Championship facemasks.
NBA, WNBA to sell licensed face coverings | SportBusiness
The National Basketball Association and Women’s National Basketball Association have struck a deal with Fanatics to sell licensed cloth face coverings that will benefit charity.
Each of the major US sports properties thus far have resisted making licensed face coverings amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, believing such efforts could be seen as in poor taste. As a result, face coverings with sports team and league logos available to date at various online retailers have been unlicensed merchandise.
But the NBA, WNBA and e-commerce partner Fanatics will begin selling officially licensed face coverings produced by apparel licensees FOCO and Industry Rag on NBAStore.com, WNBAStore.com, and team e-commerce sites.
The face coverings will be available in logos for each league and their individual teams. The FOCO-made masks will be sold in packs of three for $24.99, while the Industry Rag-made items will be sold individual for $14.99.
All proceeds from the sales will be donated to Feeding America in the US and Second Harvest in Canada, charities seeking to fight hunger. Select NBA and WNBA teams will also participate in the fundraising, donating all of their proceeds from sales of the face coverings on their team e-commerce sites. Industry Rag and FOCO will additionally make additional donations to benefit the charities.
“As a global community, we can all play a role in reducing the impact of the coronavirus pandemic by following the [Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s] recommendation to cover our nose and mouth while in public,” said Kathy Behrens, NBA president of social responsibility and player programs. “Though this new product offering, NBA and WNBA fans can adhere to those guidelines in the league’s effort to aid those who have been directly affected by Covid-19.”
In addition to the CDC guidelines, numerous individual US states have made it mandatory for people to wear face coverings while in public or at a store.
“These face coverings are an important tool in this public health battle,” said Lori Nikkel, chief executive of Second Harvest.
Picture Perfect: Canadian photojournalist wins major award for Raptors picture | Times Colonist
Blinch’s picture of Kawhi Leonard’s dramatic series-winning jump shot told a complete story in one incredible image. The Toronto-based sports photographer was rewarded for his efforts this week by winning the prestigious World Press Photo sports singles top prize.
“The whole look of the photo is just people waiting,” Blinch said Friday. “Just 25 years of Raptors basketball, it almost comes down to that moment.”
On the play, Leonard dribbled to the corner of the court and let an arching shot fly over the outstretched fingertips of defender Joel Embiid.
Leonard took a few steps backward before squatting in front of the Toronto bench as the ball hit the rim. The tension was palpable as three more bounces followed.
Blinch clicked at just the right time. He captured a wide mix of facial expressions and unusual body positions from Leonard, his teammates, opponents and fans just as the ball was falling into the basket.
“That’s what I like about the picture is just that anticipation and all of the buildup,” Blinch said. “You could just see it on everybody’s face.”
The euphoric celebration began a split-second later as the sellout crowd at Scotiabank Arena erupted. The Raptors went on to win the next two series to claim their first-ever NBA championship.
Blinch, the team photographer for the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs, was working for the NBA on this occasion. He has also done freelance work for The Canadian Press and other outlets.
Shooting from the gondola is not usually ideal for a photographer due to the distance from the action. In this case, everything happened to set up perfectly.
Blinch explained that for any potential game-winner, his goal is to try to get the shooter, the ball and the basket in the frame.
He zoomed out a little bit more than usual and was ready when Leonard made his move.
“It’s the best thing that ever happened to shoot overhead like that,” Blinch said. “There’s no other angle where you’re going to see all those reactions.”
Leroux: How a theoretical salary cap drop changes the 2020 offseason – The Athletic
With so few teams using cap space even at the $115 million projection, the biggest effect is actually not on them or even elite free agents.
Since the Collective Bargaining Agreement tethers the luxury tax line to the salary cap, a drop in the cap moves the tax below what front offices have been planning, from $139 million down to about $129 million in this scenario. That shift is massive for almost two-thirds of the NBA.
An easy place to start is with teams like the Warriors, 76ers and Nets staring down tax bills even on the rosier projections. Lowering the tax line by $10 million does not impact their holdover contractual obligations at all, particularly notable for the Warriors as their four most expensive players will make a combined $130 million in 2020-21, which is now over the tax threshold. The CBA uses a progressive, escalating luxury tax so teams pay more per additional dollar of salary the further over they are. Dropping it by $10 million would make each player significantly more expensive, likely enough to make owners balk at using their full Mid-Level exception or Golden State maximizing their $17 million trade exception.
The impact of a lowered tax line will be felt most strongly by those tax teams, but the biggest effect would actually come from the other part of the equation since it involves so many more franchises. In January, I projected more than half the league would be in the area between the cap and tax but that group only grew larger at the trade deadline and then again if the cap drops.
