![[SI] Matas Buzelis Feels the Difference for the Bulls After "Extremely Hard" Year 2](https://external-preview.redd.it/fo1dQphP7Hr3Ez28fZ3ExLYJui3qXY3SeZa_q3H95UQ.jpeg?width=140&height=78&auto=webp&s=1fbd61f0a6b3591c33d31a6ebad36d0ef5be993b)
Pretty interesting comments from Matas on how different things feel now. He called last season “extremely hard” and said:
“There was no type of rhythm. We didn’t know who was playing. We didn’t know how we were going to play.”
Then on this year: “Now, there is going to be more structure. Everyone is in a role. And you know what you’re going to get every night.”
The jersey Jordan wore in Game 3 of the 1998 Finals just sold for $12.26 million. That breaks the previous NBA jersey record, which was also Jordan: his Game 1 jersey from the same Finals sold for $10.1 million in 2022. Game 3 was the famous 96-54 Bulls win over Utah
The NBA is making off-arm push-offs by offensive players a point of emphasis for 2026-27. Basically, refs have been told to pay closer attention when an offensive player extends the off arm to create separation or move a defender. It’s not a new rule, just stricter enforcement of an existing one.
As always with these preseason points of emphasis, the interesting part will be whether they’re still calling it this way in January.
NBA Official’s already did the work with two explainer videos.
Ben Golliver’s ESPN article for some additional context
11 NBA seasons, all with the Milwaukee/St. Louis Hawks
1955 Rookie of the Year
2× NBA MVP (1956, 1959)
2× scoring champion
11× All-Star
10× All-NBA First Team
4× All-Star Game MVP
1958 NBA champion
50 points in the title-clinching Game 6 of the 1958 Finals
First player in NBA history to reach 20,000 career points
Hall of Fame, NBA 75th Anniversary Team
One of the defining players of the NBA’s first great era. RIP legend
Still one of the craziest rookie games ever.
Jennings had 0 points after the first quarter, then went for 10 in the second, 29 in the third on 12/13 shooting, and 16 in the fourth to finish with 55 against the Warriors.
It was only his 7th NBA game. He broke Kareem’s Bucks rookie scoring record and, at 20 years and 52 days, became the youngest player ever to score 50.
Pretty wild
"15. Orlando Magic
Something has to give here. Orlando has the league’s third-highest payroll, a monstrous tax bill, and, not for nothing, zero above-average offensive seasons since Barack Obama was first elected president. Jamahl Mosley was replaced by first-year head coach Sean Sweeney this year. Maybe he will turn everything around. But on the personnel side, Orlando’s answer to a wildly disappointing campaign was … to bring back Nikola Vucevic? What? If Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner, Desmond Bane, or Jalen Suggs gets moved before the trade deadline, don’t be surprised. "
One of the best rebounders of the ’80s. On a per-100-possession basis, his rebounding numbers were right there with Moses Malone.
He had his own little fan section with the Warriors, Larry’s Local 13, and they used to wear construction hard hats because Smith was so limited offensively and could throw up some serious bricks at the line.
He was in the ROY conversation in 1981, was Bob Myers’ favorite player growing up, and had a huge playoff run in 1987 under George Karl (he gave a young Karl Malone all kinds of problems in the Utah series, which ended up being one of the worst playoff series of Malone’s career).
Smith was always pretty low-key with the media, but he stayed in basketball for a long time after retiring, including about a decade as an assistant under Rudy Tomjanovich in Houston.
Also, “Mr. Mean” has to be one of the better nicknames of the ’80s.
You basically never see his name anymore, even though he was a fan favorite in Golden State for almost a decade.
https://deepbenchchronicles.com/2026/03/21/larry-smith-mr-mean/
I went back to Darryl Dawkins’ 2003 autobiography, Chocolate Thunder: The Uncensored Life and Times of Darryl Dawkins, while researching his career recently, and I’d forgotten just how completely unfiltered this book is.
It was co-written with Charley Rosen, but Dawkins’ voice is all over it. He talks very openly about sex, drugs, race, money, teammates, coaches, his own laziness and bad decisions, and pretty much anything else that comes to mind.
And he definitely doesn’t try to make himself look good.
He can be hilarious, petty, wildly biased and occasionally completely unreasonable. He takes shots at guys like Robert Parish, David Thompson, John Drew and others, and he seems capable of turning almost any basketball story into a discussion about race or sex. But once you accept that this is Dawkins telling the story exactly the way he saw it, it becomes incredibly entertaining.
