https://official.nba.com/rule-no-7-24-second-clock/
> The shot clock shall be reset to 14 seconds anytime the following occurs:
> The offensive team is the first to gain possession after an unsuccessful free throw that remains in play, or an unsuccessful field goal attempt that contacts the basket ring
h/t to @LawMurrayTheNU for noting this
> Not only did Pistons screw up the rebound but they didn't need to foul!!! They had a short shot clock and they smoked it!
clipped this while watching the combine scrimmages. guess Presti is media-savvy enough to know there's always a chance he's getting filmed
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5u7S1m2jI5nnEeKURahS4d?si=yyqRunrZRUmM3dvGjPJCKg&t=327
> I think Harper potentially is a 2nd banana. I think it's realistic to think this is a guy who can be as good as those guys. That he can be a 1st team all NBA guy
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7274411/2026/05/12/jason-collins-obituary-nba/
When Jason Collins was working up the courage to come out as gay to his grandmother, he worried what she might say. She was a deeply religious woman. And, out of all of his family members, she was the one he was most nervous to confide in.
But she looked at him — truly saw him for who he was — and embraced him. “Baby,” she told him, “it’s about love.”
Love is one of the many principles Collins would come to stand for. Love is what Collins encouraged. Love is what enabled him to overcome his fear of what his family, friends, NBA teammates and coaches would say, when he decided to come out on April 29, 2013, a watershed moment in professional sports.
Love is one of the many gifts that Collins gave us. He died at age 47 Tuesday. He announced in December that he was undergoing treatment for Stage 4 glioblastoma, one of the most severe forms of brain cancer.
When Collins decided to come out as gay in 2013, he was inching toward the end of his professional career. He had a fine NBA resume that included playing for six teams. He was widely respected by his coaches and teammates. He was a first-round draft pick in 2001 and an All-Pac 10 player at Stanford. Collins was drafted by the Houston Rockets and then traded to the New Jersey Nets. He was on the Nets’ two NBA Finals teams in 2002 and 2003.
He could have ended his career without saying a word. But the more he looked around him, and the more he looked inside him, searching to, as he would say, embrace “the puzzle that is me,” he realized that he would have to be the role model he wished he had. No one else had spoken up. No one else, it seemed, was willing to sacrifice, willing to take the risk of the stigma that he surely knew would come with his words.
“I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, ‘I’m different,’ he wrote that day in 2013. “If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand.”
If the measure of a life is one’s impact on others, Collins succeeded in droves. He continued his advocacy long after 2013, becoming a public speaker and political activist. He was a balm in a world where homophobia and transphobia have risen. He was an example of the way that athletes can use their voice for the betterment of society. It didn’t matter how many career rebounds he had; he taught thousands of children that words are powerful. That one can find acceptance; belonging that he didn’t know was possible when he was growing up in Los Angeles.
He followed a strong moral compass, one that taught him to “be a good teammate,” he told The Athletic in 2023. “It all goes back to what my grandmother said: your reputation will go places you will never go. Try to have a positive effect on people so that when you leave their presence, they’re speaking kind words about you. Know that the world has enough negativity already. … Try to be as positive and to help somebody else as much as you can.”
As a journeyman, he always knew he had more basketball years behind him than he did in front of him. Time was always in the background, asking players of his caliber, of his age, when it might be time to hang up his sneakers. But he was thinking beyond that. He was thinking about how to help other people. And he wanted to do it before time ran out — before his career was over.
For years, he wondered whether he should come out — and when. And what the consequences might be. When former Stanford University roommate, Joe Kennedy, a congressman from Massachusetts at the time, marched in a Pride parade in Boston, he felt more of an urge to speak his truth. But it was the Boston Marathon bombing that shifted something in him. It “reinforced the notion that I shouldn’t wait for the circumstances of my coming out to be perfect,” he wrote in 2013. “Things can change in an instant, so why not live truthfully?”
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7273558/2026/05/12/brandon-clarke-grizzlies-dead/
On Tuesday afternoon, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kyle Anderson was one of several former and current Memphis players who paid tribute to [Brandon] Clarke.
