What happened in Vegas ...
Shall be written about here and in stories to come
Seven days and six nights amount to more than I usually spend in one burst at the NBA's annual Summer League in Las Vegas.
Have to say, though, that I wasn't in a rush to get home. It was a productive stay and a great opportunity to catch up with lots of people from all over the NBA map and, yes, very satisfying in both the podding and dining departments:
Yet I am back home now and that's probably a good thing … even though I will forever insist that Texas humidity can hit you harder than Vegas' famed desert heat. I will admittedly miss The Strip's array of culinary options as much as the basketball conversation, but it's always a serious struggle in Vegas to simply find time to write. I wrestled with that challenge so often at all of my previous stops because I so dreaded the thought of missing out on a prime networking opportunity — with seemingly #thiswholeleague in one place — to stay in my room and satisfy the demand for copy from the home office. Nowadays, of course, I am the office. So I gave myself permission, especially given my four straight days of podcasting last Thursday through Sunday, to post just one story while on the road and vow to make up from lost time now that I'm (relatively) stationary again.
(Dare I add that Saturday's co-bylined notes alongside
Jake Fischer from the around the league, re-shared below, were pretty strong as a solo act.)The latest, hottest and freshest NBA free agency and trade buzz from the scalding Las Vegas Summer League
LAS VEGAS — Around-the-league NBA notes on a Saturday?
Greatly appreciate your patience and understanding as we crank up standard July operations once again. Jake and I had a chance to huddle a couple times and do some planning for the months ahead, too. While true that this Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza got unavoidably shoved into Wednesday, rest assured that we'll be posting a trademark Fischer story Thursday and hopefully another insider piece or two before week's end.
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NBA Bubble Anniversary Time
Five years ago today, I was in the midst of a 10-day quarantine in my 314-square-foot casita — Room No. 4151 — at the Coronado Springs Resort at Walt Disney World in Orlando. Which means I was as isolated as I had ever been, eagerly awaiting clearance to step out of that tiny space and see some semblance of the outside world.
That said …
Your incurably nostalgic NBA correspondent, as you surely guessed, can even find some sappiness to share when it's time to reflect on the not-so-magical NBA Bubble Summer of 2020.
There has obviously been little time for such storytelling in the midst of the NBA's ongoing offseason chaos, but I did recently tape a fun podcast to do some reminiscing with Basketball Hall of Fame Gowdy Award-winning photographer Andy Bernstein about our respective Bubble stays.
Andy and I have been colleagues dating to my first days on the NBA beat covering the Clippers for The Los Angeles Daily News in February 1994. He started chronicling the league with his trusty camera about a decade before I started and has snapped so many of the most prized NBA photos in my own personal collection … like the one that somehow ended up on a Panini trading card in September 2019 that has long held Pinned status on my Twitter feed.
We didn't get to spend any time together in the Bubble because I was part of the first wave of media allowed into the NBA's first-ever leaguewide village and I believe Andy entered during the second wave so he could be there when a champion was crowned. Yet we certainly had a good laugh or two on his Legends of Sport pod reliving the experience.
Check it out when you have a moment to indulge in some Bubble Tales:
All-Star Fever
Adam Silver's annual Summer League news conference (summary from The Associated Press' Tim Reynolds enclosed in this sentence) was hardly Tuesday's lone marquee entry on the evening's sporting calendar.
Around the same time that Silver was explaining, yet again, that the NBA is still in the very early stages of deciding whether it wants to stray beyond 30 teams and insisting that "nothing has been predetermined" in the league office about expansion, Major League Baseball's All-Star Game was also taking place in Atlanta and featured Pittsburgh's Paul Skenes as the National League's starting pitcher for the second midseason classic in a row.
That's the same Paul Skenes, of course, who pitched for El Toro High School in Southern California before becoming the luckless Pirate who never gets any run support. I went to the same school another lifetime ago with Skenes' high school coach Mike Gonzales, who was one of the first people I contacted Monday upon discovering a store in Sin City that actually stocked a SKENES 15 jersey in Charger blue that I was never going to be able to resist.
Especially when I found it hanging next to a Michael Jordan Birmingham Barons jersey:
The specialty at All Star Elite is obviously pre-NBA and pre-WNBA jerseys for a slew of NBA stars, as the other picture below indicates, but I only had eyes for a Skenes.
It was an absolute must irrational purchase … even though, truth be told, there were no names on the backs of ETHS jerseys in Skenes' day.
Yeah, yeah, Skenes is great. But Kyle Hendrix won a World Series as a core part of the Cubs rotation. Capo Valley Cougs 4eva.