Basketball is back, and both of Florida’s NBA teams are walking into a season with real buzz.
The season tips off Tuesday, and the Heat open at home Wednesday night against Minnesota. That’s when Giannis Antetokounmpo makes his Miami debut.
Pat Riley has spent years looking for a true superstar after LeBron James left town. The Jimmy Butler era had some highs, but the Heat always felt like underdogs riding a wave rather than top dogs in the league.
The stars finally aligned in the offseason, bringing in a player in Antetokounmpo who is inarguably a top five player when healthy, though he’s dealt with injury concerns the last few years.
Up the Turnpike, the Magic are betting on a new coach rather than a new roster. Orlando fired Jamahl Mosley in May and replaced him with Sean Sweeney. Last year’s team, stocked with talent, was a bit of a train wreck most of the season. The squad almost pulled off a first-round upset in the playoffs against the Pistons, but fell short.
That provides a lot of intrigue as Heat fans get to see how far Giannis can carry them and Magic fans get to see if last year was just a season from hell.
The two teams have combined for 100 wins in a season just five times, with the high being 110 wins in the 2010-11 season. The Heat that year won 58 games in LeBron’s first season, while the Magic won 52 behind Dwight Howard’s third straight (and final) Defensive Player of the Year performance.
Don’t expect the teams to match that mark. But with some health luck, one or both teams could be viewed as contenders come playoff time.
Now, it’s on to our weekly game of winners and losers.
Winners
Honorable mention: Jimmy Patronis. Over a week ago, Patronis was keeping Panhandle residents safe by warning them about an impending hurricane. This week, he went to bat for the same coastline against a different threat.
The freshman Republican from Florida’s 1st Congressional District filed a bill that would block new oil and gas leasing across a large chunk of the eastern Gulf the military uses for training. U.S. Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody introduced a Senate version as well earlier this month.
The target is the Interior Department’s offshore plan from last November, which proposed 34 lease sales through 2031 and carved out a new South-Central Gulf planning area that sits inside the Gulf Test Range.
That’s the stretch of water where Eglin Air Force Base, Hurlburt Field, Tyndall Air Force Base and Naval Air Station Pensacola run weapons tests and training, and it’s been off-limits to drillers for decades. Eglin alone accounts for about 20,000 personnel and $11 billion a year in economic impact, and leases could be on the block as early as 2029.
This isn’t a new fight for Patronis. He served on the state’s task force after the BP spill in 2010, joined fellow Republicans last year in a letter to President Donald Trump asking to pull the range from the plan, and urged constituents to flood the public comment period.
This issue is about as bipartisan as anything gets here, particularly in these more polarized times. But some of the loudest anti-drilling Republicans in the delegation are on their way out in U.S. Reps. Vern Buchanan and Byron Donalds.
Somebody has to pick up that torch, and a guy whose district depends on both beach tourism and military bases is a natural fit.
Almost (but not quite) the biggest winner: Democrats looking to board the hype train. Hopium is back in stock.
Florida Democrats have landed in the winners section of this column a few times recently, and we’ll repeat what we’ve said throughout: This isn’t the first time the blue team has looked good in October, and it’s often ended in disappointment after disappointment in November.
But this week, Democrats behaved like a party that thinks it can win, and they brought some serious star power to prove it.
Bill Clinton is coming to Hollywood on Tuesday to campaign with David Jolly at an interfaith event. It’s the former President’s first public stop this Midterm cycle, and it’s happening in Florida.
Then, former Republican U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, who served in the George W. Bush administration before winning his Senate seat, endorsed Democrat Bale Dalton in Florida’s 7th Congressional District.
And on Friday, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries headed to Miami to campaign with Eliott Rodriguez, who is trying to unseat U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar in Florida’s 27th Congressional District.
Big names are nice. Money is nicer, and the latest reports handed Democrats plenty of it, including Angie Nixon in the Senate race along with multiple House incumbents and other candidates looking to win seats for Democrats to help wrest control of the House from Republicans.
Now, many of these Democrats have been playing catch-up and still trail their GOP opponents in overall cash. And while analysts have shifted races toward Democrats, Republicans are still favored in many of these tightening contests.
So yes, this could all be a mirage on Nov. 3. But whatever happens next month, Democrats have earned a few days of believing.
The biggest winner: Stone crab harvesters. Stone crab season opened Thursday, ending months of waiting for crabbers, restaurants and anyone who’s been counting down to their first plate.
Crews could drop traps up to 10 days early but couldn’t touch a single claw until the opener. Now the boats are out, with the season running through May 1.
For the people pulling those traps, this is a big deal. A manager at the seafood market Starfish Company estimated stone crab accounts for half or more of a fisherman’s yearly income, and said business at the counter doubles once fresh claws become available.
