Here’s everything David Thorpe and I have been talking about watching every first-round series.

PANIC

HENRY Over the weekend in a couple of Game 3s, the Wolves had to play without Anthony Edwards and Donte DiVincenzo and the Spurs had to play without Victor Wembanyama. Both the Wolves and Spurs won.

It was the best possible outcome for those teams. Think about how much more robust they are for the rest of the playoffs knowing they can win competitive games with players like Stephon Castle, De’Aaron Fox, or Ayo Dosunmu leading the charge? This is how you build trust in your teammates, and this is how you treat, almost medically, the anxiety attack that is Tom Thibodeau, and so many coaches, who only believe stars can lead you to wins.

Those games were a little reminder: take a deep breath. There are many ways to win games.

The people who were desperate for Wemby to play in Game 3 … I personally found the idea they’d play Wemby so crazy. The guy, he didn’t nick his elbow, right? Yeah, he didn’t have a contusion. He has a brain injury. How sick do you have to be not to care about that? And by the way, if he gets another concussion, oh, it’s all sorts of problems for the rest of his life.

HENRY Obviously, he played in Game 4 and played well. But to my eyes he fell down a lot more than normal, which is in keeping with some research Tom Haberstroh found. Also, betting on Wembanyama to just shake off the rigors of this game has not worked so well in the past. It’s hard on a body to be that tall! He had a stress fracture in 2020, and a bunch of ankle and calf issues, before he missed half a season to deep vein thrombosis.

DAVID Let’s protect his unique body! So what if it costs you a game! It’s not the first one to one, it’s the first one to four. You have to think bigger picture on this kind of stuff. One word that I get a lot from from NBA players when we talk this time of year is panic. Coaches panic, players panic, the grizzled veterans tend not to. It’s amazing that coaches panic, considering they’re the oldest of all of them, but they feel so pressured.

HENRY To me, it’s categorically stupid for the owners to wind coaches up in that way, right? And it’s categorically stupid for the coaches to think they can get the best out of their players. Screaming and yelling might make you a better athlete for say, the last 20 meters of 100 meter dash or whatever. Mindless rage doesn’t do nothing. But it is not going to be the best way to handle a two-and-a half week tussle with an elite opponent where you have to think a lot, recognize the defense, and make smart winning decisions.

DAVID I couldn’t agree more. Honestly, I drill this in myself. If there are two minutes left on the microwave timer, I’ll determine a little list of tasks to get done in those two minutes, and then it’s my task not to get sped up, to get the cup of tea ready or really tie your shoes nicely or whatever it is. You can’t let the clock overwhelm your thinking.

CAVALIERS-RAPTORS

DAVID Toronto plays absolutely terrible offensive basketball. Can’t make a shot. They’re missing Immanuel Quickly, so they’re starting Ja’Kobe Walter who missed all 11 3s he attempted over two games and 13 in a row. With Jamal Shead, they combined for two points over 53 minutes. But they won.

My first thought: that was a game, not a series victory. When you’ve won two, you have to get to four. And Cleveland’s at home in Game 5. They are overwhelming favorites. But the feeling in Cleveland, I’m sure, is Armageddon. Oh my God, we lost two straight to Toronto even though they’re without Quickley and can’t make shots. Jarrett Allen was bad in Game 3. They’re probably thinking “we’re the worst ever.”

But a Game 5 win on Wednesday and they can close this out and move on—that’s the mindset. I saw Donovan Mitchell appear to say to a teammate as they walked off the court “we’re OK, we’re OK.” That feeling needs to resonate. Cleveland has to shake the feeling of “we should have swept these guys.” The focus should be on finding ways to win Game 5, that is it.

Donovan looked so hurt and tired in the game every time he scored. I kept thinking my god, he’s a magician. It sometimes looks like he’s laboring to get back on defense. He’s carrying a big load. His effort to save the ball as it rolled out of bounds when the game was over, goodness that was awesome to see. That’s a guy who’s just, he’s all in. I love that. And so I would not be surprised to see him, and the Cavs, play fantastically in Game 5 because of that voice saying “we’re OK.” Of course it would help to get better play from James Harden and Allen!

Did you see Raptors coach Darko Rajaković after Game 4? He went to the locker room like it was a WWE event. I loved it, because American players see him as kind of a weird European. But here’s where they’re aligned. And you know what? His guys play hard as fuck, man, hard as fuck. They’re so physical. I think Darko has done for the Raptors what J.B. Bickerstaff did in Detroit. They draft for toughness much of the time and then Darko gets it out of them.

Colin Murray-Boyles wasn’t drafted top five, he was taken ninth. He’s not as skilled as a lot of guys. He’s not as long and tall as some guys are playing his position, but he has the heart of a freaking warrior.

HENRY And Darko plays him!

DAVID Exactly my point. This team is mirroring the personality of their best player in Scottie Barnes, and this playoff experience will help them grow that way.

HENRY I’m happy that this team is built this way, because they will develop. They probably won’t have another 53 minutes with two points from two players like that, right? Those guys will have great offseasons and figure it out.

DAVID Right. Or those spots will go to other good young players. The 905 won the most games of any team in the G-League this year, 37-13.

HENRY They’ll figure that out, which is cool.

But also part of me is like: this might be peak Scottie Barnes. Kinda like Giannis at a certain stage. And he’s on a shitty team, which is too bad. Maybe he’ll still be peaking in three years when these guys are ready to run with him. But he’s incredible right now. He’s guarding the best player, and competing so hard, and wow what if he got to play with someone like Donovan Mitchell, you know? Toronto’s rebuild might be mistimed for Scottie. It’s kind of sad.

DAVID Getting Brandon Ingram was probably a gigantic mistake. I mean, he’s a bucket getter, but not an efficient one. They’d probably be better off not spending that money. Meanwhile, it’s not the same management crew. Scottie’s superpower is an incredible feel for the game, combined with unbelievable motor and physicality. So he’s got to improve his skill game, because he isn’t Giannis. He’s big, but not that big. And you can’t just always bully. He and Colin Murray-Boyles are in similar boats. If they can really get to be skilled players, they can improve so much.

NUGGETS

DAVID This has become a very disconcerting series, reminding me of the Raptors 2019 title win over the injured Warriors. Up 3-1, but without sharpshooter and spirited leader Donte DiVincenzo due to a blown Achilles, and superstar Anthony Edwards owing to a bone bruise and knee hyperextension. The Wolves were very unlikely to win on the road at altitude. Denver was missing do-it-all forward Aaron Gordon. It’s become a series of “does it matter now?” as both teams seem very unlikely to be in position to upset the Spurs in the next round (yes that’s a prediction).

But Nikola Jokić gave us all a gift. It would be easy to expect the oft-frustrated mega-star to try to channel his inner-Kobe and carry his somewhat listless team to at least one more win at home. Instead he handed out 16 assists and took 15 shots, and finished with 27 points, 12 rebounds, and 16 dimes. Many of his assists were garden variety, simple dribble hand-offs that enabled his shooters to get good looks.

Others were more a trademark of his passing gifts, like the dime to Hardaway Jr. at the millisecond Rudy Gobert tried to switch back to Jokić. There are very few players who ever played that could make this kind of read and pass.

Win or lose this series, it seems Denver has to retool. More athletes. More dynamic defenders. More size inside. The Joker is still in top form, let’s see if ownership and management can keep up. (Keep reading for my Pistons/Nuggets trade idea.)

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The first note is that the 48 hours the NBA mandates concussed players to sit out is not a science-backed amount of time to heal.

