The Bill Simmons Podcast - Best NBA Unicorns, Plus Sports Card Boom 3.0 With Kevin O’Connor and Mike Gioseffi

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Kevin O'Connor to discuss NBA "unicorns" past and present, as well as the unusually high number of unicorns in today's NBA, including LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Kevin Durant, Nikola Jokic, and Luka Doncic (2:30). Then Bill talks with The Ringer's Mike Gioseffi to discuss the sports card market's historical ebbs and flows, the impact of auction sites like eBay in the early 2000s, as well as today's increasing demand for football and basketball cards, and more (1:09:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And then Mike Giuseppe first. Pearl jam. All right. Kevin O'Connor is here. We are officially one-fourth of the way through this weird NBA season. Did you realize that? We're at the quarter mark. Yeah, I recorded with Chris Vernon for the mismatch this morning, and he alerted me. We're at the quarter mark. Somehow I already... We're at the quarter mark, but the Wizards have played 12 games.

So if that doesn't explain the season, I don't know what does. If you look at the standings, the Lakers are in first in the West. That makes sense. The Sixers are in first in the East makes a tiny bit less sense, but that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about unicorns. I wrote a piece for the ringer in 2016, December did the unicorn rankings, because at that point we had Giannis had entered the league and was starting to do stuff and bead was starting to play. Uh, poor Zingas was thriving on the Knicks. Anthony Davis was there. And just the whole concept of what is an NBA unicorn? Um, who stands out? Who's a true unicorn? And I basically described it like this. There are three versions of the unicorn in the NBA. There is the one we haven't seen before, but might be replicable. There's the one we'll probably never see again, but the

emphasis is on the word probably. That's the tweener unicorn. And then there's the one we'll definitely never see again, which is the true unicorn. And I think for a unicorn example to try to bang this home, for me, it was always Barkley. Yeah. I remember going to see him in person. I'm older than you. As a rookie, he was 6'4". He was 275 pounds.

And he was a runaway freight train. And he would get a rebound and just go down like he got shot out of a cannon. Everybody would get the fuck out of his way. He would be jumping in traffic against guys like Parrish and McHale, jumping over them to get rebounds. And all of us were just in the stands like, what is this? What is happening? What is this human being? How did we get here? So that's the premise of the whole unicorn thing. KOC, I would say we have a lot of unicorns right now. It's a unicorn heavy league wouldn't you agree

absolutely and you know reading that back one of the reasons why we have so many unicorns is i liked in that article besides the fact that in the local popularity section kp at the time won that for with your vote the local popularity that's changed quite a lot but you looked at it like everybody talked about unicorns as bigs but you looked at like curry as being a tweener unicorn you had you know pete maravich in there as a true unicorn and it's true like unicorns in the nba are beyond just big players it's often big players but not always yeah you have to look at it like am i ever ever seen this before? Am I ever seeing it again? Yeah. So I made a list in that piece, the traditional unicorns, which I had down as Russell, Wilt, David Thompson, Dominique, Ralph Sampson, Pippin, Spudweb, Shaq, C-Web, Penny, Rashid,

T-Mac, Dirk, Yao, Young Blake. Traditional unicorns means I hadn't seen that before, but I might see this again. This might, this might happen one more time. Like young Blake Griffin. I was like, wow, haven't seen this before, but I wouldn't be surprised if I saw it again, the tweener unicorns, which I basically had down as Jordan Iverson, LeBron Curry Harden. And I would add Westbrook to that. Cause the more I think about Westbrook, I do feel like we could see that again, where it's like, you had him at that time when you published it four years ago. But I feel like we could see that again, where it's like, you had him at that time when you published it four years ago, but I feel like we might see that again because there's been guys

already who have blended that stuff. So the tweener unicorns are basically, I might not see this again. I wouldn't be stunned. I think Harden out of that list, Jordan Iverson, LeBron Curry, Harden Westbrook, Harden might have the best case to not be a true unicorn because Southpaw, inside-outside game, the fact that he has mastered the Eurostep and the Step Back 3.

At the time when he came into the league, we were thinking he was going to be Ginobili 2.0. He's clearly Harden 1.0. Do we see a Harden again? I think we could. I think we could see, like you said in that article, somebody who's created in the sports analytics lab, threes and layups, playing that style of game. And I would be willing to bet that because of his influence,

we'll see a generation of players that do kind of adapt and play that style. So we'll see. I mean, it takes a lot, though, because Harden is more than just a scoring. It's also his body. You know, 6'5", strong frame. That's what separates him too.

He's not just some lanky guy either. It's part of just the way he is physically too. And plus like his handle, his ability to create off the dribble. There's not many guys that come through that have that ability to also have the body he has and the mind that he has. That's a tough combination to match, but

who knows? And the durability too, I think, is the underrated thing with him. The fact that he just, I mean, right now he's 15 pounds overweight and he plays, what, 49 minutes in a double overtime game. It's unbelievable. So when you talk about those tweener unicorns, one at a time,

Jordan, greatest player I ever saw. I still think he's the GOAT. Kobe came in and did a very reasonable Jordan impersonation. It was close. He really mastered kind of how to try

to be Jordan 2.0. He didn't pull it off, but a lot of the turnarounds, the way he carried himself, he did a reasonable enough impersonation that I feel like we could see that again. Iverson, that's going to be tough because he was like five foot 10, the way he carried himself,

the ferociousness he had, what an unbelievable athlete he was. I wouldn't be shocked if we didn't see it again, but we haven't seen anything close to that, right? We got a tease with Isaiah Thomas for a year and a half. IT at his peak in Boston. But doing that for 10 years, I don't know. I don't know if we'll see it again.

Hard pressed to believe it. LeBron as a tweener unicorn. So... Have you changed there? Four years now, the fact that LeBron is still theener unicorn. Have you changed there? Four years now, the fact that LeBron is still the best player in the game? I mean, you wrote in there, you said how LeBron James. I could imagine another six foot eight super athlete like LeBron who never gets tired and plays basketball like he's the queen on a chessboard. But at 36 years old? I don't know.

Yeah, so this is a tough one. Will we see the career again? Like, watching last night, he was awesome against the Cavs. It was... I felt like he was lingering in this MVP debate as the stealth favorite,

but he needed a game like the one last night that bumps his stats. It was memorable, recognizable. He's got somebody in the Cavs bench pissed him off. He just starts...

He goes over in front of the calves bench where he scores like his last eight or nine points and he's kind of staring them down stuff like that the stuff he's doing in year 18 is just ludicrous it's it's brady-esque um is the is the only way you could really compare it to anybody even in a different sport oh yeah no i guess maybe in the 2000s but Clemens was never as great as LeBron or Brady. No. And with LeBron,

I mean, I'd put him in the true unicorn category for sure. He might be edgy there. Yeah. I think there's a case. Curry, I would say tweener unicorn

just because I think he's going to have such an impact over the next couple generations that whether we see somebody with the hand-eye coordination he has, I don't know, but I think we'll see somebody who is doing basically a Curry impersonation

and probably doing a really good version of it. We got the true unicorns. So this is who I had in the column and we'll, and we're going to debate about the guys now, whether they fit Kareem, who was before your time. There's just nobody. We'll never see that again. Um, the durability he had, he played 20 years plus four in college, the sky hook, which was the greatest shot of all time. Um, how coordinated he was, how he had this 13-year prime,

and then followed it up with like seven, eight more years where he was a productive guy in the center. That's not happening again, right? Very challenging. It's like we're talking about with LeBron. To have that level of longevity, pretty close to unmatched. So you're a generation after Kareem.

When you see the Kareem highlights, what are your thoughts? I see a guy that when people talk about, you know, how would this player fit in this era or that era? I see a player that would fit in any era. Kareem would dominate today just as he did, you know, over multiple decades in his prime years. Kareem would have played anytime and produced at an elite level at any time. That's what I see when I watch him. Whereas with other players, sometimes you look back and it's like, I'm not sure how this would work. They'd

have to adapt their play. Kareem wouldn't have to adapt. Players would still have to adapt to him. Yeah, it would actually be... I think he actually would have been better in some ways now because there's less centers, but he would have been just as effective. The thing, you know, when we had that three-month pandemic

stretch where there was no sports and watching old basketball games and just even seeing eighties Kareem, who wasn't even the best version of Kareem and how unstoppable that sky hook was. And if he got it on a certain part of the floor, it was it, he was shooting it. You weren't blocking it. And you're basically crossing your fingers that it didn't go in, in the, in the room, in the arena. It, I always thought it was going in. It just seemed that it didn't go in in the, in the room, in the arena. It, I always thought it was going in. It just seemed, it was like, how do we stop this? If he gets the ball, the job was like knocking him out of the spot.

So he was like a foot further than he had to be or whatever. But if he was in the spot, that was it. Um, Earl the Pearl. Now he's before my time revered, uh, earned the nickname black Jesus, which seems relevant. Like if you're so special, people are like, that's black Jesus that, uh, that might mean something. There's just that herky jerkiness. We've never seen that. Uh, pistol Pete, same thing. Dr. J now you could argue Dr. J is a tweener unicorn, but the reason I don't think we see him again is you watch the old tape. First of all, the hands, he had the Kawhi hands, um, even a little bit bigger and use them almost

like he had a tennis ball in his hands and the way he would just kind of, um, kind of parade around and just go through people, stuff like that. The reason I don't think, I think we see it again is because he didn't have an outside shot. The book on him was like playoff. I'm hoping he misses whatever version of doc that could come now. The guy would, the guy would be a shooter and the, and I don't feel like would have the diving into, you know, three people soaring over people, like just trying to get to the rim. Cause that was his best asset, right?. That's kind of one of the things that bums me out about where basketball is going is the ingenuity of the stuff he did. I don't know if people will do that anymore. What do you think?

Well, I mean, if a player improves from the prior construct, the prior version, you kind of touched on this in that article with McHale and Anthony Davis. Does that bump somebody who was previously considered a true unicorn into like a tweener unicorn status? Yeah, it could. What does that keep them there? So it'd be Dr. J with a three-point shot. Could we see that maybe? Does that move him out of true unicorn?

Yeah, it would bump him down if it happens. Yeah, if it happens. So McHale, does that mean he gets bumped out of true unicorn? You compared him to AD, 80 is now won a championship four years later, even better than he was before. Let's talk about that now. Okay.

I still feel like McHale's a true unicorn because of the post-up menu. As Davis has the body, I think he's a 26, 10 every night like McHale was at his peak before he broke his foot.

I think the thing that made McHale different and Hakeem too is the post-up menu of post moves. They had every move. He had 15 moves. He had moves that were the variation off the move, the move that set up the second move that actually led to the third move. Davis has great footwork, but he's not a post-up guy like that. He's more of a face-up guy or like a bulldoze you down low, but he's not on the bird Hakeem class.

