On December 2, 2021, six-foot-six forward Gary Clark was called up from the Mexico City Capitanes to the New Orleans Pelicans. When Cheatham saw the news, he was confused. Hurt. Frustrated. He and Clark played the same position. Sure, their games were different, but still—if the Pelicans wanted to upgrade their roster, why hadn’t they pursued someone from their G League affiliate? If they wanted to call up a dynamic forward, why hadn’t that forward been Cheatham?
It was only natural for Cheatham to compare himself to Clark. Every G Leaguer performed a similar exercise whenever a player—perhaps someone with a comparable skill set or comparable physique or comparable stat-line or comparable taste in movies—got called up. In Cheatham’s case, this wasn’t apples and oranges. He and Clark were both versatile forwards who prided themselves on defense.
No matter. Cheatham couldn’t harp on it for too long, lest it distract him from trying to follow in Clark’s footsteps. The team was back in Birmingham for its home opener, and the impending three-week stretch ahead of the Showcase was critical. That afternoon, Cheatham went to grab a bite with Young and Petty before the Squadron’s first practice at Legacy Arena. They talked about the upcoming game—which, coincidentally enough, was against Clark’s Capitanes—and about the significance of bringing professional basketball to Birmingham. Petty was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, only one hundred miles north of the city, and played four seasons at UA, so he understood the area’s passion for hoops well.
“We were talking, like, ‘Look, bro, this is one of the best things that has happened to this state,’” Petty later explained. “It’s one of the best things that could happen for us to be in the states, in a new city, with a new team, great organization, great people behind you. And we were like, ‘We can’t go in there and lose the first game. It’s the first game ever in this state with this team. We can’t go in there and start this whole stretch with losing.’
“It’s going to hold weight,” Petty continued. “Twenty years later, this is going to be remembered. Like, ‘I remember when the Birmingham Squadron first came to Birmingham.’”
The three of them agreed that such a message was worth sharing with the entire team. Cheatham texted Pannone, requesting that the coaches give them fifteen minutes alone on the court that evening for a players-only meeting.
Legacy Arena was a cut above most other venues in the minors. It presented more of an NBA atmosphere, whereas some G League sites, like the Swarm Fieldhouse in Greensboro, felt more like high school or college. After practicing at the ill-lit Bill Burch Gymnasium, walking into Legacy Arena was like opening a set of blinds in the morning. Beneath the powerful LED lights hanging above, the hardwood floor glistened, its fresh coat of red and blue paint designs popping. Other than contractors, no one had been in the building since before the COVID pandemic. A large-scale renovation had kept the doors closed for several years. The work was finally complete, and the transformation was impressive.
One by one, players filed out of the locker room. “I’m home!” Cheatham shouted, taking in his surroundings: the new hoops (which made the BSC goals seem like peach baskets taped to wooden sticks), the jumbotron, the massive speakers suspended from the rafters, the more than seventeen thousand seats. “Who got the sage?” he asked with a laugh, to which multiple teammates responded, “Malcolm!”
With the coaching staff still in the locker room, the players held their meeting at midcourt. Cheatham conveyed the messages that he, Young, and Petty had discussed over lunch. He encouraged others to participate in the conversation, to share their thoughts on how the team could improve heading into such a meaningful game.
“All it takes is one: one win. One win and then we get on a streak,” Cheatham said. “And this shit crazzzzy,” he added, marveling again at the ten-story Legacy Arena. “We’re here. . . . Might as well take full advantage.”
Here was a loaded word. Cheatham meant it in the literal sense—here in Legacy Arena, in the city of Birmingham, in the state of Alabama. He also meant here in the G League. It wasn’t where any of the players wanted to be, but heck, they might as well take advantage.
Spirits across the Magic City were exceptionally high as the sun rose on Sunday, December 5. Churchgoers left morning services to discover that some of their prayers had already been answered: the University of Alabama was ranked number one in the college football playoff rankings, one day after beating Georgia in the SEC championship. UA’s basketball team had pulled off an upset of its own on Saturday afternoon, taking down number three Gonzaga.
Legacy Arena was ready for its first event in more than two years, and its first professional basketball game since the Houston Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies met in a 2018 exhibition. The top bowl was curtained off, leaving space for roughly eight thousand spectators. Vouchers were taped to a handful of chairs. “You have been chosen as a Squadron winner!” they read. “To redeem your free souvenir, just visit the Squadron Sales & Service table on the concourse near section 132 by the end of the first half.”