Consider the Orlando Magic. They were a clear example of a team in this situation unless Evan Fournier opted out and left, but they looked to have the wiggle room to use the full MLE unless their retentions were much more expensive than anticipated. If the $139 million threshold becomes $129 million, their front office has much more complicated decisions to make. Their holdover players (including 2019 first rounder Chuma Okeke) will earn about $100 million, so a Fournier return plus their 2020 first round pick and minimum salaries gets them really close to the tax. Unless management is more willing to spend for a lower end playoff team, they likely do not use some or all of the MLE if the tax line goes down.
That is massive for them and the free agent market because it takes away a slot from someone without creating any additional opportunities elsewhere. This is not Whack-A-Mole or a zero-sum game because a cap/tax decrease affects almost the entire league. Additionally, this shift also moves the line for the hard cap, making it more challenging for front offices to acquire players via sign-and-trade and their full exceptions.
‘Sports take a back seat’: Why Basketball Africa League was first to cancel games – The Athletic
Commissioner Adam Silver said during All-Star weekend in Chicago, “we see great opportunity” for the BAL. Those expectations remain the same but have simply been delayed.
“This is meant to be a historic moment, starting the first professional pan-African league for the continent in partnership between the NBA and FIBA,” Fall said. “We wanted to make sure that when we do launch, we launch in perfect circumstances without having something like this hanging over us.”
In the weeks leading up to the postponement, Fall hadn’t considered the possibility of a shutdown. During an All-Star weekend luncheon in Chicago that included Fall, Silver, deputy commissioner Mark Tatum, Hall of Fame center Dikembe Mutombo, Toronto Raptors president of basketball operations Masai Ujiri and FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis, BAL introduced the colorful uniforms that were produced by partners Nike and Jordan Brand. Then, the following week, Fall was inducted into the University of the District of Columbia Athletic Hall of Fame.
“We were not yet contemplating this scenario,” he said.
But when he returned to Senegal to begin the final preparations for the inaugural game at Dakar Arena, Fall began to take notice of the approaching danger.
“We don’t live in a bubble,” Fall said. “Leading up to it, as the coronavirus situation started to rear its head, we started to pay attention and monitor the global situation and the minute that we started to have some cases in Africa, it started slow for us … and you know, you started thinking. Even before I think the case (in Senegal) was announced, we started to hear messaging from the government and the authorities about words of caution, avoiding non-essential mass gatherings.
Why a Second Wave Could Be Even Worse for Sports – WSJ
Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who is advising the Trump administration on its coronavirus policy, says he sees a high risk of a second wave in the fall. He’s been pushing for a staggered return of activities. His plan calls for gradually scaling back up again, based on the size of the gatherings and their significance, and monitoring the effects at each stage.
Mass gatherings for sports games are at the bottom of his list. The sight of fans in stadiums is contingent on a “quiescent” fall and robust system of testing and contact tracing to identify and isolate new cases— as well as measures that include fever guns, hand sanitizer handouts and masks inside stadiums.
“We could bring lawn maintenance crews back at the end of the month with very low risk, but we can’t fill up stadiums,” he said Wednesday. “I think the entertainment venues are going to be some of the last things we bring back… Sports are going to be played with no fans for a while.”
For some scientists, it’s a probability problem. The prevalence of cases is unlikely to sink low enough by this fall to host a football game without the high risk of someone infected being in the crowd. The more people in the crowd, the greater the chance that at least one is infected, and the more people the infected will be in contact with. All it takes is one game to trigger a local outbreak.
“I think the risk of a second wave is a huge risk, and you’re playing with fire holding a football game with people in the stands,” said Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington.
There are roughly 20,000 fans at NBA games and 30,000 fans at MLB games. But the average NFL game draws about 65,000 people, and the University of Michigan has one of several college stadiums that can hold the sort of enormous crowds that might become a relic of the recent past. “You’re certainly not going to put 100,000 people in the Big House,” Bergstrom said.
Another part of the fear is historical. The first wave of the 1918 flu pandemic hit the U.S. and the world hard. It was mitigated in the summer only to come roaring back harder in the fall.
“The second wave killed far more people than when the Spanish flu first swept through the world,” said Lawrence Gostin, the director of the World Health Organization’s center on global health law. “We have no reason to believe that Covid-19 will take more lives this fall and winter, but it is likely to return and will continue to have similar impacts on health, deaths, and hospitalizations.”
There are big unknowns as well. Some of these factors might end up cutting against a big second wave. But experts also suggest that what we don’t know could add up to a cycle of waves until the existence of a vaccine, which almost nobody thinks will have been developed and mass distributed by the fall.
“Will enough people have been infected in this present round to bequeath some kind of herd-immunity and so protect those who were not exposed? No one knows,” said Jeremy Brown, an emergency medicine physician and author of “Influenza.” “Does the fact that you have been infected once give lifelong or prolonged immunity, or some lesser degree of immunity, or perhaps none at all? No one knows. Will Covid-19 just go away, like so many other winter viruses do, as the weather gets warmer, perhaps never to return? Possibly. But no one knows.”
