{"id":150883,"date":"2025-09-18T00:21:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T00:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/150883\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T00:21:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T00:21:06","slug":"western-notes-thunder-biyombo-hyland-wolves-m-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/150883\/","title":{"rendered":"Western Notes: Thunder, Biyombo, Hyland, Wolves, M. Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Thunder showed last season that veteran know-how isn\u2019t necessarily a requirement to win an NBA championship \u2014 with an average of 25.6 years, Oklahoma City became the second-youngest champion in league history, according to Curtis Rowser III of Slam<\/a>, who spoke to 24-year-old star Jalen Williams<\/a> about that subject within the magazine\u2019s latest cover story.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think you need a bunch of veterans to be successful,\u201d Williams said. \u201cI think they\u2019re definitely useful. But\u2026I learned how to be a professional before I even signed paperwork to be on the Thunder. You go in there, and every single basketball on the ball rack is facing the exact same way; we tuck our shirts in for practice; we\u2019re not wearing jewelry for practice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat stuff was ingrained in me since I\u2019ve been in the organization. So we haven\u2019t had to have vets teach us how to do things. We matured faster, because that\u2019s the environment that we\u2019ve been in.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have more from around the Western Conference:<\/p>\n

Bismack Biyombo<\/a> and Bones Hyland<\/a> each waived the right to veto a trade as part of their<\/a> deals<\/a> with the Spurs and Timberwolves, respectively, Hoops Rumors has confirmed. A player who re-signs with his previous team on a one-year contract typically receives an implicit no-trade clause, but the club can ask that player to waive that clause in advance \u2014 many have done so, as our tracker<\/a> shows. Biyombo is on a fully non-guaranteed Exhibit 9<\/a> contract with San Antonio, while Hyland got a $425K partial guarantee on his one-year deal with Minnesota.
\nNew Timberwolves CEO Matthew Caldwell spoke to Chris Hine of The Minnesota Star Tribune<\/a> about why he accepted the job after nine years with the NHL\u2019s Florida Panthers and his plans for the organization, including a possible new arena. Caldwell cautioned that even if an arena plan comes together quickly, it will take a few years to come to fruition, but added that it\u2019s \u201ca huge priority for us.\u201d
\nWhat might a rookie scale extension for new Suns center Mark Williams<\/a> look like? Duane Rankin of The Arizona Republic<\/a> explores that question, relaying comments made by Sam Vecenie of The Athletic, who suggested that the former Hornet has been \u201cquite poor\u201d defensively in his first three NBA seasons. \u201cHe\u2019s not as good as the length would make you believe on defense and his mobility has not been strong enough in ball screens and he consistently gets beat, but he\u2019s massive. He\u2019s a great lob threat,\u201d said Vecenie, adding that a deal in the range of $20MM per year with some injury protections could make sense for Williams and the Suns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Thunder showed last season that veteran know-how isn\u2019t necessarily a requirement to win an NBA championship \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,101281,101282,12831,40515,101283,85],"class_list":["post-150883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-bismack-biyombo","tag-bones-hyland","tag-jalen-williams","tag-mark-williams","tag-matthew-caldwell","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}