The math is simple. Eight players were not enough to even have a regular basketball 5v5 practice. You hear players mention the word “sacrifice” a lot. But what the men from the top offices of the USA Basketball had to do to get the team to where they wanted to be took even more than sacrifice, because the three players from the USA Select Team knew they were always going to be in the background. They didn’t care, though. They were ready to join the team in the exhibition games before the Olympic Games. They even made the trip to Japan to help the squad play 5v5 in practices until the NBA Finalists arrived. Draymond Green doesn’t want you to forget about them. “We had three guys, John Jenkins, Cam Reynolds and Josh (Magette) who gave up their time with no reward in the end, except to see this team win the gold medal,” Green said after winning the Final against France in the Saitama Super Arena. He went on: “Those guys are special. We had nine guys, we lost Bradley Beal, Kevin Love – we started losing guys, and those guys were here. Doing everything we needed to win a gold medal. It’s a very special group, it’s not just the twelve guys you saw win the gold medal.”
The math is simple. Eight players were not enough to ev…
June 25, 2022 | 8:58 pm EDT Update
Chet Holmgren bailed early on draft workout with Orlando?
According to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation, Holmgren bailed early on the last day of his Orlando visit, conducting a brief on-court shooting workout that he cut short.
“I thought they crossed the line,” Kerr added. “I’m all for booing guys, cheering for your own team. The appropriate cheer — if you want to go down that path — is ‘so-and-so sucks, so-and-so sucks.’ … when they were saying ‘F you Draymond,’ 20,000 people, I thought of Draymond’s kid too.
Brandon Rahbar: I asked Chet Holmgren (very loudly) about his fit with SGA and Josh Giddey: “I feel like I fit in well with them. They’re great players. Shai is a really good scorer, Josh is a great passer. Just go out there and be a great floor spacer.”
Murray on bringing a winning mentality to the Kings: “I’m excited. I’m excited to get down there. I feel like for me, the first thing that I feel like I bring to the Kings is just a winning culture, winning mindset. I think that’ll be special for me, to be able to get down there and help them win and see success in that. So I’m excited to go down there and play with a lot of really good players.”
“Listen we still run that franchise [Magic]. If they wanna sell it to us, DeVos family, we’re ready to go right now,” O’Neal said on The Big Podcast. “This message go out to the DeVos family, if you’re ready to sell Orlando Magic, sell it to somebody who’s gonna take it to the next level, that’s us. D[ennis] Scott and then, D Scott can pick everybody else. Smart people combined with common sense people and people that’s been there before, you can’t go wrong.”
Shaq’s generosity knows no limits — the NBA legend is donating the $50,000 he was set to make from a DJ’ing gig in Buffalo to the family of one of the shooting victims.
June 25, 2022 | 7:06 pm EDT Update
“Their continuity wasn’t there,” Perkins said on a recent appearance on JJ Redick’s The Old Man & the Three podcast (h/t Lee Tran of Fadeaway World) about Westbrook and Durant. “No matter how much they tried to fake it to the public, their brotherhood, it never was a brotherhood. And that’s okay, right, because you don’t have to be somebody’s brother to go out there and win a championship. But it helps. They never just got on the same page.
