Webster’s World.
‘It was always basketball’: How the Raptors became family to a superfan couple – The Athletic
Bobby Webster was taken by surprise when they told him. Shahid Hadi and Samira Khan, two longtime Toronto Raptors season seat holders and Raptors 905 superfans, would miss the concluding games of the NBA Finals.
Worrying about how to break the news of their absence to the Raptors general manager is something most fans can’t relate to.
But Shahid and Samira aren’t most fans.
The Hadis rarely miss a game, let alone an important one. They’d gotten to know Raptors staff and their families thanks to their regular seats at Scotiabank Arena, just behind the friends and family section of seating near the players’ tunnel. They are fixtures beside the Raptors 905 bench in Mississauga and had watched Fred VanVleet, Norman Powell and Pascal Siakam grow from rookies into potential champions.
For Shahid and Samira, the Raptors became much more than a team. They were part of an extended family — people that were part of all of their big moments as a couple. It was a connection that grew through years of sweat and cheers, packed into the seats, giving hugs and high fives, sharing disappointments and victories with players and staff they’d come to love. Their passion for the team mirrored that of many Raptors fans who’d packed into Scotiabank Arena, Jurassic Park, and in parks and basement and pubs across Canada during last season’s championship run.
It was the kind of connection only found in being there, with others — a physical part of the collective pursuit.
But after the Golden State Warriors tied the series 1-1 in Toronto, the couple learned that they would have to skip the remainder of the series.
They’d been waiting years for a chance at a title, but there was something more important they’d been waiting for a long time, too, something that would pull them out of the country for the most important moments in franchise history.
Faction of NBA players hesitant to restart season in Orlando bubble, sources say
Players are citing a number of concerns, including family situations, the inability to leave the Disney World Resort campus, the coronavirus pandemic and the implications surrounding the emergence of social justice causes in the country, sources said. Participants in Orlando — including players — will not be allowed to leave the bubble environment without a 10-day quarantine upon their return to the Disney grounds, sources said.
Players with medical issues that might put them in high-risk categories could seek an independent examination to learn whether they would be excused from participation, sources said. Even those told that they’re fit to play would be allowed to bow out of Orlando, but without pay for the final eight regular-season games, sources said.
Players deciding against the Orlando resumption would not be paid for missed games, sources said. The league started withholding 25% of players’ paychecks on June 15 because of the force majeure provision in the collective bargaining agreement that will repay teams for canceled games.
Players who decide against participating in Orlando could be replaced by a substitution player, sources told ESPN. The NBA plans to allow replacements for players who test positive for the coronavirus or suffer injuries, sources said. Those players who are replaced become ineligible for the rest of the 2019-20 season, sources said.
NBA rookies set to make an impact when season resumes – Sports Illustrated
Matisse Thybulle, Philadelphia 76ers
Thybulle’s potential postseason impact might be highly predicated on whom the Sixers are facing. The Washington product showed a limited offensive repertoire throughout the first 57 games of his NBA career, but he had already proven to be a disruptive force on the defensive end. Per The Athletic, he made just 21 shots in 1,110 minutes of play after taking two or more dribbles. He was shooting 35% from three on just 2.5 attempts per game when the league stopped play. However, he could shine this summer against teams like the Heat and Celtics as both Eastern Conference foes have a plethora of talented wings. Thybulle was fully entrenched in head coach Brett Brown’s rotation, and if Thybulle’s Tik Tok dribbling drills pay off this summer, he could be a prime candidate to play an even more important role during his extended rookie season.
Why Raptors are well-suited to navigate NBA’s return-to-play challenges – Sportsnet.ca
The first and, admittedly, most lacklustre option is for the Raptors to seek out a player from the aforementioned free-agent pool. Any player who has signed an NBA-or-related deal this season or, significantly, in a past year, will be considered a part of that pool.
Even so, the options here are essentially the equivalent of buyout players, the vast majority of whom have an underwhelming history when it comes to making a notable mark for the team that signs them. The major difference, though, is that unlike buyout players, who are at least typically given the chance to integrate into a team’s system for the latter half of a season, free agents signed this summer would be coming directly into the fray, without any rapport having been built up at all.
Still, there are some break-glass players on the market. DeMarcus Cousins (who was working his way back from a torn ACL before the Lakers released him in February) is sure to be a name on many teams’ minds if something happens to one of their bigs, and both Jamal Crawford and J.R. Smith, two players who have consistently been brought up throughout the course of the season by a multitude of teams, continue to be available.
Of more specific interest to the Raptors, due to their understanding of the team’s system and culture, guys like Jeremy Lin (signed with the Beijing Ducks) or Jordan Loyd (signed with Valencia Basket) will potentially be options as well, although any expectation of those players to enter the bubble and be highly impactful is likely ill-founded.
A positive for the Raptors in all of this is their pliability, which all but ensures they won’t have to probe the free-agent market at all. They have plus-defenders across the board to such a degree that they have been able to successfully plug holes created by injury already this season— even when those holes are obscene (think OG Anunoby guarding Nikola Jokic in place of Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka in the last Raptors-Nuggets matchup). In almost any context, Toronto is versatile enough that it should be able to avoid feeling the pressure of needing to go after a free agent should something unfortunate happen.
Just a few months after being jettisoned by the Indiana Pacers and joining the Golden State Warriors in 2007, Stephen Jackson helped his new team upset the 67-win Dallas Mavericks in the opening round of the N.B.A. playoffs. By the beginning of the following season, Jackson had picked up a new nickname to paste over the old troublemaker label that led Indiana to trade him.
Don Nelson, the Warriors’ coach at the time, christened him Captain Jack.
