The Opening Tip

You gotta give.

1. Going forward, the NBA will not humor your pathetic little ‘city’

All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis, functionally, seemed fine. There was a court in the airport. The floor had LED lights. Those parts were pretty cool.

But something must have happened or Adam Silver must have had an epiphany, because the NBA immediately decided to up the standards for host cities by changing a bunch of rules.

Should a market want to host, it now must have, via the Oklahoman: 

Basically, the NBA said, we couldn’t really say no small cities … but, uh, yeah, no small cities, which means places like Minneapolis, which has a PATHETIC convention center with ONLY 475,000 square feet, will never even sniff an All-Star Game.

And, don’t worry, we’ll get the full story a few years from now on what happened in Indy when The Athletic runs an oral history titled ‘Sold-Out Hotels, Crowded Airports and Long Beer Lines: How Indy (Accidentally) Changed All-Star Weekend Forever.’

2. Daily GIF: Uhhhhh, ok

Since signing a four-year, $140M contract, Jordan Poole has exercised the holy trinity of bad NBA things:

He also made that pass last night.

3. Trivia

4. The Celtics are up there

Two things can be true about the 2023-24 Boston Celtics. 

They’re now 44-12 after blowing out the Bulls last night, which puts them on pace for 64-65 wins, a historically elite but not all-time great total. 

By some of those little nerd stats, though …

By net rating (point differential per 100 possessions), they are in 2016-17 Warriors territory, too:

(Side note: That’s three MJ teams in the top 10. Whose teams are missing?)

Only two of those teams didn’t win the title (the 2015-16 Spurs and Warriors), with an optimistic TBD on the loaded 2023-24 Celtics.

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