“While [the two-day layoff] is understandable,” Nowinski said, “I don’t know if the NBA has gotten burned yet by having a 48-hour rule. The day will come when someone returned too soon and has a second injury, whether to a brain injury or a lower extremity injury, because their balance was off or reaction time was off, or moving in a way they wouldn’t have moved otherwise.”

For a 7-4 center who slaloms like a guard around a forest of defenders, the potential for a downstream injury can’t be ignored. According to a 2021 study, NBA players were almost five times more likely to sustain an acute lower-extremity musculoskeletal injury within 90 days of return-to-play following a concussion compared to players who did not suffer a concussion.

That makes me think about this video:

That’s a then-college soccer player who grew up training at the facility, P3, that I wrote a book about called Ballistic. I’ve seen NBA players ooh and aah over that video—it’s perfect jumping.

What I hope you’ll notice is the title that someone at P3 gave this video: “nervous system training.”

This gets to the core of what I learned in my years researching and writing this book. Injuries, by and large, are not caused by tissue and muscle things that we can find on x-rays and MRIs. They’re most commonly caused by how we move, which is abundantly clear to everyone with a giant database of athletic human movement. That’s where the gold is.

I lived this. In the middle of writing Ballistic, I fell victim to a debilitating shitstorm of lower back pain. I could barely drive a car or sit at a desk. And then, long story short, P3 assessed me, figured out the movements that were causing my trouble, and assigned me rigorous and weird new training that within a year made me feel good enough to compete in Hyrox, if you know what that is.

A lot of my training, and the training for everyone at P3, is low-key brain training. Watch how that guy lands in that video. His toes are up, he’s landing on the balls of his feet so that the force of impact passes swiftly and efficiently into the big strong built-for-it tissues of his Achilles, calves, quads, and (importantly) glutes. A great many of us move … oddly … so that the force of landing gets misdirected to little backwater tissue that can’t take it.

One of my troubles was not to bend at the hips much, which shunted landing forces that might have been absorbed by my glutes instead on up the chain into my lower back. The MRI showed the destruction.

Many athletes have some twisting of the long bones, or strange foot position, which across thousands of athletes, tracked for years, reliably contributes to risk of major injury.

But of course, you can’t just stare at a row of boxes and decide to land well. You can’t elect not to let the long bones of your legs rotate, nor to suddenly get into your hips on landing. Those things are managed by your nervous system, at speeds faster you can think. (In fact, thinking hurts the process.)

You want to just move freely, and have your nervous system do those things competently.

The training, then, is to change your nervous system, to build new pathways, over time, like learning a new language. I put my hips through an incredible array of vocabulary lessons, movements and activities, and then slowly began running and jumping differently. It’s fun.

It’s also why this concussion news makes sense. In one sense impaired neurological function is the cause of the vast majority of injuries! The training to reduce injuries is largely brain training, so it makes sense that brain setbacks could come with setbacks all across the brain’s body-wide sphere of influence.

Thank you for reading TrueHoop!

The players are doing their part to make the NBA playoffs spectacular. I don’t want to talk about anything except V.J. Edgecombe and Scoot Henderson!

But the antics of the dang billionaires are a persistent stain on the NBA. Here’s a ranking of Epstein-affiliated teams in the NBA playoffs:

76ers

• Josh Harris was an analyst at Drexel Burnham Lambert and co-founded Apollo Global with Leon Black, who funded Epstein’s operations for years.

• For reasons that have not been explained, Jeffrey Epstein emailed Leon Black’s assistant to say that he was arranging for Josh Harris to pay her $2.4 million.

• Harris met with Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates for an “intimate” breakfast at Epstein’s house. It was scheduled to last two hours, afterward Epstein emailed to ask Harris if he had fun.

• The money behind Harris comes from Apollo Global. The money behind David Blitzer, Harris’s partner in sports investments including the 76ers, comes from the Blackstone Group. Blackstone is a complex firm run by Stephen Schwarzman, whom Epstein knew, invited to dinner, and called “terrific.”

• There’s a lot more in this TrueHoop story.

Nuggets

Substack has hosted breathtaking investigative journalism over the last few months, with brilliant people stitching together insight from the Epstein documents from the Department of Justice. Two stories stand out:

• Kait Justice on the Deutsche Bank files that Epstein and Steve Bannon were utterly convinced would end Trump’s presidency, and

• Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on defense and intelligence implications of Epstein’s New Mexico property.

Both are must read; if you haven’t, please don’t delay.

And then note that Nuggets billionaire Stan Kroenke is in both.

In support of Kait Justice’s work, I researched and published a list of the biggest clients of the business unit at Deutsche Bank that attracted so many Epstein-connected people, including Donald Trump and Carl Icahn. Near the very top of the list, in terms of assets invested with Deutsche at the time, was Stanley freaking Kroenke.

And it’s even creepier when you read Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s story which traces the commingled origins of the American intelligence and defense industries, and the people connected to both who bought up ranchland in New Mexico with proximity to the two major sites of America’s nuclear weapons industry. A focus of that story is a man named Henry Singleton, a major defense contractor and massive landholder, including a ton of land adjoining Epstein’s ranch. It turns out the Singleton family recently sold most of that land to … Stanley freaking Kroenke.

How it all fits together is unclear, but Kroenke is certainly traveling in some iffy circles.

Knicks

James Dolan inexplicably built an intelligence-grade surveillance infrastructure, staffs it with former CIA and FBI officers, and is sitting on a trove of surveillance material that could be used for just about anything that billionaire wants. And that billionaire’s empire was financed by the same machine that produced a CIA Executive Director on the Apollo board, a former Drexel trader running the Pentagon, and the deep pockets that funded Jeffrey Epstein’s operation.

Hawks

Tony Ressler was a senior vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the high-yield bond department. He left when Drexel collapsed in 1990 and co-founded Apollo Global Management in 1990 alongside Leon Black, Marc Rowan, and Josh Harris—using Credit Lyonnais money to buy distressed Drexel bonds at fire-sale prices. Adam Silver’s college roommate at Duke, Jim Zelter, runs Apollo as president. Ressler left Apollo in 1997 to co-found Ares Management. Leon Black, who funded Epstein, is married to Anthony Ressler’s sister Debra. Anthony’s brother Richard was also an associate of Epstein. The word “Ressler” appears 487 times in the recent Epstein file dump. Reportedly the most successful investment in the history of private equity–Lyondell Basel–was a collaboration between Ares, Apollo, and oligarch Len Blavatnik.

Rockets

Tilman Fertitta comes from a family with well-documented historical mob ties.

Fertitta himself made his fortune from investing in hospitality properties like Landry’s restaurants and Golden Nugget casinos. Donald Trump appointed Fertitta as U.S. Ambassador to Italy.

But Fertitta’s most interesting ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s world come through his good friend Richard Handler, who runs Jefferies. Handler was a 28-year-old trader at Drexel when it collapsed in 1990, and has a career that has intertwined in interesting ways with Leon Black and Carl Icahn. The word “Handler” is in the Epstein files almost 700 times.

Handler and Fertitta have a well documented friendship: Jeffries served as lead underwriter when Fertitta financed the Rockets purchase with $1.4B in bond sales, bought his yacht in 2024, and they co-founded the SPAC Landcadia Holdings (the name is evident part Landry’s and part Handler’s Leucadia).

