The Press Box - You Are Cordially Invited to Cover Don Jr.’s Wedding. Plus, an NBA Roundtable With Howard Beck and Logan Murdock!

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Today on The Press Box, Bryan and David discuss the ProPublica piece revealing that Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding was funded by a Russian oligarch (18:16). Then they touch on a handful of other media topics, including Arch Manning and Holly Rowe, a Troy Aikman verbal tic, and more (37:12). Then Bryan is joined by Logan Murdock and Howard Beck to discuss some pre-preseason NBA media stories. They provide some thoughts on the Clippers scandal, investigative reporting in sports, all-time quote guys, LeBron's impact on the media, and much more (54:15). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guests: Logan Murdock and Howard Beck Producers: Isaiah Blakely and Jon Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by DeZone. DeZone is the only place to watch every single NFL game, Europe's elite soccer and boxing's biggest nights. Catch exclusive NFL Sunday games and NFL Red Zone with Scott Hansen. Plus, for just $1 ad Ultimate and watch four games at once using Multiview and catch every knockout, touchdown, and gold. The biggest stars all in one place. Sign up now at DeZone.com.

Limited time offer see website for details. This episode is brought to by Uber Eats. You can get almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Sorry, you can't get a beach delivered, but you can get a peach. A canoe, no. Shampoo, yes. A rocket? No way.

Chocolate, yes way. It's everything you need, including $10 off your first grocery order with code anything 30-30. Get almost, almost anything with Uber Eats. Order now. Order a minimum of $30 required, valid on grocery, convenience, retail, specialty foods, or flower delivery orders only, terms and conditions. Why. Damn it!

Is there anything that makes you feel more like an adult than buying a membership to a museum? Ha! Um, dang. Uh, I was a, like, monthly donor to Philly's NPR station when I was living in Princeton. That's a good one. Um, not even for the tote bag, just so I could, like, have access to the, to the, to the, the you know BBC shows that they co-produced or whatever um and also because I love the radio uh

what else museum I mean museum is pretty I did join the film I mean the the the indie movie house uh here Montclair because it's down the block now it probably would have been worth it because they do show the big movies there so I don't know that that's necessarily like adulting but it really but I did it with great adult confidence just like this is I'm this is I'm this This is the right thing to be doing, you know. But I don't think that even comes close to a museum, a museum membership. I went to the Montclair Art Museum. It's like two rooms, you know, whatever.

It's relatively small. We did that this weekend, and it was super cheap because there was some under construction. If they had offered me reduced rates of membership, would I have done it? Maybe, maybe. Related question. is there anything that makes you feel like you failed at being an adult than never using the museum membership you bought? Oh my gosh, it's the worst.

When you're doing that annual thing where you're trying to like check your subscriptions and get your life in order and you never finish doing it and whatever. But there's, it's one thing to be, to have like wasteful ones. Like, wow, I'm paying a whole lot of money for, you know, the highest tier. of Paramount Plus. I'm just, I don't even know if there's tears on Paramount Plus. I'm just saying, it's like you, you can point at yourself being super wasteful on the things that you, you kind of use, and it feel, and you can delete that and whatever, and it feel like you've accomplished something, but it feels really bad when it's something you've like never, when

you did from a moral perspective, and you've never used it. Yes, you declared the Shoemaker family or the Curtis family is getting into art this year. Yes. And then you look up and a year has gone by, It's like, actually, we never went. The auto renewal on a gym membership, you know, when you see the auto renown notice and you're like, this is such a slap in the face. You know I haven't been there in 11 months, you know, and you're going to auto renew me. Despite all this, David, I purchased a founding membership to the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

Yes. The new museum here in Los Angeles. Whenever there's a new Star Wars movie or Star Wars TV show, I always think, what would 10-year-old David or 10-year-old Brian feel if they knew they were just going to be constant Star Wars movies and TV shows coming out all the time, that that world would exist? So I also ask, what would 10-year-old David and Brian think

if they knew that George Lucas was going to build a huge, museum to put his Star Wars props in how excited would we have been? You know, been crazy. Would he have been the number one director that you would have guessed would have a museum when you were a kid? Him or Spielberg? I was, I'm leaning Spielberg. That's what I was saying, because it feels like Spielberg has a little bit more breadth, right?

That he could actually, he could have the, you know. The Amistad Wing. Yeah. This is something different than E.T. Or the traveling exhibit that would relate to the, to Schindler's List or Amistad or whatever, you know, you could do different stuff. I would assume George Lucas would be like,

10-year-old Brian and David would found out that they're like hosting a special exhibition of his at the Air and Space Museum or something like that, you know, and you'd be like, awesome, but you would never think he gets his own museum. That he built it himself. Yeah. At an expense of $1 billion. That's a real number.

Owen and I got to go to the Lucas Museum as a part of a preview a couple of weeks ago. Membership has its privileges. Also, I wanted to get on the board. We went at least once in our year-long membership. Were you allowed to live stream it?

Like, the people, they get the special sneak preview of the new Star Wars rides at Disney or whatever? It sure seemed like it, because there were a ton of pictures on Twitter of this thing. It's built here in Los Angeles right next to the L.A. Coliseum, which is just funny.

Because if you're standing in the little, little gardens that they have around where there's a giant statue of bikini Delea fighting Jabba the hut. That is a real thing that was built next to the museum. You look past that very strange and surreal piece of art and then you just see the grandstand where USC plays. Oh my gosh. Wonderful L.A. mashup.

Yeah. Building is by an architect named Mahon Song. It looks like a spaceship. Specifically a spaceship from the Star Wars prequel. Not the kind of worn-in dirty ships from the original trilogy. No, the sleek, shiny stuff. 300,000 square feet.

You'll be happy to know, David, there is one room devoted to Star Wars. Oh, okay. Luke's land speeder from a new hope. A very awesome Jawa costume, which I got right up close to and took pictures of. Oh, wait. Like the full fur, not just the clothing,

like the leather that the jaw, oh sorry, I'm thinking of an Ewok. A full Jawa costume. Okay. Is it a face a solid plane? The face is the black mask and then the little glowing, like, is it flat? Is it flat like the toys were or is it go around a face?

I believe so. This is on my Instagram page if people want to look. So take a peek. General Grievous is wheel bike from the prequel trilogy. Maybe looms less big in our imaginations than it does. our kids' imaginations, but that's there. That's like 15% of the museum, the Star Wars stuff.

The other 85% is George Lucas's art collection. Now, we've asked the question of George Lucas over these many, many decades. Why didn't he direct more movies? Uh-huh. My theory is,

he was too busy buying stuff. Like the eBay addiction? Truly. Like, maybe he was, he didn't want to buy museum memberships. like, I'm just going to buy this stuff in the museum. This will make me feel better. I mean, this museum is like

an unmade George Lucas movie. Wow. In the sense of how is he spending his time? What is his taste? And I think we know what his taste is, right? It's populist. It's a little more political than you might have guessed.

Those Ewarks were supposed to be the Viet Cong in return to the Jedi. He's interested in liberal political causes. he's interested in political art. This thing is unbelievable. First of all, George Lucas owns almost every famous Norman Rockwell painting you've ever seen. It's crazy.

Including the one about Ruby Bridges, integrating a school. That painting is called The Problem We All Live With. That is in this museum. Wow. Right there with a nice bench in front of it. You know, the special painting gets the bench because more people want to sit there and enjoy it.

I was with, Owen and we were talking to one of the docents, I think it was in the Star Wars exhibition, and he said, you know, make sure you go up to the fifth floor because there's a Banksy on the fifth floor. Ooh. I want to see a Banksy.

Yeah. That's cool. We go up to the Fifth Floor. There's not a Banksy. There are multiple Banksy's. I stopped counting when we got to double digits. Holy moment. Are you able to collect Banksy, that?

I always wonder that. I mean, yes, I remember. Something very different than I thought. A lot of the Banksy coverage in the past decade or two has been about auctions. You know, it's possible. But it does seem sort of bizarrely intangible for a physical thing. The museum has got a replica of a golf cart with a presidential seal on it. It's got a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken in the passenger seat.

And then all these like missiles and machine guns attached to the. presidential golf cart. It's really cool. Did you see the, this threads the needle here. There's some London street artist who is not Banksy, but is very early Banksy-esque, who painted art on a wall that has, it's Jabba with Leia in chains, except Jabba has a Donald Trump hair on top, and Leia is the Statue of Liberty. Ooh.

That's good. It feels like, it's a beautiful work. The artistry is amazing, and it feels like something that would really fit in here. Although I don't know how George feels about, you know, like the copyright issues at hand there. I think pretty happy because there's like he did buy the Mad Magazine parody of Indiana Jones. I believe Jack Davis is the artist there where they would just, you know, have all the characters looking out at you and have him doing funny quotes. The original of that is in this museum as well. And this is when I had to text you because I went to the comic art wing.

Now, you and I know George Lucas. We know his taste. What kind of comics would you expect George Lucas to be buying? Prince Valiant. Captain America. Ducktails. A lot of ducktails in Indiana Jones. Oh, yeah.

For real. Pogo, gasoline alley, those kind of, that stuff that existed before our time. Yeah. And also into our time. Yeah. And I'm talking, when I say comics, I'm talking to original art here, right? Yeah, yeah. A comic book.

Well, he has all that, but then I started snapping pictures for you because George Lucas also bought originals from Frank Miller, Jack Kirby, Gil Cain, Will Eisner, Charles Adams, Gary Larson Farside Originals. Oh, wow. Those are in this museum as well. That's pretty incredible. Every cool piece of comic art you could imagine, which is what you can do when you have piles and piles of money like George Lucas does. I also had this thought going through the museum. If you had the George Lucas money, you could buy just about anything you wanted. What would you buy?

Well, I mean, listen, every few months we'll be texting about some wrestling-related vehicle that is on sale. Stone Cold Steve Austin's pickup truck used personally owned a pickup truck, not from TV, but like his personal truck was on sale six or eight months ago or something, and it was very compelling. It was also pretty cheap. Yeah. It was not as expensive as I thought it was being. It was just like a non-vintage, like an 80s Toyota pickup. Like it was like, you know, real ones know that it's a great model, but like, you know, it's not like it's all got 120,000 miles or 200,000 miles on it. But that would have been just immediate if I have all the money in the world.

Like, yeah, it's like when you see a, you know, t-shirt you want on eBay or whatever, you're like, yes, I'll just take it. I'm not going to worry about fit. you know, whatever. There would probably be a lot of that sort of thing. So wrestling apocrypha? 100%. Rare books? I think original art would also be in your and my wheelhouse.

100% a lot of original art. Like if there was a Jack Kirby, you would be like, I want this, put this in my house. This is cool. Yeah. I mean, Kirby's a really funny one because he's such a, he is like so of the Lucas generation. I mean, like, the fandom is of that generation. They just, they just deify him,

you know, and he's great. Frank Miller? Yeah, Frank Miller. But certainly if there was like a cool Kirby. I mean, at first you're like, you want, you want the best, you want the things you actually want to hang on your wall. Obviously, before this museum existed, I'm guessing George Lucas had most of these in a storage shed somewhere, you know? And that would be that, that would be the hard thing to wrap your head around. I'm buying something that's, that's not the coolest thing ever, but it's like a solid B plus and it's not going to ever be seen by me again, you know, unless I open a museum.

Maybe you thought that all along. Probably did. Yeah, it's true. It's true. The rare books one is interesting because I've never been one for like, like it's cool to get your hands on a first edition if it's 50 bucks, you know, or whatever.

