The Weekside: Olympics and healthcare are coming to save the NBA summer

Kevin Durant decided to join the Golden State Warriors on July 4. He interrupted sportswriter barbecues across the land to share the news, and the world was abuzz for a week to come.

That’s how great KD is and how gobsmacking his decision was. Not many sports stories, these days, can capture the news cycle for more than 24 hours. Durant did it for much, much longer.

But everything fades and so, too, did The Decision 2.0.

Since then, the NBA has been a dull affair, by and large, with Tim Duncan fading quietly into retirement — via press release, of course — being the only news casual sports fans might care to know. We are in the dog days of July, after all, where there’s nothing new to discuss and only time to wait until the Olympics begin.

Maybe Mark Cuban was correct when he advocated stretching the season later into the summer. To him, baseball isn’t really a rival for ratings, so why not push the season back a little, avoid some overlap with football leagues and NCAA basketball, and be the only game in town awhile longer?

“I’d rather us go later in the season into July,” the Mavericks owner told ESPN in 2015. “Used to be, we had to be concerned about baseball. Now we don’t.”

Cuban’s ideas are far from becoming reality, though. Maybe someday.

Still, there have been a few things happening this month that are, under the radar, worth paying attention to. If you’ve checked out on the hoops world, here are a few things worth knowing.

DeMar DeRozan Almost Started WWIII

Toronto Raptors swingman DeMar DeRozan tried to take the media’s attention away from the political conventions dominating the news cycle by making an international declaration of war. Not since Vince Carter leaped over the immortal Frederic Weis have we seen someone clad in red, white, and blue so flagrantly disrespect a member of a foreign basketball team.

Up by about a half-hundred, DeMar got the ball on the break and tried to 360-dunk on a real, live person. He just barely missed. For which we should all be thankful. Had he converted this and-one monster jam, Beijing would have had no choice but to launch its ICBMs before DeRozan even got a chance to take his free throw.

Crisis averted.

Which is nice, because other than a minor calf strain for Paul George, Team USA has cruised through its warmup period in the lead up to 2015 Olympics in Rio.

Jimmy Butler ain’t scared of no stinkin’ mosquitos, but the results of the exhibitions against China suggest everyone else going to Brazil should be very afraid of the hoop hordes swarming in from the United States.

Even without LeBron James, Steph Curry, and some other high-profile stars, it looks like Squad Rock, Flag, and Eagle will roll to the gold.

People Won’t Get Better at Free Throws

The excellent Tom Haberstroh of ESPN did a deep dive into the realities of free-throw shooting, analyzing release angles, shot mechanics, hand size, and “the yips.” The takeaway: It’s basically all mental, and practice alone cannot overcome people’s in-game inability to make easy, uncontested shots.

Chris Ballard of Sports Illustrated, in his must-read book The Art of the Beautiful Game, detailed a similar story with a similar conclusion, honing in on Nick Anderson, one of the only famous non-big-men to have mental block when it comes to shooting flat-footed 15-footers.

Both leave the reader with basically the same conclusion: For whatever reason, there is  something within our social, human brains that make some of us unable to complete simple tasks in certain high-pressure situations. This is encoded into our minds, and is very, very, very hard to overcome. Which is to say it has almost nothing to do with basketball.

So yelling at tall people to “Just make your free throws” is essentially the same as saying “Why is your brain different?”

Number one, never do that. Number two, this problem isn’t ever going away. Number three, change the damn rule already, because I have no interest in having my favorite sport continually turned into the most boring televised activity imaginable simply because coaches (often incorrectly) think that committing intentional fouls can give them a tiny numerical advantage towards winning.

Retired Players Now Have Healthcare Coverage Through Players Union

In a monumental move, the NBA players’ union has approved a measure that, from this day forward, guarantees anyone who has played at least three seasons in the NBA can get health insurance.

The Chris Paul-led union unanimously approved a measure that will ensure all eligible players can enroll in a NBPA UnitedHealthcare plan that includes medical, hospital, and prescription drug coverage. What’s more, the coverage would only force them to incur “modest out-of-pocket costs for deductibles and co-pays,” per the union. Players with seven or more years of service get the same benefits with “even lower out-of-pocket costs,” while those with 10 or more years can include their family in the plan.

The union says this is unique among North American sports leagues, with Paul himself saying he was “proud of his fellow players for taking this unprecedented step to ensure the health and well-being of our predecessors.”

The influx of new money — the same windfall that led to a $150 million payday for Mike Conley — is helping fund the initiative. But the plan, which improves coverage access for 1,500 retired players, has been in the works for some time, and should only cost the union up to $15 million per year, according to a report by Zach Schonbrun of the New York Times.

The NBA Left North Carolina

Adam Silver’s NBA has become committed to standing up for the values it boasts about in press releases. Which is a lot rarer than it sounds.

Almost all companies routinely parrot easy-to-say lines about diversity and inclusion and supporting the military and curing cancer and taking your vitamins and eating fruits and vegetables and being nice to animals and every other no-brainer stance that essentially every human takes in public.

Few money-making enterprises actually do much about it, however.

But Silver’s NBA rooted out the racist scourge running the JV team in Los Angeles after David Stern let that cloaked, festering internal wound continue to inflict damage on the league for decades. The expulsion of Donald Sterling was quick and definitive. A few years later, as the racial discourse in the country has become even more elevated, the banishment of Sterling seems less monumental. Still, Silver’s unwavering stance — in public, anyway — was remarkable to see. It was an outcome few expected in the initial days after TMZ leaked audio of the owner’s troubling remarks.

Silver threw down a similar gauntlet when he made the decision, bolstered by growing concerns from within the league ranks, to move the All-Star Game. His initial message to the state of North Carolina never seemed like a threat. He was simply informing decision makers there of his plans should the status quo remain. Then, after trying to encourage change, he did what he said he would do.

After months of clearly and publicly espousing his league’s beliefs, Silver pulled the NBA’s showcase weekend from a state that passed laws counter to those values. That kind of organizational backbone may not be unprecedented, but it absolutely deserves respect.

Two-and-a-half years after taking over for Stern, one thing has become increasingly, abundantly clear: Adam Silver’s league is unlike any league — or any NBA — we’ve ever seen.

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