While his Tennessee squad lost to the No. 12-seeded Oregon State on Friday in the first round of the 2021 NCAA tournament, Johnson finished with 14 points, two assists, and six boards. Many are speculating where Johnson will take his talents next, whether that’s suiting up for the Vols next season, or entering his name in the Draft.

Only time will tell, but until then, learn more about Johnson, how his freshman season went, and more.  

(This interview has been edited for length clarity.)

SLAM: How did this season go for you?

Keon Johnson: It started slowly. But things started to pick up as the season went on and I got more comfortable. 

SLAM: Was there a specific adjustment you made that led to that change?

KJ: I feel like, throughout the whole season, I’ve been growing constantly but it really went to another level over the last few games and even during the SEC Tournament. 

SLAM: What was making you uncomfortable?

KJ: Just coming in as a freshman, trying to find my footing, where I fit on the team, things like that. I feel like now I’ve found my place. But also, everyone at this level was “the guy” coming out of high school, so you’re competing against those types of guys. The level of play is just completely different. And the pace is so different. 

SLAM: Were you a different player in high school 

KJ: Yeah. I shot a ton of 3s, I’d have the ball in my hands the majority of the game.

SLAM: When did you feel like things clicked for you this year?

KJ: I feel like after the Kentucky game [Johnson scored 27 points in an 11-point win] I really started to find who I am as a player. After that it felt like things opened up for me. I feel like as a player I’m an inside-out player and that game showed it and helped me bring that to this level.

SLAM: Let’s talk dunking—when was the first time you dunked?

KJ: My first time dunking was when I was seventh grade, but my first time dunking in a game was the summer of eighth grade. One of my teammates had gotten a steal and was running down the left lane and I was running down the right lane and he threw a perfect alley-oop, but I barely got it in. I hung on the rim, though, to make it look better than it was. 

SLAM: Do you remember the first time you dunked on someone?

KJ: No, but in high school there were no more lay-ups—everything was a dunk pretty much. I felt like everybody in the crowd wanted to see me dunk.  

SLAM: What’s something about you that you think people would be surprised to learn?

KJ: I love to fish. Anyone who knows me knows if I’m not playing basketball I’m probably somewhere fishing, or trying to get in someone’s boat to go fishing.

SLAM: How old were you when you started?

KJ: I was really young. Fishing runs in my family. 

SLAM: What’s the biggest fish you’ve ever caught?

KJ: Probably a 30-pound catfish. 

SLAM: What is it you love about fishing?

KJ: It’s educational. It’s taught me a lot.

SLAM: Like what?

KJ: Like that you need to have patience. I try to apply in all areas of my life.

— 

Yaron Weitzman is an NBA reporter and the author of Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports. Follow him on Twitter, @YaronWeitzman. 

The post ‘I’ve Been Growing Constantly’: Q&A With Tennessee’s Keon Johnson appeared first on SLAM.

That art, of course, is the underhand free throw. 

“My dad’s still automatic from the line,” Canyon said in a recent phone interview. All of Canyon’s practicing seems to have paid off, too. In March, he joined the Iowa Wolves, the Minnesota Timberwolves’ affiliate, in the G League’s Disney World bubble. There he connected on all 21 of his free-throw attempts, each one shot by gripping the ball on its sides, dropping it down towards his knees and then flicking it up toward the hoop. 

“I would like to think that’s the only time someone has shot 100 percent from the line in any sort of season while taking that many shots,” Barry said. He was proud of himself, and like his father, who hit 89.3 percent of his foul shots over 14 NBA seasons and has spent the forty years since proselytizing on behalf of the technique, Canyon is a true believer. He wishes more players would follow in his family’s footsteps.

He’s always felt that the underhand free-throw could offer a lifeline to struggling players. He still feels that way, but there’s another motive now, too: in a way, he’s fighting for the survival of his family’s legacy. 

“It’s such a good shot, and we’ve had so much success with it, I hope someone is willing to take up the challenge,” Barry said. “I’d hate to see the underhand free-throw just die.”

Barry understands the hesitancy. He himself didn’t change his technique until his junior year of high school, and in the years since he’s heard every joke. 

“Every time I shoot I get an interesting reaction,” Barry said. 

There was the time in high school when a referee, after seeing Barry shoot underhand, turned to him and asked in a mocking tone, “Who do you think you are, Rick Barry’s son?” There was the other time in high school when he missed a free-throw and opposing fans chanted that he was adopted. There’s a look he gets every time he joins a new team and steps up to the foul line for the first time.

“It’s the ‘What the fuck are you doing,’ look,” Barry said. “Which is why I get why people don’t want to try it. You have to be able to handle the criticism.” 

Barry, who will represent the United States in this summer’s FIBA 3-on-3 basketball tournament, didn’t start shooting his free-throws underhand until his junior year of high school. “And even with my background it still took four years to click.” He transferred from the College of Charleston to Florida before his senior year, and that season shot 88.3 percent from the line. 

“The science is proven,” said Barry, who has a masters in nuclear engineering. “The motion is more repeatable because the shoulders are the only joints that are moving. The ball lands softer on the rim, which leads to better bounces.

“The key,” he added, “is to bring the ball straight down between your legs, not to bring it back. And when you bring it up not to use your wrist but instead roll your hands together when you get around chest level so that your thumbs point down.”

It’s complicated, but he’s willing to offer his services. “IF YOU SHOOT LESS THAN 70% consider switching,” Barry recently wrote on Instagram. “Tag a bad free throw shooter who needs to switch.” He puts tutorials on YouTube. 

He doesn’t expect to receive many calls in the upcoming days, but he’s optimistic that, just maybe, his G League performance will help the cause. During one game he pump-faked a defender into the air, drawing a foul. 

“What the f— are you doing?” Barry heard the opposing coach shout at the player. “I told you he doesn’t miss foul shots.”

“Maybe people are noticing,” Barry said. 

—

Photos via Getty Images.

Yaron Weitzman is an NBA reporter and the author of Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports. Follow him on Twitter, @YaronWeitzman. 

The post Canyon Barry Is Doing Things His Own Way In the G League appeared first on SLAM.

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“Basketball is all I know,” Pryor, who averaged 7.5 points last season last season for the Utah Jazz’s G League affiliate, the Salt Lake City Stars, says over the phone. “I’m a professional basketball player,”

But not for the past nine months. It’s not that he’s given up on his NBA dream, or that he’s grown tired of the G League’s long bus rides and poor pay. The issue is that, right now, jobs for players like Pryor don’t exist.

“A lot of players are getting squeezed,” one veteran agent says.

The coronavirus has wreaked havoc on the professional basketball ecosystem, and no one in that world has felt the brunt more so than those players on the fringes of the NBA. The cancellation of Summer League robbed undrafted rookies and young free agents of a critical audition space. The uncertainty of the G League’s future (the plan as of this writing is to implement some sort of limited bubble, but with many NBA teams strapped for cash, some, reportedly, are uninterested in footing the bill for their G League squads) has thrust professionals like Pryor, who haven’t played a game since the league shut down in March, into a state of limbo. That many of these players were stretched financially even before the coronavirus arrived—last year’s average G League salary was $35,000—creates even more angst.

Going overseas would typically be an appealing option, but the virus has made doing so more difficult. Some international teams, agents say, weren’t interested in dealing with the quarantine periods that come with signing Americans, or the added expenses of finding them homes. Meanwhile, some players are hesitant to leave loved ones and others didn’t want to worry about adjusting to a new country amidst a raging pandemic.

“Our options are limited,” says Phil Booth, a guard who played last season for the Washington Wizards’ G League team.

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Pryor says that he speaks to his agent multiple times a day, seeking any sort of update. In the meantime, he keeps busy by staying ready, just in case the call comes. Wake up at 8, weights at 9, on-court work at 10. Finding an open gym was hard—until a good friend of his, an overseas guard named Rayshawn Simmons who happens to be close friends with Wizards All-Star Bradley Beal, offered Pryor the use of Beal’s half-court set-up, near Pryor’s Fairfax, VA, home.

It’s one of the many reasons Pryor says he’s lucky. Another is that his wife has a steady government job—meaning he doesn’t have to look for side gigs, like the teammate who recently began working at Chick-fil-A.

Still, the uncertainty of it all weighs on him. He and his wife married over the summer—they got their first place together, a one-bedroom apartment they were only able to afford because its price had been slashed—and would like to celebrate with a ceremony, so they’re saving up. They’ve talked about starting a family, too.

“Finances are a big concern,” Pryor says.

CJ Williams isn’t married, but he shares those worries. At 30, he’s older than most of his G League peers, so he thinks about the future in ways they don’t. He knows his career is winding down. “But I think a guy like me still has something to contribute,” he says. He’s played 53 NBA games, and traveled all over the country and world. Now he’s living in North Carolina, and thanks to a friendship with a local middle school coach he was able to secure time at a nearby gym. He spends most of his time training, but also calling his agent and scanning the latest NBA news. When he sees players like former All-Star Isaiah Thomas unsigned, he grows concerned.

“A team in the G League might take him over me,” Williams says. “Stuff like that is on my mind every day. It’s hard not to worry.”

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Undrafted players like Nate Pierre-Louis are facing different stresses. A 21-year-old guard out of Temple, Pierre-Louis declared for the draft early after graduating in three years. Had this been a normal year, he’d likely still be playing in college. Maybe he would have stayed at Temple, or perhaps he would have looked to transfer to another school. “But with the coronavirus everywhere, it didn’t seem like a good idea,” he said. Too much uncertainty, too many concerns.

Pierre-Louis knew it was unlikely he’d get drafted and that NBA scouts didn’t think he had the jump shot or handle to make the NBA. But he also thought his game would translate better at the pro level, no matter where that was, and that someone, somewhere, would give him a chance. He says money isn’t a problem, but he does worry about falling off the basketball map.

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“I just want an opportunity to prove myself,” he says. “I haven’t been seen for nine months. That’s literally two college off-seasons I’ve had to work and to get better. One thousand shots a day. Things like that.

“I’ve gotten better, but I haven’t gotten a chance to show it,” he adds. Even if he did, it’s unclear where a player like him would find a home. As one prominent NBA agent puts it, “If there is a G League bubble, I’m not sure how much emphasis from the teams there will be on developing young guys versus trying to find players to immediately add to the NBA roster.” He and others bring up Duncan Robinson—the Miami Heat sharpshooter who became a revelation after spending a season with the Heat’s G League unit—and say they’re dubious his story could be replicated under the current realities.

Recently, Pryor has taken the plunge and begun planning for life after basketball. He’s working on an apparel company. He wants to leverage his contacts across the sport and supply gear for athletes at schools that can’t afford Nikes or Jordans. He also wants his company to provide those schools with a curriculum “to help athletes find their identities on and off the court.” He has a logo already and is calling the company ID.

Pryor’s excited, but not ready to give up basketball yet. He believes in what he brings to a team. He’s heard the news about the bubble setting the G-League is hoping to set up in the winter and thinks there will always be a place for players willing to let others do the scoring, who want to pick up full court and don’t care about their individual stats, who care about winning the way he does. And if not?

“I heard Puerto Rico might be doing a league,” Pryor says. “I can check that out.”

The post What It’s Like to Be a G League Player During COVID appeared first on SLAM.

When LeBron James elected to sign with the Los Angeles Lakers in July 2018, he and the team, led by then-president of basketball operations Magic Johnson, decided that the best way to move forward would be by surrounding him with fellow ballhandlers.

Not only would relieving James of some of his playmaking duties help him remain spry for the entirety of the season, but it would also transform him into a lethal off-ball weapon. At least that was the plan.

So the Lakers signed Rajon Rondo and Lance Stephenson. They played James alongside Lonzo Ball, the point guard they had drafted second overall the year before. 

The plan backfired. The Lakers won just 37 games and became the first James-led team to miss the playoffs since the 2005 Cleveland Cavaliers. Head coach Luke Walton was let go. Johnson resigned.

And so last off-season, the Lakers took a different approach. It helped that they were able to finally reel in Anthony Davis from the New Orleans Pelicans, and that to acquire him they had to part with Ball. But the team’s brain trust, led by general manager Rob Pelinka and new head coach Frank Vogel, also recognized that they’d be best served adding to James’ playmaking responsibilities, not limiting them. They signed shooters like Avery Bradley and Danny Green.

Despite the presence of Davis, they added two more springy centers in Dwight Howard and JaVale McGee.

“A quarterback’s got to have wide receivers,” is how Vogel explained it earlier this year. “With our bigs at the basket and the shooting support that he’s got around him, [the roster] really fits his skill set.”

GRAB YOUR COPY OF LEBRON VOL 2

The result was a team that finished the regular season with the Western Conference’s best record—and then stormed through the playoffs en route to a title. The 2020 Lakers will be remembered for many things: Being crowned champions of the longest and most turbulent season in League history, ending a Lakers championship drought, providing James with his fourth ring and Davis with his first. 

But they should also be remembered as being the first team to fully lean into playing James at point guard, his true offensive position. In doing so, this season has helped the 35-year-old James secure one more crown: that of greatest point guard of all time. Think of him as the true Point God.

“He makes the game easy for everybody around him,” Green said. “He is a great facilitator. He will find you on time, on target. When he finds you, he usually wants you to shoot it right there and then because you are probably wide open.”

Trying to classify James’ position has always been a tricky proposition. He was viewed as a small forward coming out of high school, because of his 6-9 frame, and has often referred to that position as his “natural” one. Other times he’s scoffed at the idea of being beholden to any sort of position labels. “He’d always say, I’m a ballplayer,” Norris Cole, who played point guard alongside James with on the Miami Heat, said.

He’s also rarely guarded opposing point guards, and, as former Orlando Magic and Detroit Pistons head coach Stan Van Gundy put it, “Offensively, positions don’t matter. As a coach you’re thinking about defensive matchups.”

Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a team without a designated point guard—even in today’s mostly positionless NBA. Shooting guards and forwards might now all be “wings,” and centers may be going extinct, but most teams still charge specific players with running their attacks. The role remains unique. And it’s one James has always held.

“He was a point guard with us from Day One,” said Mike Brown, who took over as the Cavaliers’ head coach in 2005, James’ third season in the NBA, and coached him for five years. “He brought the ball up, he initiated the offense, he did everything.”

According to Brown, James never officially being announced as the team’s point guard was never intentional; a staffer—often a member of the public relations team—was usually the one who submitted the official starting lineups.

“I guess they just assumed the shortest player was our point guard,” Brown said. “But that was never the case. Those guys”—he mentions former Cavalier Mo Williams—“were all shooting guards.”

This season that changed. Not only was James often the lone ballhandler on the floor, but the Lakers became the first team to begin listing him at that position, a switch James embraced.

“He was more fully a point guard than on any team he’s ever played for,” said Channing Frye, a former teammate of James’ and current Turner Sports analyst. 

In response, James tweaked his game just a bit. But while most aging superstars with his size and skills migrate toward the hoop once they hit the twilight of their careers, James took a different approach, drifting toward the perimeter, and embracing his point guard skill set instead.

He had the ball in his hands more than ever before, according to the NBA’s tracking data. Thanks to that, he was able to lead the League in assists per game for the first time in his 17-year career and move up to eighth on the all-time list.

If he continues at his current pace for another two seasons he’ll soar past Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, Mark Jackson and Steve Nash, leaving him behind only John Stockton, Jason Kidd and, depending on how the next few seasons play out, Chris Paul. James is also now second all-time in playoff assists, trailing only Magic, the player most historians consider to be the greatest point guard ever.

But should James have that belt? These are the sort of inconsequential but also nerdy conversations that can make sports fun. So, let’s do some legacy math.

If you agree with Brown that James was always a point guard, and if you, like most people, consider James one of the two best players of all time, then that title should, indeed, belong to him. The counter would be that James spent three seasons in Cleveland alongside another All-Star point guard in Kyrie Irving, and four in Miami sharing the point guard duties with players like Mario Chalmers. There’s also the fact that this was his first season ever leading the League in assists, while players like Johnson and Robertson did so multiple times.

The counter to that counter would be James’ assist numbers, and how you have to scroll all the way down to No. 31 on the all-time list before you’ll find a non-point guard (Kobe Bryant). In other words: James approaches the game in a fashion similar to the players we consider point guards. He, like Johnson and Kidd and Nash, is a facilitator. And anyway, if shoot-first players like Stephen Curry can be labeled point guards then why can’t James? As former Brooklyn Nets head coach Kenny Atkinson said earlier this season, “I don’t know what’s going to be on his Hall of Fame plaque, but it should say point guard.”

And, maybe under that: greatest to ever play the position.

—

GRAB YOUR COPY OF LEBRON VOL 2

Yaron Weitzman is a freelance writer and author of Tanking to the Top. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty

The post LeBron James Might Be The Best Point Guard Ever appeared first on SLAM.

—

Joel Embiid is fond of comparing his life to a movie. The story, in his account, begins with a scout discovering him on the streets of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where Embiid grew up. It’s a good opening scene, but not exactly true.

The story actually begins with an email.

“Best wishes brother!!!” Didier Yanga wrote to Joe Touomou in January 2011. “I’m sending you pictures of my nephew…Thomas’ son, who is 2m06 tall and 17 years old. He’s in 11th grade.”

Eighteen months earlier, Yanga’s nephew Joel Embiid had watched his first NBA game, a Finals matchup between Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers and Dwight Howard’s Orlando Magic. Joel had grown up around sports. He excelled in volleyball, was an avid soccer fan, and also the son of a professional handball player. Yet something about the NBA spectacle was different.

“I had never seen anything like that,” Embiid recalled. “The way they moved, and the athleticism, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I had that moment like, I just wanna do that.” He found  a run-down hoop nearby and started playing regularly. “Kobe!” he’d shout after each shot. He’d extend his right wrist and freeze it in the air, just like he’d seen on TV.

He begged his parents to let him play. “But my brother wanted Joel to have excellent grades and not be distracted by anything else,” Yanga said. Thomas served as a colonel in the Cameroon military. His three kids knew his edicts were not to be violated, and his wife, Christine, was just as strict, forcing Joel to memorize his school notes before playing outside and forbidding him from staying up late to watch NBA games. “I didn’t even have any friends because all I ever did was sleep and do homework,” Embiid recalled.

As Joel grew older he became more rebellious. After school he’d arrange a bunch of highlighted textbooks on his family’s kitchen table and slip out to a nearby soccer field. He’d play until spotting his mom’s Mercedes driving down the street, then dash back, hide his sneakers, and greet her from behind a stack of study materials.

Thomas and Christine planned for Joel to leave for France after high school, where he’d enroll at the National Institute of Sport and Physical Education. He’d continue his volleyball training—a sport they understood—and maybe earn a spot on Cameroon’s national team. Thomas had followed this path and look at the life he now lived: Three beautiful children. A spacious home. A wife driving a Mercedes. The family even employed a maid.

But Joel didn’t care about any of that. What he cared about, what he wanted, was to play basketball, to be like Kobe. Slowly, Thomas began reconsidering his stance. He reached out to his brother, who had played some high-level amateur basketball in the Ivory Coast and coached a bit too. Yanga wasn’t an expert, but he knew enough to recognize the potential in his 6-foot-7 volleyball-playing nephew. He thought of an old friend of his, a man named Joe Touomou, one of the few bridges between Cameroon’s cracked courts and America’s lavish gyms. Touomou had grown up with Thomas and Yanga before leaving to attend Georgetown on a basketball scholarship. He was the first Cameroonian ever to play Division I and had worked as an international scout for the Indiana Pacers. He was the perfect person to illustrate all the opportunities basketball could provide.

Yanga explained the situation to Touomou, then sent him pictures of Joel posing in front of a doorway, to accentuate his height. Touomou received the photos on a Saturday afternoon. He saw how tall Joel was. He knew how athletic Joel’s father was. He booked a flight to Cameroon and a few weeks later was in the Embiid home handing Joel a gym bag stuffed with leftovers from a previous camp—basketball jerseys, shorts, and a size 16 pair of white sneakers.

Thomas and Christine told Joel to wait upstairs. They sat with Touomou in the living room. Touomou began by explaining the potential he believed Joel possessed. He said he knew a local coach who could help him harness all that potential.

“Joel is stubborn,” an unmoved Thomas said.

“All he wants to do is play sports,” said Christine. “He needs to focus on school.”

“Basketball can get him into the best schools,” Touomou responded. He was armed with examples. Look at Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje, he said, the first Cameroonian to ever play in the NBA. And look at Luc Mbah a Moute, an NBA forward whose father, in a similar conversation eight years earlier, Touomou had swayed. Both, thanks to basketball, had earned college scholarships.

The three spoke for more than an hour. Touomou could tell that the education pitch had softened Thomas and Christine. He told them to think it over, that he’d be back soon. Two days later, he returned to the Embiid home. Joel sat with them this time, and Christine served food. She and Thomas told Touomou that Joel could play, as long as he promised to remain focused on his academics. Joel looked on quietly, hiding his excitement.

In February, Thomas signed paperwork allowing Joel to join a local team led by a coach named Guy Moudio. Moudio gave Joel a tape of Hall of Fame center Hakeem Olajuwon to study. He used a medicine ball to build up Joel’s strength. Moudio had to teach Joel some of the game’s more basic skills, but he was impressed with what he saw and how Joel, despite being a novice, seemed to have an innate feel for the game. He mentioned his new pupil to Francois Nyam, a former French professional basketball player whose father was from Cameroon. Nyam was a cousin of Mbah a Moute’s and had since become a fixture in the country’s basketball community. He and Mbah a Moute were opening a basketball camp in Cameroon; that summer five attendees would earn an invite to Basketball Without Borders, a program organized by the NBA with the intention of spreading the sport across the world. An invite there was an opportunity to audition in front of a group of people with the power to fulfill the loftiest of dreams.

Joel was invited to participate, but while getting dressed on the morning of the camp’s first day, he began thinking about all the players he’d be competing against. They were so advanced and he was still so raw. Anxiety overcame him. He spent the day at home playing video games with his younger brother instead.

The next morning, Moudio showed up at the Embiids’ house. This was Joel’s chance, and Moudio wasn’t going to let nerves ensnare his prized pupil. He ushered Joel to the Yaoundé Sports Palace, and for most of the camp Joel was overmatched. “He couldn’t catch a basketball, dribble, or anything,” Nyam said. But like Moudio before, Nyam and Mbah a Moute were both impressed with the way Joel absorbed the game. “You could show him something completely new and he’d pick it up after, like, three tries,” Nyam said. That was all the group needed to see. About a month later, Joel was standing on a court in Johannesburg surrounded by a group of NBA coaches and some of Africa’s top prospects. He was skinny and raw, but also tall and agile. “His feet,” said Monty Williams, a former NBA player who worked as a coach for that camp, “were unreal.”

Impressed, Mbah a Moute and Nyam arranged for Joel to enroll as a junior at Montverde Academy in Florida, Mbah a Moute’s alma mater and home to one of the country’s top high school basketball programs. In September, Thomas and Christine drove Joel to Yaoundé Nsimalen International Airport. Joel was scared, but excited too. He barely spoke English, but he recognized the opportunity in front of him. He hugged his family, not knowing when he’d see them next, and boarded the plane. 

—

Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports is available now.

Photos via Getty.

The post EXCERPT: Joel Embiid’s Journey from Africa to America appeared first on SLAM.

Then there are players like Carlos Boozer. “I loved the game so much, I didn’t want to detach,” he says in early April over the phone. Boozer, now 36, retired in December 2017, after a 13-year NBA career that included two All-Star Game nods and one season in China. But he immediately felt a void.

He’s tried picking up other hobbies. He’s traveled a bit. He and his family have gone snowboarding. “Three-to-four times for like five days each” over the past few years, he says. He’s enjoyed that and says he’s gotten pretty good. But he just couldn’t imagine life without basketball, or without trying to improve the sport. He’s done some broadcasting, but wanted more.

“Basketball has taken me around the world—I’m a kid who grew up in Juno, Alaska, and look where I’ve gone,” he says. “It’s been so good for me.

“A lot of people use basketball for the wrong reasons. I want people to respect the game and use it for good.”

And so recently he came up with an idea: a youth showcase to help some of the game’s most highly touted young players prepare for the high-pressure world they’ll soon be entering. Fittingly, he titled it the Respect the Game Showcase—a slogan we here at SLAM can appreciate, word to our former podcast—which will go down this October in Mason, OH.

“I remember the first big camp I went to,” Boozer says. It was the now-defunct ABCD camp, which used to take place every summer in New Jersey. “Being there by myself, with no teammates to lean on, it was really hard,” he adds. “It’s all about you.” He’s also taken his 12-year-old son—the oldest of his three children—to multiple camps over the past few years and felt he could add something to that world.

Off the court, he believes young basketball players would benefit from learning how to cope with these sorts of pressures at an earlier age. On the court, he thinks helping introduce top young players to each other can lead to a healthy exchanging of moves and ideas.

“Competition in a good environment is always healthy,” Boozer says, when asked whether it’s problematic to be tossing middle school kids into this sort of fishbowl. “Kids get ranked at younger and younger ages now. I want these kids to see what they can learn from their peers, but in the right context.”

He also plans on exposing the showcase participants to various voices from in and around the NBA. Nate Robinson will talk about how he overcame being considered too short. Soon-to-be Hall of Famer Ray Allen is scheduled to speak. So is former NBA point guard Jason Williams. Boozer plans on finding more names from his rolodex, too.

“I want these kids to have these opportunities as early as possible,” he says. “The goal is for all these kids to get scholarships. I think this can help.”

—

Yaron Weitzman is a writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images.

The post Carlos Boozer Is Helping the Next 🌊 of Up-And-Coming Ballers appeared first on SLAM.

“Is that Cherokee Parks?” a longtime NBA scout asked me that night at MSG. Parks was drafted 12th overall in 1995 by the Dallas Mavericks and bounced around the League until 2004. He played his last NBA game that season, for the Golden State Warriors, and then, contrary to the way most basketball players remain connected to that life even after hanging up their uniform, he just sort of disappeared, cutting himself off from the NBA world.

Both the scout and I were curious where he’d been, and why he was suddenly popping up in random NBA arenas. So I walked over to Parks, introduced myself and asked if he’d be open to sharing his story.

About a month later I met Parks, now 45-years-old, at an East Village Starbucks, around the corner from where he now lives. “This whole area is rad,” he said. Coincidentally, he’d lived in the area—“on the same block, just two buildings down!”—the summer after getting drafted. “It’s wild, I’ve come full circle,” he said.

Parks shared the CliffNotes version of his life story: how, after a remarkably unremarkable nine-year NBA career (he averaged 4.4 points and 3.6 rebounds), he stepped away from the game to open a punk rock music bar; how around 2011 he embarked on a comeback and signed with a team in France; how two years later he underwent open heart surgery; how he’d recently linked up with an NBA internship program, officially, the Basketball Operations Associates Program, where former players like him are brought into the fold and taught the ins and outs of the NBA’s various businesses.

The job is in the NBA’s Fifth Avenue office, which is why Parks was back in New York, and why he’d been frequenting NBA games.

The program was also what Parks wanted to talk about. It introduced him to Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti! And Boston Celtics assistant GM Mike Zarren! He’d learned about the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement! He’d recently underwent some IT training! And was taught how to use Excel! And how you don’t set up meetings with colleagues by walking over to their cubicle! He’d even purchased a bunch of slacks and button-down shirts, and also pair of loafers, but he wore those out over the summer. “You don’t realize how much walking you do in New York City until you live here,” he said.

No man has ever sounded so excited about Midtown Manhattan’s stuffy office culture. That such giddiness was oozing out of one of basketball’s more renowned free spirits—remember, this is a tatted-up punk rock fanatic—was confounding.

But then talk turned to Parks’ NBA career, and whether he views it as a failure, and suddenly his excitement over his Microsoft Office conquests began to make more sense.

“Unsatisfied,” Parks said when I asked what he feels looking back. “My head was never in the right place.”

Why do you think that was?

“I was depressed a lot,” he said. “But that’s a whole ‘nother story.” It was one he was initially reluctant to tell. “I want this to be a momentum piece,” he said. Still, after some prying, he was open to sharing some details, and to explaining why the fact that he was now living on the same East Village block left him wondering if there were some sort cosmic forces at play. But also, how it didn’t matter whether that fact was happenstance or fate. This—his new life—was an opportunity Parks wasn’t going to waste.

“I get to come back and do this journey again,” he said. “I get a second chance.”

—

Parks’ childhood was far from typical.

His parents were, well, Hippie-like. His father was a musician. His mother raised her children as vegetarians and fed them mostly vegetables grown in her own garden. As for his name—they named their son Cherokee after learning that his father’s great-grandmother had been a member of the Native American tribe.

Parks’ parents divorced when he was around three years old. He spent the next seven years with his mother and two siblings bouncing between California, Colorado and Nevada, before finally settling in Huntington Beach, Calif., one of the country’s largest and most bustling seaside cities, which, perhaps, is why Parks feels that, “I thrive when there’s a program. I like when there’s an in itinerary, a syllabus.” It’s a line he used multiple times with me.

The point being: he was only craving the thing he never had.

Thanks to his height and athleticism, Parks earned a basketball scholarship to Duke. Over his four years there, while playing alongside stars like Christian Laettner and Grant Hill, he emerged as one of the country’s top basketball prospects.

“He was a super-talented big man who could post up with his back to the basket and shoot the ball from the outside,” said Juwan Howard, a former NBA All-Star and current Miami Heat assistant coach who was in the same high school class as Parks and competed against him in college and the NBA. “He was also really smart.”

Those skills propelled Parks up draft boards and into the NBA, which was great. The problem was that he entered the League during a period of heated labor strife. The 1995 draft had taken place in the midst of a lockout, which lasted from June until September, meaning Parks’ first three months as a professional basketball player were spent alone without the guidance of or instruction from an NBA organization.

This would be a theme throughout Parks’ career. The man who coveted structure never received it. He came into the NBA during a lockout, and had to deal with another one just two years later. He never spent more than two seasons with a single team. Even the team that drafted him, the Mavericks, traded him after just one season.

At one point, Parks believed that many of his NBA failures could be attributed to this chaos.

Only years later did he discover that this bouncing around was more a symptom of a greater problem.

—

He remembers the bus rides. He’d sit there, on the way to the arena, gazing out the window towards the streets of San Antonio or Boston or whatever city he happened to be in that afternoon. He’d watch the men and women walking home from the office and then think about how his work day was only just beginning.

“All I’d want to do was get off the bus and join them,” Parks said. “I wanted to join them and go home.”

These feelings began bubbling to the surface early on in his NBA career, but they were mostly dormant until the 1998-‘99 lockout. That winter, while he was in Minnesota, sadness began to wash over Parks. He doesn’t know exactly why. What he does remember is sitting on his living room couch, nowhere to be, nowhere to go, and coming to a realization.

“That I was thoroughly depressed,” Parks said.

He assumed basketball was the problem, and so he packed a bag, folded his long limbs into his 1997 GMC Yukon and drove west for 22 hours straight back to Huntington Beach. There, Parks said, “My life became complete chaos.” He declined to detail the specifics, saying instead: “The party just never stopped. Whatever you can think of recreationally, I was there, in and around it.”

That lifestyle followed him back into the NBA after the lockout. He began to develop a reputation around the League. The phrase “free spirit” comes up often when talking to his former coaches and teammates. None of them had any issues with Parks. “But we knew he liked to have a good time,” Jerry Sichting, who was an assistant coach in Minnesota while Parks played there, said. “At the core he was a good guy. But I don’t think he was totally committed to basketball.”

Which, Parks concedes, is correct. He’d spend his off days and off hours in bed, sleeping and watching TV. He’d go entire offseasons without picking up a ball, maybe jogging on a treadmill once or twice, but nothing more. He barely saw his family, including a grandmother who died from Alzheimer’s while he was in the League. When, in December 2003, then-Golden State Warriors general manager Chris Mullin called Parks into his office and informed him that he was being released, Parks was relieved, so much so that when another team called a few weeks later with a contract offer, Parks turned it down.

Basketball had been his life and he wasn’t happy with his life. Therefore, he deduced, basketball was the core of his problem.

He kept his demons to himself, talking casually with a few friends, one a Yale-trained psychologist, but never following through. Instead, Parks self-diagnosed. And self-medicated.

“It wasn’t that I was partying, “Parks said. “It was more just about escapism. But I just had no idea what I was trying to escape from.”

—

In May 2006, a little over two years after playing his final NBA game, Parks was sitting in his punk rock bar when he learned that two bands that he’d booked for a big show that evening had cancelled.

He’d worked hard on the show, spending hours promoting the event. Yet, once again, life was letting him down.

Why is this happening to me, he wondered. He was 33 at the time, and his life was crumbling. He began thumbing through a “Fritz the Cat” cartoon, a story created by Robert Crumb about the adventures of a con artist cat. He’d been reading the cartoon for a while, but something about this specific strip, in which Fritz was espousing the virtues of driving on an open road and freeing your mind from thoughts, stood out.

“At that exact moment,” Parks said, “things shifted.”

He asked himself why he couldn’t seem to get anything right, but then flipped the question into something deeper: What, exactly, was he trying to get? He played around with his thoughts for a bit, a process he described to me as a “kind of adductive, inductive, deductive reasoning thing,” all of which led him to a simple, but life-changing conclusion:

“That I,” Parks said, “was the one who didn’t get it, who was viewing things in life the wrong way.”

He still has trouble pinpointing why, exactly, the combination of some bailing bands and a talking cat cartoon triggered this come-to-Jesus moment. The best explanation he can give is that he had to undergo his own Siddhartha journey, a reference to the Hermann Hess novel about a spiritual journey of self-discovery. It’s a book he referenced multiple times in our interviews.

Parks went home that night and put a microscope to every aspect of his life. He took up journaling, and studied the dictionary so that he could better articulate his feelings. “What does irate mean?” he asked “When I say, ‘I’m irate,’ am I using it correctly?” He began underlining his favorite lines in books, which he’d lug with him whenever he moved homes. He spent more time with his family, especially with his the youngest of his three kids, a daughter who was born in 2008 and lives with him now. He’d always considered himself agnostic, but for the first time in his life he began wondering what that actually meant.

“Spiritually, there’s definitely a method to what’s going on in our lives and more to it than we can understand,” Parks said. “Why things happen—that’s not in some mystical realm. It’s available to us, but it takes a lot of dedication and introspection to get that.”

Parks spent the next few years putting his life back together. In that time, he realized that basketball had actually been one of the lone bright spots in his life, not the root of all his problems, and so he decided to attempt a comeback. He signed a contract with a team in France. He loved being back on the court and part of a group. His mind was finally in a place where he could succeed, too. This time, though, it was his body that failed him. His heart raced whenever he ran. He returned to California, where doctors diagnosed him with an aortic aneurysm. Open heart surgery fixed the problem, but his playing days had come to an end.

Still, Parks wasn’t ready to give up on a second career within the game.

“I realized I loved basketball, that I really liked the opportunities it provided and the people it introduced me to,” Parks said. He wrote down a new set of goals. One was to one day have an NBA business card with his name on it. The reason?

“I wanted to leave the game on a good note,” he said. “I didn’t the first time around. But I wanted to have a positive impact.”

—

It’s early afternoon one day in March when Parks walks into a small conference room overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. We’re in the NBA’s main office so Parks can show me around where he works, and also share some of those details he’d initially held back.

“I just met with Brooks!” Parks tells an NBA public relations official who’s there with us. I don’t know who Brooks is but he seems to be an important person. “Brooks heads all our basketball academies oversees, he’s rarely here so you have to catch him when you can.” That’s why Parks is so excited. He’s excited about many things this afternoon: That Kiki Vandeweghe, a top NBA executive, has an office right near his; that he can now use corporate jargon like “360 approach”; that he finally got ahold of an NBA employee named Kim. I don’t catch what exactly it is that she does.

Clearly, though, Parks is ecstatic about where’s arrived in his life, and for good reason. He’s worked hard to get here. Harder than most know.

His journey back to the NBA started immediately following his surgery. He did his rehab on campus at Duke and then began reconnecting with old contacts from his playing days. He eventually got in touch with a community relations manager he knew from his days with the Clippers and said he’d be happy to do anything and everything, from appearances to handing out flyers. Through the Clippers he got in touch with Corey Maggette, who told Parks about the NBA’s internship program, where he hustled and networked and LinkedIned his way into everyone’s good will.

My interview with Parks lasts about 40 minutes. This, he says, is the first time he’s spoken this extensively about his past. “I’m getting chills just talking about this,” he adds. “This is new ground to me.” But he’s still hesitant to fully open up.