But like I've never been one for like $50,000 for the limited first run of whatever. Like it's always felt so strange to have a book that you don't intend on reading. Completely. agree. I would buy every $50 first edition. That's what I would use the money on. Yeah. Not every $50,000 first edition. Unfortunately, all the AI engines have chopped them

all the pieces now. Oh, Jesus Christ. I was thinking about this too, because like, and I feel you and I are pretty aligned on this, I've never been into cars. So if I had all the money in the world, I would not have the Jay Leno airplane hanger

or Seinfeld airplane hanger full of cars. That's totally uninteresting to I wouldn't even, I mean, I don't really even want a nice car now. I wouldn't want like tons and tons of homes. I wouldn't want cool clothes, though it couldn't get any less cool with me now, so maybe a small upgrade. If we're talking just purely fanciful stuff, I was like, I think if you'd asked me 10 years ago,

like Private Island would have absolutely been near the top of the list. There's a lot of stink on that one now, though. Yeah, after Epstein and. and Don Jr.'s wedding reception, we've downgraded Private Island. I don't know, maybe I'm not, maybe I can't fathom great wealth enough. But to me, like, buying property is such,

is an investment, right? And if you're so rich that the investment is sort of negligible, it's, like, unnecessary, wouldn't you rather just zip into whatever town you want, a city you wanted at the last minute and get the finest hotel or rental property available to you as opposed to just, like, having to deal with ownership in 20 cities?

Sure, but you can afford ownership, right? Like, you can, there's somebody that will take care of this and it's in the private island fantasy, right? There are, there are attendants who are like, welcome, Mr. Shoemaker. That's the answer. With an unlimited amount of money, I would just staff up. I don't know what they would do. But I like the idea of just being like,

I remember when my boss at when I worked at Henry Holt Books, he was a very wealthy man, the publisher, very wealthy man separate from publishing, obviously. and one thing that was totally insignificant to him was that he had a driver. And, you know, I saw it in action a few times. I never rode in the car, but you'd see him say, like, you know, just kind of look at the clock

and just be like, I've got to get to this thing. And he'd say, like, text or call, just like John pulled the car around or whatever. Yeah. I mean, it was just like a black car that was sort of always in the area. And I thought that was just, like, so bizarrely extravagant.

and yet I can't say I disliked it You know That sounds pretty awesome You gotta just page on the driver well And make sure that like He's okay with sitting around And doing nothing for 99% of the time

You know Make sure he has hobbies iPhone games that he likes to play Yeah I would just staff up I'd have a lot of people around You know It's just like God I shouldn't have

Shouldn't have gotten this many groceries Knowing I had to walk home Hey Hey Hey Bill Come here. So wait, in this scenario, you're still walking, someone just carrying the groceries with you? Yes.

Yeah, I like it just being, there's an orbit of employees. They don't really involve themselves in my life unless they're called out. This is the Jeeves fantasy. Yes, it is. Come here, Jeeves. You're doing exactly what you would normally be doing as current David. You just have a body man who is. You know how your kids have it.

Aren't you ever jealous of your children? when you're walking out the door and you're like, do we need coats today? And the kids are just like, well, just bring them. But you're just like, but if I just bring them, then I'm the one that's going to be carrying them with them around when nobody wants to wear them. Yes.

You could have the life of your child, right? We are Jeeves. Yeah. To our children. Oh, that's all the time. It's like, can you just take this, you know, dirty dish back to the kitchen? I'm like, I'm sorry, what? Felt the, I would never ask my wife to do that.

Yeah. No, I wouldn't do that myself. but you, child, feel like you can just ask me to do anything. All right, coming up on our unassisted podcast, David, ProPublica scored a big story about Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding reception on the heretofore mentioned private island and how it was funded by a Russian oligarch. How should we cover a story like that?

Plus, we got updates on 60 Minutes, on Ted Cruz and ESPN's College Game Day, on Arch Manning and Holly Row. And then our friends, Howard Beck and Logan Murdoch, stopped by for a pre, pre-season NBA Media Roundtable. All that much more on the press box, a part of the Ringer, podcast network. Hello, media consumers, it's Brian, it's David, it's Isaiah Blakely and John Not Bones-Jones,

producing this here podcast. You texted me right away about this ProPublica blockbuster a bombshell that is actually a bombshell. The bylines were Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Andrew Mirjewski. The headline was self-explanatory. Donald Trump Jr.'s Bahamas wedding was secretly bankrolled by Russian oligarch close to Putin. You don't need puns when you got the goods.

Don Jr. married Bettina Anderson this spring. The wedding, by the way, took place on multiple private islands, not just one. Yeah. The reception was on one, but the wedding was on the other. About that reception, according to ProPublica included dancers in stilettos and sailor caps. What a weird aesthetic fantasy that is. A five-tier funfetti cake that had been airlifted in from Florida. The author's right.

helicopters and sea planes that were depositing the guests on the islands. They also stayed in oceanfront villas. Love oceanfront villa as a phrase. There was also a fireworks show. I looked at some of the pictures. Were there lesser villas on those islands? It seemed like it was all oceanfront. Oh, yes.

I think if you have the private island, you don't even bother to build the lower tier. Yeah, there's no, there's no, like, cul-de-sac where your, like, fifth villa is. No, you're on the ocean. Maybe for staff. Maybe for the aforementioned people he's booked up. Yes, jeeves. Back to the crappy villa, you? This was funded by Umar Kremlev,

who footed the bill. ProPublica rights for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses. According to records reviewed by ProPublica in interviews with three people familiar with the event, the oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands where the reception was held and where the guest slept. He also covered other big tickets. at items like the fireworks show and his team helped plan the event.

The authors continued, the oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They stood sometimes stood off by themselves speaking Russian. Now you ask, this guy's close to Putin. What exactly does that mean? Well, recently, Putin bestowed upon him a state honor of the order of friendship. So when we say tied to Putin, it's not just tied to Putin, he's giving him a very strange and clear award. Can we have our own order of friendship that includes all of our best guests? Like we bestow it to bestow it upon them after appearing? I'm writing this down, the press box order of friendship.

Yeah. You are linked to us. Can I give you, can I just give you a little bit more about Umar? Please. Fact check me if you think this stuff is totally wrong. I heard from my brief research, he was early on was a member of a most. Russian motorcycle gang, but it was a Kremlin approved, a Kremlin sanctioned motorcycle gang. And through that, became close with Putin's head of security.

And then through that man, that head of security was given the opportunity to become an oligarch. I'm a little bit unclear about the definition of Russian oligarch. If you are just a Russian citizen with a certain amount of wealth and proximity to power, are you automatically an oligarch? Or is it like, are there a set number of oligarchs and someone has to die for you? you to become an oligarch? Like, you know, is it just a, is it like a literal, I mean, is it like a real title on some level or is it just rich Russian equals oligarch?

Well, as I say in the newspaper, I think you have to have proximity to Putin. Right. Especially if you're a guy like this, because you have to acquire money somehow. And he acquired money through sports. He is the head of the Russian Boxing Federation or was and then became president of the IBA, which is an international boxing federation. And we're using International Boxing Federation. Well, you don't have to use it loosely.

It just doesn't mean, you know, like you or I could just say like, you know, I'm the, I am the president of the universal boxing conglomeration, right? The company I just started and it would sound impressive and it wouldn't actually mean anything. The boxing company of which he is in, the IBA is, is, has been around since 1946. I think it was, I think it was involved in like post-Olympic. like Olympic style, Olympic and collegiate style boxing, the sort of like, you know, global apparatus. But it's lost a lot of esteem,

a lot of controversy surrounded it since then. And Umar bought it in not a particularly, not in particularly good shape, nor is it, you know, particularly notable, I don't think, in the boxing world, under his, under his guidance. I did see a flyer for a big event that was, that was, had his face in the middle and was co-hosted by, by Andrew Tate and John.

John actually Bones Jones. Those were the two celebrity hosts. Wow. What a roundtable. So, yeah, this is kind of what we're dealing with here. I'm not sure. It is not particularly plausible that the IBF is the source of... The IBA.

The IBA. Sorry, is the source of the IBF. Of, of, you know, just immeasurable wealth. It is more of an indicator of wealth that it is like an actual, like, source of wealth. That's very well put. When you mentioned the biker gang that he was a part of, did you mention that it was called the Night Wolves? No.

I want to put that out there for our listeners as well. It's not clear how Trump Jr. And the oligarch met or why they became friends. Also, apparently... One of the articles, I don't have it here, which one that I read said that they met relatively recently. And it was because of their show. shared love for hunting, big game hunting.

Which is probably what I would have guessed. Yeah. Like, what does Don Jr. have in common with this guy? The super rich big game hunting world, I'm guessing, is pretty small. Pretty small. At least, yes, at least on that level. The group chat. Hey, anybody want to go shoot some giraffes this weekend or anything?

And just like, oh. And just, can you hop on the private plane to go do that? And Umar is just like, hey, we haven't met, but I'm free. I would love to, you know? Umar was also deleted from the, the photos and videos released by Don Jr. and his wife, who's Bettina Anderson, by the way. Socialite, Bettina Anderson. Socialite Bettina Anderson. It's a great word that is. That's according to ProPublica as well.

So it's funny to see a story like this, isn't it, David, that's not insinuating something. It's not reporting something at two or three degrees removed. It just is. The Russian oligarch paid for... the wedding reception of the president's son. Yes. I mean, we're already... His relatively new friend.

His relatively new friend. And the explanation, the excuse or whatever from Don Jr. and his new wife was basically just like, yeah, it happened. What's the big deal? Our friend paid for her stuff. Like there was no... Our dear friend. It just a very...

it's just a very bizarre situation. It's just, there's no denial at all. I mean, listen, I'm sure we've all had the experience of like, not all, but many of us have experienced of like, you know, you meet somebody who's over the course of a night, who's a friend of a friend of a friend, who bank rolls the whole evening out

because he's just weirdly rich. But if you're, you know, your dad's the president and you might want to do some due diligence to figure out whether or not this guy's an oligarch trying to, you know, weasel his way into your circle. Yeah, usually that would happen at a steakhouse. Yeah.

Not on a private island with fireworks or, in fact, multiple private islands. I wonder, was any of it, he said he planned it. Or the dancing people, all of those bizarre details. Was that just Umar's own creation? Or was that he did do that in conjunction with the couple? That's a great question. So they were like, here's what we're looking for. Can you give us some dancing people in Sailor Hats?

also I saw there are no pictures there seemed to be one group picture that that Umar may have been in the back row of but there was all this reference to It's like the NFL team photo if you're talking about the one That was in the pro pro poeuvre story And it was like just the top of his head Yeah he was in row four

He was like I'm tall I can be in the back And then like all these tall people got in front of him He's incredibly tall I mean I know being tall next to Putin is no Great Shakes but he seems like a very big fellow But the The mob of people, I don't mean to use that in a derogatory way, the strange group of people that the guests were alarmed by that he was there with.

I wish I had some better grasp of that too. Was it just like his Jeeves'es? Was it just his security attache? Like he, does he travel with 30 people at all times? And that was what was going on? Or did he have his own party bros that were there joining the party? That's a fascinating question. I would like to know that as well.

It just seems, I mean, I feel like it, you know, you didn't, I don't, I mean, you, you came to my wedding and you didn't, you know, know, know, know a lot of people dearly. I mean, it would have been, I guess, weird if, like, Dominique's entire family was like the Russian mob, you know, and they were all standing over to the side just staring at you awkwardly, you know. Right. But they would, but they would be a more logical reason for them to be there. Right. It wouldn't, it wasn't, it's not just the discomfort is what I mean, you're right. It's, it's, it is just why. What you're talking about if there was just like a third party that I didn't know and that maybe your wife barely knew that was funding the whole night and they were off in the corner.

It's more like you're joining up with somebody else's party. It's like we're combining parties now. Like what you would do back in like, you know, the college days where it's like, shit, man, the neighbors don't a party at the same time. We're combining parties. It's going to be crazy because only 50 people came. They only invited 50. The Trump, Don and his wife only invited 50 people. Yeah, it's very small.

So if there was a group of any size that came with Umar, I mean, it could have conceivably doubled the size of the party. And that's what made Eric Trump's statement about this so funny. Eric Trump, brother of Don Jr., said his or somebody, his spokesperson said, Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has ever heard his name. That just made me, I just love the strong denial. I have no idea this person is, and I've never even heard the name. What's Eric Trump clearing out for?

