Flying out of Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport is tricky. To get to most destinations, travelers must connect through Atlanta, which is forty minutes away by plane and a little over two hours by car. In the G League, teams fly commercial—a stark contrast to the lavish private planes that transport NBA teams, where guys have the space and freedom to lounge, sleep, socialize, gamble, play video games, sing, dance, throw parties—do whatever they want, really.
On Thursday, November 4, the Squadron was on a 12:05 p.m. CT flight out of Birmingham—landing in Atlanta at 2:03 p.m. ET—followed by a 4:37 p.m. flight to Greensboro later that afternoon. All in all, it would be more than six hours of traveling to go just 480 miles, almost the same amount of time it takes to drive that distance.
The trip was not without drama, either. Everyone boarded the flight to Atlanta for an on-time departure. Squadron players and coaches were scattered throughout the thirty-or-so rows. Cheatham and Banks, two guys over six feet eight, quickly relocated to the very back. Empty seats allowed them to sprawl out more, but Banks’s long legs were a flight attendant’s worst nightmare, spilling out into the aisle.
Passengers were settled in, when suddenly Joe Young was being escorted off the plane. Other members of the Squadron began murmuring, speculating: “What’s happening? Where’s Joe going?” Nobody knew. All they knew was that one of their teammates—one of their top players—was no longer on the flight, and the cabin door was now closed. There had been no major disturbance, no commotion. Most people hadn’t even noticed.
The pilot’s voice came over the PA system; he apologized for the delay. “We have a passenger who just decided to get off the airplane,” he said, as if such a strange occurrence wasn’t so strange at all.
As it turned out, there hadn’t been much of a scene because there hadn’t been much of an incident. Masks were still required on planes, and Young wasn’t wearing his properly. A flight attendant instructed him to fix it, tapping him rather aggressively on the shoulder. Young responded by telling the attendant not to touch him, then obliged and adjusted his mask. “Do I need to tell the pilot?” the flight attendant asked, clearly offended by Joe’s retort. The question was rhetorical. A few minutes later, the attendant returned and ordered Joe to get off the flight. Young didn’t protest. He calmly grabbed his things, slipped on his backpack, and walked off.
That was it—no security, no ruckus that might end up on TikTok or TMZ. Young simply wasn’t allowed to take Delta Flight 2791 with the rest of the Squadron. The punishment felt too severe—an overreaction to an overreaction—but it made sense given the times. The pandemic was still creating tension in public spaces. Flight attendants were growing increasingly frustrated with passengers who refused to follow mask-wearing policies; passengers were growing increasingly aggressive in their opposition to said policies. Crews were running out of patience, tolerating less and less with each unruly traveler.
For Young, the situation was but a minor inconvenience. With help from the Squadron staff, he found another way to Greensboro, beating the rest of the team there. Coaches weren’t worried; they were accustomed to dealing with unexpected travel complications. When they were in Erie, flights were constantly delayed or canceled. On one road trip, they got stuck in a snowstorm and were on the bus for half a day. New rules required teams to fly if the drive would take longer than five hours. To former G Leaguers, that alone sounded like a privilege.
During the 2008–9 season, the Dakota Wizards were bussing from Bismarck, North Dakota, to Des Moines, Iowa, to take on the Iowa Energy. They left around 10:30 p.m., and two hours into the ten-hour journey, the bus started bouncing. The driver pulled over to investigate the source of the problem. Apparently, something was wrong with the vehicle’s axle, the primary suspension system. They were able to continue on, but the bus bounced the entire ride, like a low-rider with hydraulics. No one on the Wizards was able to get a minute of sleep ahead of the game.
A year later, the Reno Bighorns were supposed to fly home from Salt Lake City, but their flight was canceled due to a blizzard. So right after their game against the Utah Flash ended, the Bighorns hopped on a bus to make what was normally an eight-hour drive (given the conditions, it was more like twelve). Players hadn’t eaten dinner and were understandably starving. They searched, and searched, and searched for a place to get food off Interstate 80—there was nothing. It wasn’t until close to 2:00 a.m. that they found an open McDonald’s. Crisis averted—or maybe not.
“Half of us got food poisoning on that bus ride,” recalled Rod Benson, a forward on the Bighorns. “It’s funny because we had all these girls lined up for when we got back because we had been gone for a while. I remember I was supposed to hang out with this girl, and my stomach was just in excruciating pain. It felt like I was just imploding from the outside in because I ate this McDonald’s on this dumbass bus ride.”