It's not even close. I don't think. Not on the post, for sure. Absolutely. It's like you said in the piece, he's an evolutionary version of some of those guys where he's taken the game from the post, hasn't invested as much time in mastering post moves,

but instead has become a guy who can bring the ball up the court, hasn't invested as much time in mastering post moves, but instead has become a guy who can bring the ball up the court, grew up playing point guard, then had its growth spurt. And that's what we see, I feel like, with a lot of these modern-day unicorns is those guys that grew up with the ball in their hands played point until they got into high school. He's a little like McHale in that on a certain night,

he looks like he's the best player in the world. And then you catch him on another night and you wonder where he is for a quarter. Because McHale would do that to you. Like, where's McHale? And then all of a sudden, he would have 17 points in the third quarter or something. But George Girvin,

we'll never see George Girvin again. I'm just telling you. He just could fill it. And they were all two point shots. And he had every kind of shot in the finger roll I haven't seen since. And I don't even know why somebody would try to develop the finger roll. It was such like a stupid shot, but he made it every time. But it's like he would take 12 foot finger rolls. If somebody did that now, it would seem like they were fucking around but this was like in his arsenal i don't think we see it again i i feel like the way you describe unicorns is a little

bit different than the way some people do like you're talking about almost some specific skill sets that players have that they were just so much better at anybody else at doing a mikhail post like you said the finger roll i feel like a lot of like especially a couple years ago when everybody was using the term unicorn a lot, it was just big guys who happened to be able to shoot threes. That's the way it was. It was basically it was body dependent. It wasn't

kind of game dependent, which I think was what, and this is another guy I had in there, Adrian Dantley. So he was six foot three and he was a post-up guy and he had nine different moves down there. He had the ability, if you put a taller guy on him, he would just get fouled. And if you tried to guard him with somebody his size, he would just overpower the guy.

And Bob Ryan used to, he had a, he called it the Dantley, which was, he named after weird Dantley box scores where it'd be like Dantley would have, you know, four field goals, 20 free throws. You'd be like, what the fuck? How did that guy get to 30 points? He made four field goals, but, um, I've never seen a six foot three post-up guy before since very strange magic Johnson. We don't need to talk about that one. Uh, Hakeem. So it's not just how he basically had the McHale post-up stuff, but just like his backstory, which I wrote about in my book about this guy who was, grew up playing soccer in Nigeria

and basically picked up basketball as a lark when he was 14 or 15, but kept all his footwork. It's just not happening again. You would have to basically try to recreate his background. Barkley mentioned Manute Bull. You would have loved. He just would walk in the room. You'd be like, oh my God, what is that?

He's seven foot six. Just never seen anything like him. We do got Bull Bull though. Yeah, Bull Bull. Thanks. Rodman. Rodman, physical freak. All he cared about was rebounding and defense.

Hey, you could argue he's a tweener unicorn, but I haven't seen anyone remotely approaching him. And then Durant, who we're going to talk about in a second. So, of the new guys. Did you say Bird? I skipped over Bird. My bad. I forgot Bird was a true

unicorn. Did you see the Greatest Peaks series on YouTube by Thinking Basketball? My friend Ben's been looking at a lot of the historical great players and when they're at their best, the Bird videos is awesome. That'll take you down memory lane if you haven't watched that yet, Bill. Bird gives great YouTube. It was really fun in the moment, but you could carve out his career

and you could do a 10-minute passing clip thing. You do like nine minutes of game winners, whatever you want to do. Um, okay. We're going to get to the new guys. Actually, let's take a break and we're going to cover the new guys. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance. Look at Travis Kelsey. Before he rocked that Super Bowl ring, he rocked that super soup strainer. Grow a mustache for Movember. You'll do great things too. You won't win the Super Bowl,

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Sign up now. Just search Movember. I'm going to start with people I'm not sure are unicorns or I feel like are not unicorns. So first one is Towns. We litigated Towns four years ago. I just feel like Towns is Rashid 2.0. He's not as good defensively as Rashid was. The body remains the same. Towns on the right night reminds me of Rashid on the right night. I feel like there's enough DNA between those guys, I don't feel like, to earn unicorn status. Now, he's had a really rough last 12 months. He's had a lot of family stuff, things like that. But even before all that stuff happened, the losing, the question of, is this a guy you could build around as the best guy on your team?

All of those things. I just, I feel like he is not a unicorn. What do you think? You know, not right now. I think the Rasheed Wallace comparison is pretty sound, but there's a chance that Towns can achieve that status. And here's the thing. We're talking about a guy who's seven feet,

who shot last season, eight three-pointers a game, and hit 41% of them. A lot of them, not just off the catch, not just picking pops, but off the dribble, step backs pull-ups he's different for a player his size of his ability to hit the three-pointer however you know to your point the defensive ability is not at the level it needs to be yet and he just hasn't won he hasn't done it in a winning situation at the level that we need to see him when the

timberwolves won it was because they had jim Buller. So if Cat can be in a winning team and do this and be better defensively, he should be in that conversation for sure. To me, he'd be better than Wallace's best in his career if he can do that, which we haven't seen yet. How old is Towns now?

25 years old. 25? Just turned 25 in November. He's still young. See, part of the problem with Towns and why I don't think it's going to happen. I mean, I don't think it's going to happen anyway, but they've done such a disservice to him with the roster they built.

Part of that's his fault. He's the one who was pushing for the D'Angelo Russell trade. That's a trade that is a road to nowhere for a variety of reasons. And you end up, you know, now they might not, they could get the fourth pick in the draft. They just lose it to Golden State.

And it's a franchise that just over and over again seems to shoot itself in the foot. They were close with, when they got Butler, it felt like they were on the fringes of building something. And they were pretty good that year until they had some injuries. But I think we're going to look back at the towns, Minnesota,

just that whole Minnesota stretch. Basically, from the moment they make the 2004 Western Finals all the way to now, I don't know if any franchises made more mistakes. Can you think of any? Like maybe Sacramento? Sacramento is really the only other one that comes to mind. It's too bad, you know, because they've had some great players come through i mean obviously you have kevin

garnett you know you got cat you then you get jimmy butler it's not like they haven't had talent come through with some of their squads over the years and with townsman i i hope they were able to find something out but i don't know about that mix there in Minnesota with D'Lo and Edward Stewart. I mean, a bunch of guys who like scoring and not guarding anybody. You don't like it? It's just, it's sad. I feel bad for Wolf's

fans. You have the player you want in Cat. You just don't have everything else around him to make it matter. Well, you think just like starting with the KG trade, right? They get Al Jefferson who I still feel like people shit on the KG trade now. First

of all, Minnesota got their first round pick back. They're trying to tank and rebuild. So that was what allowed them to trade for Kevin Love when they get the fifth pick the next year. They're able to do the OJ Mayo Kevin Love thing. They got Kevin Love. That's part of that trade fifth pick the next year, they're able to do the O.J. Mayo, Kevin Love thing. They got Kevin Love.

That's part of that trade. Yeah. The second piece was Al Jefferson was an awesome piece. He was a 22-year-old potential, you know, 24 and 10 guy. Talking about post moves? Big Al has post moves. It was a fair trade. So anyway, the bad luck with Al Jefferson, good luck with Kevin Love.

The next year in 09, they have two chances to take Curry and they miss on that. They take Rubio, who I think still could have made it right as he's taken off. He blows out his ACL. They have the whole Kevin Love thing. They flip Kevin Love for Wiggins.

And one of the what-ifs with that one is if Embiid doesn't get hurt when he's training right before the is if Embiid doesn't get hurt when he's training right before the draft, Embiid is the first pick. It is lock it down. There is no question he's the number one pick,

and Embiid is the guy that gets traded to Minnesota, not Wiggins. So Embiid gets hurt in a workout. He falls to three. I did the draft that year. I still thought Embiid should have been the first pick. I saw a workout in person with him. I was like, oh my God, what is this? So anyway, they had bad luck with that. They get Towns. I think they've had relatively bad

luck for him considering what we kind of thought he was going to be as a franchise guy. And then the Anthony Edwards thing, they compound the mistake with the Russell trade with the, we're building around, we're building around towns. We're going to trade a future number one for Russell and we're not going to take James Wiseman. And I think if you do that over again, I don't see how Edwards is one of the three choices

you would look at, right? It's either Wiseman, Lomelo. You really do? That's what I would do what have you seen from James Wiseman so far that makes you believe that he would be the pick is this a swerve are you swerving against James Wiseman

I like James Wiseman but also Steve Kerr has moved him to the bench for good reasons I mean he's a quality rookie but ultimately the feel for the game the passing ability he has so many turnovers already, so few assists, defensive ability. Like, Draymond's going to help him along,

but he needs a lot of help for good reason. I'm not sure Minnesota would have went in that direction. Edwards has been very inefficient and has had some really bad moments, but some of the highs have looked pretty good. We disagree on this one. I I'm with you that Edwards has potential, but to me,

he is like a 25 points, zero says zero rebounds guy. That's what I see from him. I see like a Dion waiters. I'm filling up one part of the box score and that's it. And there's a chance, you know, could he be a 25 point a game guy?

Sure. But what else is he going to do on the court that's going to help me he's one of those high ceiling low floor guys like it would not shock me one bit talked about there's a bunch before the draft like wade wouldn't shock me waiters wouldn't shock me and that's a scary place to be if you're minnesota whereas like if they could have traded down and let's just say taking a Halliburton, a guy who is a safer pick but adds those winning qualities that you need, that

might have been a lot more helpful for the next four or five years with this Cat D'Lo core than the upside of Edwards who might not be any good until he's 26 or 27. That might be the reality with him. It seems like the move should have been to pretend they were taking Wiseman

or LaMelo and try to get Charlotte to panic to move up. And then if you're going to end up... I still don't understand why they didn't pull it off. I am a much bigger Wiseman fan than you. I just feel like he hasn't played basketball in a year and a half. That team's trying to make the playoffs and they're in a unique spot

where this guy has so much talent but they can't kind of throw him out there for 30 minutes a night if they're also going to try to make the playoffs. Because the interesting thing with Golden State, man, this is a huge digression. The interesting thing with Golden State, they're in this situation with that Minnesota pick that a couple teams have been in over the years

where it's like we might have an awesome pick or we might get nothing. And in a way, because the Celtics were in this position a couple of times with like, uh, you know, the Brooklyn picks, the Kings pick, even the Grizzlies pick in a way, you're better off trading it, especially if it's top three protected because it's a 50, 50 chance at that point, you might not be in the top three and Minnesota might just keep the pick. And now you have this asset that looks awesome. But with the way they changed the lottery rules, I think they're better off taking Oubre, taking that Minnesota pick and trying to get somebody who's a real guy and add that person

now. And at least you know you got something. And try to bolster the team this year in a way that helps you now, but also helps you when clay is back. That's fair, though. I mean, there's a lot of appeal to hold it onto that pick because this is a strong draft in 2021. I mean, everybody talks about the top three, you know, with Cade Cunningham and Evan Mobley and Jalen Suggs, but there's a lot of talent to be had in the lottery. Even if that pick ends up, you know, number six or number seven, that could have a lot of value on draft night, or you're able to take a player that could be a nice young

piece on a rookie contract for you when you get back or you hope to get back to contending once clay Thompson get returns to the court. And by the way, even if it ends up in the top three in Minnesota gets to keep it, it becomes unprotected in 2022. So it would still have a lot of value with a Minnesota team that shouldn't be significantly better. That's fair. Yeah, because then you're betting on Minnesota

to be bad again. I can't believe they didn't I forgot that they didn't protect the 2022 part. I know. Yeah, so you can't trade that. But if you did trade that, I think that's an incredible asset. Now, you would have to get,

I would think, a top 20, 25 guy with the Uber contract for that pick. Anyway. Okay, so we don't think Towns is a unicorn. LaMelo Ball. LaMelo Ball. I don't know, Bill. LaMelo?