Thunder

A lot of TrueHoop’s investigation into the dirty money around Epstein has focused on A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, a former CIA executive who was on the board of Apollo Global when Apollo founder Leon Black funded Epstein’s operation. The thing is, Buzzy has been on a lot of boards—often in companies where Carl Icahn is a big investor. Starting in 2014, Krongard was a board member of a Chesapeake offshoot called Seventy Seven Energy. In the years to follow, McClendon got in legal trouble, and then died driving his Chevy Tahoe into a bridge embankment. I’m not sure anyone has explained to the public how it all fits together, but I do know that this guy Buzzy connects the Thunder’s ownership group, Apollo Global, and the CIA. Read more about all that here.

Lakers

The Lakers are now owned by Mark Walter, who made his name at Guggenheim Partners. Guggenheim formed in 1999 and quickly became a big player in the world of sports investing—but it always seemed to exist in the shadow of Michael Milken, whose Drexel Burnham formed the network and defined the methods that made Apollo Global successful. Indeed, the SEC investigated and fined Guggenheim $20 million for failing to disclose that Guggenheim president Todd Boehly had taken a $50 million personal loan from Milken while Milken was under a lifetime securities industry ban. The SEC found Guggenheim “breached its fiduciary duty” to clients. Mark Walter and Boehly used Guggenheim insurance company funds (at least $300 million) alongside their personal capital to buy the LA Dodgers in 2012. Government regulators investigated the insurance fund arrangement but declined to act. Guggenheim is mentioned here and therein the Epstein files.

Thank you for reading TrueHoop! Here is a guide to the whole TrueHoop Epstein investigation.

What a breath of fresh air! And what a travesty the end of the season was by comparison. This is the NBA when guys are fucking trying, defending everywhere, all over the court.

NBC loves to show their stuff from the nineties, when NBC was the NBA, right? And I’m sure it’s not the intent, but what they’re showing most of the time is eight guys standing around, one guy dribbling with another guy guarding him. No one’s really guarding anyone outside 15 feet.

And then we revert to today’s live action, and guys are moving everywhere, guys being guarded everywhere, all over the court. It’s so physical.

I talked to a player who played Sunday, and he watched all the games on Saturday, just kind of getting the flavor of the intensity of the games. We talked about the refereeing and my thought was: it was the same. It was relatively physical, to a point where you weren’t totally sure when they might call a foul. If you hit a guy in the face, you’re probably called for a foul. If you hit him on the arm with your hand, it’s gonna get called a foul.

But there’s a lot of body contact. There are a lot of scrums where there’s just no call, which means it’s intense and tough. That’s just the reality, which is what I thought was predictable. They don’t want these games going three hours.

So yes, Shai got 17 free throws, and Jamal Murray got 16 free throws. And a few guys had, you know, 10 or 11 free throws. But if they had used the old whistle from four or five years ago, those guys were getting 20 or more.

Jalen Suggs sniffs out the lob to Jalen Duren, breaks the pass up, then races to recover the loose ball near the sideline. Then Franz Wagner did what he did all game, and just bullied a dude for an And One.

This is playoff basketball. It’s like the regular season, except everyone’s doing the opposite of tanking. Everyone is very invested.

Not every player can handle that. We can go back just a little bit, to the Charlotte-Orlando Play-In game. Did you know the three biggest losses in Play-In history all feature Charlotte?

LaMelo Ball has grown and changed, and he’ll keep growing. But to my eyes, he still doesn’t have that. He hasn’t gotten that level of Ali versus Frazier, where they both almost died from overheating, and kept fucking answer the bell for the next round, because fuck you, fuck you, I’m fucking fighting.

That’s the level of playoff basketball. It’s pushing yourself into uncomfortable territory.

I remember talking to a former high school player of mine who played in the NCAA Final Four in the 1990s, one hour after they lost, hugging him after a heartbreaking last second loss. I said to him, how does it feel? You’re this guy no one expected this from who made it so close to the top of the mountain, leading your team in scoring in the Final Four.

He answered sweetly, “I’ve never been more tired in my life.”

And that’s playoff basketball. I was so proud of the product this weekend. This was a flare being shot into the sky, Adam Silver, and the 30 billionaires, you must fix this disastrous problem of these players and these coaches appearing in listless games. The last three months of the season, the ship isn’t just sinking; it’s leaking oil and it’s on fire.

And I don’t want to go on too big a tangent, but I’m worried that the results of whatever they’re going to do is going to mean coaches are going to play their best players more and not develop young guys. The answer is not to bench 22-year-olds for 33-year-olds. You can do both, fight to win games and still play future starters.

A second observation was about the degree of talent, skill, and athleticism on display–it was just extraordinary. This is Game 1. Everyone but the Play-In teams has had a week off. You’re challenging people everywhere. You’re flooding the rim with bodies. There was marvelous play making and shot making. There were some stretches in the Hawks-Knicks game where I thought “oh my god” as someone took an incredibly tough shot, and they just kept fucking going in.

The way the Thunder rally to drives yet keep their structural integrity on the perimeter is incredible. In general, teams flooded the first box well, offenses need to counter with more second box targets in Game 2. There were a couple of stretches in the OKC game where I wanted to grab an Ajay Mitchell defensive possession and send it to the whole world. Just unbelievable defense. He also made his first three 3s, which is always nice.

When Karl-Anthony Towns is “Angry Kat” the Knicks have one of the best inside-outside duos in the NBA.

I just couldn’t help but notice the level of Karl-Anthony Towns’ play. That was just a man possessed. He was angry, ornery, you know? If he showed that kind of shot making and driving in the eighties, it would shut the arena down. What? A seven-footer plays like this? His shot making, his competitiveness. And Atlanta is giving it right back.

Deni Avdija is a fearless driver with rare agility for his size. The Blazers only had one guy play great, but for a new playoff team on the rise, it can build around that guy.

Another thought: How many players were impact players on their team and were basically given up on by a previous team?

• C.J. McCollum was important for Atlanta, and has been important for Atlanta, and he’s 34. This is not about “we should give old guys more chances.” Normally, we give them too many chances. But I mean, he was left for dead. And now he matters in the playoffs.

• How does Minnesota not find a way to keep Nickeil Alexander-Walker?

• Deni Avdija is 25. You can build around him. He can fucking score and lead, and he’s the boss of that team. His next deal is max, and he’ll deserve it.

Teams misread their own personnel all the time.

I’m going to pass along some information that I don’t see as news. I have no idea what the truth is. I just know these are insiders telling me this. But I’ll tell you that in my circles, between the players and agents and people who I talk to constantly, it’s taken as fact that Jamahl Mosely is a done deal to leave Orlando to become the next coach of the Pelicans. He and Paulo never get along, and you’re always going to fire the coach before you fire the player, right?

And the other one is Jayson Tatum and Jalen Brown are done. They aren’t gonna play together anymore after this season–one’s definitely winning. That’s what everyone has been telling me.

Okay. Meanwhile, the two most impressive wins of the opening weekend of the playoffs were the Magic and Celtics. Brown and Tatum combined for an efficient 51 points.

You just never know when a team’s going to catch fire, and then … do you really want to break it up?

I remember in 2006 Udonis Haslam called me so upset that they were tied with the Bulls going into Game 5. He was so surprised how selfish the team had gotten, because the team was so connected all season. He was saying all season that he’d never been on a team at any level with that kind of connectivity—they’d go all fifteen guys to see a movie. And he’s like, so shocked at how the team was reacting to the stress of fighting the Bulls.

And my only advice was simply, one game at a time, you never know when your team’s going to catch fire. They won the next two in Chicago, the beat the Nets in five, they beat the Pistons in six, and then they won a championship against the Mavericks.

I’m not predicting that kind of run from the Magic or Celtics, but you can’t rule out a remarkable run and then how easy would it be to make a big change?.

