With the start of the NBA summer league fast approaching, a lot of teams are in a rush to get their training camp rosters ready.

Around the dinner table, that night, Cody starts with a discussion of how the NFL deals with undrafted free agents in training camp:

"Let's say that, even with the equivalent of more than eight rounds' worth of picks, given that the average NFL career isn't actually that long, each and every team will have to sign at least one undrafted free agent, and that's not counting the training camp!"

"Dad, I have the feeling that it takes forever to negotiate the training camp contracts..." Al retorts. "Front offices have other things to do!"

"If you end up being, like, the DT equivalent of Travis Etienne, and make the big team from day one, you stand a better chance of your career lasting longer, but even then, don't count on it..."

"And there are lots of players who get cut. It's easy to imagine a player for whom being cut from an NFL training camp before they play even one game in the big league is the end of their football career!" Lana interjects.

"If you're not lucky enough to make the big team, but still relatively good, you might be signed to a practice squad contract, in which case you pray that someone at your position gets injured... You can play up to three games per season; if the team wants you to play a fourth one, they need to sign you for the rest of the season!"

"The practice squad sounds like the NFL's equivalent of a two-way contract, and the training camp, an Exhibit Nine one..." Heather sighs, without expanding on what these contracts are just yet.

"Hold on, what's an Exhibit Nine contract anyway?" Al asks his sister.

"Exhibit Nine implies that there can be at least nine exhibits on an NBA contract. Do you have any idea what's so special about that exhibit?" Cody asks his daughter.

Not many basketball fans know about contract exhibits, other than Exhibits 9 and 10, if that. Only the most dedicated would know, for example, that Exhibit 1 is the most important one since it's about length and salary. Or Exhibit 3 is used to protect player salaries against injuries.

"Exhibit Nine is specifically for training camp players, lasts for the season the contract is signed in, and a contract with one isn't guaranteed at all. Oh and teams can't sign such a contract until they signed fourteen players under contract! Excluding two-way ones..."

"Players get injured in training camp all the time, honey. What happens to a player on an Exhibit Nine contract if he gets injured?" Lana asks her daughter, knowing the harsh reality of pro sports.

"The team would then need to pay fifteen grand in workers' comp, as opposed to the entire salary, because if, somehow, an Exhibit Nine player made the team, he'd be paid the league's minimum salary..."

And they signed "pick #53" to an Exhibit 10 contract, Heather muses as she checks the notification on her phone.

"My team signed their second-rounder to an Exhibit Ten contract!"

Something's not right. Heather refrained from naming what her favorite team was, but they picked at #23 and #53, while having subsequently traded what amounts to #23 for #28 + cash. Why doesn't she name the players and teams involved? Albert starts getting irritated about Heather's evasiveness.

"Why do you keep referring to your favorite team without naming it?" Al confronts his sister.

"That I won't answer for a while, Al! I won't answer until you stop trying to evade me!"

"How does an Exhibit Ten deal differ from an Exhibit Nine one?" Lana asks her.

"Whereas an Exhibit Nine deal doesn't provide for a conversion to a two-way contract, an Exhibit Ten one does, but it's what happens if the player clears waivers while on one that's interesting about it!"

"It's getting more complicated than I thought... understanding one concept means I must understand another one first!" Al whines when he hears about the existence of the waiver wire. "I kind of expect the waiver wire to be, like, the team with the worst record will have priority in claiming players..."

"In that you're right!"

"I think I have enough for now. I might want to study some; by now you know the SAT isn't something you can study for just a few days before you take it..." Albert is about to storm off, feeling like it's a lot to take in.

Gotta ask Daisy and her SAT-taking friends who's available to study for the math portion with me... Albert has a lot on his mind about who could help him study. Especially since he studied for the reading portion last night, using excerpts from AP US Government class notes.

"Not so fast, Al!" Heather interjects.

"Let's backtrack a bit. You said that a NFL practice squad contract is like an NBA two-way contract, how so?" Cody asks his daughter. "As far as I can tell, the practice squad is used to develop players, just like the G-League!"

"An NBA player on a two-way contract can be called up to the big league for a maximum of forty-five days per season before his team has to sign a rest-of-season deal to keep him. Usually a pro-rated minimum..."

Same goes for a team wanting to keep a player who finished both 10-day contracts with them. Speaking of which, often people on Exhibit 10 contracts get signed to 10-day deals if they play well enough in the G-League, Heather muses as she realizes that 10-day deals can't be signed before the league-wide guarantee date.

"You still haven't told us about what happens to players on Exhibit Ten contracts and clear waivers!" Lana reminds her daughter.

"If the player clears waivers, and then stays sixty days with the team's G-League affiliate, or the deal is converted to a two-way contract before the regular season begins, he then receives a bonus!" Heather answers her mom.

At the same time, Daisy responds to Albert about studying for the math portion of the SAT. He sighs in relief because he feels like it can't come soon enough.

Daisy: Come over to my place ASAP

Don't forget about the diagnostic test, Al! But don't go around thinking that we're dating. Henry, Qian and you are the football players I respect most off the field. And not simply because they date my friends. Look at some of their teammates: they are athletic, but they chew through tutors like crazy, especially when their own tests draw near, Daisy ruminates while she gets her daily set of math practice questions.

