The Ringer NBA Show - How the 3-Point Shot Revolutionized the NBA With Mike Prada | The Answer

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Kyle and Seerat are joined by Mike Prada from The Athletic to discuss his new book, ‘Spaced Out: How the NBA’s Three-Point Revolution Changed Everything You Thought You Knew about Basketball.' They begin by diving into the book’s central theme, exploring the definition of “purity” in basketball, and pondering whether James Naismith would recognize the modern game next to the one he created (7:42). Next, they talk about legendary coach John McClendon’s contributions to the speed of the game, and dissect how some of these developments have led to certain types of players being pushed out of the league, with Roy Hibbert as a prime example (12:47). They end the pod by examining how Billy Knight’s archaic team-building philosophy as the Hawks GM ultimately stunted his team’s development and the culture of accepting new ideas in the today’s NBA (37:28). Hosts: Seerat Sohi and J. Kyle Mann Guest: Mike Prada Associate Producer: Chris Sutton Production Supervision: Conor Nevins and Benjamin Cruz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. To the answer, today we have joining us.

Obviously, we have Kyle. Kyle, how are you? Obviously, right? Yeah. Just jumping right over you because I'm very excited to introduce our guest today. Mike Prada and NBA at the athletic and also the author of Spaced Out, how the NBA's Three Point Revolution changed everything you thought you knew about basketball. How's it going, Mike?

I'm good. That's impressive. You did the whole subhead in one breath. Yeah. Could you, could you hear me kind of losing it at the end? I could hear it. I was like, oh, crap, this is a bad subhead. You can't.

It takes too long to stay. Is this something you've been monitoring? Yeah. You know, like when you put a book out and you're just very self-conscious about everything. Yeah, I was just saying. No. When you put a piece out, you put a piece out and like, you hope people like kind of understand what it's like. You're working a big feature, Kyle.

You're working a big video. And you're like, God. I'm looking at everybody's reaction to make sure like they like it. Multiply that by about 100, and that's what the experience of the two weeks after a book is like. Gotcha, got you. Just making sure that everybody understands the general thesis. Yeah, you can't do anything about it, but you can't help yourself. Gotcha.

I was going to say, one of the things about your work that I've always enjoyed is your, like, Star Wars tie-ins. I feel like that was like one of your big things. I was curious before, you know, one of the more important things I wanted to ask you today was, have you been watching Andor before basketball? I have. It's terrific. What a show. Good.

I love how, I mean, it's actually this may connect to the theme of this book in the way, I know. But Tony Gilroy didn't make a Star Wars show in the Star Wars universe, and it's the best thing that Star Wars has made in a long time. I feel like that's an analog to the three-point shot. Yeah, that's pretty good. I'm glad that we could tie that in. I didn't want to derail us with Star Wars. He broke outside the Star Wars box to make something different.

I have nothing. I have nothing. Seriously, they're like what? Seriously, you're like, what are you talking about? This is a good time for me to admit that I've never seen Star Wars. Sarah with her hood up has a Sith look going on right now,

but hasn't seen it interestingly enough. No, yeah. Yeah, I just embody it naturally, I guess. Mike, how is this for a thesis? I kind of, I was going to your book, and I kind of feel like it's a tactical history of the modern NBA, and the through line,

is just essentially that pretty much every single modern innovation that we have finds, you know, some sort of motivation or impetus in either trying to shoot more threes or trying, like trying to create more threes or trying to defend the three. Yeah, no, I think absolutely. The thing that's like kind of was, was racking my brain about this whole process and that all thing. And I think I quote this, I don't remember if you were with us in 2017 at SB Nation's year, but I remember that was the first year that Mike D'Antonies Rock is.

just started shooting a zillion threes, right? And I remember telling Christian Winfield, who's now at the New York Daily News, like, hey, when they come to Brooklyn, you should ask them about how they shoot really long threes. And Mike Dantility gives him this, like, great line that I quote in the book. It's like, the line is there. It doesn't mean you have to stand on it.

And I keep wondering, like, if there was no three-point line, would the game expand? You know, there's obvious value in spacing the floor and playing on a bigger surface. But like, did we need the three-point line to nudge the whole league out. And I came to the conclusion as I was writing this, that the answer was yes.