“A lot of that stuff was not something I’m proud of,” Parks said. “I’m going to make good decisions and bad decisions. But it’s memories of those decisions that I’ll always have to live with. Memories that I have to have.”

I turn off my recorder a few minutes later. Parks breathes a sigh of relief. He shows me to the office he shares with a few colleagues. He has some business cards with the NBA logo lying on his desk. His name is etched onto them.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images.

The post Cherokee Parks’ Inspirational Journey Back To Basketball appeared first on SLAM.

The Skyforce have been in business since 1989, eluding the graveyard that is minor league basketball, and Heineman has sat shotgun for nearly the entire trip. He remembers the days, pre-sports drink sponsors and NBA-team partnerships, when Skyforce players and staff would celebrate the delivery of a box stuffed with free Pony shoes. And so, looking at the three pictures he held in his hand that day, Heineman couldn’t help but smile.

Each photo was of a Skyforce team. One from 1996 featured 12 players and three coaches. Another, from 2006, the Skyforce’s first year in the D-League, also had three coaches bracketing the team’s 10 players.

Then he looked at the most recent photo, of the Skyforce team that the previous year had captured its first ever D-League title. Heineman counted 11 staff members posing alongside 10 players.

“I’ve been around a long time and seen a lot,” Heineman says today (the team partnered with the Miami Heat in 2013). “To see where we’ve come to, it’s quite remarkable.”

Once viewed as a basketball purgatory, the G League has in recent years morphed into a springboard towards greater basketball heights.

You can find examples all across the League. Trey Burke, the former lottery pick who, in September, turned down a contract with the Thunder so that he could play with the Knicks’ G League affiliate, and then balled out when called up. Quinn Cook, who, after proving himself on the Warriors’ G League team in Santa Cruz, just won an NBA championship with the Dubs. Former lottery pick Brandon Jennings, now 28 years old, spent a season in China before leveraging an audition with the G League’s Wisconsin Herd into a multi-year deal with the Milwaukee Bucks. And then there’s the Toronto Raptors, whose franchise-record 59-win season was partially built on the backs of an explosive bench consisting of graduates from their G League team, the Raptors 905.

“I think our second unit is a testament to the work we do with the 905,” says Dan Tolzman, a Raptors executive who also serves as 905 GM.

According to data provided by the NBA, 53 percent of players on NBA rosters at the end of the 2018 season spent time in the G League. Every NBA team this year had at least six one-time G League players on their roster.

“If you’re a player trying to get into, or back into, the NBA, the G League is now your best option,” Craig Robinson, the Knicks’ vice president of player development and G League operations, says.

For years this had been the plan. But reaching this level of legitimacy took some time.

“When I played, when a scout or someone from the NBA came to your game, you noticed it,” says Kasib Powell, a 37-year-old assistant coach for the Skyforce and former D-League MVP. “We used to feel so much pressure whenever an NBA scout came. Now our guys assume the NBA is watching.”

The G League’s been gradually growing since its inception in 2001. But this injection of resources is a recent development, one tied to NBA franchises recognizing the myriad ways in which adopting a minor league team could benefit them on the NBA stage.

The first NBA franchise to purchase a G League team was the Los Angeles Lakers in 2006. Before that, most either ignored minor league development or outsourced the work.

Today, all but three of the NBA’s 30 franchises own and operate their own G League affiliate (the Nuggets, Pelicans and Trail Blazers are the lone holdouts). But, in an e-mail, G League commissioner Malcolm Turner wrote that he expects those three franchises to join the fray “within the next 12-to-18 months.”

Turner also pointed out that the NBA doesn’t solely view the G League as a breeding ground for players. As Robinson puts it: “We see our mission at the Westchester Knicks to develop players for the New York Knicks, but also employees, from coaches to scouts to administrators.” Scour the directories of G League teams and you’ll recognize the names of dozens of former players.

Of course, there are still areas where the league can grow. Player salaries is one, though the NBA, which pays all G League salaries, is taking steps towards addressing that issue.

In April, it was announced that G League salaries would be bumped up to $35,000 over the five-month season (plus housing and insurance benefits). Previously, salaries were either $26,000 or $19,000. This comes just one year after the league instituted the two-way contract—a hybrid deal where players split time between the NBA and G League—all of which will now allow G League players to earn up to $385,000 a year.

But perhaps the greatest testament to the G League’s rising prominence was the decision of Darius Bazley, a five-star recruit out of Ohio, to renege on his commitment to Syracuse so that next year he could play in the G League instead.

That, Turner says, is a move he expects to see replicated.

“The competition in the G league is tough,” he says. “The coaching is NBA-caliber and the exposure to life as a professional athlete is valuable.”

—

Yaron Weitzman is a writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images.

The post From Basketball Purgatory to NBA Springboard: The Evolution of the G League ⬆️ appeared first on SLAM.

So there’s Josh, and then there’s Eric, whose voice, not surprisingly, is nearly identical to Josh’s. Eric is new and DeAndre is still trying to carve out his character. At the moment, it boils down to a collection of hobbies—like playing NBA2K and Fortnite, lots and lots of Fortnite—which, coincidentally, DeAndre happens to share.

So there’s Josh and Eric. And then there’s Alejandro. Alejandro is DeAndre’s favorite of the trio. He’s been around the longest and appears most frequently. “If I don’t want to do something I have to, I’ll just make fun of it,” Ayton says. Certain questions “bring out Alejandro.” This, Ayton proudly adds, often “shocks” whomever he is speaking to. I ask Ayton if he has an example he can share. He does. Over the past year, he says, Alejandro would often come out if and when Ayton attended a University of Arizona frat party.

“I didn’t want to talk to anyone and so I told everyone my name is Alejandro. I said”—and here Ayton’s voice shifts into a not-so-great impersonation of a Latino accent—“Who’s DeAndre? My name is Alejandro. Where are you getting this DeAndre kid from?”

Ayton’s always had some jokester in him. His mother, Andrea, says she always thought he’d become a comedian. Her point is that these characters have always lived inside him.

But lately Alejandro has been making more appearances. This, of course, is thanks to Ayton’s budding basketball fame. In just a few months, he’ll hear NBA Commissioner Adam Silver call his name during the NBA Draft. Ayton’s name might be the first Silver calls out, or maybe the second. Perhaps it will be the third, but it’s highly unlikely Ayton will have to wait any longer than that, not with his bouncy 7-1, 260-pound frame, Popeye-like muscles and deft feet, which his mother says were honed as a kid dancing to Michael Jackson videos.

It’s a blend of physical tools and skills that make scouts woozy.

And Ayton knows it. He knows how talented he is, how great he can be. “The NBA ain’t ever seen a player like me,” he says at one point during his afternoon with SLAM. He may be just 19 (he’ll turn 20 in July), but his future, to be the future of the game, is a future he wants and expects. And yet to fulfill all the promise packed into all those muscles, to see that future come to fruition, he’s going to first have to learn how to navigate all the bumpy terrain that comes along for the ride.

It’s early April and we’re in Phoenix, and it’s about 12:30 when a smiling DeAndre Ayton—he’s always smiling, unless you make the mistake of trying to wake him up in the morning—strolls down the ramp leading toward the basketball court where our interview and photo shoot are scheduled. This is notable because our interview is scheduled to begin at 12:30, meaning Ayton is on time, something rarely said about NBA players, meaning Ayton’s either incredibly punctual or doesn’t yet recognize how much of his surrounding world orbits around him. It could be the latter. But the half-dozen times over our few hours together that Kyle Weaver, Ayton’s former high school coach and current personal trainer, has to remind him where he left his wallet and phone and keys doesn’t exactly paint the picture of a perfectly organized teenager.

Ayton spends the afternoon cracking jokes and admiring his own photos—“That’s sexy shit,” he exclaims after seeing one—and swatting away his trainer the first, oh, half-dozen times Weaver attempts, perhaps only half-jokingly, to transform the photo shoot into a practice session. Upon hearing the photographer ask Ayton to dribble for the camera, Weaver, a Phoenix native with dark black hair who’s built like the former college guard he is, strolls over, wearing a grin and carrying a second ball.

“Get that shit away,” Ayton, smiling and relishing a day off, responds. He’s spent hours with Weaver over the past few weeks working on his handle, going through various drills where he pounds both ball balls into the ground. He’s never really needed guard skills before, not when he’s always been the biggest and strongest man on the court, but he knows the NBA game is different today, and that nowadays even seven-footers are asked to shoot from deep and put the ball on the floor.

So he spends his pre-draft days strengthening his ball skills and launching three-pointers and not leaving the floor before draining 50 shots from deep, which, Weaver says, Ayton usually does in 70 or less attempts. The form’s not perfect, but it’s far from clunky. Watch him shoot and then cue up the highlights of him bullying opponents last season during his lone year at Arizona, to the tune of 20.1 points and 11.6 rebounds per game, and you can see why an NBA general manager and an assistant general manager that I spoke with for this story both described Ayton as an “incredible” offensive talent, exactly the type of player a 21st century NBA offense can and should be built around.

“There are a lot of versatile bigs, but I’m a different versatile big,” Ayton says. “The versatile bigs that are in the NBA, all the unicorns, they start outside in. I establish myself down low before I come out. That was just old school to me—that’s how they taught me how to play.”

But also, “You know, I hate being a big man, because I don’t like jump hooks. I don’t want to see a seven-footer do a jump hook so I don’t do them. I’m an entertainer, I like entertainment. I like to entertain myself.”

Which is great. The challenging part is learning how to adjust when the world around you suddenly feels as if it’s closing in and choking the fun out of the fun, or entertaining, aspects of your life.

Ayton wasn’t always a boisterous Joel Embiid clone. Growing up in The Bahamas, he didn’t start playing basketball until the fourth grade and, by his own admission, he was “trash.” But by age 12, he had shot up to 6-5 and so naturally he caught the eye of some coaches who reached out to some scouts who connected with the Aytons and, before long, DeAndre and his family were packing their bags and headed to San Diego and playing alongside kids who had no qualms with reminding him how trash he was.

“They really got on my ass,” Ayton says. He was afraid to talk back. He knew they were right, that his game was raw. But also, “I had a little accent back then and a deep voice and they would make fun of it.” He adds that he had a bit of a stutter.

Driven at least partially by that ridicule, he began spending school nights in the gym, sometimes until 2 a.m. His skills grew. So did his body. “I got pretty good at basketball pretty fast,” he says. He was dubbed the best eighth-grade basketball player in the country. With that came confidence, on the court but also in personality.

“As I got better I started disrespecting [the people I was playing against],” Ayton says. He’d run with older pros trying to get into the NBA and drop lines like, Yo, you play in the G-League—what? Man, I’m going to the NBA, and, How old are you? You already lived your life. I’m going up and you’re going down.

It was quite the transformation.

During the initial years in San Diego, Ayton lived in three different homes—all belonging to men connected to Balboa City School, the private academy Ayton attended—before Andrea moved the family to Phoenix. There he enrolled at Hillcrest Prep, where Weaver served as the basketball coach. “When he first got to us, he was really shy and quiet,” Weaver says. “You could tell he didn’t really trust people.”

Ayton declines to go into detail on these years. Instead, he says, “I’ve been around a lot of snakes, people who say they have your best interest [in mind] but they’re really there for their own purposes. Kids like me, who are in my position, really have to watch out for that. They got guys who will give you their whole world, but they know what you’re going to get in the future and take that away from you.”

I ask how that’s changed him.

“It changed me a lot in how I read people,” Ayton says. “When it comes to my personal life, I watch people around me. Even family members—I watch how they act. Who was there with you with the struggles, especially when all this stuff happened at U of A.”

By “stuff,” Ayton means the ESPN report that came out in February on the heels of the FBI’s investigation into the NCAA. The report claimed Arizona had discussed paying him to come play for the university. It has since been both refuted and denied, though ESPN has stuck behind the story.

Beyond the scope of the world of NCAA infractions, whether Ayton was paid is largely irrelevant—has anyone explained why, exactly, the FBI is essentially conducting an investigation to enforce the NCAA’s corrupt and twisted rule? But what does matter was how the ordeal stripped away Ayton’s adolescence and introduced him to his new normal. And it wasn’t just seeing his name tossed into stories containing phrases like “federal investigation.” It’s the microscope that he’s been thrown under, like the pre-draft scouting reports criticizing his effort and motor while playing at Arizona.

“I don’t get that,” Ayton says, growing animated. “What does that even mean? That gets on my nerves. I honestly hate that.

“I’m playing small ball, switching on guards and then have to go back to the post and switch back onto the guard the whole game. Like, there’s times where they put their best guard at the 4 and I have to guard him all game. I have to run behind screens, come off off-ball screens, then try to rebound, then switch back onto the big.”

That particular critique, he adds, “makes me sick.”

His mother sums it up a few days later over the phone: “His whole season at Arizona, we never got a break. His name was all over the place. He’s such a happy kid, but there I don’t think he ever had a chance to smile.”

Which is perhaps what excites him most about the NBA. Basketball will soon again be fun. In fact, in the time since Ayton’s college season ended and he began his official pre-draft training with Weaver in Phoenix, it already has.

After our interview, Ayton works up a small sweat getting up jumpers with Weaver before heading to the sideline to pack up his things and head home. Two teenage boys approach him. They’re dressed in basketball clothes and have spent the past half hour or so shooting around on a separate hoop. They tell Ayton they saw a Snapchat video he posted earlier during the shoot and recognized the gym’s logo and so they decided to come meet him.

They ask him for pictures and autographs.

Smiling, Ayton fulfills their requests.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos by @matthewcoughlin, action shot via Getty Images

Video by Jakob Owens

The post DeAndre Ayton is the NBA’s Next BIG Thing 💪 appeared first on SLAM.

And also this:

“You could see the way he looked at guys like ourselves and how we worked, he was taking notes, mental notes,” Wade recalled prior to a recent practice in his first-round playoff series against Simmons’ Philadelphia 76ers, a series in which Simmons carved up Wade’s Heat and became only the fifth rookie in NBA history to record a postseason triple-double. “To see him a few years later and see where he is in his game, it’s impressive. He’s on a different level.”

During that same series, Simmons’ teammate, veteran guard JJ Redick, summed up Simmons’ game similarly, saying: “It’s almost become expected now that he’s going to go average a triple-double.”

That’s barely hyperbole. Simmons finished his rookie season averaging 15.8 points, 8.2 assists and 8.1 rebounds per game, all while helping lead the Sixers to a 52-win season and a first-round series victory over the Miami Heat.

As far as rookies go, what Simmons did in his first year in the League is nearly unprecedented. There’s the Oscar Robertson-like numbers and the All-NBA-level defense and the point guard skills and poise and feel. All that packed into a ripped 6-10 frame and you can’t help but think of previous and current one-name greats—you know, guys like Magic and LeBron.

But most of all, there’s that thing you see while watching Simmons play, whether in person or on TV. If you’ve watched him you’ve no doubt recognized it. The cliché would be to label it the “It Factor,” but doing so would be an oversimplification.

Simmons is both aggressive and composed, both rousing and repetitious, and he is forever effortlessly walking the tight rope that connects these two worlds. It’s a trait rarely seen in players, let alone rookies (or, for you Donovan Mitchell-loving sticklers out there, second-year guys playing NBA games for the first time), and yet it’s the foundation of Simmons’ basketball DNA. And it’s all because he’s chasing something different than most.

“The thing that drives me is just me wanting to be the best and get different accolades and win championships,” Simmons tells SLAM in April. “Just push and see how far I can go in this League and make a name for myself.”

He’s asked why that’s important to him.

“Because I can,” he says.

Simmons, in other words, is chasing something that only a few athletes ever find within their grasp.

He’s chasing greatness.

Forget, for a moment, your opinion on the whole Trust The Process ordeal and whether you’re a Sam Hinkie devotee or believe that he and his acolytes have cheated the game.

All that is in the past now. The Process is complete, and the Sixers are now the team of the future, and that’s because of their two stars of the future, Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, who appear set to, respectively, play the roles of Philadelphia’s Kareem and Magic.

That’s not to say that Simmons’ path toward that future is a clear one. He’ll be the first to acknowledge that the NBA is hard, and that being a star at that level, and bringing your A-game every night, can deplete even the strongest of men.

“The hardest part this season was probably staying mentally prepared all the time,” Simmons says. “It’s a long season—it’s draining.”

And yet, somehow, Simmons managed to get better as the season inched on. His numbers spiked, and the team won, and as the year went on he became even more sure and comfortable orchestrating the offense and getting where he wanted on the floor whenever he wanted. Talk to Sixers coaches and they’ll rave about his poise and IQ. They’ll tell you how they’ve never seen a player his age possess not only the skills but also all the stuff that goes into the constructing of a star.

Take, for example, the way Simmons has gone about leveraging a perceived weakness into a strength.

Simmons’ lone flaw is his lack of a jump shot. It’s not that he doesn’t make many shots from deep; it’s that he rarely shoots from beyond 15 feet. Opposing coaches have been well aware of this all year and so Simmons spent his rookie season watching defenders sag off of him, daring him to launch.

It’s a tactic that’s crippled a myriad of young players throughout NBA history. It can sap a player’s confidence and aggressiveness. Even all-time greats like LeBron James have, at times, struggled navigating these types of schemes.

Yet Simmons, from his first possession of his first game, refused to give in as his opponents attempted to dictate his moves. Instead, he spent the year standing tall, like a quarterback in the pocket, and firing lasers to open teammates, or punishing defenders for providing him with a runway to take off from.

“It’s hard for guys to stop me driving down the lane. [I’m] 6-10, 240 [pounds], fast pace,” Simmons says, before adding the key part: “I stick to what I’m pretty good at.”

How does a 21-year-old dominate the NBA in his first season as a pro? By recognizing what it is he’s chasing, yes, but also by understanding what his strengths are and doing his best to stick with them.

That’s the kind of thing that might sound simple. But it’s a trait rarely seen in men Simmons’ age.

Here’s a fun stat you probably don’t know: During the regular season only one player (Russell Westbrook, because of course) recovered more loose balls than Ben Simmons, according to player tracking data compiled by the NBA. And while Loose Balls Recovered may not be the sexiest of categories, that a player of Simmons’ caliber, in his first NBA season, meaning exhausted from all the games and travel and more, would so willingly hit the floor so frequently is telling.

It shows that Simmons isn’t just preaching what he thinks people want to hear when he professes to be chasing more than individual accolades—though he’s made clear that this season’s Rookie of the Year award is an honor he believes belongs to him. It shows why Sixers coach Brett Brown blushes whenever Simmons’ name is mentioned, and why Simmons’ teammates adore playing alongside him.

Says Simmons, when presented with this data: “I think it shows that every possession counts.”

And here’s another obscure stat, another number that illustrates how little Simmons cares about racking up numbers, a trait not often seen among players who rack up numbers the way he does: Eight times this year, according to that same data compiled by the NBA, Simmons attempted a shot from beyond half court with the game clock ticking down. This might sound like nothing, but in an age when the majority of players will sneak in an extra dribble right before the buzzer so that their heave is late and, thus, not counted against their shooting percentage, habits like these are telling.

They show that he’s not just talk, and that winning is truly the most important thing to him. They illustrate why Simmons is the future.

Greatness, after all, doesn’t take plays off. That Simmons already recognizes this is why he’s so likely to achieve what he seeks.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Portraits by @pushnik_photo, action photo via Getty Images

The post Ben Simmons is Going to Take Over the NBA 📈 appeared first on SLAM.

100-51 
50-11
No. 10: Larry Bird
No. 9 Tim Duncan
No. 8: Wilt Chamberlain

Order your copy of the SLAM TOP 100 issue at our store. 

—

“The most divine teammate there ever was.” That’s how legendary sportswriter Frank Deford described Bill Russell in a 1999 SI profile. There’s no better way to summarize who Russell was as an athlete, though this, courtesy of Jerry West and shared with Deford, is pretty perfect, too: “It wasn’t just that Bill was the whole package—and he was,” West said. “But there was such presence he brought to the game.”

Russell won three consecutive high school state titles, then another two in three years at the University of San Francisco. In 1956, he was drafted by the Celtics, whom he lead to 11 championships in 13 seasons, two of which (’68 and ’69) came with him serving as the team’s head coach, the first black man to hold the position in a major American sport.

Our favorite Bill Russell stat is the following: He played in 11 series-deciding games in his NBA career. Guess his record? Yeah, in those contests Russell was 11-0. You hear a lot of athletes talk about losing not being an option, but for Russell it was almost literally the case. This is why teammates would often find him hunched over a toilet and vomiting prior to big games. “It’s a welcome sound…it means he’s keyed up,” Celtics guard John Havlicek once said. “Around the locker room we grin and say, Man, we’re going to be alright tonight.”

Russell was a majestic athlete. A 6-10 former college high jump standout, but also a brilliant tactician, he was considered by his teammates and opponents to be the most impactful defender the game ever saw. It’s the primary reason he was a five-time MVP. He turned shot blocking into an art, swatting shots softly to teammates, which he realized could trigger fast breaks.

But that all captures who Russell was as a player, not a man. That, at least, was what he’d say—that basketball was what he did, not who he was. Who was he? President Barack Obama once described him as “someone who stood up for the rights and dignity of all men.” Obama shared those words in May 2011, prior to awarding Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his accomplishments on the court and in the Civil Rights movement. Russell stood by Muhammad Ali and marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

He was one of America’s first black superstars, keenly aware of the burden and importance that came with such a title. In 1958, while touring with a group of NBA All-Stars, Russell and his black teammates were denied hotel rooms in a segregated part of North Carolina. He would describe the incident: “It stood out, a wall which understanding cannot penetrate. You are a Negro. You are less.”

Of course, Russell was, and is, much more, more than a Hall of Fame player, more, even, than an all-time winner, more than an NBA legend—though he’s certainly all those things. Bill Russell is one of the most influential athletes in all of American sports. Hero, icon…choose your label. They all apply.

Photos via Getty Images.

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100-51 
50-11
No. 9 Tim Duncan
No. 8: Wilt Chamberlain
No. 7: Bill Russell
No. 6: Shaquille O’Neal
No. 5: Kobe Bryant
No. 4: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
No. 3: Magic Johnson
No. 2: LeBron James
No. 1: Michael Jordan

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—

The résumé is, obviously, exceptional, and certainly worth highlighting. Larry Bird was a 12-time All-Star, a three-time NBA champion, a three-time MVP and also a two-time member of the exclusive 50-40-90 club.

His rise began with his on-court rivalry with Magic Johnson, which started back when the two were in college at Indiana State and Michigan State, respectively, and carried into the NBA, which carried the League back into living rooms across the country. Jordan might have transformed the League into the behemoth that it is today, but he wouldn’t have had the freedom to do so had Bird and Magic not saved it first. Bird’s feathery jumper remains one of the smoothest strokes in the history of the game. The cliché eyes in the back of his head might as well have been invented just to describe his unbelievable passing and court vision.

But it’s the stories behind these triumphs that make Bird so special, that give meaning to the moniker of Larry Legend. There are too many to fit here so instead let’s just review a few.

In February 1986, moments before the NBA’s first ever Three-Point Shootout, Bird, who was competing in the event, entered the locker room to size up his competition and also to share a message with his opponents. Actually, he had a question: “Who’s finishing in second?” he asked. He won the competition that year, and the next two as well. For the third one, in 1988, he did so without taking off his warmup shirt.

Just days after the ’86 contest, prior to a matchup against the Blazers, Bird—according to then-Celtic Bill Walton—told teammates that he planned on playing the next game left handed. He didn’t completely live up to his word; he only scored 20 of his 47 points with his off-hand.

Talking trash might have been Bird’s greatest skill. Take, for example, the time he told Sonics forward Xavier McDaniel that he was going to hit a game-winning shot over him. Bird caught the ball about 10 seconds later and drilled a jumper from the right elbow—the spot he’d pointed out—over McDaniel’s outstretched arms. He also had a habit of asking opponents on the road what the scoring records were in their respective arenas so that he’d know how many points to score that night. Oh, and let’s not forget the game against the Sixers where Bird politely reminded Julius Erving that he was outscoring him 42-6 and politely suggested that Dr. J consider retiring.

The two wound up throwing punches and getting ejected.

That’s who Bird was—the rare player who could talk with the best of them and then back everything up. Is he the greatest player of all time? No. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be the most legendary. We will simply never see someone like Larry Bird ever again.

Photos via Getty Images.

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This, of course, is the sort of praise you often hear coaches bestow upon their players; it’d be easy to write it off as standard cliché coach speak. Here’s the thing, though, the part that makes clear that Spoelstra’s admiration here wasn’t just another example of a coach saying the thing he thinks he’s supposed to say: When it comes to Josh Richardson, and his story, and how he arrived here—here being the NBA, but also his place in the League as one of its better and more underappreciated players—there’s nothing typical or cliché.

Richardson was never supposed to make it this far. He grew up in Edmond, Oklahoma, where he was a good enough guard to earn a basketball scholarship to the University of Tennessee. He averaged a measly 7.9 points per game as a sophomore—not exactly a mark that screams future pro—and so he figured he’d spend his post-college days chasing a different dream: medical school. He’d always wanted to be a surgeon, and even enrolled in a pre-med track at Tennessee. But then came his junior season, and a change in position (to point guard) combined with an injection of confidence and freedom, which led to a boost in his numbers.

As a senior he averaged 16 points per game. The Heat drafted him in the second round (40th overall) in 2015. Richardson spent some time on the bench, and some days in the D League. But he found some NBA minutes here, and some starts there, and by the end of the year he’d established himself as one of the Heat’s top young prospects.

Now, having wrapped up his third season and having graduated from the school of prospects, Richardson has proven himself to be more than that. He’s proven himself, after putting up career high numbers across the board this season (33.2 minutes per game, 12.9 points, 2.9 assists, 1.5 steals and 0.9 blocks) to be one of—if not the—best players on the Heat, even if, as Spoelstra said, his traditional box score doesn’t jump off the screen.

“He’s All-NBA defense,” Spoelstra told Miami reporters recently. “Night in, night out he’s going to have three of the toughest covers in the game and he doesn’t even blink. And that’s the expectation and how he’s developed that potential. He’s become a very disciplined, dynamic defender, one that can really guard multiple positions in a totally different way. I think it’s a shame, I don’t think his name out there. I don’t think people recognize the kind of defender he is except for the teams that he plays against. I think they see it.”

Let’s talk about that defense for a moment. Whether Richardson is worthy of a slot on one of the League’s two All-NBA Defensive teams is a matter of math. Was he one of the NBA’s top 10 defensive players this season? That’s for others to figure out. There’s no arguing, though, that Richardson has evolved into one of the game’s best on that end of the floor.

“I think I’m a top 10 defender in this League,” Richardson said recently, adding: “I’ve gone from working harder to working smarter on defense. Knowing guys tendencies, knowing what spots they like to get to and trying to keep it away from them. That’s where I’ve gotten a lot better.”

Looking for some fancy numbers to back that up? How about that the Heat held opponents to a stingy 4.4 points fewer per 100 possessions when Richardson was on the floor, one of the best marks among all wing players in the NBA. Or how about the fact that this season only two players (Draymond Green and Danny Green) 6-7 or shorter swatted more shots than he did. Or that opponents shot 3.4 percent worse while being guarded by Richardson.

And for the math-weary of you, just know it’s not that calculus-sounding stats are prove all. But when the numbers back up what you see on the floor, that’s how you confirm that what you think you’re seeing is right. And in this case, it’s what Spoelstra said, and has said, all season: Richardson is a dynamic defender, capable of slowing even the most explosive of scorers.

“It’s just his hands,” Sixers wing Robert Covington, one of the players Richardson is competing with for one of those All-Defense spots, said last week. “He’s guarded me and different guys on this team and not a lot of people can do that in this League. Him having the demeanor to take on that challenge is similar to me so that’s why I have respect for him just based on the way he gets the job done. He’s one of those guys that can do the little things on both sides and he can make his team better.”

Right, the other side of the court. Whereas on defense he’s a star, on offense Richardson’s game would probably best be summarized as solid. He’s a solid scorer, a solid creator, a solid shooter, though as far as his three-point shooting goes, that characterization might be a bit unfair.

Richardson drilled a ridiculous 46.1 percent of his deep looks as a rookie before dropping to 33 percent last year. This season, he connected on 38 percent of the 4.1 triples he jacked per game—a strong number considering the volume. He also flashed the ability to get the rim and finish off the bounce, and his assist rate was one of the better ones among NBA wings. Again, none of these skills are anything that excite. But wrap them all together and then fold that into a package with that tenacious defense and suddenly you have a player who’s exactly what teams looking to win want and need.

And that’s the key, right? In the NBA you have about, oh, 20 or so players who can rightfully bill themselves as stars—for everyone else the trick is figuring out how to best help their team win. We call these guys role players. But if you can figure out how to perfect the role of a role player, well then you morph into something even greater, a star on the level of Draymond Green.

Josh Richardson isn’t there yet. But he’s not as far from reaching that peak as you might think.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a writer living in New York. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images.

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Also: “My nickname is Boog because of my dancing ability.”

None of this, of course, comes at the expense of Garland’s game. Or, for that matter, the on-court traits he prioritizes most. As the Brentwood Academy (TN) guard says, “Off the court I’m a jokester, roasting guys, but that’s only off the court.”

For example: Garland grew up in Gary, IN—his family moved to Nasvhille, TN, when he was in seventh grade—a three-hour drive from Detroit. Even as a 7-year-old kid, his father, former NBA journeyman Winston Garland, would have Darius watch Pistons games so that he could study the team’s star point guard, Chauncey Billups. Billups became Darius’ favorite player. He’d mimic Billups’ jumper when shooting around. Once, as a birthday present, he served as the team’s ball boy and went home with a ball autographed by Mr. Big Shot. The ball still sits on a shelf in his bedroom. Garland plans on bringing it with him to Vanderbilt.

But what he says he loved most about Billups was the way he interacted with teammates.

“My dad used to always talk about leadership when I was growing up, because I was the point guard, which makes me the leader on the court, the second coach,” Garland says. “That was Billups. He was always communicating with the other players on the floor during games, staying on them—his leadership was a major reason they won the championship [in 2004].”

Which is exactly what Garland is hoping, and believes, he can deliver to Vanderbilt, even if the school has never captured one before. His rejection of offers from powerhouses like Kentucky, Indiana and UCLA surprised many observers. Top-15 recruits don’t often spurn coaches like John Calipari in favor of lesser-known programs like Vanderbilt that have never made the Final Four.

But in Vandy Garland saw an opportunity too good to pass up. He could remain close to home. He could play for a head coach in Bryce Drew whose camps he had attended as a kid in Indiana. And he could help Drew build a new foundation as opposed to adding to an already existing one.

“The school’s just a perfect fit for me,” Garland says. “I hope I can get them to that next level.”

At the very least, he’ll give the Commodores a boost of swag.

—

Photos by Matthew Coughlin

Video by Christian Quezada

The post Vanderbilt Commit Darius Garland Is More Than Just A Hometown Hero appeared first on SLAM.

He was a kid back then, about 12 or 13 years old, in love with basketball and trying to soak up as much of the NBA in whatever way he could. That meant tuning in for whatever odd game trickled out of the U.S. and onto Yugoslavian TV, usually matchups featuring the era’s top teams: Detroit’s Bad Boys, Bird’s Celtics, MJ’s Bulls.

But nothing excited Peja quite like All-Star Games. They offered a chance to see all the League’s best players facing one another on the same floor. The games didn’t tip-off until around 2 a.m. local time and so Peja’s parents would try repeatedly to throw him out of the T.V. room and back to bed.

There were no Europeans in those games. Peja would have to wait until 1993, when he was 15, to witness Germany’s Detlef Schrempf break that barrier. But he was stubborn and persistent and also obsessed with the NBA, which usually meant he got his way. As he sat there and watched Magic majestically push the ball up the court and Chris Mullin stroke jumpers from the outside and Charles Barkley do a little of everything, he couldn’t help but dream of one day wearing an All-Star Game jersey himself and performing on that stage.

He never imagined that his dream would wind up underselling his true impact on the game, that he’d go from refugee to NBA star and help dispel some popular-yet-ignorant stereotypes along the way.

Stojaković has just completed a mundane meeting on a mundane mid-season afternoon when he answers his cell phone. His playing career ended seven years ago. But now, after a stint that a former teammate once referred to as “civil life”—meaning life outside of the NBA bubble, which for Stojaković consisted of some restaurant investments and, somehow, a solar energy project in Greece—he’s returned to the NBA and to one of his former teams, the Sacramento Kings, for whom he holds the fancy sounding official title of Director of Player Personnel and Development. There, even the most boring meetings leave him feeling fulfilled.

“It just felt right,” Stojakovic says. “That other stuff gave me good experience but they didn’t drive me, it didn’t excite me.”

Basketball does, partly because of what the sport has meant and done for him and also what it’s allowed him to do for others.

Stojaković’s NBA career technically began in 1996, when the Kings drafted him 19th overall, though it took two years for him to make his NBA debut. When he made that debut during the 1998-99 season, he was a starring player on one of the NBA’s best and most enthralling teams. A team, stylistically, very much ahead of its time. “We played like today’s Warriors, only we didn’t shoot the same volume of 3s,” Stojaković’s former teammate Doug Christie says. They’d pass and cut back door and run and shoot and when it came to shooting, Stojaković was, well, king—even if his form resembled something you’d see on a playground full of novices.

Instead of keeping his right shooting arm in a tight “L” and raising the ball straight up, he’d swing his elbow out past his hip and swipe the ball across his face before slinging it towards the hoop. Instead of keeping his toes pointed forward they’d bend inwards, bringing his knees within inches of touching.

Textbook it was not, and yet something about that crooked jumper was so smooth, so fluid. It’s hard to make ugly look pretty, but Stojaković was able to do exactly that. He could also handle the ball, too, despite being a 6-9 forward, and during the early 2000s he torched nets for a Kings squad that was perpetually competing for titles, but also perpetually coming up just short. (Some shady officiating certainly didn’t help, but that’s a story for another day.)

As time marched on, and that electric Kings team was eventually dissolved, a pair of Stojaković misfires served as representatives for that team’s overall failure, and, to many, as symbols for why many European players couldn’t be trusted when it mattered most.

It was Game 7 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals. Trailing the Lakers—the Kobe-Shaq defending champion Lakers—by 1, at home, with about 13 seconds remaining, Kings forward Hedo Turkoglu drove and dished to a wide open Stojaković standing in the left corner. His shot sailed over the rim by about two feet.

Sacramento wound up tying the game up, only to find itself in a similar situation in overtime. With 10 seconds remaining and trailing by 2, Kings guard Mike Bibby drove and dished to Stojaković, once again wide open but this time on the left wing. He cocked and flung the ball towards the basket. It missed the entire rim and flew off the backboard into the waiting hands of Lakers forward Robert Horry.

“You obviously regret parts of your career and you remember the stuff that didn’t go well more than the stuff that did,” Stojakovic says. “But honestly, it’s not like I’m thinking about those shots every day. You just move on and try to make the best of the next opportunity.”

And anyway, Stojaković was chasing something greater.

“I wasn’t given promises in my career,” he says. “I was always proving myself, every day of every year.”

The call came in about four months prior to that Game 7. It was around 8:30 in the morning and Stojaković was on his way to a local school for an appearance when his phone rang. It was a Kings public relations staffer and he had some news: Stojaković had been named a reserve member of the Western Conference All-Star Team. He’d also be competing in the Three-Point Contest, which, of course, he’d wind up winning, and repeating as champion the following year.

But it was that first All-Star Game honor that has always held the most weight. After all, as a kid it was the game itself, not the contest surrounding it, that led to him fending off his scheduled bedtime calls so that he could watch.

“Being part of that game, it makes you feel like you’re part of something big,” Stojakovic says. “Especially for me, being from Europe.”

Stojaković is wary of labeling himself a trailblazer. He’s more of the deferential type, instead tossing out other names like Dirk Nowitzki, Manu Ginobili and Pau Gasol. Push him, though, and he’ll concede, just a bit, and admit that “I think we”—it has to be “we”; “I” won’t due—“kind of helped open those doors for NBA scouts and management to have more trust in bringing kids over from Europe.”

Those who followed in his footsteps are aware of this as well.

“He was one of the Europeans who kind of paved the way for me and others,” says Kristaps Porzingis, the 22-year-old Knicks star and Latvian native.

