NBA season has tough act to follow after turbo-charged summer

Kyle Lowry explains how Kawhi Leonard’s desire to win is making it easy for him to fit in with the Toronto Raptors.

The NBA never really stops, but now, finally, it starts again.

Few leagues have managed to fuse entertainment and drama and competition as expertly as the world’s best basketball league, even if some of it is by accident.

The league’s best players are off-court icons with designs on more – LeBron James as a Los Angeles Laker was never just about basketball – while the franchise-altering power of superstar player movement is at a dizzying, all-time high and the league and its players enjoy a celebrity halo effect across music, Hollywood and fashion.

All of it is turbo-charged by social media, where the NBA reigns supreme.

And that’s just the off-season.

The most buzz-worthy sport pulls in eyeballs from non-traditional fans at rates most leagues can only envy without alienating the hardcore follower charting after timeout plays. Come for Russell Westbrook’s wardrobe choices, stay for the triple-double and who knows what he’ll say after the game to throw more gas on his ‘feud’ with former best bud Kevin Durant.

On Tuesday night the ball goes up on the 2018-19 season. Things get real and fans and media and players can enjoy a nine-month breather when there are actual basketball games being played as distractions from everything else.

The players – like fans – can’t wait.

“It’s exciting. It’s a new season. Changes, a lot of things happened in the summer, so it’s like a ‘going back to school thing,’” said Toronto Raptors forward Pascal Siakam, who grew up a soccer fan in Cameroon so was late to the 24-7 nature of NBA fandom, and sometimes can’t quite believe what he’s gotten into.

“It’s always fun, man,” he says. “… It’s never normal.”

If there has been a flaw in the NBA’s formula it’s that as the off-court storylines have grown more convoluted, the basketball itself has been too predictable lately. Thanks to a quirk in the collective bargaining agreement and timing of a new TV contract that unleashed a flood of money into the league in the summers of 2015 and 2016, the Golden State Warriors have been able to build and retain a dynasty, with three titles in the past four seasons.

They remain the prohibitive favourite to win their third straight this coming June and their fourth in five years.

But even if everyone feels like they know how the story will end, the plot twists along the way keep you glued.

A sampling heading into this season:

• How will four-time all-star and occasional enfant terrible DeMarcus Cousins mesh with the Warriors in a one-season cameo once he recovers from his Achilles tendon injury?
• What will happen in Boston now that Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving are fully healthy, squeezing minutes and shots from a young core that thrived in their absence?
• Markelle Fultz was drafted No. 1 overall by the Philadelphia 76ers, lost nearly his entire rookie season due to a mystery shoulder injury and then saw the man who traded to draft for him – former 76ers general manager Bryan Colangelo – fired because of a scandal over anonymous social media accounts. Will a healthy Fultz be the final stage of ‘The Process?’
• The drama in Minnesota now that Jimmy Butler announced his determination to be traded with a metaphorical blow torch, especially now that he doesn’t appear to be traded any time soon.
• How will the San Antonio Spurs integrate DeMar DeRozan in San Antonio and how will Kawhi Leonard tolerate the minute-by-minute tea leaves reading about his future with the Raptors?

As players it’s not necessarily cool to announce yourself as hanging onto every NBA story that trends on Twitter – although the way emojis fly from players’ accounts when big stories break suggest more do than they care to admit — but there’s no sense in pretending that even those whose job it is to play in the league can’t easily ignore the drama.

“I don’t get caught up in it, but I hear about it. It’s impossible not hear about it, unless you’re Kawhi,” said Siakam, laughing about his notoriously offline teammate. “Then you wouldn’t know. If you have social media, it’s impossible not hear about it.”

“I’ll be watching the Lakers, obviously, all the changes,” said Siakam. “What is DeMar going to do in San Antonio, and you have friends, so I want to follow what’s going to happen with [former Raptors big man Jakob Poeltl] and I’m excited to see what is going to happen in the East: how is [76ers star] Joel Embiid going to develop?”

[relatedlinks]

Danny Green spent last season in the middle of one of the NBA’s longest off-court dramas as a witness to the slow and (externally) confusing divorce of Leonard from the Spurs.

“San Antonio was tough last year,” he said. “Minnesota, I’m sure they’re going through some stuff right now. That drama is interesting, wondering if Jimmy’s going to go, going to stay; how they’re going to play if he does stay. What if he does stay and doesn’t play?

“Regardless, Minnesota is going through a lot of stuff right now and I can understand because we went through more than a little bit last year. So if it’s in and around your organization, you get caught up in it.”

Does he understand why everyone else does too?

“It generates people’s attention,” Green said. “It’s not something we purposely try to do, I don’t think. It just happens and it gets blown out of proportion sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t — sometimes it is what it is. But that’s the stuff people want to read and people want to hear. People love to gossip.

“That’s why reality TV is big – people want to see the problems people are having and feel normal about themselves. And hey, whatever people find entertaining, cool.”

[snippet id=3360195]

A worthy question may be how new it all is, or has it always been the reality of life in a highly demanding, highly scrutinized profession that’s spilling out more now due to a social media savvy generation of fans and players alike.

Raptors sharpshooter C.J. Miles came into the NBA as a teenager, back when email was still in common use, and his head coach in Utah, Jerry Sloan, collected tractors.

Times have changed, or have they?

“Well, there were a lot of crazy guys in the league back then,” said Miles, who is beginning his 14th season. “People didn’t know about it because there was no social media, but there was so much stuff that went on that people will never know, and stories you heard through the grapevine even on my team that I would never repeat, but now they might get out there because of the social media age.”

Miles’ wife, Lauren, a former Division 1 player herself, has one of the more slyly funny Twitter accounts out there and the three-point specialist realizes that even if – as he says – he doesn’t want to get drawn into the league’s never-ending storyboard, it’s a challenge.

“If it’s not affecting my team, I don’t even know about it,” he says.

What about Butler?

“Well, yeah. I heard about that. How could you not?”

Let the games begin.

When submitting content, please abide by our submission guidelines, and avoid posting profanity, personal attacks or harassment. Should you violate our submissions guidelines, we reserve the right to remove your comments and block your account. Sportsnet reserves the right to close a story’s comment section at any time.