Another burst of Late Night NBA Intel
Sunday Best (and World Cup hangover) Edition
I miss the World Cup already.
Or maybe I should put it like this: I will deeply miss soccer mattering as much in this country as it did for the last six weeks.
I must also re-iterate, speaking now as myopically as possible, that the timing was certainly less than an ideal for a footy-loving NBA scribe. The highest-stakes team tournament on the planet, which just spanned 39 days and 104 matches, clashed head-on with the most chaotic transactional month-plus that #thisleague can serve up.
How chaotic?
Sunday delivered the NBA's THIRTEENTH trade in less than a month since the two-day draft held on June 23-24.
Which meant I had to settle for attending two World Cup matches in person (England v Croatia and Sweden v Japan in Dallas) and likewise tune out for significant stretches to stay focused on work matters. Still ...
Dealing with all of the obstacles and calendar conflicts, combined with any of the various FIFA flaws that you could so easily cite, can't diminish the occasion. Actively covering the 1994 World Cup was one of the absolute highlights of my professional career ... and then seeing Copa Mundial return to the United States some 30 years later was super special in all its own ways.
Yet I suspect I've written more here about The Beautiful Game than the bulk of my audience wants at a time like this. Oklahoma City, Atlanta and Dallas just combined Sunday on a three-team trade and now the basketball world eagerly awaits a resolution to LeBron James' fourth career foray into free agency.
And I think I can speak for all of us when I say that I hope that resolution is imminent.
Cavaliers? Heat? 76ers? Warriors? Surprise LeBron Sweepstakes Winners?
Let's hear ASAP.
Let's also dig into a fresh helping of Late Night NBA Intel while we wait for LeBron's announcement and at least one more rush of transactions that we'll surely see on the other side of it ...
Detroit's negotiating window with restricted free agent big man Jalen Duren opened on June 14 ... one day after the Knicks completed a five-game dismissal of San Antonio in the NBA Finals.
Some five weeks later ...