ADAM SCHEFTER INTERVIEW
Exclusive: Adam Schefter sheds light on Clowney's future and O'Brien's reputation
May 21, 2020, 5:49 pm
Photos by Getty Images. Composite image by Jack Brame.
It has been a very controversial offseason for the Houston Texans after trading away All-Pro WR DeAndre Hopkins to the Arizona Cardinals. ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter had no shortage of interesting things to say about how internally the Texans are justifying the trade.
"Bill is running the team with the way that he wants to," Adam Schefter said on The Jake Asman Show on Gow Media's SB Nation Radio. "I can tell you from speaking with people from around the league and in Houston that they (Texans) believe they have a strong justification/validation for every single move that they made. They had numbers on DeAndre Hopkins, with the contract situation being what it was, in their minds they were going to have a tough time justifying paying what he wanted… The issue is that we are living in a world where everybody wants to assess things right away… They can justify that move, their analytics say it was a good move, they believe it was a good move and over time we will find out if they are right."
Former Texans DE Jadeveon Clowney is still a free agent but don't count on Clowney playing for the Texans again even though he has been working out in the Houston area.
"How many teams are out there right now that are going to pay Jadeveon Clowney what he wants," Schefter said. "Cleveland is the one I can think of. Maybe Seattle but it won't be what he wants exactly. I think there are teams out there that won't want to spend money if they don't know if they are going to be losing money this year without fans. Do you want to go and throw all this money at Jadeveon Clowney when we don't know for sure there is going to be a season?"
One under the radar impact caused by the pandemic on the NFL is the future salary cap number for the league. While Schefter said that he still anticipates the league still finding a way to play 16 regular games, he believes that the loss of revenue is going to have a huge impact on all 32 clubs.
"Right now nobody knows the answers to those questions," Schefter said. "If there are no fans, based on the way I calculated it talking to people, it would be roughly about 100 million dollars lost per team... I was told that the number is even higher than that. Again, when you factor in the 2021 salary cap, you take in the revenue from 2020 and if there are no fans in the stadium, it is going to be down. The pandemic impacts just about everybody and I don't believe in the end that NFL owners and NFL players are going to be immune to that.
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They’ll be watching in Canada, not just because of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, though the NBA’s scoring champion and MVP favorite who plays for Oklahoma City surely helps lure in fans who are north of the border.
They’ll be watching from Serbia and Greece, the homelands of Denver star Nikola Jokic and Milwaukee star Giannis Antetokounmpo. Alperen Sengun will have them watching Houston games in the middle of the night in Turkey, too. Slovenian fans will be watching Luka Doncic and the Lakers play their playoff opener at 2:30 a.m. Sunday, 5:30 p.m. Saturday in Los Angeles. Fans in Cameroon will be tuned in to see Pascal Siakam and the Indiana Pacers. Defending champion Boston features, among others, Kristaps Porzingis of Latvia and Al Horford of the Dominican Republic.
Once again, the NBA playoffs are setting up to be a showcase for international stars.
In a season where the five statistical champions were from five different countries, an NBA first — Gilgeous-Alexander is Canadian, rebounding champion Domantas Sabonis of Sacramento is from Lithuania, blocked shots champion Victor Wembanyama of San Antonio is from France, steals champion Dyson Daniels of Atlanta is from Australia, and assists champion Trae Young of the Hawks is from the U.S. — the postseason will have plenty of international feel as well. Gilgeous-Alexander is in, while Sabonis and Daniels (along with Young, obviously) could join him if their teams get through the play-in tournament.
“We have a tremendous number of international players in this league,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this season. “It’s roughly 30% of our players representing, at least on opening day, 43 different countries, so there’s much more of a global sense around our teams.”
By the end of the season, it wound up being 44 different countries — at least in terms of countries where players who scored in the NBA this season were born. For the first time in NBA history, players from one country other than the U.S. combined to score more than 15,000 points; Canadian players scored 15,588 this season, led by Gilgeous-Alexander, the first scoring champion from that country.
Gilgeous-Alexander is favored to be MVP this season. It'll be either him or Jokic, which means it'll be a seventh consecutive year with an international MVP for the NBA. Antetokounmpo won twice, then Jokic won three of the next four, with Cameroon-born Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers winning two seasons ago.
“Shai is in the category of you do not stop him,” Toronto coach Darko Rajakovic said after a game between the Raptors and Thunder this season.
In other words, he's like a lot of other international guys now. Nobody truly stops Jokic, Antetokounmpo and Doncic either.
And this season brought another international first: Doncic finished atop the NBA's most popular jersey list, meaning NBAStore.com sold more of his jerseys than they did anyone else's. Sure, that was bolstered by Doncic changing jerseys midseason when he was traded by Dallas to the Los Angeles Lakers, but it still is significant.
The Slovenian star is the first international player to finish atop the most popular jerseys list — and the first player other than Stephen Curry or LeBron James to hold that spot in more than a decade, since soon-to-be-enshrined Basketball Hall of Famer Carmelo Anthony did it when he was with New York in 2012-13.
“We’re so small, we have 2 million people. But really, our sport is amazing,” fellow Slovene Ajsa Sivka said when she was drafted by the WNBA's Chicago Sky on Monday night and asked about Doncic and other top Slovenian athletes. “No matter what sport, we have at least someone that’s great in it. I’m just really proud to be Slovenian.”
All this comes at a time where the NBA is more serious than perhaps ever before about growing its international footprint. Last month, FIBA — the sport's international governing body — and the NBA announced a plan to partner on a new European basketball league that has been taking shape for many years. The initial target calls for a 16-team league and it potentially could involve many of the biggest franchise names in Europe, such as Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City.
It was a season where four players topped 2,000 points in the NBA and three of them were international with Gilgeous-Alexander, Jokic and Antetokounmpo. Globally, time spent watching NBA League Pass was up 6% over last season. More people watched NBA games in France this season than ever before, even with Wembanyama missing the final two months. NBA-related social media views in Canada this season set records, and league metrics show more fans than ever were watching in the Asia-Pacific region — already a basketball hotbed — as well.
FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis said the numbers — which are clearly being fueled by the continued international growth — suggest the game is very strong right now.
“Looking around the world, and of course here in North America," Zagklis said, "the NBA is most popular and more commercially successful than ever.”