Locked On Lakers - Daily Podcast On The Los Angeles Lakers - Luka Dončić Plays in (Revamped!) All-Star Game... Still Not Sure to Play Friday

Starting point is 00:00:00 Luca plays briefly in the All-Star game, but we still don't know for sure if he'll be ready when the real games start again this week. That's next. You are Locked-on Lakers. Your daily Los Angeles Lakers podcast, part of the Locked-on Podcast Network, your team every day. Thanks to everybody for making Lockdown Lakers. First listen to every day Monday through Friday, sometimes on weekends, even on holidays, and now more than even once a day, no matter how you're getting the show, whether you're an Apple guy, Spotify guy. you're one of the 37,000 plus subscribers to the Lockdown Lakers YouTube channel, no matter how you do it, part of making the Lockdown Podcast Network, the number one sports podcast network anywhere in the universe that we know of. Brian Komeneski with Andy Komenetsky, nearly 20 years covering the... Well, former President Obama did confirm the existence of aliens,

Starting point is 00:00:55 if not necessarily in Area 51. Right. He did walk it back a little bit. He made it sound like there was like firsthand president. a dense kind of knowledge that he had that he let out of the bag. And he kind of walked it back later on Sunday, which is exactly what you would do if you realize that you let it out of the bag. Well, regardless, he said it is impossible to believe that in a, you know, a universe this large that we are the only living beings amongst us. and at least some of those people have to be listening to podcasts,

Starting point is 00:01:35 but we're still bigger than them. Yeah. So I forget where I left off in the preamble here, but we'll just keep going. I do want to let people know that today's episode is brought to you by Fandul. Use your profit boost on an NBA future and get entered for your chance to win a trip to the NBA finals. Play your game with Fandul, the official sports betting partner of the NBA.

Starting point is 00:02:00 We'll get into some interesting stuff, Adam Silver. So we did a little mini show on tanking earlier last week. And that was a huge topic of conversation in Adam Silver's normal annual All-Star press conference. So it was one of the big things that came up. So we'll talk about that. We'll talk about the format. But first, Andy, we got to talk about the fact that Luca Donchich did, in fact, participate. I think it was the word that was thrown around last week after the lake.

Starting point is 00:02:30 The Lakers finished their pre-break schedule. He participated in the All-Star game, played five minutes in the first game for Team World, and that was it. That was the end of the day. Seems to get through it okay. Yeah, he played two minutes, scored two points, had two assists, said afterwards that felt fine, but when asked about Friday versus the Clippers, the first game for the Lakers, after the All-Star break, he said, we'll see and did not commit to it.

Starting point is 00:03:01 And obviously, it should be noted that Luca is under no obligation to commit to anything now, whether because he doesn't want to, whether because he'd rather under promise and hopefully over-deliver, whether because he quite literally can't do it right now because he doesn't know. But what I do think is really interesting about this is we had talked before heading into, to the All-Star game when it was known that Luca was going to play, that in my opinion, while I don't think it is a massive deal on a, you know, in the grand scheme of things, Luca missing four games and then playing in the All-Star game for five minutes. Like, it's not a massive deal in terms of what it says about Luca's dedication to the Lakers

Starting point is 00:03:55 or anything like that, and the odds of these five minutes setting his recovery back felt low. That being said, though, if he misses four straight games, plays five minutes in this thing, and then doesn't play on Friday, I can promise there are going to be some pissed off Laker fans. There probably will be, but I think those fans would be kind of off for the reasons that you're talking about. Do you, do you, I mean, you're making a face of me. Do you think that playing five minutes in the All-Star game set his recovery back in the slightest? No. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:04:30 There's no reason. I don't know and you don't know. I'm saying optically, it is a bad look to miss. I'm not debating the optics. I'm debating whether those people who would be mad about it are wrong. And I think they are. No, I don't think they're wrong. I think they are correct because their first and foremost investment is with this.

