Overtime Elite’s coaching staff is run by Kevin Ollie, who coached UConn to a national championship in 2014. The players are given personalized nutrition plans and training programs. They are marketed across Overtime’s social media network. (So far, sponsors include Gatorade and State Farm, which signed multiyear, eight-figure contracts with the league. Topps has a licensing deal.) And in the most obviously radical departure, each player gets a small share of the company and earns a salary of at least $100,000 annually, plus bonuses, depending on the contract he has negotiated. Jalen Lewis and some others make more than $500,000. (“There is a marketplace,” says Aaron Ryan, a former N.B.A. executive who has been hired as the league’s commissioner, “and players have varied value.”) In return, they have agreed to forgo their remaining years of high school and any chance of playing in college. That means no state titles or prom dates, no strolls on leafy campuses, no March Madness or Final Four. They also allow Overtime to use their names, images and likenesses, the same assets that college athletes have just earned the right to monetize for themselves, though the Overtime Elite players are permitted to strike their own deals with sponsors in noncompetitive categories.
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.