I mean, is he looking for it, looking towards his future political? career. I think he's just getting out. I don't want anything to do with this. Maybe he didn't want it to happen. But don't they work hand and glove all the time, the two brothers? Yes, they do.

I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, it just seems like one of their, like, if any of them has any black marks on them, it goes both ways, no matter what he'd deny. But anyway. There just might be so many black marks that, after a time, you're like, I just don't want that one

specifically on me. Yeah. You know, David, a lot of time, when people see a story like this, they ask, why isn't the media making a bigger deal out of this? And my first response is always, the reason you know

about this is the media. Correct. ProPublica is part of the media. They reported this. Every news organization out there has followed this story, as they say in journalism, with their own version of it, or just recapping what was in the original story.

I do think, however, this is the kind of story that the nonpartisan media just is not structurally equipped to make a big enough deal out of. Go on. Which I mean like 20, 30 years ago, this would have just been the lead story for weeks.

I mean, this would have been such an enormous deal. I mean, obviously Putin's relationship with the United States generally. the fact that Donald Trump specifically is trying to negotiate a truce between Ukraine and Russia in a war of Putin's, a war of Russian aggression. Like everything, forget even Donald Trump's interesting ties with Russia, which all came to a head during his first term. Everything about that. It's fascinating.

It makes this a huge story. But there's just so much thrown off by the Trump administration. That even if the quote unquote media is doing its job, this just will not. hang at the top of the homepage for very long. I think that's true. I mean, we've spent a lot of time on this show over the past however many years we've been doing it, talking about the media sort of recalibrating to learn how to cover Trump. And I think in so much as they've been successful, I mean, it's not a thing,

it's not a conversation that we have that much anymore. Maybe we've, you know, gotten weathered to it. But I do think that the media establishment has gotten somewhat better at it. But I think that's sort of come at the expense of handling a, sort of quaint story of corruption like this one. You're sort of limited from a, I mean, when you talk about the media in general, right, ProPublica should get all the crowd in the world for,

for this story. And certainly every story that exists now about it is, is, you know, is following that one. But you could also say, like, why didn't you report it to ProPublica or whoever else? Why don't you report, why didn't you report this four months ago? Like, why it took so long, you know? I mean, that's not, I don't think that's a logical argument, but like, this is, uh, the fact is nobody was paying attention.

And maybe if the wedding had been a thousand people instead of 50, you know, there would have been somebody that talked to some reporter somewhere and the word would have got, you know, the story would have been uncovered faster. Yeah, there were these guys at the reception. It was odd, you know. They were speaking Russian. It was, it was strange. Uh, but, but it does seem like frequently. And it's not just the, I mean, you see a lot of, this in the Israel Palestine conversation right now. Even in the Ed Shearhan story that's going around,

it feels like a lot of legacy media is hamstrung by the fact that they will like kind of just state the facts and not look deeper. And part of me or assume that people can see the same depth to it that they do, without saying it, which is just sort of an aim. You know, just stating the facts is not necessarily enough, right? You can't just say, I mean, really, you can't just say Trump's, Trump Jr's wedding was paid for by an oligarch. You need to explain immediately what that means.

Like, you just laid out, like, in terms of geopolitics, in terms of corruption, in terms of, like, why this, why one specific dollar could mean a disruption of the world order, you know? And I don't know if that's because people are so hyper-focused on dealing with Trump's constant chumming of the waters, like you said, but it does seem like there's a correlation there. I'd go in a different direction. I think part of the problem for, again, we're talking very, very broadly here, but part of the problem is when you have a normal political scandal, let's say a scandal in a different administration or with a different politician, there are consequences to it. Right. So the later stories are not just more information, which, by the way, reporters are chasing right now.

Sure. They are, what is the fallout? What are the consequences? And the consequences here are nothing. The Trumps don't care. They will just power through it. They're not ashamed by it. It doesn't matter to them.

Republicans in Congress are not ashamed by it. Will not hold Trump to account in any reasonable way. Democrats are powerless to do anything about it. it, at least right now. And so that's what it is, right? There's no forward motion to a scandal. And that makes it easier for reporters to dig into it. Because of course, you'd like to find out more information about this guy, more information about whatever their relationship is. Is there any quid pro quo here? That's all great. And I think reporters will do that, but there's just nothing will happen, right? It just stops. And if, and if, you know, the Democrats retake

Congress and take the Senate, you know, whatever, I mean, at the midterms, they, certainly will or should, you know, investigate this. But to some extent, it will feel like sour grapes. It will feel like, you know, sort of politicizing the issue because no one did anything about it at the time. Does that make sense? Like even, like, you're right. The reporting needs the invent, it needs Congress to act.

But if Congress only, if Congress waits till Democrats take back, take over to act, then it'll seem like, oh, or they're just trying to, they're just, you know, they're just flexing their muscles. It's not, it's not necessarily a real thing. Sure. I mean, let's just imagine you're in a newsroom right now. It's like, okay, we want our investigator. We're going to go yell at our investigative reporters for not getting this first. And then we're going to say, what do you got on this, right? What can you get? Can you advance this story? And let's say, we'll print what you got, right? We want that. We're hungry for that story because that's really good. Then the next step is to say, okay, a week from now, what are we doing on this? Is there anything else to do on this? We've got the investigations working. anything on Capitol Hill? Nope, Republicans don't care. Anything from the administration?

Nope, doesn't matter. Any relation to the election coming up? Well, maybe, right? Because people, you just read all those dire New York Times polls this week for Republicans. People think Donald Trump doesn't care about inflation. It doesn't care about prices and feels like he's let them down and is distracted by other things. So maybe it ties into that in some way. Did you see him with the giant

The Kennedy Center Destruction poster writing on Air Force One? That was unbelievable. It just feels like he is trying to lose, doesn't it, in a weird way? Like, it's just, I felt this way. I remember feeling this way a little bit in like 2020,

like the way he was running his election down the stretch. We're just like, you're trying to win, right? It's really strange. A couple of notes before we get. get out of here. Follow-ups, David. Game Day and Ted Cruz. I was at Game Day when Ted Cruz stopped by on his burn orange blazer. He went on the air for more than eight minutes to talk up the Donald Trump sponsored Protect College Sports Act. People rightfully, including Joel and I on Monday, were like, wait a second. Why is this a political ad, essentially? With very few follow-up questions

from Reese Davis, skeptical questions about what's this consequence? What's this consequence? What about this? What about that? Ted Cruz, even at one point during that, every said, call your senator, which is not something you normally hear on college game day, or by the way, even a show like Meet the Press. The sort of like direct

call to action like that. Yeah. Well, a lot of people said, hey, why didn't Game Day have an opposing point of view? And in fact, ESPN did put NAACP president and CEO, Derek Johnson on Sports Center on Tuesday, their reasoning for putting him on Sports Center instead of the next edition of College Game Day, which will be a big audience, right, that's focused on college football,

is because the bill's moving and they wanted to do it sooner rather than later. So instead of bringing him to the set in Oxford, where Lane Kiffin's going to play Ole Miss, his old team next week, he did it on Sports Center on Tuesday. This still seems like such a gigantic, self-creatic. mistake on their part. I cannot imagine they wanted to be a part of the story in this way. I think they let themselves get talked into an appearance by Ted Cruz's people, and now they are just like, what the hell do we do?

I don't know how it's difficult to deny Ted Cruz. That's what I say. I think that there's a point in a politician's arc where you can decide whether you're serious or whether you're a troll, or whether you're a troll, and Ted Cruz is obviously chosen the latter. Now, you can still run for president. Anybody can. Trump's president. But like, just media outlets, like, ESPN of all places, don't need to be, like, countenancing him as, as a serious person. I don't care if he's the author of the bill. You know, it's just like, it's so secondary to what everybody knows about Ted Cruz. It's just crappy TV.

Like, it's like, you know, it's just, I even think if you were doing like a full-on skeptical interview, which you could probably justify. Mm-hmm. I just think it's like, this is going to be a, we're a freaking game day. Yeah. And like, we, first of all, Nick Saban is also a support of the bill, and he's on game day. So you can just talk to him about it if you want to do any of this stuff. And he is somebody people want to hear from, unlike Ted Cruz.

Also, it's totally empty. It's like the emptiest thing. Like, if you had actually, the, having somebody from the NAACP speaking on is, is probably the best possible move you could have for the counterpoint. But if you have two senators who are on office. opposite sides of this bill, regardless of political affiliation, and you had them both on TV, I guarantee they'd say the exact same things. It's like a ballot initiative where like they word it in such a way that you think you're both sides sound like they're voting for like everybody's continued happiness. They're both saving college sports. They're both saving college sports.

They both say, well, we can all agree on these, this handful of problems. They're saying the same ones. You know, it's just like, but like you know that when Ted Cruz comes on, he's going to say absolutely nothing of interest or value. There was an awful announcing newsletter. this week talking about how much game day has changed. You know, it's funny. I don't think I can be upset about this segment and upset at this segment. And I don't really think that's the case all that much. You know, I watch it.

I'm like, I understand Pat McAfee is not Lee Corso, but he's really not that different than Lee Corso. Like, if you watch what Lee Corso, I know Lee Corso is old time, cool game day, and this is Pat McAfee's the new thing. And I'm just like, I watch that. I'm like, I don't know. I think they're kind of doing the same thing in a lot of ways, but that's just me. Elsewhere in Austin News, we could have woken up Monday morning after Arch Manning and the Longhorns beat Ohio State under miraculous circumstances. And we could have said, David, what's a thing Arch Manning could say today during his press conference?

It would take all the people who were so happy and so pleased at what he did, so happy for him, and turn them against him. We would not have come up with Arch Manning talking about a random video that was created online that showed his head coach Steve Sarkeesian slapping ESPN reporter Holly Row. And yet Arch Manning said that. Here is the clip. I've seen a few AI edits and stuff, but that's about it. I saw AI edit at a Sarg's interview. You all seen that one? That's a good one. of him slavin how I wrote.

Yeah, it's hilarious. You hear all the chuckles from the sports writers in there who thought that was a real knee slapper. I mean, when I first saw the tweet, I'm like, surely he was just talking about how insane it was that such an edit existed at all. Surely he was just noting that and like there's this just insane thing on the internet. I still don't know why you would like casually volunteer that at a press conference, but that's what I thought. But then you hear that and you're like, oh, no, he's saying, yeah, it's a good one. And everybody in the room is yucking it up and laughing. And, you know, naturally a lot of people come out and said, you know, we shouldn't just be doing misogyny.

Yeah. And laughing about it. Not to mention violence during a college football press conference. I saw Nicole Arbach of NBC tweet about this And then all her replies were just more misogyny? Yeah This is what happened We yuck it up about this stuff guys

Another update, David, 60 minutes They led the season premiere with the story about the colonel Who was rescued in Iran Joel and I made a point About Nora O'Donnell Who was a correspondent on that piece and said Should Nor O'Donnell have asked Pete Haxeth because she got the rare interview,

and in this case it actually was a rare interview with Hegzith, about the war in Iran. In fact, Nora O'Donnell did ask about the status of the war, and that exchange did air before the 60 Minutes piece. It aired last Thursday on CBS mornings. Here's that exchange. What can you say about what victory will look like in Iran to the American people? That's probably a topic for another interview,

but the more we look and understand what's been done on the ground, the devastation done to Iranian military capabilities is historic in proportions. And we have all the control of the world about what this outcome looks like. And the president has put us in a fantastic position. So she did ask about it. I'm glad. I'm glad this wasn't just like a, hey, we're just talking heroism today. Mm-hmm.

Any questions you might have about the war in Iran or verboten? I don't think that Nora Donald would have agreed to an interview under such circumstances, but I'm glad she got one in there. I think what Joel and I were talking about on Monday was like asking him about the idea that if Donald Trump had not gone to war with Iran, then this airman would not have been in perilous circumstances. And the people who went into Iran and put boots on the ground on Iranian soil would not have been in peril of circumstances.