So I think that's a pretty good thesis, you know, just as long as you think of the three-point line as kind of this like almost this marker on the court, this incentive to be like, hey, guys, you can play out here too. You don't just have to play by the basket. And that without it, you don't get all of the stuff we get, even if the benefits of the three-point line

don't all have to do with three-point shooting. I love that you use Christian just to do your future reporting. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's very versatile editing work. He got a lot of pages and a lot of attention and a citation out of it. It's all good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that I think is interesting is like skill development kind of going hand in hand with this as basketball is evolved.

And you were talking about like whether or not the three point line had been there, would it have spaced? Do you think, I mean, just in your study, do you think that? Let's say we got good at shooting. Do you think that we would have continued to get good at distant shooting? Would people have been motivated to do it? Or was it a sort of a cat, like the three-point line was the growth catalyst to make that skill development revolution happen? God, I was thinking about that so much throughout this book.

I do think that you needed the line to just sort of give people a reason. Because otherwise, the game would have just grown vertically, I think. You know, people would have just, if you're, you look at games that you watch in the 60s or the 70s, so many of the plays end with like a turnaround jumper from a taller guy over a shorter guy. And you see the sky hooked by Kareem is essentially the reason that shot is unblockable is because his reach goes way higher than your reach. So I feel like the game might have grown that way more so with that three point line. The three point line I think forced people to kind of be able to extend out and also added more

of the small man and kind of eventually the big men co-opted the small man skills and that's sort of the cycle we've been in but you know you look back that there I don't think I don't remember if I actually cited them in this in the book but there are a lot of headlines like dating back to like the 30s 40s and 50s are like this basketball is just a big goon game it's just a bunch of tall guys and I don't I think those sorts of criticisms like just continued and piled up they very much echo what is happening right as the three-point line is introduced where it's like these games are just slug-fests. And they kind of, the fact that it took even 35 years to the three-poor line to really be used in a transformative way, to me illustrates that without it, it would have taken way longer to even think about like just the very concept of like,

why do we shoot the ball from far away? I mean, if all points, if all shots are worth two points, It's hard to kind of conceive of a reason to stand further away from it and closer. You kind of needed a reason. So I don't think that I think the game would have just evolved in a totally different way if we didn't have a three point line. Yeah, one of the things that I think you get into this in the fourth chapter of the book, and it's kind of, it's one of my favorite talking points about the history of basketball is just this kind of constant battle between physicality and grace.

And in the book, you get into the invention of basketball, was essentially supposed to be an antidote, an alternative to football. It wasn't supposed to be a violent sport. But, you know, just the nature of competition and the way that the players were evolving, it just inspired aggression. And that was the impetus for a lot of the rule changes that we saw, was to make it less aggressive, to make it less physical, whether it's, you know, the first one I think is dribbling.

I think after the first week of basketball or something, it was kind of clear that dribbling needed to be. part of it. Otherwise, players would just tackle each other. Yeah. To your point, just so that the listeners understand, there was no rule about dribbling in the original 13 rules of basketball. Like, it was entirely

like you said, a natural invention just to add some context to what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think dribbling was pretty much the first rule change in basketball, right? I believe so. Yeah. Although Naismith himself, like,

sort of thought the dribble was like this high dribble that you would do to like back away. He didn't realize that like people would start to just like kind of go as low as possible and just kind of plow through people as they were dribbling really low. And he was like, why is this isn't what I expected. It's like a great example of, you know, the inventor not seeing like kind of the future of the game and just being like, how could they use dribbling this way? This doesn't make sense. It's kind of one of my favorite things about the book in general is just the amount of

times that Naismith is a little bit peeved about where people take the game. I just like, no, this isn't what I intended. I put this in the doc, too. I'm just really kind of interested about like this idea of purity. I don't know, you hear people say that a lot. It's like what I mean, what do you think that people meant when they said purity or when they were defending the purity of basketball? Is it like is it defending that idea of it being like a finesse answer to football? What, what do you? What, you think they meant by purity? What I think they meant by purity is, you know how, have you guys studied how music, there's like a certain age where your favorite songs of that age, it's like,

are your favorite songs for eternity? Like, you're just sort of more open to like these impressions of what, like, think about your favorite music now is probably the stuff you were exposed to at, I don't remember what the exact age is, but like teenage years-ish type of music. why everybody thinks the best S&L is when they were in high school, that whole thing. Exactly. It's why Michael Jordan was the best player of all time if you're a certain age and why LeBron James will be the best player.

