Reacting to NBA Shovegate (and much more)
Our usual Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza spin around the league, as promised, was pushed post-election to Wednesday
For those of you, post-election, who would like to think about professional basketball on this Wednesday ...
Our election-delayed Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza leads off with an eight-is-enough burst of reactions to pressing NBA news items:
🏀 A three-game suspension without pay for Joel Embiid sounds about right. My instinct, in the Adam Silver Era, has been to brace for suspensions to land on the shorter side, so I must admit that I expected a one- or two-gamer tops … even though Embiid reportedly added a fairly ominous verbal threat to his reported shove of Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes. For Embiid to be forced miss three games and lose out on more than $1 million in salary sends out a pretty strong message to the entire league: You can't put your hands on a media member even if the reporter/columnist/pundit writes or says something that many consider to have strayed beyond the bounds of acceptable. Verbal confrontations are one thing and, as noted here previously, part of the job we sign up for in sports media. They happen. Physical contact, by contrast, is a line that simply can't be crossed.
🏀 The NBA, in its statement Tuesday announcing Embiid's punishment, all but suggested that it, too, had a problem with Hayes' column that initially referenced Embiid's young son and his deceased brother until the newspaper edited those references out online. "While we understand Joel was offended by the personal nature of the original version of the reporter’s column, interactions must remain professional on both sides and can never turn physical," NBA head of basketball operations Joe Dumars said. I've heard (and understand) the fury coming from Sixers fans who openly question why Hayes can dodge punishment while Embiid is forced to miss more game time, but the reality is that the league has zero jurisdiction over the columnist's content. Only his paper does.
🏀 The Sixers are 1-5 and won't have Embiid in uniform before next Tuesday's NBA Cup opener against visiting New York. The first month-plus of Philly's season has been non-stop chaos and confusion — long before Shovegate — and much of it stems from the fact that Embiid and the Sixers have been so murky with their explanations for why he had to miss the entire preseason. I strongly recommend this column from my longtime colleague Howard Beck of The Ringer; Hojo traces the arc of the Sixers' rocky start as well as anyone has.
🏀 ESPN is reporting that Embiid will indeed make his season debut Tuesday against New York. He has to play in that game if the Sixers want the three-game suspension to start with Paul George's homecoming game tonight in Los Angeles against the Clippers. League rules dictate that the suspension can only start with a game Embiid is confirmed to be otherwise healthy enough to play in.
🏀 I mentioned Monday that I had little prior understanding of the Drake/DeMar DeRozan tension that my fellow Substacker Tom Ziller helpfully explained, but I am quite clear on this part: There was zero place for it on a Raptors game broadcast on the night Vince Carter's No. 15 was being retired … especially when Drake is officially listed on Toronto's team directory as Global Ambassador. DeRozan, whether Drake likes the Southern California native or not in the wake of a celebrated rap beef with fellow Southern Californian Kendrick Lamar, is Raptors royalty just like Carter.
🏀 The NBA staged its annual regular-season game in Mexico City over the weekend and Silver, at a pregame news conference, reiterated his well-known fondness for the largest city in North America, saying: "Personally I would love to have a team here." I'm right there with him, as a longstanding supporter of anything that can make the game more international, but I just can't see it happening. It's been seven years since I attended an NBA game in Mexico City, but I don't think the traffic issues, logistical challenges and security concerns posed by trying to put a franchise there have eased much since that visit in October 2017. In a follow-up interview with The Athletic's Joe Vardon after the main press conference, Silver acknowledged that the legitimate prospect of an expansion franchise in Mexico's capital city remains "many years off." The league's desire to expand to Mexico to capitalize on the revenue potential there is understandable but the most feasible short-term answer for the NBA's international growth ambitions continues to be playing more regular-season games abroad. Which is the right thing to do anyway — hear that, Premier League? — when more than 20 percent of the league's players are born outside of the country where the NBA is based.
🏀 The Nuggets and Pelicans are facing full-blown injury crises. The Mavericks, Timberwolves, Kings and Lakers have been up-and-down ... mired in what you would call middling starts at best. The West has been rather funky through these first two weeks of the regular season, but the most significant problem that all of these teams have in common can be found in Oklahoma City, where the Thunder look flat-out lights out at 7-0. They are playing withering defense, allowing a mere 93.8 points per 100 possessions and still haven’t seen the most expensive free-agent acquisition in franchise history (Isaiah Hartenstein) log his first Thunder minute. Scary.