What's the case for Lomelo? I just want to talk it out. I do not think he's a unicorn. I just want to talk it out. Okay, so... 6'8". 6'8", the vision he has. The specific way he plays.

I'm not positive. I've seen it before, but then I realized, like, eh, Magic in 1980, when he was, like, early, early Magic, was doing all the same stuff Lomelo's doing right now at a 17 times higher level.

So Lomelo's not a unicorn. But I wanted to bring it up. The comparison that I heard a Hornets broadcaster bring up that I first heard our own J. Kyle Mann bring up in his video of Lomelo was Pistol Pete. You know, Pistol Pete being he was 6'5", one of the most creative passers that we've ever had in basketball ever, if not the most creative and flashiest,

we've kind of seen these types of pastors before with size and vision that Lomelo has today. I wouldn't put them in a unicorn category unless it's like with towns where we see the ability off the dribble as a score, reach a higher level. Unless we see him start to defend with some consistency. I thought what their head coach Borrego said earlier this week was pretty shocking, first of all, that he blasted Lomelo publicly.

But he said, if you're going to turn the ball over five times and not make it up on defense, you're not going to start. That was crazy to hear that publicly, but he's holding Lllo accountable yeah in order to get him to buy in if we see lamello become a great defender which he could which he could if he locks in with his feel for the game and his instincts i don't see it though he hasn't shown it yet throughout his entire basketball life in high school or overseas and not yet in the nba um but if all that happens maybe maybe you could put him in that you know modern day unicorn category

but I don't see it I see him and Wiseman in a similar situation as this season unfolded where there was a moment where I was like wow and then as I think

other teams started studying the tapes and they start playing people differently oh he can't do this yet he can't do this with Laomelo. He's so eager to pass at all times that it reminds me a little of what happened to Rondo and Rondo didn't want to get fouled anymore.

When teams would just play him for the pass every time he could be driving down the middle and they'd be, you know, they'd, they'd be sealing off passing lanes. I think Lomelo team, the, it seems like teams have figured him out.

His stats have gone down. His playing time's gone down. I think he's going to work his way out of it. I have actually been impressed. I was not a fan, as you know. I thought he was going to be a bust. There's enough there that he's definitely not going to be a bust, but I'll be interested to see how he works out the next 20

games or so. I agree. Lomelo's going to be a quality player. Anytime you're six foot eight with that passing vision, there's always going to be a spot for you in the NBA. It's just about everything. And the rebounding. Yeah. And the rebounding, the rebounding I think is unusual. So he's got two skills. I like that. One thing I really do like about him. And I always love playing with people like this is that he doesn't need to have the ball. If he has the ball, he's always trying to look, how can I advance it? Oh, that guy's open 30. He'll just get rid of it, which is why I was really hoping they would trade for Lonzo.

I was hoping for a Rozier for Lonzo trade because Lonzo, it's not like he's been really good on New Orleans. Just put the ball brothers together and the ball would just be flying around. That sounds like a Borrego's worst nightmare to have. You think so? Borrego's like, I quit. I mean, right after he just blasted his rookie publicly. I'm not sure LeVar would be too happy about that.

LeVar might make a push for that head coach spot. Anthony Davis. Well, LeVar as a head coach would be good to be at least. Anthony Davis. I still don't feel like Anthony Davis is a unicorn. I feel like I've seen it before. I think I'll see it again. Why?

What do you think? Why, though? I mean, I'm curious about the McHale part of it, too. Because that was the comparison you had in your article at the time. He's an evolutionary McHale. Very similar bodies to McHale. Evolutionary McHale. But will we see evolutionary Davis?

I wouldn't be surprised. Some guy, seven feet comes in, has a lot of the skills that he has long arms. I, I, I just feel like we might see it. His ability to comfortably think about the modern game right now,

though, with the, with the level of perimeter scores that we have 80s ability to comfortably switch onto those star level shooters and survive and sometimes lock guys down that to me is a level that we may not see very often if ever from a player his

size with his overall skill set overall with everything else he does to me he's a unicorn and very clearly a unicorn maybe not a true unicorn you know with your categories so you give them tweener unicorn tweener you know traditional he's at not a true unicorn with your categories. So you give him tweener unicorn? Tweener. Traditional. He's at least a traditional unicorn.

Yeah. Four years ago, he reminded me more of McHale than I think he does now. Now it's more about the body type than anything. But McHale was the best defensive forward of that whole era. And I think same kind of thing where Davis can switch on anybody and be a huge problem.

All right, so you say tweener unicorn. I still can't get there. He reminds me too much of McHale. Poor Zingas, who I had as a true unicorn. Oh, no. Yeah, I think I did have him as a true unicorn four years ago. And I wrote, what would happen if Dirk Nowitzki grew to seven foot three, kept

all his offensive skills, protected the rim, and had more attitude? Well, four plus years since that column, he's not the same guy. The question, first of all, before we get to the unicorn piece of this, does that guy

who gave us so much excitement and hope and promise in the 16, 17 season, is that guy gone? I don't think he's gone, but I don't know if he's durable enough for us to see it in the moments. And for as long as we need to,

he always gets hurt. And this was, this is the issue right now with Dallas. You have Luka, and you have a pretty good supporting cast, but his co-star, KP, is somebody that you can't rely on to be there. Missed the start of the season, missed a lot of big games last season, and he's probably going to continue to, unless he's one of those guys who suffers a lot of injuries early in their life and then stays healthy. More often than not, it seems like those guys just keep having lingering issues throughout their career. And KP. I mean, I'm not sure he's skills wise.

He's changed all that much. If anything, I would say he's a bit better defensively than he was before. That's partially the system he's in and the lower offensive workload that he has because he's next to Luca. But the durability aspect is huge. I feel like the new whiskey thing is gone and I'm a kind of embarrassed. I wrote that it was an insult to Dirk Nowitzki, one of the 20 greatest players ever. I mean, Dirkitzki thing is gone. And I'm kind of embarrassed I wrote that. It was an insult to Dirk Nowitzki, one of the 20 greatest players ever.

I mean, Dirk did it for so long. Right. And KP has nothing to say on the court. There's a fluidity and a durability to Dirk that KP does not have. Question for me, is he actually just Rick Smith's 2.0? Rick Smith's was somebody,

this is a compliment and an insult. Rick Smith's is.0. Rick Smith's was somebody, this is a compliment and an insult. Rick Smith's is somebody that I think was a lot better than people realized in the moment and remember now. He was on some playoff teams where he was the crunch time guy for them. If you look at some of his Indiana stats, he's around 18 a game with seven, eight rebounds, which is basically where Porzingis is now. And

it's like, all right, if you gave him a three point shot, is he Porzingis? Um, little awkward. He had the same kind of durability problems could protect the rim the same way, but still felt like slightly unathletic. And I think Porzingis reminds me of like a rich man's Smith's with a three point shot, which to me nullifies him from unicorn status. So I'm sorry for saying this. Isn't it kind of wild that the guy who kind of earned the unicorn nickname and kind of jump-started this unicorn conversation

is now getting compared to Rick Smiths? It's kind of wild. The lower half of it, the lower half of his body, I think, just sailed on him. I was watching them last night. He just doesn't move as fluidly. I think if you go back and you watch those

Knicks games from four years ago and you watch the guy now, it's a different guy. Whether that four years ago guy can come back, I don't know, but he seems heavier and slower to me. I would be really concerned if I was Dallas. I'd add this with KP too. He's, we just mentioned how Kat is a 40% three-point shooter on a high volume.

Porzingis is like mid-30s. He's like a 35%, 36% guy throughout his career. He isn't that level of an elite shooter. He's not a Dirk. As you said, he's not even a Cat as a shooter. And not only that, but with his height at 7'3", he's not a great post player either. I mean, he does not handle smaller matchups very well,

doesn't have many post moves. I talked to him last season, I think the 2019-20 season when I was in Dallas, and he talked about improving his post game. That hasn't happened. And so we haven't seen the level of improvement from four years ago that I wish we could have seen. Even though I think he's a bit smarter on the court, he's a better passer, he reads the floor a bit better on defense, the body and the athleticism, to your point, isn't the same level it was before.

And the skills overall haven't improved to the point that we need them to to put him in that unicorn status. Well, in 18, the year he got hurt. 48 games. He was 23 a game. 39.5% from three. Dominance. He's getting to the line six times a game. Last year on Dallas, so he misses a whole year, comes back for Dallas last year. Shot 43% from the field last year.

Now, he took a lot of threes, but he was only 35% from three. Five free throw attempts, which for a guy who's seven foot three, that's rough. And then this year, the threes are down to just a shade under 30%. And he's at three free throws a game. Now he's only played seven games, but I don't like the trajectory at all. And I gotta be honest, I'm not sure I like the fit with him and Luca. If you're building your ideal team be honest, I'm not sure I'd like to fit with him and Luka. If you're building your ideal team around Luka, I'm not sure Porzingis is on it.

Do they need to make a change sooner than later? You know my take on the windows. They have a generational superstar right now who's healthy, who puts up 35, 15, and 10 any night he wants. And I don't think his supporting cast is good enough. Now they're missing guys. Like Richardson's been out. They had some COVID stuff. They haven't had their team. The question for me, A, would they trade Porzingis? And B, what's Porzingis' value? Because it feels like you're taking back somebody else's, eh, not sure about this guy either. And, and, you know, I don't know what they

could get for him. I'm not sure what the market would be for him either because of the durability, because of the, the diminishing production, uh, as a score, his, a lack of improvement as a score. So I don't know what the market for him is either. And that's scary. Cause if you're How about Time Lord and Semi Ojale? Is that enough? How about Andre Drummond? He's been pretty good for Cleveland. Yeah. Well, we'll see. Porzingis, look, I'm not writing him off,

but all the signs are bad. Yeah. Including how he's looked this year. He just doesn't look healthy to me. One more unicorn before we get to the ones we're going to talk about. Luka Doncic. Ah. Is he a unicorn to you?

Because you could say yes, or you could just tell me he's bird 2.0, and I'd be like, cool. Yeah, I'd put him in that category, I think. In the bird 2.0, he has LeBron qualities to him. He has bird qualities. Big, jumbo-sized playmaker. We've seen this before.

Have we seen, you know, somebody with his level of footwork in combination with the size and the passing vision and everything else? Have we seen that bill? So the thing, the thing that could make him a unicorn is if he gets the three point shooting up to like 42, 43%. Because the thing that reminds me of Bird, and I get it, two white guys. But the thing that reminds me of Bird, and it reminds me a little bit of Magic too, actually. He doesn't seem like he's ever going full speed, but he's always a half step ahead of whoever's trying to defend him.