There's something Freudian about it because I always joke about this where like my office basically I'm building this like weird basketball shrine to like the early 90s and I just want to like cuddle up in it. I don't know what that's about. Oh yeah. Totally. I get the just Kyle returning to the womb in his office. But like, it's getting weird.

I think for sports it's like younger. Like, I mean, for me, it's the NBA and NBC. That just stuff is just seared into me in this nerdy way. But I think when people say this is the purity of the game, they're talking about what basketball was like literally when they were that age. That's what they think the purity of the game is. And, you know, actually, Siri, you pointed this out in the dot. And you also have talked to me about this before offline through this.

But I just love the way you put it. like this idea that basketball is this kind of battle between like let's be physical and then let's pull back. One of the things that I really wanted to do with that chapter was to illustrate to what you guys have said, the purest form of basketball, and if you think of it as like James Naismiss intention is pretty close to what we have right now without the shooting. But it's very much like I think this interchangeability, this fast pace, this constant up and down and up and down and up and down.

This idea that you were almost not playing just offense or defense, they would just fold into each other. Like, just kind of, he didn't even think we needed coaches. You know, think about that for a second. Kyrie Irving, onto something. Carrie Irving, secretly and James Neat Smith reincarnated. Yeah. But this is closer what we want.

And yet it seems to be like the thing that so many people don't think is like not pure. But like in some ways, this, I was so maybe like the 60s was probably the pure version, but like it's still, we're closer to like James Naismus MBA than we were 20 years ago and really had been for a long time. And so it's just so interesting to hear people say this isn't like real basketball. And it just reflects that taking a lot of like just what I was saying before. What's pure is always in the eye of the beholder and when you came up. Yeah.

The other guy that you that you talk about, I think it was in that chapter is John McClendon as well, who was another favorite of mine, just like in terms of just going back to the history of the game, he was, uh, for the listeners who don't know, he's pretty much the first, uh, black coach in the NBA. He learned from Naismith himself. Uh, he was, you know, uh, Naismith was probably his prime mentor. And he was the inventor of the fast break. Also, uh, a purpose of nothing, also the inventor of the Four Corners offense, but, uh, he wasn't allowed to coach at Duke or North Carolina. Yeah. Well, in fact, he, when he coached, at North Carolina, it was now North Carolina Central.

They had like a secret game between his teams and Duke and I think 1954. I forget the exact year. And it like didn't come out for 50 years until there's New York Times Magazine story in 1996, I believe. They made it on a Sunday so that, you know, all the racists were in church so they could like shepherd all the black players to Duke. All the racists were in church. Woo! At a time.

And that's over. Those are my words, not theirs. There was like a journalist found out about the game, and he was like, please don't write about this. Anyway, the final score was his team went 88 to 44. Pretty good. And I guess this is a really good Duke team. That gives you a sense of like kind of how he's like this lost grade of history.

So you think like the stylistic kind of system shock of that maybe was, I don't know anything about the two teams, but you're saying they were good. I mean, so his style was radical, I guess, for the time. So maybe playing a part there.

Yeah. Yeah. Him and Dean Smith, I think were pretty close too. So, you know, and some of the ironically was, it was more, you know,

well, I'd all for up, who was like famously racist, also borrowed stuff from McClendon, but ironically, it was also kind of like the more non-racist, white coaches that learned a lot from him

because they were willing to learn from him. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I mean, the reason I cite him in the piece is that he has this, first of all, like, if you read, he has this like 1965 dissertation on fast fake basketball. And it's like, it just looks like something I would read today. But the other thing is he had this thing where he called it like a four second role. It was like everybody's got to be in the front court in four seconds. And like I think about that now. I'm like, think about how much of an emphasis there is on pushing the pace and getting into your offense quickly. Like this dude had to figure it out. 50 years ago. So what happened? I mean, the easy answer is, you know, segregation and racism. And, you know, he tried to, he coached the Cleveland Piper's, I believe, of like Abe Sapperson's ABL and George Steinbrenner was the owner. And George Steinbrenner was a meddlesome terrible person

that fired him after a year. And he just sort of missed his time. But it's like, what exactly was it that stopped people from figuring out what he did for 50 years? And, you know, there's more in the book on that. But yeah, that's why I wanted to include him. It's like, I think we've talked about this thematically. Like, there are always people who are ahead of the curve and just come around at the wrong time. And he's such a great example with that. Yeah, that's a really good point. The other thing, you know, I think purity is something that was probably used as a different, you know, type of term back then, too. I do remember. I would say so. Yeah, I do, I do remember reading that, like, there were, like, there were just kind of stereotypes about this is not the type of basketball.

