Ex-G Leaguer Chance Comanche’s murder trial set for March 2025
Former G League player Chance Comanche, who was charged with the murder of a woman whose body was found near Las Vegas, had his trial date set for March 10, 2025, at a hearing on Wednesday morning.
Comanche appeared in front of Judge Michelle Leavitt of Clark County, Nevada’s 8th Judicial District Court.
Comanche’s trial was set after he pleaded not guilty last Thursday. On the same day, his lawyer, Gary L. Guymon, told ESPN that the state decided that Comanche, who also was charged with kidnapping, will not face the possibility of the death penalty if he were to be found guilty at trial.
Prosecutors said that Comanche and his former girlfriend, Sakari Harnden — who faces murder and kidnapping charges related to the death of the same woman — will be tried together. Harnden, 19, also pleaded not guilty.
The charges against Comanche and Harnden are related to the disappearance and death of Marayna Rodgers, who is from Lynnwood, Washington. Las Vegas police said Rodgers, a medical assistant, was choked to death early Dec. 6. Her remains were later found in a roadside ditch in suburban Henderson.
An autopsy report obtained by ESPN concluded Rodgers’ death was a homicide caused by asphyxia due to strangulation.
After his arrest, Comanche, a 6-foot-10 power forward and center, was dropped by the Stockton Kings, the NBA G League affiliate of the Sacramento Kings. The team had played the G League Ignite in Henderson, Nevada, on Dec. 5. Comanche played one NBA game, for the Portland Trail Blazers, on April 9, 2023. He collected seven points and three rebounds in the Trail Blazers’ 56-point loss to the Golden State Warriors.
WITH ALL DUE respect to Disneyland, “the happiest place on Earth” for any player or team after an NBA championship win is the hallway inside the arena that leads to the photo room.
Time loses all meaning. Family and friends walk gleefully through the corridors to take their turn posing with the gleaming Larry O’Brien Trophy.
It was well past midnight on June 18 when Jayson Tatum and his family made their way in. He had just put up 31 points, 11 rebounds and 8 assists to lead the Boston Celtics in their series-clinching 106-88 win over the Dallas Mavericks in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
It was the crowning moment of his career. The win that was supposed to silence anyone who had questioned whether he was enough of an alpha to carry a team to a title like his idol, Kobe Bryant, had. It was supposed to validate that the Celtics had made the right choice by placing their faith in the much- and long-questioned duo of Tatum and Finals MVP Jaylen Brown by letting them grow through their mistakes as they advanced to four conference finals appearances and one NBA Finals appearance throughout their 20s but were not able to win it all.
For a few moments, it felt as if all of that was true.
“Y’all called him too ‘nice,'” Tatum’s mother, Brandy Cole, told ESPN in that happiest of hallways the night her son won his first championship. “I think he is nice. He’s laid-back and well-mannered. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s like people just wanted to hear him scream.”
As she spoke, Cole spotted Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens walking the same hallway with his family. Stevens had been the Celtics’ coach when the franchise drafted Tatum in 2017. He had spent the past four years building the team around Tatum to maximize his well-rounded skill set.
“We don’t have to scream [now] … because we won, right, Brad?” Cole called out. “We can whisper that. … Because we champions!”
Stevens caught her eye, pointed and yelled something back. This was the night to lean into moments like this. Because as Stevens, Tatum, Brown and the entire Celtics organization were about to learn, these moments don’t last very long.
TWELVE DAYS LATER, Boston’s championship honeymoon was officially over. It was June 30, and Stevens was in his sixth-floor office inside the ultra-modern, 70,000-square-foot Auerbach Center, the Celtics’ gleaming practice facility just 7 miles down Storrow Drive from TD Garden. Memorabilia from the team’s historic past adorns the walls. But everything else about it is meant to feel big and spacious — an obvious metaphor for a team with unrivaled history but still hungry for more. In his office, Stevens was deep in discussions about committing nearly $440 million to two of his team’s key players — a record-breaking $314 million extension for Tatum and a $125.9 million extension for guard Derrick White.
The discussions were not so much about whether the Celtics should commit that much money to two players so soon after investing $304 million in Brown, $135 million in ball-hawking guard Jrue Holiday and $96 million in center Kristaps Porzingis, but rather about committing that amount of money in an era in which the new collective bargaining agreement makes it exceptionally more punitive to field such an expensive team.