Upon entry, fans were given white towels stamped with red Squadron logos. Suites were occupied by business partners and distinguished Birmingham residents. John Petty Jr. had his own personal cheering section, made up of twenty friends and family. Patrick and Erica Harper made the short trip from Atlanta to watch Jared, who was also a favorite among the many Auburn alums filling the stands. Clayton Hughes, Malcolm Hill’s stepbrother, drove all the way from St. Louis. Kelvin Davis, the sixty-two-year-old from open tryouts, trekked from nearby Huntsville. Former NBA All-Star Gerald Wallace, an Alabama native, sat courtside, along with Randall Woodfin, the mayor of Birmingham. Scouts from the Indiana Pacers and Cleveland Cavaliers were stationed behind the scorer’s table, computers and notepads open.
Considering that many of the 4,972 people in attendance had just a vague idea of what the G League was, the buzz in the building was tremendous. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this,” the PA announcer exclaimed prior to the 6:00 p.m. start. “It’s finally time for basketball in the Magic City!”
From the opening tip, the pace of the game reflected the energy of the crowd: excitable and frenetic. Banks won the jump ball. Harper controlled it, raced to the frontcourt, and whipped a pass to an open Hill on the wing. Hill caught it in rhythm and immediately launched a three-pointer. Swish.
Eight seconds into the game, Birmingham was on the board. Harper scored shortly after on a midrange fadeaway. Then Cheatham joined in, draining a corner three off a feed from Young and turning to pump up the fans. 8–0, Squadron.
That burst of momentum would fade, however. Abrupt swings are common in the G League, in part due to rule changes that speed up the action and allow points to be scored in a hurry. For example, when G Leaguers are fouled in the act of shooting, they take only one free throw worth the value of total free throws that would be allotted under standard NBA rules. So, if Harper gets fouled on a three-pointer, he goes to the line for one free throw—worth three points. The innovative rule applies until the final two minutes of the game, when it switches to normal NBA guidelines.
Since its founding in 2001, the G League has been used as a laboratory for the NBA—a testing ground for various ideas that might improve the game. NBA regulations such as the transition take foul, coach’s challenge, and 14-second shot clock reset all originated in the G League. Of course, for every successful experiment, one fails to gain any traction. The international goaltending rule—where the ball can be touched as soon as it hits the rim, even if it’s above the cylinder—was in place from 2010 to 2015 but never got adopted by the NBA. Others have blurred the line between radical and flat out absurd: in the 2004–5 season, the league tried a rule where three-pointers counted for only two points until the last three minutes of each quarter.
Needless to say, that rule didn’t stick, so when Capitanes guard Matt Mooney nailed a 26-footer to open the second half against the Squadron, it counted for three. Birmingham fell behind by double digits in the period, as the defensive game plan completely crumbled. On one play, Mexico City forward Alfonzo McKinnie grabbed a defensive rebound, dribbled the length of the floor like he was suddenly invisible, found himself right at the Squadron basket, and elevated for a monster dunk. “Coach Pannone was right beside us, and he was not a happy camper when he saw that play,” said color commentator Rick Moody.
Spot on, Rick.
There was a clear pattern to the game—when Jared Harper was on the floor, the Squadron played well; when he was on the bench, the Squadron struggled. Unfortunately, Harper couldn’t play all forty-eight minutes. He fueled a late run, scoring or assisting on 17 straight Birmingham points—an outburst that prompted a fan sitting courtside to shake his head in amazement and mutter, “That boy’s going to the league.” Harper finished with 35 points, 8 assists, and a plus-minus of +9, yet the Squadron were defeated again, 123–114, thanks to a defense that looked like five guys trying to bring back the Mannequin Challenge. It was the team’s fifth straight loss—sixth if you counted the halftime game of musical chairs, where Commander, the Squadron mascot, lost to Juanjolote, the Capitanes mascot.
Storming off the court, Cheatham resembled a cartoon character about to throw a temper tantrum: fists clenched, muscles flexed, face scrunched into a frightening scowl, ears ready to blow smoke. This was supposed to be a night that everyone at Legacy Arena would remember. Instead, back in the locker room, Cheatham and the rest of the Squadron were already eager to forget it.
“You can’t play where you want to go if you’re not perceived as somebody who just plays hard as shit,” Pannone said.
Once again, the Squadron had lost. And once again, Pannone found himself stressing the same message in the ensuing film session. An embarrassing clip played on the projector screen—after an ugly turnover, no one on the team had hustled back on defense.
“Look at the guys who have made it from here to the NBA,” Pannone continued. “Alex Caruso . . . I’m sure everybody saw the quote he had.”
Player-development coach Andrew Warren pulled it up on his phone and read it aloud. “The stuff I do is not always glamorous,” Caruso, the Chicago Bulls guard and former G Leaguer, had told reporters. “It’s stuff that wins basketball games. That’s what I love doing—winning.”
