Scott Adamson, Author at Adamsonmedia.com

Birmingham nips Maine

Thursday was an active day for the Birmingham Squadron.

It started with the acquisition of 6-11 center/forward Karlo Matkovic, brought in to add some size and strength to the lineup.

**Scott Adamson writes stuff. Follow him on Threads @sladamson1960 and Adamsonmedia on Facebook.**

Later in the afternoon Malcolm Hill – the NBA G League’s top scorer – was given a two-way contract by Birmingham’s parent club, the New Orleans Pelicans.

And Jalen Crutcher, who has played every game for T.J. Saint’s squad in 2023-24, got a 10-day contract with New Orleans and was immediately assigned to the Squadron.

For the day to have a happy ending, though, the Squadron needed to topple the visiting Maine Celtics at Legacy Arena.

Dereon Seabron made sure they did.

Seabron scored on a reverse layup with 1.3 seconds left as Birmingham (9-12) downed Boston’s developmental team, 127-125, in front of 1,353 fans.

The Squadron led by six late but the Celtics (11-10) managed to rally and knot the score at 125-all just 14 seconds from the finish.

Opting to work the clock down, Seabron made sure the ball was in his hands when it came time for the last shot.

It was the most important bucket of his 16-point night, and he also added 11 rebounds to earn the double-double.

But the “W” was secured in large part by Hill and Matkovic; Hill finished with a team-high 27 points and Matkovic was outstanding in his Magic City debut with 19 points and nine rebounds.

E.J. Liddell aided the cause with a double-double of his own (16 points, 10 boards), while Landers Nolley II added 12 points, Izaiah Brockington chipped in 11 and Crutcher wound up with 10.

Joe Wieskamp led Maine with 36 points and University of Alabama product JD Davison, a two-way player, contributed 28 points and eight rebounds.

Other double-digit scorers for the Celtics were Drew Peterson (18), Tony Snell (12), Jordan Walsh (11) and DJ Steward (10).

The game was tight throughout, with Maine leading 30-27 after the first quarter and 62-54 at intermission.

Birmingham won the third quarter 28-20 to erase the deficit, and outscored the visitors 45-43 in a wild fourth stanza. The victory leaves the Squadron three games out of the final playoff position with 13 games remaining.

Next up: The Squadron and Celtics square off again here Friday at 7 p.m.

Ignite in trouble?: One of the unique aspects of the G League is the Ignite, a team based in Nevada and made up of elite NBA prospects. It was formed as an alternative to college basketball, offering salaries up to $500,000.

However, NBA commissioner Adam Silver suggested that G League Ignite will be “reassessed” due to NIL options for current college players.

“I think given that that’s happened, I think we are in the process of reassessing Team Ignite,” Silver said during his state of the league address during All-Star weekend. “Now some of those same players who didn’t want to be one-and-done players because they felt it was unfair and they wanted the ability not just to earn a living playing basketball but to do commercial deals that weren’t available to them at college, to hire professional agents, an opportunity that wasn’t available to them at college, they now — all of those same opportunities have become available to them.

“I’m not sure what the future of Team Ignite will be, because before there was a hole in the marketplace that we thought we were filling before doing that, and now my focus is turning to earlier development of those players.”

OTD in 1948: The Birmingham Vulcans of the Southern Professional Basketball League defeated the Mobile Gulls, 77-46, for their ninth consecutive victory in league competition and tenth straight overall.

Shag Hawkins led the winners with 20 points and four other Vulcans notched double figures.

OTD in 1949: The Birmingham Steelers of the SPBL lost to the Laurel Oilers, 78-49, allowing Montgomery to clinch the league title.

G League gets ‘even’

As someone who loves symmetry, the NBA G League’s 31-team lineup has been bugging me for a while.

Don’t misunderstand – I love the Association’s developmental circuit. Once ESPN+ began televising games in 2018, I watched as many as I could. (The Brooklyn Nets are my favorite NBA team, so I cheered for the G League’s Long Island Nets until my hometown Birmingham Squadron – affiliates of the New Orleans Pelicans – came along in 2021).

I won’t say it became an obsession, but I won’t say it didn’t become an obsession.

Still, there was something missing – namely a farm club for the Phoenix Suns. While the G League Ignite and Capitanes de Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City Captains) are independent and unique, every other G League club had a parent.

Starting next season, the franchise repping Arizona’s capital will be childless no more as the Suns will own and operate a G League team located in the Phoenix metro area.