The Pistons, for example, didn’t jump a level up. It’s possible, maybe even probable, that they are feeling themselves. I don’t think they looked flat. I think they look the same. But Orlando raised their level of fight. The announcers kept talking about Jalen Suggs, how could they not!

And JB Bickerstaff, I thought, was just so focused on the referees. I have no idea what he was saying on the bench or whatever, and so it’s unfair for me to castigate him fully. But I just felt like he was spending so much energy bitching to the refs. I wanted him to focus on the Pistons! Not that Coach K never yelled at referees, but I always loved his philosophy of “talk to Duke.” He was always telling his team, let’s focus on ourselves, building each other up, helping each other problem solve. And he definitely worked referees too, but, but he was never Bobby Knight, there were no throwing chair incidents. He coached his guys up. Phil Jackson coached his guys up. I feel like JB needs to coach his guys up. He’s in a war. This is a big, rugged, physical fucking team they are playing.

And the only one that isn’t really big and physical is a tall, skilled, very controlled Anthony Black. He’s not going to beat you up physically, but the fucking guy is Mozart.

Mozart was born to play the piano, obviously. But also: his dad was a famed piano teacher, yeah. So no surprise, it’s this very gifted person, he’s born to a farmer, we have no idea what would have happened. But born to a teacher and we have a legend.

Anthony Black is Mozart, and he’s got a coach who, at the very least, pushes him to play beautiful basketball.

As LeBron James is the fastest and strongest 41-year-old on earth it can be easy to forget he’s a genius playmaker. His 13 assists showed that, at least for one game, he can still carry a team in the playoffs.

THE SECOND BOX

Let’s keep trying to get good shots. That’s the game of NBA offense. It seems to me that too often there was too much focus on getting to the rim. I can tell you firsthand from players themselves who don’t like the philosophy of only taking dunks and 3s, because against some teams when you get to the rim the defense is such that there’s nothing there.

This is the entire reason why I invented the second box theory: to give my guys a target that they could play with when teams are so focused on flooding the rim.

The most basic part of the Art of War is to attack where your enemy is not. If the opponent has done an amazing job of protecting themselves against archers, and you feel like, okay, we’re gonna go to hand-to-hand combat. Well, your guys better fucking know how to attack that way, or it doesn’t matter. You have to practice and be ready for the moments where the best shots available aren’t what is typically considered high percentage, and if you are good enough at them, they are certainly better than highly contested dunks and 3’s. .

You’ve got to train for it. OKC is very comfortable with it (plus they’re not playing a team with great rim protection).

But a lot of these other teams were going to the rim, and they just had nothing there. Instead of just stopping on a dime and shooting that 12-footer when you’ve got the open space, you just rush to the rim and there’s a gigantic, athletic, coordinated dude waiting for you. And so I bet we’ll see a pivot. I bet we see a trend of a lot less of that as the playoffs unfold. Plus, getting to the second box means every teammate is just one pass away(as opposed to what we call “two passes away) when a ball has to travel a great distance). So getting to that spot earlier in possessions can unlock a good shot elsewhere.

And then, of course, the counter is when teams start sending their help up the floor more, into the second box, now that guy is running towards me instead of waiting for me. Then we can see about attacking the rim, as the defender is more vulnerable farther up into the paint.

The other thing I’d add is that for contenders, it’s a blessing to have a feisty opponent right now. It’s better to be more tested in the first round, because you’re practicing solving problems and playing with more intensity.

We just went through the worst two months of NBA basketball in recorded time in terms of how often teams were trying to win. It’s not that anyone is going out there trying to miss shotsInstead coaches aren’t necessarily coming up with their best strategies to win when they don’t want to win. The joke is a guy that’s heavily left handed that you only run screens for them to go right. That mentality is infused into everyone on the team. All-Stars aren’t playing as if their hair is on fire when they know nobody cares if they win. It affects everybody.

This first weekend was a challenge to ramp up. They did it in terms of effort and execution, and maybe their shooting suffered. The playmaking was amazing. Execution suffered, as you might expect. And I think that’s going to come around a little bit. Teams get more comfortable playing with uncomfortableness, because they’ve done it. And they’ll have to play with a bench. You’ve got to give the bench players time to let them perform in the playoffs.

So many players impressed me this weekend. Nickel Alexander-Walker, LeBron, Chet, Karl-Anthony Towns. Jalen Suggs. Franz Wagner. Wendell Carter Jr. Deni Avdija. Scoot Henderson—I don’t know how talented of a playmaker he is. I think his stats suggest that he’s good. I did not think he was great last night, but I was very impressed with his power and speed coming in. He just got to play his first playoff game and I thought he was good.

Victor Wembanyama hit a 3 in isolation a few possessions earlier, and went 5-6 from 3 in the game. Good gosh almighty. But this is where he is most dangerous, screening and rolling, because his shooting touch from 3 causes all sorts of problems for defenders who are not sure what to take away. My guess is, the Blazers will prioritize taking away these shots in Game 2.

I thought Wemby’s approach was great. I just found him to be so dialed in. He really plays like a Zen master. I mean, he is a cauldron of competitiveness, but I feel like he controls it really well.

Chet Holmgren made an unbelievable 3 at the end of the quarter. It was almost like Christian Laettner’s famous gamewinner. Chet just looked super composed. Again, tell me what seven-footer was doing that the 80s? These players are amazing.

Nuggets vs. Wolves was a popular pick to be the West’s best first-round battle. Denver’s defense has not been great. But Jamal Murray took it on. He drew ten fouls in Game 1, including this one on defense. His fight to stay in front of Anthony Edwards was rewarded, and he really took it personally.

Nikola Jokić got a triple double, but I thought he had to spend a ton of time on his teammates. His vocal coaching is very obvious. I worry Jokić is going to be out of gas because of all the coaching he’s doing on the court. He looked frustrated to me at times with some of his teammates’ decisions. He’s a good teammate. It looked to me like he wanted to yell one time at Christian Braun for something, and then he just picked him up. I feel like Cam Johnson pissed him off a couple of times.

Some coaches would say this effort by James Harden was risky and lazy. I just know that they need him to make plays on D, be a fighter, and not a target. He had an OK Game 1, and when Donovan Mitchell is cooking, 22 and 10 with two steals is plenty.

Cavaliers vs. Raptors was an interesting game. Toronto actually shot well (13-27 from 3) and got thumped. That isn’t common. I thought Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen had a little edge to them, which is super important. Harden was just in control. It helps that Quickley didn’t play; it’s really kind of a mismatch there now.

The Knicks had KAT locked the fuck in. They’re a team that crushes the offensive boards, because of Mitchell Robinson, but only had six, Brunson did not shoot well, and they still rolled. Brunson just has that swagger of, oh, I know how to do this.

Desmond Bane has shown some real abilities to lift that team up. He’s an angry guy. I don’t know where it comes from. That’s not what I’ve heard about him. But he’s had a couple different flare ups. You’re not going to bully Detroit, but Bane is bringing something that matters to Orlando.

Franz Wagner just bullied people. He’s a fucking huge guard. I thought he just out-physicaled guys. I very much enjoyed watching the world’s best players compete the way they competed.

You know what I didn’t see? Hero ball (except from the Sixers). Instead there was lots of ball movement, lots of player movement, lots of pace, not just in the full court, in the half court, lots of Indiana Pacers/OKC Thunder style. On the court, in the playoffs, the league is in a good place.

Thank you for reading TrueHoop!