In 2015 the Bighorns were on a road trip in Texas, scheduled to face the Austin Spurs and the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. Following their game against the Spurs, the Bighorns boarded a coach bus for the five-hour drive to Edinburg, home of the Vipers. Their driver was not actually supposed to work that evening—a mix-up by the company had resulted in her being assigned at the last minute. Within a few hours, it became apparent to everyone onboard that she was far too sleepy to operate a vehicle. The bus started swerving on the highway, so unnervingly that coaches insisted she pull over at a gas station. Even the driver had to admit that she was unfit to soldier on. Rather than be stranded in the middle of Texas, in the middle of the night, one of the Bighorns’ staff members took the wheel and drove the team to Edinburg.
Throughout the history of the G League, teams have frequently traveled on game days. Kevin Danna, a longtime play-by-play announcer for the Santa Cruz Warriors who used to travel with the team, recalled the Warriors playing on February 5, 2015, in Bakersfield, California, flying to Boise, Idaho, for a matchup against the Idaho Stampede on February 7, and then back to California to face the Los Angeles D-Fenders on February 8. To make matters worse, there was no direct flight from Boise to Los Angeles, so on the morning of the eighth, the Warriors flew to Oakland and then connected on to LA. They arrived in the city around 3:00 p.m. ahead of a 5:00 p.m. tip-off. That’s three games and three commercial flights in a seventy-two-hour span.
With teams traveling so hectically and being so understaffed, absurd mishaps were inevitable. One year, the Dakota Wizards flew to Colorado for a game against the 14ers, only to realize that they did not bring enough pairs of shorts. The jerseys were all there, just some of the bottom halves were missing. Getting more shipped out before the game was impossible, so players would have to share. Those on the bench wore nothing but tights and had towels wrapped around their waists. Whenever a player subbed out, he quickly removed his shorts, handed them to his replacement, and received a towel in return. “Only in the D-League,” said Wizards guard Maurice Baker, who appeared in that unforgettable game. “If you were going in for that guy, you better get his shorts.”
That wasn’t the only time the Wizards had to improvise their attire. They once traveled to Oklahoma for a matchup with the Tulsa 66ers and mistakenly checked the bag with all their uniforms. The flight was delayed due to weather, and when they finally arrived, their precious cargo was nowhere to be found. The game was still played as scheduled, but the Wizards had to wear Tulsa’s practice jerseys. To uninformed fans, it looked like an oddly competitive intrasquad scrimmage.
By 2021 those nightmare scenarios were far less likely to arise, though some crises could always be expected. Pannone used his long travel days to analyze film. Not just of the Squadron—of teams all over the world. He binged basketball games like they were episodes of Stranger Things, getting lost in the various clips and completely losing track of time. Sometimes so many clips were open on his computer that it looked like a glitch—just endless windows stacked one on top of the other. Pannone would shuffle through them on fast forward, his eyes scanning for anything worth saving: a good set, a botched assignment, someone not hustling or closing out.
During the two-and-a-half-hour layover in Atlanta, players ate the food available to them: Chick-fil-A, P. F. Chang’s, snacks from Hudson News. Coaches did their best to encourage healthy eating habits, but it was tough to enforce any rules. The Squadron didn’t have the budget for a team chef, and per diems on the road were modest.
Atlanta Hawks center Clint Capela, who hails from Switzerland and was formerly with the Houston Rockets, wasn’t even introduced to U.S. fast food restaurants until he was assigned to the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. “It kind of helped me discover about the not fancy side of the U.S. We used to eat at Denny’s, Applebee’s, Chili’s,” Capela said of life in the D-League. “I would have never known those places if I would’ve never gotten assigned to the D-League.”
When he was with the Vipers, Capela found it refreshing to be at a regular airport again, not taking off from some private runway. Troy Daniels, who was Capela’s teammate on the Rockets, played for the Vipers the season prior and remembered players racing to the gate to see who could get an exit-row seat.
In roughly twenty-four hours, the Squadron would be engaged in a physical, fast-paced, competitive game in front of NBA scouts. Right now, they were just a bunch of hungry travelers, munching on Chinese food and chicken sandwiches, navigating the chaotic crowd at Hartsfield-Jackson International.
The primary goal of every player in the minors is not a secret. Make it to the NBA. Earn a call-up. Get out.
Naturally, that feeds the popular misconception that winning doesn’t matter in the G. Why would the final score of the Squadron-Swarm game matter to a bunch of guys whose sights are set on the NBA? Given the choice between a call-up and a G League championship, none of them would choose the latter.
