Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily, presented by Amazon Prime for February 18th,

2026. I'm Dave Dufour. Here was Zena Keda and Mirren Fader. Coming up, we talked to

Mirren Fader about her big con-canimple piece, the Charlotte Hornets, and basketball joy.

Good morning, everybody.

What's up, Zena?

Welcome to the show.

Mirren.

How are you guys doing?

We're good.

Thank you for having.

Awesome.

The Charlotte Hornets are fast becoming our favorite team around here. Like,

there's so much fun. And with the slow week, we thought it would be a good time to check in on

some of the bigger stories that we've had over at the athletic. So we brought in our feature writer,

Mirren Fader, who wrote a great story about Con Cinepple and his whole process

and family and upbringing. Mirren, welcome to the show. How did you have the idea to follow

around Con Cinepple? And how did you know it was going to be so interesting? My editor,

actually, Glenn, he was like, you know, there's something interesting about this guy in his family. Like, I'm seeing this family everywhere. And there's a lot of K names. And so for me as a feature writer, I'm like, okay, what's interesting? What's beyond the like somebody scoring 20 points a game? And I was like, huh? Like, he's actually really good. But who is he? You know, what's what's happening with him? And I think a lot of smaller market teams that don't get a lot of attention, they have the best stories. So I was like, I need to see what this guy's backstory is. And I love your piece, especially the way you open it up, coach Charles Lee, head coach of the Charlotte Hornets,

calling Khan an effing killer.

And that feels jarring, given how composed and kind of understated and poised Khan comes across publicly.

He looks like an accountant.

Like, we can say this, Zena.

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