Friday we learned from Noah Shachtman and Robert Silverman of WIRED and Pablo Torre Finds Out that Madison Square Garden is an antsy little surveillance state controlled by the never-likable little dictator James Dolan and, unfortunately, his highly competent and aggressive security team led by a guy named John Eversole, who reportedly posted the photo above.

They documented an 18-page report on the movements of an innocuous fan around the building. They documented the private texts of security freaking the hell out as some fans started chanting anti-Dolan phrases. They documented security tracking children, Charles Oakley, and many others. And they documented that, despite Dolan’s saying it was all to stop terrorism, in fact the Garden is not coordinating with law enforcement on anything like that.

As explained by those great journalists, it’s creepy as hell.

As I heard it, the better part of a decade looking into dirty billionaires, intelligence, Jeffrey Epstein and the like–it’s perhaps even creepier.

Schactman told Torre: “I had one tech exec say to me that [Eversole] was a quote unquote badass who could quote tell the NBA and the NHL what to do, not the other way around.”

Yup. When John Eversole worked for Symantec, part of Broadcom, they published a brochure that said this:

An Army reservist and former Marine, John ran security for the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff; he was the personal bodyguard for a U.S. secretary of defense; and in the corporate sector he directed personal security for one of the richest CEOs on the planet.

One online bio of Eversole suggests that CEO must have been Larry Ellison, head of Oracle.

That’s an interesting name. In an earlier TrueHoop post, I declared that the most important thing in the Epstein files happened in the private wealth division of Deutsche Bank. And here’s a 2013 email to from that group’s executive Chip Daulton saying that Lawrence J. Ellison is an “active client under Russ Daulton.” Daulton is in all kinds of public records as a Deutsche banker. So it certainly appears that Ellison banked in a small niche of the banking world with Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Black

Ellison has become the controlling owner of TikTok, a major federal contractor, and a vocal champion of a surveillance state who reportedly told investors:

We’re going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.

Summarizing: Madison Square Garden is a surveillance state, where anyone perceived as an enemy of James Dolan’s can be tracked, banned, or dealt with by an elite security veteran who thought it was cute to post a picture of a cat and a gun on a bed.

And that’s before you get to the bad stuff.

James Dolan is rich because of his dad, Charles Dolan, who built a cable television empire. But the way he built it was tricky. He kinda built it twice. The first time, he got deep into debt and lost everything but a small outfit on Long Island. Then he got creative about the financing, and eventually roared back to dominance thanks to billions in junk bond financing from Michael Milken and the disgraced Drexel Burnham Lambert.

That might carry implications. If you’ve been reading this Epstein series on TrueHoop, then you know that a lot of NBA and Epstein-affiliated people emanated from Drexel, whose annual meeting was staffed with young women and called the Predator’s Ball. There are credible ties to intelligence, to the arms trade, and to Apollo Global, the NBA’s most important source of cash.

In Dolan’s case, their personal Drexel banker, named Dick Hochman, joined the Cablevision board and remained there for decades (as Cablevision got in trouble for how it handled stock options). Milken and Drexel financed a huge swath of the cable industry, including CNN, MCI, McCaw Cellular, TCI, Viacom, and Time Warner. With a capital structure drawn up by Milken, the Dolan’s empire came to include Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Knicks, the Rangers, and Sphere.

And Cablevision was always weird. A 2001 New York Observer profile by Landon Thomas (who is all over the Epstein files would later lose his job at the New York Times for being so close to Jeffrey Epstein) wrote that Cablevision’s Long Island headquarters has “about as many security guards — meaty guys with blank expressions, all dressed uniformly in red polo shirts — as employees” and a security office called “intelligence services.”

It’s the cable company! Why would it need all that? And why has the Dolans’ next business followed suit with its own intelligence services?

Over the end of the 1980s, Drexel collapsed and Milken went to prison in 1990. Drexel’s alumni spread all over the finance world. Among them: Leon Black, Marc Rowan, 76ers billionaire Josh Harris, and Hawks billionaire Tony Ressler went to Apollo; Steve Feinberg went to Cerberus; and Richard Handler went to Jefferies where he became essential to the fortunes of Tilman Fertitta, Trump’s ambassador to Italy and the billionaire who runs the Houston Rockets. The Cablevision/Dolan relationship survived; Dick Hochman stayed on the board, and Cablevision’s next bank became Bear Stearns, where Jeffrey Epstein once worked and maintained strong connections.

In 2003, James Dolan and Jeffrey Epstein were part of a small group, along with several investors with Drexel ties, who failed in their attempt to purchase New York magazine.

Less than a decade later, Bear Stearns collapsed which caused problems for Epstein and his network. Leon Black’s foundation funds were kept in Bear Stearns accounts. Deutsche Bank, which had financed Steven Feinberg’s Cerberus and maintained Epstein as a client, became popular with a laundry list of billionaires, many of whom are tied to Epstein’s network.

Deutsche Bank included a unit that had once been called Alex. Brown. In internal documents it’s referred to as DBAB, for Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown. Alex. Brown had been run by A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, who long had CIA ties, and where he quickly became the executive director after leaving Alex. Brown.

And then Buzzy joined the board of Apollo Global Management board. His wife Cheryl Gordon Krongard was previously CEO of Rothschild Asset Management North America, then a senior partner at Apollo. Krongard simultaneously served on the In-Q-Tel board (CIA’s venture arm) for 15 years overlapping his Apollo tenure.

Apollo is the direct descendant of Drexel Burnham Lambert, with many of the same staff and holdings.

The Epstein files document Epstein attended the Milken Global Conference at least in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2017, and that Epstein brokered introductions using Milken’s name.

Apollo’s founder Leon Black then paid Epstein at least $158 million, which was recently confirmed under oath by his accountant.

The Drexel network always had some evidence of arms dealing, intelligence affiliation, and defense contracting. That has only become more overt over time.

Apollo has Buzzy on the board and acquired Blackwater.

Cerberus subsidiaries include DynCorp and Tier 1 Group.

People disappear far too often, especially when they have powerful enemies. It’s a byproduct of lawlessness, and some people wielding unchecked power. An incredible example of this, of course, is journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed and sawed into pieces, which we know because there’s an audiotape of the exchange that you can hear if you’re so inclined. I listened to some of it, and was blown away by the idea that the head of Saudi Arabia has a team of men who clearly were not doing this for the first time.

And then it emerged that team had been trained by Tier 1.

Who else have they trained?

In 2018, Cerberus honcho Steve Feinberg was appointed to chair Donald Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which meant a private equity billionaire got classified intelligence while remaining CEO of a massive player in the defense space. Cerberus was a Deutsche Bank wealth management client. In March 2025, Feinberg became the deputy secretary of defense, overseeing huge defense expenditures.

And so it’s in that context that in 2018, MSG Entertainment began deploying facial recognition technology at Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon Theater, and eventually Sphere. LinkedIn shows that former FBI agents, CIA officers, and NYPD detectives join the Garden security staff.

Like his dad before him, a billionaire inexplicably builds intelligence-grade surveillance infrastructure, staffs it with former CIA and FBI officers, and is sitting on a trove of surveillance material that could be used for just about anything that billionaire wants. Surveillance is powerful. And that billionaire’s empire was financed by the same machine that produced a CIA Executive Director on the Apollo board and a former Drexel trader running the Pentagon.

Is this a story about NBA fans and the personal oddities of James Dolan? Or is it a case of sports putting a friendly face on a scarier tale of a ruthless effort by a small group to use their money and leverage to become untouchable?

During the Arab Spring, the governments in Moscow, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi began to sweat. Digitally-organized mobs dragged dictators through the streets; at one point 120,000 people were amassed at the Kremlin demanding change. They reacted in many and varied ways, but especially tracking dissidents, including by placing spies within Twitter.