But that doesn’t mean winning is inconsequential. In fact, it means the opposite. Successful G League teams attract more attention from NBA front offices. The thinking is simple: If you can’t impact winning in the G, how are you going to impact winning in the NBA? Scouts are drawn to guys who play the right way, not who chase stats. Who are unselfish, not who try to be heroes. Being on a winning team is perhaps the best way to get noticed by the people upstairs. Those with significant G League experience attest to that.
“What I’ve noticed is that with the teams that win, everybody’s lives usually get better on those teams,” said Anthony Vereen, who played 127 games in the G League and became an assistant coach for the Santa Cruz Warriors. Vereen won a championship as a player in 2016. “Everybody can’t make it to the NBA, but usually you have a better chance of playing at a higher level than you would have without winning in the G League. Nobody wants somebody that doesn’t impact winning. I tell these guys, your stats look better when you win.”
“It for sure mattered to me,” said Maurice Baker, Vereen’s teammate on Santa Cruz. Baker played 357 games in the G, third most in league history, and was called up to the NBA twice. “If you’re winning, that’s when the people start noticing you and looking at you. On a losing team, a guy could average 30; he’s going to be the last guy they look at.”
“For me, winning a championship is paramount,” Scotty Hopson, a longtime G Leaguer, said. “I think putting your best foot forward and trying to win a championship is how you get the most out of the experience. I can attest to this, too, especially when you’re younger—your goals to win might not coincide with your goals to get to the league, to get to an NBA contract. That’s not just the fans thinking that; players are feeling that. But I think the goals need to be in line, because if you focus on winning and playing good basketball, that’s only going to help your performance.”
“Any individual player that doesn’t care about winning, I think that the game, at the professional level, has a way of weeding those guys out,” Ron Howard, or “Mr. Mad Ant,” added. “Anyone that doesn’t care about winning, they won’t have a long career. And if they do, they won’t be playing anywhere that we’ve heard of. That’s why we play—to win. No one just wants to lose. Losing sucks.”
Howard’s final point should be obvious, though it sometimes goes overlooked. Even if winning had no bearing on a player’s chances of getting a call-up (which it does), no one just wants to lose.
The first twelve games of the G League season would determine the seedings for a mini-tournament (the Showcase Cup) at the Winter Showcase, an annual scouting event to be held in Las Vegas from December 19 to 22. Teams were divided into four regional pods. The team with the best winning percentage in each pod, along with the next four top teams across the G League, would have a chance to claim the Showcase championship and the $100,000 cash prize that came with it. Every team would compete in Vegas, but only a handful would be in the running for the title.
The road to the Showcase began opening night: November 5, 2021. Tickets for the game could be purchased for less than $15. Hot dogs were being sold for $1, cans of Natural Light for $2. The Greensboro Swarm Fieldhouse—a small venue even by minor league standards—would eventually be near capacity, with just over seventeen hundred people filling the bleachers. One of those seventeen hundred was LaVar Ball, father of NBA players Lonzo Ball and LaMelo Ball and G Leaguer LiAngelo Ball, who came off the bench for the Swarm.
Tucked beneath the bleachers, hidden from the crowd, was the visiting locker room, where the Squadron convened thirty-eight minutes before tip-off. Ten players were currently with the team; Dylan Smith and Nate Bradley, the two players from tryouts, had been cut at the end of training camp. The starting lineup was Jared Harper, Joe Young, Malcolm Hill, John Petty Jr., and Zylan Cheatham.
Coach Saint kicked off the pregame speeches. Up on the television screen was the Squadron’s logo: a blue star with hits of red, gold, and white. The top and bottom two points of the star mirrored the spear of the Vulcan statue. A pair of wings stretched out within the star, meant to embody the unity, precision, and power of a squadron, or a group of pelicans on the hunt together.
Saint encouraged the team to look at the logo and consider the broader significance of this moment. This was the official start of a brand-new organization, representing a proud city that hadn’t experienced professional basketball in more than fifteen years. As Saint emphasized, it was an opportunity to establish a “Squadron way,” to lay the first foundational bricks of the Squadron identity.
“You set the tone,” he said, pointing to the logo. “You write the script.”
On this night, it was Harper who set the tone. A minute into the game, he recorded the first points in Squadron history: a step-back three-pointer from several feet behind the arc. It was a bad sign for the Swarm, particularly point guard Jalen Crutcher, who was tasked with guarding Harper.
