondary actions that flow out of an initial pick-and-roll involving New York's centers. If Toppin's man lunges to help on the ball-handler, Toppin slips out of screens at turbo speed. He's fast enough to get to the rim before the opposing center crosses the lane to stop him.

"He's one of the quickest I've ever seen getting out of screens," says Anthony Grant, who coached Toppin at the University of Dayton.

He's a nifty passer too, with a knack for the always fun quarterback keeper:

Toppin should set more flare screens, and even run off pindowns -- anything to keep him active. He thrives in a fast-paced ecosystem with lots of ball movement, but New York's starters -- the guys Toppin should play alongside more -- didn't fit that ethos last season. Randle was a ball-stopper. The point guard spot was a sinkhole once the Kemba Walker experiment failed and Derrick Rose got injured. Perhaps Jalen Brunson, some creative coaching and a renewed commitment to passing could remedy that -- and benefit Toppin.

He'll get the offense moving anyway. Toppin is one of the league's most ferocious end-to-end runners, and should be even more dangerous trailing fast breaks this season -- jacking 3s and pivoting into his hand-off game. He can sprint into mismatches, and seal smaller guards under the rim.

"He can run all day," Thibodeau says. "His energy is a gift. It allows us to play at a different pace, and everybody likes that."

Toppin might leak out more than Thibodeau likes -- leaving New York vulnerable on the defensive glass. "We can't run if we don't rebound," Thibodeau says. The general rule, according to Thibodeau: If Toppin challenges a shot up high, run. If he's in the paint, try to secure the rebound and then sprint.

Toppin is a minus defender at both front-court positions, but he tries and talks. His biggest obstacle is a stubborn upright stance that makes it hard for him to slide.

"He's got some flexibility issues," Grant says.

Toppin tried to crouch lower this summer in defending guards -- including Brunson and Chicago Bulls guard Coby White in workouts. "Even if I can't get low, I have to find a way to stay in front of them and contest shots," Toppin says.

Right now, Toppin is a good backup big. If he stagnates or improves only a bit, that's what he'll be. But the actualized version of Toppin is an average defender and major plus on offense -- a true-blue starter. That's what the Knicks need him to be.

PATRICK WILLIAMS, CHICAGO BULLS
Williams may be the most important young X factor in the league, and the one who feels most like a blank slate. Williams has played only 88 games in two seasons after missing most of last season with a wrist injury. He's barely 21 -- younger than Edwards and eight first-round picks from the last draft.

He returned for last season's playoffs, and embraced the assignment of guarding Giannis Antetokounmpo (and sometimes Jrue Holiday). He looked a hair more aggressive on offense, averaging 12 points, doubling his 3-point volume and nailing 58% on 2s.

Opening Week on ESPN, the ESPN App
Wednesday
Knicks-Grizzlies, 7:30 p.m.
Mavs-Suns, 10 p.m.

Friday
Celtics-Heat, 7:30 p.m.
Nuggets-Warriors, 10 p.m.

*All times Eastern

A major short-term leap from Williams is Chicago's best and maybe only avenue of contending in the DeMar DeRozan/Zach LaVine/Nikola Vucevic era. Williams holds the keys to their next era given the Bulls dealt three first-round picks and Wendell Carter Jr. for DeRozan and Vucevic.

He hasn't lived up to expectations on defense, but chalk that up to youth and injury. Williams should grow into a very good, ultra-switchable alpha defender. He's huge and strong, and tries hard. In his one season at Florida State University, coaches often spotted Williams lingering after practice and early in mornings with an older teammate -- Wyatt Wilkes -- peppering Wilkes with questions and having Wilkes walk him through actions, says Leonard Hamilton, the Seminoles coach.

"Unlike most kids -- 'What are my stats? What are my minutes?' -- Pat only cared about getting better," Hamilton says. "He didn't worry about the NBA. He just wanted to learn."

He asks staffers for film on elite scorers, looking for clues on guarding them. He has worked on slithering around picks, and uses his giant hands and arms to disrupt passing lanes.

