NBA Week 3 recap: Enjoying the Kings and Thunder on the rise

This is the first of a weekly article highlighting trends from the previous week of NBA games and a brief look ahead to the upcoming slate of games.

The NBA has been blossoming as an on-court product for a couple of seasons now. The game has sped up, the players are more multi-dimensional than they’ve ever been, the NBA gives their players the freedom to express themselves on social media and on the court with their sneakers, doing as good a job as any league with promoting and marketing their stars.

This doesn’t even count the countless GIFs, memes and beefs that arise on a nightly basis. The game is truly the perfect combination of highlights, talent and storylines for the current state of social media and roundtable talk. The rise of NBA League Pass generates hype for the league’s bottom-feeders as well, showing there is interest in dissecting and watching all 30 teams in the NBA, at least for people like me.

I have covered the Los Angeles Lakers and hosted the site podcast for Hoops Habit for 15 months, and now will be starting this weekly column covering some of the games, players and teams that caught my eye the previous week. The number of slides and talking points may vary week to week, but expectations are there will be at least one deeper dive and some other talking points each time.

After that, there will be a slide with the plays and stat lines that stood out before laying out the best games for the upcoming week’s slate. This week, we begin with the surprisingly enjoyable Sacramento Kings.