“Just a really good person, a really good teammate, obviously someone who was really good on the court. Just someone I could instantly see and we would start laughing and start sharing jokes. He was Memphis’s own, for sure. He did his part in the community,” Anderson told The Athletic. “It’s just crazy. It really don’t make no sense. I was on the phone with him two weeks ago on FaceTime. It’s really still raw.”
Clarke’s coach at Gonzaga Mark Few said the forward had a “really screwed up looking shot,” when Clarke arrived on campus in the fall of 2017. He red-shirted that season and worked diligently with a Zags assistant, and “changed his whole shot.” The following season, Clarke paced all of NCAA Div. I basketball with a .687 field-goal percentage (he also topped the nation in blocks, with 117), as he and Lakers forward Rui Hachimura led one of the greatest Bulldogs teams in school history to a 33-4 record and a No. 1 seed in the tournament.
“He was the most low-maintenance dude,” Few told The Athletic. “He was just so easy to coach. Every time you’d see him walking around the facility, he had a smile on his face. Just a warm, kind spirit, and a heck of a player. Our team that year could’ve won the national championship. He was fun to be around.”
Few said Clarke was so relaxed and easygoing that he was “oblivious” when the NBA came calling.
“We had to tell him, yeah you’re going to have to leave – you’re going to be a lottery pick,” Few said. “I don’t know how many people you could put on a Mt. Rushmore of Gonzaga players, but I would put him up there for sure.”
Niele Ivey, a former Grizzlies assistant coach who is now the head coach of Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team, told The Athletic that she was “heartbroken” to hear of Clarke’s death.
“He was an incredible player, but an even better person,” she said. “I have nothing but great memories of his positive energy, enthusiasm, and the way he uplifted everyone around him — teammates and coaches alike. He was the definition of a great teammate and truly a pleasure to coach. Brandon made a lasting impact on so many people, and he will be deeply missed.”
Brad Jones, a former Grizzlies assistant who coached Clarke for most of his NBA career, called Clarke the “unsung hero” of Memphis’ 2022 first-round playoff series win over the Minnesota Timberwolves, which was the first time in seven years the Grizzlies won a playoff series.
“He was low key, cool, always had the good look – like he would dress nice but not overly nice,” Jones said. “In the locker room everybody loved in, on the plane everyone wanted to be around him. He was just ‘easygoing B.C.’ In all my years with him, I never heard one person say anything cross about him.”
“He was driven to be good,” Jones said. “He had decent stats but for him it wasn’t about stats. Ja Morant loved him – he was such a good screener and could jump out of the building. Ja threw him lob after lob. We couldn’t ask any more of him.”
> “I don’t think it’s [LeBron's] last year,” Suns forward Dillon Brooks, who was in attendance, told Yahoo Sports. “I think he got one more in him. I watched him when I was in the NBA, when I was a kid in high school. He’s got a phenomenal career and battled everybody and done it at a high level throughout. It’s been amazing to watch overall, a pleasure to battle against him.”
https://basketnews.com/news-247225-luka-doncic-will-not-play-for-slovenia-this-summer.html
> "I love my daughters more than anything, and they will always come first in my life. As I continue working toward joint custody of my daughters, I have been forced to make a difficult decision between traveling and playing for the Slovenian national team and being with my daughters this summer. Unfortunately, it has been made extremely difficult for me to see them over the past eight months," Doncic wrote.
> "I have given everything to representing Slovenia and I am disappointed that I will not be able to play for my country this summer. But right now, my daughters and my responsibilities as a father are my priority," he added.
based on this article from earlier this year, seems competing in the FIBA World Cup qualifying games this summer, to qualify for the FIBA World Cup in Qatar next year— was a pathway for Slovenia to qualify for the 2028 LA Olympics
> The Slovenians have to finish the qualifying tournament as a top-three team to secure an outright berth to reach Qatar next year, where a ticket to the LA Olympics will be at stake.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/30Zq3B7yPhi1Ja8cn0eV21?si=y3bp2JtiTNaErKUEdeJlWA&t=2210
says an idea is for process of elimination. with the 3-2-1 system some teams will have 3 balls, some will have 2, some will have 1.
if you have 3 balls and get drawn 16th. that doesn't mean you get the 16th pick. it means they take that ball (you now have 2 balls left), then they draw again until the 16th pick goes to a team with only 1 ball.