He's going into the lane. It's always at the pace that he wants to be at. And he's just in control at all times, which is exactly what Bird was like. Bird was never like flying, but was always in control and was always going by people or always had a guy in his hip or a guy behind him or a guy that he was up faking that was going the wrong way. He's just, he's got the game on a yo-yo a lot like Bird of Magic did. And that's why it's like, I almost feel like he's not a unicorn because he reminds me so much of those guys in LeBron. Now you could

argue if somebody is a piecemeal of Bird Magic and LeBron, that might make them a unicorn. I don't know. I think it might, it might honestly i mean think about the age he's at right now and how much better he should only get as he continues to age into his 20s there's a chance i mean if you take pieces of all those other unicorns that should make you a unicorn but we'll see i think it does come down to a lot of the three-point shot and the peak he can reach as a scoring option obviously the level he's at already is MVP caliber, but there's still untapped potential with him, which is the scary part.

Well, okay. Is right now. Let's, let's elevate him to the, to the next segment, which will be, we're talking about who is the biggest unicorn right now.

I think, you know what? We're going to, we're going to let him into the nightclub. We're going to let him in the unicorn nightclub. We're taking a break, coming back and trying to figure out the biggest unicorn right now. This episode is brought to you by Coca-Cola Creations.

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We have five true unicorns right now. Giannis, Embiid, Durant, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic. I wrote this at the time for most unicornish gimmick. If you ask questions before this person showed up in the NBA, how ridiculous it would have been. For Giannis, what would happen if Scottie Pippen grew to seven feet and kept his ball handling skills? That's Giannis. Embiid, what would happen if Dikembe Mutombo

sacrificed 25% of his defensive ceiling for a legitimately advanced offensive game with 25-foot range? Like, what? That's not happening. Well, it happened.

Durant, what would happen if we crossed Bob McAdoo with George Girvin and Plastic Man, made him seven feet and gave him 25-foot range? Well, that's ridiculous.

No, it happened. Jokic, This is a new one. What would happen if we took Jeff Rulon's body cross Bill Walton and Arvidas Sabonis and put them in that body, gave them an inside outside scoring game in the same crazy passing skills. That's Jokic. That would have seemed inconceivable. Unreal. And then, Luca, we made the thing already. What if we took, what if we kind of put Bird and LeBron in some lab,

took DNA, twisted it around, and tossed, sprinkled in a little magic, and had him born in a foreign country, just imported him here. And he wasn't totally in shape but was still putting up 30, 10, and 11 every night. That's Luka. Okay.

So we'll start with that. Out of those five gimmicks, which is the most unicorny to you? I feel like it's got to be one of the two bigs here. Giannis or Jokic. Jokic is so unusual. Everything we just talked about with Luka, with his ability to, you know,

have a guy on his back and play at a different speed and really manipulate the game, you know, manipulating time and space with the way he uses hesitation and change of pace moves. Jokic does all of that too in a 7-foot, 280-pound frame body. And the level of production, the way he runs and orchestrates that offense, and on the defensive end has become a solid guy, at least positionally, and a great rebounder,

just an overall great player who impacts winning. I'm not sure I've ever seen a guy like Jokic. I mean, we're going to see great bigs. We have great bigs today, but I'm not sure we're going to see many guys that do it in the way that Jokic does it. It's so unusual. Yeah, it's weird. I don't know if I got used to Giannis and Embiid a little bit.

It might be part of it. But night to night watching Jokic, I'm just constantly perplexed and delighted. Even last night, I've just never seen anything like it. And it's funny because Walton was one of my favorite players growing up and really only had that two-year run on the Blazers when he was on TV. I remember he came to the garden a couple of times and be like, oh my God, what is that? One of the things with Walton was just how big he was. Like he was like a legit seven, three. When he ended up on the Celtics, it was this giant man who could pass and just played basketball fundamentally perfectly. But the passing was what jumped out and the way he clicked with bird,

all that stuff. But the real thing was just how big he was. He was legit 7'3". He was listed at 6'11", but he was 7'2", 7'3". The Jokic thing, I remember Sabonis, hearing about Sabonis, and then Sabonis showed up when he was in Portland, and he was this big, lumbering, washed-up version of himself, but still so effective because of the passing. Jokic isn't big like those guys. And that's the part that I feel like it's why he's not like them.

But it's all the same DNA and the way he just makes everyone better, the things he sees, how discombobulated the defense is. And I feel like he's gotten better every year, which is another thing with, when you're talking unicorns. We'll get to Giannis in a second on this. Jokic has improved every year, which is another thing when you're talking unicorns. We'll get to Giannis

in a second on this. Jokic has improved every year. I feel like each year he's kind of mastered whatever he's doing a little bit more, whereas Giannis, I feel like he's plateaued. And I don't know if there's another level to go to him. But have you noticed that with Jokic where it feels like there might even be a little more room here to go where the arrow is still pointing up? Absolutely. Because at one point, the knock on Jokic was, oh, I mean, he's not aggressive enough. He needs to carry the team offensively when, you know, things aren't working out. He can't always be a passer. Well, he's doing that. He's become a guy who averages 25 points per game. He has become a guy who can carry the offensive load and not just be a playmaker,

not just dribble the ball up the court and run up, you know, a pick and roll with Murray or Gary Harris, but has become a guy who can get a bucket for you. He can throw the ball to him in the post and he'll twirl around and seemingly create an open shot or hit a contested moon ball shot over the entire defense. He's, he's become the player that people said that he needed to be. And with Giannis, the lack of the jumper improvement, the worsening free throw percentage, he's gotten better as a passer. And I think he's gotten much better.

We saw a couple years ago in the playoffs when they built a wall against him and he wasn't able to pick apart the defense. He's gotten better at that. But he's still not a guy like Jokic or even like Bam out of bio in terms of the playmaking ability. Bam has gotten better as a passer.

Demonta Sabonis has gotten way better as an offensive hub. So, you know, that might work as an argument against Jokic that we're seeing some other bigs become offensive hubs in the half court for their teams. But Jokic is still a different level and a

higher level than any of those other guys in the league today and with yannis i'd love to see that develop over time but i'm not sure if the playmaking feel is there at the level that it needs to he's he's probably more like as people have talked about and written about recently he's probably more like in that shack category category in terms of just an uber-athletic guy who is able to score from the perimeter and dominate inside. But the shot is not there to score from the outside. He can start out there to get inside.

But the lack of the development of a jumper is a bit worrisome when you think about what Milwaukee needs to be in the postseason. Yeah, I've been saying that for two years. I think he's Shaq. I don't know why they think he's a face-up guy. I'm delighted in the last four minutes if I'm playing him and you're facing up Giannis versus putting him in the post. LeBron hit this point too in the early 2010s, most famously in the 11 finals, when he just wasn't good enough on the low post and teams really exposed it. And he's got, he's worked on it. You think like what he is now and how he just overpowers people. Giannis doesn't do that yet. And he doesn't really have any moves down there. And what's interesting when you watch them, when he has the ball down there, there's back to the basket,

like six, seven feet away, the defense panics. They don't know what to do. They don't want him to be one-on-one. And he has the ability to hit passes and stuff. And the fact that they won't do that with him, I think is really strange. If I'm playing him, I'm so happy he's 25 feet from the basket. Awesome. To me, when I look at the Bucs, I mean, Giannis is

still a unicorn, right? He still is. No doubt about it. So it's not a knock on him at all. But when I look at the Bucs, what I don't understand is the lack of pick and roll. Like Chris Middleton, to me, is an answer within their roster. He is one of the league's most efficient pick and roll scorers, a very good isolation scorer. We've seen him have some massive scoring nights.

I don't understand why Bud Budenholzer doesn't put the ball into Middleton's hands more often with Giannis as a screener. And same thing with Drew Holiday too. And maybe we'll see that in the playoffs. Giannis is a screener far more often than we already do. But I don't understand how you have a guy like Chris Middleton getting only 15 shots per game. To me, he's the quality of player where I at least want to see what does Middleton do when he has two months straight of 20 shots per game or 18 shots per game 15 is not enough i think they can get more out of him and elevate what they are but also if you're doing that with middleton it means you're putting yannis and more screens

as the screener you might elevate what he can do in the half court as well so i i want to see it and i'm a little confused why we haven't seen it this year after you acquired Drew Holiday for all the picks you got him for. I'm going to break your brain. I think their best play in crunch time doesn't involve Giannis. I would actually run the screens

with Holiday and Middleton, and I would have Giannis near the rim as like a lob threat and an offensive rebound threat because Holiday's really good at running those pick and rolls. Giannis, if he's not rolling to the basket, I don't care if he's hanging back. Good, shoot your 22-footer. Take it.

I'd love for you to take that, Giannis, please. But with Middleton, now what do I do? And then Drew's coming off and Giannis is near the rim. Because I thought about that when I was watching them play Brooklyn and they just couldn't match the firepower, right? Brooklyn can't stop anybody. Cleveland had 140 points in them. And Milwaukee is like, what's our play? Who's our guy

who's going mano a mano with these three dudes? And it kind of turned out to be these Chris Middleton in the corner. You know, and it's like, what is this? Why don't you have two really good offensive players? Why don't you use those two? So I don't know. Maybe they'll get there. You want more small, small pick and rolls. Defenses would switch it, but maybe what you're saying is you end up with a mismatch in that situation and maybe can attack and find Giannis

for a lob dunk or whatever. I like Giannis around the basket. I think he's unstoppable. He's got these, these Freddy Krueger arms and and any he's able to get to any lob he's a really good offensive rebounder i i would be more nervous do you feel like all these years we've talked about yannis needs to add a jumper he you know there's that story published last year about how he'd have his wife run around if he missed free throws or whatever he's focused on improving the jumper do you feel like all those hours, all that work he's put into his shot should maybe have instead been dedicated to the

posts? Jump hooks, drop steps. Yeah, I do. I do. I think people made a mistake trying to think he should be a LeBron type guy. I don't think that's who he is. I think he's Shaq. Most unexpectedly innovative skill.

There's one more category as we figure out the number one unicorn. For Giannis, I think it's a chase down block. He's taken LeBron's title as he's just the best at that. And when he's behind somebody, they turn behind like a car is chasing them. For Embiid, it's the pull-up threes, which I would just never get used to with his size.

He did it to Ice the Celtics the other night where you're like, oh, I constantly forget he could do that. KD has that stop and pop, which just nobody's ever been better, more efficient, perfectly, fundamentally superior. And he's so tall, he's shooting from the top of his head. It's a little like the Kareem Skyhook. I don't know how you defend it. I don't know how you block it. You just hope he misses it. Jokic has the twirling, awkward, he's barreling through the lane. You almost feel like he's drunk and then he's hitting a backdoor cutter perfectly. I've never seen that in my life. Without looking. Without looking. Right.

And then Luka has like seven things. Yeah. One of the things Luka has that I haven't seen since like the 80s is when he beats the guy by a half step, he's on the foul line with space. And the guy's behind him. And he kind of slows up, but he doesn't do anything yet. And he's just kind of riding this guy on his back. He's like, I'll just shoot my 12 footer. But he's like, should I get a foul on this guy?

Should I do a pass? And he's taking his time in situations that we're just used to people making decisions. He takes this extra second and a half or he'll be like, oh, I'll just hit this guy in the corner. I've never seen anybody since Bird of Magic decide in the flow, almost in slow motion, right? It's just, have you ever seen that?