The onslaught continued: driving layup, midrange fadeaway, corner three. The way Harper maneuvered at his size, weaving through defenders at high speeds, was like a figure skater gliding around cones—fast yet smooth, arduous yet effortless, a blur.
Harper was fearless too. He had been playing against older competition—bigger and stronger athletes—since elementary school. Now the men patrolling the paint were seven-footers, fourteen-or-so inches taller than Harper, but he attacked them without hesitation. As Erica Harper, Jared’s mom, always says about her son, “It’s like no one told him that he was small.”
Along with Cheatham, Harper was one of Birmingham’s leaders. Both were well liked, though their styles were the complete opposite. Cheatham was boisterous and animated—the type to give speeches, break huddles, and participate in film sessions. Harper led more by example. He was quiet, rarely speaking up in the locker room and usually hoping to avoid interviews with the media. The court was where he did most of his talking. He directed players where to go, called audibles like a quarterback, displayed a sense of poise that permeated the entire team. His knowledge of the playbook—and basketball overall—was remarkable; he knew what every position on the floor was supposed to do on a given play, not just his own.
“A lot of kids are around basketball, but they don’t become students of the game,” said Desmond Eastmond, who ran the AAU program that Jared joined growing up. “Jared was one of the ones who was a student of the game. That’s what allowed him to excel early.” Eastmond would go on to coach against Harper at the high school level. By then, he knew the only strategy that might succeed at slowing down the Pebblebrook star: send a double team right away. “Our job was to get the ball out of his hands and make somebody else beat us,” Eastmond explained. “We couldn’t defend him one-on-one.”
Bruce Pearl, Harper’s head coach at Auburn University, used to call him the Tom Brady to his Bill Belichick. “It’s my way of giving Jared credit for having a high basketball IQ,” Pearl told the Montgomery Advertiser. “There will be times when I’ll have something called, and he will have already had a play called, and I’ll defer to him. It’s sort of out of respect.”1
As defenses adjusted, Harper adjusted quicker, always staying one step ahead. In private film sessions with Squadron coaches, he often pointed out things that they hadn’t even noticed. Years after he graduated, Harper would get calls from his former coaches at Pebblebrook: “Hey, Jared, we’re at practice, and we forgot how to run this play. Any chance you remember?” And Harper would walk them through it, like he was standing right there.
During the state championship game his senior year, Harper suffered a concussion in the third quarter. He drove hard to the basket, elevated for a layup, and was clotheslined in midair, landing directly on his head. To this day, his memory of what happened next is murky. He was in a complete daze; at one point, Pebblebrook switched to a zone defense, and Harper picked up a man.
Basketball was second nature, though. Even in a daze, Harper’s body knew where to be—knew the motions to perform—because of all his training. Pebblebrook trailed Westlake High School by five points in the final minute of the game. Harper hit a floater to cut the lead to three. After Westlake’s Chuma Okeke, a future NBA player, missed a pair of free throws, Harper nailed an improbable three-pointer with two defenders in his face to force overtime. Though Pebblebrook went on to lose, the only person in the building who could forget such a heroic effort was . . . Harper himself.
Unlike Cheatham, Harper scarcely—if ever—showed emotion on the floor. His expression remained blank, focused. He approached basketball like a grandmaster hunched over a chess board, reading the action, planning out his next moves.
This was Harper’s third consecutive season in the G League. He spent his first year, 2019–20, with the Northern Arizona Suns—the affiliate of the Phoenix Suns—and recorded 20.2 points and 5.5 assists per game. In 2020–21, the league’s bubble season, he played with the Westchester Knicks and averaged 21.3 points and 7 assists, being named to the All-NBA G League First Team. The Knicks faced the Erie BayHawks, coached by Pannone, in the last game of the regular season. Erie was hoping to secure the top seed in the playoffs, but Harper erupted for a career-high 35 points to lead Westchester to a 130–124 victory. When the season ended and Squadron decision-makers began preparing for the 2021–22 campaign, they immediately went after Harper. If you can’t beat him, they figured, then sign him.
By now, Harper was accustomed to G League competition—the bruising, up-tempo style of play. From the opening tip against Greensboro, he controlled the game for the Squadron. He scored or assisted on the team’s first six baskets. At halftime, he had 20 of their 59 total points, as Birmingham held a double-digit advantage. He got help in the second half: Young came alive, finishing with 30 points and the best plus-minus (+22) in the game; Cheatham and Petty played stifling defense; Ra’Shad James, Riley LaChance, and James Banks III all contributed off the bench. Harper shined brightest, however, matching his career-best of 35 points and adding 6 assists (with just 2 turnovers) in thirty-four minutes. Birmingham secured the 128–117 victory. The tone had been set.