“We’re going to face some basketball penalties down the road that we’re going to have to make decisions on,” Stevens told ESPN. “But we’re also very cognizant that we have a really damn good team and we’re trying to win a championship.”
That night, when the league’s free agent moratorium opened, Stevens planned to place calls to the representatives for Tatum, White and the team’s other free agents. But before he could dial out, a call came in that he had to take.
It was team owner Wyc Grousbeck.
Stevens didn’t think much of it at first. Everyone was on board with the team’s offseason plans.
But Grousbeck wasn’t calling to approve the deals or strategize about the ramifications of a $500 million payroll in the future. He was calling to tell Stevens that he would soon announce his intention to sell a controlling interest in the team. That, in other words, someone else would eventually be signing the gigantic checks Stevens was about to authorize.
“He reiterated his support for basketball operations,” Stevens said. “And he said to just keep on doing what we’re doing … and know that this is probably going to be a long process.”
Later, Grousbeck clarified that he would remain as the team’s controlling owner through 2025 and didn’t intend to complete the sale until 2028.
It was unsettling news.
“I think our job is to continue to, with everyone in the room — owners, basketball operations, [coach] Joe [Mazzulla] — our job is to build the best team that we can under the comfort level of the people in the room,” Stevens said. “So we’re just going to do our best to put our best foot forward, and then each year we’ll have to assess how everything looks. Then certainly the new ownership group will dictate a lot of that.”
Recent NBA history has not been kind to defending champions. The last champion to make it out of the second round of the NBA playoffs was the Golden State Warriors in 2019, and even those dynastic Warriors eventually disintegrated on and off the court — losing Klay Thompson to injury and Kevin Durant first to injury, then to free agency.
The Celtics didn’t even make it through two weeks of the offseason before the ground beneath them started to shift. Even by NBA standards, Boston has had one of the shortest championship honeymoons in recent memory.
“It’s amazing how many of my friends in the industry who have won a championship [say] it’s like it’s one or two days and then it’s done,” Stevens said. “I think in a lot of ways I would agree with that from my own perspective.”
He chuckled. From Grousbeck’s shocking announcement to the public dismay over Tatum’s sporadic playing time with Team USA and Brown’s exclusion from it to the lingering uncertainty over Porzingis’ serious ankle injury, the Celtics’ summer vacation could’ve come with trip insurance. And what should have been weeks or months of elation quickly turned.
But Stevens knows sympathy is in short supply, especially for champions.
“I think [Mazzulla] summed that up well with his ‘nobody cares’ quote,” Stevens said. “Everybody’s after [us]. We’ve got a really good team, so do a lot of other teams. We’re going to have to beat all of them and human nature. That’s the challenge, and what the hell, it’s a great challenge.'”
TEN DAYS AFTER inking Tatum and White to massive extensions, and just three weeks after paddling down the Charles River in duck boats in front of hundreds of thousands of screaming fans, the second domino of the summer fell in Boston. It was unanticipated and initially seemed irrelevant to the Celtics or their summer. But its ripple effects would soon go viral.
Kawhi Leonard had just withdrawn from Team USA after several days of practice, opening a coveted roster spot on a team heavily favored to win gold. Candidates to replace him were discussed internally, within Team USA, and externally. Brown, who’d just been named the Finals MVP for his scintillating, two-way dominance throughout the playoffs, seemed like an obvious choice.
Instead, within hours, Team USA chose his teammate, defensive specialist White.
Brown was not about to let the slight pass quietly.
The same day, Brown posted a cryptic tweet with three eyeglass emojis. Five hours later, he posted again, this time accusing Nike, which was a sponsor of Team USA, of preventing his participation. “This what we doing?”
Team USA executive director Grant Hill denied the allegation.
“You get 12 spots, and you have to build a team,” Hill said. “And one of the hardest things is leaving people off the roster that I’m a fan of. … But the responsibility that I have is to put together a team … that will give us the best opportunity for success.
“And, so, whatever theories that might be out there, they’re just that.”