It’s also one of the few fisheries where everybody comes out ahead, crab included. Harvesters take a claw, as long as it measures at least 2 7/8 inches, toss the crab back alive, and it grows the claw back. Recreational crabbers can join in with up to a gallon of claws a day.
Many Floridians this time of year watch the ocean (or, like last week, the Gulf) to prepare for storms. Starting this week, the open water is providing something much more pleasant.
Losers
Dishonorable mention: Elijah Manley. Here’s a free tip for anyone hoping to help an underdog Senate candidate score a shock upset: Don’t threaten to behead the people who won’t vote for her.
Manley, who lost the Democratic Primary for Florida’s 20th Congressional District to U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in August, posted a message of purported support for Angie Nixon’s U.S. Senate campaign.
It started innocently enough by urging people to vote for her. Then he promised that anyone who didn’t would get their “f***ing head” cut off.
Manley was reportedly booked into jail on Friday and is now facing two counts of intimidation.
Manley is trying to turn this into a First Amendment issue, arguing the President says worse things all the time. Try using that excuse the next time you get pulled over for speeding while other cars were going faster and see how that works.
This isn’t the first time Manley has gotten in trouble during campaign season. In 2018, as a 19-year-old campaign worker in Fort Lauderdale, he was arrested on allegations he vandalized campaign signs before prosecutors dropped the charge.
But beyond the obvious problem with saying stuff like this, it’s just dumb strategically. Nixon spent last week turning JD Vance’s “get the hell out of here” line into a rallying cry. The last thing her campaign needs less than three weeks out is a supporter making violent threats in her name.
If Manley wanted voters to rally to Nixon, it was already happening. He would have done more good just staying off social media entirely (as would most of us).
Almost (but not quite) the biggest loser: Amendment 3. The property tax amendment, born from the Governor’s monthslong push and reshaped by the GOP Legislature, is increasingly in trouble, if polls are to be believed.
Three new surveys all put support for the initiative short of the 60% needed on Nov. 3. Stetson University had it in the 50s, a poll from MDW Communications and EDGE Communications put it at 50%, and the Associated Industries of Florida (AIF) survey landed at 53%.
AIF added that the measure fell short of 60% in every media market in the state, and support sagged further once voters were informed about its effects.
On top of that, the “Yes” campaign backed by Florida Realtors got undercut by its own ally.
Florida Realtors has poured millions into Vote Yes on 3, selling the measure as relief for people priced out of owning a home.
Realtor.com, which runs under license from the Realtors’ national parent group, has been telling a different story. Its Senior Economist, Joel Berner, estimated that wiping out property taxes would push Florida home values up 7% to 9% almost overnight. And who pays for that? First-time buyers, who would face even higher prices in a state where home prices have spiraled out of control post-COVID.
To be fair, Amendment 3 doesn’t fully eliminate property taxes. But the logic still holds: cut the tax bill on owning a home, and the price of buying one goes up.
When reporters asked the Realtors about it, the group sent back a statement restating its pitch about helping families afford a home and didn’t touch the price estimate at all.
Realtors also earn a cut of every sale price, so higher home values mean bigger commissions. Just coincidental, we’re sure!
The biggest loser: Matt Gaetz. Two women have filed a federal civil lawsuit accusing the former Congressman of being part of a sex trafficking operation while he was still in office.
The women, identified as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2, say Gaetz and former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg recruited young women, paid them for sex, supplied drugs and flew them on trips between 2017 and early 2019.
The suit, filed in the Middle District of Florida, also ropes in former state Rep. Chris Dorworth, whose Central Florida home allegedly hosted one of the parties. (Dorworth also spent last week fending off angry Seminole County residents over his Pappy’s Patch development. Rough month.)
The women say they were in their early 20s with little money and no steady income, and that the men exploited that by paying them irregularly and tying perks to sex. The complaint also leans on the House Ethics Committee’s December 2024 report, which concluded Gaetz paid multiple women for sex and found “substantial evidence” he had sex with a 17-year-old.
Gaetz called the latest allegations false and posted a screenshot that critics said appeared to identify at least one of the anonymous plaintiffs. Maybe that plays well with his base, and if he wins in court he can gloat all he wants. But doing this sort of stuff while these allegations remain up in the air is just slimy behavior.
The flip side, of course, is that Gaetz deserves his day in court. The Justice Department already declined to charge Gaetz in 2023, and this civil suit carries a lower standard of proof.
But the guy who now hosts a prime-time show on One America News Network is also defending a defamation suit filed in July by a Dallas philanthropist. He keeps saying he wants his day in court. Now he has two.
