One week until training camp
Can you believe it? NBA media day is one week from today. It will be the first team appearance for your new Oklahoma City Thunder. The Thunder will then begin training camp with the first day of practice one day later on Tuesday, Sept. 30.
I’ve finally returned from vacation and I’m excited and can’t wait to get started, getting to know this new team, its players, coaches and front office personnel and delivering readers news on the franchise on a daily basis. For those who don’t remember our coverage from the Hornets’ two-year stay, we essentially had a daily story and a notebook every day. That format will be revved up times 10 with the Thunder, partly because this team is a permanent one, but also because The Oklahoman is constantly striving to utilize more story-telling methods and take advantage of all the multimedia formats we have at our disposal.
Having said that, this will be the place I will blog throughout the season on all things Thunder and NBA as it relates to Oklahoma City. Thundermadness.com, which I’m sure most of you are familiar with by now, is The Oklahoman’s new fan message board dedicated specifically to the Thunder. My partner on the NBA/Thunder beat will be Mike Baldwin, who you’ll learn is an excellent reporter who I’m sure will gain a reputation for getting you news first. Mike will be a regular contributor to Thundermadness, and I will occasionally weigh in on that forum as well.
In addition to this space and Thundermadness, we’re planning on bringing you a heavy dose of videos and podcasts on the Thunder/NBA. We’ll have regular weekly videos, as many as four a week, including one live weekly roundtable that is in the works. And get this, I’m even scheduled to shoot video from the road to give readers/viewers a sense of what some of these other cities and arenas are like. That should be interesting to say the least. There also will be live chats with myself and Mike, podcasts with writers and columnists and sometimes with players and national media members as well.
That’s all in addition to the bevy of information we’ll have for the paper every day. We’ll kickoff our coverage Sunday with a training camp/preseason preview. Then you can expect to see a story on the Thunder every day in The Oklahoman through the end of the season. It should be a great inaugural season, one in which we hope to answer all your questions about this team and many more you never knew you had.
I’ll have a brief note in Tuesday’s paper on the Thunder now selling partial season tickets. The team is offering five different eight-game plans to those fans who signed up for the season ticket request list but had their select-a-seat appointments cancelled. The timetable of the mini plans being made available to the general public will depend on the remaining availability following the purchases made by the original ticket request list customers.
The Thunder has also finalized its training camp roster, which could be announced as early as Tuesday. The team didn’t invite any “fringe” players to camp, so the roster you see is what you get. NBA teams can open the regular season with only 15 players but can carry more on the roster throughout the preseason. The Thunder is likely to enter the season with 14 players under contract, so it would have been unlikely that a training camp invite would have actually made the team.
Mike Baldwin also reports today that the uniforms will be unveiled next week and the road uniforms will be sky blue.
Lastly, Thunder guard Kevin Durant hooked up with Hornets point guard Chris Paul last week for Paul’s annual celebrity weekend event in his hometown of Winston-Salem. You can read a report here, here and here. That last one is the most detailed about KD and how he has some laughable but effective skills on the lanes.
-DM-
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Go OKC Thunder!!!
P.S.- You’re getting slow in your old age Ed W.