At 2-5, clearly Squadron players weren’t doing the winning stuff, like hustling back on defense after an ugly turnover. “It’s the little things that win games that truly fucking matter,” Pannone said. “You can go down the line of the guys who have made it.”
Pannone was right. If you performed such an exercise, you would find a lot of guys just like Caruso—gritty, tough, reliable, blue-collar players: Gary Payton II, Robert Covington, Danny Green, Fred VanVleet, Jonathon Simmons.
Before film ended and practice began, Pannone announced that the Pelicans would be assigning three players for the team’s next game (also against the Capitanes): third-year center Jaxson Hayes, rookie forward Trey Murphy III, and undrafted two-way guard Jose Alvarado. “This is the G League,” Pannone said. In other words, this is what you should expect. “I understand how that impacts some of you individually.” Rotations would change. Minutes would decrease for certain players. Hayes and Murphy would be inserted into the starting lineup, replacing Hill and Banks. Alvarado would get extended run off the bench, cutting into Young’s playing time.
Some frustration was to be expected in these situations. Assignments often brought tension to G League locker rooms—even more-so in the D-League days, when there were fewer one-to-one affiliations and teams were shared among multiple NBA franchises. Back then, D-League coaches had to earn the trust of various NBA front offices.
“As a D-League team, you had to develop relationships—you may have had two or three NBA teams that worked with you,” said Jay Humphries, who coached the Reno Bighorns from 2008 to 2010. “But you had to develop a relationship with the management of the NBA team to make them comfortable. And typically during that time, when a player was brought down to your team, he would play a majority of the minutes, plays were going to be really focused on him and [based on] the conversations that you’ve had with the coaches, management, general manager of the team that’s sending him down about working on the things that he needs to get back.”
Even as the D-League evolved into the G League, the expectation remained that assignment players, or two-way players, would receive ample opportunity to shine, regardless of how that impacted others on the roster. It created a strange dynamic. An awkward dynamic. “I had a really positive experience in Sioux Falls. To be honest with you, I think part of that was the fact that I was on a two-way,” Miami Heat guard Duncan Robinson, who played thirty-three games with the Sioux Falls Skyforce in 2018–19, said. “I think it’s a little bit different. Not that I got preferential treatment, but I was kind of in and out, especially toward the second half of the year, and when I was in Sioux Falls and playing with the team, I was featured a lot on offense, plays were run for me, and all that sort of stuff. I’m very aware that I was in a privileged position relative to some of my peers out there.”
In some cases, assignment players did receive forms of preferential treatment, even when it wasn’t requested. “I remember on normal planes, as an NBA player, I would get first class, but the other guys, they would be in eco,” said former Houston Rockets center Clint Capela, who was assigned to the Rio Grande Valley Vipers during the 2014–15 season. “Sometimes I felt kind of weird. For some players in the U.S., when they’re like top players or whatever, it’s normal for them to have special favors. But for me, where I’m from in Europe, usually if we’re on the same team, everybody is treated equally. I felt kind of weird to be the only one in first class, the only one with my own [hotel] room, and I remember my per diem was more than everybody else’s too.”
Capela tried to support his teammates however he could, paying for dinners and passing on insights about the NBA. His mindset on the court, though, was to dominate everyone. “I felt that I had a duty to prove myself, to prove that I deserve to have that kind of sticker on my back that I’m an NBA player, even though I was younger,” he said. “I always went hard at practice, made sure to dominate every single time, and to also let the Houston Rockets know that every time I go out there and play, they have to pay attention also. I also felt that I had that duty to be dominant all the time.”
That was a mentality shared by most assignment players. Coming from the NBA, those players were supposed to be better than everybody else. “I do think that when you’re sent down from your NBA team, that is the attitude that you have to have in order to not stay there,” Humphries said. “I don’t belong here with these guys.” Of course, if it leaned more toward cocky than confident and inspired a selfish approach on the floor, that attitude had the potential to spark conflict. Squeaky Johnson even recalled one player who was sent down to the Austin Toros getting into an argument with a coach and shouting, “I make more money than you!” Which, to be fair, was definitely true.
Mix some or all of these aspects together—the mindset of assignment players, the minutes they took from everyday G Leaguers, the preferential treatment they sometimes received—and the results could be . . . interesting. Or, as longtime G Leaguer Scotty Hopson put it with a laugh, “That’s a recipe for a disaster.” Hopson had experienced both sides of the arrangement; he had been the G Leaguer whose minutes were reduced due to the transfer of an assignment player, and the assignment player who took minutes from a G Leaguer.
“Now when I see somebody not handling it the way I would, I go say something,” Hopson explained, referencing the situation from the perspective of a G Leaguer, “because I’ve been there before and I don’t want them to suffer from a lack of humility, you know what I mean? Because it’s not that deep—it’s not about you right now. I would hate to see somebody fail from that as opposed to their performance.”
