u/Left_Dance_8954

Hi Magic fans,

I wrote a historical piece about Jeff Turner, and the mods didn’t answer my messages, so I hope it’s okay to share it here. I thought it might interest some younger fans who mostly know Turner as one of the familiar voices on Magic broadcasts through League Pass.

Before that, he had a pretty interesting basketball life. He was part of the 1984 U.S. Olympic team with MJ, Ewing, Chris Mullin, Sam Perkins, and others. He was drafted in the first round in 1984, played in New Jersey, spent two strong years in Italy then came back to the NBA with Orlando.

what I found most interesting is that Turner became the first F.A in Magic history and ended up being a useful part of the franchise’s early years. never a star, but he was a steady frontcourt piece during the expansion years and the rise toward the Shaq/Penny era. Before Horace Grant arrived, he started a lot of games for Orlando, and by the mid-90s he had even become a pretty early version of a stretch big.

Here’s the piece

Small personal note: I collected basketball cards in the 90s, and his 1995-96 Fleer card was probably the card I had the most duplicates of. I think I had 7 copies of it. So I guess that’s how Jeff Turner first got stuck in my head

Hi, do you have any books on college basketball you'd recommend? especially your favorites. I've only read one, Steve Alford's book about his years under Bobby Knight, so I have a long way to go.

I randomly put this game on League Pass recently and couldn't pull myself away from it. (I'm putting a YT link here since you need to be logged into your account to watch it on League Pass.)

Jordan takes 49 shots (!!), Scott Skiles is fantastic, Jeff Turner gives Orlando some really good minutes off the bench, and rookie Shaq absolutely destroys Bill Cartwright inside. Cartwright also misses a big free throw late in the fourth, and when Will Perdue comes in for him he almost looks like Wilt Chamberlain by comparison.

And somehow that's only part of it.

The game is in Chicago and goes to overtime. With less than three seconds left in regulation, Nick Anderson hits a three from about a meter behind the line to tie it and send the game to OT.

You even get a couple of minutes of Steve Kerr in a Magic uniform playing against his future team. On the Bulls side, besides MJ being absolutely magical and knocking down fadeaways one after another, Horace Grant is really good too.

Just a ridiculously entertaining game from start to finish. If you've got 90 minutes to kill, this one is absolutely worth it.

Hi Suns fans,

I wrote a longform piece on the 1995-96 Suns, and the mods kindly allowed me to share it here.

It looks back at the last Barkley/KJ/Westphal season in Phoenix: Majerle gone, Ainge retired, Barkley already talking about retirement, the tension between Barkley and Kevin Johnson reaching its peak, Westphal getting fired midseason, Fitzsimmons returning, and Michael Finley getting hurt in the final regular-season game, just as he had been one of the few bright spots before the playoffs.

I thought it might interest Suns fans because that season feels like more than just a 41-41 year. It was really the final unraveling of the team that had come so close in 1993.

Here’s the piece

Curious how Suns fans remember that season

Hi everyone, I wrote a historical piece on the 1950s NBA and the extremely low shooting percentages of that era, and I thought it might fit this sub.

Just to be clear, I’m far from a specialist in basketball analytics, so the article stays pretty light on the numbers. What interested me more was the context around those numbers, especially after reading books by writers like Charley Rosen, or older-player testimonies in books like Echoes from the Schoolyard.

What comes through in those accounts is how different the conditions could be: rough travel, uneven or sometimes freezing courts, heavy uniforms, different balls, including old balls that were not perfectly round because of the inflation valve, and a version of professional basketball that was still figuring out what it was supposed to look like.

So the idea was not just to say that players “couldn’t shoot,” but to ask what those shooting percentages actually mean when the sport around them was so different.

Here’s the piece

Curious how people here think about the 1950s NBA, I’d be interested to know if there are other factors behind those numbers that I may not have thought about in the article.

Hi Sonics fans,

I recently wrote a piece about Paul Westphal’s posthumously published book, A Tale of Two Seasons, and a big part of it focuses on his years coaching the Seattle SuperSonics.

I thought it might interest Sonics fans because it looks back at a strange, difficult period of the franchise through the eyes of someone who was actually trying to coach it.

Here’s the piece

Curious how Sonics fans remember the Westphal years. Were they mostly seen as a coaching failure at the time, or more as a symptom of a team that had become difficult to manage? When people talk about difficult NBA locker rooms from that era, the Jail Blazers usually get most of the attention, but this version of the Sonics seemed to have its own kind of chaos too.

Also, has anyone here read his book?

Hi Jazz fans,

I recently wrote a two-part historical piece on the 1997-98 Utah Jazz, the last great Stockton/Malone/Sloan team and the other side of The Last Dance.

The idea was to look beyond the usual Bulls-centered version of that season. Utah finished with the best record in the league, swept the young Shaq/Kobe Lakers in the Western Conference Finals, and came within a few possessions of forcing a Game 7 against Chicago.

But the season was also full of tension and strange details: Stockton missing time, Malone’s frustration with contracts and conditioning, the Shaq/Ostertag slap, Antoine Carr nearly retiring, the Rony Seikaly trade that never happened, and Jerry Sloan going through a difficult year personally.

I thought it might interest older Jazz fans who remember that team, but also younger fans who mostly know the 1998 Finals through Jordan’s side of the story.

Part 1
Part 2

Curious how Jazz fans remember that season. Did it feel at the time like Utah’s best shot at a title, or did 1997 still feel like the cleaner opportunity?