I mean, isn't this what made him an obvious, should have been the number one pick in the draft? Yes. Right? This was clear before he was in the NBA, and he's only gotten better at it since he's entered the league. I mean, this was clear as day prior to the draft. One thing on KD,

we've talked about Imani Bates a handful of times over the years, the young high school prospect who will likely be the number one pick in a couple years whenever he's allowed to enter, depending on the high school age. He's got some KD in him with his size and his ability to shoot 40 plus percent from three, create a shot from anywhere and he

combines that with like a kg you know trash talk mentality on the court i feel like baits could be could potentially be one of those guys that you're like oh we actually have another kevin durant there's a chance depending on how he continues getting better i just want to throw that out there when it comes to whether it's true unicorn or tweener or traditional there's a chance depending on how he continues getting better. I just want to throw that out there when it comes to whether it's true unicorn or tweener or traditional, there's a chance. Well, the thing with the honest versus Katie,

Katie at Texas, the ball was going in. Yeah. There's just certain guys where it's like, Oh, that's going in and they just have it. And he had it since he was a kid. The ball just went in.

George Gervin was like that. That's the thing with Giannis. He doesn't naturally have that. And you even see it with the free throws. It's just kind of ugly. Most freakish physical trait out of these five. It's between Giannis and KD for this. KD,

you kind of, because we hadn't seen him in a while. I still feel like he's the number one unicorn body. This seven foot dude who carries himself like a guard and is just so smooth. But then when you watch him on TV, he's towering over these other dudes.

And it's even like that, like doing the podcast with them. You just forget how fucking giant he is, but doesn't seem giant on the court, right? He seems like he's 6'4", but he's seven feet. And so I would have them in the finals. I would give the slight edge to KD.

What do you have? I'd give the edge to KD there too. I would. Okay. Combined with the scoring ability as well. By the way, are you doing any more KD pods in the future? How many did you do? Six, I think?

We did six. Well, now he's got his own pod. Yeah, that's true. Six pods. The seeing them in person factor, which was the ultimate LeBron thing. I mean, that was like the case for LeBron as a true unicorn was especially that

2009-2010 range when just the speed and the explosiveness the athleticism all that stuff out of these five guys I'm trying to think who would be the most shocking just to watch for two hours in person for some reason I'm leaning toward Embiid interesting I was gonna

say Jokic well that's a good one too because the thing with Embiid, I keep going back to that playoff series with the Celtics when he would take over for little stretches and just the fear in the crowd where it's like, we're not stopping that. You just got to hope he gets tired. And now that he's put together this MVP campaign,

he's in shape and it's happening for three and a half quarters or four quarters instead of one. We don't get to see it in person because we don't get to go to games. But I feel like out of these five, I think that would make my sphincter clench the most out of these five. Giannis is a freak.

You watch Giannis in person, you're like, how do I belong to that species? I don't understand. How is that a human being? So I don't know. That is that a human being? So I don't know. That's why I say Jokic, because with Jokic, he's so slow and sometimes looks like he's plotting on the court.

And yet he's just dominating you and sucking the life out of your team. Jokic reminds me of just like a telepathic basketball player, sort of like a video game where he's controlling where teammates go with his brain he he's controlling exactly what precisely where the ball is going it's it's as if he is the computer with where his command of the ball and and that to me if you're in the crowd and you're a fan of the other team that just that just deflates you if a guy you feel like you

should be able to stop just continues beating you over and over and over and over again the way he does, that's why I'd pick Jokic. It's almost like hockey, right? Where he's like Gretzky. He just has the puck. Can we get the puck from this guy? He still has it. He just found somebody. Highest ceiling out of these five unicorns. It's got to be Giannis, right? I mean, if you theoretically add the jumper, which you won't. I would have said Giannis even last year.

I wouldn't say him anymore. I feel like I kind of know what the ceiling is with him now. That's fair. So you're limiting the ceiling now because we feel a higher level of confidence that the jumper just won't be there. The free throw should actually won't be there. I think it's Luca because if he becomes a 45% three point shooter,

if he, if he just makes one, one out of 10 more every game, two, three seasons from now, I don't know what his stats are going to look like. I would say it could be like a 36, 12,

13. It's like in play with Luka. I mean, when I say Giannis, I mean theoretically. The realistic highest ceiling is definitely Luka. I mean, I have no question about that of these guys.

All right, so we're going to go Giannis, true unicorn. KD, true unicorn, which was already decided years ago. Jokic, no question, true unicorn. Luka, I think I've no question, true unicorn. Luka, I think I've talked myself into true unicorn for him. True unicorn?

Okay. Yeah. Not even tweener? Not keeping him there? He's somewhere between tweener and true. I don't know. I have to think about it more. Need a little more time.

And then Embiid, I would say tweener because I do feel like we could see Embiid again. So not traditional. We haven't seen him yet. Not traditional there for him. Yeah, I think that's fair. I like that. Traditional unicorn for him.

Like you said, one we had, haven't seen before, but might be replicable. The traditional unicorn. I think that's fair for him. Before we go, are you rooting for Tom Brady? Absolutely, Bill. Absolutely. You love this. This really helps the goat case.

This last Super Bowl appearance. Oh, man. It's unbelievable. If you can get through Drew Brees, I don't care how old he is. If you can get through Aaron Rodgers, I don't care how poor of the coaching decisions were.

And then get home, get through Patrick Mahomes, the greatest quarterback today arguably the most talented talented being the keyword quarterback we have ever seen i would say he is the most talented we've ever seen i agree if you can get through that your first year with a brand new team i mean super bowl he was so bad in the second half i know he was i know and it didn't matter because he gives his team confidence. But he still had that big pass at the end of the first half.

That was a dart. I tweeted out, what a throw by Brady. And people were like, he was wide open. It's like, he was a pinpoint pass. Right. Unbelievable throw. Tom Brady. I was thinking about my favorite tom brady moments earlier today

yeah i think the favorite is coming back from 28 to 3 and i the reason why i think back to that day you mentioned the belief he gives teammates like as a fan you feel believe i i remember watching that game with my dad like we're not out of this because we have tom brady you know you don't feel good you feel you don't feel sick to your stomach you're down have Tom Brady. You don't feel good. You feel sick to your stomach. You're down by that much, but you don't feel like you're totally out of it because of Tom Brady. That level of belief.

I remember they scored and it was 28-9. They missed a two-pointer. Oh, yeah. And I remember doing the math. I was with Kyle and my son and my wife. And it was like 28-9, 19 points, 8-8, 3. Hey, we're still in this. It's like absurd. There was no reason to think that. But yeah. Um, I think, I think with, uh, with him, if he pulls this off, he'd already cemented everything that there is to be cemented.

If he pulls this off and beats my homes, what a fucking cherry in the sundae. Oh, my God. Should he retire on top like that? Forget the second year? No, he's never. I think he's like a boxer. It's going to have to go badly for him to leave, right?

He's going to have to get knocked out. Why would he stop, though? I mean, with this Bucs team, they're still a really, really good team built for the future as well with all the weapons they have, the strong defense that they have.

They can keep winning. They can keep winning more. I don't see why you would retire when you're still playing at a level that he is. Well, I also think that he feels like when they get the full year together and all that stuff

and they can incorporate more. They're doing this all piecemeal and that's why I think it seems so choppy. But, you know, Tom Brady. Yeah, I've been surprised by how much I'm rooting for him to win this now.

I bet on him the last couple weeks. I'm just kind of all in. I have no bitterness anymore. I'm glad you are, Bill. I've been shocked by the amount of Patriots fans that are like, ah, F Brady. I don't want to see him win. Like, this guy has been, you know, if you grew up a Patriots fan like I did, I'm 30. I was 11 years old.

11 years old, Bill, when Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl. I'm 30 now. I work for Bill Simmons now. And like two of the sports trends in my life, you know, from when I was a kid to now are Tom Brady and LeBron James. It's just kind of crazy to have these

two all-timers still playing at the level that they are competing for championships after two decades. It's, I two decades it's i mean it's just really insanity that like as a sports fan my age everybody has their players in their own generation you know you know you had bird to root for and you know yeah prior to you people had russell and you know and everybody else but you know wilt whoever it might be but to live through this it's i mean it's special to have these guys to watch and root for and to root against

and, you know, just be awed by. It's, uh, it's pretty special. I don't, I don't take any of it for granted. I can't wait till Super Bowl Sunday.

It's funny. Chiefs minus three seems so low. And yet there's this fear of like, man, I want to bet against Brady with two weeks to prepare with like

whatever speech he's going to give before the game? It's a home Super Bowl, too. Pretty wild. KOC, we can hear you on the mismatch, and we can watch your YouTube series that we run on our Twitter, The Void. The Void, yeah. And they also launched Ringer NBA University every other Wednesday.

Oh, that's right. Talking about young players. Yeah, me, Jonathan Sharks, and J. Kyle Mann. You could defame James Wiseman on that podcast. Maybe we will. We'll have to start up on Wednesday. All right. Good to see you, Cassie.

Thank you, Bill. This episode is brought to you by Prime Video. You know me. I can't go a day without sports. I really can't. And now Monday nights are all about hockey. That's right. There's a new exclusive home for streaming Monday night NHL hockey.

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your adventures will be many. Pennzoil. Long may we drive. Available at your local Canadian tire. Enrollment required. Keep your receipts. Other conditions apply. See Pennzoil.ca slash warranty for full details. All right, we launched a new podcast this week. It's called Sports Cards Nonsense. The first episode will be on Thursday.

One of the hosts is here, Mike Giuseppe, who was referred to me by Chris Vernon, a sports card lunatic who fell in love with your TikToks and your YouTubes and was like, there's this guy, he loves cards, he's great. And the reason we were talking about it is because Verno and I have both been fascinated by what's happening with the sports card business. There's been a couple of booms since I've been alive. And for whatever reason, the last 12 months, we're in a major, major boom. What happened?

What changed? Yeah, it's absolutely insane. Well, first off, I got to say, I'm psyched that we have adult men like Chris Vernon falling in love with our TikToks. That was our goal for sure. I can guarantee it. You know, it's just kind our goal for sure. I can guarantee it. You know, it's just kind of a perfect storm. I mean, the commodity market across the board, me and Jesse, the co-host, are both big in the stock market too. Everything was kind of up. And then when COVID happened, it's like people were home, people wanted to be involved. And then I think you just got a perfect timing. Guys my age, the 35 to 45-year-old bracket, we've got some extra money now. And I'm not going out to buy a Mona Lisa. I want a picture of Tom Brady on a baseball card to throw on my shelf behind me. So just perfect timing. And then people are at home watching this stuff. Everybody was stuck inside,

just paying attention to social everywhere. And the boom went nuts. Well, and you also had some, some rich people got into it and then also started touting that they were into it and trying to drum up a market that way, which is somewhat self-serving, but also legitimate because it's not like they weren't buying the cards, but that helped too, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, someone like Gary V holds up a Kevin Durant card and all of a sudden it booms, right? I mean, even the fact we're talking about rich people. I mean, Mr. Simmons on the other side here, you know, Bill, people know you and the hobby as well. All of a sudden your network is interested in a show that talks about baseball cards. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you guys weren't

looking for the space five years ago. No one, no one was. So it has a huge influence. Giannis, Giannis showing that he has his own cards, spends tens of thousands of dollars. I mean, it's just, it's caused this, this buzz where nobody wants to miss out on what's going to be the next boom. And some of these things are up 10 times, literally tenfold back on your money in a matter of months. It's just absolutely insane. I can't believe it. So I was going to the collector's convention every year from like, I'm going to say 2008 or 2009 on through the mid 2010s. And I would do these photo essays from there. And at that point, the money was still in there.

