Monday Bolts – 10.12.15
Ramona Shelburne of ESPN.com: “If Durant stays, everything they’ve built here endures and other small-market teams that have tried to replicate what the Thunder have done well — teams like Orlando, Utah and Milwaukee — have the same chance. But the NBA’s new nine-year, $24 billion media rights deal with ESPN and Turner Sports complicates the Thunder’s efforts to re-sign Durant in 2016. The new revenue is projected to spike the salary cap by $20 million next summer, giving virtually every team the war chest to pursue Durant, instead of just the handful that had sacrificed to make room under the old cap. It is anathema to what the NBA and its owners fought for in the 2011 lockout and a hell of a curveball to throw at one of the league’s most successful small-market franchises. Asked how he feels about the economic shift, Presti bites his tongue and points to a magnet on his office wall that reads: forget it jake, it’s chinatown.”
Erik Horne on why you can’t watch preseason games: “So, why couldn’t a local TV network pay for the preseason games that Fox won’t air? It’s not allowed. According to Mahoney, the terms of their agreement lock in Fox Sports Southwest as the exclusive rights holder of Thunder basketball and at least 70 regular-season games annually. The rest of the regular-season games? Those are national broadcasts shown on either ABC, TNT or ESPN. Those networks are paying approximately $24 billion over nine years to air the NBA.”
Here are the Thunder’s Stance Socks.
Anthony Slater on Russell Westbrook’s post game: “Westbrook has always had rare explosion for the point guard position. But three summers ago, he started strength training harder in the offseason with his father. Then he began studying how to best channel that core power into on-court post production, emulating a couple of the craftiest low-block guards.”
Thunder preview from 538, which debuts a new player projection system.
New security at Thunder games.
David Roth of Vice: “So when Stephen A. Smith looked into the camera during Monday’s episode of First Take and windily threatened Kevin Durant for the offense of dismissing a rumor about Durant that Smith himself had authored, it was both necessary and difficult to remember that this was a real human talking. The material itself is difficult to absorb—Stephen A. has a habit of beginning sentences before he knows how they’ll end—but also the mind reels at the prospect of engaging anyone or anything that monomaniacal and overstated on a personal level. Stephen A. Smith simply refused to believe that Kevin Durant knew Kevin Durant’s thoughts more clearly than Stephen A. Smith did, and laboriously performed that disbelief in the pause-laden huffiness and barking tweetstorm syntax that are his signatures.”