Offense is the wild card. So far, Williams has been a bit player -- a reluctant corner shooter and tentative dribbler. He defaults to his one-dribble pull-up -- an important shot, but not one to overdo.

Williams has good feel and vision with the chess pieces in motion. The Bulls have dabbled in using him as a screen-setter -- with Vucevic spotting up -- and Williams comes to life in that role, flipping rapid-fire between actions and slinging smart passes in space:

Williams tripled his screen-setting volume last season, per Second Spectrum, and early indications are we will see more of that. Zipping closer to the rim should generate more offensive rebounding chances for him. The Bulls may even experiment with Williams at center.

In his best screen-setting moments, Williams is a good playmaking power forward -- think peak Aaron Gordon in that role, but well short of the apex version in Draymond Green. He has hit 41% from deep; as a spot up stretch four, he brings to mind someone like Harrison Barnes. The blend of all those role players -- the ability to shift between those identities -- is a really, really good player.

That's fine now, with Williams so young and surrounded by three recent All-Stars. But the Bulls did not draft Williams No. 4 in 2020 for him to be a Barnes-Gordon hybrid. At some point, they will want more on the ball.

Even now, Chicago's coaches and stars encourage Williams to be less deferential -- to take the reins when action dictates it. (Williams joined DeRozan in Los Angeles this summer for DeRozan's "Hell Week" of early morning workouts and lifting. He also played pick-up in L.A. with several stars.)

Those around the Bulls whisper that Williams hasn't discovered how good he is. That tracks with Hamilton. When Hamilton sat with Williams to discuss declaring for the draft, Hamilton said that Williams asked, "What if I don't get drafted?"

Williams has run a piddling five pick-and-rolls per 100 possessions over two seasons, per Second Spectrum. His efficiency on isolations has been dreadful. He has nine career post touches, and that's a tool he needs as a screen-setter -- a way to exploit smaller defenders on switches. (Teams already hide their weakest defenders on him.)

When Williams kicks the skittishness and gets aggressive, he almost looks like a different player. It's jarring. If the Bulls want that more, all they have to do is ask, Hamilton says.

"If you tell him what you want," Hamilton says, "he's gonna give it to you."

so much more of this nytimes sport section type shit on there now

https://i.imgur.com/ZV5QHyn.png

I hope Pat Will makes it, just for Zach’s stock performance.

Anyone post the Lowe article on espn+ on Maxey?

1. Tyrese Maxey and the Sixers are ... fine?

Every few weeks, one security guard at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia reminds Maxey of the unlikely series of events that led Maxey to the 76ers -- a rare stroke of strange luck for a franchise that has suffered some of the weirdest NBA melodramas: "Shout out Mike Muscala!" the guard chants, according to Maxey.

It is an inside joke, Sixers lore -- code that identifies a hardcore fan. The Sixers selected Maxey with the 21st pick in the 2020 NBA draft -- a pick that belonged to the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Sixers acquired it in 2016, traded it away, and then got it back in the deal that sent Markelle Fultz to the Orlando Magic. It contained a twist: Philadelphia would receive it only if it fell 21st or later; otherwise, the Thunder would send two second-rounders.

It came down to the wire in the Orlando, Florida, bubble. Muscala hit two 3s in the final 35 seconds of the Thunder's second-to-last game to help their deep reserves complete a comeback that meant nothing to that specific Thunder team and everything to these current Sixers. With that win, the Thunder pick was capped at No. 21.

Four years later, Maxey's ascension toward his first All-Star nod has the Sixers well positioned to pivot away from a spasm of deals that saw Ben Simmons and then James Harden come and go as would-be co-stars for Joel Embiid. Maxey is that guy now, averaging 25 points and 7 assists on nearly 50/40/90 shooting splits -- taking care of the ball and developing deeper pick-and-roll chemistry with Embiid every game. Maxey being this good is the most important positive thing to happen to the Sixers since drafting Embiid. If the rumblings around Embiid quiet -- if he chooses to ride out his career with the franchise that drafted him -- Maxey will be a big reason.