There’s also a lot of genuinely useful NBA history in there: the late-’70s Sixers locker room, the 1977 Finals, his relationship with Billy Cunningham, the broken backboards, the Nets years, injuries, drugs, money problems, Italy, and obviously all the Lovetron/Chocolate Thunder mythology.
It’s basically the opposite of a polished, carefully managed athlete autobiography.
I ended up using it heavily while researching a piece on his career, and I tried to work quite a few excerpts from the book into the article for anyone who wants to go a little deeper:
I was doing some research on Tony Massenburg and randomly came across this book, which I somehow had never heard of (published in 2018)
Massenburg was actually a freshman at Maryland during Len Bias’ final season, while Walt Williams grew up in the area idolizing Bias before eventually playing at Maryland himself.
From what I can tell, it’s not really another conventional Len Bias biography the focus seems to be more on what his death did to the Maryland program and to the players who came through it afterward, including Massenburg and Williams.
Has anyone here read it? And did you even know this existed? I’d genuinely never come across it before.
I was looking back at the Vancouver Grizzlies and it’s kind of crazy how quickly the whole thing was over.
They joined the NBA in 1995 and were gone by 2001. Their best record in Vancouver was 23-59.
Obviously they made plenty of bad decisions themselves, but the conditions they came into the league under were pretty brutal too.
For their first season, Vancouver and Toronto were only allowed to use 66% of the salary cap. And for their first 3 years they weren’t allowed to get the first pick in the draft, even if they won the lottery.
Vancouver actually won the lottery in 1998 and still had to pick second because of that rule. They ended up with Bibby, so it didn’t exactly kill them that year since the Clippers took Olowokandi, but it’s still a pretty wild restriction to put on an expansion team that was obviously going to need the draft to build anything.
Toronto had to deal with the same rules, of course, but Toronto was already a much bigger market. And then they got VC at basically the perfect time. Vancouver never got that guy.
Instead they had 6 straight losing seasons, Bryant Reeves getting hurt after they gave him a huge contract, and then the whole Steve Francis mess in 1999. They took Francis #2 and he made it pretty clear he didn’t want to play there, so they had to trade him before he ever played a game for them.
On top of all that, the Canadian dollar was terrible at the time. The Grizzlies were bringing in a lot of their revenue in Canadian dollars while NBA salaries were paid in US dollars, and the exchange rate was absolutely brutal for them in the late 90s. That was a problem for Toronto too, but again, Toronto had the bigger market and then Vince Carter basically saved their ass.
And it’s not like Vancouver had no support from the start either. In their first season they drew about 16,000 fans a game despite going 15-67, so the interest was there. But after years of losing with basically no sign of things getting better, attendance obviously started dropping. By the time they finally started putting a few decent pieces together, the crowds had fallen off, the team was losing a lot of money and the new owner was already looking at relocation.
Then they move to Memphis in 2001 and immediately get Pau Gasol.
I’m not saying Vancouver was secretly a great organization. They drafted pretty badly, made bad contracts and never came close to winning.
But six years still feels incredibly short for an expansion franchise, especially when the league made it harder for them to build through both free agency and the draft right from the start. Minnesota is a good comparison: they went through seven straight seasons with fewer than 30 wins before they even started to show some signs of success in the second half of the 90s.
So yeah, that was just my little thought for the day. I don’t really see Vancouver getting an NBA team back someday. I just think that six years is incredibly short when you’re talking about building a franchise, and that the whole project was almost killed before it ever really had a chance to get going. That three-year restriction on getting the #1 pick was unique to the two Canadian expansion teams, by the way. Previous NBA expansion teams hadn’t been subjected to anything like that.
I’ve always put TC in the same group as Shawn Kemp, KJ, Mark Price, and even Laimbeer when it comes to notable HoF omissions (+Larry Nance?). Especially when you look at some of the players who are already in, like Tim Hardaway, Richmond, Webber, it’s hard for me to understand why Chambers is still on the outside.
He has 20,000+ points, 4 All-Star selections, 2 All-NBA teams. and won the 87 ASG MVP. At his peak in Phoenix, he averaged 26 points in 1988-89 and 27 the following season, helping the Suns reach back-to-back WCF. Obviously his case isn’t perfect he never made a first team, never won a championship, and his absolute peak wasn’t especially long. But when I look at some of the players who have made the Hall over the years, I have a hard time seeing TC as clearly below that line.
I dug pretty deeply into his career a while back, including the Hall of Fame question, if anyone wants the longer version:
https://deepbenchchronicles.com/2026/06/06/tom-chambers-slam-mullet/