“We are honored to welcome Mat Ishbia and the Phoenix Suns to the NBA G League, and are thrilled to achieve our long-stated goal that each of the 30 NBA teams has an NBA G League affiliate,” NBA G League President Shareef Abdur-Rahim said in a statement. “The NBA G League has never been more valuable to NBA teams than it is today, and the Suns’ investment only reinforces that reality. I can’t wait to join fans in the Valley next season to enjoy the unique brand of NBA G League basketball.”

That’s boiler plate stuff from Abdur-Rahim, but no less true.

The G League is an extremely valuable asset to the big league, and is, indeed, a unique brand.

One of their biggest points of pride is the fact that nearly 60 percent of NBA players have G League experience. During the 2022-23 campaign, 49 players were called up.

Of course, having two-way contracts (allowing a player to play up to 50 games with an NBA team during a season) means the guy you watch in a Thursday G League game might be on a big-league court on Sunday.

Trey Jemison was a rebounding machine for the Squadron. It put him on the radar of the Washington Wizards, who signed him to a 10-day contract, and then the Memphis Grizzlies, who offered the same deal.

Memphis was so impressed with him that they inked him to a two-way pact, and now the young man who began his pro career in Birmingham has already scored points and cleaned glass in an NBA regular season contest.

Oh, and eight current NBA head coaches (including Atlanta’s Quin Snyder and Oklahoma City’s Mark Daigneault) coached in the G League first. That’s impressive.

However, it’s the innovative rules that make it such a great fan experience – at least for me.

My favorite is the One Free Throw Rule, which has been part of the league since 2019. During the first 46 minutes of a game, only one charity toss is taken in all free throw situations. A two-shot foul gets you one shot worth two points, and if a guy is fouled while attempting (and missing) a 3-pointer, one successful freebie is worth three points.

During the last two minutes of a contest and overtime, standard NBA free throw rules apply.

This streamlined approach really speeds up games, and it’s rare when one takes more than two hours to complete.

My second favorite innovation? The “Elam Ending,” or target score finish to overtime. If a game is tied at the end of regulation, the first team to score seven points in the extra point is the winner.

Such experimental rules aren’t just done for kicks; the Coach’s Challenge and 14 Second Shot Clock Reset on offensive rebounds were tried in the G and later adopted by the NBA.

And you can also give the farm system a bit of credit for the new in-season tourney in the NBA. Before a G League team starts on its 34-game regular season, it plays 16 games in the Showcase Cup Tournament.

If you’re a hardcore basketball fan, there’s too much to like about the G League to ignore it. It’s not just a proving ground for future NBA stars, but it offers the next-best thing to NBA quality.

As part of the All-Star Break this weekend, four teams of G League players will compete in the NBA G League Next Up Game today, which is actually four teams squaring off in two semifinals. There are 28 players participating, with 10 selected by fan vote.

Each team will be coached by a member of the Indiana Mad Ants staff.

G League teams won’t return to regular season action until next Thursday. Once they do, it’ll be a mad dash to the March 30 finish, followed by single elimination playoffs.

Do yourself a favor and check out a game – any game. If you have a favorite NBA team, it’s fun to follow the progress of their affiliate. And since all 30 will be matched up with developmental squads next winter, a great league will be even better.

The G League might not become your next sports obsession like it did for me, but I’ll bet you’ll find watching it is time well-spent.

Now it’s the UFL’s turn

Anytime the subject of spring pro football comes up, a lot of us – me included – tend to look at the original United States Football League as the measuring stick for longevity.

The late, great USFL made it three seasons before being laid to rest, so now we wonder if any new endeavor can match that modest run.

But we tend to overlook the World League of American Football, which morphed into NFL Europe (and NFL Europa over its final season).

True, it only had a domestic element for two seasons before going on hiatus and then reforming as an all-European circuit. But it played 15 seasons in all, helped propel guys like Jake Delhomme, Kurt Warner, Brad Johnson and Adam Vinatieri to successful NFL careers, and was a quality Triple A league.

So … how did it last a decade and a half?

Because the NFL allowed it to.

WLAF/NFL Europe/NFL Europa was reportedly losing $30 million per year. Once the NFL established its international footprint, league officials decided a better use of its resources was to become a global sport itself instead of funding a developmental league.

So, fans in England who once cheered on the minor league London Monarchs now get multiple NFL games in their backyard each season.