Pannone and Chasanoff found each other in the hallway outside the locker room. “Thanks for trading for Joe Young,” Pannone cracked, as the two embraced. Then he jokingly hollered to a nearby reporter, “Jared Harper saved our asses!”
Despite his big night, Harper received far less media attention than the well-known LiAngelo Ball, who notched 22 points for the Swarm. Not that it mattered to Harper. He believed, as every G Leaguer must, that somebody was watching, be it a scout, coach, or executive. Players in the minors had to approach every game like they were walking into a job interview. One exceptional performance could put them on the radar of an NBA team; one dud could result in their name being crossed off a list. Those were the stakes.
“The thing about Jared is, he’s an NBA player,” Pannone said following the game. “He’s so much different than what I thought. He’s so smart—and not that I didn’t think he was smart—but he’s so smart and thinks the game, and he’s ahead in how he’s moving the pieces around. And he scores, but he scores unselfishly. He’s an excellent passer, an excellent reader of the game, and willing to give it up. Man, he’s so good, and people get so caught up in his height; there are plenty of guards that are six feet four in the NBA that can’t do what he can do.”
Birmingham played Greensboro again the following night. Back-to-backs against the same opponent are common in the G League. Winning both games, particularly on the road, is uncommon. The game started about as poorly as it could have—the Squadron scored just 16 points in the opening quarter, none of which came in the paint. The team’s offensive woes continued into the fourth, when Birmingham fell behind 85–70 with 6:49 remaining.
It was an easy game to concede: an early November back-to-back, down 15 midway through the final quarter, on the heels of a victory the evening prior. But the Squadron were a resilient bunch. Malcolm Hill nailed a three-pointer to give the team some life. On the Swarm’s ensuing possession, Young got a steal and dished it to Hill for a wide-open layup. The rally was on.
Birmingham came storming back, getting big buckets from Hill, Young, and guard Tra Holder. Cheatham continued to be a dominant presence on defense; he locked down the Swarm’s top offensive weapon, big man Vernon Carey Jr. The former Duke star struggled to deal with Cheatham’s hounding pressure, turning the ball over a combined 14 times in the two games. (As Coach Saint later learned, the Charlotte Hornets abandoned their plans to bring Carey up after seeing what Cheatham did to him.)
With 15 seconds remaining, and the Squadron down 94–92, Harper drew a foul and calmly strolled to the free-throw line. He never appeared nervous during a game; on the contrary, he sometimes appeared so relaxed that others perceived him as disengaged. He denied ever feeling nervous, too, except maybe the first time he put on an NBA uniform as a member of the Phoenix Suns. The work, Harper would say, erased the nerves. He had prepared for every scenario, studied every scheme, taken every shot before. So what was there to be nervous about?
“I’m very comfortable, whether it’s pick-up basketball, a college game, a Final Four, or whatever it could be, I feel like I’m always prepared because it’s always basketball,” he said. “Basketball has always been basketball for me. It’s all the same.”
“He would come to the huddle and tell us, ‘Calm down. Why are y’all so riled up?’” Coach Washington remembered from Harper’s Pebblebrook days. “The coaches would be screaming, cursing, showing their emotions. He’s like, ‘Calm down. Why are y’all making a big fuss? We’re okay. We’re down right now; y’all relax.’ That’s what he would be telling us.” Washington had a nickname for Harper: “Cool Hand Luke.” Others would call him “Vino”—the same nickname as the late Kobe Bryant, one of Harper’s favorite all-time players—because he, like wine, got better with age.
Vino now stepped to the line, Swarm fans screaming and clapping to distract him. He dribbled four times, took a deep breath, and nailed the first free throw. Then he repeated the routine and buried the second. Neither touched the rim.
Overtime. Two minutes on the clock.2
Just one basket was scored during the extra period: a three-pointer from the right wing by . . . Jared Harper. He finished with a game-high 27 points, and Birmingham stole the victory, 97–94, to sweep its first road trip. It was a gutsy display, a statement from the guys.
Winning matters.
The first chapter of the Birmingham Squadron had thus been written. Its brief synopsis—“Jared Harper saved our asses.”