It’s not just that Stojaković played and excelled. It goes back to a word, soft, and the way it was so often thrown at the feet of European players during his career. America, despite its welcoming slogans, has always had some not-so-beneath-the-surface issues with foreigners. Fans, players and executives questioning the toughness of European basketball players has always been how that fear has manifested itself in the NBA.

“I don’t even know where that came from, but it was definitely something that was talked about back then,” Christie says.

It didn’t matter that Stojaković grew up a refugee in a war-torn country, or that those two missed shots against Lakers came in a series where he was hobbling around on a blown-up sprained ankle and yet had still played 25 minutes that evening—the opposite of soft, however you choose to define what the word even means.

“I haven’t seen many people fight on NBA floors,” Stojaković jokes when asked whether the barb bothered him. “I never thought about it that much. I always looked at it that you step on the floor and do the best that you can. I don’t think you can label somebody like that. I don’t even know what soft means. At the end of the day it’s a game and either you can play or you cannot play. My coach when I was young used to talk about our ceiling. We all have different ceilings and your goal is to reach it.”

Stojaković eventually reached his. He responded to that loss to the Lakers with three brilliant seasons and even finished fourth in the 2003-04 MVP voting. He played 15 years in total, retired with a scoring average of 17 points per game and eventually did win a title, with Dallas, in the final season of his 15-year career.

But acknowledging that he believes he fulfilled his potential is about as far as he’s willing go when it comes to legacy talk. He’s not interested in any special praise or a slap on the back. The way he sees it, he worked hard, enjoyed some luck, hit some shots, missed some shots and most of all relished every day along the way. And perhaps that’s all true. Perhaps he was just a talented and lucky man who happened to be in the right place at the right time. But that doesn’t diminish what he did for NBA, and, if you believe in such tangential connections between sports and society, the country as a whole.

The interview wraps up and Stojaković hangs up and returns to his job of Kings executive. He’ll no doubt check in with his boss, general manager and Serbian native Vlade Divac, and perhaps they’ll review a directive from Vivek Ranadivé, the team’s Indian-born owner. Or maybe they’ll speak with one of the handful of GMs born outside the United States. Who knows, maybe one of the 113 international players, none of whom are viewed as soft, currently suiting up for NBA teams is on the trade block? Or maybe there’s a kid in some far-off place who needs to be scouted, a kid studying clips of NBA players dreaming of the day he, too, might change the game.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post Peja Stojakovic Helped Pave The Way for European Players appeared first on SLAM.

There are the Warriors, with their four All-Stars and multiple MVPs, and the Thunder, with the newly constructed Big Three. There are the Rockets, rolling in with a backcourt that features a two-time MVP runner-up and arguably the decade’s best point guard, and the Cavaliers, where The King’s court now includes his old pal Dwyane Wade and will welcome back two-time All-Star Isaiah Thomas in the very near future.

Basketball, for all its preaching of teamwork and espousing about culture, is a game of stars. And in the NBA universe, it’s stars who make the world go ’round.

And yet, a funny thing happens every year come Conference Finals time. Surely you’ve noticed it. Games slow down, just a bit, and weak links become highlighted—and then exposed. Maybe it’s a wing with a crooked J. Or perhaps it’s a stone-footed big that can’t contain pick-and-rolls.

Opponents find them—they always do—and suddenly all that hope that came riding into town with the shiny names vanishes into the night. That’s one of the cool things about basketball, especially at its highest level. It’s a five-man game, with a court not large enough to hide one man with a weakness.

This is where the supporting actors come in. You know them—the role players, the x-factors, the guys behind The Guys. The ones who do all the little things that come crunch time are anything but. They space the floor and man the back line, they spring open your favorite player with backbreaking screens and wrestle the other team’s top gun. Shane Battier and Robert Horry, Derek Fisher and Steve Kerr. These players, like the stars, come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are big, some are small, some do a little of it all. But go back and examine every champ and you’ll find one of them, their name alongside Kobe and LeBron. They are the irreplaceable men furnishing inerasable feats.

These are some of their stories.

***

The advice came from Stephon Marbury.

It was the summer of 2004 and Trevor Ariza, a lanky rookie forward out of UCLA, was struggling to find his place. The Knicks had taken a flyer on him with a second-round pick. They liked his 6-8 frame, his bounce and his length.

But Ariza, like so many in the NBA, was unsure of how exactly to adapt. Growing up in L.A. he had always been the focal point of his teams, and even during his lone year at UCLA he was one of the squad’s stars. Then he entered the NBA, and that’s when he realized he wasn’t as special as he thought. If he wanted to stick, he’d need to come up with a new plan.

During the preseason, Marbury, the Knicks’ star at the time, pulled him aside.

“You have to figure out a way to stay on the court,” Ariza recalls Marbury telling him. “Your mentality, your mindset, they have to change. You’re talented enough, but you have to show that you can do things other than score.”

It was an epiphany for Ariza, one that changed his career. Let others worry about scoring, he soon began to say. I’ll take care of the rest. And now here he is, 13 seasons later at the age of 32, not quite as spry as he once was yet still a key cog in a team with championship aspirations. What started as a survival strategy—“you quickly learn that everybody in the NBA can score,” Ariza says, “so if you want to be on the court you better figure something out”—has morphed into a mantra.

“My job,” says Ariza, now flanking James Harden and Chris Paul with the Rockets, “is to knock down shots, play defense, provide energy and keep everyone having a good time.”

For Ariza, this attitude changed his career. But for others of his ilk, that sort of thought process is built into their DNA.

“My role? I don’t know, I really haven’t given it much thought,” Thunder big man Steven Adams says. “I think the way I play is just my normal mindset. To be honest I’m just happy to be involved.”

Adams, though, is more than just involved. He’s essential to everything his Thunder do. Playing center is one of the most difficult positions to occupy in today’s up-tempo, space-and-pace League, and Adams deftly shuttles between old-school brute and new-school dancer as well as any big man in the NBA.

He deploys his 7-foot, 235-pound frame as a weapon for laying screens and on the offensive glass, two areas where he is among the best in the League. He’ll bang with a bruiser one possession, then glide with a guard on another—and never complain about a lack of post-up looks.

“My focus each game is mainly to set screens to make sure our defense is set,” Adams says. “Any type of scoring that happens is a bonus.”

James Posey, who won a title with the Heat in 2006 and another alongside the Celtics’ Big Three in 2008, says he feels the same way. Scoring, after all, was really never his thing, even back in college. Sure, there were times when he’d drill a couple of threes and then come down and jack a poor pull-up jumper, but, as he says, “If there was a game where I got 15 shots, we knew something was wrong.”

Posey is sitting courtside in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center as he re-lives this part of his playing career. He’s gazing out onto the court’s wooden floor as Jae Crowder and Tristan Thompson prepare to warm up. Both Thompson, with his switchy defense and relentless motor, and Crowder, with his tenacious defense and smooth deep stroke, have perfected the art of filling the voids left by their team’s bigger names.

“And that’s what I’ve talked to them about,” Posey says. “Maybe one of those players are lacking a little bit. But I tell Jae all the time, ‘There are going to be games where you have to cover for these guys who don’t give extra effort all the time.’ And I think that’s something he thrives on. You’re doing it for a good cause.”

Like Adams, and Ariza, and Crowder, and Thompson, and Andre Iguodala, and even Draymond Green, whose super role player ways helped transform the Warriors into a superteam, all these players know they’ll never be the reason for bringing a title back to their respective cities. One of them, though, will have a moment. Maybe it will be a long jumper, or maybe sweet pocket pass, or perhaps a blocked shot. Whatever it is, you’ll notice it.

Then you’ll think back to all the other NBA teams, and why so many of them have trouble filling out their rotations with players capable of being two-way guys, only to recall just how few of these players there are. That’s what makes the superteams’ super role players so valuable. Only a handful exist. The ones that do wind up crowned as kings.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @yaronweitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post Know Your Role appeared first on SLAM.

Think about that for a moment. The Warriors, a team that won more regular season games than any other team in history, and boasted the two-time reigning MVP, along with two other top-20 players (Klay Thompson and Draymond Green) were, well, scared of facing off against LeBron once again in the Finals. And they weren’t wrong.

That’s the greatness of LeBron. He’s still a one-man wrecking ball capable of destroying everything in its path, no matter the strength.

I mean, just look at the numbers he put up during last year’s postseason: 32.8 points, 9.1 rebounds and 7.8 assists per game. He also shot a ridiculous 56.5 percent from the field and 41 percent from deep, all while playing an obscene 41.3 minutes per game.

Do you know how hard that is, to play that many minutes and carry that much of a load but also do so that efficiently? It’s literally unprecedented, as was his averaging a triple-double (33.6 PPG, 12 RPG, 10 APG) during the NBA Finals, and all that came after leading the League in minutes per game during the regular season (and Real Plus-Minus, by the way, so don’t worry about the slight downtick in numbers). The dude’s a cyborg, only stronger and smarter.

And it’s a good thing, too, because with Kyrie now gone, and Isaiah Thomas’ hip likely holding him out for a few months, the Cavs will be leaning even more on James. One of these years, he’s going to show signs of age and fatigue. He has to, right? Either way, that time, remarkable, appears to be years away. The Warriors may be the title favorite, but only because they amassed a collection of stars unlike anything the League has ever seen. That’s what it takes to beat LeBron James. There’s not another player in the world that can boast that claim.

Previous Rankings:
2016: No. 1
2015: No. 1
2014: No. 1
2013: No. 1

Rankings are based on expected contribution in 2017-18—to players’ team, the NBA and the game.

No. 50 – Dion Waiters
No. 49 – Ben Simmons 
No. 48 – Brook Lopez
No. 47 — Harrison Barnes
No. 46 — Jrue Holiday
No. 45 — Lonzo Ball
No. 44 — Myles Turner
No. 43 — Goran Dragic
No. 42 — Andre Drummond
No. 41 — Al Horford
No. 40 — LaMarcus Aldridge
No. 39 — Kevin Love
No. 38 — Paul Millsap
No. 37 — Hassan Whiteside
No. 36 — Andrew Wiggins
No. 35 — Marc Gasol
No. 34 – DeAndre Jordan
No. 33 — Bradley Beal
No. 32 — Kemba Walker
No. 31 — CJ McCollum
No. 30 — Devin Booker
No. 29 — Nikola Jokic
No. 28 — Joel Embiid
No. 27 — Mike Conley 
No. 26 — Kyle Lowry
No. 25 — Rudy Gobert
No. 24 — Gordon Hayward
No. 23 — Kristaps Porzingis
No. 22 — Carmelo Anthony
No. 21 — DeMar DeRozan
No. 20 — Blake Griffin
No. 19 — Draymond Green
No. 18 — Chris Paul
No. 17 — Klay Thompson
No. 16 — Jimmy Butler
No. 15 — Isaiah Thomas
No. 14 — Karl-Anthony Towns
No. 13 — Damian Lillard
No. 12 — DeMarcus Cousins
No. 11 — Kyrie Irving
No. 10 — John Wall
No. 9 — Paul George
No. 8 — Anthony Davis
No. 7 — Giannis Antetokounmpo
No. 6 — James Harden
No. 5 — Kawhi Leonard
No. 4 — Stephen Curry
No. 3 — Russell Westbrook
No. 2 — Kevin Durant
No. 1 — LeBron James

RELATED:
GALLERY: 2017 SLAM Top 50 Players

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That’s all because of Steph.

He’s the one that rendered the League’s previous pick-and-roll defenses useless, that forced teams to become obsessed with finding players capable of switching assignments on screens, lest they fall victim to one of Curry’s silky bombs. Look at PJ Tucker. He went from out of the League to $32 million man within five seasons.

That’s what Curry’s done. He’s forced teams to change the way they think and play. (Big men? What are we supposed to do with them?) Keep up or be left behind.

And even if Durant is bigger, stronger and, probably, more talented, it’s still Curry that makes the Warriors’ offense—meaning the greatest offense the sport of basketball has ever seen—go. His shooting pulls defenders out near half court, stretching the floor vertically, where he’s then able to burn then with his wizardly handle (which would probably get more love if not for that magical stroke) and get to the rim, where he’s, perhaps to your surprise, one of the top finishers in the League (he scored on 63 percent of his shot attempts there last season, placing him in the 94th percentile, according to data from Cleaning The Glass).

It’s a mix of skills that over the past three years has proved literally impossible to guard (the Warriors outscored its opponents by a league-high 1,015 points last season with him on the floor).

But there’s more to Steph’s brilliance than just his ability to dribble and shoot like no one we’ve ever seen. His willingness to cede the spotlight to Durant—to not only accept the addition, but also pitch for it—is a display of selflessness we’re not used to seeing from NBA stars. It’s not that most are selfish; it’s just that, understandably, it’s hard to watch someone else absorb the spotlight that you helped create. It’s why Pat Riley says winning the second championship is harder than the first. “The Disease of Me,” he calls it. It was based on the idea, which he witnessed first hand, that teams who win championships ultimately stop winning because all involved become too focused on themselves.

That the Warriors have managed to avoid this pitfall for three years now is nearly unprecedented in NBA history. It’d be like if Kobe and Shaq never fought.

That all starts with Curry, from the way he plays the game to how he acts before and after them. It’s the trait of a truly great leader, which, in a sport like basketball, is the kind of thing that can elevate a team.

But elevating his team is what Steph does. It’s why watching him is such a treat, and why he is, and will always be, an all-time great.

Previous Rankings:
2016: No. 2
2015: No. 4
2014: No. 5
2013: No. 10

Rankings are based on expected contribution in 2017-18—to players’ team, the NBA and the game.

No. 50 – Dion Waiters
No. 49 – Ben Simmons 
No. 48 – Brook Lopez
No. 47 — Harrison Barnes
No. 46 — Jrue Holiday
No. 45 — Lonzo Ball
No. 44 — Myles Turner
No. 43 — Goran Dragic
No. 42 — Andre Drummond
No. 41 — Al Horford
No. 40 — LaMarcus Aldridge
No. 39 — Kevin Love
No. 38 — Paul Millsap
No. 37 — Hassan Whiteside
No. 36 — Andrew Wiggins
No. 35 — Marc Gasol
No. 34 – DeAndre Jordan
No. 33 — Bradley Beal
No. 32 — Kemba Walker
No. 31 — CJ McCollum
No. 30 — Devin Booker
No. 29 — Nikola Jokic
No. 28 — Joel Embiid
No. 27 — Mike Conley 
No. 26 — Kyle Lowry
No. 25 — Rudy Gobert
No. 24 — Gordon Hayward
No. 23 — Kristaps Porzingis
No. 22 — Carmelo Anthony
No. 21 — DeMar DeRozan
No. 20 — Blake Griffin
No. 19 — Draymond Green
No. 18 — Chris Paul
No. 17 — Klay Thompson
No. 16 — Jimmy Butler
No. 15 — Isaiah Thomas
No. 14 — Karl-Anthony Towns
No. 13 — Damian Lillard
No. 12 — DeMarcus Cousins
No. 11 — Kyrie Irving
No. 10 — John Wall
No. 9 — Paul George
No. 8 — Anthony Davis
No. 7 — Giannis Antetokounmpo
No. 6 — James Harden
No. 5 — Kawhi Leonard

The post SLAM Top 50: Stephen Curry, No. 4 appeared first on SLAM.

Ben Simmons is going to be a stud. You know that passing gene, the one you either have or don’t, the one that legends like Bird and LeBron possessed from Day one? Well add Simmons to that list. Also, notice how the two other players mentioned were forwards? Guys who are 6-10 and can read the floor like chess masters come around, maybe, once every decade. Simmons is one of those players. Add in his strength, his athleticism, his versatility, which perfectly suits the new position-less, NBA, and you have a player who’s worthy of that praise piled onto him prior to last year’s NBA Draft.

The questions with Simmons will be when, not if.

Which brings us back to this list, and to trying to figure out what to expect from Simmons in 2017-18 and, well, there’s no obvious answer. Assuming he’s healthy and fully recovered from the broken bone in his right foot that sidelined him all of last season (and, given what he’s said this offseason, what the Sixers have said, and the videos coming out of his social media accounts, there’s no reason to fear he hasn’t) then he’s still a Godly prospect who’s only 21 and who was given the gift of a year to learn the ins-and-outs of NBA life.

On other hand, there are still question marks. For one, there’s that clanky jumper. Simmons will tell anyone who asks that he can make it rain if he wants to, that he did in high school and that the only reason he launched just three (three!) 3-pointers during his lone season at LSU was because he didn’t have to.

It’s a nice thought, and the way he should feel. But also: a bit of a reach. Clearly, at this point, he’s not a good shooter. That’s not an insult as much as an acknowledgment that the dude isn’t a perfect player. The problem is that nowadays in the NBA a lack of a jump shot can be detrimental to both an individual and a team. Opponents have no issue sagging off potential weak links (see: Roberson, Andre; Rondo, Rajon; and even Wade, Dwyane), and, as paradoxical as it sounds, being left wide open can actually sap a player’s ability to contribute on the floor. It removes you from the game’s rhythms, and your instincts from your actions. Every move becomes a calculation. It can alter the very DNA of a player’s game and in doing so force a coach to remove said player from the floor.

Can Simmons defeat this tactic? That he spent all last season working on his jumper is a promising sign, as are some of the clips he put out of his new and improved (notice the elevation of his left shoulder?) jumper.

Also, Simmons instincts are strong. You know how Wade was mentioned earlier? His sharp off-ball cutting would be a perfect example for Simmons to study, though it seems he might actually be spending the majority of his floor time with the ball in his hands, even with the Sixers having drafted a point guard first overall in Markelle Fultz. Simmons has said numerous times this offseason that he’s a point guard and that he plans on playing the point this season. It’s safe to assume he wouldn’t be doing so if Sixers head coach Brett Brown didn’t agree, but it does make you wonder how the coaching staff plans on molding this whole post-Process crew together.

Maybe Simmons comes off the bench? Maybe he and Fultz do a poor-man’s imitation of LeBron and Kyrie (sans the break-up)? Maybe Brown has a different plan that we’re not yet aware of?

Or maybe Brown, like the rest of us, isn’t quite sure what to make of Simmons just yet. That’s what’s going to make watching Simmons this season so much fun. The sky’s the limit for him. This year will give us a taste of just how high he plans on soaring.

Previous Rankings:
2016: No. 50

Rankings are based on expected contribution in 2017-18—to players’ team, the NBA and the game.

No. 50 – Dion Waiters

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For many of Ice Cube’s new employees, the BIG3 offers a chance to temporarily sip from the Fountain of Youth. They can put on official looking uniforms and field questions from the press—like they are on this day at The Sunset Terrace at Chelsea Piers—and play ball in front of a packed arena, in this case Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.

Mike Bibby’s situation is a bit different, though. Bibby, now 39 and five years removed from his last NBA game, is a guard for the George Gervin-coached Ghost Ballers and might be trying to tap into a bit of nostalgia by being a part of the BIG3. But since stepping away from the NBA, the No. 2 pick in the ’98 draft has stayed in shape, unlike so many of his peers. He doesn’t go on the radio and talk about how soft the game is, or how his team could have destroyed the Warriors, or how players are now launching too many threes. There are no Charles Barkley-esque get off my lawn takes.

Instead, Bibby’s dedicated his life to helping bolster the future of the game. For the past four years, Bibby’s served as the head basketball coach for the boy’s varsity basketball team at Phoenix’s Shadow Mountain High School, his alma mater.

“I take it seriously,” Bibby says during the rare quiet moment at Media Day. He’s dressed in a grey uniform with his number, 10, which the University of Arizona retired in 2004 as homage to Bibby’s spectacular two years at the school and as a thanks for the national title he helped deliver, stitched to the front, and a pair of Jordan IXs. “A lot of people do stuff to try to get stuff out of kids. What I want from these kids is for them to get better and when they get to the next level, they’re not behind the eight-ball.”

Bibby’s coaching career began about 10 years ago, back when his son, Michael Bibby Jr, was 8 years old. This was before Bibby stepped away from the NBA, and at the time he was coaching a group of green and inexperienced kids. Yet he immediately caught the bug. Something about being able to impart all that knowledge he had amassed over his 14 years in the League sparked a fire inside of him. It gave him a purpose.

He could talk about how as a starring member of the turn-of-the-century Sacramento Kings he remained calm in the heat of his many battles against the Kobe-Shaq-Phil Lakers, and how he was able to be one of the few players to make that trio sweat. He could share the lessons he learned by playing for six different NBA franchises and under coaches like Rich Adelman and for team presidents like Pat Riley. Coaching gave him a vessel to pass all the wisdom that others had been so kind to pass onto him.

Bibby watched his son, who suited up for the University of South Florida in the fall but is now looking to transfer, play one year of high school ball before Mike Sr took on the Shadow Mountain job. He figured what better way to remain close to his kid, and to ensure Jr was receiving the best possible basketball education. Turns out he was pretty good at the coaching thing, too. Shadow Mountain has captured three state titles in Bibby’s four years at the helm (and even won 33 straight games last season before finally falling at the annual DICK’S High School Nationals Tournament). He even remained on the job last year, after his son’s graduation. A few of his players have earned college scholarships, too.

It’s when he hears back from those former students that he feels most fulfilled.

“Some tell me, ‘Hey, Mike, we do the same things here we did in high school,’” Bibby says. “That’s what I want—that when they get to that level they’re not behind.”

Still, with his son now two years removed from high school, Bibby is unsure where his path will lead him next. In May, he received his Bachelor’s degree from UNLV, where he’d been taking online classes. The degree was Bibby’s chance to fulfill an old promise he’d made to his mother, but will also open up all sorts of new coaching opportunities for him, both at the collegiate and NBA ranks. He’s already dipped his toes in the latter (he’s spent past training camps with the Kings and Spurs) and thanks to his young age and impressive credentials could soon find himself back at that level on a more permanent basis.

Also, it seems pretty clear he’s tired of dealing with high school-level refs.

“That’s the hardest part—[refs] treat me differently than other coaches get treated,” he says. “When I coach, my voice travels. I’m a loud talker. I talk to my kids the same way, but my talking is loud to where you might think that I’m yelling, but I’m not.”

Bibby says this has led to some of the officials labeling him a hothead coach.

“But I’m not,” he adds. “It’s just that you’re in a gym with thousands of people—you’ve got to scream or talk for people to hear you. I don’t know if they take that the wrong way or whatever, but I get treated differently than other coaches.”

Yet despite all that, one thing is for sure: No matter where Bibby ends up coaching next year, it won’t be because he’s ready to leave the next generation of ballers behind.

“My main thing is, I teach kids. I love to teach kids,” he says. “I teach them all the stuff that I learned throughout my time. I think I’m a pretty smart player, so I’m just trying to give them all that I’ve learned.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Additional reporting by Max Resetar

Photos via Getty Images

The post OG Mike B appeared first on SLAM.

It’s tough to find a moment to squeeze in a quick bite, and so one of Smith’s public relations staffers has brought him a small paper plate full of crackers and fruit. At least he thinks it’s fruit. There are certainly strawberries and next to them lay triangular-shaped yellow slivers that look like pineapple.

Smith, leaning on a table behind a makeshift curtain in the lobby of Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt hotel and dressed in basketball shorts and a white tee, headphones tucked behind his ears, takes a bite. His mouth then contorts and his dark eyes open wide. “That’s not pineapple,” he says. He’s told it’s cheese, that no one would put pineapple on a cracker.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” he responds. “Long day I guess.”

The day might be close to winding down, but there’s still more than 24 hours to go before he hears his name called by Adam Silver, who the next night announces that the Dallas Mavericks had drafted Smith ninth overall.

Smith, many analysts believe, could wind up being the steal of the draft. The Fayetteville, NC, native averaged 18.1 points and 6.2 assists per game as a freshman last year for NC State—not bad for a kid who tore the ACL in his right knee the year before. He says the knee’s fine, by the way. No, scratch that, better than fine.

“I’m more athletic than I was before,” the 6-3 guard says. “Because of it I had to do work on the muscles around the knee for the first time ever and it made me more explosive.”

But just how explosive is Smith, who has drawn comparisons to Russell Westbrook? He’s asked to give an example.

“Well, I’ve got a 48-inch vert,” he says. He then flashes a big, warm smile before picking up another cracker, this time sans the cheese. Talk then turns to the entire pre-draft media process, and the repetitive nature of the whole ordeal.

“Just please, no more Knicks questions,” Smith pleads. He’s just endured his first experience with the New York basketball media. It’s not that he doesn’t like the Knicks, it’s just, “That’s the only question they were asking me before, and then someone else would come over and ask me the same questions again: ‘What was it like meeting Phil?’ ‘How do you feel about the triangle?’ Over and over.”

So what would you like to talk about?

“I’m an avid paintballer.”

He says he was only introduced to the sport about a year ago, but that since then, he’s been playing about once a week. He plays with friends, his father, sister and his girlfriend. There’s a field out in the outskirts of his hometown that they frequent. It’s owned by a man whom Smith declines to name—“I’m not giving you that,” he says—who last year allowed the group to spray paint a title onto the course’s wooden entrance: Dennis Smith Field.

“It’s like real life Call of Duty,” Smith says. “But also, I love being out in the country, in the woods. It’s what I’m used to.” He’s then reminded that his upcoming NBA contract might bar him from playing anymore.

“I don’t know, I ain’t never seen an NBA contract,” he says. “But I’ll definitely ask.”

The PR woman signals that there’s only time for one or two more questions. There’s another charity event Smith needs to be shuttled to. Before he leaves, though, Smith is asked if he’d like to respond to those who say that NC State’s ugly 15-17 record last season is proof that he’s not ready to excel at the NBA level.

“I don’t really have a response,” Smith says. “I guess I’d say you have to take a lot of things into account when evaluating players, but really, criticism doesn’t bother me. I don’t really focus too much on proving people wrong. I’m too old for that.”

With that the interview comes to an end. Smith picks up a couple of game-worn NC State jerseys that he signed earlier. Part of some sort of licensing agreement that he says he can’t yet discuss. He heads for the elevator and disappears.

He’s not yet a member of the Dallas Mavericks, but his professional life has already begun.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post Ville Mentality appeared first on SLAM.

—

There are days when Larry Hughes still needs to hear his baby brother’s voice. December 18 is one of them–that was Justin’s birthday. January 3—that’s the day in 1996 that Justin, at age 10, received his heart transplant, a procedure that was supposed to save him from the heart defect he was born with. Also, May 11—that’s the day Justin, at 20, took his last breath. His body eventually rejected the heart.

Eleven years have passed since then, 11 years since Larry last felt the warmth of Justin’s embrace. He still has the tattoos of two teardrops underneath his left eye—a constant reminder of what he lost. But on the days where he misses him more, Larry will take out his cell phone and dial his baby brother. He’ll let it ring and ring until his brother’s voice—the voicemail greeting—hits his ear.

“I still pay his phone bill—I never turned it off on purpose,” Hughes says. “I’ve been able to heal and grieve and am at peace with it, but some days you can’t let go.”

And so instead he does his best to live the life he thinks his brother would have wanted him to. Cliché? Perhaps. But the 38-year-old Hughes, five years removed from his last NBA game, says family is what his time revolves around now.

Take a drive on a school morning through St. Louis, where Hughes grew up and now resides, and perhaps you’ll spot the former first-round pick and 20-ppg scorer, shuttling his two youngest children to school. Afternoons are often spent cramming his skinny 6-5 frame into a chair to watch his daughter’s dance recital. On fall weekends Hughes and his wife will pile all four kids—and whatever cousins happen to be around—into the back of the black sprinter van they own and take a field trip to the local pumpkin patch.

“I go to everything, man—my schedule revolves around the kids,” Hughes says. “One of the reasons I stopped playing professional basketball is because I wanted to be around them. That’s my motivation.”

Of course, it’s not like Hughes has left basketball behind. He runs a youth basketball academy, and is one of many former NBA players suiting up for Ice Cube’s 3-on-3 league, BIG3.

In fact, Hughes still thinks about his NBA career, about his 2007 Cavs team that made it to the Finals—on the back of some epic performances from a young LeBron James—just days after Justin had passed. He thinks about his time with the Sixers, alongside good friend Allen Iverson, and his days with the Wizards, where he put up the best numbers of his career.

“I’ve been around a lot, I’ve seen a lot,” he says. “From a sports standpoint, from a life standpoint, it’s fun for me to be able to try to relate and help the kids I work with.”

But what about those who say that someone like Hughes, a player who at times received the dreaded label of headcase or bust, might not be the best role model for aspiring stars?

“Yeah, anytime you’re misjudged, it’s going to bother you,” Hughes adds. “For me, it’s just about how you form these opinions. If it’s because we had a conversation and that’s what you think about me, then fine. But if you just look at me, and see cornrows and tattoos, shit, that can get frustrating.”

Let’s pause for one second, though, because this is an anecdote that should be noted. You see the curse word in that previous sentence? Well, according to Jared Jeffries, who played with Hughes in Washington, a love of that synonym for defecation just happens to be Hughes’ most endearing trait.

“Larry’s always saying, ‘sheeet,’ with a drawl, and it’s like the ‘I am Groot’ line from Guardians of the Galaxy,” Jeffries says. “It can mean so many different things—he could be happy, angry, sad. It all depends on the tone.”

In the case of this interview, the meaning of the word is clear. Hughes is tired of being misjudged by strangers, yet also comfortable enough in his own skin to pay these insults little heed. At this point in his life there are more important things for him to worry about. He’s got a household full of kids to shuttle around and a gym full of players to teach.

There’s a brother’s memory to honor.

Perhaps even a voicemail to leave.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post Real Love appeared first on SLAM.

—

It was the morning after Kyrie Irving’s recent 42-point Eastern Conference Finals explosion against the Celtics, and Juwan Howard, a former All-Star and now assistant coach with the Heat, was marveling with a friend about the performance. Howard was particularly in awe of Irving’s acrobatic finishes in the paint, the way he was able to repeatedly contort both the ball and his diminutive (by NBA standards) body and find glimmers of light when stuck under the basket among seven-foot trees.

All of it reminded him of a former teammate, a sinewy 6-3 guard from his days with the Washington Bullets.

“The only other small guy I’ve ever seen who could do that stuff like Kyrie was Rod Strickland,” Howard says. He’s then reminded that this comparison is perhaps more apropos than he realizes—that Strickland is actually Irving’s godfather.

“You know, I heard that years back but didn’t remember it,” he says. “Rod’s Kyrie’s godfather? No shit, that’s crazy.”

Strickland and Irving’s dad, Drederick, grew up in the same South Bronx housing projects, where they spent countless hours honing their skills in the Mitchel Houses gym. They’d sneak into the building during winter nights, after it closed, when it was too cold to play on PS 154’s outdoor court. First they started rigging the building’s back door to prevent it from locking. Eventually, though, the staff caught on. Undeterred, Strickland came up with an even more creative solution.

“Somebody would hide under the bleachers or in a locker at the end of the day.” Strickland says recently over the phone. He’s driving one of his sons, Terrell, from their Tampa, FL, home up north to Suwanee, GA, for an AAU Tournament. “After the place was locked up they’d come out and let us in.”

It was there where Strickland perfected the smooth handle and eagle-like court vision that propelled him into the NBA. Strickland may not have trained his godson, but his 17-year career (which took him to nine different teams) served as a beacon for guards like Irving to study and follow.

“He’s one of the most unique point guards I’ve ever seen,” says ESPN analyst Tim Legler, who also played with Strickland in DC. “He was one of these guys who had a playground legend type of game but was able to bring it to the NBA floor.”

Like Howard, Legler remains enthralled by the magical way Strickland was able to finish in traffic. He also points out that their 1997 Bullets team was one of the few to make a Michael Jordan-led Bulls squad sweat in the playoffs.

“That was the best defensive team I’ve ever played against and Rod was a driving force for us,” Legler says, referring to the Bullets group that was swept in the first round by the Bulls despite only being outscored by 18 total points over the three games. “What Rod was able to do in that series”—average 19.7 points, 8.3 assists and 6.0 rebounds—“against that group was incredible.”

Even more so when you consider his regular pregame diet.

“Rod’s going to kill me for saying this, but for some strange reason he liked eating hot dogs and pizza before games,” Howard says. “Sometimes he’d have two hot dogs and a slice of pizza before a game—and then go stuff the stat sheet, and he still had a chiseled body. I don’t know how he did it.”

Strickland never did earn an All-Star bid, an honor that both Legler and Howard say he deserved. He did make the playoffs 11 times, and was named second-team All-NBA in 1998, after leading the League in assists. Still, given the lack of accolades, it’s easy to forget Strickland’s trailblazing ways.

That’s a reality Strickland used to face regularly when on the recruiting trail. After retiring from the NBA in 2006 he took a job on John Calipari’s Memphis basketball staff. He spent 11 years as a college assistant, following Calipari to Kentucky and then moving on to the University of Southern Florida before the school made a coaching change this spring. There, he says, he’d often meet recruits who’d see his grey hair and skinny frame and assume he was just another college coach, just another old man with a scholarship offer. Then he’d leave, and a father or uncle would cue up some videos and show the recruit who Strickland was.

“I’d come back the next day and they’d look at me in a totally different way,” Strickland says. “There’d be a big smile on their face and their eyes would be wider. Especially the guards.”

It was a look of admiration. They realized they were staring at a man who helped pave their path.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post The Inspiration appeared first on SLAM.

The same goes for international prospects, only they usually mention how they’re nervous for their interview, too. English, after all, isn’t their first language. They then share how they’ve spent the past five years honing their speaking skills by imbibing every piece of American pop culture they can get their hands on. For Frank Ntilikina, the 18-year-old guard out of Strasbourg, France, that meant binging TV shows like How I Met Your Mother and Empire (interesting combination, no?) and devouring every piece of music put out by Drake or Meek Mill.

But also: “I read a lot,” he says over the phone from France about two weeks before the NBA Draft.

Ok, so that’s a bit different? But is he talking War and Peace or Instagram captions?

“I love basketball books,” he says. “Phil Jackson’s Eleven Rings.”—a morsel that will certainly get play in New York, the city Ntilikina could very likely end up calling home following tonight’s draft—“a biography on Michael Jordan, now I’m reading a book by (longtime NBA trainer) Tim Grover.”

Ntilikina says the first two he read in French, but Grover’s book was an English version. He says he was intrigued by all the different lessons Grover was able to share, tidbits the trainer picked up or witnessed throughout his three decades in the NBA.

Which is to say, perhaps the clichés typically spouted by NBA prospects actually do apply to Ntilikina. Perhaps he has been preparing his whole life for this moment, and perhaps he is ready to make the leap from France’s LNB Pro A to the League and reward whichever NBA team elects to take a flyer on the kid with a last name that most fans don’t know how to pronounce (it’s Nee-lee-Kee-na).

“His greatest strength is his versatility and age,” says ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla. “He’s going to play his entire rookie season as a 19 year old and he does everything on the court pretty well.”

Fraschilla projects Ntilikina as a “solid NBA starter and potentially an All Star.” He does add, though, that Ntilikina has the chance to become a defensive stud. The combination of a 6-5 frame and 7-1 wingspan, of quick feet and a basketball IQ that’s been honed over two seasons in one of the top basketball leagues in the world makes him the sort of versatile, queen-like chess piece that every team in the new, position-less NBA now craves.

“He’s what I would call a no-mistake player,” Fraschilla says. “He doesn’t have dynamic athleticism, but he understands the game well and has a good feel for it.”

Much of that comes from the countless hours he spent playing alongside his two older brothers—ten and 12 years his senior. Ntilikina, who was born in Belgium to Rwandan parents, moved to France with his family at the age of three. He spent years there watching his brothers and friends battle on Strasbourg’s local courts, shooting on an open hoop and waiting for an invite into their game. Eventually it came, and it was in those parks where Ntilikina realized how his Inspector Gadget-like arms could be deployed as a weapon on the defensive end.

Then, at the age of 15, Ntilikina signed with Strasbourg’s club team. He made his professional debut a year later and soon after was on the radar of every front office in the NBA, especially after a season in which as a teenager he averaged 5.3 points in 19.1 minutes per game for a team that made it all the way to LNB Pro A’s finals (the series was undecided as of print time).

Even his jumper, once viewed as a weakness, has begun rounding out. Ntilikina drilled 39.1 percent of the 1.6 treys per game he hoisted this season and Chris Brickley, a former Knicks assistant coach who now trains NBA players and has worked with Ntilikina, says the Frenchman’s stroke is NBA ready. He has proof, too: there’s an arduous drill Brickley likes to put his players through; it consists of launching 100 3s from different spots on the floor. Brickley says that when Kevin Durant runs through it, he’ll nail around 80 percent. Most guards, he adds, drain about 70.