“He was our leader,” Baron Davis, the point guard widely recognized as the best player on that team, said this week of Jackson.
Controversy found Jackson often during his 14 N.B.A. seasons, but teammates as decorated as Davis and the retired San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan have raved for years about his leadership, loyalty and protective instincts.
On Thursday, Jackson was back in Minneapolis for a march on the local district attorney’s office with a specific goal.“I’ve got to stay until we get convictions,” Jackson said, referring to Chauvin and the three other officers charged in Floyd’s death.
Jackson, 42, was introduced to Floyd through a mutual friend in the mid-1990s, before he was selected by the Phoenix Suns with the 42nd overall pick in the 1997 draft. The two bonded immediately over their facial resemblance — they habitually referred to each other as “twin” — and became close enough that Jackson brought Floyd as a guest to Washington in 2001 for the N.B.A.’s All-Star Weekend, where Jackson played in the Rookie Challenge as a member of the Nets.
Jackson bounced around before landing with the Nets, playing in professional leagues in Australia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, as well as in the Continental Basketball Association. Through it all, trips to see Floyd in Houston were a staple for Jackson, who furnished him with clothes in later years after Floyd moved to Minneapolis to try to restart his life after multiple arrests and incarcerations.
“Every time I watch that video, I see myself down there because we look so much alike,” Jackson said. “It easily could have been me down there: Just let me get pulled over by an officer who’s having a bad day and don’t like the fact that I’m in a nice car.”
Jackson said he and Floyd were “going down the same road” in their youth, spending time “in the same neighborhoods, in the same cars, doing the same things.”
“But I had more opportunity,” Jackson said. “The reason we need to change how people look at us and put some money into these minority areas is because there’s no opportunity there.”
He added: “If I can stand up for a change in the world and everybody coming together and standing together and making history with protests and knocking some doors down to get social justice and change some of these laws — if the president ain’t going to do it, hey, I’ll stand up and do it.”
Sports Chases a Changing America in Rush to Address Racism – The Wall Street Journal
Leagues already knew that their domestic audience was changing ahead of the year that rocked American sports. In 2018, the National Hockey League brought in a demographer to tell them what he had already told military recruiters, art directors and political consultants: that this year, the U.S. Census is expected to show that two-fifths of the nation’s population identifies with a racial group other than white; and that sometime after 2040, there will be no racial majority in the country.
The NHL was operating a broad program called “Hockey is For Everyone” in response to the need to diversify its audience or risk extinction. Then it was hit with allegations by black players of racist attacks that included team colleagues appearing in blackface. This week, two of those players formed a Hockey Diversity Alliance independent of the NHL that says it aims to confront hockey’s culture of intolerance.
Nascar’s move came two days after Bubba Wallace, Nascar’s lone full-time black driver, raised the flag issue on CNN, saying: “It starts with Confederate flags. Get them out of here.”
Nascar had also already made several visible gestures of support for Black Lives Matter. On Sunday, when Wallace had worn a “I Can’t Breathe/Black Lives Matter” shirt on the track, Keedron Bryant, a black 12-year-old whose song “I Just Want to Live” spread on social media, was invited to perform the national anthem.
On Wednesday night Wallace raced his car with “#BlackLivesMatter” over the rear wheel in Martinsville, Va., and an image of a white hand shaking a black hand on the hood, with the words “Compassion, Love, Understanding.” Nascar published an interview with him on its site in which he discussed the car, and wore the shirt again while applauding the announcement on the Confederate flag.
“Today has been special…that was a huge, pivotal moment for the sport,” he said, adding that he had had several discussions about race issues with Nascar president Steve Phelps in recent days.
Wallace was racing in an empty stadium because of coronavirus, allowing Nascar a window in which to figure out how to enforce the ban. It has said it would allow spectators back on June 14 at the Dixie Vodka 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and they will be at the Geico 500 at Talladega Superspeedway on June 21, with protocols that give it an unusual degree of control, including screening spectators before they enter and requiring them to keep 6 feet apart from each other. The first spectators will be members of the U.S. military.
We the Champs: One year since Toronto Raptors’ championship run | The Star
Doug Smith, the Toronto Star’s reporter on the Toronto Raptors talks to Adrian Cheung about the Raptors’ championship run, his memories covering the franchise for 25 years and what a restarting NBA season, in the middle of a pandemic, will look like.
Meet Raptors Uprising, the Hottest Team in the NBA 2K League | Complex
Currently on a 7-0 run to start the 2020 season, the official Raptors eSports squad is riding out the COVID-19 pandemic like many of us right now: sheltering in place, working from home, and playing a whole lot of NBA 2K. Only in their case, those last two are one and the same.
“We’re trying to make the best of it. We’re just staying safe, staying healthy. Trying to give y’all some good games to watch,” said Kenneth “Kenny Got Work” Hailey, the Raptors Uprising’s former No. 1 draft pick and all-time leading scorer, in a call with Complex during the team’s bye week.
Originally launched in 2018, the 2K League had been scheduled to kick off its third season on March 24th… until March 11th, when the NBA shut down operations in response to COVID-19—and every other professional sports league in North America quickly followed suit. Including the NBA affiliate 2K League.
“I think gamers in general were more prepared for this,” said Shane Talbot, manager for the Uprising (as well as the rest of MLSE’s eSports initiatives, including Toronto FC FIFA and Leafs Gaming). “I tell people all the time, I’ve barely been bored, despite being stuck at home, because my preference on a Friday night would be to stay in and play whatever game I happened to be playing at the time.” Which, right now, happens to be Call of Duty: Warzone—a definite favourite in the Fibe House as well.
