The Lakers sold for 12.5 billion dollars - Doncic found out from the media

Mark Walter sold the Los Angeles Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for 12.5 billion dollars - the most expensive sale of a sports club in history. Doubly strange: Walter held the club for only 14 months, and closed the entire sale in three days. Neither of those numbers sounds like a long-term vision. The most interesting detail is nevertheless a human one: Luka Doncic, the face of the franchise, was not even consulted about the sale, as reported by Dave McMenamin of ESPN. He will speak to the new owners by video link from Slovenia, where he is preparing his teammates for a mini-camp. The Slovenian's public reaction was impeccably diplomatic: "Being a Laker means everything to me," he wrote on X. For Doncic this is the fifth different ownership group he has played under in his career. When a star of that calibre gets used to changes of owner the way you get used to changes of timetable, that is not stability - it is liquidity with a human face.

Real Madrid brought Shulga back from the NBA - and that is not only a basketball signing

Real Madrid has officially signed the Ukrainian point guard Max Shulga on a two-year contract until the end of the 2027/28 season. The 24-year-old comes from the Boston Celtics organisation, where last season he played 11 games in the NBA, while in the G League with the Maine Celtics he averaged 15.7 points, 4.4 rebounds and 6.7 assists. Boston did not extend him a qualifying offer at the end of June, so he became a free agent. Here the second layer of the story begins. Shulga was born in Kyiv, but moved to Spain as a child and was formed in the Spanish basketball system - which means he counts as a locally trained player. And the rules in the Spanish ACB require at least four locally trained players in a registered roster of 10 to 12. So Real did not just buy a guard option - it bought a slot on its own list. Sometimes the most expensive part of a signing is bureaucratic.

Jabari Parker returns to Partizan - the club still does not know what to do with him

Partizan begins pre-season on 20 August with a squad full of open questions, and the most visible one is called Jabari Parker. The 31-year-old American arrived in Belgrade as the highest-paid player in the team and delivered a season best forgotten quickly. He spent the end of the season on loan at Joventut Badalona, but the Spaniards could not cover his full contract for next year, so he returned to Humska - where there is no solution for him. According to Mozzart Sport, Parker will show up at the start of camp with his teammates. The black-and-whites evidently do not want to repeat the Ife Lundberg case, where he trained individually in Denmark for an entire season until Maccabi Tel Aviv agreed to take him. That is an admission that says a lot: the club is more afraid of photographs of a player training alone than of the transfer policy mistake itself.

Macedonia's cadets finished 14th after a 62:102 rout by Bulgaria

The men's cadet team finished the European Championship Division B in 14th place, after a 62:102 defeat to Bulgaria in the game for 13th position. A forty-point margin. At the championship, whose games were played in Skopje and Gevgelija, Macedonia recorded three wins and five defeats. The match was decided early: after a level 15:15 the Bulgarians went on a 0:9 run, the first quarter ended 15:24, and at half-time the deficit was 25 points (29:54). Coach Dejan Stojanovski did not hide: "Today we were not ready to fight, and we also made a lot of tactical errors. We did not stick to the game plan, at many moments we were undisciplined." But he also said one sentence more important than the result: "We do not have a deep bench that can compensate for those things." That is not a tactical remark - it is a description of a system. Home court, home crowd, and the biggest margin of the entire championship.

Grigorij Gjorgjevikj joins TFT Skopje - third best assist provider at the U18 Euros

One of the biggest Macedonian basketball talents is officially a player of KK TFT. At the U18 European Championship, Grigorij Gjorgjevikj averaged 13.4 points, 4.7 rebounds and 6.4 assists - making him the third best assist provider of the whole championship. At the U18 final four he was named most valuable player of the final tournament playing for KK Vardar, and in the final he recorded 25 points, nine assists and eight rebounds. The numbers speak for themselves, but they are worth placing next to the other story from the same day: the cadet national team that lost by 40 points. Macedonia produces individuals with European numbers - what it does with them afterwards is an entirely different statistic. TFT now has a chance to show that a club can hold on to what the federation fails to gather.