“And the first time I ran Frank through,” says Brickley, “he hit 78.”

None of this, of course, makes Ntilikina a sure thing. But 18-year-old kids with professional experience who project as defensive wizzes and can also do a bit of everything on the floor, well players like that don’t exactly come along very often.

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Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post The French Connection appeared first on SLAM.

But then he also had to bang with Thunder forward Enes Kanter, and watch Russell Westbrook do all sorts of Russell Westbrook things, and that’s when the doubt began creeping in. Am I good enough? The Knicks, who acquired the 6-11 Hernangomez in a 2015 draft night swap with the Sixers, clearly thought so. As did Porzingis, who purposely invited his buddy to the gym at the midtown Manhattan apartment complex where he lives.

Yet it was only after the Knicks’ first regular season battle against the Thunder, three months later, that Hernangomez started to feel like he belonged.

“I saw how much I was able to keep up with them,” the 22-year-old Madrid native says. “After that I was able to start being more aggressive, to change my goals.”

Hernangomez finished the season averaging 8.2 points (on 53 percent shooting) and 7 rebounds per game. More impressive: his Player Efficiency Rating (PER) of 19 was tops among all rookies who played more than 31 games.

During a dysfunctional Knicks season, Hernangomez was able to emerge as one of the franchise’s few bright spots, at times even flashing a combination of skills and smarts that offered hints of him possibly morphing into something more.

Hernangomez already boasts an impressive array of post moves and a deft touch with both hands. And he says that over the last year he’s trimmed his body fat percentage from 11 to 6.4 by cutting out soda and cheese, his favorite food.

This summer, he says, he’ll work on increasing foot speed and pushing his shooting range out toward the three-point line, to keep up with the schematic changes happening in the League.

“I’m still very young,” Hernangomez says. “There are a lot of areas I need to improve.”

If he does, the Knicks’ future could be brighter than it seems.

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Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @yaronweitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post Willy The Kid appeared first on SLAM.

Sure, Antetokounmpo—or The Greek Freak, as most of us know him—was different than most of the game’s giants. He could run smoothly and dribble cleanly and even shoot a little bit. But still—a near-7-footer playing the point? That’s something the NBA game has literally never seen.

After all, being a point guard isn’t just about being able to dribble the ball up the court or pass it to a teammate. There’s more to it, something almost intangible, a feel, a touch. The great orchestrators have it. Maybe it’s not something they’re born with, but it—the pure skills but also the instincts to read the heartbeat of a team and determine on each possession what it needs from you, the leader on the floor—is certainly developed in the embryonic stage of a basketball career.

Playing point guard requires hours and days and years of practice—in-game practice, actual reps at live speed, the kind of reps that at the youth and high school levels are typically reserved for the smaller players.

And yet Kidd still saw something in his 21-year-old phenom that made him think this transition for Antetokounmpo was possible. And anyway, if there was any coach who could nurture this change it was Kidd, one of the greatest and most versatile point guards in the history of the game.

One problem, though: the 6-4 Kidd, large by typical point guard standards but an ant compared to his young protégé, couldn’t relate to the angles and perspective Antetokounmpo was viewing the floor from. Kidd was used to peering between defenders; Antetokounmpo was looking over them.

So the coach got creative. At practice one day he dragged a folding chair out onto the court and climbed on top. From there he could see the game like Antetokounmpo does—and more easily explain the position’s nuances.

That scene—one of most talented and physically gifted point guards in the history of basketball standing on top of a prop so that he could understand how it looks when Antetokounmpo attacks on the court—demonstrates perfectly what it is that makes this Greek such a freak. You can count on two hands the number of point forwards the NBA has seen over the past 50-plus years, yet it took Antetokounmpo less than a year at Kidd’s position to morph into a player who looks like he could one day make his head coach’s career feel antiquated.

This is what makes the success Antetokounmpo has enjoyed since becoming the Bucks’ point forward so special and unique. This season he was named an All-Star, became the first player in NBA history to finish in the top 20 in total points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks in a single year and at times made the Raptors look like a helpless JV squad in the first round of the playoffs.

He’s also offered us a glimpse into basketball’s inverted future.

Today, Antetokounmpo is viewed as a gem, a unicorn—a freak, as his nickname suggests. The reality, though, is that more players like him are on the way. Maybe they won’t boast 7-3 wingspans and 12-inch mitts, but there’s a whole generation of “point forwards” ready to infiltrate the basketball world. Some day, we may see a whole batch of them running up and down NBA courts.

“The game, especially at the NBA level, is no longer being played traditional with traditional positions and position definitions,” says ESPN basketball analyst Fran Fraschilla. “Kids growing up see this.”

What does all this mean?

That one day soon there may be so many point forwards on NBA courts the moniker freak will no longer apply.

Many take credit, but Marques Johnson swears he was the first to ever use the term.

It was May of 1984, and Johnson’s Bucks were struggling in their first round playoff bout with the New Jersey Nets. Milwaukee was thin at point guard and getting killed by Nets All-Star guard Micheal Ray Richardson. So Don Nelson, then the Bucks head coach, came up with a crazy idea: have Johnson, a 6-7 forward with a better handle than most of his peers, initiate the offense by bringing the ball up the court.

“So instead of a point guard I’m a point forward?” Johnson asked. Nellie, the NBA’s resident mad scientist (who at the time Johnson says was wearing faded jeans with a corduroy shirt and “nasty” brown boots), thought the title was perfect.

Nelson’s Bucks weren’t the first team to employ point forwards as a means for triggering the offense. Rick Barry, also a 6-7 forward, spent much of the ’70s running various pick-and-rolls from the top of the key (“We didn’t call it the ‘point forward’ back then, but I’m pretty sure I was the first,” the never-shy Barry says now.). And then there was the Seattle SuperSonics team coached by Lenny Wilkens in 1977-78, when Wilkens instructed forward John Johnson to dribble the ball up the court so that sharpshooters Gus Williams and Dennis Johnson could roam free of the ball.

But it was Nelson who would become the point forward’s greatest proponent. He continued to use it in Milwaukee (with Paul Pressey) and would later bring it to stops in New York (Anthony Mason) and Golden State (Stephen Jackson). Meanwhile, more point forwards slowly began to show up on NBA floors. There was Magic Johnson and Scottie Pippen, Lamar Odom and, of course, LeBron James.

Yet it wasn’t until the NBA’s decision to ban defensive hand-checking in the summer of 2004 that the seeds for this new world were more firmly planted.

The rule change, implemented to create more free-flowing offense, set off a chain reaction across the basketball ecosystem. No hand-checking opened up the lanes for guards to penetrate, which pushed teams toward offenses constructed around dribble-drives, which forced defenses, freed from the shackles of the no-longer-existent defensive three-second rule, to react by packing the paint (mostly thanks to the defensive designs of Tom Thibodeau), which offenses then countered by spreading the floor with shooters and pinging the ball all around the court.

Suddenly, the rules of positions were no more. Point guards became rim hunters (10 of the league’s top 18 scorers this season were point guards) and power forwards became long-range snipers and everything you’d find in a Coaching 101 textbook was rendered obsolete. Add in the increased presence of talent from international leagues where, as Fraschilla puts it, “big kids are trained at a young age how to handle the ball,” and you get a league that looks completely different than the one Johnson was playing in.

“I was dribbling the ball up the floor,” he says. “But I wasn’t really playing point guard. Guys like Giannis and LeBron, they’re on a different level.”

Bob Cimmino used to be just like everyone else.

“When I was a younger coach, I learned about positions the way you do chess pieces,” he says. “The 1 is supposed to do this, the 2 this—that’s how I used to coach.”

Recently, though, Cimmino, the sexagenarian head coach at New York’s Mount Vernon High School, one of the country’s most successful basketball programs, has changed his ways. He says he’s become more open to having his tallest players run the show (though only after they prove they can make a layup inside). He even offers proof: much of his team’s success this season came with 6-5 Noah Morgan, a Fairleigh Dickinson University signee, playing the point.

Part of that, Cimmino says, is the result of a coach going through a typical evolution. But there’s more to it, too.

“It’s rare these days to have a kid grow up and want to play the 5,” he says. “It’s just unglamorous.”

This, no doubt, was what the NBA had in mind when it initially banned hand-checking 13 years ago. Not only did the rules alter the DNA of the NBA game, but the move created a new product featuring new players boasting new skills for the millions of youth players throughout the world to study and mimic.

“Over time things trickle down,” says Rob McClanaghan, a renowned basketball trainer who’s worked with stars like Russell Westbrook, Derrick Rose and Kevin Love. “Now you see kids wanting to shoot like Steph and high school coaches trying to play like the Warriors.”

To do so, though, you need to have multiple ballhandlers, which means you need to have multiple players who are well-rounded, which has led to an important change at the grassroots level.

“In the past, youth coaches would pigeonhole kids into positions,” Fraschilla says. “Now everyone learns to shoot and dribble.”

And so you have a whole army of young big-bodied players—players who in the past would have been relegated to the paint and forced to run suicides every time they dribbled the ball—honing their point guard skills. Some of them, no doubt, are bound to make the NBA, where they won’t be viewed as one-in-a-million freaks or special weapons, or even point forwards.

They’ll be known as point guards, all of them. The inevitable rise of the point forward will kill the term and all its built-in prestige.

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Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post Push Forward appeared first on SLAM.

The gig is not a new one for Pierce, whose NBA career came to an end last month after his Los Angeles Clippers were eliminated from the playoffs by the Utah Jazz. The 10-time All-Star was a part of ABC’s Finals coverage last year as well.

This year on NBA Countdown, Pierce will join host Michelle Beadle and former NBA players-turned-ESPN analysts Chauncey Billups and Jalen Rose.

Pierce’s first ESPN on-air appearance of the postseason will come Wednesday afternoon at 3 PM EST on The Jump hosted by Rachel Nichols. Pierce will regularly appear on the show, which was recently expanded to one hour.

Related
Celtics To Retire Paul Pierce’s No. 34 Jersey

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Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him @YaronWeitzman.

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McGee played just eight minutes this afternoon during the Warriors’ victory over the Knicks; it was his pre-game work that led to the need for such extensive physiological maintenance. He spent nearly an hour on the MSG court prior to tip-off, banging bodies with Golden State assistant coach Jarron Collins. The two worked on finger rolls (“I’m gonna cut this fucking thing off,” McGee exclaimed while looking at his left hand after missing a shot from a foot away), fadeaways, short jumpers and, this being the Warriors, even long treys.

It’s the type of work that’s helped turn McGee, once viewed as nothing more than a headcase, a meme, a waste of talent and physical gifts, into a valuable component of one of the League’s top teams. He might only be seeing the floor for about nine minutes a night, but even in limited time, McGee’s impact has been immense.

His 7-foot body and 7-6 wingspan make him a nightmare for opposing guards probing the paint. His pogo stick-like legs make him a threat to snatch alley-oops from almost any angle. Most teams try to space the floor horizontally; the Warriors, for three years now, have thrived by leveraging the shooting range of the Splash Brothers to also stretch defenses vertically (meaning up toward the half-court line). With McGee on the floor, Golden State can add to its never-before-seen spacing by making defenders worry about the area above the rim, too. McGee allows the Warriors to essentially transform the offensive side of the court into a cube. It’s no accident that they’ve been even more potent (scoring about 7.9 points more per 100 possessions, per NBA.com), with him on the floor.

“His size and athleticism gives us a different dimension,” Warriors forward David West says. “Dudes have to account for him, whether above the rim, or because of his ability to run the floor and finish at the basket.”

All that on-court success has helped McGee, for the first time since he was drafted 18th overall by the Wizards back in ’08, feel comfortable and secure off the court. Which brings us back to Shaq, and their feud, which is really just an avatar for McGee being fed up with the world viewing him as nothing more than an overpaid, dumb and lazy jock.

Shaq, of course, has played a role in this. Or rather his “Shaqtin’ a Fool” segment on TNT’s Inside The NBA has. McGee is a frequent “Shaqtin’” guest star. There was the time he attempted, and missed, a fastbreak dunk from the foul line in the waning seconds of a game against the Kings…with his team trailing by 15 points. And the one where McGee ran back on defense…after his team had corralled an offensive rebound. And the game where he fell into the lap of an elderly woman sitting courtside…and planted a kiss on her left cheek.

Also, he once forgot to remove his warmup pants before checking in.

So, yes, McGee’s occasional foolishness did prompt much of this ridicule. But years of being portrayed as a dope would eventually get to even the most Zen of souls, and so this year McGee—now 29 and coming off four seasons in which he played a total of 62 games, for three different teams, due to multiple stress fractures of his left tibia—began fighting back. He went after Shaq in local papers, then on Twitter, using a peanut emoji to not-so-politely request in not-so-nice language that Shaq cease talking. He punctuated his response with a phallic culinary suggestion.

Which is all to say that clearly the barbs from Shaq got to McGee. So why doesn’t he feel like delving more into the incident?

“My story,” he says, “is all positivity and good stuff.”

As for what exactly “his story,” is, well, McGee is thrilled that people are finally asking.

He was always reserved. Not quiet, at least not around friends and family, but like many 7-footers forced to deal with constant gawking and jokes growing up, McGee preferred to keep to himself.

“We’ve been tall our whole lives,” explains McGee’s younger sister, Imani Boyette, a 6-7 center for the WNBA’s Chicago Sky. “Our mom”—Pamela, a boisterous Hall of Fame women’s basketball player—“has a huge personality. People are always coming up to us asking how tall we are. It just makes you a bit shy.”

Naturally, given his height and genes (his father, George Montgomery, was a 6-9 center for Illinois), McGee turned to basketball. The hardwood, though, didn’t offer as many answers as he had hoped for. “I always enjoyed basketball, but I didn’t really like practicing, at least not until I got older,” McGee says.

He ran into other problems at gyms around his hometowns of Flint, Sacramento, Detroit and then Chicago. “When your mother is a Hall of Famer and you’re as tall as us, when you walk onto a court there are expectations,” Boyette says. “Even at a young age.”

Back then, the mere sight of a player with JaVale’s height coupled with his last name often turned him into a target during local pickup runs. Slowly, though, he grew into his body. He earned a basketball scholarship to the University of Nevada, where he left after just two years.

His physical gifts had betrayed him again.

“I think he developed a little late and learned the game a little later than most,” Mark Fox, who coached McGee at Nevada, says when asked about McGee’s repeated bloopers. “A lot of big guys are like that.”

The difference, says Fox, was that McGee’s ridiculous talent was propelling him up draft boards, making it impossible for him to stay in school to better hone his craft.

“It’s my fault for not preparing him better,” Fox adds. “It probably would have helped him a lot, if he was able to stay in college for longer, but he was so highly touted he had to leave for the NBA.”

* * *

Back at MSG, McGee is explaining what it is he loves about Disney’s Magic Kingdom, a place Boyette says he visits every year. “I’m from the hood and ain’t never seen half of those animals before,” he says. “It’s pretty dope.” His lips curl into a smile, pushing his fuzzy black mustache up closer to his nose.

McGee then starts delving into why Golden State has been such a beautiful fit for him. He lists the Warriors organization, the coaching staff, the players and even the offensive scheme as catalysts for his now-frequent smile. But there’s more to it.

“You can’t stand up for yourself when you’re on a bad team,” he says. “How does that work? I was on the Wizards one year and we won 19 games. If you’re on a losing team you can’t say shit. What are you going to do? Be like, Oh, I missed this layup because you all suck? If you’re on a losing team and say something, the media is like, He’s not focused on the team, he only cares about himself, so I tried to stay silent. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet.”

He pauses and reaches for a cup of water on the wooden bench next to him. None of those misunderstandings, he says, show up when you’re part of a winning organization. For the first time in his life, McGee feels comfortable expressing himself in public and, suddenly, the world appears to be interested in what he has to say.

“I’m from Flint, right?” he says. “I’ve been in situations where I’ve just been walking down the street and got jumped for no reason.”

Why’s he sharing this?

“I’ve always had this thing that people I don’t know, I don’t talk to. So people thinking I’m dumb, once they get to know me they’re like, This guy is clever, witty. I’m lowkey one of the wittiest people ever. I’m quick with it, but I’m not really the, Hey, get to know me guy, so people don’t know it.”

Wittiest? Go ahead, get the chuckle out of the way. Know this, though: It’s a comment backed up by many others. The first word Fox uses to describe his former player is “intelligent.” Boyette calls him a “technology nerd” and says she’s often in awe of the work he’s able to do with different gadgets. Even West, who prior to this season had never played with McGee, admitted to being astounded by how well versed his new teammate is.

“JaVale’s an informed guy,” West says. “Whatever’s going on in the world, we’re always talking about it. The person I thought he was before I first met him, he’s not that.”

Meeting McGee, it turns out, was all it took for West to learn otherwise. There’s a good lesson there. For us, but also for McGee, a man who, like so many of us, spent years yearning for a stable home.

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Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post I’m Different appeared first on SLAM.

Still, Brody, who’s talking on the phone from his Tel Aviv home, is in good spirits. He usually is, but that’s especially the case whenever he’s given a chance to talk hoops. Conversations with Brody frequently derail; almost all make their way back to basketball. A question about Israel’s political standing in the early 1980s could end with him talking about a chat he once had with “Billy” Walton or the time Bill Russell announced at an annual NBA All-Star Weekend legends banquet—an event Brody never misses—that his salary was greater than Wilt Chamberlain’s.

But we’ll get to that in a bit. First, let’s back up and answer the question you—Young Basketball Fan Unaware of 1970s Geopolitics—are no doubt pondering: Who the hell is Tal Brody?

“He’s the Forrest Gump of Israeli basketball,” says Dani Menkin, an Israeli filmmaker whose new movie, On The Map, documents the ’76-77 Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team and with it, much of Brody’s life. Few know as much about Brody as Menkin, but even that comparison—describing Brody as a Forrest Gump-like character—doesn’t do the man’s life justice.

Forrest Gump witnessed important events. The difference between Forrest and Brody (aside, of course, from one being fictional) is that Brody didn’t just observe history. He altered it.

* * *

Israel in the 1970s wasn’t exactly a hot tourist spot. Emerging out of the shadows of the Holocaust and WWII, it was officially formed as a Jewish state in 1948, only to immediately find itself engaged in a virtually neverending war with its Arab neighbors. There was the war after Israel declared independence in 1948; the Suez Crisis (where Israel, France and Britain attacked Egypt) in 1956; the Six Day War in 1967 (Israel, again, against Egypt, Jordan and Syria); and then the Yom Kippur War six years later.

The latter battle drained the soul of the country. On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria, with help from Arab allies, launched surprise aerial attacks on territories captured by Israel during the Six Day War. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Sirens rang through the country a bit after 2 p.m., halting the calls of repentance ringing out of the synagogues, where many of Israel’s reserve soldiers were spending the day.

The fighting raged on for 19 days, with heavy casualties on all sides and Israel, despite its miniscule size (it’s roughly as big as New Jersey), losing just under 3,000 men and women over that three-week span. Every Israeli knew someone in the army, and so everyone knew someone who had been lost in the battle, and just 13 months had passed since 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics had been captured and later murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group.

Israel was in a state of mourning.

Brody first traveled to Israel about eight years prior, to compete in an international Jewish Olympics, the Maccabiah Games. A native of Trenton, NJ, he was an All-American point guard at the University of Illinois before he was drafted No. 12 overall by the NBA’s Baltimore Bullets in 1965.

“Tal had a lot of talent,” says HOFer Rick Barry, who was drafted the same year as Brody and later traveled to Israel as his guest. “He was a damn good basketball player. I think he would have had a good NBA career.”

Brody was Jewish and attended Hebrew school as a kid, but his connection to Israel—despite both his father and grandfather having emigrated to Israel from Europe before arriving in the US—was loose, at best. Still, that summer he leapt at the opportunity to play in the Maccabiah Games and represent Team USA. He led the Americans to a gold medal and afterward was approached by some of Israel’s top basketball decision makers as well as Parliament members about remaining in the country and helping it build a strong basketball program.

The sport was new to Israel, where soccer was still No. 1. Professional hoops games were often held outside, sometimes in sandstorms. Israel was also struggling economically (due to boycotts from its neighboring Arab countries and the Soviet Union) and its underdeveloped culture was vastly different than America’s, too.

“There was chicken every day for lunch and dinner,” Brody says. “The refrigeration wasn’t very good either.”

And yet something about the experience, about living in a Jewish state surrounded by Jewish people, ignited a flame inside of him. Brody remained in Israel for the ’66-67 season, only returning to the US in 1968 so he could fulfill his mandatory military service for the Vietnam War. During the Passover holiday two years later, while at Fort Pope in North Carolina, he received a postcard from Moshe Dayan, Israel’s then-defense minister, asking him to return and “continue his work.” After completing his military service Brody made Aliyah—Hebrew for “going up,” and the word used in Israel to describe immigrating to the country.

“My dream was always to play in the NBA—I was only supposed to be in Israel for that one year,” Brody says. “But I replaced that dream with a challenge. I saw what basketball was doing for the country and that I could help bring pride to Israel.”

Leon Wandel remembers hearing the sirens on Yom Kippur in 1973. Born nearly 40 years earlier in Belgium, he and his parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in a neighbor’s home. Later in life, he became a FIBA official. But he had friends in Israel and that year decided to spend Judaism’s holiest day with them. Then war broke out. Wandel asked how he could help.

“They said, ‘Make sure we can play this basketball season,’” Wandel recalls. “That’s all they wanted.”

By then Brody emerged as the best player to step foot on Israeli soil, earning the nickname “Mr. Basketball” and transforming Maccabi. But it took years for the club to rise to the level of its European counterparts.

Then the 1977 FIBA European Championship Cup [known today as EuroLeague] arrived, and Maccabi Tel Aviv won its first two games to advance to the semifinals. No Israeli team had ever made it that far. There, Israel was slated to face CSKA Moscow, one of the league’s top franchises, boasting some of the world’s best players.

“The odds of Maccabi winning that game were maybe 10 percent,” Wandel says.

There was just one problem: the Soviet Union had broken off diplomatic ties with Israel about a decade earlier, and politically supported Israel’s Arab enemies, too. CSKA Moscow refused to travel to Israel for the game, and the Soviet Union refused to grant visas to the Israelis and host the game itself. It was up to Wandel to find an alternate location. The game wound up being played in the tiny Belgium town of Virton.

With hundreds of Israelis in attendance and millions more tuning in on TVs back home, Brody and Co. stunned the world with a 91-79 win. After, a euphoric Brody had a message for Israelis and also the world.

“We are on the map!” he proclaimed in Hebrew to an Israeli TV camera as thousands of Israelis flooded the streets. Brody forcibly waved his right arm while yelling, as if wanting to further drive the point. “And we are staying on the map–not only in sports, but in everything.”

Three weeks later, they knocked off Mobilgirgi Varèse to capture Israel’s first EuroLeague title. Israelis, and Jews, knew whom to thank.

“Tal was the symbol of somebody who made Aliyah, who became Israeli, and who has been vocal about his pride for his home country,” says former NBA commissioner David Stern. “This was an event that transcended basketball. That’s the magic of the sport, and few people illustrate that more perfectly than Tal.”

* * *

Brody retired soon after but has remained a strong presence in Israel. He served as an assistant coach and front office member for Maccabi Tel Aviv. He’s worked as a broadcaster and helped cultivate the relationship between Israel and the NBA. He ran for office and in 2010 was named the country’s first Goodwill Ambassador by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a position and title he’s embraced.

“He set an example for so many. He was a trailblazer,” says former Cleveland Cavaliers and Maccabi Tel Aviv coach David Blatt, who made Aliyah himself in 1981. “He showed how an immigrant could come to Israel, become a citizen, be embraced by society and mold Zionistic and sports dreams together.”

“He’s dedicated his life to being a real advocate for Israel,” says Sacramento Kings forward and Israeli native Omri Casspi. “That’s something I’ve looked to emulate.”

Sometimes Brody wonders what his life would have looked like had he remained in the NBA. Then he sees people like Blatt and Casspi, and Maccabi Tel Aviv becoming a premier EuroLeague franchise, and stories from Stern about all the NBA-crazy Israeli fans who stay up until 3 a.m. watching games, and he thinks about all the endangered Jewish people Israel has saved over the past 40 years and any regret he might have momentarily felt suddenly washes away.

“I see how basketball influenced my country,” he says, “what winning gracefully and beating teams like Moscow meant to Israelis. The journey has been a beautiful one.”

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him @YaronWeitzman.

Photos: Shmuel Rahmani, Tal Manor

The post Mr. Basketball appeared first on SLAM.

What does Crowder think of all this? How is he handling the idea that the Celtics, the first NBA team to truly believe in him, and trust him, and give him a real role with real responsibility, are considering shipping him out?

“I’m in the Bahamas at the moment,” he texts. He’s there with his 3-year-old daughter, spending time poolside and by the beach, where his 6-6, 235-pound frame is soaking in some sun. And who can blame him? Crowder’s always been a valuable contributor, a solid two-way player who elevates teams without getting in the way. This year, though, he’s upgraded his game. He’s evolved.

The dreads and muscles and rugged play still live. But Crowder has also transformed into one of the NBA’s premier 3-and-D studs, the rare player who knows how to thrive while on the periphery, a guy who in all likelihood will be at the center of the Eastern Conference playoffs.

And to think: It hasn’t even been 10 years since he could barely find a college willing to give him a shot. Only eight years have passed since he was just another intriguing JuCo player. Only five years since he was forced to hear 33 names called before his during the NBA draft. And it’s only been three years since he was sent from the Mavericks to the Celtics as a throw-in to the teams’ Rajon Rondo trade.

“I never doubted myself, but there were times before that I started thinking my bad luck was never going to run out,” Crowder said over the phone earlier this season. “I always worked hard, I just thought that sometimes things aren’t meant to be, and that was what was happening.”

Which is all to say that Jae Crowder was never supposed to make it this far. So why should trade rumors bother him, or even interrupt his much-deserved vacation?

Crowder grew up in Villa Rica, GA, a once-small town (it’s experienced a major population boost over the past decade) about 30 miles west of Atlanta. He was named Corey Jae Crowder, after his father, Corey, a former fringe NBA player who played some overseas ball, too.

Corey was Jae’s idol, and the two, like the rest of the family, remained close even after Corey and Helen, Jae’s mother, split up (amicably). Jae was around 11 at the time. After, he began spending most of the school year with his mom and four siblings. They’d play football in the basement (once Jae lost a tooth) and always had friends sleeping over. During summers Jae would head south to his dad in North Fort Myers, FL.

Jae always wanted to be like Corey. He hung posters of him on his bedroom walls and tried emulating his moves out on the court.

“I never pushed him to basketball,” Corey says. “It’s something he wanted. He wanted to be just like me.”

Thing is, Jae just didn’t have the skills. Or, for that matter, the physical tools.

“He loved Honey Buns,” says Helen. “He’d call me all the time and ask me to bring some home.” McDonald’s double cheeseburgers, too. And Coke. And Moms was more than happy to oblige. She’d buy Jae whatever food and snacks he wanted. Corey would call Helen and beg her to stop. “But Jae was always a mama’s boy,” she says. “I just couldn’t say no.”

Eventually, he cut back and enlisted his dad to help him lose weight. He trimmed down and started honing his craft. But the offers from big-time college basketball programs never came.

“I never told him this, but, no, I didn’t think he was going to make the NBA,” Helen says. “Yeah, he slimmed down, but the offers just weren’t coming. I never stopped supporting him, but I just wasn’t sure it was going to happen.”

He spent a year at South Georgia Technical College, then another at Howard College in Texas, where he was named Junior College POY. That led to a scholarship from Marquette, where things got off to a bumpy start.

“Going from being the Player of the Year, even if it was junior college, to just another Division I guy with a smaller role, that was hard for me,” Crowder says. “I was playing with Jimmy Butler and it just took me a couple months there to buy into the system and teammates and realize what my role should be.”

Crowder took that mentality—how to excel at being one of the guys instead of the guy—and turned it into a skill. He was named Big East POY the following season, then got drafted by the Cavs in 2012 and was immediately traded to the Mavericks. He never found much success in Dallas, but it was there where he discovered, and honed, what became the secret to his success.

“I grew as a player and got wiser,” Crowder says. “I came to the conclusion that for me to succeed, and for me to help my teams win, I’d need to take a role. As soon as I did that, basketball became much easier for me.”

He adopted defense as his focus, realizing that locking down opponents was how he’d make his way onto the court. He began talking to his father about ways to boost his numbers and rack up points without having plays drawn up for him. An offensive rebound here, a steal there. All of which made him a perfect fit for the new ping-the-ball-around system being installed by Brad Stevens in Boston.

“I think this league is all about guys figuring out what they do best and working on it as much as humanly possible,” Stevens says. “Jae’s figured out on the offensive end what he can do while knowing on defense he can be a versatile guy who can also create chaos around the paint.”

Crowder immediately saw his playing time, and by proxy his numbers, skyrocket. He was making his name on defense (stopping guards and forwards) but was also figuring out ways to help the Celtics on offense. An occasional three. A strong drive. Always a quick decision.

“The more I played, the more I saw what I could do, the more my confidence grew,” Crowder says. “And that motivated me.”

Crowder was traded to Boston on December 14, 2014. Seven months later, after seeing him play for just half a season, the Celtics inked Crowder to a shiny five-year, $35 million contract extension.

Let’s talk about the dreads.

Crowder first grew them out as a freshman in high school. The plan was to cut them the summer before his senior year, but he balked. “Wait until after I get my college scholarship,” Helen says he told her. But he balked then, too, telling his mom that he’d cut them after he made the NBA.

Four years later, Crowder was sitting with his mother and the rest of the family in Miami when he heard his name called during the 2012 Draft. Afterward, Helen looked at her son, smiled, then reminded him of the promise he once made.

“I can’t cut them,” Crowder responded. “They’re my signature.”

It’s a line easy to make fun of, but also true. Most fans view Crowder as a role player, but a replaceable one. His look on-court—tattoos on his skin and dreads flopping in the air—combined with his style of play—rough and headstrong—helps mold the image of Crowder being a player who makes his living off hustling vs skills.

Once upon a time this might have been the case. But these days Crowder is much more.

Even after signing his new contract—the type of contract that could take care of him, and also his children and even maybe grandchildren, for life—Crowder kept pushing. He boosted his conditioning and worked on his jump shot, specifically making sure to land with balanced feet. He continued to study film, and learned where to better pick his spots. He talked with his dad (whom he speaks with almost every day) about becoming a team leader, and doing so through actions as opposed to words.

The results: Crowder, just 26, is enjoying the best season of his career. He’s averaging around 13.7 points and 5.6 rebounds per game. He’s taking more threes than ever (5.5 per game) yet drilling 40 percent of them (coming into the year his career-high mark from deep was 34 percent).

“I always thought he had the ability to stretch the floor, but in the past he did it better against 4-men who were slower with their close-outs,” Stevens says. “Now he gets his shot off quicker, so it doesn’t matter.”

He still spends his nights guarding opposing studs like LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Paul George. Most telling of all: the Celtics are outscoring opponents by 8.1 points per 100 possessions when he plays, by far the best on the team.

Crowder has become elite at not being elite. That may sound easy, but there are only a handful of players in the league who fit that description.

“In Dallas, I don’t think he would have gotten that chance,” Corey says. “He’s been given this incredible opportunity in Boston, and taken advantage of it.”

Which is why Crowder’s name keeps popping up in trade rumors. In just three years he’s morphed from throw-in to coveted piece, from after-thought to beloved, and he’s helped the Celtics to a 41-24 record so far this season (2nd in the Eastern Conference) after Wednesday night’s big win over the Warriors in Oakland.

Players like Jae Crowder help teams win games. That there are so few of them is what makes him so special.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post Headstrong appeared first on SLAM.

Rony Seikaly knows all this, and he knows that your initial reaction to learning that a former NBA veteran and ’89-90’s Most Improved Player is now a “world-famous DJ” is likely laughter. Which is why he wants you to know how wrong this line of thinking is.

“I come from the underground school where the object of the game is to play music nobody else is playing,” he says one fall afternoon over the phone from Miami. “Commercial DJs—they’re pretty much like jukeboxes. They play the hits, what people want to hear.

“Me, I’m trying to give someone the experience they’ve never had before.”

This is where all that hard work comes in. It takes new music to create that new experience, and to find that new music—what he refers to as “gems”—in an age where everyone has access to the same seemingly infinite music sharing platforms, Seikaly must parse through thousands of songs. Literally. By his own estimation he listens to around 3,000 new tracks every month, each lasting somewhere between five and 10 minutes. He spends between two and three hours every day alone in his home studio scouring the catalog of the meticulously organized folders he has saved on various hard drives. Some songs are pulled in full. Others—say, for example, one with a drop he likes but a weak rhythm—are skinned.

Eventually, all that music gets trimmed down. For his weekly SiriusXM radio show, he’ll put together somewhere between 20 and 30 tightly woven tracks. For his live sets, around 15.

“Being a good DJ is about your ear more than anything else, and that’s where the work comes in,” he says. “You could teach a monkey to mix music or play hits. It’s not hard. To me the hardest part is creating your own sound, your own vibe, so that any time you’re playing, people know, Oh, this is Rony’s style. That’s why, to do this, you have to love it. This hobby is a labor of love.”

So now you know: Rony Seikaly is not a stereotype. He’s a man following his passion. Or at least that was the plan. Then he lost sight of what had drawn him to this second career in the first place. That’s the funny thing about passion projects.

The project part is easy. Preserving the passion is hard.

Rony Seikaly has always loved house music. Want proof? How about the disco he built in his parents’ garage as a 14-year-old? He removed all their junk, painted the room black and lined the walls with foil paper because he couldn’t afford mirrors. Then he strung up a disco ball and installed two record players.

That was back in Athens, where he was raised after his parents moved to Greece from his native country of Lebanon. He and his friends were too young for the local nightlife so they spent evenings in the Seikaly garage instead. Students from visiting basketball teams were invited, too—and they were charged a $20 cover, which would be reinvested into upgrading the homemade disco.

Seikaly brought his love for house music across the Atlantic with him, first to Syracuse University and then the NBA, where he played 11 seasons and averaged 14.7 points and 9.5 rebounds per game. The first six of those seasons came for the then-expansion Heat, in Miami, which is where he makes his home today. MIA is also where his ear and burgeoning skills were refined, though at the time his NBA brethren had no idea.

“That’s the funny thing, I don’t remember him ever playing that music,” says Glen Rice, who played five years with Seikaly in Miami. “I don’t even remember him wearing headphones on the plane.” (Another memory Rice has of Seikaly: “The ladies loved him.” Adds another former teammate, Keith Askins: “Rony kept beauty around him. I’ll leave it at that.”)

Seikaly, now 51, says he tried introducing his music to teammates a few times but was always rebuffed and told to “turn that Euro shit off.” So he played for friends instead. They’d file into the mini-club he built in his new Miami Beach home that housed Seikaly’s late-night after-parties. One night, or, rather, early morning, sitting there with Sean “P Diddy” Combs and Erick Morillo, one of the world’s more popular house music DJs, Seikaly began playing one of his new mixes. This was back in 2005, five years after his retirement and right around the time of his divorce from his first wife, Mexican model Elsa Benítez.

Morillo, enjoying the beat, turned to Seikaly. “Whose music is this?” he asked. Seikaly told him. “That’s impossible,” Morillo said. Seikaly responded that it wasn’t. “What does a basketball player know about house music?” Morillo replied.

“Believe me,” Seikaly answered, “I’ve been listening to this music as long as you have.”

Over the next few months, Morillo brought more and more friends by the house. “Come on, Rony, play for them,” he’d plead. The gatherings continued to swell. Still, Seikaly remained hesitant.

“I didn’t want people to think that I was into this so that I could become a DJ,” Seikaly says today. “It was never about that, that was never the goal. It was always just about the music.”

But, eventually, he relented. He owned a club in South Beach and figured that’d be the perfect place for a test run, which turned out to be a resounding success.

Soon after he was playing at all the top clubs in the world. There were trips to New York and Las Vegas and Dubai. Around a year later he was invited to play on the island of Ibiza at a club called Amnesia, one of the most famous house music spots in the world. More than 5,000 fans came out to hear him play.

“It was just a surreal moment,” Seikaly says. “After that it really took on a life of its own.”

