The Stein Line

In a May appearance of his Mind The Game podcast, LeBron James casually threw in a "maybe into August" reference when he was spelling out to co-host Steve Nash what his free agency might look like: “I think at some point up in June, late June, as July rolls around free agency starts to get going & as July’s rolling maybe into August we start to kind of like get a feel of what my future may look like.” - LeBron James via @mindthegamepod, May 21, 2026 youtu.be/JHYXP6LjsRo?is… 4:21 PM · Jul 4,...

This is the fourth time LeBron James has been a full-fledged free agent and yet again he's in the midst of a process that is best described as free agency as only he can do it. In 2010: The (first-of-its-kind) Decision. In 2014: He announced his stunning return to the Cleveland Cavaliers in an I'M COMING HOME essay for Sports Illustrated on July 11 after holding up free agency leaguewide for days.

League rules prevent Boston Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens from publicly explaining any of his reasoning for the still-very-hard-to-process Jaylen Brown trade to Philadelphia until the deal is made official.

The night before the Charlotte Hornets agreed to trade LaMelo Ball to Minnesota, The Stein Linewas the first to reveal that the Timberwolves were doing the most serious chasing. A full five days before the Toronto Raptors remarkably convinced the LA Clippers to trade Kawhi Leonard back to Canada's team, The Stein Linefirst reported the Raptors were not only trying to reacquire the greatest player in franchise history without warning but also that Leonard himself really wanted a second marriage.

Which means it was indeed June 30th — Free Agency Day in #thisleague — when this story went live. The marketplace officially opens tonight at 6 PM ET, which also marks the start of the league's new calendar year.

Best can't be plural ... except maybe on Sundays like these. As promised we have a second helping of the usual Sunday Best notes from your two faithful correspondents now that we're less than 48 hours from the official start of free agency Tuesday night at 6 PM ET. And we're naturally leading them off with much more on the story of the day: The LA Clippers' serious discussions about trading Kawhi Leonard.

Can we call these our Sunday Best NBA notes when there very well could be another story printed just like it later tonight? Or should we just scrap the philosophical questions and get right to the news? Let's get straight to our around-the-league latest, another Stein + Fischer production, because NBA free agency is almost here and too much is happening to rhapsodize. Following up on yesterday's major development in Denver that was covered at length in the enclosed story …

Have to say it was a good week for fans of the NBA's Transaction Game. Pretty momentous week, too, for The Stein Line. Regular readers probably remember that I've explained before how this publication sort of has two birthdays. On June 25, 2021, I announced that I was leaving The New York Times to launch my own Substack. On July 12, 2021, after serving out two weeks' NYT notice, I printed my first full-fledged story #onhere.

No time for idle chit-chat or ornate intros right now. We published an around-the-league Intel compilation late Friday night (enclosed below) and have already collected an array of new items for you just hours later because, well, you already know: It's that time of year. To the latest from our notebooks on the Nuggets and their efforts to retool around Nikola Jokić after a first-round exit ...

We served up a breakfast posting Friday morning (also enclosed here), but there was no waiting until Saturday with this stacked around-the-league notes compilation. Not with what we've collected from the league's personnel grapevine as Tuesday's official start to free agency at 6 PM ET draws near.