Holiday Weekend Notes

C and I are off to Bloomington early Monday morning for her IU orientation, thus the Sunday evening post. Our holiday weekend was a little less chaotic than in recent years, so I’ll throw in some other stuff that happened over the past week as well.

Holiday Weekend

Our Fourth was fairly laid back, at least compared to recent years. We only had 15 relatives over, and just two of the young nephews were here so the pool was all theirs. I have a new Blackstone griddle and used it to cook burgers, brats, and hot dogs. I thought they all turned out pretty good, and it was much easier than past years when I tried to do the same meal on a combination of a pellet smoker and charcoal grill.

It was funny looking back at pictures of July 4’s past, and seeing how we had rather casual gatherings at other people’s houses, mostly S’s dad and stepmom’s, until 2012 when we bought our lake house. For the next six years holidays were always down there.[1] After a year’s break when we moved and had an unfinished backyard, starting in 2019 our pool became holiday central. Our girls don’t really remember the gatherings that didn’t involve water.

The girls were all out with friends in the evening and made it home safely.

Saturday evening S and I went to dinner with some friends.

Sunday the whole family got together with S’s group of best medical school friends for the first time in ages. We had a long ride on the hosts’ boat after dinner, which was cut a little short when we noticed storms were headed our way. We made it home before some nice, long, loud thunderstorms boomed for a couple hours. We needed the rain and it looks like the storms will knock the heat down for at least a couple days.

Pacers/Myles Turner

Wednesday I was sitting down to eat my lunch when I saw the shocking news that Myles Turner had signed with the Milwaukee Bucks. It was a shock because all indications were that he was close to re-signing with the Pacers, who were willing to pay the luxury tax to keep him. I was certainly surprised, even if I suggested a week earlier that keeping him wasn’t the sure thing it seemed to be before Tyrese Haliburton’s injury.

Also shocking was how the move was panned for both teams by most NBA analysts. Usually at least one side is the winner, but it didn’t seem so in this case.

In order to sign Turner, the Bucks waived and “stretched” Dame Lillard’s contact. Meaning they took the two years of money they still owed him and spread it across five years. So they will be paying Turner an average of $26 million over the next four years, and have a cap hit of $22.5 million over five years for Lillard’s contract. Which means they are effectively paying Myles $48.5 million over the life of his contract. Myles is a nice player, but he ain’t worth $48M. The deal also almost completely hamstrings the Bucks from making further moves, which is important because they don’t have a true point guard on the roster at the moment.

Very strange.

Then the Pacers took heat for seemingly letting Turner walk simply to avoid paying the luxury tax. It’s hard enough to get free agents to come to Indianapolis in the first place, a task made harder as the team has a reputation for being frugal. Letting Turner go seemed to reinforce that view. One analyst suggested letting Myles walk would cause a mutiny amongst the rest of the team, which I thought was a little extreme.

Our idiot local sports columnist, who doesn’t know much about how NBA contracts work, suggested that Turner and his agent were the bad guys here, and that they lied about the Pacers not being willing to pay the tax. He also claimed the Pacers had offered a lot more than Turner was saying.

Which misses the point that the Bucks still offered more than whatever the Pacers’ final offer was. For some reason us Midwesterners always think our best players should take hometown discounts to stay with our teams[2] Yes, Myles Turner has made a ridiculous amount of money in his life. But why should he, or any other player, not take the biggest contract offered them?

Anyway, whatever the Pacers’ motivations, I totally get the move. Myles is on the back end of his career, turning 30 this year, and has shown some minor decline. This past season he was a nearly 40% 3-point shooter when Haliburton was on the court. In contrast, he wasn’t even a 30% shooter when Hali was sitting. Maybe those stabilize over the course of a season, but with Hali out all of next year, the argument to let Myles walk makes more sense.

This also means the Pacers don’t have to make a decision on Bennedict Mathurin this summer. They can let him play, likely as a starter, next season, see if his game improves/messes better with the Pacers system, and then extend or trade him next summer.

Biggest of all, next year’s draft is supposed to be very deep, with at least three franchise building block players at the top. With the new flattened lottery odds, you don’t have to be terrible to sneak into the top three. See Dallas this year. So let your center walk, play without your best player all season, and then hope the first round pick you re-acquired a month ago turns into a mega lottery ticket in the 2026 draft.

I get why some Pacers fans are pissed. But this is a completely defensible move from both Myles Turner’s and the Pacers’ perspectives. There are no true bad guys here.

I also laughed when I turned on the local news Saturday and they said there was big, breaking Pacers news! Yep, Indiana traded for Memphis backup center Jay Huff. Maybe they were just being puny, since Huff is 7’1”. But this is not a franchise altering trade. Hell, I didn’t even know Huff was in the NBA.

M’s Adventures

M was home for the weekend – and is actually working from our house Monday because she had a dentist appointment in the morning – but her real fun was the weekend before the holiday. She flew to the Bay Area to visit her sorority “little,” who lives in San Jose. It seems like they had a great time and she got to see almost everything she wanted to see, although the marine layer was thick so the Golden Gate Bridge was totally socked in and their trip to the beach in Santa Cruz wasn’t filled with sunshine.

It was a bit of a hassle to get there, though. Her first flight out of Cincinnati was delayed because of both storms near the airport, and storms between Cincy and Denver, where her first leg ended. Before she had taken off she got a message from Southwest saying she would not make her connection and that they had re-booked her on a new flight…the next morning. Keep in mind she was traveling alone, and for the first time no less!

Luckily she has an aunt that lives in Denver. S made a call and Aunt K was thrilled for M to come spend the night.

However, I was tracking M’s flight and noticed the arrival time in Denver kept moving up. And the flight to SFO kept getting delayed. There was a chance she would make it. Sure enough rather than fly nearly to Texas to get around storms, the pilots found a gap in the storms over Kansas, and they landed nearly on time.

I had already texted M that she would probably have to Uber to her aunt’s house. When she was on the ground and responded I told her that there was a chance she might make her second flight. She got very excited. And then they sat on the tarmac for at least 30 minutes before they pulled to the gate…just as the SFO flight was pulling away from its gate.

Oh well.

Turns out they were sitting on the tarmac so the ground crew could pull bags for people who were booked on other flights, including M even though she had been rebooked. Sometimes the right hand doesn’t talk to the left at Southwest. So she stood around for another half hour waiting for her bag and then had to go ask for assistance and was told her bag was on its way to California. Egad. She was a little flustered.

By now it was close to midnight in Denver, close to 2:00 AM to her body. Once she was in her Uber I went to bed and S woke up to track her progress. M made it safely to her aunt’s house just after 3:00 AM Eastern. She was thoroughly wiped out, but at least she didn’t have to sleep in the airport. We had no idea if she could have checked into a hotel if we found her a room since she’s only 20.

She got a decent night’s sleep and then her uncle and cousin drove her back to DEN the next morning for her delayed trip into SFO. She was excited that her bag was waiting at the Southwest office for her and she didn’t have to wait for it to come out on the carousel.[3]

A bummer that cut half a day off her time in Cali, but she has a story! And the rest of the weekend was great.

TdF

The Tour de France started Saturday. I doubt any of you care about that. Just in case anyone does have any interest in this year’s race, this is a hilarious and thorough accounting of each team and the primary contenders.

An entirely vibes-based guide to the 2025 Tour de France