More than the ability to control Charles Oakley, Dolan now has a growing database of millions of people who have attended his venues. If a dictator whose cronies invest in Milken’s network needs help finding the next Khashoggi, would Dolan have his team search the database?

Another approach dictators have taken, which has been highly effective, is to invest so much in social media that they essentially own it now. (I don’t know if Elon Musk will ever make money on his Twitter investment, but I’d bet that Twitter will never work again as a tool to threaten the overthrow Putin or MBS.)

Tracking dissidents seems like a tiny thing to most of us. But it’s everything if you’re an evil dictator. And to them, James Dolan has a damn useful setup.

Thank you for reading TrueHoop!

I’m not crazy. I know the Blazers can lose to the Spurs. They just did, on April 8—by 11 points. Victor Wembanyama didn’t play against the Blazers even a single minute this season, and so of course the Spurs will be far better this coming Sunday than they were last Wednesday.

They are a 61-win team and the Vegas favorites, all for good reason. But they’re not going to sweep because the Blazers are pretty good. A few days ago, I predicted that, against the odds, the Blazers would make the playoffs, and Portland instantly made me look smart by winning a nail biter in Phoenix Tuesday night. That article contains the core rationale for my pick, which builds heavily around the idea that in the last part of the season Portland has had one of the NBA’s best defenses, starring Donovan Clingan and a collection of defenders who are high in defensive estimated plus-minus like Matisse Thybulle (99th percentile), Jrue Holiday (94th), Toumani Camara (91st), and Kris Murray (90th).

I wouldn’t be writing this except that I just read some respected insiders predicting that the Blazers will lose to the Spurs in a sweep. I think the Blazer are better than that, for five reasons:

Improved shooting

Any reasonable season preview noted that the Blazers lacked deadeye shooters. And sure enough, they finished the regular season third-worst in the league at 34 percent.

That’s a special bummer. On offense, the Blazers are only so-so … but in a particular way. They drive the ball into the paint with ease, draw a mountain of fouls, and kick out for a ton of 3s. In other words, they’re doing the work to find good looks from 3 at volume. They have an offense that’s terrible or wonderful, depending on whether or not those 3s fall.

But watching Portland play lately, it seems this team’s 3-point shooting might be improving in ways that aren’t just noise. On Basketball-Reference I learned that in 17 of Portland’s 82 games, they made better than 40 percent of their 3s as a team. They were 14-3 in those games, many of which came late in the season. There are various reasons this might not be a case of randomness.

• Matisse Thybulle over the last two seasons: 41 percent. Owing to injuries, his season began in earnest in late February.

• Jerami Grant, who made 39 percent on high volume all season, just returned from injury and hit four of his eight 3s in Phoenix.

• Toumani Camara is a career 37 percent 3-point shooter, but his month-by-month average since December has been 38, 38, 38, 38, and 43 percent.

• Scoot Henderson is a career 34 percent 3-point shooter. But evidently he had some time while rehabbing his hamstring to work on his shot, and since the beginning of March, Scoot has made 46 of 115 3s, which maths out at 40 percent.

• When the Blazers drafted Donovan Clingan they told him they thought he could develop into an NBA 3-point shooter, which looked silly when he made 29 percent his rookie year. He told reporters that he and Robert Williams III have a 3-point shooting competition every day; loser buys Chipotle. Over the last five months, Clingan has made 70 of 194 3s. That’s 36 percent … and maybe enough to lure Victor Wembanyama to play defense out there, which opens the lane for Avdija.

Is Scoot suddenly an elite defender?

The other day I wrote about the Blazers’ absurd collection of elite defenders. In the advanced stats, Scoot Henderson’s a little below average on the season. But in those same stats, he has been improving. To the naked eye, he’s a different player lately. Part of it might be that Scoot’s a fully empowered, fresh-as-a-daisy mega athlete playing against tired guys. Effective!

Many Blazers are oddly fresh

In Second Spectrum data years ago, I noticed that typical NBA players are fastest and most explosive in the preseason, and then get systematically worn down over the 82 games—which is likely why Kon Knueppel looked jaundiced and lost against the Heat and missed all six of his 3-pointers.

Meanwhile, Jerami Grant exploded off the floor to devour a crunch-time Jalen Green layup, stripped the ball on the Suns’ final possession, and hit two tough late 3s.

If Grant looked fresh it’s because he was. Grant has played fewer than 1,700 minutes this season. (Kon played more than 2,500, Amen Thompson led the league with almost 3,000). Toumani Camara and Deni Avdija have logged plenty of time on the court, but a huge number of Blazers are arriving at the postseason having spent mad time on the bench.

• Matisse Thybulle: 480 minutes

• Scoot Henderson: 748 minutes

• Kris Murray: 1,333 minutes

• Shaedon Sharpe: 1,471 minutes

• Jrue Holiday: 1,560 minutes

• Jerami Grant: 1,695 minutes

Suddenly the Blazers are ten deep

Over the last few days, Jerami Grant and Shaedon Sharpe both returned from injury. The Blazers like to play a high-energy, push-the-ball/pick-you-up-full-court style. In the middle of the season they simply didn’t have the horses to out-energy many opponents.

All of a sudden they have ten must-play players (before counting Sidy Cissoko and Vít Krejčí who both have been regulars). The upshot: Grant looked fresh in crunch time against the Suns because he only played 19 minutes.

This is how it’s going to go against the Spurs. At all times, the Blazers will have many fresh players.

Sharpe also had his moments. Under stress, the Blazers’ offense tends to be a lot of “throw the ball to Deni and pray.” It’s one tiny thing, but on a late play where Deni had been stymied by the Suns’ tough defense, Sharpe ended up sorting out the problem by driving, drawing a ton of defensive attention, and finding the open man for a corner 3 to bring the Blazers within three with 3 minutes left. Good stuff.

Playoff experience

The Spurs have very little playoff experience, all in all. David Thorpe weighs that heavily, I debated him on that point in a recent video, and there’s a good Yahoo! article by Tom Haberstroh explaining why the playoffs might be more of a young man’s game than they used to be.

But as I consider the Spurs vs. the Blazers, and who might rally everyone to keep cool heads in stressful moments, I’m aware that the Spurs’ playoff experience is mostly gathered in the minds of Luke Kornet, Kelly Olynyk, and Harrison Barnes.

The Blazers are also young and new to all this, but … not two-time champion Jrue Holiday, who is already accustomed to being the team’s vocal leader. Robert Williams III has been 20-games deep into the playoffs. This’ll be Jerami Grant’s fifth journey to the postseason. And Damian Lillard isn’t playing, but he has played in 68 playoff games and will very much be on the plane and the bench and in the locker room.

And do you know who played in 65 playoff games and won a title? Blazers coach Tiago Splitter. The Blazers are young, and sometimes can get a little tight. They are about to enter basketball’s finest and most intense finishing school, which will bode well for similar situations in the future. The learning is incredibly valuable, and sometimes painful. But on this team, I’m guessing no small about of the learning will come from coworkers who have been there, and winning—at least a game or two.

Thank you for reading TrueHoop!

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The Blazers are playing the Suns in Phoenix on Tuesday. If the Blazers win, they will be the seventh seed in the West, and face the Spurs in the first round. If they lose, they’ll fly home to host the winner of Wednesday’s Warriors at Clippers, with the winner of that game earning the right to face the Thunder.