Seikaly compares music to all sorts of different hobbies, from meditation and yoga to reading and art. He uses the word “melodic” a lot. It’s soothing, hearing him talk about what music does for him, how he’s able to lose himself in the beat. It’s like listening to the voice on one of those pre-sleep relaxation tapes.

But all that grueling touring was hacking away at the love. Retirement from the NBA was supposed to bring about less travel—suddenly he was back to spending weekends running through airports and cramming his 6-10 frame into tiny seats on 5 a.m. flights. Sometimes he’d wake in his hotel bed unsure of what city he was in. He also had a new wife and a 13-year-old daughter (from his first marriage) waiting for him at home.

“It got to the point where it was feeling like a job,” Seikaly says. “For me, that’s not what I set out to do.”

He didn’t need the money. He had made north of $27 million in the NBA (per basketball-reference.com) and dabbled in real estate, too. And yet the more famous he got the more he got paid, and the more he got paid the more difficult he found it to turn down offers. He just hated saying no.

Then, this past October, he boarded a Wednesday flight from Miami for a New York show that night. On Thursday he played in Chicago. Friday in Montreal. On Saturday morning he went through customs again to do a gig in Detroit. He finished the stretch with a Sunday night show back in Miami.

Mentally drained and physically exhausted, Seikaly returned home. He collapsed into the warmth of his house and took stock of the long weekend. It wasn’t just that he was no longer enjoying himself. He was struggling to match the room’s energy. At times he’d catch himself growing frustrated by the audience’s lack of appreciation for the rhythmic sounds and stories he was sharing with them. It was time, he realized, to make a change.

“I don’t want to be on three different continents in three days,” Seikaly says. “It was taking a toll—I don’t need that. It was time to go back to doing what I had originally set out to do, which is share my music with the people who love it.”

Seikaly decided he’d limit his public gigs to around five a year. He still has the radio show, and there are still the private concerts, reserved solely for those exceedingly familiar with him and his music, which he loves.

But there was also more to his decision to slow down. It just takes a few follow-up questions to pry it out.

“I was feeling guilty,” Seikaly adds, finally. “If I was single and didn’t have a family to take care of, I’d probably be on the road all the time. But I have a daughter and a wife and I was missing time with them.”

Then comes the kicker.

“I’m 1,000 percent happier than I was before.”

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos: Courtesy of Rony Seikaly, Suzy Allman/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images, Tim de Frisco/Allsport

The post Spin Doctor appeared first on SLAM.

That was a couple decades ago. Today, Goldberg is president of the re-launched and reinvigorated Ewing Athletics. The company—thanks to Goldberg, Patrick Ewing, Ewing’s agent David Falk and a few others—has over the past five years grown from a boutique brand into a sneaker world mainstay. Ewing says he’s constantly beseeched with requests from NBA peers. Rappers like 2 Chainz, who was recently inked by Ewing Athletics to a deal, can often be spotted rocking the kicks.

“We’re not a huge company like Nike or adidas or the others,” says Goldberg, “but we’ve managed to hang around and have an impact and are still going strong.”

Goldberg says his company’s run and impact reminds him of SLAM’s, which is why he was excited to partner with us on a new collaboration—the fruits of which you can see in the photos above.

That partnership will manifest itself in a new edition of the Ewing 33 HI, the shoe Patrick wore in 1989. It remains the company’s signature model. This colorway will boast orange and black hues and a clear sole. Ewing’s number, 33, will be printed on the heel while SLAM’s logo will run across the tongue. The special edition 33 HI will hit retail stores on January 18 with a $120 price tag, available at the Ewing Athletics website and in select stores.

“SLAM, like Ewing, is an authentic brand that’s beloved in the basketball community,” he says. “It’s an important part of basketball and sneaker culture.”

—

Purchase your “SLAM” 33 HI right now.

The post SLAM x Ewing Athletics 33 HI appeared first on SLAM.

For five seconds, Curry bobbed and faked and juked, but Love stuck with him. In search of a lifeline, Curry passed the ball to Draymond Green, who immediately tossed it back. Curry then dipped back into his bag of tricks. He faked again, dribbled left and crossed back to his right. Love stuck with him the entire time. Finally, Curry surrendered, heaving an off-balance rainbow from a foot behind the three-point arc. It grazed the back portion of the front rim on the way down toward the net, which sent it careening back into the air and then into the welcoming hands of LeBron James.

You remember that play. How could you not? Kevin Love, 6-10 with the footspeed of a statue running in quicksand, sealing a Game 7 win by stymieing the League’s leading scorer, the two-time reigning MVP who had spent the previous couple years rendering the greatest athletes in the world helpless.

https://youtu.be/5Kil_Ugzezk

But here’s what you might not remember:

Go back and re-watch the final possession of Game 7. Watch what happens after Curry, with Golden State down 4, misfires on another bomb. Watch Warriors forward Marreese Speights grab the offensive rebound on the right baseline and dribble back into the corner. Watch him rush a three with 0.8 seconds remaining. Watch all that, but also keep an eye on what happens on the opposite baseline.

If you do you’ll see Love, subbed out for Tristan Thompson and watching from the bench with his hands on his knees and a scrunched-up maroon warm-up shirt in his right fist. After the first miss, Love commits a violation. His glee thrusts him across the out-of-bounds line and on to the court. For just a moment the Cavs have six defenders on the floor. As Speights launches the Warriors’ final shot of the season, Love hops back out of bounds, but the elation rushing through his veins won’t allow him to stay sidelined. Before Speights’ shot can clank off the rim, Love is sprinting on to the court, arms spread wide.

He’s the first to meet LeBron James under the basket. LeBron jumps into his arms. They scream and laugh and cry.

You remember the stop. How could you not?

But do you remember the euphoria Love felt afterward?

* * *

It’s a Wednesday afternoon when Kevin Love calls, just a few hours before Game 7 of the World Series, as he’s driving home from the Cavaliers practice facility. We start by talking about the Indians. Later that night, Love will watch Game 7 with some teammates from a box at Progressive Field. We talk about what championships can do for a person, which is what I want to know—how being a champion has changed Kevin Love’s life. Or, rather, why it’s changed his life, why being able to hoist a trophy and wear a ring is the sort of thing that matters to someone like Kevin Love, a man who’s only 28 but is rich and famous and one of the best in the world at what he does and who before winning a title had already accomplished more than most humans do in a lifetime.

Love is also a smart and intelligent dude. He reads biographies about Steve Jobs and Andre Agassi in his free time—he’s the type of guy you’d think could figure out how to derive pleasure from life without succumbing to the sports world’s belief that championships define the man.

And yet…

To Love, there was something about being crowned a champion that clearly mattered. Why else would he subject himself to all the hardships? He didn’t have to sign off on a trade to the Cavaliers in August 2014. He could have stuck things out in Minnesota, kept filling up box scores with video game-like numbers and maybe eventually gone back west (he grew up in Oregon), signed with the Lakers and morphed into a Hollywood star.

Sounds like a pretty good life. But also one Love didn’t want. Instead, he wanted—no, needed—to win.

Why is what I want to know. But that’s too much Freud to have at the top of an interview, so instead I begin our conversation with what I think is a simple question.

What was the hardest part about joining the Cavaliers?

He rattles off a few answers, ones you’ve no doubt heard before. How it was difficult learning how to play without the ball always being in his hands, and how he also had to learn to play outside-in. How that level of media attention devoted to those Cavaliers teams—the deep dives into minutia like body language—was something even he had never experienced before. How frustrated he was after separating his shoulder during the first round of the 2015 playoffs, an injury that made him a spectator for the rest of the postseason and the Cavs’ Finals run.

“That was a real down moment,” Love says. “At the time I thought we were really rolling and playing well.”

But then he mentions something else, something different. First he says it was hard getting accustomed to living in a new city, which is not at all surprising to hear him say. Then he adds one more detail.

“I would say living downtown and living in a residence that was not only a residence but also a hotel at the same time was tough for me, knowing that, in Cleveland, they live vicariously though their sports.”

See, after being traded to the Cavaliers, Love moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the 20th floor of the swanky Metropolitan at The 9. The hotel seemed like the perfect place to live. He could see Quicken Loans Arena from the spin bike looking out his living room window. It took just five minutes to walk to games.

But there he also couldn’t be himself. The lobby was constantly bustling with locals checking out the hotel’s new restaurant and club. To get outside he’d have to walk through packs of fans, many of whom would have no problem recognizing him and spitting out requests or advice.

“Your stress levels go up like crazy when you wake up in the morning or come back at night from a game and don’t know who you’re going to see,” Love says. “It just felt a little cabin fever-ish, like I could never leave.”

So, Love didn’t. He binge-watched The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy and Mad Men. He Facetimed friends and family back west. He shot pool on the table he owned. He spent many evenings alone, unable, due to the hotel’s archaic design, to even open a window for fresh air. Every invitation morphed into a calculation. What are the pros and cons of going out? Who am I going to run into downstairs? Are they opening the club early tonight? Is it Happy Hour?

“Not being able to be a free spirit and live life the way I wanted to,” Love says, “definitely made that first year-plus more difficult. Especially in hard times, I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live.”

His lease there ended last fall and he checked out more than 50 houses before finding one to his liking. It’s in a suburb 20 minutes away from the arena and has a green yard and welcoming kitchen. He lined the walls with pictures of family and friends. He began hosting team dinners and dance parties. Gone were the nights sitting at home with nothing to do but think about whatever was going on in his life or pick up the remote.

“Right off the bat you could see how much happier he was after moving,” says Ernie Spada, a childhood friend. A longtime Cavaliers staffer says Love’s emergence from “his shell”—you know, the one myriad gossipy columns and TV rants were devoted to—coincided with when he started having teammates over.

Love had come to Cleveland searching for something. Now he was finally free to pursue it.

* * *

Love says he hasn’t watched a replay of “The Stop” on Curry, but he’s clearly seen the videos and pictures of the celebration afterward.

“If you look at my face when that buzzer sounds, when I go hug LeBron and everyone is jumping on top of us, the joy in our faces, you can see it…”

He then trails off, unsure of how to put his feelings into words. I figure it’s the perfect time to circle back to my original question, the why in all this.

Spada and Rob McClanaghan, Love’s longtime trainer, were both at Game 7. They both met Love on the Oracle Arena floor after the Cavs had delivered Cleveland its first professional sports title in 52 years. They both say they could see the pressure being released as the chips and monkey were removed from Love’s shoulders and back.

And all that’s probably true, but also something you’d expect Love’s friends, and really even casual observers, to say. It’s the sports cliché we’ve all been trained to believe. But is that really how Love thinks? And did the simple act of winning a Game 7 make all the poison lobbed at him over the previous two years, all the questioning of his talent and aspirations and mental fortitude, all the suffering on the court but also alone in his apartment—was all that worth enduring?

And if so, why?

“There’s nothing quite like sports glory,” Love says. “People are always going to remember a winner.”

So it’s more of a mortality thing?

“Well, it’s a résumé thing, and it’s validation for sure,” says Love, who through the first 15 games of the 2016-17 season is averaging 22.3 ppg and 10.7 rpg, his best-ever numbers in a Cavs uniform—not to mention his historic 34-point first-quarter outburst last week. “There’s so much that goes into winning a championship, and there was so much sacrifice, certainly from me but also everyone else on the team, and winning makes it all worth it.

“I’ll put it like this: From now on, when you talk about a guy like JR Smith, he’s JR Smith, NBA Champion. There’s no arguing it or debating it. It’s a fact. And you can’t ever take that away.”

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images.

The post Want It All appeared first on SLAM.

On The Map, which is playing in select theaters throughout the country (you can see the list of screenings here) tells the story of that championship team, but to understand Menkin’s claim a quick (bias- and politics-free, don’t worry) history lesson is needed.

Israel was established as a Jewish state in 1948, three years after Adolph Hitler’s death. That declaration led to a war between Israel and its surrounding neighbors, a war which continued intermittently for the next 30 years. There was the Suez Crisis in 1956, and 11 years later the Six Day War.

Then in 1972 the world watched as 11 Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics by a group of Palestinian terrorists. Just one year later, Egypt and Syria joined forces to attack Israel from the north and south. The raid began on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar—it caught Israel by surprise. Israel was able to hold its borders but more than 2,500 soldiers were killed in action. The country had just 3.3 million citizens at the time. The war, coupled with the Munich Massacre, affected every one of them. It left Israeli’s feeling weak and vulnerable.

Those clouds were still in the sky when Maccabi Tel Aviv kicked off its 1976-77 season. No Israeli basketball team had ever done anything of note on the international basketball stage before, but this time around Maccabi Tel Aviv had put together the greatest collection of talent the country had ever seen.

The star of that group was Tal Brody, a New Jersey native who had been an All-American for the University of Illinois. Brody was selected 12th overall by the Washington Bullets in the 1965 Draft. That August, though, he traveled to Israel to partake in the country’s Maccabiah Games. He fell in love with the country and in 1966 made it his home.

Fast forward to 1977. Brody had earned the moniker of Israel’s Mr. Basketball and now Maccabi Tel Aviv was set to take on CSKA in the semifinals of the EuroCup. Political winds were swirling around the game. The United States and Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War, and the Soviet Union was aligned with Israel’s Arab neighbors. Moscow didn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. CSKA refused to travel to Israel for the game. Instead the two teams met up in a tiny gym in the small Belgium town of Virton. Israel, behind Brody and the hot shooting of another American turned Israeli citizen, Jim Boatwright, knocked off the Soviets 91-79.

The streets of Israel broke out in celebration. Brody afterward was asked about the win.

“We are on the map!” Brody exclaimed in Hebrew. “And we are staying on the map–not only in sports, but in everything.”

Why did the win mean so much to Brody?

“It was such a critical period in the history of the country,” Brody said to SLAM recently. “After the tragedy of the Munich Olympics and the losses of the Yom Kippur War, defeating the Soviet Union and going on to win the European Championship had such a impact and influence on the culture, education, spirit and confidence of the whole country.

“This story shows a face of Israel that nobody knows about, and the story of a team that achieved so much against all odds and conditions.”

Menkin was one of the Israeli children celebrating the victory back in 1977. He said he remembers his father thrusting him onto his shoulders and bringing him out into Tel Aviv’s municipality square. He couldn’t believe that a documentary about this game, and the team, had never been produced before.

“Anyone who believes that sports are often more than just games, this movie is for them,” Menkin said. “It’s a story everyone should know. For us, it was like the equivalent of the first man walking on the moon.”

Menkin spent hours conducting research for the film. He dug up old clips and tracked down members of the team. He also interviewed former NBA commissioner David Stern, as well as Hall of Famer Bill Walton, who played alongside Brody on for Team USA at the 1970 FIBA World Championship.

“When Walton heard that we were doing this movie that featured Tal, he asked to be a part of it,” Menkin said. “He and Tal were roommates on that team and he considered him an older brother. He knew the whole story of the team.”

Walton’s thoughts add color and help bring the story to life. But the true star was, and still is, Brody.

“For four decades I’ve been reminded of this legendary season wherever I went in Israel,” he said. “Those who watched the game on TV passed down the memory of the game to their children and grandchildren.”

The hope from him and Menkin is that On the Map shares this story with thousands more.

Photo courtesy of Shmuel Rachmani

The post The Basketball Team That Put Israel ‘On the Map’ appeared first on SLAM.

Take today, for example. Up at 6:30 to watch Team Umizoomi and Blaze and the Monster Machines and other Nick Jr. shows with his 2-year-old son, Knox. Then three hours at the Clippers’ practice facility. Afterward there was a trip to the bank to deposit a check from an escrow account followed by a visit to a local bike shop to fix a busted tire on Knox’s stroller. That repair, dad was told, would take 45 minutes, which is perfect because he wanted to swing by the grocery store anyway. Knox needs more yogurt and Redick needs some ingredients for the pork tacos he plans on whipping up tonight.

When he gets home, Redick will strap Knox on to the back of his bike and pedal to the park. After that he’ll make dinner, put “my boy”—always “my boy”—to sleep, say goodnight to his wife, check out some watch websites (“I’m really into Daytonas right now”), scroll through Twitter, Business Insider and HoopsHype, prepare for an episode of his podcast that will feature former New York Times writer William C. Rhoden—a man he describes as a hero of his—clean the kitchen, put away all of Knox’s toys, perhaps give in to his OCD and rearrange his watch box or his impeccably kept closet where clothes are organized by type and color, then continue his deep dive into the world of financial markets. That started because he recently watched the History Channel documentary The Men Who Built America, which triggered a JP Morgan obsession, which led to Redick wanting to know everything he possibly could about the Federal Reserve, and now he’s reading about fixed income securities and is midway through the book The Physics of Wall Street but won’t stay up later than 9:30 reading it, or anything else, because tomorrow is another day.

“My offseason is like Groundhog Day,” Redick says. “Every day is exactly the same. I love it.”

Listening to Redick is inspiring because he makes you feel like you can do anything and everything—until you realize that you actually can’t, and that Redick is clearly some sort of alien or machine, and you’re exhausted just hearing about his schedule. He’s not only one of the world’s best shooters and an All-Star level guard, but also the type of dad and husband that other dads and husbands hate because he makes them look so bad. He’s a better podcast host than many professional broadcasters. He’s so smart and so articulate and so genuinely curious about the world around him that he’s been able to become an unofficial spokesman for athletes, and he’s done all this while making sure that the job that gave him this platform and those expensive watches and fancy clothes continues to receive ample attention.

So, what’s his secret? Also, where the hell does he get the time and energy?

“My thing is, I have a standard for myself and that’s what I’m always trying to reach,” Redick says. “I certainly fall short frequently, but my standard is my standard. I want to reach it for myself, my family and the people I love.

“I don’t do it for anyone else. I don’t give a fuck about proving doubters wrong or anything like that. I’m 32 years old, have my second kid on the way. [That second kid arrived since this interview was conducted. Congrats, JJ!—Ed.] In terms of a public image—I guess I just literally don’t care at all about what other people think.”

* * *

Once upon a time everyone hated JJ Redick. Everyone hates the preppy white shooters from Duke, right? He also had a sweet jumper and a ceaseless motor, though, and a bit of an attitude, all of which allowed him to graduate as the ACC’s leading scorer in 2006 but also transformed him into the most loathed athlete in the country.

Back then opposing fans would regularly lob verbal grenades at him. “There’s literally nothing you can say about me or any member of my family that I haven’t heard before,” Redick says. Much of the venom was unwarranted, though Redick wasn’t perfect either. “JJ could, and sometimes would, have beers the night before a game in college,” says Redick’s friend and former Duke teammate Shavlik Randolph. “And yet he’d still be the best player on the court the next day.”

Redick, by his own admission, entered the NBA brash and cocky. He and others say he was unprepared for the League, both physically and emotionally. He was arrested and charged with driving under the influence in June of 2006, weeks before being drafted by the Magic. He spent more time on the bench than the court in his first three professional seasons. On offense he was too easy to guard. On defense he was too easy to blow by. It took him until 2010 to find his place in the League—as a sharpshooting role player who, on defense, could use his IQ to make up for his lack of lateral quickness. In 2013 he signed a four-year, $27 million contract with the Clippers to become one of the League’s top 2-guards as well as an irreplaceable cog on a contending team.

And, yes, Redick believes the Clippers are a contender. Every offseason he has a “thing” that he works on. “I’m not trying to add lots to my game,” Redick says. “Instead I’m always looking to become a better shooter, and add one more weapon.” Last year the “thing” was runners and floaters. This year it’s shooting off the dribble, especially going left off screens. All of it, of course, is mapped out beforehand.

The day I speak with Redick, for example, is a Tuesday. Tuesdays in the offseason are catch-and-shoot days. On Wednesday the focus will be dribble hand-offs. Saturday is all about spot-ups; he has to knock down exactly 342 shots before leaving the gym.

“The way I look at it,” he says, “is if I can add one little thing to my game, and that thing gives us one or two additional wins over the course of the season—well, that means it was worth it.”

Forget basketball for a moment, though. Sure, Redick is a career 41 percent three-point shooter and coming off a season in which he drilled a career-high, League-best 48 percent of his shots from deep, even though he now draws so much attention that the majority of his looks come over outstretched arms. If you’re reading this magazine, then you’re already familiar with Redick’s picturesque stroke and basketball reinvention, so let’s move on to some things you might not know about JJ Redick.

“He’s a really good rapper,” Randolph says. “We were at Duke around the time 8 Mile came out and so we’d have battles around the dorms all the time.” Talk to Redick and his friends and you’ll quickly learn that movies play a major role in his life. In college he earned the nickname Redick and Ebert. Quotes from Swingers, The Waterboy and Wedding Crashers routinely make their way into his conversations. One of the many childhood friends whom he’s still close with, Daniel Payne, made sure to quote the latter— “true love is the soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in another”—while giving a toast at Redick’s engagement party.

“But that was before he traded in the baggy sweats for tight dark jeans and other items from the Russell Westbrook Collection,” Payne says. “If I made a speech today I’d be sure to mention his new wardrobe.” Not surprisingly, Redick’s new love for fitted pants and exotic shirts has drawn the attention of those who have known him for years.

“The jeans have definitely gotten skinnier and darker,” says Tom Hagan, another longtime friend. Adds Chris Collins, the current Northwestern head coach and former Duke assistant who recruited Redick to Durham, “It’s especially funny because he’s a kid who grew up in a log cabin in Roanoke, VA, and now he’s dressing like a model.”

For a moment, though, let’s use the new and improved wardrobe as a metaphor, one that perfectly sums up who JJ Redick is and how he’s managed to morph from borderline NBA player into Championship-team-level-starter, from despised college kid into the NBA’s equivalent of Prom King.

Think of it like this: When Yahoo! reporting wizard Adrian Wojnarowski was looking for an NBA player to host a podcast on his new network/website, The Vertical, Redick was the one he tabbed. When Bill Simmons wanted an NBA player to come on his new HBO show and talk about Kevin Durant’s decision to sign with the Warriors, it was Redick who garnered the invite. It’s not just high-powered media members, either. Redick’s Twitter mentions are filled with messages from former antagonists confessing that their former hatred has given way to love.

And really, who can blame them? The tabloids are littered with examples of individuals who’ve sold their souls in pursuit of riches. Redick, on the other hand, is the rare L.A.-based famous person who’s managed to successfully toe that ever-so-thin line. Think of his clothes: They might have changed over the past half-decade as both his fame and bank account have grown. But the core of the man wearing them, well, he’s still the movie-quoting, book-reading, hard-working, fun-loving person who goes to bachelor parties with childhood friends and perks up when asked about subjects like parenting and a college Anthropology class.

Of course, none of this fawning matters to Redick. He doesn’t care what we think about him. Men worthy of such praise rarely do.

—

Yaron Weitzman is a Senior Writer for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images

The post Win The Day appeared first on SLAM.

To be honest, I’ve been waiting for Russell Westbrook to be given this opportunity for years. I remember arguing with friends following Derrick Rose’s 2011 MVP campaign that Westbrook could put up better numbers and get the Bulls further than Rose did if the two swapped teams. But Westbrook had Kevin Durant on his team while Rose was allowed to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, at least on offense. Durant is a marvelous player, but I also think he—or rather his presence—was holding Westbrook back.

Some players just aren’t meant to play second fiddle. From a pure basketball standpoint Westbrook certainly isn’t, and when it comes to an emotional presence Russ takes a backseat to no one. He’s just not wired that way, for better and for worse.

Me, I think it’s for better. There’s a reason Westbrook is the favorite to win this season’s MVP award. Dude is a beast, and now the shackles are gone, the team is his, the offense is his. You know how Nate Archibald is the only player to ever lead the NBA in points and assists per game? Believing Westbrook could do so too this year isn’t crazy.

https://youtu.be/TdkH6Qqmgho

He led the League in scoring two seasons ago (28.1) when Durant missed a chunk of games, then averaged 10.4 assists last year. Obviously Durant’s absence will hurt the assist numbers, and the Thunder could use some more shooting. Still, the ball’s going to be in Westbrook’s hands the majority of the time this season and OKC does have a number of bigs (Steven Adams, Enes Kanter) who should thrive on dump-off passes.

Think of it like this: Westbrook was a part of 722 pick-and-rolls last season, according to NBA.com’s player tracking database. Durant, meanwhile, was the ball-handler on 348 screen-and-rolls.

With Durant now in Golden State where do you expect those now free pick-and-rolls to go?

Then again, we all know Westbrook can, and will, put up monster numbers. In terms of most ridiculous athletes to ever step foot on an NBA floor, Russ is up there with LeBron, plus he’s got skills. The ability to blow by anyone trying to guard him, to create fast break points, to finish in the traffic at the hoop, and let’s not forget that picturesque stop-and-pop foul line jumper he’s perfected.

But the real question facing him and OKC this is year is can they win without KD? Or, more to the point: Can a team with a wild dervish like Russell Westbrook as its primary weapon compete for a title, or at least climb to the top of the standings? (No one in the West is knocking off the Warriors.)

In order to do that, Westbrook is going to have to do the Alpha Dog Balance: He’s going to have to learn when to take over and when to get teammates involved, and how to be more efficient (he shot 45 percent last year, but just 42 percent in 2015). He’s going to have to give full effort all the time, even on defense.

And he’s going to have to lead.

The latter, leading—it’s something that sounds easier than in actually is, especially for someone with as electric a personality as Westbrook.

(Though more no-so-subtle Instagram shots at his former buddy would certainly be welcomed by this writer).

What’s cool, though, is that these are responsibilities Westbrook clearly wanted; after all, he didn’t have to sign an extension with OKC, he could have waited to become a free agent and done that whole dance. And obviously that decision wasn’t a selfless one; there were financial benefits to him doing so.

But he was also itching to, finally, be handed a team and show everyone what he’s capable of if fully unleashed. I for one am excited that we’ll no longer have to spend May mornings debating whether he and Durant can co-exist. They don’t have to anymore. The Thunder now belongs to Westbrook.

And who knows what happens now? Maybe the League will soon be Westbrook’s, too.

RUSSELL WESTBROOK SLAM TOP 50 HISTORY

2009: –
2010: 24
2011: 12
2012: 9
2013: 12
2014: 6
2015: 5
2016: 3

Rankings are based on expected contribution in 2016-17—to players’ team, the NBA and the game.

Follow the entire SLAM Top 50 countdown.

The post SLAM Top 50: Russell Westbrook, No. 3 appeared first on SLAM.

“I vividly remember him calling me after his first day of training camp and on the brink of tears,” recalls Eric Fleisher, Garnett’s former agent. “The guys on the team were being physical with him, pushing him, grabbing him. He was a kid joining a man’s world.”

Garnett was just 19 years old at the time, two years away from being allowed to legally buy a drink. He was also just months removed from being selected fifth overall by the Timberwolves, becoming the first player since 1975 to be drafted into the NBA straight out of high school. A South Carolina native, Garnett moved to Chicago prior to his senior year so he could enroll in the more prestigious Farragut Career Academy, and also so that he could get away from his native Mauldin following a racially charged fight at his school.

But this latest move to Minnesota would present an entirely new set of challenges. Suddenly KG had millions of dollars in the bank and millions of fans following his every move. The mall was no longer an option; 6-11 men with octopus-like arms don’t exactly blend in.

So Garnett found other ways to entertain himself. He and his friends would race go-karts up and down the street, Fleisher says. Garnett bought himself some puppies, too. Anything to ease his adjustment off the court, so that he could focus on thriving on it. And—when given the chance to play—thrive he did. Garnett averaged 10.4 points and 6.3 rebounds during his rookie season, despite playing just about 29 minutes per game for a team that would win just 26 games that year, a number that even as a kid KG found unacceptable.

“He’d call me after games, almost in tears following a loss,” Fleisher says. “Even then he couldn’t take losing—and when he was a rookie he’d get even more upset when teammates of his would be joking around in the locker room after a loss.”

Then again, Garnett’s rookie year wasn’t about wins and losses. It was about building a new foundation in Minnesota, and in the NBA, too. KG was there to show high schoolers—and the League—that skipping college and going straight to the NBA was a viable path. Not just for anyone, though. It took more than raw talent to pull off that jump.

Sure, Garnett was blessed with a combination of physical gifts we see once in a generation. He was as tall as a skyscraper but could run like a gazelle. He could bury jumpers from 20 feet out but also shoot over smaller defenders in the paint. He was the rare player who could swat a shot on one side of the floor, then sprint down the court and finish with a dunk, and he often did.

But there was always more to No. 21’s brilliance. KG showed a generation what it meant to play with passion and what it looked like to be addicted to winning.

“He paved the way for lots of high school guys and young players,” Fleisher says. “All you have to do is look at the Drafts after him.”

Kevin Garnett changed the NBA. And it all started his rookie year.

—

WATCH: Karl-Anthony Towns x Kevin Garnett Mixtape

Photos: Mitchell & Ness, Getty Images

The post 21 Savage appeared first on SLAM.

When he’s on the court, Bosh is one of the 20 best players in the world. He’s the perfect big man for today’s NBA, a dynamo who can single-handily generate offense, and do so efficiently (19.1 points per game last season on 47 percent shooting), and space the floor with his silky smooth stroke (37 percent from deep).

He’s a brilliant team defender, too, a 6-11 big man with long arms and quick feet. Bosh is agile enough to stifle opposing guards above the arc. He doesn’t block a lot of shots, but his understanding of angles and body positioning makes him a more than adequate rim protector.

My favorite aspect of Bosh’s game, though, is just how willing he is to relinquish the spotlight to others. We saw it when LeBron came, and even after the Big Three era, when Wade was still around. Simply put: Bosh is the ultimate team player, in both spirit and skill set. He might not be good enough to be the best player on a championship contender. But you’d be hard-pressed to name 15 guys you’d prefer as a No. 2.

His skills can mesh with any player on any team. His personality—that easy-going yet competitive mind fascinated by both basketball and the entire world around him—would be welcomed in any locker room. With him in the fold, the Heat could just maybe challenge the Cavaliers come playoff time.

The problem, of course, is we have no idea if the 32-year-old Bosh will be able to play a single game this season, and right there is why we have him in a sort-of no man’s land of these rankings.

By now, you’re likely familiar with Bosh’s health concerns. Blood clots were discovered in his lungs following the 2015 All-Star Game. He spent weeks in bed and lost 13 pounds. He returned to the court last season but was told that if the clots resurfaced, his career would likely be over. Another clot, this time in his leg, was discovered prior to the 2016 All-Star Game. Bosh was forced to miss the rest of the year.

Except he wasn’t ready to quit playing the game he loves. He said he found a doctor who told him he could return to the court; the Heat, reportedly, were told by the doctors they consulted that Bosh could face a fatal injury if he stepped back on to the floor. The two sides exchanged public statements. The NBA Players Association got involved. Bosh sat out the remainder of the year and the Playoffs and still, today, nothing has been resolved.

Bosh wants to play. The Heat, ostensibly for fear of what could happen to him if he does, believe the safe route is for him to continue sitting out—at least for another few months.

And so here we are, with the 2016-17 season less than two months away from tipping off, and still no idea whether we’ll ever see Chris Bosh play in the NBA again. My hope is that Bosh does come back and come next year we see him return to the top-20 of these rankings.

My fear, though, is that this winds up being the last time we see Bosh’s name show up in this space.

—

Rankings are based on expected contribution in 2016-17—to players’ team, the NBA and the game.

Follow the entire #SLAMTop50 countdown.

The post SLAM Top 50: Chris Bosh, No. 46 appeared first on SLAM.

Yet that’s exactly what Richardson, the 40th pick in the 2015 Draft, was. He averaged 10.2 points after the All-Star break and, despite connecting on just 32 percent of his treys during his four years at Tennessee, finished the season shooting a scorching 46 percent from deep (he says a tweak to the direction of his hips and a removal of a hitch are responsible for the improvement). He was one of the Heat’s top perimeter defenders, too.

Not bad for someone who once figured his basketball career would end as soon as his college days did.

“I was going to go to medical school to become a surgeon,” Richardson says. “I didn’t even consider the NBA an option until my junior year.”

Draft day

— Josuélito (@J_Rich1) June 23, 2016

I remember this time last year I was home about to watch the draft just to see where my homies got picked.. Who would've thought.

— Josuélito (@J_Rich1) June 23, 2016

But forget basketball for a moment. Richardson, instead, wants to talk about his life off the court.

“I’m versatile in my tastes, from music to what I do in my free time,” he says, when asked what he wants people to know about him. “The way I think is different.”

He’s asked for examples. He says he plays the piano. He adds that the first purchase he made after moving into his downtown Miami apartment was a seven-foot long tan beanbag chair because, “I just really wanted one.” Also, he loves the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And he started a “hat club” featuring custom slogans with teammate and fellow soon-to-be second-year man Justise Winslow.

Of course, he remains focused on basketball and to his responsibilities on the court. In three 2016 Orlando Summer League games, J-Rich averaged 16.7 ppg and 4.7 apg.

“It took me a bit to figure out how to play at this level,” Richardson says. “But now I know that I belong.”

The post Look At Me Now appeared first on SLAM.

Never, though, had Jeffries felt quite as muddled as he did that September day four years ago when he agreed to go alligator hunting with Brad Miller.

“It was a disaster,” Jeffries says between laughs. “I still can’t believe I let that idiot talk me into doing it.”

Since retiring in 2012, Miller, the former NBA center best known for his time with the Kings, has hosted a hunting TV show on Sportsman Channel. Like Jeffries, Miller grew up in Indiana. He and Jeffries both shared an affinity for outdoor sports and Miller thought it’d be fun to invite his buddy onto his show.

We’ll let Jeffries take it from here:

“First I told him I had never gone before, so I asked him what do I wear. This idiot talked me into coming in basketball shorts and a T-shirt—to go gator hunting in the middle of a Florida swamp with spiders and mosquitos everywhere. You don’t understand how bitten I got. So we go out and we see the gator. They pass me this bow-and-arrow thing with, like, a grappling hook attached. I shoot the gator—turns out it’s like 12 feet. Then they tell me we have to hand-line it in. That takes about two hours and we had each had about 12 Budweisers by then.

“We eventually get the gator to the boat, then you stun in it. Then you have to drag it into the boat and cut its spine. And of course the knife they gave me to do that was this tiny thing the size of a pocketknife. Needless to say, the whole thing was a disaster.”

Me taking jerrod out for his first gator ever pic.twitter.com/MAXZnjG6

— CountryBoysOutdoors (@CBOTV) September 3, 2012

Well, that part’s not entirely true. Jeffries did get to meet the crew that now produces his fishing show, Modern Fishing with Jared Jeffries, which airs on the Outdoor Channel. And, yes, you read that last sentence correctly. Former NBA journeyman Jared Jeffries does, indeed, host a reality fishing show. But what’s most surprising is just how unsurprising this is. Jared Jeffries may not quite be the NBA’s Dos Equis Man. But he’s certainly close.

“If I just played basketball, worked in the NBA, retired and did nothing else, that would be a boring way to live,” Jeffries says. “I’ve been blessed and it would be a disservice to myself and that blessing if I wasn’t always trying new things, the kind of stuff that I can tell my kids and my grandkids about.”

It’s lunchtime on a relatively quiet spring day in the office when Jeffries picks up the phone. Three years ago the former Indiana Hoosiers star and 11th overall pick of the 2002 Draft (a Draft we were excited enough to build a cover off of, giving Jared his brief moment in SLAM history), moved into a loft in downtown Denver after the Nuggets hired him as a scout. He was just 31 years old at the time, coming off a down season with the Blazers, the fifth team of his career. Doctors told him that if he planned on returning to the court he’d need to undergo yet another surgical procedure on his right knee, which had already been operated on four times.

“I figured that meant it was time to transition to the next phase of my career,” says Jeffries, who earned north of $40 million over an 11-year career. “So I started looking for something stable that I could grow into.”

He decided a front office role would be the best path. Tim Connelly, who had just been named Nuggets GM and knew Jeffries from the time they spent together with the Wizards, offered him a job. Today Jeffries is the Nuggets’ Director of Pro Personnel. He’s involved in all key organizational decisions. Also, he gets to spend the majority his time with his two young daughters at home. He loves his job and his life and feels blessed and grateful to still be able to work in the NBA. He’d like to be a general manager one day and appears to be on the right track.

But what truly separates Jeffries from the hundreds of other successful but undistinguished players to step foot on an NBA court is the mentality he carries off of it.

“It’s rare to see a seven-foot guy be an extrovert, but that’s who Jared is,” says former NBA player Sean May, who played high school ball with Jeffries. “He’s always been the life of the party.”