Starting point is 00:04:52 team and I understand why they would be bothered by Luca not playing in those four games, then playing five minutes in the All-Star game and still not being ready for Friday when the real action begins. And this team desperately needs to get everyone on track. Whether there is a causation or not, I understand why they would feel like, dude, skip this thing. I am saying their anger with their future anger would be. misplaced because they're you know I understand why they would be but to me the I mean if you go back and watch the five minutes that Luca played you know at no point I'm not even totally sure

Starting point is 00:05:38 he ever ran I you know so like if he he sprinted up he he jogged at least to get up ahead of that layup that he scored I mean he was leading the transition right and he know he was doing warm-ups on the floor before Thursday's game when the Lakers last game, you know, had they, you know, all that stuff like he wasn't doing anything that he hasn't done already as part of his rehab process. Again, I'm talking about the optics of it. The optics. My point is the people who are hung up on the optics of it as if playing in the game is the reason that he isn't, you know, potentially ready to play Friday, I can understand

Starting point is 00:06:19 why they would think that and I would tell them they're wrong. I hope that he can play Friday because I hope he can play Friday. But he had, but playing in the All-Star game will have nothing to do with that. I didn't say, ever in, I know,

Starting point is 00:06:36 again, I am not saying that you're saying it is. I'm responding to the idea that these people would legitimately have a reason to be upset with Luca for anything other than, I guess not appearing to be serious enough to your commitments to the Lakers, which I think is way off base. And I think when you consider how Luca feels about his other obligations to fans,

Starting point is 00:07:07 to the league, to fans both domestically and internationally, I see nothing wrong with him playing. Until I see some sort of evidence that Luca was, you know, legitimately risking his recovery to participate in this game, I don't think there's any real reason to get upset about it, even if he doesn't play a Friday. Okay. Because he wouldn't have played Friday anyway.

Starting point is 00:07:37 Again, I'm talking about the optics of it. I'm talking about... Sometimes you have to tell people your opt, your reading of the optics are wrong. And that's what I'm saying. Okay. Sometimes things are about more than optics. That's fine, but I also, I understand what you're saying in terms of sometimes things are about more than optics, but I also feel like if I had to guess, the majority of Luca fans would be more concerned about his availability for the Lakers than they would for five minutes of an All-Star game.

Starting point is 00:08:05 So I understand where, again, I am not saying that I think the five minutes that he played in this game will have set him back. And ultimately, neither one of us will ever know for certain regardless. I mean, neither one of us is actually going to know, but were I to guess, I would guess one had nothing to do with the other. I just feel like if you aren't ready to play in the regular season games, you are better off for yourself, just sitting out the All-Star game. But regardless, he will hopefully be available. And if I had to guess, I would think he is going to be available because I would guess that everybody is wise enough to realize if there really is. is a chance he won't be, it really doesn't make much sense for him to do this thing at all. Well, that I would agree with. I mean, also, too, like it's got to be part of your normal

Starting point is 00:08:56 and your normal path back, your rehab path. Like, you know, again, like this is, you know, sort of playing it, you know, semi walk through shoot around speeds, you know, on a day like this way. I don't even think, you know, we'll get into the, the way guys played and all that kind of stuff, which, you know, generally I think was pretty well received. It's still wasn't what I think you would call anything close to the amount of output that you'd have to put in for an NBA game or a playoff game or a preseason game or even a hard practice. So we'll see. I mean, LeBron played both. LeBron played three games or two games, I forget.

Starting point is 00:09:34 Really? Is his team, the team? Team old times. They got to the finals of this round robin thing. The old times. So LeBron was busy. Yeah, Team Stripes played three games. Him and Kauai and Durant and even a guy like Brandon Ingram now qualifies as an old-timer.

Starting point is 00:09:53 Yeah. So, and they, you know, they look good. It was, you know, LeBron played just fine. Yeah. His team Stripes got waxed in the final, but LeBron, you know, statistics. Well, I think Team Stripes was tired by that. Again, it was all the old guys. We'll talk here in a second.

Starting point is 00:10:09 We'll take a break and we'll come back. But LeBron did, all joking aside, LeBron actually did have a nice showing. He, I thought he, uh, put on a pretty good show for the fans. And he tried very hard to stay off his feet in between, you know, Thursday's game and appearing in this one. So we'll break down what it looked like and we'll get into some of those tanking comments next. Locked on Lakers is brought to you by Fandul.

