WHAT: An NBA Summer Vacation Special with Katie Heindl

Katie Heindl dropped by the Hoops and Talks podcast to discuss all things summer vacation: what makes a good NBA summer vacation? How important are summer friendships to the regular season? How does the summer vacation rating system work? Which players excel at relaxing during the off season? Is a beach workout a vacation or a workout? We explore the best vacations, the guys who don’t know how to do it right, and all the areas in between.

We find out that the Trail Blazers are one of the best teams at summer vacationing. Between talking to fish, sitting in infinity pools, hosting UNO tournaments and teasing Raptor fans with trips to Canada’s Wonderland amusement park, the Blazers are having a great off season. Does that mean anything for the rest of the year? Maybe it does! Tune in and find out.

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Highlights

2:00 Icebreaker: What four NBA stars would you like to see in a remake of “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”?

7:30 Introducing Katie Heindl who grew up in Toronto. She remembers as a kid writing into the newspaper to vote for the name “Raptors”. She enjoys how the NBA players are accessible.

10:50 Started writing about basketball on a site called The Classical, where she wrote NBA Fan Fiction (what?? There is NBA Fan Fiction?). She started to cover them more seriously for Raptors Republic. Still likes to write the personality and player-driven stories. It is getting harder to find places to write about basketball from a different angle, like The Classical.

13:00 NBA Summer Vacation Watch started because she was kind of going through withdrawal. Vice Sports was another good platform that doesn’t exist anymore for stories from a different angle.

16:15 Summer Vacation Rating system--what makes a noteworthy summer vacation? If there is a pool but no workout, that is a strong indicator of vacation. Beach workouts are a grey area. For example a beach workout but in casual clothes is tough to evaluate.

19:00 Australian players are consistently bad at vacation. Case in point: Matthew Dellavedova is always working out in pools while on vacation and Aron Baynes is not a good vacation dresser.

21:39 Breakdown of how the Trail Blazers stack up against other teams as far as summer vacation goes. Some standouts are Hassan Whiteside and Party Boy Steve, Damian Lillard in the infinity pool, CJ McCollum at Canada’s Wonderland, which got Toronto fans very excited. (Sidebar: remembering 2016’s great airport chase for Festus Ezeli.) Kent Bazemore Uno Tournament.

28:44 The Blazers have consistently shown themselves to be good at vacation, so good in fact, that they are in the running for the Team Best at Summer Vacation.

30:00 Does anybody know what happened to Evan Turner’s Instagram account?

31:30 Where does Katie stand on workout videos? There are grey areas. The biggest measure of a vacation post is if you are smiling and enjoying yourself when you look at the posts. If so, that probably counts as a good vacation, even if there is some work going on.

33:00 Summer Vacation friendships. How important are they to the league? The Banana Boat was the best of times and the worst of times, because even though they try they will probably never re-capture that banana boat spirit on a basketball team.

35:00 Devon Booker and D’Angelo Russell creative adventures together.

38:00 Do you ever think about who is taking the pictures? Jimmy Butler’s are really well composed, so are the ones that Kevin Love’s girlfriend takes.

41:00 When the season starts, what storylines are you looking forward to? It is always interesting to notice if a good vacation leads to a good season. Right now there doesn’t appear to be a correlation. Also, how do the Toronto Raptors bounce back after Kawhi Leonard leaves? Finally, the Trail Blazers look like they are going to be a really good team. They just seem to know how to have fun, and it seems like the teams that know how to have fun and enjoy themselves (for example, who know how to have a good vacation) do well.

43:30 Basketball Feelings newsletter explores the emotions that basketball brings up. Subscribe!

46:00 Find Katie on Yahoo Canada for NBA Summer Vacation Watch, on DimeMag, and on twitter @wtevs.

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Music used in the episode: “Happy Alley” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License