Jeffries was raised on a piece of farmland in Bloomington, IN near several creaks, ponds and rivers. He and his father, Tom, often stayed up past midnight fishing along the banks. Sometimes they’d bring along marshmallows to roast. When Jared was about 13, Tom decided to splurge on a bass boat. He and his wife Celia would take Jared and his younger brother, Justin, on weeklong fishing vacations up north toward Minnesota and Canada. Other times they’d go hunting in the woods. Tom felt it was important to pass along the lessons his father had passed on him—only he added his own little twist.

“I grew up in the Mississippi Delta where things were rough,” Tom says. “My father was a no-nonsense guy because he had to be. He taught us how to fish as a means for survival. I was expected to account for every bullet I took out with me. I wanted to instill some of that, but also, because things had gotten a little better, I wanted to introduce my kids to as many things as possible and to have them enjoy them.”

Jared latched onto it all. “He probably talked about fishing more than basketball,” says Texas Southern University’s Mike Davis, who coached Jeffries at Indiana. “He got that from his dad.”

During his playing days he’d try to squeeze in as many fishing trips as possible. In Miami he’d often walk straight from AmericanAirlines Arena across the street to a boat waiting for him on Biscayne Bay. He was especially drawn to the competitive aspect of the sport. He also liked the catch and release part. “I could be outdoors without killing,” he says. “I don’t like cleaning the big animals. And I feel bad for them.” Unless it was a fish he spent hours wrestling. “That means I won,” he adds. “I eat him.”

One time he spent 150 minutes trying to reel in a 275-pound yellowfin tuna while sailing off the coast of a small Mexican fishing village named Punta Mila. He remembers the moment well. His forearms were burning and hands were begging for a break. Sweat dripped down his forehead as he stood on the edge of the outboard-powered fishing boat known as a Panga. No fish had ever fought him for that long. Jeffries looked toward his friends for help. There’s a group he hangs out with when staying in Punta Mila. They make sure to feed him plenty of tequila and beer and to turn the music—preferably Backstreet Boys or NSYNC—all the way up.

These days Jeffries doesn’t have as much time to chase adventures as he used to. But that doesn’t mean he’s left his passions behind. His TV show—which airs on a TV station owned by Kroenke Sports Enterprises, the same group that owns the Nuggets—will begin filming its fourth season this summer in South Florida. And anyway, there are plenty of other adventures that Jeffries can chase, plenty of other ways for him to explore himself and the world.

This, after all, is a man who, while living in Portland, performed stand-up routines during open-mic nights at local comedy clubs. And who, while playing for the Knicks, would skip out on visits to clubs like 1 OAK and instead spend nights belting songs like Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” in Koreatown karaoke bars.

Now Jeffries says he’d like to eventually run an NBA team. Also, he wants to climb Mount Everest by the time he’s 45. “I watched these documentaries about it and it made me want to try it,” he says. “I heard it’s one of the hardest things a person can do.”

Sure, that sounds a bit crazy. But that’s never stopped Jeffries before.

—

Yaron Wetizman is an Editorial Assistant for SLAM Magazine. Follow him @YaronWeitzman.

Photos via Getty Images.

The post Gone Fishin’ appeared first on SLAM.

“His skillset was unbelievable,” Farmar says now. “I called my people back home that night—I had to tell them about this 17-year-old kid.”

Less than one year later Dragan Bender, a 7-1 Croatian native, is on a collision course with the NBA. He can play inside and out and, according to Farmar, has a “high” basketball IQ. He’s rail-thin and saw less than 10 minutes of playing per game with Maccabi. But teams appear to be more impressed with the fact that he was able to hold his own while going toe-to-toe with some of Europe’s top teams.

“I think he’s going to be awesome,” Farmar says. “He has all the skills and just understands how to play the game, too.”

Bender, for his part, admits that he didn’t put up the kind of numbers he hoped he would with Maccabi. But he also points out that he’s a better player today because he spent a season playing against such stiff competition. League decision makers seem to agree. Bender is widely expected to be one of the first five players to hear his name called by Adam Silver on the evening of June 23 during the NBA Draft.

“Learning how to play with bigger physical players was tough,” Bender says. “But it also really helped me prepare for being in the NBA.”

Bender’s English, which he speaks fluently, was honed through childhood viewings of Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. As for his game, that was refined in duels with his older brother Ivan, a forward at Maryland, and in a local academy ran by Croatian star Nikola Vujčic, a former Maccabi Tel Aviv center who now serves as team manager.

Vujčic brought Bender over to Israel in 2014. Bender took up residence in an apartment by himself and spent a year playing for the club’s junior team before being called up. He spent the past season living alone in a Tel-Aviv apartment and getting acclimated to life as a professional athlete on a big state.

Now, he says, he’s ready to make the next leap to an even bigger stage.

“I’m chasing my dreams,” Bender says. “I’m not trying to model my game after anyone else. I just want to push myself to be the best player I can possibly be.”

—

Photos courtesy of Maccabi Tel Aviv

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“I put my name in this morning and we’ll see at the end of the [Maccabi] season whether I stay in,” Bender said in a phone conversation Wednesday afternoon. “After the season me, my family and my team will sit down and plan everything out.”

The news of Bender entering the Draft was first reported by ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla, who was informed of Bender’s decision by his NBA agent, Doug Neustadt.

Dragan Bender officially entered the 2016 NBA Draft this morning, says his NBA Agent Doug Neustadt.

— Fran Fraschilla (@franfraschilla) April 6, 2016

Maccabi Tel-Aviv’s season ends in May. The annual draft combine takes place May 11-15 in Chicago. The deadline to withdraw is June 13.

Bender, who is just 18, is expected to be a lottery pick if he does keep his name in. DraftExpress currently has him going No. 3 overall.

This season, his first with Maccabi’s senior team, Bender is averaging 4.7 points and 2.3 rebounds in 12 minutes per game.

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The air in the gym was thick, warm and sticky. Most of the time Draymond Green arrived just as the building doors were being unlocked, before the AC could begin churning. Within minutes, pools of sweat would streak down his forehead and penetrate his Spartan green shirt.

The previous Championship season had been a grueling grind, one he wanted to both revel in and recover from. And that he did. There were the Championship parades and a celebratory trip to Vegas with high school teammate and current NFL linebacker Lamar Woodley. There was an NBA-organized visit to China and time spent with family and friends.

He considered how far he’d come. From the gang- and drug-riddled streets of Saginaw, MI’s north side to Michigan State. From pudgy 268-pound freshman to the NBA. From second-round pick to role player to Defensive POY runner-up.

“I didn’t come into this League with a top-10 tag,” Green says over the phone one evening in December. “Everything I got I had to earn on the defensive end. Getting stops was the only way I could stay on the floor.”

That mentality had delivered him so much. Minutes, opportunities, a ring, and of course, millions of dollars, enough money that he could retire tomorrow and still know that his future grandchildren, and maybe even great-grandchildren, were secure.

But in early August, Green arrived in his adopted hometown of East Lansing with a new set of goals. As an 8-year-old, he was once thrown out of a rec center for jumping on a pool table after a loss and throwing balls at anyone who tried to pull him down. In middle school he broke a Nintendo 64 controller after dropping a game of Mario Kart to his brother Torrian. “He was always a sore loser,” Torrian says. “But now he’s able to control and use that edge.”

In other words, complacency was never something Green was going to succumb to, no matter how high a peak he reached.

***

NBA history is littered with champions who have fallen prey to what Pat Riley famously labeled “the Disease of More,” the idea that rather than solving problems, a title actually creates myriad new ones. “Success is often the first step toward disaster,” he wrote.

This year, the Warriors have faced no such issues, instead coming out looking even more potent. They set a record by winning their first 24 games of the season. Their small ball five-man lineup is outscoring opponents by a historic 60.3 points per 100 possessions. A 73-win regular season, which would be a record, is in play.

All of Golden State’s success starts with the team’s baby-faced, three-point sniper. But it is Green’s diverse and distinctive skills that allow the Warriors to make so many games look like scrimmages against the JV.

“There’s no one in the League better than him at guarding positions 1-5,” says an Eastern Conference executive. “And on the other end he’s so versatile. His skill set is really rare.”

Green, 25, has been flummoxing opponents with his defense for almost two years. He’s able to use his strength and wide base to bang with bruisers in the paint and his quick feet and IQ to keep up with the energizer bunnies on the perimeter. He allows the Warriors to always play small and keep the floor spread, to avoid tough defensive rotations and instead switch on pick-and-rolls.

But Green, whom friends say pays attention to everything written about him, didn’t want to be known as a stud on just one end of the floor. He wanted to be an All-Star and an Olympian. He wanted be on a 70-win team, and of course he was desperate to be crowned once again. So over the summer he put a microscope to his offensive game.

“One thing I’ve always hung my hat on is my basketball IQ,” Green says. “But you can always get better with that stuff.”

Watching film always came easy to him. At Michigan State, he’d frequently stay up until 1 in the morning talking basketball in Coach Tom Izzo’s office. “He’s one of the smartest players I’ve had,” Izzo says.

Green dove into cut-ups from Synergy Sports to see where he could improve. He noticed that when running pick-and-rolls, opponents tended to give him the three-pointer from the top of the key or a lane to throw a lob. “I saw that I’m open more than I thought,” he says. “Those are shots I need to take to keep the defense honest.”

Now, after adding some arc to his jumper, he’s scoring a career-high 15.2 per game and hitting a career-best 43.3 percent of his shots from deep. He also worked on a floater as a counter to giants like Timofey Mozgov, who in last year’s Finals gave him all sort of fits.

He always set backbreaking screens—Izzo says he teaches how to set a good pick by showing clips of Green—but armed with an improved repertoire, Green has morphed into one of the NBA’s premier pick-and-roll partners. The p-and-r with him Curry is one opponents have yet to figure out how to stop.

“You just gotta pick your poison,” says the Eastern Conference executive. Warriors guard Ian Clark uses the exact same phrase. Adds big man Marreese Speights, “There’s no good answer.”

But it was his ballhandling that received the most off-season attention. Green realized that at times he was either reckless or missed open teammates last season because he was moving at full speed.

“Now I usually don’t push the ball as fast as I can,” says Green, who’s averaging a team-high 7.3 assists per game. “Instead I’m pausing and surveying more—even at that speed I’m still faster than most big men.

“Most big men are taught to run back and protect the paint, so when they do that, a guard picks me up, which leaves our shooters open. That’s the stuff I saw from watching film from last year. Now, instead of going flying into the paint, I come down the court ready to make a jump stop at the foul line and hit that pass.”

***

It’s a December evening in Brooklyn and Green, after corralling a defensive rebound, is pushing the ball with his right hand up the floor. Klay Thompson is running alongside him and makes a beeline for the corner. Green begins to slow as he approaches the foul line before hitting Thompson square in the chest for a wide-open three. Nothing but net. The Warriors take an early 3-2 lead. The Barclays Center crowd, full of more Warriors blue than Nets black, responds with a boisterous cheer.

Later on Green will intercept a Jarrett Jack pass around half court and take it all the way for a dunk. He’ll connect on two three-pointers: one off a pick-and-pop with Curry, the other a pull-up from the top of the key. He finishes the game with 22 points, 9 rebounds and 7 assists. Three of them come in transition off defensive rebounds that he reeled in. One is on a pick-and-roll where the Nets trap Curry and then swarm to Green, leaving Festus Ezeli open on the block.

The Warriors walk off that night with another win, this one by a score of 114-98, making them 22-0. Not that the game was all smooth sailing. After jumping out to an early double-digit lead, Golden State allowed the Nets to climb back and even move ahead by 5 points in the third quarter.

Trash talking has always been in Green’s blood (“You can’t ever get him to shut up,” says Dubs’ swingman Brandon Rush, laughing). Since arriving in Golden State, the Warriors—and specifically GM Bob Myers—have asked Green to be as vocal as he can. “In order to be a good team, you need someone to be that guy and there aren’t many guys on our team who are talkers,” he says. “For me the key has been learning everyone’s personalities, what buttons to push and when and how to push them.”

During the Western Conference semis that meant taking a momentarily struggling Curry out to a Memphis bar for a beer. On this night Green feels a pep talk should do the trick. They’re an NBA team, too, he tells them. There’s nothing to worry about, he adds. They made their run, now it’s our turn to fight back.

“That’s why he’s the voice of the team,” Clark says afterward. “He’s the one willing to call people out and willing to pick them up.”

Some of the non-stop chatter is self-serving, too. The more Green talks, the more he has to back up. The more he has to back up, the more motivation he has.

“Sometimes I start things up just because I think that’s needed,” he says. “Bringing the energy, that’s part of my role on this team.”

That it is, along with guarding point guards and big men, rebounding, pushing the ball, passing, setting screens, creating offense off the dribble and hitting shots from inside the paint and behind the arc.

Green says he wants to be an All-Star and Olympian. For the first time ever, he may be setting his sights too low.

—

Images via Getty

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Once, for instance, Jacobs met a player in the lobby of a Boston hotel. The player was in town to take on the Celtics and used his American Express Black Card to purchased three NormaTec units—one to leave with the team, one for home, and one to keep at his mom’s house—while sitting at the hotel bar.

Another time Jacobs got a call from an agent who was in the middle on negotiating a contract for a client. The player, Jacobs was told, was annoyed the deal hadn’t yet been completed. Jacobs was asked if he could maybe overnight one of his NormaTec units to the player, to help smooth things over.

Sometimes the calls come from Mike Mancias, a Cavaliers employee who serves as LeBron James’ personal trainer. Other calls will be from Celtics trainer Ed Lacerte or Knicks trainer Anthony Goenaga or one of the other myriad team employees Jacobs now counts as clients. Some even come from the players themselves.

“People are constantly looking for ways to improve athlete performance,” Jacobs says over the phone on a recent Friday morning. “Technology has helped improve athlete gear and training. Recovery, we believe, is that next frontier.”

By “we,” Jacobs means the 25 or so employees he has working for him at NormaTec, the Newton Center, MA-based company that designs and manufactures the futuristic-looking recovery systems now populating nearly every locker room and practice facility across the League. In the age of bigger, stronger and faster, NormaTec’s computerized massage machines have become an indispensible tool for both players and teams.

And it all started on a napkin in a Dunkin Donuts in Tel Aviv.

The company is the brainchild of Jacobs’ mother, Laura, a rehabilitation physician who also held a PhD in bioengineering. She had spent the majority of her professional life working as the Chief of Rehab at New Jersey’s Cooper University Hospital (she traveled back and forth from Israel). Compression—which helps regulate blood flow in a way that speeds up recovery—was a major part of her life. But she couldn’t understand why professionals like her were still being limited to using bandage wraps and other relics from the past.

Finding a solution became her life mission and one morning, just about 18 years ago, the answer came to her. She jotted down her thoughts and soon after NormaTec—named after Laura Jacobs’ mother, Norma—was created. The machines took care of everything on the science end by essentially serving as personal massage therapists. Also, and perhaps more importantly, they were affordable, user-friendly and sleek.

Gilad graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005 and immediately joined the new family business. He worked his way up the ranks and took over following his mother’s death, from cancer, four years ago.

By then, Gilad had already taken NormaTec from the fringes of showrooms into the center of the sports world.

“We never paid anyone and didn’t do any advertising,” he says. “It was just me going around, telling trainers about it, letting them try it out and then relying on word of mouth.”

Eventually teams like Jacobs’ hometown Celtics were interested. The Knicks, too. But Jacobs’ big break came in June 2011 when he met Mancias at a trainer’s convention in New Orleans. Mancias told Jacobs what he and LeBron were looking for. Jacobs told Mancias how he felt NormaTec could help.

Less than two weeks later LeBron was hooked, giving Jacobs all the marketing he would ever need.

Now Jacobs has clients on every team. Cavaliers trainer Steve Spiro points out how easy Jacobs is to work with, and adds that every veteran in Cleveland uses NormaTec. In Boston, the Celtics have an entire NormaTec room so that players no longer have to wait for their massage.

“It’s been quite effective for us,” Celtics trainer Ed Lacerte says. “It’s really helped in injury and recovery management.”

It’s starting to trickle down to basketball’s lower ranks as well.

“I started using the NormaTec units in high school,” says Timberwolves center and last year’s No. 1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns. “I noticed right away that they helped me recover a lot faster and feel the wear and tear less.”

Both Lacerte and Spiro are quick to point out that NormaTec hasn’t replaced the need for massages but is rather just another tool they can use.

But for Jacobs, replacing massage therapists was never the goal. NormaTec was about making recovery easier and more accessible. So when an athlete like James requests three units so that he could keep one with the team, one at home and take one on planes, Jacobs can smile and know that he’s living out his mother’s dream.

“We were unfunded when she first made the company,” Jacobs says. “She did well beforehand, but those few years were tough. She’d fly back and forth from Philly to Israel every two weeks.

“To see how far we’ve come is really touching.”

The post Rehab Reinvented appeared first on SLAM.

And then there are all the other gifts the game of basketball has given him, like the means and time to pursue his other interests. Bosh has made TV cameos and learned to play guitar; he’s chilled with camels and brews his own beer in his garage. “All these things,” he says, “I couldn’t have done if I worked a 9-5.”

But like all human beings Bosh has also dealt with the merciless side of life, and over the years he’s developed a coping mechanism for such times.

“Don’t worry,” he’s fond of saying, both to himself and to his friends, “the sun will come out tomorrow. Everything will be OK.”

A “glass half-full guy” is how Dean Keener, the former Georgia Tech assistant who recruited Bosh out of Dallas’ Lincoln HS, describes him. Bosh, he says, is the definition of a positive person, which is why back in late February he was so struck by the tone of the text messages he was receiving from his former player and longtime friend. Bosh seemed downtrodden, defeated and full of despair. The few times the two did speak over the phone Bosh sounded nervous.

Of course it was understandable why.

A week earlier Bosh flew to Haiti for an All-Star Weekend vacation, only to have it ruined by an agonizing pain in his back and chest. He cut the trip short and returned to Miami to check into Baptist Hospital, where doctors discovered blood clots in his lungs. Bosh was also diagnosed with a pulmonary infarction; dead tissue had led to a buildup of fluid.

The root of these afflictions was unclear (though it was believed to be connected to a shin contusion he had suffered earlier in the year) and at the moment also irrelevant. All that did matter, to Bosh and those who know and love him, was that his life was in doubt.

“I love Chris to death, and for me, I was immediately brought back to the times when I found out about Earvin [“Magic” Johnson] and his HIV diagnosis, and [Alonzo Mourning] needing a kidney transplant—those are life-threatening diagnoses,” says Heat president Pat Riley. “With Chris, this was the same thing—a condition that could be fatal. It was a very sobering time.”

Riley also thought about another former player of his, Jerome Kersey. Bosh and his family did, too. One day earlier, Kersey had suddenly died at the all-too-young age of 52.

The cause of death: A blood clot had traveled from his left calf up into his lungs.

“It was scary,” Bosh says. “I knew all about blood clots and how dangerous they are.”

It took over a day for the blood thinners to do their job, after which Bosh was informed that death was no longer a concern. “That period beforehand—that was the most nervous I’ve ever seen him,” Keener says.

As for the 31-year-old Bosh’s playing career, well, that was a different story.

***

“I owe everything I’ve done to the game of basketball,” Bosh says. “I’ve done so much in my life that I never dreamt I’d be able to, and it’s all because of basketball.”

It’s a recent October afternoon and Bosh is calling from his Miami home. He’s upbeat and jovial, and enjoying a lunch of lightly fried snapper and broccoli. “Don’t worry,” he says between laughs. “[The fish] is barely dipped in oil. It’s not that greasy spoon stuff.”

He’s answering questions about the past year, the trials he’s endured, the pain he’s felt, and how he overcame it all. He’s introspective and thoughtful. “A renaissance man,” Riley calls him. “He and Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] are the two smartest players I’ve ever been around.” Bosh’s pensive mind serves him well when recalling the recent past.

“I’m just more appreciative of the career I have,” he says. “I used to question things a bit, wonder what I was actually contributing to society, wondering what I’d be doing if I wasn’t playing ball. Especially after the championships, things got really hectic. Basketball was really difficult.”

That word, difficult, he used to think he understood what it meant. But that was before he spent a week in a hospital room with fluid-draining pipes hooked into into him as if his body was nothing more than a clogged kitchen sink. Even months later the thought of all that hardware resting between his ribs sends shivers down his spine.

“It’s such a hard feeling to describe,” Bosh says. “Unlike anything I’ve ever felt. Just a weird and tough experience.”

One day in particular stands out as being the worst.

It was his third with tubes in his chest, and his body was slowly adjusting to the morphine and beginning to feel more pain. The walls of the room were closing in. He felt nauseous, and depressed, and dirty, too. Showering was forbidden. Instead, he was forced to clean himself with a wet cloth that seemingly never stayed warm. He knew he wasn’t going home for three more days and he was sick of watching episodes of Family Guy, SportsCenter and American Dad on TV.

“I had an iPad, but I just didn’t have the energy to do all that, set it up and everything,” he says. “I just wanted to lay back. I couldn’t deal with trying to get comfortable with the screen on me.”

He used it to watch Heat games, but his zeal for life had disappeared. No longer was the glass half full. Bosh’s wife, Adrienne, was constantly at his side, but he only allowed his kids to visit him once. He just couldn’t stand the thought of his children seeing their father in such a sickly state.

“He just looked so unhealthy,” says Ed Downs, owner of the Miami-based ProTerf gym and Bosh’s friend. “That image of him lying there, it haunts me.” Riley remembers how concerned Bosh and his wife looked and the palpable fear pulsating throughout the hospital room.

But, little by little, Bosh’s fervor returned. He’s always been ruthlessly competitive, it just manifests itself in different ways. In high school he’d scan the PUNKS section of this magazine and then share with his friends why he was superior to every player written up. He also cried after a championship game loss, just like he did in 2011 when the Heat fell to the Mavs.

“You can’t have the career he’s had if you don’t have a little bit of dog in you,” says Bosh’s friend and former teammate, Shane Battier. Or, as Riley points out, you don’t make the career decisions Bosh has if fighting isn’t a priority.

“Chris made a tremendous sacrifice when he came here in 2010,” Riley says. “He kind of fell into that third slot. But because he was the guy willing to take a step back, or even two or three, so that the other stars could shine, that’s what made things work for us.

“We say this internally all the time, but Chris was probably the most valuable player on the team because he was willing to be the complimentary star. That decision he made was one that only a true competitor makes.”

It turns out Bosh just needed some time to rediscover that drive.

***

The first signs of vigor came towards the end of his hospital stay, when nurses rushed to Bosh’s room after hearing screams.

“I was watching Heat games and getting into them,” he says. “I’m a yeller when watching my team, even though they can’t hear me. Like the manager in Major League II, jumping up and down. The games gave me an escape, a way to feel normal for a couple of hours.”

After a week of torture, an ecstatic Bosh was, finally, discharged from Baptist Hospital—only to forget to take his pain meds his first day back home. “I figured once I got out of there I’d be able to get back to being normal,” he says. “I was wrong.” It took four bedridden days for Bosh to get the go-ahead from his doctors, and even then his comeback didn’t exactly get off to a roaring start.

He began with short walks with his wife and baby girl, Dylan Skye, who’d accompany the couple in her toy car. Bosh, down 13 pounds from his listed 235, would last maybe three houses before becoming winded and requesting to turn around.

The slow progress frustrated him, but Bosh also felt invigorated. Confronting death had altered his perspective. So had the threat of losing his career.

“I realized playing basketball was what I was put on this earth to do. I’m 31 now—there’s only so much more basketball I’m going to be able to play. My career is finite, and [I’m] more appreciative of it now than I ever was.”

Rejoining the Heat last season was out of the question, but Bosh quickly went to work on preparing for an October 2015 return. Downs had reached out to Dr. Cedric Bryant, the Chief Science Officer of the American Council on Exercise, so he could design the proper rehab plan, and then sent it over to Bosh, who spent the summer at his Santa Monica home training in a sweltering high school gym with Downs, former Arizona Wildcat star Miles Simon and a shooting statistics guru named Justin Zormelo.

Workouts lasted from 10:30-2, six days a week. Everything was done in unison. If Austin or Zormelo had Bosh taking off-balance jumpers in the morning, then Downs would have Bosh standing on a balance board in the afternoon. The trio also focused on building up Bosh’s cardio and core.

“I came from a place where I wasn’t doing anything,” says Bosh, who added 20 pounds of muscle to his previously frail frame. “After what I went through, anytime I was tired I just kept pushing.” By the end of the summer he had, according to Downs, set career high marks in every fitness number which the trainer records.

Now, as Bosh embarks on his 13th NBA season, and second in Miami without LeBron James, the future Hall of Famer has just one goal. It’s what pushed him to return from the brink, what kept him going all those times when things were looking bleak, when, as he says, “I came so close to losing it all.”

“I want to win another Championship,” Bosh says. “That’s what all this is about.”

—

Yaron Weitzman is an Editorial Assistant at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

images via Getty

The post Harder Than Them appeared first on SLAM.

“The biggest thing for me is that I want to stop taking so many long twos,” Beal says when asked what he’s worked on this offseason. “I want to take more floaters and threes.”

Even when he was a boy, Beal’s shooting stroke was picturesque. His mother Besta, a former Kansas State basketball player, made sure of it. Kelvin Lee, who coached Beal at Chaminade College Preparatory School in West St. Louis, tells the following story.

One afternoon about 10 years ago, Doug Taylor, a Phys Ed. teacher in Chaminade’s middle school and assistant coach for the varsity basketball team, came running from the school’s small gym into Lee’s office. You need to see this, he said to Lee, and so the coach got up from behind his desk and went to check out what the fuss was all about.

“I get to the gym and there’s this sixth grader taking, like, real jumpers from behind the three-point line,” Lee recalls, before adding the kicker, “and making every one.”

Beal’s jump shot was initially honed in the car-width driveway of his parent’s one-story St. Louis flat where attempts were mostly limited to the area around the foul line. He eventually moved on to the hoops at nearby University City High School and Vinita Park. His two older brothers, Brandon and Bruce, both former college football players, would put him through the ringer: suicides, left-handed layups, dribbling around cones.

Beal’s father, Bobby, a jovial and gentle man and like his wife a former Kansas State athlete (he played football), would get in on the fun, too, as would the family’s baby twins, Byron and Bryon, both now offensive lineman for Central Methodist University.

But it was Besta, the more vocal and stern parent, who taught Bradley the intricacies of shooting. To keep his elbow in and at 90 degrees. His feet squared to the basket. His eyes level. To maintain balance at all times. It wasn’t uncommon for Beal and his mother to head out to the local YMCA following high school practices in order to get up an additional 1,000 shots.

That, Beal’s high school coach loved. “You’re the man, ma’am,” Lee used to tell Besta. What he didn’t enjoy was Bradley’s propensity for drifting out toward the three-point line. “It can ruin you sometimes,” Lee adds, so sometimes during practices he’d change the rules and prohibit his team from shooting from deep. Or he’d have his players run three-man, two-ball shooting drills and only permit them to shoot from the midrange. “We’d put a lot of emphasis on those shots,” Lee says.

Roy Pierce, a coach for the St. Louis Eagles, the AAU team Beal played for, taught the game in a similar way.

Beal’s focus wasn’t solely on shooting—he used to don a pair of special calf-strengthening shoes and run the mile-and-a-half back and forth to his grandmother’s house in an effort to improve his vertical leap—but it was the effortless and beautiful shooting stroke that caught the eye of Florida coach Billy Donovan.

And yet, Beall struggled during his one year in Gainesville. He shot just 34 percent from behind the arc and just 25 percent off the dribble (according to DraftExpress.com). But he did improve as the season went on and, well, his jumper was just so smooth. Beal could be standing in a phone booth and have no issue getting his shot off. Even before he entered the NBA it became commonplace to invoke Ray Allen’s name when discussing Beal’s J.

(Perhaps not coincidentally, Beal, similar to the notoriously obsessive compulsive Allen, is known as a neat freak. According to Wizards guard Garrett Temple, Beal’s apartment is always “tidy,” his clothes are always folded and his locker is always the cleanest in the room.)

The Wizards took Beal with the No. 3 pick in the 2012 Draft and immediately assigned him to assistant coach Sam Cassell. The two quickly connected. Early on Cassell started referring to Beal as “my son.” He also put Beal to work, and for Cassell, a former player who built his 15-year NBA career around burying shots from the 15-19 foot range, that meant developing the mid-range game.

“We did a lot of shooting together,” says Cassell, who’s now an assistant in L.A. with the Clippers. “Quick shots, pump fakes, pull-ups off the dribble. I know basketball analytics now say not to take that mid-range shot, and it is a tough shot, but I shot it at a 51 percent clip. I told and tell Bradley to take the shots you can make, and he can make the mid-range shot.”

Problem was, Beal wasn’t really making them, at least not in games. In his three years in the NBA, Beal has never shot over 43 percent from the field—this, despite being a career 40 percent three-point shooter. He did average 15.3 points per game last season, along with 4 rebounds and 3 assists. But he realized he could be an even more proficient scorer if he even slightly altered his approach.

Here’s the math: Last year Beal hit just 34 percent of the five mid-range shots (as defined by NBA.com) he attempted per game, the second-worst mark in the NBA among players who averaged at least four such shots. Also, most of those attempts came off the dribble, as opposed to the catch. Beal had spent years perfecting the art of shooting. His form had become impeccable. But by taking difficult shots in crowds, he was holding himself back. It was like seeing The Flash race with his shoelaces tied.

The Wizards, and specifically head coach Randy Wittman, never took issue with Beal’s shot selection. “If you’re open, he wants you to shoot it,” Beal says. But the epiphany came over the summer when Beal’s trainer and long-time friend, Drew Hanlen, presented the Wizards guard with these numbers. The two friends reviewed them and also watched film together on Hanlen’s laptop. It was then that Beal decided he needed to change his game.

“It’s the worst shot you can take,” Beal says. “I always knew I was doing it, but when you see the percentages, and then you review the film and go, Man, if I just take one step back there I’m behind the three-point line…it’s just common sense and knowing where you are on the floor.”

Beal doesn’t plan on ceasing to shoot all mid-range shots, but he would like to cut down on those beyond 18 feet. He also intends to take more floaters this season. He says he’s always had that shot in his repertoire but was never comfortable shooting it in games. So this offseason he and Hanlen made the floater a priority. They worked on left-handed and right-handed ones, off the dribble and off the catch.

“I want to get to the point with the floater where it becomes instinctual,” the 6-5, 205-pound Beal says. “At the beginning of the summer I was thinking about it too much, but now I’m moving past that.

“It’s a tough shot, but definitely a better one than those long twos,” which, Beal points out, since harder than a layup and worth less than a three-pointer, is exactly the shot opponents want him to take.

“We used to always joke with him that he was taking the worst shot in the NBA,” Temple says. “But that’s a shot he’s been comfortable with and that defenses give him.”

Of course, that would require Beal, whose current contract expires after this season, to remain with the Wizards. As of early September the two sides had failed to make any progress in contract negotiations.

“It’s something that [Wizards general manager] Ernie [Grunfeld] and I have been talking about all summer,” says Mark Bartelstein, Beal’s agent. “Whether or not something does get done, I can’t say at this point. Twwhere are a lot of variables that go into it and that’s the process we’re going through right now.”

Beal, for his part, isn’t interested in discussing his contract situation—and, well, who can blame him? He already bought his parents a new house, one that his older brother Bruce says “is too damn big for two people.” This summer he got to visit South Africa, China and Taiwan. He’s able to get Imo’s Pizza, a St. Louis classic and his favorite, delivered to wherever he wants, as evidenced by the chain’s willingness to ship four pies out to Beal in Chicago last April. And he’s achieved his dream of buying a dog and naming him “King” in reference to a bit by his favorite actor, the late Bernie Mac, in House Party 3.

For now, though, all Beal is focused on is the upcoming season. He’s healthy, something that has not always been the case, and excited to see what profits his new approach yields. That Beal has spent his entire basketball life taking the wrong shots is no accident. But now it’s up to him to shake the very habits that have gotten him this far. It’s not an easy task, but it is one that could make all the difference—for Beal, as he enters his contract year, and for a franchise trying to win multiple Playoff series for the first time in 37 long years.

Yaron Weitzman is an Editorial Assistant at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

The post Change Locations appeared first on SLAM.

First, he needs to prove that he can stay healthy and that the foot problems, the ones that kept him out of 55 games last year, are a thing of the past. No given, considering his size (ignore that laughable 6-9 listing, Durant is 7-footer. A lanky one, but a 7-footer nonetheless).

By now we’re all familiar with the player Durant is when he’s operating at full capacity. A 7-footer with a jumper that’s effortless and smooth and if it weren’t for the once-in-a-generation shooting of Steph Curry, might be considered the best in the league; a knock-down shooter but also one able to score in a variety of ways; also, recently, a playmaker, someone who has learned how to create for his teammates as well.

The career numbers speak for themselves: 27.3 points per game on 48 percent shooting, 38 percent shooting from deep, 6.9 rebounds, 3.5 assists. Don’t forget his ridiculous 2014 season, either, when he led the league in scoring (32 points per game), while also shooting 50 percent from the field and dishing out a career-best 5.5 assists per game – an output which earned him that year’s MVP award.

Of course the question is: does that player still exist? Durant is just 27, so we assume, and hope he does. But injuries, especially to the legs and feet, don’t care about age. They’re fickle and cruel and have no problem picking on the best of the best. Just ask Bill Walton.

Thankfully, Durant has looked great thus far in the preseason. He’s moving like a gazelle again and even seems to have some new tricks, like a Dirk Nowitzki-style step-back that he’s going to more and more. Also, he appears to now be playing in an offense that understands that the best way to score is to have constant movement—from both the ball and players on the floor. Don’t worry, we’re not handing Billy Donovan any Coach of the Year awards yet, but it’s safe to assume that his offense will be more imaginative than the stale, isolation-heavy sets Scott Brooks seemed to prefer.

That should make life even easier for Durant, perhaps in a way the Heat’s space-and-pace offense did so for LeBron. It was under Erik Spoelstra that LBJ morphed into a player as efficient as he was good. If Donovan’s offense helps KD even just a tad—well, this ranking might wind up being too low.

There’s also that ticking clock hanging over the Thunder franchise. Durant’s contract expires this offseason. All we can do is guess as to where he winds up next year, and for how long. Thanks to Turner and ESPN, almost every team in the league now has cap space. The Knicks are going to come calling, just as they always do, and there’s nothing an aging Pat Riley would like more than to deliver one final superstar to the Heat. And then there’s Durant’s hometown Wizards, who have John Wall and Bradley Beal and KD’s high school coach, too.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that the pressure will be on this year. Every game, every move, every outcome, will be analyzed through a large microscope, one handled by Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith. Nothing is going to be easy for KD this year, and we haven’t even talked about the retooled Spurs or defending champs in Golden State.

Maybe all the emotional and physical stress gets to him and he slowly whittles away under all that weight. Or maybe his size-17 feet fail again. But the bet here is that this season we see something else. Failing, like KD and Thunder have in recent years, can create a sense of urgency, which sometimes is all a great player needs in order to reach his peak.

I’m not saying the 2015-16 season will end with a Thunder championship, and another Durant MVP. What I am saying, though, is that I wouldn’t bet against it.

Rankings are based on expected contribution in 2015-16—to players’ team, the NBA and the game.

The post SLAM Top 50: Kevin Durant, No. 3 appeared first on SLAM.

Of course, Tim Duncan isn’t like most players. He’s a five-time Champion, a two-time regular-season MVP, a three-time Finals MVP, a player voted All-NBA First-Team 10 times and a 15-time All-Star. He’s the best power forward in NBA history and one of the greatest big men to ever step foot on an NBA floor, a transcendent star who transformed the San Antonio Spurs from just another small market basketball team into a franchise that every organization in every professional sports league views with envy.

He’s also the rare player who’s just as efficient—and, in a way, effective—as he was in his prime. He’s, obviously, not the same dominant, once-in-a-generation force he once was. But that’s a ridiculous standard to hold a player too. Compare Today’s Duncan to mere mortals, and, well, here are the numbers:

As a 25-year-old, in 2002, his first MVP season, Duncan averaged 22.6 points, 11.3 rebounds, 3.3 assists and 2.2 blocks per 36 minutes. He shot 51 percent from the field and had a PER of 27.

Last year, as a 38-year-old, Duncan averaged 17.3 points, 11.4 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 2.4 blocks per 36 minutes. He shot 51 percent from the field and had a PER of 22.6.