Brown hadn’t exactly been a star for Team USA in 2019, when he played in the World Cup under Gregg Popovich, averaging just 7.9 points and 4.1 rebounds as the team finished a disappointing seventh. And there were some questions then about his ball movement and decision-making, sources said, and questions during the summer among Team USA leaders about whether he’d be willing to play the defensive-minded role White was being tasked with.
But that World Cup was five years and one Finals MVP and NBA championship ago. This snub didn’t reflect that.
“You saw an evolution in Jaylen’s game [last season],” teammate Al Horford told ESPN. “It wasn’t just about scoring. He was getting people involved. He’s making the right reads. He is making the cuts when he needs to make it to the basket. And then, on the defensive end, he just took it to another level. His energy, his commitment to the defense — it was inspiring for all of us.”
None of that seemed to matter to the people deciding on Leonard’s replacement, which is why it seemed to sting Brown so deeply.
Brown texted White directly to make sure he knew none of this was personal, sources said.
But Brown wasn’t through publicly responding to the snub, posting another cryptic message the next day. “I’m not afraid of your resources” and then directly responding to Hill’s denial.
No one in Boston was surprised Brown had taken such umbrage.
“That’s who Jaylen is,” one team source said. “He is not afraid to speak his mind. Jaylen has a constant chip on his shoulder and sees doubters everywhere.”
If anything, there’s an expectation that the chip will be even bigger this year.
“I’ve been in the gym with Jaylen the past few weeks,” Horford said. “First of all, the dude looked like he’s put on 10 more pounds of muscle. He looks great — just unreal. He’s so hungry, so motivated, so driven.”
The controversy around Brown’s snub was only the beginning for a long-maligned duo that thought winning a championship would have silenced their critics. On July 28, in Team USA’s first group stage game — against Nikola Jokic and Serbia — Tatum, a five-time All-Star, didn’t play a single minute.
He was not injured or being disciplined. It was a true DNP-CD for the player who had started two of the five exhibition games in advance of the Olympics and had averaged 15.2 points for Team USA in winning a gold medal back in 2021.
Four weeks after inking the biggest contract in NBA history, the first-team All-NBA selection unceremoniously sat at the end of the cold Team USA bench — a public humiliation on the world’s biggest stage.
Coach Steve Kerr had told Tatum before the game that he wasn’t likely to play, sources said. But Kerr had otherwise given no advance warning or reasoning, so the public, and even the announcers, were left guessing and analyzing Tatum’s every expression and action on the sideline.
Tatum’s parents both expressed their frustration on social media.
Kerr tried to ameliorate the situation the next day by saying he “felt like an idiot” for not playing Tatum, and started Tatum against South Sudan in the next game. But the damage had been done.
Unable to get into any kind of rhythm, and still struggling to work through a mechanical issue with his jumper that arose during the playoffs, Tatum averaged 5.25 points, 5.25 rebounds and 1.5 assists in less than 18 minutes per game. He hit just 38% from the floor in the four games he played, and he missed all four of his 3-point attempts.
“I personally was not happy about it,” Horford said of Tatum’s sporadic playing time with USA Basketball and Brown’s snub. “Those guys, they’re very special to me. And even though it was nothing against me, it motivated me and all of us for this season.
“I know that they handled it well. They’re fine. But when you see those two guys, the amount of work that they’ve put in, the sacrifices they have made. To be on the top of their games and that happened to them, it was hard to watch [the Olympics] and not see them in the position that we would’ve hoped to see them in.”
TATUM, AT LEAST, was able to play in the Olympics. Porzingis wasn’t even able to help his home country, Latvia, try to qualify and compete in the Olympics. He spent his summer rehabilitating from an injury to his left ankle, one the Celtics themselves called “rare.”
The Celtics sent trainers to monitor his progress while he worked overseas and saw him back in Boston for the first time last week.
On Friday, a jet-lagged Porzingis stepped into the Celtics’ practice facility. He had just landed back from Europe. Soon after pushing open the door to the nearly all-glass building, he saw Mazzulla, already glistening in sweat, in midsession on one-legged squats, rehabbing a torn meniscus.
Seeing his center for the first time in months, Mazzulla stopped his workout to catch up.
“What do you think training camp should be? Easy or hard?” Mazzulla asked him.
Somewhere in the middle? Porzingis ventured.
“F— no,” Mazzulla said. “It should be super hard.”
Porzingis, of course, won’t be a part of it.