Adam Silver’s tone doesn’t bode well for NBA season – Sports Illustrated
Adam Silver held a conference call with reporters on Friday. Not because he had anything to announce. But because with the NBA Board of Governors (virtually) meeting this week, tradition dictated he should.
Silver’s update on the status of the NBA season?
“We are not in a position to make any decisions,” Silver said. “And it’s unclear when we will be.”
What about the isolation options, quarantining players in one location, like Las Vegas?
“In terms of bubble-like concepts, many of them have been proposed to us, and we’ve only listened,” Silver said. “We’re not seriously engaged yet in that type of environment.”
Is Silver optimistic the season can be re-started? Pessimistic?
“I don’t mean to send any signals about the likelihood or not of restarting the season,” Silver said. “All I can say is we’re still at a point where we don’t have enough information to make a decision … I know it’s frustrating – it is for me and for everyone involved in the NBA – but I’m not in a position to answer the question … there’s still enormous uncertainty around the virus.”
Every day that passes, every week that goes by without the U.S. turning a corner on containing the coronavirus, the chances of the NBA season resuming grow dimmer. Silver was clear that there are specific criteria that need to be met for the league to move forward. The rate of new infections has to decrease, significantly. Testing needs to become more available. There needs to be a path towards a vaccine or antivirals.
In short: The world needs to look a lot different.
“There’s a lot of data that all has to be melded together to help make these decisions,” Silver said. “But that’s part of the uncertainty. I think we’re not even at the point where we can say, ‘if only A, B, and C were met, then there’s a clear path.’ I think there’s still too much uncertainty at this point to say precisely how we move forward. The underlying principle just remains health, safety, and well-being of NBA players and everyone involved. We begin with that as paramount and then the decision tree moves forward from there.”
Silver has taken an appropriately somber tone in recent interviews. This one, though, felt more pessimistic. Dr. David Ho, a noted infectious disease specialist with a long relationship with the NBA, spoke to the Board of Governors on Friday, reiterating that there was still much that was unknown about the coronavirus. After previously announcing that the league wouldn’t make any decisions in April, Silver clarified that there were no guarantees any decisions would be made in early May, either.
“I just think as I sit here today, there’s too much unknown to set a timeline, even too much unknown to say, ‘Here are the precise variables,’” Silver said. “We know we need large-scale testing. As to the universal testing, there are different tests being proposed. They may have different uses in different situations. It goes without doubt that we have to ensure that front-line healthcare workers are taken care of before we begin talking about NBA players or sports.”
On the Coach
Let me be clear up front: I have a lot of respect and sympathy for Butch Carter. He was thrown into a tough situation, tasked with coaching for a reeling organization with minimal hope on the horizon. Yet, he oversaw Toronto’s first real basketball success, and most importantly, he was one of the few (only?) coaches in history to really challenge Vince Carter. Butch is something of a punchline now — which, yes, he brought on himself — but he was crucial to the development of the Raptors from 1997 (first as an assistant) to 2000.That said, Carter is no Lenny Wilkens. For the 2000-01 season, the Raptors needed stability, they needed a calm hand, and as was always the case in those early day, they needed credibility. They’d gained it on the court thanks to Vince and their veteran core (more on that in the next section); now they needed it on the coaching staff. To go from Butch Carter, a career assistant who never got a head coaching gig again after his implosion in Toronto to [checks paper] one of the most legendary coaches in professional basketball history is quite the jump.
Now, it could be argued that the Wilkens of the 2000s, much like a player nearing the end of his career, was not the coach he once was. There’s no denying he was not the right man to guide the suddenly declining Raptors of 2002 and beyond (or the mid-00s Knicks for that matter). Still, we’re talking about a guy who had played and coached — and player-coached! — in the NBA since 1969. Wilkens had seen and done it all, earned every accolade possible in his field, including a championship in 1979. One glance at some of the other top coaches of the day (Phil Jackson in L.A., Larry Brown in Philly, George Karl in Milwaukee, Gregg Popovich in San Antonio) makes it clear: to get to the title, a team needed to employ an experienced coach. The Raptors did just that, and it could have made all the difference.
Toronto Raptors: A Vince Carter ‘what-if’ has too many variables
The burden of Toronto had been on Carter’s shoulders. Tracy McGrady was years out from his abrupt tenure, and there was never another Robin to Carter’s Batman, with the 47-35 2000-01 season the most egregious scope of that. With Antonio Davis, Alvin Williams and Charles Oakley as the three next-highest scorers, it’s amazing to think the Raptors were just one game from the Eastern Conference Finals, and they never approached that again in this partnership.
