New balls, please
So far, so good for the NBA on its switch from a Spalding basketball to a Wilson basketball. It's a welcome source of calm for the league after a tumultuous opening week of training camps
Amid a torrent of dispiriting headlines throughout the opening week of NBA training camps, with debates about the COVID-19 vaccine and coverage of Ben Simmons' holdout in Philadelphia dominating the basketball discourse, there has been at least one welcome source of quiet for the league.
Noise about the NBA's new Wilson basketball ushered in this season has been largely undetectable.
"I haven't heard a single word about it with our team," said one Eastern Conference general manager.
After Spalding was employed by the NBA as its ball manufacturer for nearly 40 years, Wilson reclaimed those rights in May 2020, with this season officially marking Wilson's return to the NBA for the first time since 1982-83. This news naturally made many players skittish, because basketball players are extremely opinionated about a ball's feel … and because there are still a handful of players around who can remember the fiasco that ensued during the 2006-07 season when the NBA replaced its traditional leather ball with a microfiber version that was almost universally loathed.
The difference this time is that Wilson went to great lengths to ensure that it could produce an NBA ball using the same Chicago leather tannery (Horween Leather Company) that Spalding used in hopes of creating a similar feel. The composite microfiber ball was made from an unmistakably different material that Nets coach Steve Nash, then an MVP point guard for the Phoenix Suns, said inflicted the equivalent of paper cuts all over his hands.
Nash was one of the most vocal critics of the new ball in 2006 and then-NBA commissioner David Stern could not ignore the outcry. Stern was forced to announce just two months into the season that the NBA would have to make an in-season return to the leather ball.
"It seems like the guys are getting used to it," Nash said of Nets players and the new ball. "It's a nonissue."
Mavericks coach Jason Kidd, another Hall of Fame point guard who detested the microfiber model when he was playing, also told me that he has heard no complaints from his players. “Promising switch,” Kidd said.
The Wilson model, as Utah's Mike Conley noted earlier this week, has been in circulation for several weeks (actually dating to the NBA pre-draft camp in June) so players could start getting accustomed to the new feel. The first true test of how long this quiet will last, of course, will come in game conditions, starting Sunday afternoon when the Los Angeles Lakers play host to Nash's Nets in the first game of NBA exhibition season.
You read right, friends: There is an NBA game to consume, albeit of the preseason variety, in two short days.
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Friday marked Day 5 of the Simmons holdout in Philly. It was also the due date for another advance payment — worth 25% of his $33 million salary — that Simmons was scheduled to receive before the start of the season.
This is an excerpt from my latest This Week in Basketball column. For full access to this and all of my Substack pieces, please join our community as a full subscriber.