There's a lot of product, all that stuff. But it was still a little bit underground. And I would go and I would try to buy different basketball things and boxes of stuff.

And I really liked the NBA stuff. And I was trying to get a bunch of Hall of Famers, things like that. Their rookie cards, all kinds of stuff. Don't break it in my house, by the way.

It's all in a storage locker. Fair. Off my list of my house, by the way. It's on a storage locker. Fair. But I still felt... Off my list of things to do, I guess. I still felt like it was a little underground. And it was like you would go and you would go into this whole world. There's been a bunch of factors

that have changed this. And one is that the internet is just rounded to shape in a better way. Two, there are all these different auction sites that people now know like, oh, what the hell am I going to do with these 11 trophies I have in my garage? Even though I was a three-time MVP, I'm going to be dead in 10 years. I'll just sell my stuff. And it seems like the infrastructure now is just better. What happened the last 10 years?

Yeah. So, I mean, obviously you had a major boom with eBay, right? And people like the, you know, guys in the hobby, hobbyists, like these loyal, loyal to the sports card market, hobby fans will tell you how much they hate eBay, which is absolutely insane. I mean, beforehand it was, if I want a Mickey Mantle card, I know three 90 year olds in the city of Haverhill where I'm from who have them and that's it. Like there's nowhere else to get these things. And they're looking it up in some dusty magazine and they want 80% of book value or whatever it is. You know, people got sick of that. This doesn't have to be exclusive anymore. Like if I want something, so 10 years ago, eBay, 15 years ago, eBay comes along and just takes over. It's insane. And then social comes in. I mean, people, even now people knock Facebook. It's a, you know,

Facebook's for the old men. They say, you know, I'm 34 and I'm like one of the younger guys on Facebook. Facebook is great. The marketplace on Facebook is insanely active. Twitter marketplace for cards is huge. Instagram's big. And even TikTok guys taking, you know, 20 second videos of what they're selling with price tags. You can find anything you want anywhere. Now there's just no more exclusivity to it. Now it's just, what do you want and what are you willing to pay and then go after it and get it.

All right, so we're going backwards and then I'm going to cover what's happening now. I've been in a car as an only child who loves sports. Obviously it was into cards. Dating back to my friend Reese and I holding each other's legs at the Chestnut Hill Mall to steal change from the bottom so we could go into Toy and Hobby and buy hockey cards. And we're looking at it. They

have the old rack packs where you can see the card on each side. And we're going into Toy and Hobby and we're going through each one trying to find Bruins. Not smart enough to just look for Wayne Gretzky. The black and gold, sure. So like everyone else, we're just collecting these things. We're, we're at the, at the chest on Hill dump looking for people who might've thrown out cards, all that stuff.

We're buying cards, whole thing, but we, we're not, we're not protecting them. You know, they're in like shoe boxes, they're thrown together or whatever.

Sure. The kind of like 1987 range happens. And all of a sudden cards become a thing and everybody has same thing wait wait these things are worth something boom we have our first boom coincides with these other card companies coming in that are on tops going oh well we we have some suckers here we'll just make a shitload of cards. They flood the market over the next five years. Idiots like me are buying. I'm like, oh, cool. Upper deck NBA cards at the Kempe Matumbo, not realizing there's a million to Kempe Matumbo's in the market. And then by about 90, 93, 94 range,

everybody's kind of like, wait, this got ruined. What happened? And now I'm sure you see like the product from 88 to 93, there's just too much of it. And it's hard to even know how to value it. Right? Yeah. So, so like you said, the junk wax era, it's like tops, upper deck flare back then Don Russ said, Hey, we can make money doing this. So why make a million cards? We can make 500 million cards, crush the market, just flooded it. And again, your buying market then was so much smaller. I mean, yeah, kids were doing it once in a while, but it wasn't like adults weren't chasing these things and doing this as a full-time job like me and my friends do now. So there was only so many people to sell these things to, you flood the market. So now- And you also, you had card shows.

Yeah, card shows were huge. And people had stores, and those were the only two places you could even buy these cards. Yeah, that was it, right? And they just made up their own market. Like there was no national or worldwide market like eBay to base things off of. So people were just charging whatever they wanted. But again, hard to find and a limited buying base. So even now you look back at a lot of those years and yeah, like a 1992 Skybox, the Kembe Mutombo, sure, chuck it in the fireplace.

But what's happened now is people have said so i really feel like so many of those things just got trashed and destroyed because people held on for 20 years being worth nothing now it's like hey here's a jason kid card these be worth pennies i'm gonna grade it you know get a professionally encased grade of one through ten the grades of psa 10 all of a sudden it's hundreds of dollars i mean literally 80s and 90s are the boom right now and again that ties in with, to me, age. Those are the guys I grew up just starting to watch. You're a little bit older than me.

You know, you're in your heyday of watching sports. You're watching these guys. Yeah. So now it's like, that's what I want. Like, I want to go get a Tim Duncan card because I remember him coming out of Wake Forest and dominating. And I remember my Celtics getting hosed, not getting the number one pick that year. So, but that's what I'm chasing.

And we're seeing the boom. Nobody really cares now that, hey, these used to be junk wax. Now it's just like, man, I loved Griffey as a kid. There may be 80 million of these cards. A bunch got ruined. I want a nice, like a super nice condition card and it's worth a ton of money now. So the second boom happens in the early 2000s. Sure. eBay. eBay pops up. Yep. And now people like us can just go on eBay and be like, oh, I've always wanted a Larry Bird FLIR card. Sure. Oh, this guy's selling it. And there's a lot of, there's counterfeiting, there's people pulling fast ones. Absolutely. The grading system is all over the place at this point. But it was the first time we had a real marketplace where we

could search for things, search for things we wanted. For me, I love uncut sheets. I'm looking for uncut sheets, um, boxes, things like that. But there's a huge hit or miss thing and you could really get screwed over and deceived. But at the same time, the foundation is laid, right? Yeah. And so what was crazy about it, right?

So we look back and we call it a boom. Now, you know, At the time, the reason eBay was so good is you could then walk into a card show and this old dude, Joe, who again, it was the only one with a Larry Bird auto at the show, wanted $300. Well, now it's like, I'm just going to get it for 50. So initially eBay crushed markets. The vintage market in particular took a hit because again, it just wasn't like a rare thing to find now. But after that, then what happened is you now had an influx of buyers. You know, I always wanted to collect cards. I always wanted a Larry Bird card. I didn't have 500 bucks to spend. Well, now I can get one on eBay for a hundred bucks. Well, now what else can I get? And eventually there was a trickle down effect.

So sports shows and even card shops, the ones that weren't stupid and stubborn, that are now out of business probably because of donkeys. You know, those guys are like, hey, we got to be competitive with pricing. Not the only act in town. You know, people are getting on eBay. My first eBay sale was 2003. I sold a Byron Leftwich rookie auto for $300. And I was like out of this world psych. I didn't know anybody in Boston who was buying Byron Leftwich cards. But it was like, I got a place I can sell stuff now. I got a place I can buy stuff. It's almost like that mindset of like, nothing's unattainable. Like I can get whatever I want and I don't have to overpay for it. Right.

So now we head to the end of the decade. Sure. eBay, eBay's around for a while. Yep. Um, the car, the collector's convention, the card shows are getting better. More importantly, the grading stuff is getting better. And there's a bunch of people in place. But PSA kind of emerges as the one we all trust.

Yep. And now we're going through the end of the 2000s into the 2010s. I am on the, at the last part of last decade, I was on the top sport of directors for a couple of years. Oh, really? I didn't know that. So I had, you know, I was in some of these conversations about where the business was going and their whole attitude was like, this is a business it's steady. There's not a real massive growth potential. It is what it is. And Panini was coming in and Panini was, was basically splurging, trying to steal a lot of the market from Topps,

which they did with the NBA. And I remember being in the board of directors for that stuff, talking about, do we want to fight for basketball? My argument was, I think you should. And this isn't a case where I'm like the hero of this. I'm just like, I really felt this way. I felt like basketball was starting to replace baseball as the sport people under 30 cared about. And I was like, I don't know if you want to lose basketball,

but Panini was like way, way, way overpaying. And now we've seen Panini over the last 10 years completely transform the market. And I think as we head into this third boom that we're going to talk about, the most shocking thing to me was basketball replacing baseball. And I would say basketball and football

for at least the newer guys, the guys from the last 15 years, it feels like basketball and football is more relevant than baseball now. Yeah, no question. So like football, for example, was always known as the PC collection. So personal collection stuff. I like Tom Brady. I'm going to buy a Tom Brady card, but I'm not going to go buy a box of football stuff because the resale was always trash. And football has always been tough too, because it's always been quarterbacks only. And that's it, no matter what. And then even like all time greats, I mean, up until a year ago, which when this thing really took off again, this latest boom, you know, Joe Montana, John Elway,

Jim Kelly, Marino, even Emmett, Emmett Smith, Thurman Thomas, all these guys, Barry Sanders, you could get their rookie cards for nothing. And it was cool that you could get them for nothing. But at the same time, it's like, well, I'm not going to, you know, guys who are coming into this really wanting to spend money, don't care about a hundred dollar card. They want a $10,000 card. Now, if you're, if you were in there for a cheap card, it was great, but you know, your market can only go so big with guys spending a hundred bucks a card, but now football is nuts. I mean, Joe Burrow is single-handedly the biggest prospect in Herbert that football has ever seen. Those two guys sell for prices that are astronomical. Patty Mahomes now, I mean, that guy is just completely, hopefully he gets

whacked on Sunday and his prices fall and Brady dominates him. I don't know if that's going to happen, but his stuff. And the other thing with football, nobody ever considered football as like that. Holy grail type stuff. If I said to you, Hey, here's 50 grand, go buy something to invest in mantle, mantle, Ruth, whatever. Pick your co-fax ball guy, Jackie Robinson, Robinson, Hank Aaron. Cool. You never thought of basketball, maybe Jordan, but even that is a brand new surge that's happened. And football, no chance. I mean, you know, it just didn't happen. But now you've got guys in football where you look at it. I mean, Tom Brady stuff right now, me and my wife yesterday went and took out another safety deposit box. After the win on Sunday, literally his stuff is up four to five times what it was.