That drop-off, or lack there of, is almost unheard of (Kareem, Malone. Stockton and Olajuwon are essentially the only other players to register similar PERs at a similar age) and the reason the nearly 40-year-old Duncan comes in here at No. 25.

The minutes have dropped—he played just 28.9 last season, something which definitely should definitely be taken into account when compiling a list like this. But for those 30 minutes he is on the floor Duncan remains a force.

Really, it starts with him still knowing how to control a game without having the ball in his hands, or it being anywhere near him. On defense, that means always being in the right place at the right time, even if that means sliding over just a half-a-step. On offense it means knowing when to flash and when to clear out and how to use his ox-legs to set a backbreaking pick.

And then of course there’s his impeccable footwork in the post, and the still-beautiful and perfect bank shot which he can go to whenever he needs. Duncan is one of those players who always seems like he’s thinking 10 steps ahead of everyone else. The skills might have diminished a bit, but a great artist’s mind is the last thing to go. Duncan’s mind certainly hasn’t started to wane, and that Gregg Popovich has kept his star in bubble wrap the past few years is only going to help the aging process.

Take all these factors into account, plus the addition of LaMarcus Aldridge, which will only ease Duncan’s load, and what we’re likely to witness this season from the future Hall of Famer is something really special. After all, it’s not every year that we get to watch a 39-year-old legend spend nearly every night taking the League’s younger players to school.

Rankings are based on expected contribution in 2015-16—to players’ team, the NBA and the game.

The post SLAM Top 50: Tim Duncan, no. 25 appeared first on SLAM.

The classic Ewing 33 HI ($120) will return in OG White/Royal/Orange—the colorway that Patrick Ewing rocked back in ’89 through ’91—plus a new “Blackout” colorway of the 33 HI and a red sueded edition of the Ewing CONCEPT ($11). You can cop yours at Ewingathletics.com. Scroll through the photos above to see more detailed photos of the upcoming colorways.

And as long as we’re on the topic, you can read our feature on Ewing Athletics from KICKS 18 below:

Over the past few years, Ewing Athletics—the sneaker company of a certain legendary Knicks big man—has returned with a bang.

David Goldberg still remembers all the eyes staring at him, wondering what in the hell he was doing with a duffel bag full of shoes. Not the kind of thing you see very often during dinnertime in the lobby restaurant of the midtown Manhattan Four Seasons Hotel, but exactly the kind of token Goldberg thought was necessary to accomplish what he was there to do.

After all, for years Patrick Ewing had been resisting overtures to re-launch Ewing Athletics. The brand that he created in the early ’90s (becoming the first athlete to do so; Air Jordans were still a part of Nike back then), and which at one point was netting around $100 million a year in gross revenue before it was shut down in 1996, had morphed into a sort of dream project for myriad sneaker executives around the country. Everyone wanted a shot at the gold mine.

But Ewing and his agent, David Falk, kept saying no. The two were unhappy with how things went down the first time around. Ewing uses the word “shady” when talking about it. He and Falk were timid about giving the brand a second go.

“We were approached by about four or five different groups over the years,” says Falk. “I only wanted to move ahead if I felt we could do it well, and how we wanted. We weren’t going to go forward just so we could help a young entrepreneur.”

Goldberg knew all this, but also knew that he was different. For one, he had grown up on Long Island rooting for the Ewing and the Knicks. He was a die-hard. His dad had season tickets. He had been collecting sneakers since he was 8 years old. Ewing was his favorite player. He knew everything about him and had been amassing Ewing memorabilia for years.

Goldberg didn’t seek out the opportunity to re-launch Ewing Athletics. It found him.

A friend of his, a fellow sneakerhead, got wind that Mike Packer, a veteran of the shoe industry and owner of Packer Shoes, was interested in bringing Ewing Athletics back. At the time, Goldberg was helping run the Newark, NJ-based hotels his family owned. “You’re the perfect guy for this,” the friend told him. “You should see if you could get involved.”

Packer had a business plan ready. He had a pitch, too. What he needed was some more money, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a person to run the day-to-day business. Goldberg, with his New York background and knowledge of Ewing and sneakers, was the perfect fit.

“I wasn’t in the sneaker business, but the first time we met he could tell that I was a sneaker guy,” Goldberg says. “To this day Mike will call me to pick my brain, to ask me a question like, What year did a guy wear a shoe?”

It took some pressing, but soon after that Goldberg and Packer were sitting in the Four Seasons Hotel pitching Ewing and Falk. That duffel bag was full of Goldberg’s Ewing sneakers collection. Some fell apart as he took them out. Nerves caused him to fumble a few shoes around. Falk did most of the talking. Ewing barely looked up from his phone. He kept a straight face the entire time. After a few drinks the meeting was over.

As Goldberg exited the hotel and walked into the New York night, duffel bag full of Ewing shoes in hand, he felt his shoulder drop, his head fall. His shot at the dream job had come and gone, in just one breath.

But then one day Goldberg’s phone rang. It turned out Ewing had just been using a poker face. That cold shoulder was a tool, one that he brought out during business meetings to feel out the men sitting across from him.

Patrick, David was told, loved what he had heard. The Ewing Athletics re-launch was a go.

“I was just looking for someone I could trust,” Ewing says. “David was sincere and I liked all the ideas he had and how he wanted to build the brand slow.”

The Ewing Athletics headquarters is impossible to spot without being told where to go. It’s just another office tucked away on an industrial patch full of them in Englewood, NJ, an affluent city just a few miles from the Hudson River. The street is quiet and nondescript. The office building is gray and Ewing Athletics’ windows are tinted. There are parked trucks everywhere.

Inside, though—well, Patrick’s own house might not have this much Ewing gear lying around. White shelves full of seemingly every Ewing sneaker ever made line the walls. Many of them are Knicks blue and orange or solid white. There’s also a red, white and blue sneaker in honor of the Dream Team and a green and yellow one, the color of Ewing’s native Jamaican flag. One pair pays homage to the 1985 NBA Draft, when the Knicks selected Ewing with the first overall pick. Hanging near the shoes are framed Ewing posters. In the closet you can find a bunch of PE jerseys from all his different basketball stops. A life-size Fathead of the Hall-of-Fame center greets entrants as they walk in.

Goldberg is sitting at his desk and answering questions about himself and his brand. The 34-year-old is built like someone who lifts weights and has a shaved head and perfectly trimmed dark beard. He’s wearing a red Ewing Athletics t-shirt. Tattoo ink is peaking out from under his sleeves. A pair of baby-sized Ewing sneakers sits on his desk.

Both he and Ewing Athletics have come a long way since August 2012, when the rebooted version of the brand put out its first shoe, the Georgetown-blue-and-white 33 Hi Retro. It was sold in just six New York area stores. Ewing and Goldberg visited all of them. At each location they were greeted by a line of fans snaking around the corner, waiting to get inside. A month later, Ewing Athletics went national. Then, eventually, international. Today Golbderg says the brand is selling shoes in about 12 different countries. And yet, what’s made Ewing Athletics successful is its insistence on building slowly and staying true to its roots.

“One of the reasons they failed in the ’90s was because they started making running shoes, hiking boots, stuff like that,” Goldberg says. “We realized that our product is retro basketball shoes. That’s what we are. We’re not trying to be anything else. We make our retro shoes exactly as they were back in the day. We’re not trying to modernize anything or make them high tech. If you don’t like it, then you don’t like Ewing Athletics.”

Every Ewing Athletics reboot starts with an original shoe. If neither he nor Ewing own the version they want to make, Goldberg will scour the Internet in search of one. Once he paid $1,000 on eBay for a game-worn pair (“Sometimes I’m like, Damn, he can find anything,” Ewing says). The shoe is then shipped to a factory in China, where it is unstitched and put back together. Only then is a blueprint made up.

What’s surprised Goldberg, though, and everyone else involved, is how popular the shoes have been outside of his hometown. “I thought New York would be our biggest market, by far,” he says. “I thought all our fans would be guys who grew up watching Ewing and the Knicks play.”

Most of the shoes Ewing Athletics put out following the re-launch came in Knicks colors. The plan was to target that fan base. Then the brand began to notice a change: Those shoes were selling as well as the non-Knicks versions.

“[Ewing Athletics] kind of transcended things a bit,” Goldberg says. “Places like Atlanta and DC and other cities along the East Coast became huge markets for us. Stores started telling us that most of the people buying the shoes were kids ages 16-22, people who never saw Patrick play.”

“We’ve never done a focus group or anything like that on it,” says Falk, “but I think a major reason for that is Patrick’s credibility. Patrick has this unique appeal worldwide and the brand was able to capture that.”

It’s not just kids who are swarming stores in order to snag a pair. Ewing, now 52 and an assistant coach for the Charlotte Hornets, says opposing players are constantly coming up to him to ask for a pair, many of them men he barely knows. Goldberg says it’s not uncommon for him to receive a text message from Ewing about 30 minutes before tip-off of a Hornets game containing the name of a player and a mailing address.

As for the players on his own team, Ewing says they can often be found in Ewing Athletics gear, too, but only when a certain former player-turned-owner isn’t around. “I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble,” he says with a laugh.

For his part, Ewing is thrilled with his signature brand. He’s also very involved. During the offseason he shows up at the office about once a week. Goldberg takes him through what’s being worked on and the two share ideas—that is, when they aren’t talking basketball and Goldberg isn’t pestering Ewing with questions or pleading with him to share stories from the past.

“He thinks I’m a little crazy sometimes,” Goldberg says. “I’m always asking him about those ’90s Knicks teams or telling him about what shoes he wore when. He doesn’t remember any of that stuff.”

There is, however, one thing that Ewing does remember.

“They always said that big guys can’t sell shoes,” Patrick says. “I think I’m proof that that’s a myth.”

The post Classic Feel appeared first on SLAM.

Located about 20 minutes north of Manhattan in Westchester Country, the city of Mount Vernon, NY has become known for its high school basketball team, which is perennially one of the top squads in the country (the school has won nine state titles).

It’s with this in mind that Jerald Hoover, a sportswriter and graduate of Mount Vernon HS, set out to make the documentary Four Square Miles to Glory. The goal was to depict and chronicle all the success that this small high school tucked away in New York City’s suburbs has enjoyed as well as the impact that said success has had on the city’s residents.

“This is more than just a story about a good basketball team,” said Hoover. “It’s a story about a bunch of men who have made a difference for an entire community.”

On a recent afternoon eight former Mount Vernon basketball stars gathered for a lunch in a conference room right across from the school gym. They were there to finish filming, but also to talk about the glory days and to answer questions from the crowd. One local resident wanted to know which team the group thought was the greatest to ever come through the school.

“The ’71 team had a unique way of playing basketball which transcended the game,” said Rudy Hackett, who played for Syracuse from 1972-’75 and bounced around the ABA for a few years. “We used to score 97 points a game and give up just 53. I remember feeling bad for my opponents as we played them.”

Clinton Young, the former Mayor of Mount Vernon, said he agreed. “But all these players have contributed as much off the court as they have on it,” he added. Loews Moore, he pointed out, was now running the local Boys & Girls Club. Richie Garner, who never made it to the NBA but played at Manhattan College, was now a reverend. All of them came from poor households. Now they were giving back.

“The men sitting have made us all proud,” Young said. “Now let’s get the word out about this film.”

The post Forthcoming Documentary to Honor Mount Vernon High School’s Rich Basketball History appeared first on SLAM.

All-Star PG John Wall gets most of the credit for Washington’s resurgence—and rightfully so. But the continued improvement of Beal has also played a major role. The St. Louis native is spent last week in his hometown running a basketball camp but he carved out time to talk to SLAM about what his plans are for the offseason, drawing and the work he’s doing with Gatorade.

SLAM: What’s something we’d be surprised to learn about you?

Bradley Beal: I draw. I drew all my tattoos. That’s kind of unique, I guess. Otherwise I’m a pretty basic, boring guy.

SLAM: How often do you draw? Do you carry a notebook with you? 

BB: You know what? I do it every blue moon—that’s what’s so weird about it. I’m decent at it but I just never really pursued it the way I probably should have.

SLAM: When did you start drawing? 

BB: When I was younger. I always enjoyed coloring, I always enjoyed drawing and things like that but I never got into it in-depth.

SLAM: So which tattoo are you most proud of?

BB: Probably the one with my brothers on my right bicep. My brothers are my guys. I have four brothers and four letters in my last name. I have four stars and each star represents one of my brothers, so that’s definitely my favorite.

SLAM: Speaking of your brothers—all of them played college football, and two were offensive lineman. So what are you, half their size?

BB: Shoot, man, more like a third.

SLAM: So how does that happen?

BB: You know, I have no idea, because I eat probably more than any of them. I just have a huge metabolism I guess, because those dudes are huge.

SLAM: Growing up, were you guys like, fighting over food that was on the dinner table?

BB: Oh, yeah, all the time. My mom had to break up fights all the time. One time me and one of my little brothers got into a food fight, it got out of hand.

SLAM: Why? What happened?

BB: I don’t know, it was over something dumb, like probably something like who wanted the last piece of chicken.

SLAM: So instead of eating it you guys just threw it at each other?

BB: Yeah, we got personal.

SLAM: What was the one food that your mom would bring home and it would just get absolutely devoured. 

BB: You see the size of them? Anything she brought into the house.

SLAM: Was the household a physical one with all you guys there? 

BB: Yeah, it was always—we were real competitive, no matter what we did. Sports, video games, school, we always competed in everything we did. That’s what I attribute a lot of my success to. Those guys pushed me a lot in life.

SLAM: What are you working on with your game this summer?

BB: Staying healthy, that’s my number one goal. Just making sure I’m taking care of my body properly, eating healthy, lifting, hydrating.

SLAM: How do you work on health, though?

BB: You just gotta get with a program. You got to figure out a program that’s good for you. I’m getting together with some of our trainers soon to do do that. We’re going to talk about what kind of things I need to eat, what I should stop eating and what I need to do to stay injury-free.

SLAM: Are you going to be doing anything differently than you have in the past?

BB: I don’t know yet, because I haven’t talked to them about it yet. Next couple of weeks.

SLAM: You love shooting the midrange jumper, even though that’s an unpopular shot in today’s NBA. Is that something you’re going to keep doing? 

BB: That’s definitely a shot that, even though a lot of people in the NBA don’t like, I’m going to continue to work on it. It’s an open shot and I think you’re probably more open shooting that shot than a lot of other shots. It’s just about being able to get the mechanics down and the rhythm down and being able to knock it down.

SLAM: Has the team ever told you to stop taking them? 

BB: Not really, nah. They just let me play my game. Coach Wittman loves those shots. He wants you to shoot everything possible whenever you have the opportunity to.

SLAM: Specific skill-wise, what are you going to be working on this offseason? 

BB: Putting the ball on the floor a little more, being able to create more to help John out a little bit, to create for my teammates a little bit better and for myself as well. Defense is also a big one.

SLAM: How do you work on that?

BB: Just working on my moves, just doing whatever it takes. Just making sure I’m doing the right thing. Just basic stuff, it’s really more confidence than anything. Just making sure you have good belief in yourself when you handle the ball that you’re not going to turn it over and that you’re going to make the right decision. That’s something that needs to get better.

SLAM: So tell us about your camp and what you’re doing with Gatorade. 

BB: Gatorade is supporting my camp. I hold a camp for St. Louis kids every year, ages 6 to 16, and it’s basically us just trying to teach kids the importance of hydration. Not even just for kids, but for all athletes. A lot of injuries are caused as a result of people not being hydrated. We want people to know how important it is to stay hydrated and get those electrolytes back in your system—to “Beat the Heat.”

SLAM: You grew up near Ferguson and talked about your relationship with the town and Michael Brown when the riots were going on. Is this your first time time back in St. Louis since then?

BB: Yeah, it is, it’s the first time I’ve been back since that. Everything’s been kind of calm, though, so it’s good.

SLAM: Anything seem different?

BB: Not really. I think things have finally calmed down. I think we’re starting to realize what’s important and what the big picture is.

Yaron Weitzman is an Editorial Assistant for SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman. Images via Getty, @bradbeal3.

The post Q+A: Bradley Beal appeared first on SLAM.

Most of the festivities are taking place in a back room, with girls and alcohol and all the other fancy things you’d expect to find at one of these events. But the Yonkers-born rapper has no interest in any of that at the moment. Instead all he can focus on are the myriad satin colors lining the racks in front of him, the ones that used to be seen frequently on MTV but over the last decade or so could only be found in vintage stores and auction sites online.

Jadakiss is asked what his favorite team is. He responds that he doesn’t have one. Instead he wanders rack-to-rack, like a detective inspecting a crime scene, deciding which coat he wants to take home. Eventually he settles on one of the more iconic versions of the Starter jacket, the simultaneously ugly and beautiful Charlotte Hornets one. It’s dark purple with the word CHARLOTTE written across the front in white letters. A few months later that jacket will appear on the shoulder of Jadakiss in The Lox’s video for “Faded.”

“He was more interested in the coats than partying in the back and hanging out with everyone,” says Alexander Cole, the Sports Marketing Manager of Iconix Brand Management, the licensing company which now owns Starter. “He ended up wearing that jacket on The Lox’s next video.”

This is exactly what Iconix and Cole envisioned when they decided, in 2013, to create the Starter Black Label and bring back the beloved jackets and snapback hats—a fusion of sports and hip-hop, with Starter’s signature products acting as the conduit. After all, this was how it was back in late 80s and early 90s, when you couldn’t go more than a couple of hours without seeing the Starter jacket make its way across your TV screen.

Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew had the green Miami Hurricanes coats. Chuck D had a black Oakland Raiders one. Eddie Murphy wore a shiny blue Mets jacket to fit into Queens in Coming to America. Joe Montana donned a gold version on a 1987 episode of Saturday Night Live. Even the surly Mike Ditka, outspoken critic of hip-hop and backwards hats and seemingly everything fun, roamed the Bears sidelines in 80s sporting a dark blue Bears Starter jacket with red stripes on the sleeves.

“We used to have a hotline for fans to call and the question we’d get the most was, Where can I get those jackets?” Campbell says. “We’d go to the local sporting good store and the jackets would be everywhere.

“Even today not a day goes by that I don’t get asked about them or if I can hook someone up with one.”

In the early 90s Starter was bringing in more than $400 million in yearly revenue. But the good times didn’t last. Financial hardships—mainly caused by the various professional sports league lockouts, which hurt sales—and changes in fashion forced the brand’s original founder, David Beckerman, to sell the company in 1999. After that the coats could no longer be found on store racks. If you wanted a Starter jacket, eBay or some random vintage store down in the Village was where you had to go.

“We haven’t seen many over the past few years,” says Callan Clendenin of Beacon’s Closet, a buy-sell-trade store located in New York. “You’ve been able to find them online, but it’s been hard to get them.”

Starter changed hands a couple of times—it was purchased by Official Starter Properties in 1999 and then by Nike in 2004—before ending up in the portfolio of Iconix in 2009. The original plan was to license the brand to Walmart, who would make clothes like socks and t-shirts, sell them, and then send Starter a check every month. But in 2012 Cole and the rest of Iconix decided they could do more with the Starter name.

“We love the whole nostalgia of Starter,” says Cole, who points outs that the average brand in Iconix portfolio is about 50 years old. “We realized that you couldn’t really talk about Starter without bringing up the jackets or snapback hats. That’s the stuff that Starter was always known for.”

And so, in 2012, Starter Black Label was created. Walmart could keep selling its products, but Starter would also be producing the clothes that it thought its fans most wanted to see.

With the help of former New York Giants linebacker Carl Banks, licenses for nearly every professional sports team and 150 NCAA schools were secured. A plan was put into place. The Korean factory that made the jackets 30 years ago was given a call.

The rest took care of itself. Jadakiss, it turns out, wasn’t the only one dying to get his hands on a new Starter jacket. On the winter morning in 2013 that he was scheduled to shoot his Nachos Grandes commercial for Taco Bell, Kevin Love went into his closet and pulled out a blue Minnesota Timberwolves coat the company had sent him. It had white stripes on the sleeves. No request had been made for him to do so and no money had changed hands. This was a decision made by Love—one that, according to Cole, is nothing new for the brand. Only after filming the commercial did Love reach out to Starter and ask them about working out some kind of endorsement deal.

“It’s great to see the satin jackets making a comeback,” Love says. And it turns out he wasn’t the only athlete interested in representing something that reminded him of his childhood.

“The jackets were a big part of my life when I was growing up,” says New York Jets wide receiver Eric Decker. “I had a Hornets one that I wore all the time. It’s exciting to work with the brand and contribute to its comeback.”

That comeback has taken form in Starter’s Jackets Required ad campaign, which features the jacket in various unconventional settings.

“The point is to emphasize the unwavering passion and dedication of sports fans,” says Cole, who owned a New York Giants and Florida Gators Starter jacket when he was a kid.

“I don’t think it could’ve come out much better,” adds Love.

Starter is also tipping its hat to the past by bringing back some Seattle Supersonics, Vancouver Grizzlies and St. Louis Rams gear.

Bring back the Sonics @FloydMayweather #JacketsRequired @Starter #ZekeEnd pic.twitter.com/cdfSX4Qx3J

— Isaiah Thomas (@Isaiah_Thomas) May 25, 2015

“We’re always trying to update our retro looks,” says Cole. “We want our cloths to have that 90s throwback feel.”

Now Starter gear can be seen in every locker room and backstage at every show. Drake has his purple Raptors coat and Snoop’s got a Lakers one and LeBron’s got his black snapback hat. Soon, everyone will be trying to get their hands on one of those satin coats. And, for the first time decades, they’ll be easy to find.

Yaron Weitzman is an Editorial Assistant at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

Images by Tom Medvedich

A version of this story is published in SLAM 190.

The post See You Again appeared first on SLAM.

“What do you want to do tomorrow?” It was 3 in the morning, July 2013, and Tobias Harris was enjoying some eggs, home fries and green tea at the Candlelight Diner, a favorite spot of his going back to high school. Three hours ago he had turned 21 and Tyler, one of his younger brothers, and the three friends eating with them wanted to know how Harris planned on spending the sunlit hours of his birthday.

“Go for a run,” he answered, before adding the kicker. “At 6 a.m.”

Harris didn’t drink any alcohol that night. He never does, he says, and his cohorts back this claim up. “He probably drank Shirley Temples,” says Chris Cox, a long-time friend. And yet, for obvious reasons, mainly that only crazy people get up early on their 21st birthday to exercise, those at the table thought he was kidding.

A few hours later, at 5:45, Cox, who decided not to set his alarm, was woken up by a call. He answered with a groan.

“You coming or not?” the eager voice on the other end of the line asked. It was Harris. The sun was beginning to rise and yet, there he was, standing on the track of his alma mater, Half Hollow West, waiting for his friend. His request the previous night had, apparently, been a serious one. The Magic had given him some homework for the summer—one of those grueling, arduous circuits where you have to do a bunch of sprints in a certain amount of time and if you come in too slow you do it again—and he didn’t want to miss a day.

Most men spend the morning after their 21st birthday sleeping off a hangover. Tobias Harris spent his on a track.

***

Harris says he doesn’t show much emotion in public, but right now he’s crying in front of a packed gym. They’re not sad tears, but not really joyful ones, either. It’s just, well, he’s worked so hard to get to where he is today, an NBA player who just completed a season in which he averaged 17 points and 6 rebounds per game, a soon-to-be 23-year-old about to become a restricted free agent and, likely, sign a multi-million dollar deal.

Of course, everyone who makes it to the NBA got there by working hard. With Harris, though, the story’s a bit different.

It starts with his dad, Torrel, who put a ball in his son’s hands six months after he was born. Tobias and his siblings—there are six kids in the family; they all play ball and their names all start with “T”—played on one of those Fisher-Price hoops, until all the force of all those dunks eventually tore it apart. By the age of 5 Tobias was  frequently visiting the local the YMCA, where Pops made him dribble back and forth and shoot lay-ups with both hands.

“The workouts got torturous at times,” Tobias admits. “I probably quit basketball like 50 times when I was younger.” But as he got older, his feelings slowly began to change. “I started getting really good,” he says. “And then it became fun.” He started craving those drills and the feelings they would bring: sweat dripping down his face, his shirt soaked through, his body exhausted and unable to move. In high school he woke up every morning at 5:30 to run two miles before classes began. After school he’d get two more workouts in before he went to sleep.

Torrel, a former agent, also called upon his friends to inculcate his son. There were summer days learning footwork and fundamentals in the San Antonio home of George Gervin. Dale Ellis illustrated where the elbow should be pointing and how the ball should be gripped when shooting a jump shot. Bernard King taught Tobias the myriad different ways a player could score.

“He was so receptive to all of it,” says Torrel. “And once he got to high school, if he didn’t go hard, then I’d jump on him.”

That’s why on this January night, Harris is crying. He’s just had his high school number retired, and now a banner hangs on one of Half Hollow West’s gym walls. He’s wearing slim dark pants, dark shoes and a fitted wool coat. A gold chain peeks out. He looks slimmer in person than on TV, where his chiseled 6-9, 235-pound body jumps off the screen. With the mic in his hands, Harris begins to dole out thank yous. To his coach, Bill Mitaritonna. To his teammates, many of whom are present. His grin stretches ear to ear.

And then he gets to his parents, Torrel and Lisa, both of whom are standing to his right. Torrel is a house of man, just barely shorter than Tobias but with broader shoulders. He and his wife are holding a framed white jersey with the words HALF HOLLOWS stitched in red. A few sentences in Tobias starts choking up. Then the tears flow.

“I’m not really a crier,” he says later when asked about that moment. “It’s just I get so emotional seeing them up there with me, and so proud of me.

“They pushed me hard, real hard. But it was always in my best interest. It’s because of them that I’m the player—and person—that I am today.”

He’s asked if he ever felt they pushed too hard. He pauses, then thinks about that time when he was a third grader trying out for the fifth grade CYO team. There was a dribbling drill, and Tobias, after losing control of the ball, fled to the bathroom to cry. His father, witnessing it all, followed his son in. Don’t worry about what happened, Torrel told Tobias. Just go back out there and show them what you can do.

“I’ll answer like this,” Tobias says. “If I have a son, my dad’s going to be training him, too.”

***

The need to work never stops. The further along you get, the more you have to push yourself. At least that’s how Harris looks at it. For him, just making the League was never the goal, and so when he felt himself getting winded on defense during his first full season in Orlando—in February 2013, Harris was traded to the Magic by the Bucks, who selected him after just one year at Tennessee with the 19th pick in the 2011 Draft—he made a point of improving his conditioning that summer. That’s when he started with the sprints. That same season, Harris saw his three-point shooting percentage fall to 25 percent. So, in the offseason, he and Torrel took a look at some tape. Torrel noticed that Tobias, after catching the ball, was dropping his hands down just a bit before rising up to shoot.

“He actually saw it first and I didn’t believe him,” Tobias says, laughing. “He told me shoot 20 my way and 20 his way and see who does better.”

Tobias then pauses, and smiles. “He was right.”

This season Harris shot 36 percent from deep and 44 percent from those all-important corners. His coach in Orlando, James Borrego, says Harris’ shot had more arc this year, that it used to be a little flat. Harris could always create off the dribble and score in the post.

But now, “He can space the floor and play either forward position,” Borrego says. “On offense he either has a post-up advantage at the 3 or makes the other team adjust to us when he’s at the 4. And on defense he’s got the size, strength and quickness to match up with opponents at both forward positions.”

What Borrego says he’s most impressed by is Harris’ improvement on defense off the ball. Harris is competitive. Annoyingly so. His teammate and cousin, Channing Frye, says he “needs to win in everything. He wants to be first on the bus, first in warm-up lines, first to be showered.” This was hurting Harris on the defensive end.

“Guarding guys was always something he committed to,” Borrego says, “but I think it took him a bit to learn that being attached to your own man all the time, and trying to always keep him from scoring, can actually hurt the team.” Harris concurs. “I never wanted anyone to score on me,” he says. “But as you get more familiar with players and teams in the League, and watch more film, you start figuring out where you’re supposed to be.”

The same thing can be said off the court, where Harris has figured out what kind of person he wants to be, too. He rarely parties; he spends most of his time in the gym. Even his hobbies, such as playing chess and reading motivational books, such as The 48 Laws of Power, seem to be offshoots of his incessant need to compete.

And yet, at his heart, Harris is just a kid from the land of EPMD. It’s not uncommon for one of his friends to receive a call because Harris needs to know how to beat a certain level of Dragon Ball Z. He spends time every month meeting with local high school students and donates gifts to them at Christmas. In the summer he runs a camp on Long Island and officiates the games.

Before grabbing a whistle, though, he always makes sure to break a sweat. After all, it’s never too early to go for a run.

“I want to be a killer in this league,” Harris says. “To get where I’m trying to go, that’s the mindset you have to have.”

Yaron Weitzman is an Editorial Assistant at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

The post Strictly Business appeared first on SLAM.

TNT’s Inside the NBA crew has made the trip to New York City for All-Star weekend, and on this night they’re broadcasting live from Hammerstein Ballroom on 34th street. SLAM, along with a couple of other outlets, was invited backstage. Ernie and Shaq are hanging in a different room. In here it’s just Kenny, Chuck and a few other TNT employees. “This is the best job other than playing,” Kenny says.

Two nights ago, on Tuesday, Barkley made news by calling Rockets GM Daryl Morey an “idiot” and saying “analytics are crap.” The rant went viral, and became TV, radio and Internet fodder.

“He has maybe an extreme point, but there’s a lot of validity to what he said,” Smith says when asked if he’s given Barkley’s tirade any further thought. “I think that stuff has a place after you put your system in. Then using analytics makes sense. Information is good, but it’s also how you use it. You have to be able to evaluate talent, and make talent improve. If you don’t have that on your staff, any analysis you do won’t matter.”

Has Barkley, with two days to think about what he said, changed his stance at all? SLAM asked him that and more.

SLAM: You sick of hearing about analytics yet? 

Charles Barkley: No, not at all, I just think they’re so sensitive. Just because I don’t like analytics doesn’t mean they have to get all bent out of shape.

SLAM: What does that word mean to you?

CB: It’s a term for stats. But everybody knows about stats. But the key to me is, I look at basketball players. I’ve been in the NBA for over 30 years—one thing I’m sure of is the team with the best players has a really good chance of winning games and championships.

SLAM: What about when you’re dealing with, let’s say, two good teams late in the Playoffs, or the Finals, where the talent is equal. That’s where the analytics can come in and help. For example, some sort of coaching change could be made based on stats, analytics and info, no?

CB: Sometimes it’s all gut. Gregg Popovich changed up his starting lineup when the Spurs won a couple of championships. You know, he moved Ginobili to the bench. That’s not analytics—that’s just trying to get the best matchups. I’m not saying that stats aren’t important, but it shouldn’t be that we build our team around that stuff.

SLAM: Do you feel like you got caught up in things on Tuesday? Though Morey did come after you first on Twitter…

CB: I was mad because he’s a perfect example. He went out and got James Harden. He went out and got Dwight Howard. He got Trevor Ariza. He tried to get Chris Bosh. He tried to get Carmelo. How is that, trying to get better players, analytical? So, I mean, that whole argument is, that’s what I just said, go out and get better players.

Hold on one second.

[Barkley answers his cell phone and tells the person on the other end, apparently making a Chipotle run, that he wants “some brown rice, pinto beans and a bunch of chicken in a bowl.” ]

CB: Sorry.

SLAM: All good. We were talking about how analytics, that extra stuff, won’t trump talent but can be the difference when two teams with similar talent levels meet. 

CB: We never talked about analytics in the  ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s. It’s something they just came up with.

Kenny Smith: I have to add something too, because you asked me the same question. I’ll really believe in analytics if you trade Danny Green for Chris Bosh and win a championship. When you show me that a guy that’s not obviously better than another guy makes a team better than the other guy would have. When someone says, You know, Bosh is not going to help us win but Danny Green will and we know that because of analytics. When that happens then I’ll be like, This stuff works.

SLAM: There was an article the other day about your guy [and college coach], Dean Smith, and how he was into this stuff. He apparently was a fan of points-per-possession. 

CB: Dean Smith had McDonald’s All-Americans!

KS: You know why he did that?  That was for playing time, to see who deserved it. So if you were on the court, he’d keep track of how the team was doing. It had nothing to do why he was going to do what he did. Also, we had 11 McDonalds All-Americans.

SLAM: Charles, you said a bunch of coaches have reached out to you after your anti-analytics rant. Any chance you can say who? 

CB: No. There’s one unnamed NBA coach who said in the papers that he agreed with me, Mark Cuban agreed with me, and I had five NBA coaches say, Thank you for saying that. They’re guys who have no power and are getting their careers ruined by analytics. That’s what a lot of coaches feel like. Guys who never played the game are drafting and trading players based on analytics, and the coaches don’t have enough power.

SLAM: Enough with analytics. James Dolan, what you think about that whole thing?

CB: I thought it was much ado about nothing. Ya’ll giving these fans the ability to say whatever they want to say, I have no problem with anyone blasting these losers on the Internet. Listen, man, people can’t just say whatever they want about you. If someone wrote you an e-mail and said, You suck at your job, you don’t have to take it. It’s just much ado about nothing. Now with the Internet we’re giving every loser the ability to voice their opinions and it’s just unfortunate. We giving too much power to the fans, man, and the media also.

SLAM: Adam Silver said he’s pro legalizing gambling. 

CB: Yeah, we need legalized gambling in sports. People gonna gamble on sports no matter what. People always going to bet on sports, that’s one of the reasons the NFL is so popular, and that people like sports—because they gamble on them. Might as well turn it into something that can make jobs for people.

SLAM: In terms of basketball, we’re watching the Cavs now—they look like a different team since the trades, especially with Mozgov. 

CB: Well he’s a good player, No. 1. But also he’s just big. The Cavaliers were too small before. Getting a legitimate center made them a different team.

SLAM: So you think plugging in any big guy would have worked, or Mozgov specifically is making the difference? 

CB: A little bit of both. Mozgov is a good player, but they just had to get better. When you see a big guy down there you hesitate. They couldn’t protect the rim, they had two small forwards down there. Now they can. That’s a big difference. Trust me, as a player, you know when you’re going to the basket, you’re looking for a big guy, and the Cavs didn’t have a big guy. This is also a perfect fit for him.

SLAM: You expect Cleveland to come out of the East?

CB: I don’t know, man. Chicago’s still there. They got a better record, and they haven’t been healthy all year. But I don’t have any idea. Washington’s good, Atlanta’s solid. I don’t want to be one of those guys who pretends he knows everything that’s going to happen.

SLAM: When you’re sitting here, how are you watching the games? What are the things you’re looking at or for?

CB: That’s a good question. I’m watching the style of play, looking at matchups, you guys talk a lot about analytical bullshit—this game’s all about matchups. Here I’m looking at the Cleveland Cavaliers shooting way too many jump shots, and they’re playing at too slow a pace. And that’s why I think Chicago can beat them in a seven-game series.

[Turns to TV]

Look at that, they’re just jacking up jumpers, man.

SLAM: Separate question—you’re in the news a lot, and it feels like people know a lot about you, but what’s something about you people don’t know? 

CB: Man, I don’t tell people that much about me. I think most people know that I’m a clean fanatic. Other than that I just want to do my job and be honest and fair, some people are going to like it, some people are not.

SLAM: Hobbies or anything?

CB: Oh, man, I just watch a lot of movies, movies and sports.

SLAM: What are some recent ones you’ve seen that you liked? 

CB: Um, I enjoyed Selma, that was a really emotional movie. I liked The Judge. I’m trying to get Kenny to come see Fifty Shades of Grey with me.

KS: I’ll go to Fifty Shades of Grey if you come see a Broadway play with me. A matinée.

I’m trying to get him to go with me.

CB: You gonna buy me popcorn?

KS: Sure.

CB: I dunno, man. Broadway’s just not my thing.

—

The post Q+A: Charles Barkley appeared first on SLAM.

But don’t sleep on Victor Oladipo. He’s a part of the 2015 Sprite Slam Dunk Contest—which will take place February 14 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn—for a reason. And, as you can see below in our conversation with him, which took place last week over the phone, he’s taking this thing seriously. What can we expect from him? He wouldn’t reveal too much, but Oladipo did share an idea that one his teammates had. He also talked about some of his favorite dunks, and dunkers, of all time.

SLAM: So, you excited to be in the Dunk Contest? 

Victor Oladipo: Yeah, growing up I always dreamed about being in it. It’s pretty cool that I get to actually experience it so I’m looking forward to it.