> it'd be this kind of thrilling 'oh my god, we have one ball left. stay in there ball, we don't want you to come out'
> Winger got up from his seat and quickly went to the back of the room and got a glass of water. His hand shook as he sipped.
> One of the first people to greet him was Presti, one of his mentors whom he worked for in Oklahoma City for seven years. What Winger is trying to build in Washington is what Presti has already built in Oklahoma.
> Winger's first move, when he got the job in 2023, was to hire Will Dawkins away from the Thunder to be his general manager.
> "Thank you for the note," Winger said to Presti.
> Presti, knowing how important this moment was to his former partner, had sent a message, wishing him luck.
> Then Winger allowed himself to smile and said he couldn't wait to go see the rest of the Wizards after watching the broadcast an hour later.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/48737208/how-oklahoma-city-thunder-became-nba-newest-villains
As LeBron James and several other Lakers surrounded Reaves and the referee on the OKC logo, Oklahoma City's players observed the surreal scene. Laughter broke out among the Thunder, who had seized control of the game with reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander sitting on the bench in foul trouble early in the second half.
"Do we get a meeting, too?" Gilgeous-Alexander joked at the moment.
The Warriors remember dealing with it even before the Durant days. Kerr injected an ecosystem of off-ball offensive movement that fully unlocked the shooting greatness of Curry and Klay Thompson. When it vaulted them to the top of the NBA mountain, the outcry was swift and loud: Illegal screens!
"That became a constant topic of conversation," Kerr said. "It did frustrate us. Especially if teams countered that by flopping. You run into a slightly moving screen and act like you've just been hit by a truck. [Andrew] Bogut in particular, when he'd set an off ball screen, guys would go flying. But all's fair in love and war."
Coaches complained that Thompson pushed off to generate space. The Warriors complained right back that evolving defenders were learning to hold and grapple Curry too much off the ball when the eyes of officials wandered.
"Yes, they do foul," Green said. "Yes, Shai does sell fouls. Yes, Lu Dort does some bulls‐‐‐. Yes, yes, yes, yes. All of that is true. Oh, well. If you can't f---ing beat 'em, shut up. One thing is for certain -- a team that only plays to bait fouls, and a player that only plays to bait fouls, it catches up with them in the playoffs. They lose. [The Thunder] won a championship. So shut up."
"I don't have a problem with Shai," Kerr said. "I have a problem with the rules."
Kerr has been on a crusade against the off-arm usage of offensive players. He's of the belief that if the NBA rewards the league's best scorers for hooking a defender when they use the arm bar, they should no longer allow those same scorers to shove off when a defender is forced to keep their hands up to avoid the hook.
"It's like there's no way to guard," Kerr grumbled.
"Well, I love Mark [Daigneault]," Kerr said. "I think he's a great coach. I think their guys really represent the league well. They have really high character guys. I think they're smart. We just get frustrated when they get away with using their hands defensively, but then Shai is allowed to push off. But I don't blame them. I blame the league."
"It's humorous to me because it's like, what do we want to champion? Do we want to champion good, tough defense?" Caruso said. "Everyone complained because the league scored too many points. As long as we're not malicious with it, we should be able to play the way that we want to play."
"When you rely on refs, sometimes it takes you out of your game," said Dort, who does possess an expert ability to alert officials to illegal screens by sprawling to the floor after contact occurs. "I mean, we're a physical team obviously. We play hard defense without fouling. Sometimes the other team and the other coach thinks it's a foul, but you got to let the ref make the decision. And if they don't make the decision, it's not a foul. I don't know what else to say about that.
"We try our best to play hard without fouling, and then it gets frustrating on the other side sometimes."