Wow. Michael Jordan level in football. I mean, I was posting today on Twitter his Bowman Chrome rookie, which is kind of a hallmark. This is a flagship rookie card, not a crazy low population. I bought it back in the day for 900 bucks, probably six years ago. It jumped up after the win against the Rams to 4,500 and kind of hovered after the win the other night, as of last night, paid for auctions, $22,000 to $25,000. Wow. Football never had that. And basketball is even more crazy. In basketball, you don't even have to

be good. You just need hype. Like Zion Williamson's a good player, but Zion Williamson sells for what Michael Jordan should sell for. Absolutely crazy. It's dropped, though. His rookie card went from like $1,500 to $750. Way, way down. Yeah, so like Panini Prism is kind of like a again like

a flagship kind of your standard hey this is kind of the litmus test what is his panini prism doing a psa 10 which is a gem mint grade reached as high as about a thousand eleven hundred you can get them all day now for 650 again the hype's got he's not the shiny new toy anymore he's kind of the chubby i'm getting overshadowed by brendgram toys. So it doesn't sell as well. I think what shocked me over the last 18 months or so is the volatility with unproven guys. And here's my example for the people

listening who were like, why the fuck would these guys even have a sports card podcast? Why should I care? One of the things that's hilarious is the volatility. And I'm going to use Talon Horton Tucker as my example. So Talon Horton Tucker, pre-season game, he has like 29 or something. His rookie card was selling for like $750, $800.

To put that in perspective, you could go on eBay. You can buy a Bob Pettit PSA 7 rookie card from the 1957 set, which was the first top set ever. Bob Pettit, one of the 20 greatest players ever, was going for slightly less than Talon Horton Tucker. Yep. And that's where you,

that's what's one of the most fun things about this hobby right now. The volatility with the young guys. Another classic example is Tyler Harrow in the bubble. Tyler Harrow has a couple of good games. What was he, over $1,000 for his rookie card at one point? Yeah, so like his Prism Silver PSA 10s jumped that much. But again, yeah, he went from a guy

who was hovering around 100 bucks for a base card to three, 400. I mean, then again, you're hitting 90 foot jump shots against Marcus Smart in the Eastern Conference Finals. I guess, you know what's crazy about Taylor Horton Tucker, though? He has like that one good game, prices jumped. But then, and again, this shows you volatility is exactly what it is.

Volatility and hype. LeBron tweeted something like, hey, keep an eye on this kid. That literally had as much to do with his prices as the 29 points. It's just, which to me is, it's cool because you can get in on some of these guys early and just dump them. Also makes, it's like anything else. If you're going to invest, you got to be ready to take some hits. So it's like, you got to invest wisely.

So for me, I don't love the one hit wonder type guys. Preseason basketball, I just don't watch for that reason. I just don't care. Like, what's THT going to do in a real game? I mean, he's playing against me and you out there in game three of the preseason because LeBron and AD are, you know, still on vacation. So. But year, goes toe-to-toe with the Clippers. Hits the three to win the game. And what happens? So the three to win the game, those cards were trading at $1,500 that night, a PSA 10 Panini

Prism. I sold all three that I had in minutes for $2,000. And within hours of the next loss, a couple of days later, I got messages like, man, maybe a mistake. His card, so again, he's a little bit more quiet now. The hype is gone. He's still 15 to 1600, but even that, I'm good investing money in Luka because the dude can play. He's a triple-double machine. If they had anybody on the court worthy of being his number two, that's a competitor in the West. His stuff's not going to fall, not as drastic, but even him, he goes on a good week. Like Durant back in the day had those 10 straight 40 point games. Luca's going to do something creepy like that. And those are going to be two grand again. So I think he's a great buy right now. Actually, he's low. I would absolutely buy Luca stuff right

now. And the volatility is one of the, one of the biggest reasons we wanted to launch a podcast. I wanted to find the right person, which I think you are. And I think people are going to love listening to it, but it's become like stocks. Absolutely. And people were always like, oh, what would a sports stock look like? Sports player stocks. And even though we had all the pieces with cards, the way the internet works now, the handle that we have on the product, and this is what leads to the third boom, which we're in right now. There's less product. We have these companies like Panini and some of the other ones who are really careful about how much they. Yeah. And they're just putting this stuff away. So there's less product on the market because people aren't opening the boxes

because this is my buddy, Mike Mendelsohn, who's been in this world forever and who loves this stuff. He's always like, don't open the boxes. Once you open the box, the value goes down 300% unless you get lucky with the card. Just keep the boxes. So we have less product. People understand it better. The PSA grading system. I think people really get that now,

like the 10, the nine, the eight and a half stuff like that. And it just feels like everything is in place now for this to be sustainable. I feel like this is all sustainable. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, again, so people, you talk to guys who have been in this for a long time and like a guy in my position, my job is 10 times harder now than it used to be. Just really quick to put in perspective, in 2016, when we opened our accounts with distributors to buy cases direct without any spend history, we walked in the door, me and my bruise breaks, my partner at the time, we walked in and bought 70 cases at cost. The product was worth like four

times the amount once it came out. Months later, that's when the first boom. If you walked in right now and said, I have $100,000 cash, what can I buy? They would literally laugh you out the door. Nothing. We don't have anything for you to sell. We're not going to sell you anything even at new pricing. And we're not going to give you allocation because you don't have a spend history. That market is so crazy now because of what you just said. Everybody under the sun knows wax is literally just gold sitting in a box. You put it in the attic and you forget about it. That's my thing. I like wax because there's no risk with it. It's just leave it alone and over time, it's going to go up. And it works hand in hand with a single side. Like, yeah,

it used to be, hey, I might get really, really lucky and hit a hundred dollar card. Well, yet now you might get really, really lucky and hit a million dollars I own. And people laugh at that, like, oh, a million bucks. Like, yeah, I'm not kidding. It's a million dollars. I mean, look at some of these auction houses. They do that kind of money. The chase factor is just absolutely insane.

And that's why it's sustainable. Again, these diehards are like, oh, you're pricing me out. My seven-year-old can't go get a pack of cards at Walmart. Sure he can. The cards that you've been used to sell to buy him a pack be five times the amount of money in a week. Those are the adults who know that this is money. So the singles are high. You can sell things easier now than ever on a million different platforms. Again, you talk about the boom just starting. Yeah. Gary Vee posts now more than ever. The Ringer has a stinking sports card show. Like these are things that would never have happened before. And this is just the beginning. We're seeing people literally take stuff now and present an item. Here's a PSA 10 Jordan,

and we're going to sell as an SEC regulated thing. We're going to sell shares to a card. Which is a really cool idea. I like that idea. You can own a stake 1% of a Jordan card that might be worth 5 million bucks. Absolutely. As soon as this calls in, I'm going to pitch the idea. We're going to do this. We're taking over the world. It is. It's just you can buy stuff easier. You can sell stuff easier. You can get great prices for it. So yeah, I don't think the single side in particular, I think is going nowhere but up over the next couple of years, two years, at least in my opinion. We're going to take a break and then we're going to talk about what happened to basketball cards, because I think that ties into a lot of what's happening. What's the feeling of fall?

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Bets off in Iowa, 809. With it in Indiana, 800-270-7117. Michigan, 800. Gambler in Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Virginia. Tennessee, 800-889-9789. And 1800gambler.net in West Virginia. So basketball cards. And I wrote about this in my book.

I've written about it in columns over the years, did stuff on when I would do the collector's convention things. The basketball industry was really fascinating because you have the 1948 Bowman set, which has George Mike and a bunch of the early Hall of Famers. No more basketball cards for nine years. 1957 Tops has the rookies of Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Bob Pettit, all of like the first 12, 13 year, guys.

Nobody makes cards for another four years. 1961 Fleer happens. That's got Wilt. That's got Oscar. It's got Jerry. Another eight years pass. makes cards 1969 that has all the hall of famers from you know havlicek kareem all the guys from that generation tops makes cards now from 69 through 81 so it hits all the hall of famers there but there's not a lot of

them and there's some sets where there's barely like anything. Right. Then they stopped making cards. This company called Star is making these little bags of cards that people have. It's there's mixed feelings on that, but we don't really have anything else until 86 Fleer. 86 Fleer happens. That's got the mother load.

It's got Jordan. It's got Barkley. It's got Carl Malone. It's got all those guys. So then we have another little run with basketball cards, which goes through the Fleer. Then they start overproducing it. We go into the mid-90s.

Topps Chrome comes in. People kind of belatedly realize, oh, cool, these Topps Chrome cards. Now that happens. Topps Chrome takes us into this century. And then it kind of dies down again near the end of that decade. And we have a year with Panini Prism where it's a double set.

It's the 2012-13 set. And it's two drafts in a row. Those two drafts include Kawhi, Anthony Davis, Dame Lillard, Kyrie Irving. They're just loaded. And that kind of rejuvenates things. And now we're going. The bigger point is, basketball

has replaced baseball. And I have my theories on this, but I think the main reason is this. The personalities of basketball just trump the personalities in baseball. It's more fun to own a Luka Doncic card than it is to own a Trevor Bauer card.

So you feel like basketball is number one now? Yeah. Here's the thing. We've done this in the podcast before when, you know, before we were doing shows, I'll ask my wife, name a baseball player right now. Any baseball player in the game? None. Like, you know who Mike Trout is?

Oh, maybe. Mike Trout is a generational talent. No one knows who he is. Now I'll say, hey, name, names of basketball players, five or six names. Oh, by the way, hey, she even said to me this morning, oh yeah, do you know yesterday was Kobe's one anniversary to his death or two days ago? She doesn't know that about a baseball player, but she knows basketball. Basketball markets their players.

Again, that to me has huge appeal. And I don't have to watch 987 slow moving four hour basketball games in a season. I know, you know, everybody loves these 86 hour game, you know, Yankees, Red Sox. The average game when I was growing up was like 13 hours. Like you went to school and came home and it was the third inning. Like, I don't have time to watch this. Like, what are we doing? Basketball is on TV in your face. You see the stars. They market players. It's huge. And a major shift has been guys used to be big into prospecting in baseball. That was when the first boom took off in 16, 17.

I'm going to find Ronald Acuna as a 16, 17-year-old kid and buy his stuff. And it's going to go up literally 150 times the amount of money. But now it's like instead of taking a risk, I'm just going to buy the guy who just got drafted because next Tuesday I'm going to watch him play. Not in single A, he's going to be on TNT. Like that's, that's where the star power comes in. Top five lottery picks. And also guys, you know, like it happened with Dame Lillard in the bubble. Yep. He makes his little run. The cards doubled. Um, I think with basketball and football, I do feel like the personalities of those sports were probably more popular than the baseball personalities for the last 10 years. The card industry didn't catch up with that because the card industry was just so baseball,

baseball, baseball. And it feels like that's flipped. We saw it with the football because we knew this was a generational class. Potentially at borough before he got hurt. You had two who's about to play. You have Herbert. You have chase young Herbert, by the way, just insane.

So Herbert becomes the gym. But for a while we thought it was going to be borough. Then we have all these receivers and it's like, Oh, Jerry Judy, Henry rugs, Jefferson emerges as the guy. Yeah. I hate to compliment Pittsburgh, but even Claypool played really well.

Right. So yeah. Don't compliment Pittsburgh. Can we edit that out? Is that all? Kyle, edit that out. I was going to say C.D. Lamb too, but I will not speak about the Cowgirls. So absolutely not.

So the boxes start coming out. Yep. And there's interest like there's never been with football, including from my son, who was demanding that we got a panini. He wanted to see if we get the Herbert, whatever. And they're putting out these different things. There's one, there's like a snakeskin edition, but they're very careful what they're putting out and they're going on the market. And some people are just buying the boxes and not even putting the cards out. Yep. What really happened though, is that PSA got overloaded, the system that grades the cards. And now we have this huge cloud, it takes six months.

