Nine Takeaways From NBA Media Day – The Ringer

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Jimmy Butler has a new hairdo, Damian Lillard has a new uniform, and the Sixers have a new holdout. Most importantly, we have a new NBA season.
With media day in the books, the 2023-24 NBA season is officially upon us. Between disgruntled star holdouts and Jimmy Butler’s follicular shenanigans, it feels like the NBA is starting to build some lasting and meaningful traditions. Here are some takeaways from the league’s first word on the season to come.
It hasn’t always worked, but there is a book on how to best contain Lillard—ironically written back in 2018 by Jrue Holiday, the marquee player the Milwaukee Bucks had to give up to acquire Lillard’s services. Dame will initiate a pick-and-roll. You will blitz. You will trap. You will force him to get rid of the ball by any means, because the alternative is far less palatable. “I haven’t played against a lot of coverages where teams aren’t at the level of the screen, whether it’s showing, trapping, or just being there to where I got to get the ball up,” Lillard said during the Bucks’ media day press conference.
The pick-and-roll is its own language. Two players—ball handler and screener—possession after possession after possession, develop a code unique to their relationship on the floor. The language takes into account body positioning, movement, skill, and the almost indecipherable tells of a person that can be picked up after years spent together. The complex grammar of Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray was integral to Denver’s first championship.
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But say you wanted to construct the greatest pick-and-roll tandem in modern NBA history based solely on tools. It’s hard to imagine a pairing more ideal than what the Bucks now boast in Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Take one of the league’s most potent offensive engines with limitless range and pair him with an athletic playmaker and finisher whose dominant blend of size, power, agility, and skill can be matched by only a handful of players in history. Lillard has never played with anyone who commands remotely the amount of defensive attention that he does. As always, it’ll take some reps to improve their on-court syntax, but in this case, quality of execution may be less important than the sheer psychic torture that the action will instill:
“When I think about playing with him, I’m just trying to figure out: How do you defend it?” Lillard said. “I can’t imagine wanting him to have the ball at the free throw line coming downhill with an advantage and Khris [Middleton] on the wing and Brook [Lopez]—you know, you got really good players out there, so I’ve definitely thought about it, and I just don’t know how you handle that.”
Nobody does Media Day like Jimmy Butler does Media Day pic.twitter.com/mjCCblN2rz
Embiid on long-term commitment: “If every year is going to be the same thing, that doesn’t put you closer to winning a championship. That gets frustrating. But I also believe it doesn’t matter who’s on the team, I’m always going to have a chance to win.”
“Honestly, I would probably say, ‘I’m disappointed,’” Joel Embiid said at Sixers media day in 2021 when asked what he would say to then-teammate (although barely) Ben Simmons—who did not appear that day—about his trade request and team holdout.
Two years later, frighteningly little has changed. The reigning MVP once again had to answer for a star who was AWOL on Monday. This time: a defiant James Harden, who has all but disavowed Daryl Morey, the man who took a chance on him more than 10 years ago and helped turn him into a superstar in Houston. Harden, who was once the avatar of Morey’s vision of basketball’s future, has become an itinerant hooper who hasn’t fully reconciled the player he was with the player he is now (which is still really, really good!). Hopping from superteam to superteam hasn’t gotten Harden any closer to whatever he’s seeking; regardless, he is steadfast in his demand to be traded to the Clippers, which would be his fourth team in four seasons.
Luckily, the Sixers know the drill. With experience comes perspective, or at least the desire to not make headlines for reckless word choices. The responses from not just Embiid, but also Tobias Harris and P.J. Tucker—each of whom experienced past media day holdouts from Simmons or Harden—felt less pointed this time around compared to the Simmons saga. They leaned into genuine admiration for Harden as a person and friend and “We control what we can control” platitudes. Between the season-ending injuries to their first-round rookie talents in four different seasons, embarrassing managerial blunders, and now multiple star holdouts, the Sixers have forged an air of catastrophe in the post-Process era, with the relentless pessimism from their fan base serving as a sort of doom-insulating ozone layer. They’re all isolated incidents, surely. But then why does everything always feel like déjà vu in Philly?
“If every year is going to be the same thing, that doesn’t put you closer to winning a championship,” Embiid said on Monday. “That gets frustrating.”
… because I’m starting to buy that Simmons is no longer hurt himself.
Ben Simmons: “This is the best I’ve felt in a long time… Every day is a lot easier.” #NetsOnYES pic.twitter.com/aErnTKKMyp
Cronin, the Portland Trail Blazers general manager at the epicenter of two league-shifting trades over the past week, was soft-spoken and often contemplative, taking a few seconds to compose himself before answering questions at media day. He hardly sounded the part of the conniving puppeteer that select Heat and Blazers fans have made him out to be. And yet, one of the great joys of media day is reading quotes devoid of context and tone. Here are two things Cronin actually said:
“I told him I personally thought it was a bad idea,” Cronin told Lillard when Dame was suddenly willing to return to the team.