Coach Huang feared that Hill might struggle with the sudden changes to the Squadron roster, that such a development might be triggering for him. When Hill signed with Hapoel Jerusalem in August 2020, he assumed that a significant role awaited him. Of course, that wasn’t the case. When he joined the Pelicans for the 2021 NBA Summer League, he anticipated a real opportunity to showcase his abilities. But that wasn’t the case either. Unlike most organizations, the Pelicans had several rostered players competing in Summer League, which made Hill an afterthought. He logged just forty-five total minutes across four games, averaging 4.8 points and 3.3 rebounds.
“Honestly, I thought I was going to make the Pelicans when I showed up to Summer League,” he admitted. Instead he barely made the team’s box scores.
“He’s learned patience,” said Hill’s father, Malcolm Sr. “When he was with the Pelicans in Summer League, it was a low point for him. He kind of thought he was going to walk in and get all of these minutes. That didn’t happen.”
Once again it tested Hill’s faith—in his routines, in his approach, in himself. Such a discouraging outcome threatened to throw him off course. “The hardest thing about keeping a steady routine,” Hill said, “there’s three things that you’re going to come across. When you have so much success, you’re like, All right, I’m good. And you stop. Or you come across, Dang, this didn’t work out how I thought it would. Is the stuff I’m doing really working? Or you come across, I’ve been doing this for so long, when am I finally going to catch that big break? Those are the three obstacles that are probably most common that you see within the journey. And it’s easy to fold when you come across those three.”
Hill didn’t fold in Israel, nor after Summer League. He stayed with his daily routines, even adding more practices. Now another bump in the road—the additions of Hayes, Murphy, and Alvarado, which moved Hill to the bench—could cause him to swerve a bit. Coach Huang wanted to ensure that some swerving didn’t result in a crash. “I just knew there was something going on,” Huang said. “In his mind, he was basically being benched and not going to play at all.”
He pulled Hill aside later that day. “You’re too important to this team,” he told him. “Why would we bench you like that? You’ve been playing the minutes. You worked to become our best perimeter defender. You’re shooting well. What makes you think we’re going to go against our word?”
That calmed Hill. It was the sort of reassuring message he never received in Israel, where communication was lacking. Huang went further; he wanted Hill to understand that similar obstacles were going to keep arising, especially if he reached the NBA. Malcolm needed to start viewing them differently, not as slights but as challenges. And once he did, he would emerge from those situations a better player.
“It’s not going to be roses all the time,” Huang said to Hill. “You’re going to be put in situations where it’s not fair. This is preparing you for the NBA.”
All it takes is one: one win.
The Squadron finally got one. Having Hayes, Murphy, and Alvarado certainly helped. But with the game knotted at 107–107 with less than 10 seconds remaining, it was Harper who had the ball in his hands, driving hard to his right and finishing a tough lay-up to put the Squadron ahead. Alvarado, an aggressive and pesky six-foot guard, stole the ball on the ensuing possession, and Birmingham was back in the win column.
One win and then we get on a streak.
The three assignment players went back up to the Pelicans (Hill played twenty-five minutes and recorded 3 points while they were in Birmingham), but the Squadron now had momentum. The team had four more games at Legacy Arena before heading to Las Vegas for the Showcase—two against the Lakeland Magic and two against the Memphis Hustle. It won all four by an average margin of 16.5 points.
The key, above all else, was the very complex art of, as the coaches put it, “giving a fuck.” Defense was perhaps where “giving a fuck” showed the most; players were competing with intensity on that end, executing Saint’s strategy of packing the paint and contesting all threes. The ball zipped around the court on offense, an unselfish display that made Pannone giddy. Everyone had moments. And everyone looked better because the team was winning.
In a 97–88 victory over the Magic, Hill had a near-perfect performance: 24 points (on 9 of 10 shooting from the field and 3 of 3 from behind the arc), 7 rebounds, 4 steals, and 0 turnovers. Cheatham notched 14 points and 18 rebounds that same night and was also shooting above 35 percent from three for the season.
Young’s perimeter shooting had been inconsistent, but in a narrow 113–109 win over the Hustle, he buried six three-pointers and led the team with 30 points. Harper remained steady, clearly one of the top guards in the minors. He continued to shoot a high percentage from three and orchestrate the Squadron offense.
As the win streak continued, Campbell’s phone was blowing up. His connections in the NBA were calling more and more to inquire about Squadron players. With the Showcase less than a week away, the team was clicking at the perfect moment.
Another factor was beginning to emerge, however. While all this was unfolding, the world at large was facing a new developing crisis, one that would incite the most chaotic and momentous time in the history of minor league sports: the arrival of Omicron.