Starting point is 00:10:40 The winner games are officially here. And if you're anything like us, you're locking in for events that you get to see on the biggest stage only once every four years. And that's why following the winter games on Fan. It just makes sense from metal counts to individual events to finding your angle on the sports that you care about most. Fan duel gives you more ways to stay connected to the action. Like suddenly curling matches are going to feel incredibly intense, even though you don't quite even understand the rules of curling, how it works.

Starting point is 00:11:10 Everything just becomes must watch because you are fully locked into that competition. Fan duel keeps the entire Olympic experience engaging from start to finish. The winter games are on. There's no better way to follow them than with Fandual. Fan duel, play your game. All right. So the other thing, Andy, that was getting everybody's attention was the revamped format, because people are very concerned about how hard everybody plays.

Starting point is 00:11:38 We'll bring a little bit of intensity back to the All-Star game like it was back when, you know, we were kids and, you know, men were men and All-Star games were intense gladiatorial, you know, fights to the death. Well, once you, every single All-Star game, at least once one All-Star died during competition, which looking back on it was not a great way to promote the stars, but it was exciting. It was exciting. But that in-memorium segment that they play at a half-time really hits. They would execute the lowest-scoring All-Star every time, which again, I don't know if it's the best way to promote your All-Stars or promote your game, but it is exciting. It, you know, and it was a dark moment because you had to watch. It was, it really was must see TV.

Starting point is 00:12:28 Audiences were not ready for a beheading. No. But anyway, got everyone's attention. Oh, yeah. But, like, to be fair, I think, you know, there's, there's room in between we're being, obviously mocking here a little bit, but like, I think there is room in between this sort of nostalgic view that, like, kind of what we're talking about, these all start games were incredibly competitive.

Starting point is 00:12:54 And guys, like, certain players, I think there was an era where the games were more important to the players than they are now. There's no question about that. But usually the cliche had always been, always it was nothing for three quarters and then everybody would try in the fourth. Certain players occasionally would, you know, break that mold a little bit. There were certain years at least where Kobe was a little more intense about the All-Star game than others.

Starting point is 00:13:19 and you could see that. And I think Kobe has kind of a modern equivalent in Victor Wenimiyama, who clearly takes this game very seriously. But I do think it's fair to say that over the last two or three seasons, the effort level has gone down. And it is reasonable for the league

Starting point is 00:13:38 to try to figure out how to get it back. I don't think it's never going to be what people at least think that it was. But I do think, you know, I wasn't paying, hyper close attention to this. But I think the format worked. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:54 I think it was enough changing up of stuff. Guys were kind of, I think, into something new. And I know we were texting back and forth. You kind of recognize they sort of tapped into some of competitive things that I think help. Yeah. And one of those things,

Starting point is 00:14:11 by the way, I don't think, I mean, maybe we'll hear more comments from players that disprove what I'm saying. I don't think the U.S. versus the world, thing was a particularly big factor one way or another, particularly the way it was applied when it's like we're debating whether or not Carl Anthony Towns is American or world depending

Starting point is 00:14:30 on the needs of the team. Like at that point, the needs of the squads. Like at that point, it is, I think, very. When you start digging up people's family trees to find out like, you know, hey, Jalen Brunson, do you have an uncle who might have been from Denmark? Like, I think that piece of it felt forced and manufactured. But the piece of this that really did, I think, work. And I will admit, I did not see this heading into the weekend where I was pretty mercilessly mocking the format and all the concern over it, in part because there had been so much confusion over the U.S. versus world piece of this, not just by us, by other NBA media, frankly, by the fan, I mean, by the players.

Starting point is 00:15:16 Like, a lot of them didn't even seem to understand what they were going to be doing and what the format was. The idea that these squads would be eliminating each other and that there was a last man standing format, that is something that we've seen, like with the NBA Cup recently, as much as people talk about the money being a motivating factor, and it is players cop to this, players also, like high end, the most psychopathically competitively competitively. competitive athletes on the planet. They don't like getting bounced from anything.