"I really don't care at all," said Gilgeous-Alexander, who led the league in drives per game the previous five years before ranking third this season. "The players that I grew up loving and watching when I fell in love with the game, they used their skill and their tactics to get to the free throw line. It's just how the game has been picked up, and I'm not the only one that's ever done it. They can pick on me all they want, but I love it. It's amazing."
Simmons says if the Clippers keep #5, the pick should be Wagler. but says the trade back to #7 for Kings assets would be a godsend for the Clippers.
THERE ARE HYPERBARIC chambers and then there is the giant hyperbaric chamber at the UCLA Medical Center. Lakers star Austin Reaves spent the better part of four weeks in this enormous tube as he tried to recover from a Grade 2 oblique muscle tear he had suffered April 2 during a game in Oklahoma City.
Initially doctors told Reaves he would be out 4-6 weeks with the injury, but probably on the longer end of that timeline.
The Lakers initially assumed he would be out until the conference finals, team sources told ESPN, but Reaves was determined to get back for at least some of the Lakers' playoff run.
"I left my house every day around 7:30 in the morning to get treatment and didn't come home until about 8 at night," Reaves told ESPN. "I was going crazy trying to get back. ... I was in that hyperbaric chamber all the time."
The giant hyperbaric chamber at UCLA Health can accommodate up to 18 people and simulates the pressure of being 30 feet underwater -- roughly double the amount of pressure at the surface. That pressure promotes healing by forcing pure oxygen to dissolve into your blood at concentrations far beyond what's possible on land.
Reaves made it back in four weeks, in time for the Lakers' improbable first-round series win over the Houston Rockets.
After Game 3, Caruso was lingering in the locker room with about seven other players. That's about as rare a sight for a team with a free Saturday night in Los Angeles as you'll ever see. But Caruso had a simple explanation. "We're all going to a team dinner," he said. "The whole travelling party."
Those great Warriors teams used to plan team dinners like this on the road all the time. The Spurs did too. Not to build chemistry, but to relish in the chemistry they had already built.
Caruso, of course, has seen both sides of this equation. He was a key role player on the 2020 Lakers championship team, led by James and Anthony Davis.
"That was an older team," Caruso said. "We had guys with experience. Hall of Famers with experience. Dwight Howard, [Rajon] Rondo. Then our role players were pretty elite, too. It can work, but they didn't think it was sustainable because they broke it up."
Caruso departed that championship team in 2021 as a free agent. The Lakers chose Talen Horton-Tucker and Kendrick Nunn to fill the role he had played -- a choice that stings even more watching the way he fits so well with the Thunder.
For three years, the Wizards’ braintrust has circled 2026 as the draft. The one that could deliver them the level of player every team needs to compete at the highest levels of the NBA. You cannot honestly challenge the best teams and the best players if you don’t have your own killer, your own budding or arrived star, who not only has the talent to compete against the best but also the disposition. The Wizards have thought Dybantsa was that guy, the young player who could become their version of Anthony Edwards or Cade Cunningham or Cooper Flagg.
---
General manager Will Dawkins, who’d been in the room the previous two years, was in the city for the NBA G League Combine. But he opted not to go to the drawing this time. Instead, the team rented a gym downtown, and Dawkins, a point guard at Emerson College, played four-on-four with the team’s scouts after the Wizards had completed their morning interviews with prospects from the G League. Their game was interrupted when the team’s vice president of strategic communications, Ketsia Colimon, came into the gym and let Dawkins know what just happened.
“I think we ended 2-2,” Dawkins said. “We had to go home. We should have played Game 5.”
---
The 6-foot-9, 19-year-old Dybantsa is a three-level scorer who is utterly fearless. He wants the smoke. Now, he is far from fully formed. His defense is not where it needs to be. He will have his welcome to the NBA moments like everyone else who enters the association. But it is impossible to concoct a scenario in which he fails. He not only fits the timeline of the completion of the $800 million-plus renovation of Capital One Arena, set for fall 2028, but also could be, in time, the kind of connector who’ll get the best out of his contemporaries such as Alex Sarr, Kyshawn George and Tre Johnson. (Is Anthony Davis thinking a little differently about the franchise’s long-term forecast now? Who knows?)