That's kind of what I meant earlier about like you just like by like stating the facts without explaining the depth sort of, you know, it's just like if you sort of take things in a vacuum, then yes, the appropriate question is what will victory look at? But I mean, it looked like, but like, but the real question that everybody with an inkling of attention wants to know is like, what the fuck are we doing here? Right? I mean, this story, this is a story of great heroism. But we have seen an hour lifetime.

but particularly our parents' lifetimes, how heroism means something completely different depending on the arena, right? The great heroes of the Vietnam War were not treated as such necessarily, right? And certainly not in comparison to their parents who were their fathers who were fighting in World War II. It is like a real, like if you're going to tell a story of heroism,

you have to explain the backdrop because it's not some pristine thing. We're like heroism always gets treated the same way. By the way, this is a dude that Donald Trump would have said that he didn't like, right? Because he got, well, I guess he got shot down. He didn't get captured. So he passes the Donald Trump test. But it's a cane test.

Yeah. But it's, but I mean, it's just like you have to. I mean, it's not always the same thing. So let's actually talk about it. Why was there a need for heroism? Oh, because we declared war in Iran. And again, I think Noro Donald's question there is good. Like, how do we get out of this war?

How does this war end? is absolutely a question that should be asked repeatedly to Donald Trump, Pete Hegson, and everybody else. But there's a different question too. I mean, there's also the implicit question of how do we underestimate the Iranian opposition so badly? I mean, that goes directly to how he got shot down.

But you're right. I mean, I don't say this in Noro Donald defense or anything like that, but like if you and I sat around and game planned, like we know we can get one question over to like to Pete Heggseth without him walking out, what's our one question going to be? It would be a very difficult, we'd have a very difficult time crafting the perfect question. And we might have, in fact, settled on the one that she settled on.

Sure. I think that's, you know, because that is the what happens next question rather than the what already happened question. You're right. One was probably what you were going to get in. I think that might be what the calculation was. But anyway, I didn't want to stay. His response felt very canned. Even with the thing at the beginning of this is maybe is better for a different

interview. For an interview that I will not grant. Yes, exactly. It felt like it was very, one way or the other, very prepared to answer that question. Do you see the tease for next week, 60 minutes? Mm-hmm. Ross sitting down with

Mr. Clancy. Yeah. By the way, we always knew that Barry Weiss was a good booker. That's not the question, right? We always know she was good at booking people. Anyway, that's a good conversation for another day.

Dan Lebertart and Troy Hinkman. Mr. Lebitart has discovered that Mr. Aitman has a certain verbal tick on Monday night football. Here is Lebitard telling us what that is. This is what Troy Aikman said. The Denver roster is as deep as any in football. Reed understands as much as anyone in football that they've got to run the football. Pat Bryant had as good a camp as anyone in football.

Denver has as deep a wide receiver room as anyone in football. Denver has as good as secondary as there is in all of football. Trent McDuffie is as good as anyone in all of football. That was the first quarter. All right, Isaiah, I think that's probably fine. It goes on and on from there. So that's a really funny tick. As good as anyone in football is from the announcer basket of cliches.

I have an explanation for this. Slightly contrarian. Yeah. Here goes. Social media is in all these announcer's heads. Yeah. Remember the 2018 Super Bowl Patriots versus Eagles? Where Chris Collinsworth said a few things during the broadcast that were not absolutely worshipful of the victorious Eagles.

And he just got dunked. Oh, yeah. Okay. I see where you're going. I've talked to announcers about this. That kind of reaction is absolutely in their heads. Yeah. And I think what happens is.

They go out of their way to praise and they go out of their way to overpraise. So if you're going to be critical in the broadcast, you have at least tossed a bone to the fan bases and said, hey, your wide receiver room, best in football. now I can criticize the receivers themselves or the offense. Right? Like Chris Collinsworth, he is a different guy than he was a couple of years ago. Yes. In the way he praises people. I still think he does an excellent job.

He absolutely shredded the Cowboys secondary the other night when they were running, and the Giants were running the same play over and over again. But if you listen to the way he praises, it's much more enthusiastic. It sounds like Dan Lebitard quoting Troy Aikman and I believe that comes to some extent from social media. I think the way the announcers

You must be right. I mean, the line specifically just sounds more workshopped than Pete Higgs says the answer to the Norodontal question. You know, I mean, it just feels like like obviously the best film the blank as good of film the blank as there is in football

is a sentence with a meaning, but it is a pretty vacuous way of saying that thing, right? And it is just sort of thing, like, I'm sure he would have no trouble saying that 20 of the NFL teams have as good as secondary as any team in football, right? They can't all be right. Right, but you would say it confidently, right? Because it's not like you're really not going on the record with stats

or numbers or, like, comparing them specifically to another team or even saying where they exist in the hierarchy. It's about as vague as a just effusive, compliment can get, or at least conversational. But yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You have to be, it's like you have to do your due diligence. You have to pay your compliments so that then you can like earn the opportunity to save truths almost. Last thing for you.

We talked a couple of weeks ago about a certain phrase that pops out of my mouth at your mouth. Whenever there's a big interception on our television screen. Yeah. Well, Dominic Foxworth, who has been linked to the press box, was on GetUp on Tuesday. Didn't you pay for his wedding reception? I don't remember. No. He would have had to pay for mine.

Let's put it that way. Dom Foxworth was on Get Up. They were doing a highlight package of that Chiefs Broncos game that Troy Aitman commented on. You remember that game started with an interception. Boenicks doing an I-N-T. want you to listen to Foxworth recounting that highlight. Bonix also coming off injury with a fractured aimful. First drive of the game, Dominique, Mansoor Delane, welcome to the NFL.

That's a nice way to start your career for a young corner like Man So Delane. Get your hands on the ball and give it back to your offense. Pickles! Oh, the falsetto out of nowhere is really what does it. I know it's hard. You just got to, it just has to be in the, it's so good. It's so good. Pickles.

He did a great job, too. as falsetto was right on point. And again, the legacy of Troy Smith and Teddy Yin continues on GetUp. By the way, just start saying that at home. Trust me, you will say that after every single interception. Your team, the opposing team, it doesn't matter. It makes it more fun. It just sounded very natural on Get Up.

Pickles. All right, coming up in 30 seconds, David, Logan Burdock, Howard Beck, the NBA. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same times, and your nominees at the Pressbox pod were there, always, always gratefully received. J.D.

Vance has been out there over the last few days. Doing some interviews, making some statements. He was talking about AI. A big issue. In the election, a big issue in our world, here is J.D. Vance, with his advice to companies dabbling in AI.

What I would say to those people, if you're building Frankenstein, stop. It was an overworked Twitter joke, David, to write, actually it's if you're building the monster. Stop. That's good. Thanks to our friend Chris Sullen Trump. If that 11th grade distinction never ceases to be funny,

congrats, you made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, here is our special interview. All right, we are delighted to be joined today by the ringer's best pick and roll combination. On loan from real ones. It's two of our very, very good friends. Howard Beck, Logan Murdoch. Welcome back to the press box.

Thanks for having us. This is awesome. This is really cool, man. Every time I come on the press box is really a dope experience, but the fact that I get to do with my man ears tight. You guys are in L.A. So we thought we'd do a pre-season NBA media roundtable.

This conversation is sponsored by Press Box. It's sponsored by the professional basketball writer. Association. Thank you. And by the firm of Wachtel Liptin. Just FYI. Let's start there. Steve Bomer announced this weekend that he's going to accept the NBA's penalties. The Kauai Leonard trade finally went through. Howard, any lingering thoughts about the Clipper story? I still wonder a little bit whether this is truly over, because Pablo's not stopping anytime soon. Wachtel Lpton now can close the books. Like the NBA left it open, walked out of it and left it open, like, if any other material information,

witnesses happen to come our way, we might revisit this, right? But once Balmer has stood down, I think the league probably is like, all right, we're good. And he'll go serve his suspension. They'll move on. We'll see what becomes of the clippers in the next year to five to ten years. But I think this is pretty much over, except that, and I'm serious about this, I'm not being that glib. Pablo's not going to stop. If anything else comes his way and his crew's way, and there are other things to ferret out, that it's going to, that will happen. And so I'm not sure that we've heard the last of this.

What do you think, Logan? I mean, I think the biggest thing that we've seen, just not only from the Clippers situation, but ownership in general and how fickle it is at this particular point in NBA history, right? You see what happened with the Lakers. You're seeing kind of what the rumors that are percolating down in Phoenix with Matt Isbia, we're getting to this point. And one thing that I thought throughout this thing with Bomber and him maybe being ousted, say, I think we were talking about this in the, um, yesterday when we

were doing shows, like, if there was an option for bomber to sell the team, right? And if bomber sells the team, who is the other guy, if one of the punishments, excuse me, was for bomber to sell the team, what other guys or what other person or what other entities can buy this team at the price that is so inflated. And is that also going to be a kiss of death as well? I think that's just the biggest thing that we are seeing right now. I know we're going to talk about this a lot during this episode, which is just where the NBA is. And I thought that this summer, from a financial standpoint and from, you know, what's the word that we call it? Just from a circumvention standpoint and all these things, it just showed how fickle the NBA can be if the wrong things happened.

a point in time. Howard, why do you think this story hit so hard? You know, it's interesting. Did the story hit hard with us in the media and especially NBA media with just hardcore sports fans who maybe care about things like salary cap. Like a salary cap is a pretty arcane thing. And especially the longer, the deeper we go in these leagues, the more arcane it becomes because collective bargaining agreements are like the tax code. Nothing ever gets eliminated. They just keep adding until it gets like this high. And so it's almost like the apron. Well, that's the thing. We have an apron. Oh, no, no, we need a second apron. Like, by 10 years from now, we're going to have like 15 aprons. It's so arcane. It's so impenetrable. But we know that in principle, this is how a league works, right? If a league has a cap, right? NFL, NBA, NHL. This is an agreed upon set of rules for these in the NBA 30 owners who are competitors, but also business partners. And I think to the extent that, and again, I don't know how much this is us in media. versus the fans, how many, like, the average fans care about cap circumvention, even that phrase.

But it matters because it is fundamentally about the fairness of competition in sports. We have all agreed on a set of rules. And just like your guy can't get 10 fouls while my guy only gets five, you can't, you know, give guys under the table money if I am hamstrung by the salary cap. And so once they're starting to break the rules and they're compact with each other, doesn't matter that it's billionaires versus billionaires. It doesn't matter that we may not understand all this. What we do to understand is that this is about fundamental fairness of competition, and these are the rules that everybody agreed upon when they bought the teams and when they signed the various CBAs over the last several decades. If you break that, then what do you have? What is

this league? It's wrestling. Yeah. But this is why Adam Silver, I think, almost had no choice. As long as Wachtell Lipton found enough, and they certainly did, you had to do this. You had to have a severe punishment because the credibility of your league and even amongst your owners and their trust in each other is at stake. So what you're talking about is the most basic feelings of sports fans. Our team is being treated differently than that other team that we're competing with and that we get our dander up. I mean, that's an interesting theory. The other one I've heard is it's rich guy comeuppance. And at this point in American history, rich guy comeuppance is not, you know, that common. There are some people that are getting away with it. Oh, yes. So

even if it's just salary cap circumvention. I mean, what's interesting to me about this is like the clippers were not taking money from Kauai Leonard. They were not stealing money from a player. They were accused of funneling money or finding ways for that player to earn more than he should have owned.

So, you know, and I know we're very like second apron coated here at the ringer. Like we are very interested in salary cap economics. But at the end of the day, that's what this story is about. Right? It's about salary cap economics. And that, it surprises me that it has hit us just like a movie.