Just as Al gets his: while subscribers get a dozen daily practice questions, he can change focus areas at any time. He wants to focus on geometry, Algebra II and pre-calculus questions, so his set of questions for today reflects such.

"I'm going to be at Daisy's home to study!" Al signals to his family before leaving home.

"Not again!" Heather yells at him as he prepares to leave the house.

When he arrives at Daisy's home, a few blocks away, as night is about to fall, Daisy has study materials ready:

"Just because plugging answer choices in equations can help you cover for you not having taken Algebra II and pre-calculus yet, doesn't mean you should!" Daisy shows him a chart of the relationships between trig functions.

A right triangle, an angle and the sides. Which one is the hypothenuse, which side is deemed adjacent to an angle, and which one is opposite to it. Exhibit 9: Sohcahtoa.

Why does that chart remind me of what my sister told me earlier about training camp contracts? Albert freezes in place as he also sees what the formulae next to the triangle in the chart mean.

"Why does that remind me of... contracts?" Albert asks Daisy, unsure of what trigonometry would have to do with contracts, and triggered by the caption.

"There's not a whole lot of that aspect of pre-calculus on the test, so we might want to attempt a handful of questions on that, together, will you?"

While Daisy can seemingly complete that portion of the test pretty rapidly, Albert, on the other hand, seems to be confused when faced with applying the concepts outside of simply finding what a sine, cosine or tangent is. The only thing he keeps in mind is that sine or cosine cannot be greater than one, nor smaller than negative one. (Technically, they could be, but the angle would no longer be a real number, and they quickly realize that complex numbers aren't on the SAT.)

"But sometimes your mind can play tricks on you. Something I feel might be useful for you once the test ends has to do with examining statistical claims and inference!" Daisy shows him another exhibit from her SAT math study guide about the key concepts of statistics as it relates to the SAT.

Exhibit 10: The 3 Ms of statistics, Albert starts reading on that aspect of stats, based on the visual. And do practice questions on that.

"So far this isn't troubling me that much. What troubled me on the last practice question set was something else altogether. These kinds of questions start with What statement is best supported by, or What evidence would best support the above claims, or similar..." Al's head starts to spin.

"I heard about how you're going to take AP US Government this year. Being able to answer logic questions correctly is critical to you to succeed in that course!" Daisy warns him.

"What do you mean?"

"I can show you past AP US Government tests from the semester I took it if you want. In that course, short or long-answer questions will often start with a reading passage making a certain claim about the impact of a policy..."

"That's too early for me..."

You don't need to be a star debater to understand that logical fallacies can hurt you in AP US Government. Speaking of debates, was I playing almost everywhere else in the state, I would be the kind of debater around whom to build an entire team, or at least a co-star. Yet, even "debate team cornerstones" would at best fly under the radar, and at worst be bullied elsewhere, Daisy ruminates on what her life would have been like was she playing for another school, triggered by Albert's admission of weakness in logic. Which makes her mind conjure images of logical fallacies.

And then Albert spends much of the night learning about logical fallacies and other tips to answer SAT logic questions, as well as how would that carry over to other areas. Such as, of course, political discourse. Once the logic session ends:

"I knew some people could struggle with logic, but no more than that!"

"That was very helpful, if a little dry..." Al points out.

"You now have a better idea of how formal logic could help you well after graduation..." Daisy sighs. "That was the main thing I could take for granted in SAT math, though!"

"Of course you can take logic questions on the SAT for granted, you made it to debate-State last year!"

At least he acknowledges that logic is one of the key skills every debater needs to qualify for State, Daisy starts to ruminate again, before the two move into another area of the test where logic might come into play.

Which brings them back to reading passages again. However, this time around, Al decides not to use his own practice passages, so that he doesn't get burned out on government.

After having read practice passages about different topics of government, and then move on to more "sciencey" passages, this one is a breath of fresh air... if a bit long, Al starts reading a long passage Daisy got the other day, but struggles to think of how to approach the questions.

"Time to review what I got wrong..." Al seems to despair a little bit, when he sees that he has gotten a few questions wrong.

"You might remember from our opening session that Anna fell into the trap of using outside knowledge, so what about you try reading the questions first next time? It would eliminate the temptation to use it to answer!"

"It would save me time, but when is it not a good idea?" Al rolls his eyes.

"I'd say read the passage first if you struggle on main idea questions, which I suggest you answer last, because it would be harder to get the main idea. Especially since reading the questions first will often lead you to focus specifically on the details asked by questions!"

But then the last reading passage for the night has to do with... contract law.

What's going on here? How could Daisy have gotten such passages what are way out of my league? It's obvious by now that I'm not on her level in that stuff! Al is about to scream shortly after having read the questions attached to the long passage.

"This passage reminds me of all these things going on in the NBA offseason, and the sheer complexity of it all!" Albert whines about the content of the reading passage while he gets to the main idea question.

Daisy rolls her eyes, oblivious to Albert's comments about what this passage evokes to him. "I think we have enough for tonight!"