First things first, an admission from yours truly: Non-pandemic NBA media days are a lot more fun for us sports scribes.
When there’s not a deadly virus getting in the way, you pick a high-profile team with the sexiest storylines, book a flight to said city and get to work telling tales that come out of those in-person reactions while remotely monitoring the other media days around the league along the way. Instead, we have this virtual reality that has been taking place all week long — Zoom sessions galore with players, coaches and team executives who, per league rules, can’t all get together to truly start training camp until Sunday.
Alas, these are the unwelcome times. And even with the drastic change in medium, this much hasn’t changed about these start-of-season sessions: Amid all the rhetoric and fluff that make up the vast majority of the group sessions, there is some substance too — if not in the words being spoken then in the…