The Blazers are pretty big underdogs right now in Phoenix, and would likely also be underdogs at home should there be a game on Friday against the Warriors or Clippers. (When the Clippers came to town four days ago, L.A. arrived as 1.5-point favorites, but lost by 19.)

I’m a Blazer fan, so write this off as homer pablum if you want. But I’m telling you right now: the Blazers are making it out of this play-in and into these playoffs, because they’re a better team now than they have been most of the season.

Here are a couple of charts:

How has this happened?

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But first, wanted to share a little something I just made with help from Claude: these are players who are on teams that are in the postseason, averaged at least 20 minutes per game, and according to DunksandThrees, are pretty darned bad either on offense or defense.

Mostly, this is the time of year for the best players. And almost all of these players are excellent. Caleb Love will probably only see time in blowouts. The Clippers’ Jordan Miller shows up as the worst player in total EPM among these players, but he has been a whole new player the last few months.

But there may still be some strategy here. The Nuggets have not one but two guards who are vulnerable on defense, and a forward in Bruce Brown who’s somehow almost the worst offensive player in the NBA. Keon Ellis has not helped the Cavs’ offense. The Hawks will pay a price in the Jock Landale minutes. And key guards for the Knicks, Cavaliers, Celtics and Heat kinda need to be rolling on offense, because their teams give something up at the other end when they’re out there.

Thank you for reading TrueHoop!

I don’t know how your YouTube algorithms work, but when I login? I tend to see a big mix of NBA highlights, pottery, and Julian Dorey’s work. I have no idea how many hours of his interviews I’ve watched. Was a real treat to meet Julian in person the other day, and to talk about the worst topic in the world …

There are Vegas lines, playoff predictors, and power indexes. Many different ways of modeling the teams that are most likely to win the 2026 NBA title.

They don’t agree, but they agree that the Thunder are the favorites, followed by the Spurs and then, in varying orders, the Celtics, Pistons, Nuggets, Knicks, Cavs, and maybe Hornets.

Soon we’re going to be swayed by the excitement of the play-in tournament and the opening games of the playoffs. Before all that arrives, I called David Thorpe to get his early look into how he sees this year’s contenders.

DAVID: OKC is a no brainer. I’d pick them over the field. Let’s say 54 percent likely to win the 2026 NBA title.

Jalen Williams is not the same player he was a year ago. But the team is better. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is sharper, unbelievably confident. He’s the best leader in the NBA. Ajay Mitchell and Cason Wallace are playing with unreal freedom and ease. Chet’s gotten better.

A lot of these teams will make up their own narratives to help sharpen their focus, and I think in Oklahoma City they feel like they’re disrespected. They’re upset it took them seven games to win last year–they were worried they were going to lose the Finals. They survived, they’ve battled through a lot of injuries this year, and now they have an edge. You’re not going to catch them unaware, and they feel like they have tiger blood.

HENRY: I almost feel like they have too many players. I don’t know what they’re going to do long term.

DAVID: They’re going to move those players to very lucky teams.

The Celtics are my second choice. Doing the math, let’s give them a 13 percent chance to win it all. They found a way to win with younger bigs Neemias Queta and Luke Garza. What Jaylen Brown and Derrick White have done, and then you throw Tatum in? Unlike everybody else, who’ll be getting tired, I think Tatum is going to find his rhythm better and better in the playoffs. As opposed to wearing down, I suspect he’s going to get up to speed.

The Pistons have not done this at all.

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Along with the Raptors, 76ers, Magic, and Heat, the Charlotte Hornets are in the thicket of East teams that’ll finish with about 44 wins.

But unlike those other teams, the Hornets will terrify their first-round opponent, because they’re only so low in the standings because they started 15-27. Since then, they’ve been one of the best teams in the NBA, with wins against the Spurs, Rockets, Celtics, and Knicks. 6-10 24-year-old forward Moussa Diabaté has electrified the starting lineup, second-year coach Charles Lee has the team fighting, Kon Knueppel is one of the most effective rookies in years, LaMelo Ball has found a new resolve, and the Hornets are certain to be a tough out.

David Thorpe and I just recorded more than two hours of an early team-by-team playoff lookahead, the bulk of which we’ll publish on Wednesday. But once we started really digging into Charlotte, it seemed pressing to publish a little something today.

DAVID: You can bet that the teams at the top of the East standings are eager to face anyone except the Hornets.

I don’t think they have a chance to be champions this year. I do think they have a chance to make a good run. This is a group that’s really figured some things out. They have a number one starting five in the league. They’ve got three high-level shooters in Brandon Miller, LaMelo Ball, and Kon Knueppel. And they’re, they just play with so much swagger and confidence.

They would be a scary first-round matchup for the Knicks.

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If the Pacers retain their pick, it could propel the franchise back into title contention two seasons after a run to Game 7 of the 2025 Finals. Indiana would have star Tyrese Haliburton back from an Achilles tear and be in position to draft from a pool of players that includes AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, Cameron Boozer, Darius Acuff Jr. and Caleb Wilson.

Oh Bobby.

Word for word, he isn’t wrong. “Could” is the appropriate word. But I could win the lottery this week, my ten-year-old dog could live another ten years, and the Timberwolves could win the NBA Finals because Rudy Gobert started to rain 3s. Not bloody likely.

It’s tempting to think an incoming rookie will immediately reverse a team’s fortunes. It’s time to take a far more realistic view, for both the betterment of our understanding of the NBA and for the players themselves.

I’m being a little unfair to Bobby, who is hardly alone. But of course in the world’s hardest basketball league, everything is hard.

It takes time and experience to account for NBA shot blockers, and this play is part of learning. When Dylan Harper is a veteran, he probably won’t drive directly into a waiting shotblocker like Clint Capela.

I had a dear friend, an NBA agent with multiple clients, say to me when JJ Redick was hired, “it’s disrespectful to you and your line of work to think someone who has never coached before would be able to do it well enough to win a title in year one.” One of my brothers told me the same thing. JJ played in the NBA for over a decade, his teams competed in 23 playoff series over those years, with his appearing in 110 games, and after his career he hosted a popular hoops podcast and was famous for breaking down film clips with fellow players or coaches. A basketball lifer, to be sure. But he had never coached before. Was he ready to lead a group of men to a title? Not a chance. So much of this you can only learn by doing.

Of course it’s true of players, too. This league is so tough that even wonderful players and coaches take some time to master it. The last 17 NBA rookies of the year average an EPM of 0.1, which is the current EPM of Trayce Jackson-Davis, Luke Kornet, or Matisse Thybulle.

• Last year Stephon Castle won ROY and the Spurs were clearly better at both ends when he sat.

• Not a single rookie was better than +0.8 in EPM in 2024-2025.

• This season the NBA has played 75 rookies and all in all they’ve done well. By EPM, Kon Knueppel has produced like Victor Wembanyama. And yet no rookie is in the NBA’s top 30 in EPM. Only one has played at least 50 games and is +1 or more. Seven are in the positive. Way more rookies (15) are -4 or or worse than are +1 or better.

• Cooper Flagg might win ROY and is the 222nd most productive NBA player.

Mercifully for Cooper Flagg, the Mavs only have six games left. But when they’re good enough to contend, at this time of year they’ll have two full months left, all against super-prepared good-to-great teams.

VJ Edgecombe is more explosive than anyone in the 2026 NBA draft—but making only a pedestrian 58 percent of his shots at the rim, which puts him in the 21st percentile. What he’s missing isn’t hops, but a hard-won ability to read the defense.

These are the kinds of things that are in my mind as I think about the idea any rookie will help the Pacers next year. The top five players in the 2026 draft class are all freshmen, none led a team to the Final Four, each would be hard-pressed to even start for the Pacers, much less improve their title odds.

