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Curry couldn’t attend the awards ceremony as he’s in the middle of the NBA season, but in a bit of additional good fortune, the hoops schedule takes his Golden State Warriors to Salt Lake City tonight for a game against the Utah Jazz. Proudfoot tells Deadline he and Curry will be able to celebrate their Sundance win together following the game. The Baddest Speechwriter of All centers on Clarence B. Jones, an attorney, adviser, and key speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ira Winderman: The Heat team flight from Salt Lake City to Phoenix was delayed by more than three hours. According to FlightAware the team did not arrive until 4:30 AM local time with the game scheduled for 6 PM tonight Phoenix time, 8 PM Eastern.
Yet the repeated signals emanating from Salt Lake City indicate that Utah wants to keep Kessler have not stopped Indiana from expressing trade interest in the promising big man. Kessler and Dallas' Daniel Gafford are two bigs that the Pacers have tried to engage on in recent weeks with an eye toward landing a quality center before Tyrese Haliburton's projected return from an Achilles tear when next season commences.
Josh Robbins: After today's game, Magic coach Jamahl Mosley said Moe Wagner will not play on the Magic’s upcoming trip to Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Portland. Wagner tore his ACL nearly one year ago and has been working his way back.
A winter afternoon in Salt Lake City might be the last setting where you’d expect to find a celebration of Afrobeats, a musical meshing of West African rhythms and styles. But in Utah in 2023, a medley by the Nigerian singers Tems, Burna Boy and Rema at halftime of the N.B.A. All-Star Game showed that American sports leagues were embracing the genre. “I was just so proud to see our own playing on that stage,” said Masai Ujiri, then the president of the Toronto Raptors, who was raised in Nigeria and takes dance lessons to the music about once a week. Afrobeats had been part of track and field and soccer culture by that point, but its influence on the sports world has only grown since.
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Dave McMenamin: Lakers’ injury report for Sunday: Bronny James and Adou Thiero will stay with South Bay and did not make the trip to Salt Lake City. Deandre Ayton, who did not practice Saturday because of an illness, is not on the report.
The consensus in the basketball community is that AJ Dybantsa is at BYU because of money. The Salt Lake City region has become a tech hub and is home to several billionaires. BYU is funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, Inc., has stock holdings valued at more than $58.4 billion. The asking price for Dybantsa was somewhere in the range of $3.5-5 million, according to sources from teams that recruited Dybantsa. BYU met the price, but Dybantsa insists, “They didn’t even offer the most money.” What BYU did offer was the closest extension to the NBA. Dybantsa had never even heard of BYU when his father mentioned the school as a possibility in the spring of 2024; Ace Dybantsa was intrigued by new coach Kevin Young, who was hired away from the Phoenix Suns and left a job as the highest-paid assistant coach in the NBA.
When Tari Eason’s life changed forever, he was thousands of feet in the air. It was March 26, 2025. Eason, then finishing his third season with the Houston Rockets, was on a team plane bound for Salt Lake City, where the Rockets played a game the next day against the Utah Jazz. The previous week, relatives had told the Rockets’ forward that his father and namesake, Tari Timothy Eason, was missing. The man he called Pops, known to most people as “OG” or “T-Money,” was beloved for his vivacious and confident personality. He was devoted to Eason’s 4-year-old sister, Talia, and it was unlike him to disappear while looking after her. Eason tried to remain even keeled and focus on basketball, to keep himself from thinking the worst. Five days later, New York authorities discovered the body of Tari Timothy Eason. He was 41.
Ryan Smith, who was taking on a Herculean task of relocating the team to Salt Lake in a matter of months, asked players and staff what they needed. The response included everything from better travel and nutrition to, yes, a facility for training. He shakes his head at how far they’ve come. “We didn’t get into sports to be like, ‘Hey, we want to conquer the world,’” Smith tells The Athletic. “It was very much community-based. We really had to keep asking, ‘What are we doing?’ In a world that’s completely divided, (sports) bring everyone together. That’s our ‘why’ and what keeps us going.”
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Smith Entertainment Group is partnering with music entertainment company Live Nation to build a new indoor music venue in downtown Salt Lake City. The roughly 6,000-capacity venue is the first major piece of SEG’s downtown sports and entertainment district to be revealed. The venue aims to host 200 events yearly, including 100 concerts. It will also host a range of corporate, conference and community events.
Gina Mizell: Jared McCain is not going to be on the summer league roster, as he continues to recover from his knee surgery. Still a good chance he travels to Vegas/SLC to be around the team, however.
Ace Bailey: What were your first 24 hours like in Salt Lake? Ace: “Came straight to the gym. Beautiful scenery—I didn’t think the mountains were real. Just great meeting the coaches.”