Starting point is 00:15:51 Like they just don't. It's the reason why you may say that the dunk contest has just grown stale and everyone's run out of ideas. I would say that. But it's not a lack of effort. It is not a lack of effort that the contest goes this way. Certainly the players get into the three-point contest. Because, again, it's a last man standing format.

Starting point is 00:16:12 And I think this format, whether they continue, doing it U.S. versus world or whatever. I think this tapped into something that by now the East versus West thing, I think has grown stale and also players move around so much. Like there's no novelty to it anymore. It's not particularly fresh that, you know, there's nothing interesting about seeing these players that have gone up against each other for multiple years in the Western Conference playoffs all of a sudden beat teammates.

Starting point is 00:16:40 But I think this idea of eliminating each other from. something tapped into it. And also to your point, Brian, Wemby set a tone very early that everybody else did not have a permission structure to deviate from. It was funny too. Wembe, it was the first game was the two world teams.

Starting point is 00:17:06 And so that one world, one. One world. I'm sorry. Okay. Thank you. I think getting Wembe on the floor first, was either really smart planning or good luck because it does make a difference. Like it's one of these things too. It's like it also helps when the, when the rosters are for each of one of these teams a little bit, are a little bit shorter.

Starting point is 00:17:29 So you don't have like, you know, one guy or two guys, like, you know, it's you're kind of, there aren't that many players on each team. But it does make a difference. When you have one or two guys who are really trying and five or six guys who aren't. Those aren't guys stick out. And I think there are a lot of players who don't mind putting it in like kind of cruise control to, you know, nobody needs to be playing their hardest in one of these games except I think Wemby. But nobody wants to look bad either. And so if you can get one or

Starting point is 00:18:05 it's a great thing for the league that Wembe, who is going to be an all-star basically every year he's healthy between now and the end of his career. It is a great thing for the league that he is so into All-Star Games and takes it so seriously. That will, you know, that'll raise the level for guys, especially as different guys cycle out of the league, you know, guys like Durant and some other people don't, you know, take it quite as seriously. LeBron, who's frankly too old to, I think, get too worked up.

Starting point is 00:18:37 And he needs to be sitting still when he has this many days off. Again, he was a big part of Stripes. man, they did, they did well. He did. No, LeBron. LeBron did exactly what you would want one of your league ambassadors to do in this game. He was out there. He put in the right amount of effort, put on a show, did all that stuff. I think it worked.

Starting point is 00:18:56 And what I would like to see them do, leave it alone for two or three years. Just leave it alone. Well, a big piece of it, too, like you were saying before, like, this was not playoff intensity. Like, this was not, this was not guys, you know, leaving in everything on the court, diving for loose balls. Like, you know, you look at the scores of these 12-minute quarters. And clearly this was not playoff level high-intensity defense. But what it was, and just this in and of itself, makes a really big difference.

Starting point is 00:19:32 It was high energy. Like the energy was high during these games. And as the energy was higher and, again, the competitive juices get going, what you see are fewer just effing around threes getting jacked up. Like guys were having fun and there was competitiveness to it that I think at times felt like loose fun, but it was still competitive and it was still energetic. There was less effing around. And I think, you know, like you said at the top of this conversation, people remember the

Starting point is 00:20:08 All-Star Games from the 90s and the early. 2000s as way more sickly intense than they were. You and I attended a few of these. They were not. But the energy was higher. And as long as the energy is high and guys seem, you know, invested enough to want to win. And again, I think this format change raised that investment. I think moving forward, we can be in a place that everyone will stop complaining about it. Because the NBA has become the league that everybody complains about the most, and these complaints have a snowball effect, and they start building upon each other.