SLAM: When did you dunk for the first time?

VO: I think the first time I ever dunked was in the eighth grade. We were just fooling around in practice, guys were throwing it up, alley-ooping it to us and I went up and dunked it crazy. They threw it towards the middle of the rim and I went up and grabbed it with two hands.

SLAM: Were you surprised?

VO: I really was always kind of athletic, but never really could jump that high. I was surprised and excited at the same time. I was more hyped than anything. It was kind of crazy, but it was pretty cool.

SLAM: How tall were you then?

VO: Um, 5-11, maybe.

SLAM: What’s your best dunk ever? 

VO: Probably in high school, when we were playing against a team called Spalding, from Baltimore, and one of my teammates kind of threw it up—Quinn Cook, he plays for Duke—he threw it up and I jumped and the guy guarding me jumped too and that kind of boosted me higher and I was like kind of like, my head was over the rim, well over the rim. That was probably the best dunk I ever had.

SLAM: You got a favorite time you dunked on someone? 

VO: My first high school varsity dunk I ever did was on somebody. Those were actually my first varsity points. We came down and the guy was trying to block me from behind, and he chased me down, and I kind of slowed down because I was trying to dunk it. He came and caught me and he jumped and I jumped but I dunked it. I kind of dunked it on him. My first varsity points—that was kind of crazy.

SLAM: Who’s your favorite dunker of all time? 

VO: Um, probably MJ and Vince. MJ just did it so easy, he just made crazy stuff look easy. And Vince just brought a new flair to it. That Dunk Contest was just crazy. One of the first ones I remember really watching. It was just insane. That between-the-legs one he did, when Tracy dropped it and he took it between the legs, that’s probably my favorite dunk ever.

SLAM: Have you competed in dunk contests before? 

VO: Yeah, in high school I did them all the time.

SLAM: I’m guessing you did pretty well.

VO: Yeah, I did pretty good [laughs]. Then I was just really good at jumping over people. Just lining people up and jumping over them was my big thing.

SLAM: Is that something we can expect to see from you in Brooklyn? You got any hints for us?

VO: Oh, maybe, I don’t know. We’ll see. We got a lot of talented dunkers in the Dunk Contest so I gotta do something to stand out.

SLAM: You preparing or practicing?

VO: Yeah, there’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about for a while, so I won’t just be thinking about this the night before. Nothing too crazy, since we are in a season, but I’ve been practicing a bit.

SLAM: Are your teammates giving you advice? 

VO: Yeah, some of them give advice, some of them give crazy stuff, some have good advice. But for the most part it’s just crazy stuff people come up with.

SLAM: Like?

VO: One dude told me to come out dressed as Prince Akeem from Coming to America, and have rose bearers.

SLAM: Who said that?

VO: Kyle O’Quinn.

SLAM: You get any other crazy suggestions? 

VO: I think that’s probably the funniest one.

SLAM: Who are you worried about in the contest?

VO: I mean, all the guys are really good. Mason and Giannis, they’ve got something going for them because they’re long and athletic. And everyone knows about Zach LaVine, so, shoot, he just does crazy stuff. So I’m going to have to be ready.

SLAM: You going to be using props, or just focusing on the dunks? 

VO: Maybe a little bit of both. A little bit of that stuff. I think the crowd likes to see that stuff.

SLAM: Last question: Who’s the best dunker in the NBA right now?

VO: I’d have to say Gerald Green.

—

Yaron Weitzman is an editorial assistant at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

The post Q+A: Victor Oladipo appeared first on SLAM.

He won’t share many details, but the remnants of his pregame snack do. They’re scattered around his unkempt Barclays Center locker on this blisteringly cold January night. A small box of GoPicnic hummus and crackers is nestled underneath some shorts, a yellow wrapper that once held gluten-free crackers finds itself trapped under a folding chair leg, a blue and white container with the words “METABOLIC DRINK” printed on it leans against the wooden locker’s left wall. It looks like something Neil Armstrong might have brought with him to space.

At the moment, Marc Gasol is out on the court warming up. It’s about an hour before tipoff of what will turn out to be a relatively effortless Grizzlies win, and the not-nearly-as-big-as-he-used-to-be big man is working on his outside shot. His feathery touch is on full display. The ball seems to glide through the air after Gasol shoots it. The net barely moves as shot after shot falls through.

After about a half-hour of work, Gasol begins to make his way off the court. He stops to sign autographs for a bunch of kids, poses for a selfie with an older fan and then retreats back to his locker room chair. There, he takes a swig of his NASA-looking drink.

Now, at the age of 30 and in his seventh season in the NBA, Gasol is playing the best basketball of his career. Before this season he’d never averaged more than 15 points per game; this year he’s averaging 19, with 8 rebounds, 4 assists and 2 blocks, while shooting 50 percent from the field. His Grizz have spent the entire season near the top of the Western Conference standings (they’re currently 37-12, the third best record in the NBA). They were always great on D, but this year the Grizzlies are actually scoring efficiently, too, 105.3 points per 100 possessions to be exact, the ninth best number in the league. The team, in its 20 years of existence, has never had an offensive rating that high. 

On the court, there’s not much the 7-1 center can’t do, and on this night, where he goes for 18 points in 30 minutes, the Nets have no answer for him. Gasol hits all types of shots from all types of spots. Dunks, rainbow fadeaways, baby hooks. Mid-range jumpers, which this year he’s taking more frequently and hitting a higher percentage of. He never holds the ball for long and seemingly always makes the right play.

“He’s like a point guard on the elbow,” says Knicks point guard Jose Calderon, who has played with Gasol on Spain’s National Team. Timberwolves point guard Ricky Rubio, who also played with Gasol for Spain, uses the same description but adds something else, too: “I always tell Conley that I’m really jealous of him,” Rubio says. “Marc sets the best picks. He’s so big, but also he holds the screen for a long time. He’s not worried about rolling to the basket to get himself more numbers.”

It’s a perfect metaphor for Gasol’s game, an example of a tangible skill he brings to the court, but one that might go unnoticed by most. Against the Nets, Gasol’s back-breaking screens, both on and off the ball, lead to more than 20 Grizzlies points.

In the third quarter, Gasol throws a beautiful no-look, behind-the-head pass to a cutting Tony Allen, one which proves Allen prophetic. Prior to the game he joked with a reporter about how part of his paycheck should be sent to Gasol because of all the points Gasol creates for him.

“That’s Big Spain, man, he’s the best center in the NBA,” Allen added, before explaining how Gasol’s defensive presence allows him to take more gambles on that end of the court, where Gasol is a monster, a nimble beast as smart as he is strong. He can push big men off their spots and swaddle up dribblers as soon as they enter the paint. He can blow up an opposing pick-and-roll by jumping out above the three-point line or falling back into the lane. Watching him man the defense’s back line is like watching a conductor lead an orchestra, only this one can talk.

“He just has amazing defensive awareness,” says former NBA player Shane Battier. “He understands how to use his length to his advantage and is always in the right spot on the court.”

Battier has known Gasol since the latter’s high school days. Battier’s wife taught at Lausanne Collegiate School, the small Memphis private school that Gasol attended. When Gasol was a student there, Battier, along with his then-teammate Pau Gasol, Marc’s brother, watched myriad of Marc’s high school games together.

Back then, though, Marc looked different than he does today. His hair, now cut close, would grow long and floppy; when sweaty it sometimes fell down around his eyes. His face, now long and thin and bearded, was round and smooth. His body, now cut and trim, was, well—it certainly wasn’t that.

“Growing up I was always very skinny but Marc…he was, you know, bigger,” Pau Gasol says while laughing. “He always had a bigger frame. Everyone’s body structure and metabolism is different.” Marc’s apparently caused him to balloon to nearly 350 pounds.

“If you had told me that he’d eventually become an MVP candidate, I would have bet you my entire NBA salary,” Battier says. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a bigger physical transformation.”

***

It didn’t start last year—Gasol has been steadily shedding pounds since his post-high school days in Spain—but a November 2013 injury to his left knee that knocked him out of the lineup for two months did force a change. “I felt like I wasn’t in good shape when I came back,” Gasol says. “But being away from the game, and having a lot free time, that made me rethink a lot of stuff and think about what I wanted to do, what I wanted my goals to be.”

Those, he says, were to be better on the court and feel better off of it. But for that to happen, some habits had to be changed.

The Gasol brothers run a foundation that focuses on teaching kids how to live a healthy lifestyle, and Marc decided to start following the advice he was handing out. He wasn’t looking to go on a diet; he just wanted to overhaul his. The weight he dropped over the summer, estimated to be around 50 pounds, was a result, not a goal.

“The more natural, and the less touched by human beings, the better,” is how Gasol describes his current diet. “We tend to screw things up usually, to commercialize and mass produce products. It’s just about learning about and understanding what you’re putting in your body”

Gasol used to go to McDonald’s all the time—“He loved the golden arches,” says Jason Peters, his coach at Lausanne—but nowadays he barely touches red meat. He grows his own vegetables in the yards of both his Memphis and Barcelona homes. He especially loves tomatoes—“as long as winter isn’t coming” (Gasol is apparently a big Game of Thrones fan)—and likes planting broccoli and cauliflower, too. On team plane rides he gets a special meal. “We’ll all be eating chicken or steak or something,” says Conley, “and Marc will be sitting there eating, like, quinoa and vegetables.”

He also changed up his exercise regimen, adding, according to Peters, distance running and hill training to his routine (neither Gasol, nor anyone connected to him, will share more details). Today, Peters and everyone else who knows Gasol from his high school days barely recognize him. When they turn the TV on they can’t believe their eyes. Gasol is listed at 265 pounds, but his true weight (also not being shared) may be even less.

“He eats very healthy, very balanced and is really strict with it,” says Pau. “He’s been putting in the work for years, trying to get better in every way possible, and now it’s paying off.”

Says Marc, “Being in better physical condition, that allows me to stay aggressive throughout the game.”

Marc then pauses for a second before continuing.  There’s one clarification he wants to add.

“I’m really surprised that everyone is surprised at how well I’m playing. I’m still playing the same way, just taking what the defense gives me and trying not to hesitate.”

***

Back in Brooklyn, the Grizzlies are in good spirits following their 103-92 win. There’s lots of laughter coming from the Barclays Center’s visitor’s locker room shower, and one suspects Gasol is playing a role. He’s known to clown around a bit and has enjoyed pulling off some pranks in his time. Both Calderon and Rubio, when asked if they have any favorite stories about Gasol, answer, “Yeah, but not for print.” But Jon Van Hoozer, an assistant to Peters at Lausanne, doesn’t mind sharing his.

It was Gasol’s senior year of high school, and Van Hoozer’s wife had just given birth to a baby boy who the couple decided to bring to a game. At one point Gasol went over to greet the pair, took the child and held him in his arms. He then turned to Van Hoozer’s wife. “I don’t know about this,” he said. “He’s got Coach Peters’ face.”

After exiting the shower, Gasol dresses quickly and eventually settles into his chair. He sits there wearing black jeans and a baggy light blue t-shirt. It matches his Nike sneakers and has the words ROSHI’S GYM written across the front.

Members of the New York media surround him. They’re here to ask Gasol about his impending free agency (his contract is up after this year). They want to know whether he’ll consider the Knicks, or any other team outside of Memphis, as an option. Gasol looks calm and relaxed. He answers some questions with jokes.

He won’t say much of substance, but it’s hard to imagine him ever playing for a different city or team. Gasol has officially been a member of the Grizzlies for seven years, but he’s been a part of the organization for even longer. When Jerry West was the Grizzlies’ general manager, he sent his son Jonnie to Lausanne. He and Gasol were teammates and remain good friends today.

“Marc just loves Memphis,” says Jonnie West. “It’s a special place to him.”

To Gasol, the city is home. He visits coffee shops in the morning and grocery stores during the day. At night he can be seen in midtown restaurants enjoying some red wine. He’s an ambassador to the St. Judes Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, where he shows up several times a year. There he plays video games with the older kids and hosts tea parties with the younger ones.

“Down here he’s a god,” says Ryan Baum, a longtime friend of Gasol’s.

Gasol answers questions for about 20 minutes before the media session is shut down. In one corner of the locker room sits a folding table with tin pans full of food. Zach Randolph is finishing off what looks to be a plate of ribs. Gasol, though, never even glances in that direction as he rises up from his chair and makes his way toward the door. Instead, he heads right for the team bus. His quinoa and vegetables await.

Yaron Weitzman is an editorial assistant at SLAM. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

The post The Constant Gardener appeared first on SLAM.

“I think we have to show better composure, but at the same time some of [the technical fouls] were ridiculous,” Paul said. “The tech that I get right there was ridiculous. I don’t care what nobody says, I don’t care what she says; that’s terrible. There’s no way that can be a tech. We try to get the ball out fast every time down the court, and when we did that, she said, ‘Uh-uh.’ I said, ‘Why, uh-uh?’ And she gave me a tech.

 

“That’s ridiculous. If that’s the case, this might not be for her.”

This going to become a Thing because Holtkamp is female, even though it seems like Paul is directing his criticism at the idea that she’s a rookie official. There’s no reason to believe that Paul has a problem with a woman officiating his games .

The post Chris Paul Calls Out Female Ref Following Clippers’ Loss appeared first on SLAM.

The Skills Competition will feature Brandon Knight, Isaiah Thomas, Jeff Teague, Jimmy Butler, John Wall, Kyle Lowry, Michael Carter-Williams and Trey Burke. The format will also be different this year (if you can remember what the format was last year you’re way ahead of me). Instead of pitting the two conferences against each other, there will be a bracket to determine the winner.

The Shooting Stars Competition participants will be Chris Bosh, Dominique Wilkins and Swin Cash; Anthony Davis, Scottie Pippen and Elle Donne; Steph Curry, Dell Curry and Sue Bird; Russell Westbrook, Anfernee Hardaway and Tamika Catchings.

So, who you got?

The post NBA All-Star Saturday Night Participants Announced appeared first on SLAM.

“Ultimately we want to see your best teams in the playoffs. And there is an unbalance and a certain unfairness. There is a proposal (from one of the broadcasters)…  where the division winners would all automatically go into the playoffs and then you’d seed the next 10 best teams. I think that’s the kind of proposal we need to look at. There are travel issues of course, but in this day in age every team of course has their own plane, travels charter. I don’t think the discussion should end there. And as I’ve said, my first year I was studying a lot of these issues and year 2 is time to take action. It’s something I’m going to look at closely with the competition committee. I do think it’s an area where we need to make a change.” 

Silver’s certainly not messing around. Who knows whether he can pull this, or any of these other changes, off, but NBA fans have to feel good about the fact that he’s interested in improving the NBA in any way he can.

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I’ll never forget the night I got an email from the future president of the United States consisting only of Tony Parker’s stat line.

 

I typed an email back to Barack Obama: “Those are good numbers. But it was against a weak team.” Then I added Chris Paul’s stats.

 

I had been Obama’s personal aide for a few months by then. But with that little exchange, something shifted in our relationship. I like to believe that learning to handle my responsibilities earned me Obama’s trust. But I also know that the strength of our friendship grew out of our shared love of basketball.

 

Basketball was our common ground—something we could talk about that didn’t drain him like his other daily conversations could. Basketball modified the tenor of our interactions and took us from boss and underling to something more like friends.

 

It began with that back-and-forth during the 2007 NBA playoffs. Who was going to be right? The debate went on for years. After Paul, a Los Angeles Clippers guard, won the All-Star Game MVP in 2013, Obama reluctantly conceded, though Parker’s collection of four championship rings with the San Antonio Spurs may make the president’s case for him a little better than mine for Paul.

The post Barack Obama Thought Tony Parker Was Better Than Chris Paul appeared first on SLAM.

As a first-time head coach with the New Jersey Nets, Byron Scott guided the New Jersey Nets to the NBA Finals. And the anchor of his roster was All-Star point guard Jason Kidd, who carried a bit of a reputation.

 

“He was kind of known as an (expletive),” Scott said.

 

Going into his first career coaching matchup with Kidd, who now helms the Milwaukee Bucks (26-22), the first-year Lakers coach didn’t offer much in the way of a rebuttal to that perspective.

 

Kidd was reportedly at the middle of his firing in 2004, with the Associated Press reporting that Kidd had gone to management to demand a change on the bench.

 

Asked if that story was accurate, Scott said he was unsure.

 

“That’s all I’ve heard,” Scott said. “Now, did he actually go talk to Rod Thorn and all those guys? I don’t know. I never got that story. I always said, though, where there’s smoke there fire.

 

“I’m in a much better place and I’m sure he’s happy where he is, too.”

Kidd’s Bucks beat the Lakers in overtime on Wednesday, 113-105.

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First, the good: Jackson admitted that pretty much everything this year has been a colossal failure. Given that the team is 10-39 and giving major minutes to guys named Langston Galloway and Louis Amundson, this is really not something that an executive should get credit for. But any time a Knicks executive isn’t completely delusional is an anomaly so we have to give credit where credit is due.

But it didn’t take long after Jackson sat down for a recent interview over lunch to admit that his debut as an N.B.A. executive has been sobering, stressful and, during early morning reflections, doubt-inducing.

“Like nothing I’ve seen before,” he said of the Knicks’ first 41 games, of which they lost 36, a half-season of hell. “So far, my experiment has fallen flat on its face

Of course, none of that is going to keep Jackson from demanding his team run the Triangle. That today’s NBA rules make it silly to do so, well, that’s of no concern to Phil.

But as to skepticism about whether he can make the triangle work in a league in which no one else plays it, Jackson said: “I’m not daunted by the number of people who have commented that this way of playing is arcane, that the game has moved on. The game has moved on.”

He also believes that the game, stylistically, moves in mysterious ways.

“I think it’s still debatable about how basketball is going to be played, what’s going to win out,” he said, leaving no doubt of his disdain for the point-guard-dominated concept of “screen-and-roll, break down, pass, and two or three players standing in spots, not participating in the offense.”

In the interview Jackson also explained why he traded Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith (he felt he needed to “weed out certain guys); shares some thoughts on the job he believes Derek Fisher is doing; and explained his plan for the Knicks going forward. Check it out.

The post Phil Jackson: ‘So Far, My Experiment Has Fallen Flat on Its Face’ appeared first on SLAM.

“I’m always in a win-now mode. I want to win and that’s been my goal, to try to get into the playoffs,” Bird said. “Hopefully, down the road, we’ll see where Paul’s at. We still have no idea whether he’s coming back or not, but it seems like every week he’s getting better and better. If we do have an opportunity to get into the playoffs and he can get some games under his belt and (then) get ready to go next year (then we could play him).”

 

Bird’s statement marked the first time a Pacer official has acknowledged that George, if healthy, could possibly return this season. George will meet with the media Thursday.

 

“I always say if the player is ready to play, he’s got to play,” Bird said. “We’re not going to hold (George) back if he’s able to go out there and play. I think it’s important because when you’re out like that, you lose something. He’s going to get beat up, he’s going to get knocked around, he’s not going to look good but I still think it’s important, if he’s able to play, he should be out there.”

George seemed pleased with Bird’s statement, tweeting this later in the day. 

March?! — Paul George (@Yg_Trece) February 3, 2015

Right now the Pacers are 17-32, which, somehow, means they’re just 5.5 games back of the Charlotte Hornets and Miami Heat, who are tied for the Eastern Conference’s eighth seed (only in the East could a 17-32 team be in the playoff hunt). It seems improbable that George makes it back, and that the Pacers hang around for him to want to come back. But the team is still playing hard and the bottom of the conference absolutely stinks. Come March, the temptation for Bird and George might be there.

The post Larry Bird Says Paul George May Play This Year appeared first on SLAM.

This is pretty funny, though.

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With the victory Oklahoma City is 24-24, and 3.5 games behind the Phoenix Suns for the eighth seed in the West.

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…as well as 13 rebounds. Eric Gordon, back from the dead, added in 20 points. Jeff Teague scored 21 points for the Hawks in the loss.

The post Pelicans End Hawks’ 19-Game Win Streak (VIDEO) appeared first on SLAM.

The Brooklyn Nets continue to explore the possibility of trading center Brook Lopez but to date have resisted a serious push from the Denver Nuggets, according to league sources.

 

Sources told ESPN.com that the Nuggets have offered big men JaVale McGee and J.J. Hickson, as well as one of the two draft picks Denver recently acquired in a trade with the Cleveland Cavaliers for center Timofey Mozgov, in exchange for the Lopez.

 

But Brooklyn, sources say, has rebuffed those advances so far.

Lopez is averaging 15 points and six rebounds per game this year and is shooting 50 percent from the field. He has one year left on his contract: a player option for the 2015-16 season worth a little less than $17 million. The Nets have been shopping him all  year—they were close to making a deal with the Thunder in January—and we can probably assume that, come the trade deadline on Feb. 19, Lopez will be suiting up for a different team.

The post Report: Nets Rejected Nuggets’ Offer for Brook Lopez appeared first on SLAM.

Dallas Mavericks point guard Rajon Rondo will not play Monday night against the Minnesota Timberwolves due to a facial injury, league sources told ESPN.

Sources say that Rondo, who suffered the injury in the first quarter of Saturday night’s win in Orlando, was scheduled to be evaluated extensively Sunday by the Mavericks’ medical staff to establish a firm timetable on how long he’ll be sidelined.

But Rondo has already been ruled out of the Mavericks’ home game Monday night against the Timberwolves, who will be welcoming Ricky Rubio back to the lineup after his 42-game absence thanks to an ankle injury.

Here’s the play where Rondo got hurt.

The Mavericks are 32-17 and in seventh place in the Western Conference. They are 13-9 since acquiring Rondo from the Celtics in December. Rondo is averaging nine points, seven assists and five rebounds in 29 minutes per game with Dallas.

UPDATE: The Mavericks have announced that Rondo has an orbital fracture in his left eye, and a nasal fracture,and will miss at least three games.

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The Houston Rockets are bracing for the loss of Dwight Howard for at least a month due to persistent trouble with his right knee, according to league sources.

 

Sources told ESPN.com that the Rockets, while confident that Howard ‎has enough time to bounce back for the regular-season stretch run and playoffs, fear their defensive anchor will be lost for a period of “weeks” as opposed to days.

 

Howard is still in the process of getting additional consultation from various doctors to determine the best treatment course for the knee.

 

Yet sources told ESPN.com that the Rockets already acknowledge that a period of rest “likely measured in weeks” will be the minimum requirement before their defensive anchor is ready to the return to the lineup. But sources say Houston nonetheless remains confident that Howard will be able to come back “in plenty of time” to ramp up for the postseason, even if the absence stretches into the six-weeks range.

The Rockets are currently 33-15 and in fifth place in the Western Conference. They have a seven-and-a-half game lead on the ninth place New Orleans Pelicans. The Thunder, at 23-24, are also lurking. If Howard winds up missing multiple months Houston could find itself in trouble.

The post Report: Dwight Howard Expected to Miss ‘At Least a Month’ With Right Knee Injury appeared first on SLAM.

Asked to reflect on what he would remember most about his first year as commissioner, with Sunday marking exactly one since he replaced David Stern, Silver said: “That I had to decide between DeMarcus Cousins and Damian Lillard. I didn’t like having to make that choice. I wish I had another slot for Damian because I think he’s deserving of being an All-Star as well.‎

 

“I rely heavily on our basketball folks in terms of where the coaches’ [voting] came out. Of course there’s a fan vote for the starters and the coaches choose the reserves. DeMarcus was very high up on the coaches’ vote, so that had a strong influence on me. Ultimately I deferred to them. DeMarcus, based on his numbers, absolutely deserves to be an All-Star. Damian … his numbers are great, too. When I look at his team’s record, I want to take that into account as well. Damian is someone who has literally been a model citizen in terms of what he’s done in the community, he’s done in Portland [and] activities he’s engaged in with the league. It was essentially a tie in my mind, so I ultimately deferred to the coaches.”

 

Asked specifically about expanding the rosters in the respective conferences to 13 or even 15 players, Silver said: ‎”I think that’s something that will get very strong consideration. I think that’s an issue that we’ll end up discussing with the Players Association. It has a direct impact on many of the player’s bonuses. There’s preset bonuses in their contracts for making the All-Star team. I think counter-balancing that is the issue of playing time. [NBA executive vice president] Rod Thorn and I were having this discussion yesterday. We said we should move to [Kentucky coach John] Calipari’s platoon system for All-Star to make sure that everyone gets [enough] playing time.

 

“In all seriousness, that’s one of the concerns with a larger team. We want to make sure guys get minutes as well if they’re All-Stars. I’m in favor of expanding it. I’m not sure if it’s by one or two [roster spots], but it is something Michele Roberts and I will discuss.”‎

Silver also said that he’d like to take a look at the playoff format, the lottery and “things that have a direct impact on the competition” and that this “this is going to be the year where we have to make those decisions.”

He’s certainly thinking big, which is something that NBA fans have to be excited about. The question is whether he can actually push through some of these changes.

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SLAM: So you and Michael Jordan are neighbors? 

Cam Newton: We are neighbors. He stays, as you would imagine, in the penthouse but yes, I am relatively close with Michael Jordan.

SLAM: Got any good MJ stories? 

CN: I tell you this: he is as cool as advertised. It’s always a surreal moment when you get to hangout with you childhood hero. I admire him, the person who he is, the athlete who he was and the man that he is today. Any time I get the opportunity to talk to him I try to soak as much information as I can up. He’s a person who has lived it, who has done it the right way, and I’m hoping that I can have half of what his career brought him.

SLAM: So, what’s an example of him being as cool as advertised? Like did he have a bunch of cigars out the first time you met him or…

CN: That’s what I’m saying, man, that’s what I’m saying, typical MJ, man. The first time I met him he was in the—I met him at a lounge in Charlotte, and he had a bunch of family around and it was very theatrical, the smoke was coming up, I couldn’t really see his face, and then when he said, “Hey, what’s up, Cam?” I kind of stopped and was like, “Oh sh…, he knows my name.” When you talk to him, he kind of deflates any kind of…he’s one of you, he’s very down to earth and that’s what makes him so cool.

SLAM: So what are you going to be watching for tonight? 

CN: So, No. 1, you’re talking about the Super Bowl, the thing I look at No. 1 in the Super Bowl are the commercials and the halftime show.

SLAM: Not the game? 

CN: I couldn’t care less about the game—it’s not my team playing in it. I don’t care who wins. For the most part I just want to see a hard-fought game, not a blowout, something that keeps the fans’ attention. When you’re watching at home with your family and friends, something that keeps everybody talking.

SLAM: Where are you going to be watching and who you watching with? 

CN: I have no idea. I’m thinking about taking a one-day trip somewhere; I don’t know where yet, though. If all else fails I will be back home in Atlanta watching it with family and friends.

SLAM: According to Cam Newton, the food that one must have at a Super Bowl party is…

CN: The wings and things like that, but I don’t eat meat. I stick to the fish, shrimp—there has to be seafood that’s very tasteful; if that’s there then we’re all good.

SLAM: Who’s the better corner, Darrelle Revis or Richard Sherman? 

CN: Two different players. They all bring something different to the table. They’re great for what their team schemes are. Revis has been doing this for so long; it feels like he’s been in the league for what, 12 years? I think it’s his seventh year, but it just seems like he’s been doing this forever. And Richard is a great young player who just keeps getting better every year.

SLAM: You played the Seahawks in the Playoffs—give us a scouting report on their D.

CN: Well, the thing that sticks out is that they are what you think they are. Very hard-nosed physical defense that you know what they’re going to be in, but they’re saying we’re just flat out better than you, and we’re going to execute our game plan better than you’re going to execute your game plan. I think their front-7 is underrated. Those guys are extremely fast and, in my opinion, don’t get talked about enough. They do a great job in stopping the run.

SLAM: You’re making the rounds on behalf of Gatorade, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. So, what’s your favorite Gatorade flavor?

CN: My favorite Gatorade color has to be The citrus cooler. That’s the orange-peach color.

SLAM: There’s a Super Bowl prop bet on what color Gatorade gets poured onto the winning coach. So, what you going with?

CN: There is? I never knew that—Isn’t it always orange? I never thought about. But I’d have to go with orange.

Yaron Weitzman is an editorial assistant for SLAM Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman. Image via Getty. 

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The Orlando Magic are close to firing coach Jacque Vaughn and a change could come soon, league sources told Yahoo Sports.

 

As embarrassing losses accumulate, Vaughn is rapidly running out of time to show the progress needed to make it through the next several days – never mind the fourth and final year of his contract in 2015-’16, league sources told Yahoo Sports.

 

“It isn’t a matter of ‘if,’ anymore, but ‘when,’” a source close to the decision-making process told Yahoo Sports about Vaughn’s fading job security.

 

After a 115-100 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks at Amway Arena on Thursday night – the 13th loss in the past 15 games – the Orlando Sentinel reported that the Magic “haven’t ruled out making an in-season coaching change.”

 

The Magic are 15-34 and have free-fallen into 13th place in the East, and while there was no mandate to make the postseason this year, there was an expectation that Vaughn needed to compete into April for a spot in the playoffs.

 

This is Vaughn’s third year as the Magic’s coach. Orlando exercised the fourth-year option on Vaughn’s contract over the summer, guaranteeing his salary for the 2015-’16 season.

 

In fact, the lack of a natural candidate to promote to interim head coach from a young, inexperienced staff of assistants has played a part in Orlando management’s hesitancy to have already made a change, sources told Yahoo Sports.

 

Management has been evaluating Vaughn closely in recent weeks, and played a part in pushing him to play a faster tempo based on the youth and athleticism of the roster, league sources said.

Vaughn is 58-154 in his career. The Magic are far from a juggernaut, but with players like Elfrid Payton, Nikola Vucevic, Tobias Harris and Victor Oladipo, should be playing at a higher level than they are. One has to wonder, though, if Rob Hennigan, the team’s general manager, is on alert now, too.

The post Magic Reportedly ‘Close’ to Firing Jacque Vaughn appeared first on SLAM.

Houston Rockets center Dwight Howard will get a second opinion on his injured right knee and could miss extended time, league sources told Yahoo Sports.

 

As the Rockets embarked on a two-game Eastern Conference trip to Boston and Detroit on Thursday, Howard traveled elsewhere to get further evaluation on his swollen knee, league sources told Yahoo Sports.

Howard was forced to miss 11 games earlier in the season due to a strain that knee, and, according to the Yahoo! report, is now experiencing a buildup of fluid. He’s sat out the Rockets’ last two games and has traveled to get a second opinion.

On the season Howard is averaging 16.3 points, 11 rebounds and 1.4 blocks for the 32-14 Rockets.

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“Yeah, that’s the plan,” Bryant said.

 

Bryant said his rehab over the next couple of months will involve “a lot of patience.”

 

“Sore, but it’s OK,” Bryant said of his shoulder.

 

Bryant said media opinion on whether he should return for a 20th season or retire wouldn’t affect his decision.

 

“I don’t really listen much to what people have to say to be honest with you,” Bryant said.

No doubt Bryant will give a comeback a go. The question, of course, with any older player, is whether his body is up for the challenge. Only time will tell.

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Rising higher every day. @22wiggins @daanteee @ShabazzMuhammad @RealStevenAdams #BBVACompassRisingStars Challenge pic.twitter.com/bP4TJqP4pM

— adidas Basketball (@adidasHoops) January 28, 2015

And here, via his Instagram page, is Dante Exum’s.

The game will take place Friday, Feb. 13 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. It will also feature a new format: Team USA will be playing The World. You can check out the rosters here.

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“For sure. He’s the best player in basketball right now,” Parsons said before his Dallas Mavericks fell 99-94 to Harden’s Houston Rockets on Wednesday night. “The things he’s doing are incredible. The scouting report is focused in on stopping him and you see he’s still getting 30 a game. It’s impressive.”

Harden’s 27.6 points per game is tops in the league. He’s also averaging 5.6 rebounds, 6.8 assists and two steals. He has a player efficiency rating of 27.6, the third highest number in the NBA.

The post Chandler Parsons: James Harden is ‘The Best Player in Basketball Right Now’ appeared first on SLAM.

Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant, who injured his right shoulder in last Wednesday night’s game against the Pelicans in New Orleans, underwent a successful surgery this morning to repair a torn rotator cuff. The approximately two-hour procedure was performed by Dr. Neal ElAttrache and Dr. Steve Lombardo at the Kerlan Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in Los Angeles. Bryant, who is expected to make a full recovery, will be out for approximately nine months.

 

“I expect Kobe to make a full recovery and if all goes as expected, he should be ready for the start of the season,” said ElAttrache.”

The obvious question here is whether Bryant decides to ever return. We can probably assume, given his personality, that he’ll give a comeback a go, but at this point, and at his age, you just never know.

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They were led on Wednesday by Paul Millsap, who had 28 points and 15 rebounds, and was 15-16 from the free-throw line, and Al Horford, who had 20 points and ten rebounds. In typical Hawks fashion, though, the effort against the Nets was a balanced one. Jeff Teague had 13 points and 11 assists. Kyle Korver had 17 points and was 5-8 from deep. Dennis Schroeder had 13 points off the bench. This team is playing at an insanely high level right now and deserves to have four players on the All-Star team, especially when you take into account just how bad the rest of the conference has been.

The post Hawks Extend Winning Streak to 17 With Win Over Nets (VIDEO) appeared first on SLAM.

This dance came after Kyrie hit the go-ahead, and what would turn out to be game-winning 3 with about two seconds left. Irving’s 11 made 3-pointers is a new franchise record. He also scored 24 of the Cavaliers’ final 28 points, and 16 points in the fourth quarter.

The post Kyrie Irving Scores 55 Points, Leads LeBron-Less Cavs to Win Over Blazers (VIDEO) appeared first on SLAM.

The two players were Jarnell Stokes and Kalin Lucas. Stokes, you might remember, played for the University of Tennessee last year and was selected by the Grizzlies with the 35th pick in the 2014 Draft. He’s played in 16 games with the Grizzlies this season and is averaging 14.1 points and 8.6 rebounds in the D-League.

Lucas, who played for Michigan State rom 2007-2011, is an undrafted player who’s been bouncing around the D-League and Europe since. He’s averaging 16.5 points and 4.9 assists for the Energy this season.

[h/t The Big Lead]

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Clippers’ Matt Barnes fined $25k for directing inappropriate language toward a fan in Phoenix Sunday night. Way too much of this from Matt.

— Sam Amick (@sam_amick) January 27, 2015

This, though, is where things get weird. After receiving the fine, Barnes took to Twitter to share his version of the story. It differs a bit from the one the league is telling. 

Another 25k! The part of the story the nba hasn’t told you was my language wasnt directed at a fan, I was talkn to the owner of the Suns…. — Matt Barnes (@Matt_Barnes22) January 27, 2015

..Who was sitting on the baseline & I only said something to him AFTER he cussed at me, BUT because I didn’t SNITCH I get fined!! #thecode

— Matt Barnes (@Matt_Barnes22) January 27, 2015

I’ve been fined 50k in the last mnth for kicking a “PAPER”Gatorade cup that had alil bit of water in it that didn’t even hit anyone &….

— Matt Barnes (@Matt_Barnes22) January 27, 2015

Responding to an OWNER who cussed at me first.. 50,000 dollars for that?? Come on now! — Matt Barnes (@Matt_Barnes22) January 27, 2015

I might need to find a second job with all these crazy tecs & fines. I Can see it now LA TIMES.. “Costco worker by day nba player by night”

— Matt Barnes (@Matt_Barnes22) January 27, 2015

Probably something the league should look at. Also, the thought of Barnes working at a Costco is pretty funny.

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Presenting the #SpriteSlam Dunk Contest field at @NBAAllStar: @G_ante34 @VicOladipo @ZachLaVine & @masonplumlee! pic.twitter.com/ivSUH8nDAM

— NBA (@NBA) January 28, 2015

Plumlee will have the hometown crowd on his side, but Zach Lavine has got to be the favorite. If you want to know why, you can check out his résumé here.

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Kevin Durant has a sprained left big toe and is a late scratch tonight against Minnesota. He’ll be inactive…Happened late at Cleveland.

— Darnell Mayberry (@DarnellMayberry) January 27, 2015

This was the play Kevin Durant seemed to hurt his toe on yesterday https://t.co/7m0TCLZ9mc

— Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) January 27, 2015

This was the 24th game this year that Durant was forced to miss. A fractured right foot kept him out of the lineup for 17 games at the beginning of the season, and a right ankle sprain in December forced him to miss an additional six.

The Thunder’s next game is Wednesday in New York against the Knicks.

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