Weekend dose of NBA trade intel
John Collins, Myles Turner and various Knicks, Sixers and Pistons feature in this week's around-the-league notes
SAN ANTONIO — Hello from The Alamo City, where I was with nearly 70,000 fans Friday night to watch Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors throttle the hometown Spurs but also help set an NBA attendance record.
Much more on that historic experience at the Alamodome is coming in the Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza.
The weekend priority, of course, is dispensing a fresh batch of around-the-league notes with 26 days to go before the Feb. 9 trade deadline. It's all below in Dot Dot Dot after a brief nostalgic word separate from devoting my Friday The Thirteenth to the Spurs' 50th-anniversary celebrations.
As explained here previously, this column which I regard as one of the pillars of this Substack — This Week In Basketball — is inspired by my love of the old TV show This Week In Baseball hosted by the legendary Mel Allen.
Baseball was king in the 1970s and 1980s when I was growing up and that show was absolutely drop-everything, must-see TV. I loved everything about it ... incredible theme music, closing credits that were just as goosebump-inducing, Allen's Hall of Fame voice and the whole highlights concept.
When it debuted in 1977, remember, ESPN's SportsCenter was not yet a thing. At our house specifically, I couldn't convince my mother to splurge for cable until about 1986. So for a long time in my formative years, This Week In Baseball was one of the few ways to see out-of-market players.
(When it came to the NBA, only one pal in my high school sphere had ESPN and CNN in 1984 and 1985 ... so we asked him to tape the nightly highlight shows as often as he could on his Betamax player so we could see all the latest dunks whenever our gang got together. It was absolutely incredible back then, growing up in Lakerland, to suddenly have access to the rim damage Michael Jordan was doing in Chicago and Dominique Wilkins was doing in Atlanta and then Larry Nance and Ron Harper were doing in Cleveland. Incredible memories.)
Hope I haven’t overdone the good ol' days here, but this is all a long-winded way of sharing that there have been some tweets recently that celebrated the show and (shocker) instantly caught my eye. Posting the latter tweet was especially irresistible because I can't help but refer to this column as my TWIB notes when I discuss it with trusty editor Royce Webb.
On to the good stuff …