Starting point is 00:20:47 They can play about everything, too. I mean, it's a very, very whiny. Well, it's a hyper online league. Right. The online faction of it is very whiny. They're not really satisfied by much of anything. You know, it's just there are certain things about the game will never mean what it meant in the 60s, 70s, 80s, stuff like that,

Starting point is 00:21:08 because the world is just too different now. It just is. Certain things that made All-Star Games significant just don't apply anymore. But it is in the league's interest to make this weekend. Go to say it is a showcase weekend. I think it helps too. It's like do fewer things during the game that aren't the game. Let's not stop every 15 minutes for a concert or stuff like.

Starting point is 00:21:38 Like they've tried stuff like this before. I felt like the pacing of the afternoon was better. It was just a basketball game followed by a different basketball game, followed by another one. And like there was not, there wasn't any sort of stopping to do dumb things. So like even when they were like players would want to take it seriously, you're trying to get worked up over something.

Starting point is 00:22:00 And then like you have a five minute stop so Reggie Miller can, you know, juggle bowling pins with someone. It just doesn't make any sense. Adam Silver said some really interesting stuff about tanking. And finally, Andy, got to what I think is the only thing that actually could address the tanking question in the NBA. And I'll tell you what it is next.

Starting point is 00:22:29 Locked on Lakers is brought to you by Indeed. Hiring is not just about finding someone willing to take the job. It's about finding the right person with the right background who can actually help your business move forward. And if you want candidates who match what you're looking for, Indeed, sponsored jobs, that's the move. Instead of hoping the right person just magically stumbles across your post, Indeed helps boost your job listing to people who fit specific criteria like skills, certifications, and location. If I were hiring, I wouldn't want just someone who can help. That's anybody.

Starting point is 00:23:00 I'd want someone with real experience who can jump right in. Here's a stat that says it all. The minute that I've been talking, companies like yours have made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed, data worldwide. So if you're hiring, spend less time, searching and more time interviewing candidates who check all the boxes with Indeed sponsored jobs. Listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job. The premium status, it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, do it the right way with Indeed. Lockdown Lakers also brought to you by TurboTax.

Starting point is 00:23:39 Tax the season doesn't have to take over your life. This year, TurboTax is making it easier than ever just to hand things off and move on with your day. With TurboTax, full service, you can have your taxes done for you by a trusted local experts start to finish without the stress or the guestwork. Instead of spending hours trying to figure out your forms, you meet with a local TurboTax expert in person or connect online. It's a huge time saver. It gives real peace of mind knowing that an expert is handling it because you probably shouldn't be. for a limited time. You can have your taxes done by a local TurboTax expert for just $150 all in if a TurboTax

Starting point is 00:24:14 expert didn't file for you last year. So just do all this by February 28th. You still got a couple weeks to get that done. Take taxes off your plate. Get back to your life as a turbotax.com slash local to book your appointment today. Quick reminder about the Everydayer Club. A great way to kind of level up your participation in the show. you can be part of the Discord chats,

Starting point is 00:24:42 members-only Discord chats, both for Locked on Lakers and around the league. You can join any show you want, really. You go to ours by going to Lockedonlakers.supercast.com. Again, Lockdownlakers.com. Andy and I are in there. We're in the other ones.

Starting point is 00:24:58 We respond, all that good stuff. Great way to engage with each other, engage with us. And, of course, you can also get the show ad-free. If you're somebody who doesn't want all the commercials, that can be taken care of by joining the Everyday Air Club. It's five bucks a month, 50 bucks a year.

Starting point is 00:25:12 If you don't want to sign up, don't. Just do nothing else, and we will love you just the same. Okay, so the NBA has a problem with tanking. I think this is legitimate. It is not just an optics problem. It is a legitimate competitive balance problem because it's bad for your fans for half, you know, two or three, four, five, six teams to quit trying to win games in December, in January.

Starting point is 00:25:42 But that also has a really serious impact on the conference schedules and the conference meetings. Like the Western Conference, super brutal, Andy. You shouldn't, the results of that playoff race shouldn't be based on how many times one team plays Utah or Washington or, you know, Sacramento in March. as opposed to November. And like that kind of stuff, it has a really serious impact.