Philly is 6-1 after edging the Boston Celtics on Wednesday, with the league's second-best net rating. The Sixers' passing numbers are almost identical to last season's. Harden's assists and touches have been redistributed across the roster in a faster and more democratic offense under new coach Nick Nurse.

The Sixers appear much closer to title contention without Harden than perhaps even they projected during the Harden stalemate. If that sustains -- if their championship-level No. 2 option is already in-house -- the pool of players the Sixers can target with the draft picks they received for Harden becomes much wider. Their play may also afford patience: Do they have to burn assets now if they are confident the same player -- or someone better -- might be available later, or even sign into their cap space in July?

Two players the Sixers nabbed in the Harden deal -- Nicolas Batum and "Process" favorite Robert Covington -- are contributing already. The Sixers can slot three switchable wing shooters between Maxey and Embiid in combinations involving Batum, Covington, Tobias Harris, Kelly Oubre Jr. and De'Anthony Melton. Patrick Beverley and Paul Reed round out the core rotation.

The formula is working, but the Sixers need one more ball handler to fortify them. They will spend the months before the trade deadline looking, with one eye on the maximum cap space they can carve out this summer.

They have extricated themselves from the Harden morass as cleanly as possible, if not with quite the asset haul they craved. This outcome is better than either losing Harden for nothing or re-signing him to a massive multiyear contract. They have optionality and hope.

"I was prepared for one role if James came back, and if he didn't, I was prepared to be a lead guard," Maxey told ESPN.

He worked and watched film in the offseason with Embiid and Drew Hanlen, Embiid's longtime trainer. When Hanlen visits Embiid in Philadelphia for what are intended to be individual workouts, Maxey volunteers to help as the passer feeding Embiid -- leading to jokes that Maxey is an "intern."

"Joel is the most important player on our team, and I need to know how he likes to catch the ball," Maxey said. "That means post entries, when he's the trail man, everything." (Maxey is a very good entry passer, and he and Embiid love a little pitch-back action when Embiid trails Maxey in transition.)

It means lots of pick-and-roll, and Maxey is a much different sort of partner there than Harden. He has worked on slowing down, giving Embiid time to find pockets in the lane. In the opening two games of this season, Maxey was passing early -- with Embiid catching 20-plus feet from the rim. With every game, Maxey hits Embiid more in his sweet spots near the foul line.

The two are honing a mean empty-side pick-and-roll game on the left wing. Maxey loves to reject picks -- zooming away from them -- and does so much more often than Harden. It is a way for him to occupy Embiid's defender, maybe force a switch, and give Embiid daylight for pick-and-pop actions. Maxey is learning to stay in touch with Embiid on those actions -- to not outrun him. Embiid is learning how to make himself available -- when to cut, when to fade for 3s.

Maxey can punish switches with step-back 3s, but he has made a concerted effort to roast bigs off the dribble -- to reorient Philly's offense toward the rim and open up drive-and-kick chances:

Maxey is happy to make the first simple play -- the easy kickout or swing pass that keeps the machine moving. (The Sixers could stand to shoot more 3s.)

He is shooting 54% from floater range on a dizzying variety of runners -- bank shots, high-arching moon balls, hot-potato floaters Maxey flicks even before jumping. That is an important weapon against defenses that sell out to take away any pass to Embiid -- something Boston did in last season's conference semifinals.

"They say the midrange game is a lost art, but it's big for small guards -- especially in fourth quarters," Maxey said.

He has helped stabilize the Sixers when Embiid rests; Philly has outscored opponents by nine points per 100 possessions when Maxey plays without Embiid, per Cleaning The Glass.

Challenges await -- blitzes, complex help schemes, offenses that hunt Maxey. But Maxey seems up to it. He has given the Sixers a chance at stability -- something this franchise has not known for far too long.

"I work so hard every summer to get 1% better," Maxey said. "I'm ready."

ty!