The NBA Waiting Game
Training camps will be opening leaguewide sooner than you think, but there is still much to be resolved
Media Day for the overwhelming majority of NBA teams is five weeks from today. Practice gyms leaguewide will start to populate right after Labor Day ... which is two weeks from today.
The 2022-23 season, in other words, is not that far off.
There's nonetheless a significant amount of waiting going on from coast to coast on the NBA map.
The Brooklyn Nets are waiting, with fingers crossed, in hopes that their patient approach leads to a change of heart from the disgruntled Kevin Durant about continuing his career as a Net.
The Utah Jazz are waiting for the New York Knicks to succumb to their long-held desire to acquire Donovan Mitchell and sweeten their Mitchell offer, which is said to feature five future first-round picks. That's right: Utah, specifically Danny Ainge, wants more.
The Los Angeles Lakers are waiting, as anxiously as the Nets, to see if some semblance of a Russell Westbrook trade market can still materialize … or if bringing Westbrook to camp, for all the tension it is likely to invite, is really their only short-term option.
Here are some around-the-league notes to fill the void as we wait out all those waits:
🏀 Hope, they say, is not a strategy, but …
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Question of the Week
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Last word …
I'm an idiot sometimes.
Before I posted my column last Monday on the latest with Kevin Durant's ongoing impasse with the Nets, I really should have anticipated that the anecdote I led the piece with — how an unnamed executive told me at summer league that he had heard rumbles about Durant being more apt to retire than play for Brooklyn again — would be transformed into a full-on REPORT by the NBA's aggregation machine. I mistakenly thought that my second paragraph that spelled out how I told the executive myself that I couldn’t believe such an extreme scenario clearly established the first paragraph as a mere illustration of the depths to which some in the league believe Durant is determined to go to force his way out of Brooklyn.
Nope. I misread the reaction completely.
Please allow me, one week later, to …
This is an excerpt from my latest NBA column. To read it all and receive full access to all of my work, please click the link or the orange button to subscribe.