🏀 Golden State at Boston tonight marks Steve Kerr's first appearance in the Celtics' building since Jayson Tatum's bumpy summer under Kerr at the Paris Olympics. The reception figures to be extremely chilly for early November.
The Stein Line is a reader-supported newsletter with both Free and Paid subscriptions available … and those who opt for the Paid edition are taking an active role in the reporting by providing vital assistance to bolster my independent coverage of #thisleague. Feel free to forward this post to family and friends interested in the NBA and please consider becoming a Paid subscriber to have full access to all of my posts.
As a reminder: Tuesday editions, on this and every Newsletter Tuesday, go out free to anyone who signs up, just as my Tuesday pieces did in their New York Times incarnation.
Fab Fifteen
The work of salary cap maven Keith Smith is cited often here, but Keith also finds the time to watch tons of NBA games ... many more than the average human.
Every team in the league played on a 15-game Monday night and Keith has an item on every single one of them in his latest Game Notes piece, which is one of his best regular features.
Check it out here to read a neutral's take on your team:
PS — Here are a couple more informative Smith pieces on Spotrac on salary-cap projections for the summer of 2025 and NBA bonuses and luxury-tax issues.
Numbers Game
🏀 5
The 7-1 Celtics play host to the 6-1 Warriors on Wednesday night and, as everyone knows, are trying to become the NBA's first repeat champions since Golden State in 2016-17 and 2017-18. In addition: The previous five NBA champions — Raptors, Lakers, Bucks, Warriors and Nuggets — all failed to advance past the second round of the next season's playoffs.
🏀 183
Denver's Nikola Jokić has three triple-doubles in his first seven games this season. He ranks fourth in league history in that category with 133 and is closing in on Magic Johnson (138) for third place.
🏀 199
Jokić's Nuggets teammate Russell Westbrook needs one more triple-double to get to 200. Enclosed is a tweet from my fellow Substacker Keerthika Uthayakumar, with an assist to Basketball Reference, listing the top five all time.
🏀 12
Orlando's Paolo Banchero, expected to miss at least four-to-six weeks (and possibly longer) with a torn right oblique, missed only 12 games in his first two NBA seasons.
🏀 7
A stat we will be tracking all season: As of Wednesday morning we were down to seven teams (rather than 10) averaging at least 40 3-point shots per game. There are four more teams, mind you, currently averaging 39 3s per game. The full list is embedded in this sentence.
🏀 50.9
The Celtics are averaging a league-leading 50.9 3-point attempts per game after ranking as last season's only team in the 40s.
🏀 12
The 7-0 Thunder have won their last 12 regular-season games.
🏀 40-14
When the Clippers overcame a 40-14 deficit in the first quarter Monday night to beat visiting San Antonio, it marked the second-largest comeback in league history from a first-quarter deficit according to my fellow Substacker Justin Kubatko.
🏀 27
The Knicks rallied out of a 27-point deficit after a quarter to beat the Lakers way back in January 1967 to set the league record in that category.
🏀 2019
The NBA's youth fan base more than tripled in Mexico and Brazil from 2019 to 2024 according to an NBA Global Fan Study via Nielsen Sports Global Fan Insights. The NBA has offices in both Mexico City and Săo Paulo and there is an NBA store in Mexico City (as well as one in Chile and a whopping 34 in Brazil).
🏀 4
There are four Mexican-born former players in NBA history: Gustavo Ayón, Jorge Gutiérrez, Eduardo Nájera and Horacio Llamas.
🏀 4
There are also four current NBA players who have a parent or grandparent who was born in Mexico: New Orleans' Jose Alvarado, Phoenix's Devin Booker, Miami's Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Charlotte's KJ Simpson.
🏀 33
Miami's win Saturday over Washington was the NBA's 33rd regular-season or preseason game in Mexico, which is more than any other country apart from the United States and Canada.
It's amazing that The Big O is still #2 all these years later even with the statistical inflation of the game.