Basketball Intelligence for 8/30/23
The day's best basketball reporting and analysis
LEAGUEWIDE STORIES
These NBA Stars Demanded Trades. They’re Still Waiting.
Robert O’Connell, The Wall Street Journal
The NBA salary cap wasn’t for fans. Then Larry Coon made it famous
Tim Cato, The Athletic
Sure, Coon’s FAQs won’t provide every single intricate detail. “If you need to figure out how many hotel days a (player) gets when he’s acquired, Larry might not cover that,” McNair says.
But the CBA is less a single coherent document than it is a series of Band-Aids and adjustments applied over decades. Many rules reference other clauses, explained hundreds of pages prior, which makes it difficult for the document to be read cohesively.
Coon’s explainers, while still dense, knit together all these regulations into single blocks of digestible information. Even front office executives have found value in that. “There were moments where it became obvious that this wasn’t just a resource for fans,” Rube says. “(That) it and he had become a resource for teams.”
INTERNATIONAL BASKETBALL
2023 FIBA World Cup Day 5 Recap: Canada, Germany, and the Dominican Republic finish undefeated in the first phase
Andrew Bernucca, Fansided
Watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander take over at FIBA World Cup is reminiscent of Steve Nash in 2000
Doug Smith, Toronto Star
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