Starting point is 00:26:14 So Adam Silver was, I mean, I feel like the bulk of that conversation was really dedicated towards the tanking problem. And he had, they threw in a lot of creative things for it, at least talk about it. He basically,

Starting point is 00:26:28 my impression, he correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to think, like I left that thinking that Adam Silver is willing to engage with just about, any scheme that could lower the probability of tanking. They're willing at least to think about anything. Well, there's a distinct difference, though, that needs to be pointed out.

Starting point is 00:26:53 He, unilaterally, were he able to work unilaterally, might be willing to engage in anything. The other 30 owners, though, that he is working with might not be. might not be. So that's really where you have to get everybody on the same page because I am willing to bet that the owner of the Oklahoma City Thunder has very different opinions on this than say Mark Walter. You know what I mean? And like teams around the league, depending on what your needs are and frankly what market you're in. Like the draft, for example, which is why everybody is, the draft is why everybody's tanking or the teams that are tanking. They're trying to protect the picks that they have either lottery protected or partisan swap or best of, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:43 you get to keep the best of whatever one in partisan trade, whatever. There are, I would say, roughly a third of the teams in the league that draft picks are their lifeblood. Whether you are talking about building a team through the players that you draft or having that draft capital to make trades because it's the only way you can get players to come to your team because you are in a market that players, generally speaking, do not want to play in, or it is not their first choice, their second choice, or even their third choice. And cap space, for example, does the Utah Jazz zero bit of good. Saving their cap space, having a lot of cap space to make off, it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:28:28 Like, that is not how they're going to build a team. And to Utah's credit, like for example, they just traded for Jaron Jackson Jr. who has a not insignificant contract. Lori Markinen has a not insignificant contract. Everyone is expecting. I think the general expectation is unless some other team offers an insane contract to restricted free agent Walker Kessler, they're going to keep them. Like Utah is going to be spending, but they need draft picks one way or the other in a way that certain teams don't in order to survive

Starting point is 00:29:01 in this league and if you're going to have them in the league at all, this is a very difficult obstacle to overcome. Like these are the incentives that have been created by the draft structure in this league. And that to me is where the most interesting thing came from Adam Silver. Because people talk about this. Well, the NFL manages to do it. So the NHL or the NBA, like the major league. baseball. Like the NFL, the NHL has a lottery, but it's different. Um, and, and all that kind of stuff.

Starting point is 00:29:40 The NFL has no lottery and all this stuff. But like you are, there is no sport in which your franchise is more dependent on access to players that are almost overwhelmingly taken in the top five if you want to be generous. I mean, go look at the All-Star rosters. for the game that was played today, I am willing to bet 80% of them were taking in the top 10, or at least 75. You know, three out of four of these All-Stars were taken somewhere in the top 10. Probably half of them at least were taking the top five,

Starting point is 00:30:19 and probably half of those are taking the top three. Like, if you really want a transformational player, you need to be somewhere in the top, you know, six, seven, eight players. If you're playing the odds. Right. at worst. And so that's not, football's different. Like, you can go get the number one pick

Starting point is 00:30:39 and get the best quarterback in the draft, but if your line sucks and you have a bad defense, you're going to not only get that player killed, team's not going to win. If in baseball, nobody even knows who the number one pick is. Like half the time that guy never even seems to make the major leagues. NHL, different thing. Longer development system,

Starting point is 00:30:58 you've got four lines of players and all these. basketball one player makes that much of us you get Victor Wenbinoa you get LeBron you get Kevin Durant you get one of you are instantly a team that can contend if you get one of those transcendent players and so the only way to to eliminate the tanking incentive is to eliminate the draft because you can keep waiting stuff in this and that but the whole point of the of the draft is to allow lesser teams to have access to better talent. That's the whole point.

Starting point is 00:31:35 It's a way to try to sort of socialize in winning for teams that don't have the talent. If you believe in that, then the NBA will never get rid of its tanking problem. You can get rid of the draft, which creates other potential complications. A lot of complications. I can see how it could work. I don't, it's setting something up where like, if you, You wouldn't be able to do it for another seven or eight years because teams have to cycle through all the trades that they've made and all that kind of stuff. But like it creates a very different league.