I think, I mean, I think we should give credit to Pablo in this instance that he made every one of those episodes an event. He inventized all of it, right? From his personality to the way that he presented the show. And I think that that has a lot to do with that, right? And how this was eventized in every single way. Anytime there was news that was coming up about the Clippers, you would see a video of Pablo on the street somewhere saying, hey, I have something else that I need to share with me, right? And it was eventized in that way. And I think that that in a way that Pablo did eventize every one of his reporting or every bits of his reporting, I think it showed two things.

One, usually when someone is reporting out something, it's either on the newspaper or it is on some sort of written publication. You can just let it breathe and let the public see and try to make their narrative of what happened. In this case, you saw a man on the street and you saw an eventized part. of this thing where normally when writers do this or writers have an investigation it's usually throw it out the people decide this was i think it showed that there was a maybe where media is going there i say or at the very least where um i think it was pretty unprecedented to see a person like pablo be involved be his him reporting it out the way he reported it out be just as big as the findings that he had and i think that was that that was something that really called

help my eye as this was going on because you're not really used to seeing that dichotomy. The reporter is a character in the story. Yeah. And also is kind of the hero of the story. And then as the way it went along, oh, Pablo's got something. Oh, maybe he's got a little more. He's got a little more. Get him a little more. We get to the

three quarter mark and so, oh, wait a second. Was Pablo wrong? Was something wrong here? And then, oh, no, no, no. He was actually right. I mean, it almost had this movie style art. It's like if Maggie Haberman, every time she dropped something on Trump, she just one on TV and event ties that as opposed to just basically regurghing, fading the story that she wrote in New York Times.

And by the way, the Near Times, your old home is now trying to do that because whenever their reporter has a big scoop, you go to the homepage, and you see the reporter sitting down. Yeah. I'm going to sit down, and then I'm going to look at the camera and tell you just what I got. Yeah. And look, there's a showmanship to Pablo's presentation that is really important and really effective in all this, right?

If this had just been an old, if this had been like a 60 Minutes style version of this, the information that he and his team got would have been just as important and as impactful, but it wouldn't have, I think, hit people as hard or been as interesting or as much of a, you know, the buzz factor. It's the way he unfolds the story. It's the way he presents it. And again, like that showmanship matters. Like, it is part of the sales job of it. And I think traditional journalism, you mentioned my old, my old employer at the times, like, we're, you know, it's very much, you know, buttoned up kind of, here's the information reader. You do with it what you will. We're not necessarily going to try to draw you to a conclusion.

And we're not going to, you know, try to put about a bunch of bells and whistles or add that showmanship that's going to make you more interested based on the way I give it to you. We're just going to give you the information, 60 minutes, nightline back in the day, whatever. That is how it was presented. Pablo has done something different here that I think has really, you know, caught the audience in a way that I think is worth noting. It's effective in a much different way. The information is still there, and if the information's not good and solid and in depth, none of them, the showmanship matters.

But the presentation, I think, really mattered in this particular story in the way it unfolded every chapter of it. And bring more specificity to what he said. I don't even know if that's the word. You know how I. Yes, it is. Okay, good. You did a good job there.

But no, just to add on to what he said, whenever there was an episode from Pablo, it was always like a slow drip, right? It was always, hey, if you come back, we actually have more stuff. It felt like sometimes they were holding back information to put out for the next episode. And I think that that also played a part because he was like, what is Pablo and his team going to come up with next? What is going to do that? And it was also just such an interesting story because of the character of Kauai, right? I mean, he was a guy that.

Or non-character. Or non-character. Or, you know, him being a non-character actually weirdly makes him a character in this story arc, right? but he had all the, when Sam Mamick put out a piece in 2019 talking about Uncle Dennis and the slow drip of that, right? There was always this, what's going on with him? What's going on with him? And that's, I think, made it even more intriguing that it had to do with somebody like Kauai

who, you know, by design or whatever you want to call it, we don't know much about. So to have the intrigue of what's going on with this guy. We see, you know, documents with his company. We see all of these things. I think that that also played a role into it. too. And then also you have the characters of Steve Palmer in L.A. and all of the scandal that goes on in the city. I think that all played a part and it was a perfect storm of a lot of different things. Not for nothing. Just quick add to that because with Logan mentioning 2019, so 2019 is when

they actually signed Kauai and traded for Paul George, right? There's a huge moment in Clipper history. You know, I covered the Lakers for seven years, right? And the Clippers during that time, the Donald Sterling era still, the entire of the Donald Sterling era, the Clippers never chased star free agents. They squandered the greatest asset you could have in this league. You are in L.A. Right? The Lakers, sure, they have a lot of history to lean on and there's a, you know, the glitz and the glamour of the Lakers that draws in a LeBron or whatever. But also you have the city of L.A. Well, the Clippers are in L.A. too. They don't have the banners, but you're in L.A. How do you not leverage that? They never did in the entirety of the Donald Sterling era.

In addition to him being a reprehensible human being, he was a cheap skate and didn't actually give a shit about what was going on in the court. For the first time in history, the clippers got two of the top, whatever they were at that time. Kauai's a top five player at that time, Paul George's top 15, top 20. That is a huge moment. So when years later, it's like, and even again, at the time, there were rumblings at the time, and there were reports at the time, which have been forgotten and should not be forgotten because Sam Amick and others did great work, that maybe there was something else going on

to find out after the fact, oh, when the clippers got Paul George and Kaui Leonard, it's not just because they both are SoCal natives who wanted to come home and play in L.A., but not for the Lakers. well the clippers might have been doing something else here to get kawai to agree to this and to keep him happy for the duration of his time here like that matters too in all this because the clippers were not the destination for the you know first 35 40 years or whatever the resistance all of their history yes come back to pablo's showmanship for a second because i think that's really interesting at one level we talk about you know it's a podcast it's serialized it's a

different form than maybe we're used to but at a very basic level it's just what reporters do. Like, you guys, if you had a big story in the newspaper, you guys wrote for newspapers, and I took you out to a bar that night, the thing you'd say to me is, oh, man, there's a lot more here. There's a lot more I couldn't get in this story. Keep reading.

There's more here. That's what he's doing. Right, but that's also a slippery slope, right? Because when we're talking at a bar at the end of the day, there is stuff that can, and I'm not, I want to say this, this is not a shot at Pablo or anything, but I'm just saying in terms of what you presented just now, when you are at the bar,

there's no editors there, right? There's nothing that can actually make your, it's all speculation at that point because you can't actually verify that information. So, like, that's the slippery slope that I think about with podcasts, and when you do do it in a forum like that, is that, you know, human nature,

we talk about this all the time when we do podcasts for real ones. It's like, oh, wait, I said that, ah, that's not the way I actually wanted to say that. Right, or it's, I heard this thing, and I didn't mean it to be, quote, report, colon. I just said I heard it because it was like gossip. And on a podcast, we get relaxed and we start talking about the things we heard.

And that's not the same as what your editor at a newspaper would have demanded to back up the thing if you were putting it in print. Totally. I think that like when you do have that, there's a slippery slope. And there's a slippery slope that you can say the wrong thing that you weren't intending to say. And it actually can have real ramifications for not only you as a reporter, but also the publication that you work on. I totally hear that. But there is absolutely no downside to say more coming soon on this. Sure.

Whether it ever arrives or not. And I also think what's different about this is Pablo's podcasts are not written down. When the New York Times report comes out, when the ESPN report comes down, that is a textual report that we can all look at, that we can all pick apart, that we can go revisit. Do you think anybody went back and listened to 15 hours of the Pablo podcast about Kauai? Walk-Tel Lipton did. Well, walk-tell Lipton, yes, there's one. But when we were all, and by the way, I include myself in this, when we were all putting the crown on him at the end, we're thinking about this in a totality and directional. right here's where he went he was pointing us

at this he was looking at this and going this doesn't feel right this doesn't make any sense the whole aspiration thing is very strange look at these numbers and how they match up again not taking a shot at him but it's not written down and I just think that's a very very different product I think we're all kind of wrapping our heads around that

you know it makes me think about the reporting in a New York Times centered around Trump's taxes right and when his tax returns and when the Times wrote that and it was in a written form there seem to be like a finality to that, right? And when you do it in this format of podcasting, like you said, like it's going to be hard

to listen to 15 straight podcasts. But if you have all those words down and it seems like to be like a more of a finale to what this story is, there can be more to come. But at least right now I can go back and just cross-reference and as opposed to like going on a, what we do as journalists sometimes. Maybe not him. I'm a little bit more new age where you put your sound in it and you get the transcript. maybe you can do that for a publicatory podcast or wherever that podcast stretch is going,

but there's still a finality to the written word that I think is a lot more of an effective medium than doing it on podcasts. And I say that as a podcaster who goes through the struggle of after a podcast, like, I say that right. Or I was also gotten aggregated for saying stuff that it was like, even I listened back to it, like, damn, did I say that right? But I'm also just talking to my homies or I'm talking to our co-host. And so I think that, you know, the Pablo stuff was really, really effective.

But I think in a weird way, it showed that the effectiveness of what the written word is. Yeah, I think unfortunately what it showed is that this forum, this medium, is more effective for today's audience. If Pablo had gotten all the same information and he were still working at either probably not like ESPN, but like Sports Illustrated before that, right? And it was going to be like, listen, I'm going to spend eight months on this, and we're going to have like a 5,000 word story that's going to be the cover Sports Illustrated. And the headline is like, cap circumvention. Like, who's reading that? By the way, bad headline. Terrible headline.

I never claimed to be a headline writer. But again, back to the word arcane. Like, it's such an arcane thing. So if it's a, if it's purely a written form, this is a different era, pre-podcasting era. And he's just doing, and Pablo was a fantastic journalist long before he had. had this show, right? His cover stories on Jeremy Lynn for SI back in the day were fantastic. So if he's doing it in that format, it is going to read much differently, it's going to present much differently, and also you're counting on an audience to actually read the 5,000

words or whatever it is. Like, how many words did he say? If we had to count it, how many words did he say? And what would that have translated to in written form? And with today's audience being kind of less patient, it is easier to reach people via this medium, whether audio or video or both. And again, the way he presented it matters, the slow tease, the, hey, open that envelope in front of you and tell me what's in there. It was brilliantly done. It was theatrically done, but it is also more effective, I think, in today's market than that, you know, 5,000-word story might have been. Whenever we have a big, successful piece of investigative journalism. Everybody says, why don't we have more big successful pieces of investigative

journalism? Why don't we in sports? Boy, how long can I rant on this podcast? This has been asked a lot and it's been discussed a lot and it's been written about and commented on a lot over the course of the last 12 months and especially since Wachtel-Lipton rendered and the NBA rendered its judgment. And there's been a lot of, you know, I've seen pieces in various places and I'm not going to call out various names, but where it's like, NBA writers missed this. Why weren't NBA writers on this? Why weren't other people doing this? And so if you want, anybody wants to blame me for being a little defensive on behalf of NBA writers because I've been doing this for 30 years and because I'm president of the PBWA, thanks for the shoutout. Blame, blame that on that

if you want to. But I'll just say, this is not about what writers did or did not do. For sure, other people should have been in on this story. By the way, Mike Vorkenov at the Athletic and some my other friends there did advance this story along the way. A lot of that's been kind of like forgotten or passed over. It's not that no one did anything. But to the extent, Brian, that there is not enough of this, and I'll say on this story specifically, right, we could say about a number of things. It's because of our ecosystem's broken. The media is broken right now, period. Sports media, all media, especially sports media for our purposes. You know, the Washington Post no longer has a sports section.

The New York Times no longer has a sports section. It has the athletic, but there's a difference there. We don't need to go down that rabbit hole. The LA Times, the market that we're sitting in right now, when I was working out here 20-something years ago, the LA Times had a massive sports section, huge staff, enterprise reporters, investigative reporters, feature writers, in addition to the beat writers covering the Lakers and the clippers and the Dodgers

and everything else. It's a shell of itself now. All due respect to the people who were there, but there's just, it's a tiny staff in comparison. Not a single entity in this market covers the Clippers full-time. And by full-time, I mean home and road. They are covered at home, and even then, not that much. Just ask the Clippers.