So, let’s assume McGrady still takes that massive deal with Orlando in 2000 and Carter never flips a switch on Toronto. This remains a team in need of a rebuild in the mid-2000s, and Carter probably still takes the brunt of leading the Raptors until Bosh develops; but do they cooperate as co-conspirators? Would Carter cede a piece of his pie?
It is also lost that Carter had four years remaining on a six-year contract, so he could have ridden out the remainder of it. He potentially breaks down faster, though, with Toronto not being enough of a marquee free-agent destination to attract notable players. The biggest name signed from 2005-07: Anthony Parker.
Meanwhile, do the Toronto Raptors still go through a gauntlet of busts in the draft? Rafael Araujo was the final pre-trade pick, before Charlie Villanueva, Joey Graham and Andrea Bargnani followed. There is no telling what the final records would be or where the team falls in the draft order from 2005-07, but the former president of basketball operations, Rob Babcock, spearheaded a troublesome era in all facets. Bryan Colangelo, however, reshaped the team. Could he have fit pieces around Carter?
Basically, the Toronto Raptors would have floundered, but not absolutely cratered, with Carter around. Sure, if Bosh meshed well enough with the first face of the franchise, perhaps they find a playoff appearance and win a few games, but LeBron James was rising, the Miami Heat became a contender with Dwyane Wade and Shaquille O’Neal, and the Detroit Pistons still had an NBA Finals run left in them in 2005. Even the Indiana Pacers were on top of their game in 2004-05, pre “Malace at the Palace.”
Best shooting guards in Toronto Raptors history, ranked
3. Tracy McGrady
We start off with 6-foot-8 swingman Tracy McGrady. While he played a lot of small forward with the Raptors, we’re going to count McGrady as a shooting guard for this list because he played both spots and played more 2-guard over the course of his career.After being drafted by the Raptors ninth overall in the 1997 NBA Draft, the former Mount Zion Christian Academy High School standout had a pretty underwhelming first two seasons with the team. McGrady was just 18 when he turned pro, so perhaps he still wasn’t ready.
It was in his third and final season in Toronto that McGrady proved why he deserved to be a lottery pick. During the 1999-00 campaign, McGrady averaged 15.4 points, 6.3 rebounds, 3.3 assists, 1.1 steals, and 1.9 blocks per game. He quickly established himself as one of the fastest rising stars in the league, which is what prompted the Orlando Magic to acquire him in a sign-and-trade the following offseason. Toronto got a future first-round pick in return, which, in hindsight, favored the Magic immensely.
It was after his stint with the Raptors that McGrady became a bona-fide superstar. He became a seven-time All-Star, seven-time All-NBA member, and Most Improved Player of the Year winner. He also led the league in scoring twice. McGrady was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017.
Five NBA things I like and don’t like, including Devin Booker showing skills like Chris Paul
It’s an interesting debate: Is the MVP of Toronto’s spirited title defense Lowry or Pascal Siakam? They have played about the same number of games and minutes. Raw numbers favor Siakam. Advanced stats have Lowry by a hair. The on-off numbers point to Siakam; the Raptors blitzed opponents when he was on the floor without Lowry, but barely won the opposite subset of minutes.
But the eye test says it’s still Lowry. You can tell when one player sets the identity for a team, and the Raptors take after Lowry. They play with a certain verve when he is on the floor. They run more. The ball whips around the horn.
They vibrate with energy on defense: on their toes, on a string, rotating and switching and swiping and throwing their bodies into driving lanes. (Lowry is tied for the league lead in charges drawn with Montrezl Harrell.) It looks frenzied, but there is a calm intelligence underlying all that buzzing motion — a deep, almost subconscious confidence that you and your teammates can outthink the opposing offense.
It has been a good year for Lowry believers. He was steady in Toronto’s championship run — pass-first and deferential to Kawhi Leonard when the situation called for it, and capable of bending the game to his will if need be. His closeout performance in Game 6 of the Finals — scoring Toronto’s first 11 points, staking the Raptors to an 11-2 lead — rewrote his legacy forever. Few players have changed the perception of themselves more in one game. It was a We are not losing stand from a player who has rarely shifted into that kind of scoring gear — a player who is not really built (physically) to even have it.
Lowry truthers lived through dark times. He belly-flopped in the 2015 playoffs, though he was battling a back injury and other maladies. Washington humiliated the Raptors in a four-game sweep.
He started slowly the next postseason, shooting horribly against a long-armed Indiana defense designed to torment him. The Raptors survived in seven games, but Lowry opened the next round — an unwatchable seven-game slog over Miami — bricking away again. He finished it with 96 points combined in Games 5-7, including a 35-point masterpiece to ice the series. It was then that Lowry’s postseason story began to change.
He was solid in the next round against Cleveland, though the Raptors could never really trouble LeBron James. Facing the Cavaliers a year later, Lowry was poised and productive — one of the only Raptors who appeared up to the challenge until he turned an ankle in Game 2, ending his season early.
