Breaking:Dalton Knecht Drops A Bomb Shell To Tennessee “I Would Love To Do This Trade Somewhere Else For This Reason.
In a road-trip country webbed with dream-filled interstates, the roads teem with stories even if nobody knows them as they roll along. It seems that last summer a story made its way the 18½ hours from the middle of Colorado to the eastern chunk of Tennessee. The story apparently made a stop in Indiana along the way.
In the Acura rode a father who had played basketball at Mayville State in Mayville, N.D., the kind of admirable dedication that doesn’t suggest a slew of frills, and a 6-foot-6 son.
Had they told anyone along their trudge of a trek where the son would turn up on the last Saturday in March 2024, the listeners might have presumed them bananas.
That son, Dalton Knecht, that transfer from less-televised Northern Colorado to more-televised Tennessee, would sit in an interview room at the Elite Eight as one of two first-team all-Americans in Sunday’s Purdue-Tennessee Midwest Region final clash (the other being Purdue tower Zach Edey).
He would field questions as one of the mere four Naismith player of the year finalists and as a presence in the country’s roughly 1 billion NBA mock drafts (often in the teens), and he would supply solicited advice on how to withstand long road trips with parents.
“I just put my headphones in,” he said, “and just didn’t listen to my dad at all.”
Rewarded with a guffaw or two from that, he said, “On my phone, or blocking him out.”
And so, “Just acting like he’s not in there.”