---
There was karma Sunday. John Wall represented the Wizards on the draft stage. Wall was the team’s last No. 1 pick, in 2010. He was a five-time All-Star who led Washington to the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the 2017 Eastern Conference semifinals. After injuries and ill feelings on both sides made a divorce inevitable, the Wizards had to include a future first-round pick with Wall in 2020, when they traded him to the Houston Rockets for Russell Westbrook. That pick came with yearly protections, up to and including this year.
It was that pick that Washington, at all costs, protected this season. By finishing with the worst record in the league, the Wizards kept their rights to the pick. That pick cashed in Sunday.
In a previous posting before the commissionership, as president and chief operating officer of NBA Entertainment—the league’s media arm—Silver saw untapped investment potential, particularly overseas. (The NBA now allows sovereign wealth funds to acquire minority ownership of its franchises, which is just one source of growing international capital.) When he became commissioner, Silver pressed all of the right buttons, finding new and inventive ways to cash in on the NBA brand, such as expanding the playoffs and adding sponsorship patches to jerseys.
In the decade preceding Stern’s retirement, the NBA’s annual revenue hovered between $3 billion and $4 billion. After just a few years with Silver in charge, the league was making $8 billion, and franchise valuations were soaring. Last season, total revenue was $12.5 billion; this year, it’s projected to top $14.3 billion.
Those successes help explain Silver’s perpetual vigilance. He begins and ends his days with media briefings, but he also spends plenty of the intervening hours scrolling “NBA Twitter,” studying complaints and critiques the way a stockbroker monitors movement in the S&P 500. It’s an unhealthy habit. Silver finally married in 2015, at age 53; one person close to him told me that league employees, worn out by the commissioner’s neurotic disposition, rejoiced when his two daughters were born.
Silver does not dispute such portrayals. “There’s a lot coming at us all the time, and I think there’s plenty to be nervous about,” he said. “I think maintaining a state of mild paranoia is necessary.”
I found myself wishing that Silver would spare us the anguished ambivalence and speak candidly: Yes, gambling can ruin lives, and yes, it jeopardizes the legitimacy of our game, but it’s making our league and its stakeholders rich. Reports suggest that the NBA collects some $170 million annually from sportsbook partnerships. When I asked him about all of the money being made, Silver downplayed the revenue as relatively insignificant. “The greater value to us is the engagement,” he said. “If you’re able to bet on a game or some aspect of a game, you’re much more likely to watch it.”
Silver spoke about that fixing scandal—after which an official, Tim Donaghy, ultimately went to prison—as if it’s a blip from a bygone era. But 2007 isn’t ancient history. And the league’s more recent troubles have done little to assuage concerns about basketball’s credibility. A November poll from Quinnipiac University asked self-described NBA fans whether they believe that players and coaches participate in illegal betting schemes. The results were damning: Only 19 percent of respondents believe that it happens “rarely if ever.” The remaining respondents think that it happens “very often” (12 percent), “somewhat often” (23 percent), or “occasionally” (46 percent).
More physicality, however, came with one apparent downside: more flopping. Against Detroit, the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson continually feigned injury in such farcical ways—and was so frequently rewarded with calls after crumpling to the floor—that Pistons fans serenaded him with chants of “Fuck you, Brunson!” every time he touched the ball. During the Western Conference finals, after Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was awarded seven foul shots in the opening minutes of a game, ESPN’s color commentator labeled him a “free-throw merchant.”
Silver admitted to me that, as a fan, he was annoyed watching the antics of Brunson and Gilgeous-Alexander last postseason. And then he said something fascinating. “I think it’s part of the theater of the game, to a certain extent,” he told me with a shrug. “Even those chants at the Pistons games—I think that’s what fans come there for.”
>I'm really sorry to all our fans. I own taking this risk. Surprised it came up 5th after this year. I thought we were due some luck. But please remember - this team deserved a starting center to compete with the best teams next year. We have always been resilient.
from Pritchard's social media
