Basketball Intelligence For 7/19/25
The day's best basketball news and reporting
*FEATURE OF THE DAY*
Damian Lillard and the cost of happiness
Mike Shearer, Basketball Poetry
LEAGUEWIDE
Can you win starring a bad defender?
Henry Abbott, True Hoop
Buckets are fame, fame is money, money is buckets. High scorers = best players.
Or so they have long said. Scoring matters so much that I’ve had big-time NBA coaches tell me not to worry that some of the world’s best players—Dame fits a model with MVPs like Allen Iverson and Steve Nash—have been some of the NBA’s worst defenders. They just kinda need to do what they do. Let ‘em cook.
The NBA's new tiers of contention
Joseph Casciaro, The Score
5 rookies (Yang Hansen!) who look like steals during NBA 2K26 Summer League
Bobby Kalbrosky, For The Win
My Five Least Favorite NBA Transactions of the 2025 Offseason Thus Far
Above the Break
Damian Lillard is Headed Back to Portland
Dustin Brewer, Hoops Daily
Three Things I Noticed In Basketball
Jack Zucker, Jack’s Thoughts
Thunder’s Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren deals among NBA’s best under-the-radar moves
Fred Katz, The Atheltic
TEAM NEWS
ATL: Not even Summer League skeptics can ignore what Kobe Bufkin is doing right now
Maxwell Ogden, Soaring Down South
ATL: Hawks continued their home run offseason with an under-the-radar signing
Bradley Rowland, Fansided
BOS: Celtics' Hugo Gonzalez learns a crucial lesson he'll take from Summer League
Bobby Krivitsky, Hardwood Houdini
CHI: Yuki Kawamura's summer league performance will force Bulls to make tough decision
Austin McGee, Pippen Ain’t Easy
CLE: Inside Dan Gilbert’s unprecedented commitment to Koby Altman and the Cavs’ long-term vision
Chris Fedor, Cleveland.com
CLE: Cleveland Cavaliers Offseason Review: The Retrofit
Hardwood Paroxysm
CLE: ‘He could play meaningful minutes’: Terry Pluto on why Nae’Qwan Tomlin could be a Cavs Summer League success story
Terry Pluto, Cleveland.com
CLE: How the NBA’s second apron is forcing the Cavs to face their mortality
Chris Fedor, Cleveland.com
DAL: WATCH: Cooper Flagg at point guard? How Mavericks used No. 1 pick in NBA Summer League
Esfandiar Baraheni, The Athletic
DEN: Cam Johnson? Jonas Valanciunas? David Adelman’s got Nuggets team Michael Malone always wanted. He better not blow it
Sean Keeler, The Dener Post
From here on out, DA, it’s business time. Adelman salvaged the spring admirably. He hopped onto a moving train and kept it from careening into the play-in round. He survived the Clippers, then pushed the best team in basketball — the Oklahoma City Thunder — to seven games with a beat-up roster.
Fast forward seven weeks, and DA’s got more tools, sharper tools, in his shed to play with. And fewer excuses. The Nuggets’ VP tag team of Jon Wallace and Ben Tenzer, on paper, knocked their first try at Jokic Era 2.0 out of the park, flipping two bad contracts (MPJ and Dario Saric) into four good players.
GSW: Warriors draft pick Will Richard looks like a steal after NBA Summer League
Monte Poole, NBC Sports Bay Area
MIA: Spoelstra and staff studying what went wrong for Heat, as East evolves: ‘Everybody is motivated’
Eric Spoelstra, Miami Herald