It's kind of a sore point with them. Who else was going to do this story? And then once Pablo breaks it, and we're like, where's everybody else? That's not on the writers. The writers who are covering the NBA are covering games. They're writing features. They're doing analysis. They're doing X and O breakdowns.

If they're a beatwriter, they're traveling to 41 road games and doing 41 home games, they don't have the time or the resources or the energy to be able to do this also. Pablo's team, and it is a team, did a phenomenal job. But I think Pablo said on that first report, it was like eight or nine months of investigation, and that was for the first one. And then it was several months of investigation after that with a team of reporters devoted to that, who are not writing about basketball, who do not have to write the feature stories and the X&O analysis, or traveling. It's just fundamentally different. It's a different thing. And so to answer your question

in a shorter version, what I wish is that more outlets still had investigative teams to dedicate to something like this. 25, 30 years ago, all those other entities, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, would have all jumped in on this. And they would have been beating each other over the heads trying to like get their, claw their way to the information to advance the story. But that isn't the ecosystem we're in now. And those investigative jobs don't exist. And so who else was going to chase this? As I asked that, there are answers that people might be throwing out in their heads, and I'm not going to go down that road. But like, there are, but nobody else is, is equipped for the most part to chase this. And so to me,

if you, I agree with the general criticism that more places should have been invested in this story and in advancing this story. But that is, that is a problem with employers and with media outlets, not a problem with the writers who are actually doing this. So, yes, I'm a defensive on behalf of the MBA writers because we have other things we have to do that my colleagues have to do on a day-to-day basis to keep the machine running, to keep the churn going, because that's what gets websites their traffic and generates the revenue and everything else. If editors and publishers thought we could make better money by just having you write once every seven months and do nothing but investigations, well, then that would exist, but it doesn't. There are only so many pro-publicas. you know, Wired is the outlet that did

all the stuff about James Dolan and the Garden's facial recognition and harassment of some of its fans and all that using that. Yeah, Nick's beatwriters can't do that. And it's not because of worrying about access. It's because they have to go cover the games. It's a different job. So if the question is, where the hell

were you guys? That's a question that should be not directed at reporters, but at their bosses or the owners of the media outlets. Yeah. As I said to somebody, this is not the greatest analogy. I won't put this on my analogy Hall of Fame list. But as I said to somebody

who I was having a spirited email exchange with about this recently, you're blaming the cashier at McDonald's for shitty burgers. Like, the cashier's just taking your order, man. Like, their boss is like, they don't have anything to do with who ordered the beef.

Like, they're just doing their job and their job is to ring you up at that moment. It's a terrible analogy, but it's what I guess. It's funny. It does explain sports writing in 2026. We are all McDonald's cashiers to one, 10 or another. A few weeks ago, Joel and I made a list of who wields media power in college

football. Can we make a similar list for the NBA here? Let me tick off some names and you tell me what kind of power they wield. Let's start with the TV partners. ESPN, first and foremost, NBC and Amazon. I think the TV partners, they hold power in the sense that they can control the league's messaging for it. Right. I mean, and you kind of saw that. That's the criticism that you're getting from ESPN right now on the triple by line on the Clippers, right? Where it seems like if you read that piece that it is the Clippers ghostroated, basically is what the criticism is, right? And that's what the fear is when you are with a league partner or a league partner is

reporting something. And that says it's with the NBA. It's with the NFL. I'm sure you guys have covered that for a long time. But I think that's what a TV partner wields is the ability to, one, sanitize the message and then also kind of push the message to a will. Now, there's something that can backfire on that, which is what happened with ESPN a couple of weeks ago.

But I think that that's what the power lies in on a television partner, is that they can help because of the money that they spend, they can wield the power of helping control the leads message. Yeah, and I would also say, too, I'll never forget during COVID, for instance, and it was a different set of media partners to some extent at that time. ESPN was still there, but Turner was there at that time. time. When Adam Silver wanted to do a state of the union, actually still to this day, right,

he goes on Pat McAfee. And back then he was going on ESPN and Turner. He was going to what I would call basically the friendly audience. And that's not, I'm not criticizing anything that those outlets do, but Adam sought out the network partners. He was not seeking us out as the beat writers or as the general NBA written media. He was going to the TV partners to say, here's what we're doing and, you know, hit me with questions for 10 minutes, and then that's it. He wasn't doing press conferences. McAvey is such a fascinating part of that because it's become a Goodell go-to, an Adam Silver go-to, Elaine Kiffin go-to, kind of where you go-to,

kind of where you go park and get the message out midday on ESPN. It feeds lots of headlines, lots of clips on social media. Fascinating. How about Shams within ESPN? Does he have the power to, like, set our daily agenda by scoops? Is he, like, populating podcast rundowns? What's the nature of his power? I think his power is just the extension of what I just said of working for a TV partner, right?

You can help make the message of what you wanted to be. And it's not even just teams. It's specific players. It's specific entities. Or, you know, like, it gives you the opportunity to do a press release through a journalist. I think that that's what the, that is the appeal of not even just, it's not even just shams by name. It is what the new insider is in general. That's what the new insider is able to give you.

It is able to give you someone that can, you know, maybe the punch doesn't land as hard as it can against you if you just leak it here, a little bit out of context, not having, you know, the full story there, but just maybe your side of this way. And you're saying because he's in the seat of ESPN now, because he's the lead NBA insider DSPN. The ESPN is the big company and the rights holder, et cetera.

What about Inside the NBA at ESPN? What role do they play now as, you know, beyond just being wildly entertaining and fun and a pregame show that we actually want to watch? Yeah, and a halftime and a post game and everything else that we want to watch. Mostly a post game, too, right? That's a half time is fun though, too, especially when a team plays like crap in the first half. Yeah, I guess I want to make a slight distinction between, like, power and influence. I guess those can be interchangeable, but like does Inside the NBA still very much influence?

the discussion. Yeah, we are all, even if you missed the show, the next day, one of the aggregators or several of them are clipping it. You're going to know what Chuck said the night before. And that is not the case for any of the other shows for the most part. I love what Amazon's doing. Like, their studio show has been fantastic. You know, Blake Griffin is a star from day one. Steve Nash, the rest of that crew there, like I think they've done a fantastic job. but when it comes to which show are you talking about the next day or that maybe not necessarily setting the discourse but maybe framing it a little bit

or giving everybody else something to play off of that is still inside the NBA more than the others. It's weird because it seems like the NBA right now is trying to shut inside the NBA down or like it was a concerted effort to do that once the new year rights deal came and it feels like this is going to be their last season and I think that because... Beware of Charles Buckley retirements.

Beware. It's been going on for more than a decade. He wouldn't lie to Bill. No, no. No. But the more of the thing that I was going to ask or was going to say, excuse me, is that what he just said is really important for the league that they cover, right? Or the league that inside the NBA covers. Because what you want is you want a studio show that has the hold of the zeitgeist in a way that inside does. And if you take that away, it's not easily replicable. It's not at all. And a life, I think the NBA is doing a disservice both. to his fan base and its league by pushing that post game and pregame and inside a whole apparatus out of the door. And it's going to be a new world if that doesn't happen. And I think it's going to be a word that they're going to necessarily enjoy it. Well, it couldn't last forever,

right? Even if Turner had not screwed up the negotiations, sure. Eventually it was going to go away. Someday Chuck was going to actually retire and Ernie. They didn't have to go out this way, right? Like it should have gone out a lot more celebratory. Like this is a, this is a, a, a, uh, studios show that helped build your league throughout the 90s, right? It gave your league a lot more cachet. And just because of some people on the internet talking about how bad it is or how they don't like it, and that doesn't mean that you get rid of something like that so fast, especially when you don't have a proof of concept of what's coming in on the back end

with these new TV partners. I think about this a lot because people will often say to me, you know, why do the announcers today seem so much smaller than they did back in the 90s? or the 80s and beyond? Why did Bob Costas seem so big compared to whoever has Bob Costas' job now? And I say some of those guys were fantastic, Costas included.

Some of that is because the media world was different. And certain entities, including Insight, are grandfathered in because they were not only excellent, but they started in a different time. When cable TV was the cutting edge, when you didn't have other options on weeknights to just watch in the NBA

or hear people talking about the NBA. And to your point, if you get rid of that, there's no guarantee that you can recreate that. Even if you had the best possible NBA studio show, whatever that was, that was magical and wonderful, and we've seen ESPN try a number of times and fail to actually create one. But even if you were able to do it, I don't know that you could get the zeitgeist back. I don't know that that's entirely possible. You can do something like Amazon's really good.

There are people talking about what was on Amazon the next day in the same way? Of course they're not. They can't. It would never happen. So I just think the danger is you flip the switch and say, ha, we need younger people. We need people that don't complain as much as Chuck does. And then what you wind up with is something that's just never going to be a, it never going to grab us by the shirt collar the way those kind of shows that. I mean, I think it's often, you know, it's a mistake for us to say, like, why can't you just recreate what inside the MBA had, right?

Well, there's only one Charles Barkley. And there's only one Ernie Johnson for that matter. And no disrespect to Shaq and Kenny. They're also important in all this. But it's the collective chemistry of them. that makes this thing really pop, but also, like, Chuck is the secret sauce, right? Like, without Chuck, do we, does it have the same, you know, position in, in, in our world? No.

Easy answer. Right. So, like, again, like, like, Griffin's great. Steve Nash, you know, John Wall, you know, Taylor Rooks has done a great job hosting that show. Like, it's, I think they've, they do have great chemistry. They do have fun discussions. And they are, I think, finding the right balance between having fun, but giving analysis of the game, too. And it's cool to have, and I think they can grow into the Zykeyes show.

I do think that. But what's the problem with having two, Zykeyes defining shows, right? The NFL does that all the time with its studio shows. And, like, there's something that is competing with each other. And then another thing that I do want to add to that is, I think it's bad practice, too, to, like, do your legends in that way, right? When you have, like, a legend, a TV legend, like a Charles Barclay or Ernie Johnson, a Shaquille O'Neill that are walking monuments.

And then all of a sudden, you're like, no, we're fine. We're cool on that. I just think that's bad brackets. Yeah, their connections to the past. You don't want to whisk him away because there's some, there's some, you know, NBA viewers are like, hey, wait, you know, that was my favorite time of the NBA. And when he walked away, suddenly the league didn't seem the same to me. You guys have both starred in our Tales from the Locker Room feature here on the press box, since you guys were legit beatwriters for the Knicks and Lakers, for lawyers. What's the point of beatwriting in 2026?

Wow. There's another three-hour potential discussion that I'll have to curtail for purposes of this show. What is the purpose of it? You still need the frontline information, right? Let's be specific. What do you need after a game? All right, so the Beat writer is still the person who's going to every shoot-around practice, pre-game, post-game. And if you don't have somebody with that repeated contact, there's a couple things. One, there's less information coming out, right? If you just relied on the teams and the players themselves, you're not getting any of this. And even the Shams character, who's going to get the bulky knee, at least for certain superstars. Sure.

Okay. So let's parse that out for a second here, right? So Shams is going to get like 90-something percent of the scoops, right? Including injury reports and trades when they happen, signings, coach hirings and firings. Fine. The beatwriters, once upon a time in a more democratized environment back when I was a beat writer, the beat writers would probably be the first one to tell you, oh, yeah, yeah, this knee is actually going to require season-ending surgery,

or this coach is getting fired tomorrow. That used to be the domain of beat riders, and now it is pretty much all going to one person. But he can't be in 30 markets, and he can't be in front of every coach and every player before every gamer at their practices, and he's not at any of those for the most part. That's not his job, and that's not a critique.

That is simply we have very specific jobs now. The beat writer needs to be there to ask the question about, coach why did you make the substitution with two minutes left in the game? You know, why did you run this particular play? Why did this play not work? Somebody has to be there for all of that, and that's the beat riders. The folks working for the team, they all have their own media arms. They're not asking the tough questions or any real good questions at all.