So people now have these football cards, they can't even get them graded. So I don't even know, I don't know what the market's going to look like in a year, right? Yeah. So again, PSA, for those who don't know, you take a card, you send it in, they professionally tell you the condition. And a card that is raw, in other words, how you pull it out of the pack, that's a raw card. You send it in, it's a graded card. A raw Justin Herbert, just for even numbers sake, Prism. His raw card, and I'm making this up for even numbers, might be $200. That comes back a PSA 10, you're talking $1,000 to $1,200. There's a multiplier, usually a four to five times raw now.

And so it's kind of like a two-edged sword, right? People are aggravated because, hey, I got to wait six months to get my cards back. Yep. You also get a card back that's worth five times your money when you put it in and you can pay for faster services. Even those are getting delayed. But the other thing of that too, is if everything just lived up to the hype, in other words, if I put a 20 day card submission, I'm supposed to have it back in 20 days. If these things were true to their numbers, the market would be crazy flooded because everybody grades now because of the increase in value. So it's irritating that you have to wait. It's making you more money and it's keeping the market way more stable. So I don't hate the fact that I have to wait.

That might flip though, because Collectors Universe just bought PSA and I would guess one of the things they're going to try to do is to improve the grading system because right now it's pretty primitive. Yeah. I mean, so I keep hearing like it's going to be computer graded, you know, maybe, and maybe that works and it goes faster. I just think you're kind of messing with fire there. I mean, if everything just starts coming back faster, what's going to happen to the market? It's not going to crash because there's too many buyers here, but it could definitely hit numbers hard. I mean, if the population of a card, instead of it being 50 PSA 10s, there's 350.

Supply demand is a simple rule, but it's always true. So hopefully, I don't mind they improve their process. I'm good with them not being in a big rush to get stuff back. What other trends are you seeing right now as so much money is flooding into this market? Because one thing I've noticed, you have people just coming into, especially the auctions, and they're just like,

I want a Jordan card. I want the PSA 10 Jordan. Well, it's worth this. And they're like, I don't care. I'll pay this. And it's almost like people are now treating cards like they're art or something. And that's throwing the market out of whack in a whole bunch of different ways.

Because in the old days, it's like, well, here's the established price. If you want to pay a little more, great. But it would be really foolish to pay 25% more because that's what the card's worth. Now people are saying, I don't care what the card's worth. I want a Jordan. And I think the last dance was one of the things where we talked about the boom, the last dance, Scotty Pippen's rookie is worth almost what a top 10 guy would be. For sure. Yeah. And it's indicative of society, right? I have money and I want something. So

don't use any rationale or good sense. Just go buy it. It should only cost you a hundred, but I'm going to pay 250 because my neighbor is going to pay two 40. We're seeing a lot of that. And as far as trends, so this past week, the cards we were really pushing to sell because they got crazy high, Tim Duncan, what has Tim Duncan done in the last six months that would make his cards go up in value? Nothing. Duncan is super quiet. He doesn't sign anything. He rarely makes appearances. He was on the ringer last week, I think, wasn't he? He was, but he's been retired for four years. That's what I'm saying. He's retired. So why are his cards booming? Because the guys who are walking into this market are not looking at it going, I want to buy Zion. He's 19

and might be great. Again, it goes back to, I remember how great Duncan was. I'm going to walk into this market and buy Duncan and I don't care what it used to sell for. So a prime example of Tim Duncan, 97 tops Chrome PSA tens traded forever for a thousand bucks. I was late. So I bought three, two weeks ago for 1400 each sold out this past weekend for 2100 a piece. One was 1900 bucks because I did an in-person deal. Again, what's causing that spike? Nothing realistically, but people are crazy for it. You know, everybody, Kobe stuff naturally was going to spike like crazy because he passed, right? That's going to cause a huge boom.

The other factor though, too, with some of these guys and the trend in basketball, especially is like, I know you're a big AI fan. AI has done nothing in the last couple of months to make stuff spike, but guys like us are talking about him because we remember how great he was. And all of a sudden, it's, I'm not spending money on new stuff. I want AI. I want Larry Bird stuff through the roof, up 10 times. Literally a thousand dollar card is closing for over 11,000 bucks now in under 14 months. I don't know. I feel vindicated because the, so for people who don't know this stuff, birds first card was the year when they had three people on a card,

the 1980, 81 top set and idiots like me, I'm 11 years old at the time. Don't say it. Oh, fuck. Yeah. Oh,

I thought that's what you're supposed to do. I didn't, how did I know? It was like a perforated line here. I got to rip it. Oh, fuck yeah. I thought that's what you're supposed to do. How did I know? You've got a perforated line here. I've got to rip it. So not only did I tear them into threes, I kept them together with rubber bands. So basically it's like I might as well just set them on fire. But I collected a bunch of cards that year.

The smart people were like, oh, maybe I won't rip them. I'll keep them together. So there's not that many of them, but randomly Bird and Magic are on the same rookie with Dr. J. Became one of the most famous basketball cards in the hobby. The next year is a set that there's really not that much of. It's hard to find in great condition. And it's Bird's individual rookie and it's Magic's individual rookie. Up till five, six years ago, you could steal the PSA 9 Bird for a couple hundred bucks. It was just sitting there.

Honestly, not even. So that 80, is that 81? That 81 card is a PSA 9 I bought years and years ago for like $40. I remember buying it for maybe $60 in the early 2010s. Well, now it's like, what, $10,000? Huge money.

And a PSA 10 just doesn't exist. I mean, they exist, but like you said, the condition was so hard to find. Right, it's like a $25,000 card. Oh, it's insane. And so even as a rookie, that's another card. To give you an idea, the PSA 8, which is a near mint condition, 8 out of 10, was selling forever, $700 to $800 up until 2019. All of a sudden, we got a huge spike a couple of months ago and it jumped to $4,500 and now they are all over $10,000. To me though,

same line of thought, or over $11,000 now, same line of thought. So yeah, I'm 34. I want Tim Duncan because he was one of the greatest players I ever saw play. Well, guys five and 10 years older than me, it's Bird. Like my dad is 62. Who's the greatest basketball player of all time? He knows it's Jordan. He's just not going to say it. It's Larry Bird to him. And that card is insane.

Bird, Dr. J, and Magic. It's crazy. Like that's a card. Three of the all-time greats, you know, in the order I said it, Bird, then Magic, then Dr. J. But that's a card that every, I mean, how do you not like that card? And those guys too, not to be like morbid, but as far as investment pieces, so many of those things got destroyed because people like you were ripping them up, right?

As a kid, that's what we're supposed to do. You find a high-grade card like that. In the last three weeks, a PSA 9 of that card has gone from 30 to 35 was market last night to close at 48 and 52 grand wow fifty thousand dollar jump excuse me twenty thousand dollar jump fifteen to twenty thousand dollar jump in weeks well you saw the 80s down yeah the same thing for the 86 flare which which oh so many Hall of Famers. Then the last dance happens and you have this whole new generation of people like,

whoa, Michael Jordan was really good. Where's rookie cards? And it just it's unbelievable what happened on that set. It's absolutely nuts. And that's another one. If we talk about sealed wax, if you have a box that's sealed up with the packs inside of it, 50 to 60,000, maybe two

years ago. Now, if you can find a deal at 180 grand, you're doing well. 160 to 180 grand, that's a deal. Again, I don't know what other asset you're holding. Cards, it's great. But just any investment period, what are you holding for six months that's going up threefold? It doesn't happen all the time. And this stuff you actually get to enjoy.

It's tangible. The stock market's cool, but I get And this stuff you actually get to enjoy. It's tangible. The stock market's cool, but I get to see a number on a computer move. That's great. Or I get to hold a piece of this in my hand, like an actual card. Well, don't you feel like with the pandemic where you had people who had real money

who were nervous about where to put it basically because the stock market's in flux, the economy, who the fuck knows what's going to happen with anything And it seems like some of that money went into cards with some of these these really rich people who weren't shy about talking about it Yeah, yeah And not just cards. I mean like it used to be kind of a saying too Would you rather have a thousand dollar card or ten hundred dollar cards? Ten hundred dollar cards because I can move those easy anywhere, right? I can go to

a show. I can do this, whatever. Now it's like, I'd rather have a $50,000 card than five, $10,000 cards. Cause there are so many new buyers in the market years ago, me and my wife have always been super strict with a ledger of inventory. I paid this, I sold her for that, whatever. I remember back in the day when I was still, you know, working construction, my collection got up to be a value of about 10 grand. And I was still working construction, my collection got up to be a value of about 10 grand. And I was like, psyched. This is amazing. But if I ever had to sell, it's going to be a real struggle. Who's got 10,000 bucks to spend? People on eBay, Facebook, Marketplace, Craigslist, shows, people drop. There are so many buyers who drop 10, 20, 30,

40, 50 grand and don't even blink. There are so many guys who do that with $100,000 now because they view it as an investment. I was going to put $100,000 in my 401k and make 8%. Now I'm going to take a chance and be able to enjoy this piece that's on my wall and maybe it triples and I sell it then. So the buying market is just absolutely insane right now. Well, your podcast is going to be Tuesdays and Fridays. And what we're going to try to do with the podcast is capture what's happening in the moment, crazy trends, some advice, what to buy,

playing some fun games. Like if you had $1,000 to spend on cards, what would you do? If you're my son, he gets a $200 Amazon gift certificate from his grandmother. What am I buying? And he wants to buy it on cards. What am I buying? Up and down, buy, sell, all kinds of games. This is, you're really born to do this.

This is it. This is your calling in life. I like it better than construction. I'll say that. So it's been a fun few years. And I've been doing the card thing for like 10 years, six years full time. I was thinking this though, for the podcast,

we scrapped the card idea for the next two weeks, every day, one hour on why Brady's the greatest that if you want an audible and and i am in at least put the 15 minutes at the end but like so when we were sketching out possibilities for what would the segments would be and what the lead segment would be we were doing it two weeks ago the hardened trade happens yep yeah days after we talked right so lead say lead segment of the pod is, what does this mean? Should you buy Harden cards right now? What if Brooklyn wins the title? What are all the things?

What's the best Harden card to buy? What's the sneakiest Harden card to buy? Same thing, I'm sure, on Thursday's pod. We talk about Brady and Mahomes. What's happening with that market? So we're going to try to be topical, try to teach you about what to buy, what to stay away from, certain cards,

certain sets, undervalued stuff. Watch out for this guy. Don't buy Talon Horton Tucker because he had 29 points in a preseason game. Yeah, just because every idiot was talking about it.

Don't buy Talon Horton Tucker. You're going to be our guide. You're going to be our guide through this whole crazy world as it continues to be insane. I look forward to it. I'm excited. So sports card nonsense.

Subscribe now on Spotify and Apple, wherever you get your pods. And it's going up Thursday and then Tuesday, Friday. After that, Gio, welcome to the Ringer family. Appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Mr. Simmons. That's it for today's podcast. Don't forget about Cousin Sal's new book. It's called You Can't Lose Them All.

Another offering from Render Books. Very proud to have this one and you can get it wherever you get your books. If you want gambling stories, if you want Sal, if you want to hear me made fun of, it's all there. Go get the book.

We will see you on this feed again on Thursday. Looking forward to it. I don't have I don't have I don't have I don't have I don't have I don't have I don't have

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