“I had to do what I had to do to do what was best for us,” Cronin told the media when asked about his rationale for the transactions he’s signed off on recently.
(Try reading them in Fat Tony’s voice. I find that helps add depth to the character he’s become.)
The vibes out of Denver were … serene? The reigning Finals MVP ambled into Ball Arena with his hands in his shorts and later told the media that he hadn’t touched a basketball more than a few times all summer. Aaron Gordon regaled reporters with tales of his visit to Sombor, Serbia, to get a glimpse of his altruistic captain in his natural habitat. (“His way of life is really amazing, and I can understand why he’s trying to get out of here,” Gordon joked.) Head coach Mike Malone—who spoke with the clarity of a man who hasn’t had to scream hoarsely at anyone in three months—has also taken a cue from Jokic’s general aura, noting that he left the players largely to their own devices, not wanting to “helicopter parent” anyone, trusting that they’ll come to training camp ready to defend their title.
The Nuggets’ championship run validated a paradigm shift in Denver, built around notions that Jokic has embodied in his unlikely rise: the understanding (begrudging for some) that you can be the best basketball player in the world and not be absolutely consumed by the game; that basketball is, first and foremost, an occupation; and that the NBA is really about making friends and experiences. If the author Jenny Odell—whose 2019 bestseller, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was parlayed into her 2023 book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock—hadn’t found meaning in slime molds and the lived experience of rocks on our planet, perhaps she would’ve found it in the ways in which Jokic has shaped the NBA’s best team in his image.
LeBron James has called the cavalry. Kevin Durant has guaranteed that he will play. So will Wemby. Embiid will make his decision on which team he’ll commit to soon. Murray will finally suit up for Canada. Now all we need is for Jokic to be away from his horses for juuust a bit longer next summer.
Kawhi Leonard: “Nobody is just trying to get in so many games.” Says when he is healthy, he will play.

“I’m not a guy that’s sitting down doing a load management… if the league is trying to mock what I did with the Raptors, they should stop. I was injured that whole year.”
“Want Kawhi to play more regular-season games? Maybe give him a few more days of rest between contests,” I wrote last month. “It’s not basketball that he’s trying to avoid, it’s injury.”
Pascal Siakam is one of the five best Raptors of all time (with apologies to Chris Bosh) and second perhaps only to Fred VanVleet as the franchise’s most compelling developmental success story. In just his third season, after two years of being a largely no-stats hustle big, he self-actualized into a slithery power wing who swung a Finals game and has since made several All-Star appearances and two All-NBA teams. In both background and archetype, Siakam might be the model representative of the Masai Ujiri era in Toronto. So why does it feel like the team is turning its back on him?
Ujiri came into his part of the Raptors media day presser with the party line he wanted to get across. The team was a pain to watch last season, largely because of, in his view, a selfishness that pervaded the roster. (“It’s so draining,” Scottie Barnes echoed. “Sometimes it felt like every man for himself out there.”) Every decision since the Raptors’ screeching play-in defeat has been an attempt to eradicate that funk: drafting a low-maintenance sharpshooter in Gradey Dick with the 13th pick and hiring Darko Rajakovic, a player development specialist whose entire offensive philosophy revolves around instinctive, synaptic ball movement. Ujiri may have installed better infrastructure for a more unselfish team, but he’s largely ignored the Raptors’ most pressing issue in the coming season: Siakam, OG Anunoby, and Gary Trent Jr. all are set to become unrestricted free agents next year. None of them have had extension talks with the team—most notable in the case of Siakam, who had the best season of his career in 2022 and, had the team been a bit more cohesive, could have threatened for a second consecutive All-NBA selection. When asked why a player of Siakam’s caliber hasn’t even been offered an extension, Ujiri parroted the party line, seemingly throwing his star under the bus.
“We do believe in Pascal,” Ujiri said. “We do believe that a lot of our players didn’t play the right way last year. I said it: We were selfish. I’m not running away from that. We were selfish, and we didn’t play the right way. So let us see it when we play the right way.”
For the past year, Ujiri has been biding his time. A maelstrom of trade rumors for cornerstone players—at the trade deadline, at the draft, during free agency—has come and gone without any stronger sense of the team’s direction. For a franchise that has made its name through player development and has had such a complicated relationship with its homegrown stars, it’s awfully odd to see the team give a cold shoulder to a legitimate star who actually wants to stay with the team. Perhaps this is just to light a fire under Siakam for his next leap—Ujiri is far too deliberate to project such tensions unknowingly, right? But if Ujiri, forever seeking the perfect deal, can still be swayed to move on from Siakam, why even hint at a crisis of faith?
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