My point here is that making spring pro football sustainable is going to be difficult. Growing a TV audience that comes back year after year, putting butts in the seats … it’s a tough job. It’ll take a serious, long-term commitment from people who realize any real profit isn’t possible until many years down the road.

Daryl Johnston, director of football operations for the United Football League, thinks the UFL has that commitment.

Fox owned the modern USFL and RedBird Capital funded XFL 3.0, and the product of their merger is this new league set to begin play on March 30.

“What makes this the most opportune chance for a spring football league to have sustainability? We’re doing it the right way and getting the key pieces all together,” Johnston said during a visit to Birmingham last week. “This isn’t one plus one equals two, this is one plus one equals three and half, maybe four, because of the assets we have available to us right now, without a doubt.

“Taking all the pieces from the USFL and the XFL and putting them into the UFL elevates us to such a strong position. This gives us a better chance going into our opening weekend of any other league in the last 40 years.”

Johnston is well-aware of the pitfalls of spring upstarts.

He was general manager of the San Antonio Commanders of the Alliance of American Football, a league that failed to finish its lone season in 2019.

A year later he was director of player personnel for the XFL’s Dallas Renegades. The third reboot of that spring endeavor looked promising until the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down.

“I was in the Alliance of American Football, and of course finances were the big thing,” Johnston explained. “The XFL in 2020 was kind of similar. We had the pandemic, of course, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but we had that single entity where you’re the only one writing the checks. And what we got from Fox in the USFL was the commitment for three years right out of the gate.”

The USFL used a single hub model in 2022 and had four base camps in 2023.

The XFL utilized a hybrid-hub in 2023, keeping weekly operations at a single site before moving to home cities for weekend games. That will be adopted for the 2024 UFL season, with Choctaw Stadum in Arlington, Texas, serving as host.

Although I understood the reasoning behind it, I was no fan of the USFL approach. Branding teams “New Jersey” and “Pittsburgh” but having them all work and play in Birmingham just seemed … I don’t know, disingenuous. Midway through the inaugural season my interest waned because while the product was solid an empty stadium (except when the hometown Birmingham Stallions played) was off-putting to me.

Year two was an improvement but still not good, although I got back on board as a fan because alt-football is my porn. And I started watching the XFL around March after getting over my NFL hangover.

“When I was with the AAF we brought everybody to San Antonio to train and (head of football operations) Bill Polian told me we should’ve stayed there,” Johnston said. “Year one in Birmingham allowed us to get our feet underneath us, but let’s face it – Birmingham had 10 home games and nobody else had any home games, so you wanted to engage in more communities going forward. So, we expanded to four hubs but still, there was one team in each hub who didn’t have a home game and in the case of Canton, which had the New Jersey Generals and Pittsburgh Maulers, neither had home games.”

The XFL template is much better, but community engagement faces major hurdles – except in Arlington. Flying into a host city on Friday and playing on Saturday and Sunday doesn’t allow school, hospital and community visits during the week.

“We’ll spend a week in the Arlington area getting all the work done, then we’ll go out on the road,” Johnston said. “That’s going to be our biggest challenge and that’s what we talked about with the Birmingham fans last year. We all exhaled and patted ourselves on the back after the first year, but we should have stayed engaged with the Birmingham community year-round.

“We have to be engaged with all the fan bases, and that’s something we have to figure out because in all eight markets we won’t be there during the week and that’s something the guys enjoyed when they were here.”

Johnson added that Birmingham was pitched as a hub for the former USFL teams in 2024, but in the end, it didn’t make economic sense.

“We did push for a USFL Conference hub in Birmingham and XFL Conference hub in Arlington, but the costs of two hubs would’ve been substantial,” he said. “Arlington had a few more things going for it on a greater scale that were more attractive, like flying out of DFW (Dallas Fort Worth International Airport). It just came down to budget.”

There are a lot of things I wish would happen sooner than later in the UFL.

I’d love to see aggressive expansion, especially to places like San Diego and Oakland – which no longer have NFL franchises and have no prospects of getting them in the foreseeable future.

Placing teams in major markets in the northeast is important, too; a league of eight with three clubs in Texas seems more regional than national in scope.

And more than anything, there’s a need for local ownership of franchises to help teams weave into the fabric of their communities.

But I get that this is a marathon and not a sprint, and it’s easy to suggest how to spend money when that money isn’t mine.

And since Johnston has already been down this road several times, I’m going to trust him and the UFL founders to do things right – however long it might take.