The beat writer needs to be there for that. But also, it's the rapport that you build up, that Logan was able to build up with Steph and Draymond, Clay, and the gang with the Warriors that I had with Shaq and Kobe in that era or the Knicks era that I covered of many, many different faces and characters. And you get a better feel for them than the person watching at home or the reporter who was doing overview stuff, right? Like, I don't, I'm not a beat writer anymore. Like, I'm covering the game and the league from a national perspective. I don't have the same rapport with a bunch of players specifically for one team that I did when I was covering a team.

The people who do that and do that at the highest level, like, you know, John Krasinski with the Timberwolves, right? you know that if you need to insight into the Timberwolves, not who they just signed, not just who getting the transaction first, but real insight into how they operate or what make Anthony Edwards tick. John Crosinski's there every fucking day talking to Anthony Edwards, every day of the season, more or less, give or take. That's the, that's the authority on Anthony Edwards. And that's the authority on Rudy Gobert. That's the authority on Tim Connolly and why he's deciding to trade Nas Reid to get Lamello Ball. Beat writing still matters because that's where you get the most insight. Can we talk just a minute, though, about the misery of doing

that job, okay? I know everything it is about the team. I go to every practice. I got this on lockdown. Okay, game's over. Coach made a bad decision. Player took an ill-advised shot. I'm going to go up to the locker. I'm going to ask them. I'm going to ask them. I'm going to ask a tough question. That dude from thunder.com is not going to ask him. No, no offense to whoever that person is. They give the answer. I did my job. It pops up on Twitter, and everybody goes, great, I got the answer. I don't need to pay you. I don't need to pay you or your media entity one cent because I just got it for free. And we know that if you don't pay that person's institution, we just found out that one McClatchie this week. The institution goes away or the beatwriter

doesn't have a job anymore. So what would you do? I mean, that's the question to me that's so interesting. Like, if you're doing it now, are you writing gamers? Are you writing notebooks? Are you tweeting out cool videos from the locker room after the game? Like, what would you do? I think about that all the time, right? Especially because I'm closer to this generation that has to deal with that. Right. And I don't have a great answer for you.

And I don't think anyone has a great answer for you because there's two things involved. One, you want to write the best story for the publication that you're writing for, right? But there's a paywall. You don't know who's going to see it. You don't know if it's going to hit. So what do you do? You go to the TikToks. You go to the Twitter.

You go to the Instagrams. but those don't pay the company that you're actually working for. So it does great for your personal branding for other places that are dealing with the same issues that we just talked about with McClatchie. But it's kind of just this churn. And we have it. I always talked about this when, you know, I think it was when I first got into the beat, when I was at the San Jose Mercury News.

The frustrations that I had when I was on that beat, one of it was that these newspapers need to stop. looking at themselves as newspapers from a business side. I didn't start looking at themselves as digital media companies. They should have did that maybe 20 years ago and they wouldn't be in the situation that they're in the day, right? But that is the gap that we are seeing right now where newspapers are still thinking themselves as newspapers other than like the New York Times who thinks of itself as a big media company. And then you have the Instagrams and the social media. There's this gap between both of those and the newspapers are now suffering

because of that. I just, I mean, we're in this place now, and you nodded at it earlier. They're not going to send you on the road for 82 games. So the thing that you can theoretically provide, which is that you're there all the time, that you never miss a thing. Now your publication is saying,

eh, you know, can you do home games and pick a few road trips? We'll put you back on the road in the playoffs. We've still got a paywall that nobody under the age of 30 wants to deal with. They're just like, I'll get it from social media. I'll figure it out. somebody will post it on Reddit if there's a really good investigative story.

I mean, I just don't know what to do because I agree with everything you said about the importance of it. I co-sign off. How that is going to work in the current media environment, I don't know. I mean, what we really need is a time machine. Yes. To send us back to the early parts of the internet era to scream at all these publishers. Do not give away your content for free. you will never be able to reverse this

because that was the mistake, the original sin of newspapers and other print outlets, was, oh, well, everything's online. We need to be there too. Well, how do we do? They're not going to read our stuff. We better just put it on there for free. And so that was the big mistake.

And even, you know, the New York Times, it was like 10 years later that they finally built the paywall and they made it a poorest paywall. The Times is this now great success story of getting people to pay for something that they were already getting for free and now we're being asked to pay for or pay for different levels of, right?

Napster, we thought the whole music business was going to collapse with Napster. And then the iTunes store came along and then Spotify, our corporate overlords came along. And got people to pay for music after it looked like for a while there, oh no, like it's already gone. Like you can't reverse this. Everybody wants their music for free. Remember that we had this stupid, stupid expression that took hold in the late 90s, early 2000. of information wants to be free or something like that? No, because then there's nothing to pay the people to give you that information.

So it's 25 years later and we still haven't fixed the ecosystem. The Times figured it out. Spotify figured it out. Like various entities that produce content or deliberate figured it out. But the ecosystem remains irreparably broken. And I don't know how we get that back. One other quick reference point here. The Athletic at its peak had a beat writer for every NBA team.

were 30 beat riders and they were all traveling full time. And then one by one, they started pulling out of certain markets. As of right now, and I don't quote me on the exact number, but I believe it's right around like 14 now. So less than half or right around half of the NBA teams are being covered full time. Now they have some reporters who are like national or regional and are like responsible for certain teams. But in terms of doing all 82, I'm sure my friends of the athletic will correct me if I got this wrong. But in terms of covering all 82, I believe there's like about 14 teams that are being covered. And that is with, a paywall model that is now, of course, under the umbrella of the New York Times, too.

And as you pointed out earlier, there are NBA franchises that do not have anybody on the road with them full-time. The Sacramento B just killed its sports section. Thank you, McClatchy. The athletic was already, had already discontinued their King's coverage as a full-time matter. I don't know who's traveling with the Sacramento Kings, if anybody. Like, I'm in New York, and so I see everybody as they come through. I go to more Nets games than NICs games because it's closer.

It's in my backyard. And I'm always monitoring who's coming in. And like the Hornets will come in. There'll be no reporters from Charlotte half the time. The Pacers will come in, and there may not be an Indianapolis-based reporter. It's really troubling because back in the day, like, that was automatic. There was at least one person from every market and sometimes multiple. And it's not only troubling for the newspaper industry.

I think ultimately it's troubling for the teams that are trying to get coverage as well, right? Because when we talk about the god Jeff Prisinski, he writes in such a way where you get these anecdotes that you won't get anywhere else. does that do? That adds to the mythology of the team. That adds to the interest level of the team. That adds to so many different things that we can have reference points for fans to root for said team. And then when a team like the end of the pastures who are going to be a really, really interesting team this season, you don't really know anything about them. That goes back to what we talked about a couple of years ago with the NBA has a storytelling problem. Well, part of that storytelling

problem is the newspaper apparatus is dying. And the way that, you know, fans consume and keep up with their team. That is dying. And it's going to hurt not only a newspaper business, but also sports in general. There's no bigger way to get me down than to talk about this stuff, because I just don't see a way out of it. And I am increasingly worried that not only are we not able to pay for this, at least widespread, you know, across the league pay for this, pay for beat writing as we know it, that we now have a generation that just don't understand what the point of it is. Right. They don't understand what they're getting from it because they just look at social media and it's like, well, this little pellet came along. It was really interesting.

Back to whatever else I was doing. Yeah. I think what maybe sports fans don't realize they're missing is a lot of just nuance and insight into the athletes that they love and that they want to, that they're invested in, right? You know less about them if there's no beat writer there again, the frontline beat writer to actually be there every day and get to understand them themselves so that they can then convey that to you, the reader slash fan. That's the whole point of it. And if that falls away, we have much less insight into our sports heroes. And then 20 years from now, when someone's trying to do like the last dance documentary version of like the Oklahoma City Thunder of right now or something, what are they drawing on? Like, where's the historic record?

Who's Sam Smith of the documentary now, yeah. All right, a couple more before you guys go. Your all-time quote guy that you've ever covered in the NBA. Oh, my, all-time quote guy. You have one off the top of your head? Oh, is it a list? Do number one, and then we'll go from there. Probably Jermon all time just to have like anything that I like that I know will hit or that I know that will be the, what's it?

I'm going to walk up to his locker. Yeah. Him also on a like on a more local level when I was covering Goldenstate was Jordan Bell. He would give great quotes all the time. He wrote a Jordan Bell story. He knows. But he would just say some stuff that's like, oh, okay, that is interesting. This is going to do some numbers.

those two were some like of the guys of that ilk when you ask me an all-time quote guy I think of like a guy like Charles Barkley they were of the ilk of like hey if I need something they're going to write something that's they're going to say something that's going to hit yeah candor is the most important thing here honesty right because like there's so much of sports that is either cliche slash protective of the actual thing like nobody wants to say the so you like the guys who are who are as as candid and honest as possible. And we all need, especially if you're a beat writer, you know there's at least a couple guys in the locker room who are like, all right, when a given day, Shaq may not be in the right mood or Kobe may not be in the right mood. And also as the guys who have so much on them, they're going to be a little bit more reserved,

although depending on the day with those guys. So you need, in my case, Rick Fox, Derek Fisher, Robert Orie. Like those were my guys, Brian Shaw. Like, I was fortunate to cover, you know, it was my first major beat. I was fortunate to have not just an incredible team to cover, that played an amazing basketball. These are some of the smartest guys I talked to. Like, they were a really high basketball IQ and emotional IQ team.

They didn't always show it with the way that they conducted themselves. But, like, I had all these guys I could go to. If I needed perspective on, maybe it's what's going on with Shaq and Kobe, or maybe it's just, like, how are they adapting to the triangle offense in Phil Jackson's first year? Like, Rick Fox, Derek Fisher, Robert, Robert, or you, like, those were my perspective guys, my Kander guys, my explain it to me guys. And you need that on a beat. You'll notice we both didn't say anybody from like the last five years.

Right. As a guy of an all-time quote guy. And I think one of the reasons is, is the NBA and just in general right now, from a PR standpoint, we have optimized everything. So guys don't want to talk because they, quote, want to protect their brand. They don't, they're going to a locker room pregame. They're not even there, right? Or post game, they're like, I'm not even touching that.

back in the day, it used to be like, hey, man, I'll say anything. I'll talk about anything. And I think that the PR specification of the NBA and sports in general has really kind of undercut the ability to get those quote guys because they just, they are so scared of their shadow at this point. Not only them, but their teams around them are scared. It's hard to imagine like a Charles Barkley or a Dennis Rodman existing in today's NBA. Like it just, they would feel like complete aliens because, Now, granted, even in their time, those guys were huge personalities that were beyond the norm. They were outliers.

But expressing yourself and just being honest and just shooting the shit with beat writers and also just saying whatever's on your mind was more normal back then. And everybody now, yeah, they are so, to Logan's point, they are so PR coached. They are so conservative in certain organizations in particular. Have these guys play it so close to the vest. They've become kind of bland. So you may still love watching them on the court. But again, as a fan, you are missing something. I guarantee you young fans, if you have, you know, you may not realize what you're missing, but you're missing something.

And again, the last dance analogy, the 20 years from now retrospective on the thunder is going to be boring as hell because we don't know anything about them because they don't want to be known. Tremont's near the end of the road. Kevin Durant's near the end of the road. He was wilding out with me in Austin on Saturday night, at least within 100 feet of me, not with me, not with me, exactly. like who's the great quote coming up behind him? Anthony Edwards probably. I think he is the most, the guy that is willing to both say anything and also just have that charisma and star power all the way around.

