Free agency is always a busy time for NBA blogs, and longtime followers will know that I–as someone who has spent the last six years in college, and then in graduate school with a day job teaching–have heavily weighted my blogging efforts towards the summer period.
So, July 2020, with not much going on except for waiting, is weird for me. I’m used to spending the first week of July with long hours on phone calls, writing up the constant news that comes in, and running scenarios to try and be prepared for whatever news might come in tomorrow. During this time, I regularly monitor Twitter for news for 12+ hours a day, writing late at night until I pass out and waking up the next morning to discover I’m already behind on the new day’s news.
July 2019 was agonizing, because as the Clippers, Lakers, and Raptors all courted Kawhi Leonard, free agency felt like it drew on forever without any answers. Sure, the Clippers made smaller deals around the periphery, but the real intrigue as to whether the Clippers would make the leap to contender by signing the reigning NBA Finals MVP was unanswered.
Late on the night of July 5th, I had finished another such day: 12+ hours keeping track of the latest rumors and scuttle, preparing myself for various outcomes. We had articles written for immediate publication if Kawhi chose each of the three teams in contention. On a phone call earlier in the week, someone I spoke to had mentioned that the Clippers were looking at Paul George to be Kawhi’s sidekick–I wasn’t even spending time on a possibility I considered absurd.
So, as it neared 2am (remember that I lived in New York at the time) on Friday, July 5th, 2019, I brought my dog into the bedroom for the night, turned off the lights around the house and got into bed. Before I could reach over and turn my bedside lamp off, my phone experienced what I will melodramatically describe as an eruption.
News of Kawhi’s choice had just broken on twitter.
Naturally, I got out of bed.
Then, after some celebrations and quick blog post or two, I sat down with Dr. Shap and Robert Flom to record perhaps the most jubilant Clippers podcast in history with a dizzying sequence of high-profile guests from the Clippers’ press room and LAC Twitter. The episode also featured us taking a shot with each guest that arrived on the show, so it perhaps tails off a bit near the end of the feature-film length episode, but it was all in good fun.
Click here for the episode if you’d like to relive the joy on today’s anniversary.