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I’m a Blazers fan. There was a lot to love about Tuesday’s win over the Clippers in Los Angeles. New Blazers honcho Tom Dundon was in attendance. I only know a little about him, but I know his presence meant good riddance to the creepy Jeffrey Epstein-tied Paul Allen and his also-creepy sister.

When her former-Navy-Seal bodyguard accused Jody of purchasing form-fitting swimmies and insisting on a fashion show, her lawyers responded that it was all in good fun. She also appears to have stolen penguin bones from Antarctica. So (even though Bill Gates’ daughter is in the new ownership group) it’s a win that’s over.

The Blazers played elite defense, hit some 3s, won convincingly, and improved their odds at a good seed in the Play-in Tournament. No one got hurt. For a rebuilding team, that counts as the biggest win in five years.

But increasingly, being an NBA fan means turning a blind eye to the reality that in 2026, the richest people do whatever they want.

As someone who wrote a book about cutting-edge injury prevention, I watch every game knowing that many NBA billionaires have sent their children to train at the cutting edge movement lab P3, but not their NBA players. More players might be out there if we did things better. This game was missing Shaedon Sharpe, Damian Lillard, and any Clipper who can play center.

Earlier in the day, on a radio show they asked me why it was taking so long for the NBA to investigate the Aspiration scandal centering around Steve Ballmer and the Clippers’ acquisition of Kawhi Leonard. It’s an amazing question. When players break the rules the NBA has their punishment set in a matter of minutes, hours, or at most days.

But when billionaires do it … wow is it slow. If the NBA’s salary cap rules had been followed, Kawhi might not be a Clipper at all. Kawhi joined the Clippers in 2019. Talk about slow enforcement!

The NBA did their own investigation, and failed to see any of the many red flags. They needed Pablo Torre and his podcast to map it out for them. They’ve allegedly had their second investigation up and running basically all season. And? There’s Ballmer sitting on the baseline. This season he has shared those seats with a procession of scandal-tainted figures, including Bill Gates, Dennis Wong, and Irving Azoff.

Pablo’s radical concept is that the rules should apply to everyone; the NBA’s response seems to be along the lines of “we’ll see about that.”

With about nine minutes left in the second quarter, the NBC cameras happened to focus on the Clippers’ VISIT RWANDA jersey patch.

Rwanda is ruled by a brutal dictator who has had some policy successes and the most incredible PR. For whatever reason, Paul Kagame has been particularly embraced by the NBA.

The Clippers’ reported $300 million jersey patch deal was negotiated by a team based in the United Arab Emirates, a country which has its own logo on the NBA referees’ shirts. The UAE is a global crossroads of money laundering, arms deals, and offshore Russian money, with a history steeped in sex trafficking and BCCI.

The kinds of people who are nowadays going to great lengths to downplay their ties to Jeffrey Epstein sure do seem to love Kagame:

• Here are CD-Roms of Bill Clinton photos from his Rwanda trip with Jeffrey Epstein.

• Tony Blair wrote one of the great articles promoting Kagame’s work, which was noted in Jeffrey Epstein’s inbox.

• Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative is funded in part by what used to be called the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, before Bill and Melinda got divorced in part because of Gates’ Epstein ties.

• Michael Milken’s Milken Institute has played a leading role in developing Rwanda’s capital markets.

And Epstein’s lawyers maintain that Epstein himself knew Kagame. The 23-page letter that Epstein attorneys Gerald Lefcourt and Alan Dershowitz wrote to prosecutors in 2007, arguing for leniency for Epstein, says: “On a trip to Rwanda to inspect the genocide camps, Mr. Epstein approached the President of Rwanda and offered to help identify and then to fund two worthy Rwandan students to earn undergraduate degrees in the United States.”

So “VISIT RWANDA” was on Bennedict Mathurin’s jersey as he tumbled into the front row, knocking the famous hat off a figure from the world of fashion-or-something: Jimmy Goldstein.

In a move I now regret, I had Goldstein on TrueHoop TV once or twice ages ago. I used to think what most people watching on TV think: he’s a funky figure from another world, part of the NBA circus. Harmless.

But I’ve been around long enough to see him differently now. To most of the NBA, the point of Jimmy is that, like Epstein, Goldstein travels with women, usually models, who are a fraction his age. The way Goldstein treats women has raised alarm bells for the NBA in the past.

But even after #MeToo and the Epstein files, Goldstein seems beyond welcome. Mathurin hadn’t finished checking on Goldstein before an arena staffer came over to do the same. “The ball always finds energy,” declared NBC’s Noah Eagle. “And in this case, the ball always finds the hat of Jimmy Goldstein.”

Derek Fisher declared Goldstein “tough.”

“Oh yeah, he is,” continued Eagle. “And Bennedict Mathurin recognized it and said, ‘Mr. Goldstein, you’re too much of a legend. I apologize for even entering your space.’”

I’m not the first to suggest Goldstein has Epstein vibes. Someone, presumably a model, emailed Jeffrey Epstein in 2013: “Im in la right now. Shooting at James Goldstein house. So funny. Of course h= is here as well. Just checking us out. Im sure u know him.”

Thank you for reading TrueHoop!

A top-five painful moment of NBA history came when the founder of Seattle-based Starbucks, Howard Schultz, sold the beloved Seattle SuperSonics to some frackers from Oklahoma City. They swore they wanted to keep the team in Seattle, but soon whisked the team off to Oklahoma City, only to have their internal emails later become public, revealing that the key investors wanted to the team in OKC all along. A special heartbreak for Sonics fans is that the ex-Sonics are now the best team in the NBA, the reigning champions, and a popular pick to become the NBA’s next dynasty.

The whole episode looks creepier now.

First of all: while Seattle may hate Howard Schultz,. Magic Johnson LOVES Howard Schultz.

This clip is incredible. First, look at the backdrop: they’re speaking at the Milken Conference. Magic Johnson LOVES Michael Milken and has praised him in public many times. Magic also pops up in sports investment groups with a lot of Milken associates. Magic is in part of the Dodgers ownership group with Guggenheim Partners, which is suspiciously close to Millken. Magic is currently part of the Washington Commanders ownership group, which has its own deep Epstein connections, and is led by Josh Harris who made his money from Apollo and hasn’t well explained his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. Even more fascinating, at the end of this clip, Magic says he went to raise money from CalPERS … the very same union that made a huge investment in Apollo Global.

When I was a brand-new NBA reporter, in 2000 or 2001, I saw something that stuck with me: Magic Johnson went all out in introducing this dorky guy Howard to everyone who was anyone at All-Star weekend. He worked it. He wanted to make sure everyone met his good friend.

In 2001, that guy Howard was approved, by many of those same people, as the next owner of the Seattle SuperSonics.

I see what happened next a little differently, now that I’ve spent so much time in the Epstein files.

Read more

Ordinarily I would not publish this. But David was super brilliant, talking about the industry he founded, working directly for NBA players, helping them ascend. In this talk you’ll see a lot of what makes his players so successful. So here you go.

We talk all the time about how to rank NBA players, which gets very real on draft day. But the weird truth is that players, like all of us, are context-sensitive and evolving. I love the example of Danny Green. He was cut by the Cavaliers when they were worst team in the league, and then became a starter for the Spurs dynasty. What actually happens for Danny to go on that journey? David and I use that story as a launch point to get into the things that make players better at their jobs, from “feeling seen” to “alligator blood.”

We’ll keep messing with this, and hopefully—like David’s clients—we’ll be the best at getting better.

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