CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Coby White said he wasn't surprised when Chicago Bulls executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas informed him last week the team was trading him after seven seasons.
White said the writing was on the wall in Chicago after the Bulls dealt Nikola Vucevic and Kevin Huerter leading up to the NBA trade deadline. His name has also been subject to trade rumors for several weeks as well.
“I figured I was next on the chopping block,” White said.
The Bulls were heading in a different direction, making White expendable.
In what he viewed as a stroke of luck, he was dealt to the Hornets, bringing back home to North Carolina where he remains the all-time leading scorer in high school basketball history and also played one season for Tar Heels in college before being selected No. 7 overall in the 2019 NBA draft.
“He was happy for me that I get to go home,” White said of his conversation with Karnisovas.
White, who averaged 18.6 points and 4.7 assists this season for the Bulls, has yet to play for the Hornets while recovering from a calf strain. There is no timetable for his return, but White said he's on the mend.
Once he's ready to return, he'll likely to come off the bench in Charlotte with LaMelo Ball locked in as the starting point guard and budding young stars Brandon Miller and Kon Knueppel rounding out the backcourt.
Given Ball's injury history, White could be a a valuable backup option for Charlotte.
The Hornets are one of the hottest teams in the league, taking a nine-game win streak into Monday night's game against the Detroit Pistons. White said he is thrilled to join a young team that appears on the rise and added that his new teammates have made him feel welcome.
White said this wasn't the first time his name had been circulated in trade rumors, but added this was first time he felt like it might actually happen.
“Every other time in my career I was kind of like, I don’t think was gonna really happen," White said. “But now just with the circumstances, you know, there’s a lot of us that are coming into free agency this summer. And the team had to kind of go in a direction, a certain direction. So, I really wasn’t surprised or anything like that.”
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Milwaukee Bucks' Amir Coffey fouls Chicago Bulls' Coby White during the first half of an NBA basketball game Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. military forces boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the ship from the Caribbean Sea as part of an oil quarantine meant to squeeze Venezuela, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday.
Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil and relied on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. Following the U.S. raid to apprehend then-President Nicolás Maduro in early January, several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight.
Hegseth vowed to eventually capture all those ships, telling a group of shipyard workers in Maine on Monday that “the only guidance I gave to my military commanders is none of those are getting away.”
“I don’t care if we got to go around the globe to get them; we’re going to get them,” he added.
Later Monday, the U.S. military said it had carried out another deadly strike on a vessel accused of trafficking drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
U.S. Southern Command said the strike killed two people, while one person survived. Southern Command said it had notified the U.S. Coast Guard to activate its search and rescue system for the survivor. A video linked to the post shows a boat moving through the water before exploding in flames.
Monday’s attack raises the death toll from the Trump administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats to 130 people.
The Trump administration has seized seven tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of the South American country’s oil. Unlike those previous actions, the Aquila II has not been formally seized and placed under U.S. control, a defense official said.
Instead, the ship is being held while its ultimate fate is decided by the U.S., according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing decision-making.
The Aquila II is a Panamanian-flagged tanker under U.S. sanctions related to the shipment of illicit Russian oil. Owned by a company with a listed address in Hong Kong, ship tracking data shows it has spent much of the last year with its radio transponder turned off, a practice known as “running dark” commonly employed by smugglers to hide their location.
It was one of at least 16 tankers that fled the Venezuelan coast last month, according to Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, who said his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document the ship’s movements. According to data transmitted from the ship Monday, it is not currently laden with a cargo of crude oil.
The Pentagon's post on X said the military “conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction” on the ship.
“The Aquila II was operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean,” the Pentagon said. “It ran, and we followed.”
A Navy official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations, would not say what forces were used in the operation but confirmed the destroyers USS Pinckney and USS John Finn as well as the mobile base ship USS Miguel Keith were operating in the Indian Ocean.
In videos the Pentagon posted to social media, uniformed forces can be seen boarding a Navy helicopter that takes off from a ship that matches the profile of the Miguel Keith. Video and photos of the tanker shot from inside a helicopter also show a Navy destroyer sailing alongside the ship.
Since the U.S. ouster of Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid on Jan. 3, the Trump administration has set out to control the production, refining and global distribution of Venezuela’s petroleum products. Officials in President Donald Trump’s Republican administration have made it clear they see seizing the tankers as a way to generate cash as they seek to rebuild Venezuela’s battered oil industry and restore its economy.
Trump also has been trying to restrict the flow of oil to Cuba, which faces strict economic sanctions by the U.S. and relies heavily on oil shipments from allies like Mexico, Russia and Venezuela.
Since the Venezuela operation, Trump has said that no more Venezuelan oil will go to Cuba and that the Cuban government is ready to fall. Trump also recently signed an executive order that would impose a tariff on any goods from countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, primarily pressuring Mexico because it has acted as an oil lifeline for Cuba.
Associated Press writer Patrick Whittle in Bath, Maine, contributed to this report.
This story has been corrected to show that the name of the destroyer is the USS John Finn, not the USS Johnson.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, Monday, Feb. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Whittle)
FILE - The Pentagon, the headquarters for the U.S. Department of Defense, is seen from the air, Sept. 20, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, FIle)