But Tyrese Halliburton, I think, is one guy, but I don't know if he's going to reach the level of on-court production as well to, you know, I don't think he's going to be on the on-court production is Anthony Edwards in his career. I could be wrong, but we'll see. Yeah. But other than that, like, I don't know the other stars that are going to be that on a given time coming up. Shea doesn't want to do it. No, for sure. And, you know, we already see, like, Yokic has been around long enough. We know, like, he's never going to say anything much of interest. Luca doesn't say anything interesting ever. And I think, again, I will say this, and it sounds selfish and self-interest for me to say this. And there is some of that. But they don't.

don't want to do it. Today's stars, the biggest stars in the league have already decided, like, I'm just not giving that much of myself. And the exception to it, which is my candidate to answer your question, the refreshing thing about Victor Wenbanyama, aside from him just being like a complete, like, athletic freak and his build and his skill set and the whole combination of it, he will talk. He will explain himself. He will talk about what's on his mind. Yeah, but the other thing about Victor that I am scared of, though, is he does say that in press conference setting, but the team that he is with, doesn't allow, unless you're with a French magazine.

He's more interesting in French. He's more interesting in French. And the stories that come out in American publications tend to be like a little bit of the version of what he actually is. The distinction Logan is making, and it's an important one, is like there is whether a guy is candid and giving of himself and of his inner thoughts and his philosophy and his other interests or whatever, that's one part.

Logan's alluding to more like the access issue. and how managed that is, true enough. But what encourages me about Wembe is that when he is on that, at that podium, when he is giving interviews, and somebody asks a question, like, watch the expression on his face. He's actually processing the question. He's actually trying to answer the question, not giving the pat answer. That's the one he wanted to give. He's trying to actually answer the question, which in itself sounds like a very simple

thing, but it's a really important thing. And we do get a, like, we already know more about Wembe in a couple years in the NBA than we've known about Luca, Yokic, and Shea combined in the course of their, you know, careers. So I hope there's more of that. And I hope that others, younger players coming in will follow Wembe's lead and not the other guys. The eyes are the real test, aren't they? Because every time, especially during the postseason when I watch the press conferences, and I'm watching James Harden.

It's just like, I'm just getting through this question. Like, I'm just going to get through it. I'm going to say something. Yeah. So you'll have something. It won't be particularly useful. and then we're out. Goodbye.

I'm not trying to help you in any possible way. Speaking of a guy at the end of the road, maybe we'll end here. LeBron James, year one in Philly. What has LeBron changed about the way the NBA is covered? Oh, interesting.

LeBron's fascinating in part because I think his early years with Cleveland, he was more of like that mold that I was alluding to where it's very close to the vest. I don't think he said a lot, gave away a lot, during that time. He went to Miami and things changed. One, he won a championship, obviously, two championships. But the heat, and being next to Dwayne Wade, who was very, he was great with the media, really gracious and giving of himself and willing to talk about stuff. I think LeBron kind of

evolved during that time, went back to Cleveland and was still that guy. And in L.A., I think toward the tail end of it, he has kind of pulled back a little bit. But I would just say, like LeBron and Steph as the two avatars of this generation or the defining players of this generation, as Logan will, I'm sure agree, like, Steph has been really giving him himself. Now, Steph can, like, manage it a little bit, too. Like, he's not giving you everything. But Steph has been, Steph and LeBron have been as available as any two superstars of the last 20 years. And my wish, as a reporter covering this league and who started covering the league at a time when, like,

I'm sorry, like, Michael Jordan spoke pretty much every freaking day. Like, I've made this, this analogy, I won't use a name, but like Michael Jordan spoke more. Michael Jordan, the guy who most people consider the goat, generational divides notwithstanding, spoke more to the media during his time than most of the top stars of today's MBA. And I wish they would all consider that for a moment as they stage manage everything. But Steph and LeBron, I think we're both pretty giving of themselves and had so much demanded of them. And a been just unfailingly gracious throughout. You know, good days, bad days, good years, bad years,

especially in LeBron's case, considering how much he has to deal with. But I very much appreciate how much those two guys have been willing to do this on a consistent basis. I think that LeBron, and Jordan has, Jordan and other guys have had dedicated reporters for them. But I think LeBron in this day and age was kind of like the, the first player that was his own media entity. And what I mean by that is, I think once he got back from,

once he got back to Cleveland, from, and he started a little bit in Miami, but once he got back to Cleveland, he started seeing him realize how he can, one, build, bend the media to its will, right? Or he can also use different reporters and use different networks. works to his advantage, right? And by the time he got to Los Angeles, you would see every year

there would be, or every midway point of a season, there will be a strategic leak from LeBron James of some sort, a strategic quote that he would give to a certain person, or something to send a message to the front office. And I'm not saying that players haven't done that before, but within this media structure that we have talked about throughout this episode where you have the dying of newspapers, and you have the rise of these insiders. I think LeBron figured out how to use that to his advantage in a way that no other player has before him, and honestly how no other player really could do before him. Michael Jordan couldn't go.

Now, he may have had allies within the Chicago Tribune, but he couldn't go and really just send his message through leaks in the way LeBron has. And I think that that has really just, I think it's a representation. where we are as a media society to where there isn't a lot of pushback on what LeBron does. There might be up from a fan's perspective, but he has been able to manipulate isn't the right word, I guess, but he's been doing something along those ways,

and he's being able to learn how to use it to his advantage. And I think that he is one of the few stars that has been able to actually do that. I just think that's a matter of power, honestly. the Chicago Tribune in 1991 was a very different place than any media entity is today. So the Chicago Tribune versus Michael Jordan even when he was on its way to becoming the greatest player of all time versus any media company versus LeBron today. There's just a power imbalance. So what are you going to do?

I mean, what you're saying about LeBron is fascinating, walking out of the finals press conference with the Belize. We could almost just do a media history of LeBron. Some of those quotes that came out. The one I hit Joel with the other day is we wore a better aurora hat in 2018. That's the thing that actually happened on his way into a Laker game. He came during the rise of social media,

right? And he came during a time where you could make subtle statements about how you feel without actually saying a word about it. It's just a picture. I'm just wearing a bow hat. And it feels like, you know, LeBron, for the better part of 15, 20 years, is starring in a movie, a life movie, about LeBron. He is LeBron James starting a life movie about LeBron and I feel like that's how he

carries himself. This morning he just did a Taco Tuesday ad for it looked like oh this is a bit that I've been doing for years right guys but it's to promote a company that he is doing right but he is a guy that knows the camera is on him every single time and I wonder how that's

going to play out when he retires right and the second point that I will make to that what I said about him being you know his own type of media entity onto us on. I'm really curious to see, I mean, Howard talked about this yesterday,

I'm really curious to see how that affects that Sixers team, because you're going to bring all of this circus for one guy and there's going to be all the other things that I talk about, right? He has the opportunity to leak his own whatever narrative through, you know, the podcast that is, that we put out.

Also, you know, the ESPN of it all as well. He has the ability to do that. How was that going to either help or hurt team chemistry. I think that's going to be a really fascinating media storyline that I'm sure you'll follow. When they announced the LeBron Dock the other day,

I was like, weren't we doing this? Isn't this the last 25 years of NBA history? We've been living in a LeBron Dock. I will say, there was a time 15 years ago maybe where NBA entertainment had gotten really aggressive about like they're going to be in the locker room, especially at big games or whatever.

And every so often you're having just a shoot in the shit conversation, casual content, like my recorder is away or whatever. just talking to a player just to shoot the shit. And all of a sudden you see a boom mic overhead. And you're like, wait a minute. Wait, who? And it's NBA. So I had to first get used to that.

But the last couple of times LeBron has come through, usually through New York, because I don't travel as much. So if he comes through New York, and I go, you know, I know him a little bit. So I go up just to like, just go shoot the shit pregame. But there's a camera guy there every time. And all of a sudden now I'm thinking like, all of our like offhand conversations, me just like making dumb jokes or just like saying, how you do and how's the family, whatever.

is this going to become part of his, God forbid that because of a documentary, I'm not that interesting. But it's a weird thing when you realize, and I think Kobe's last season, he had the camera crew following him around and you become very self-conscious as a reporter that, you know, we need to be off the record sometimes too. Sometimes we are just talking to somebody just to have a conversation because it's part of how you just, you know, keep up, you know, rapport or you haven't seen somebody in a while. The next thing you know, it's like there's a camera over your shoulder and it's all being recorded. And it's like, it's a little weird. We're in, A strange time.

The NBA surveillance state. Yeah, basically. The semi-benine NBA surveillance state. Yes. Logan, you have parting gifts for us before we end this segment? I do have parting gifts. He did bring a bag and I wasn't sure what was going on. Howard and I, this is not a podcast bit.

Howard and I generally have no idea what's going on right now. So last week I went to Berkeley, California because I was supposed to get something for Beck, and I went to Amoeba music in Berkeley. Legend. And I went, I got this one right here, this is for you, and I went to Amoe music, and then I went to Mo's books across the street. And I got the famous Moes book, shout out Berth in California. You should go there one time.

Next time everybody will go together. That would be great. And next one of them will go to Amoeba together. But I went there, and I got these really nice record store day, 2026 tote bags from the Amoe Music. And I got you, Brian, I got a book for you with the Moes Books. Oh my gosh. With the Mose Books bookmark.

Look at this. And this is for you. This is the struggle for a livable city, the next Los Angeles. I love this. Wow. I got you something. The very own amoeba bag from Record Day 2026. And I got you a book as well with your own Mo's book bookmark called Who Owns the Future.

Nice. How cool is this? I thought this was going to be the Brian, what's your favorite Nause album bit? No, I would do that. She turned out better than I thought. This is the press box book. We look bad now. We didn't bring any gifts for Logan.

Like, we owe you one. Logan had his own personal Yola Boko Flood. So thank you so much, guys. Thank you. We'll listen to both of you on real ones. Come back. Tell some more locker room stories. You know, take a poop on our colleagues.

And you're welcome any time. Thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having us. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Thursday's headline about tariffs for our neighbor to the north was Uh-oh, Canada.

Today's headline, David, comes to us from Mitchell Viny or Vinny from Sydney, Australia. There's so many Australian listeners of this podcast that email me all the time. Thank you for listening to us. What is that? They're all over with our sports podcast too. Yeah. Do they just have an incredible amount of time to be listening to podcasts? in Australia or they just love what the ringer does?

I think they're just great people by and large. I mean, I think 100% of Australians are wonderful people. That's my ad for your beautiful country. Mitchell sends along a headline from the Australian, the newspaper down there. It's about Sidney Sweeney. There's been another Sydney-Sweeney controversy. I don't even care what it is,

but I want you to think of Sidney-Sweeney, and I want you to think of the word tempest. Tempest, as you ponder. What was the Australians' strained pun headline? Tempest in a teapot? Tempest in a... Yeah. Tempest...

Yeah, by the way, I believe Tempest in a teapot, I believe in this case, it's also Tempest in a teacup. Tempest in a D cup. Yeah, that's exactly right. They actually put Storm in a D-Cup, so we'll just upgrade on the Australian's behalf there. Tempest in a D-Cup. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic! By Isaiah Blakely and John, not Bones-Jones, since both John Joneses were name-checked on this podcast. Instagram, follow us at Pressbox Ringer. We'd love you to do that. Almost at 7,000 followers, David, despite being up for just one.

one year on IG. Follow us there. Help us get to $7,000. If you need to reach us, pressbox ringer at gmail.com, we check that all the time. David, I will see you next Thursday. Ooh, we got some announcement here.

Next Thursday is a September issue. Oh, yeah. And let's announce it, dude. This is about, because this is coming out, it's about the new movie prime time. Mm-hmm. About the immortal NBC segment slash show to catch a predator.

stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hanson. It's all about a particular, particularly what would you say, you know, tabloidy, reality TVE. Yes. Internet is scary moment in American media. We're going to talk about the movie. We're going to talk about the show.

We're going to talk about all the weird strands that coalesced in the to catch a predator era. Plus Chris Hansen today who was doing the same thing except on YouTube. That's coming up. Next week, David, I'll see you with then with more lukewarm takes about the media. See that, David. See you later, Brian.