Starting point is 00:32:11 I'd be interested to see how it works. You know, you want Wembe, save some, you know, cap space or whatever and offer them $35 million as a rookie or 25 million. Like there are a lot of ways to do this. There's also going to be in the only way to eliminate tanking is to remove the draft from. the equation. I'm not saying, I don't know if it's a good idea, but you just can't do it in the, you have to either live with it or remove the draft. That's it. And even then, like Rob, Rob Perez, a lot of people know him on Twitter, world worldwide wobb, great NBA Twitter follow. He, he pointed out on Twitter and it's a really great point. You think something like aspiration,

Starting point is 00:32:54 you know, the cap circumvention scandal that the clippers and Kauai Leonard are accused of right now the league is investigating is a thing now, wait until all of a sudden you've got teams potentially bidding on these players and then like the sneaker markets can start, and they don't have the same rules as the league can start trying to steer certain players to certain markets and make it worth their while. You know, take a little bit below market. We'll get you back on the back end. Like there are a lot of different ways that all of a sudden this could just start, it could just start reinforcing a system where the rich remain rich and everybody else struggles. Yeah, I mean, well-run teams and like, you know, picking the right guys.

Starting point is 00:33:39 There's just, it's hard. Like, it's in some ways, I forget somebody else pointed this out. I believe this problem, but I saw it recently. Like, you're almost better off having Adulton connect in some ways than a guy who's like, kind of good, but you sort of like you see the potential there, but then you have to, you have to give them $30 million to keep them and find out. Like, you know, the whole setup is a little bit wonky. But this tanking thing, which is a real problem, I think the All-Star game is a bit of a contrived problem. It's not nothing, but it's way overblown. The NBA could get by

Starting point is 00:34:18 this weekend if it didn't, you know, light itself on fire, and trying to respond to the tanking thing is a real problem. Yeah. And I just, I don't think there's, there just isn't a good solution because of the nature of individual talent and how that changes the fortunes of your franchise. Yeah, I was trying to think about, because this has been discussed to death for several years and a lot of people have thrown out different ideas about how to try to go about doing this. The one thing that I thought of that I have not heard anybody else mentioned, and I don't know

Starting point is 00:34:57 exactly how this would be implemented. I'm not good enough with math or stats or probability or anything like that. But the idea of finding some type of penalty for teams for when they get eliminated from the playoffs that that weighs into or factors into their lottery odds, something like that, where you have to. You can, you know, it's difficult to figure out the way to do this because. Right, but then sometimes you're going to be penalized for bad luck. Right. Exactly. Two of our stars got hurt. Like, you know, we didn't do it anyway. I was just about to say you, the question that I just threw out there, I believe I just lost

Starting point is 00:35:39 Brian, but the suggestion that I threw out there will have undoubtedly unintended consequences and effects because there are teams that sometimes lose through no doing of their own or no trying to win. Right. They lose through no attempts of their own. They're not doing anything nefarious. They don't have some larger agenda.

Starting point is 00:36:05 They just have bad luck. and that you don't want to start penalizing teams for bad luck. And frankly, you don't want to start rewarding teams for, you know, the right season of bad luck, where really they don't need, they don't really need that top pick, but they happen to lose a lot one season at the right time. It's really difficult to figure out a way to make this one. And it just, as the economics of the league, and we can quit here, But as the economics of the league change and mistakes get more brutal and, you know,

Starting point is 00:36:41 we're starting to see teams really get paid for. Nobody wants to sign these older guys to like it's just like they're, you really are advantaged by getting a lot of young talent. The need to find these guys. It'd be different if everybody started tanking in March, April. But they, they've started now in January. It's just way too early. Anyway, it's an interesting topic, and I don't think there's a clean solution here to say

Starting point is 00:37:10 the least. It's tough. It's a tough problem. Lockdown Liquors on YouTube is where you can hang out with over 37,000 subscribers to the channel. We'll see everyone tomorrow.

Locked On Lakers - Daily Podcast On The Los Angeles Lakers - Luka Dončić Plays in (Revamped!) All-Star Game... Still Not Sure to Play Friday

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.