Kyrie Irving told fans at TD Garden this week he plans to sign with the Celtics long-term, and reporting backed that up. For financial reasons, he’ll almost assuredly wait until July 2019 to make it official an ink a long-term deal instead of signing an extension now. But as of now, we have no reason to believe Kyrie’s talking out the side of his mouth.
Kyrie’s future was one of two major questions about whether the Celtics would really become a new East superpower. With Gordon Hayward back and all the young players rising, if Irving had left in 2019, you might still have some doubts about the C’s. With Kyrie committed verbally for the years beyond, those doubts dissipate. The Celtics are going to be a problem for years to come, almost no question.
Romy Nemhe at CelticsBlog points out that everyone is focused on fitting in together right now in the preseason, which is a strong sign for this season -- this was the other question other than Kyrie’s plans, whether everyone could find their roles. Again, the Celtics are a huge problem for all of the teams that are not the Celtics.
Schedule Check
If you hurry as soon as you receive this, Sixers vs. Mavericks in Shanghai is on NBA TV! 7:30 a.m. ET on Friday.
Friday
Hawks-Grizzlies, 8 p.m. ET, NBA TV
Kings-Warriors from Seattle, 10:30 p.m. ET, ESPN
Saturday
Celtics-Cavaliers, 7:30 p.m. ET, NBA TV
Clippers-Lakers, 10 p.m. ET, NBA TV
Sunday
Hawks-Thunder, 3 p.m. ET, NBA TV
Jazz-Blazers, 9 p.m. ET, NBA TV
Plus lots more all weekend on League Pass.
Links Galore
Season preview season! Check out previews from all 30 of SB Nation’s NBA team blogs. You won’t regret it.
Horrible news for people who want to believe in the promise of the Thunder: Andre Roberson is going to miss another two months.
Dissecting Vlade Divac’s whiteboard. Look, it’s just bad maintenance to not clean your whiteboard for three months! If you want to keep that thing clean and effective, you’ve got to erase stuff quickly.
What is Adam Silver doing lending his good name to FIBA right now? He’s promoting the importance of national team basketball right now with FIBA’s head, Yao Ming, Andrei Kirilenko, and others. But these other folks have real incentives: Yao runs the Chinese Basketball Association and China is hosting the 2019 FIBA World Cup -- Yao would like to see the best players in the world show up for that tournament. Kirilenko (heavens I miss watching that guy play) runs the Russian basketball federation. FIBA has made some absurd reforms in international tournament qualifying and, while the youth competitive system is still valuable, it’s really odd that Silver is, for example, supporting the qualification windows that preclude NBA players from participating in. Is it because the NBA would rather its best players limit their FIBA exposure and actually like that instead of games almost every summer they’ll only play in big tournaments now?
The Mavericks hired Haralabos Voulgaris.
Here’s what we’re learning from the NCAA corruption trial. Thursday’s testimony was spicy.
LeBron gave up wine for a two-week cleanse. The MVP trophy is on the way.
Speaking of LeBron, Bryan Curtis writes that he brought the LeBron media machine with him to L.A.
For The Athletic, James L. Edwards III writes about longtime assistant coach Tim Grgurich as the Yoda of the NBA.
And finally: Haley O’Shaughnessy brilliantly reimagines NBA team as romcoms.
Be excellent to each other.