We want to play. This is like the type of basketball that's played at Black, uh, black colleges and stuff. And it took a while for, you know, that kind of prejudice to go away as well. Has it gone away yet? I'm sorry. I mean, fair enough. Yeah. That's a good point. Good point. The NBA season is underway and it's a perfect time to download Fandul, America's number one sports book, because right now new customers get a no sweat first bet up to $1,000. Plus, FanDuel is the only sports book that's giving customers three months of NBA league pass when they make a $5 bet on the NBA. Now, I've been going over some of the updated player

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Tennessee, Redline, 8,889-9-97889 in Tennessee, 1,800-2-470 in Wyoming, or visit 1-800 gambler.net in West Virginia. To your point of ideas, like, you know, came before their time, one concept that we talked about in last week's episode was just of the adjacent possible. It's like this. this term that it wasn't coined by Stephen Johnson, who I talked about last episode, but he's the guy I got it from.

So, you know, but it's basically just, you know, the set of, you know, possibilities available to people who are trying to innovate, essentially, right? Like, there is a certain allowance, either because of conventional wisdom, but also because of, like,

the tools that are available to people at a certain time in terms of what will come next. And there's basically a number of things that can't happen. Like the moment that we're in right now, a number of things can't happen because of the tools at our disposal is something you actually get into it in the book as well. It's really interesting. It's just how much smarter the average NBA athlete is because they have access to multiple trainers.

They have access to all this tape. They have access to like a bunch of stuff, right? So their spatial awareness has just never been better, right, because of all the things that they can do to study the game. But the thing I want to talk about with this is just why the evolution of the three-pointer was so slow, right? Like, this is something that was that's what everybody wants to know. Yeah. Yeah, so kind of take us through a little bit of just the inception of a three-pointer in the first few years. Yeah, I think it's important to understand, and this is a lot of chapter one, but it's important to sort of, to understand what the conditions were around the NBA when the three point line is introduced.

It comes in in 1979 on a one-year trial basis. This is three years after the ABA, a league that had the three-point line folded and was kind of merged into the NBA. And they had the three-point line very much as a, it was like the ABL, the 1960s, two or something. Their thought was this is what they called a home run shop from 25 feet away. And I make this point in the book, like how many home runs are hitting out of per pitch in an average baseball game? It's like two out of 350. I imagine if there's a home run like every other pitch. Like there is a three point shot now. Yeah. So it creates so this is the

the, the ABA is the retrogate league. They've had this like kind of war for 10 years over talent over all this stuff. And then in 1970s, the ABA folds, the big dog on top wins. And the ABA is kind of pushed into the NBA. Those couple of years after the merger were just weird stylistically, where you had some of these, like kind of gliders and shooters and sort of players like Dr. J., George Gervyn, kind of merging with the very orthodox point guard center style of play of the NBA and there's just this sort of it's just really odd basketball that

when the blazers fall apart because of injuries to Bill Walton the two championship series between like Washington, Seattle were just so poorly. There wasn't a lot of interest. They were just fighting all the time in the paint. It was just really physical. So they know they need to do something. And they know that the three point they need to kind of stop this wrestling match. So the way they do, they think of doing that as let's try this three point thing. The problem is this is a thing that came from the league that the NBA just beat. So imagine like taking like, hey, our league sucks.

Our league is having problems. We're going to take the idea from the league we beat and it's going to work for us. Like you can understand how the logic train doesn't quite work, you know, for that. And I think there were a lot of people who felt like, hey, why are we taking the thing from that that needed this like kind of, I think to quote the Warriors owner Frankie Muelli, Carnival Basketball. Why are we putting carnival basketball into our league? You know, they needed that because they were competing against us, but we don't have to compete against them. So there's just a major undercurrent of like kind of what this is an ABA thing, a cynicism around this as they sort

of shove this through because they know they need it, but they don't really like it. And I just remember the striking thing after there's a board of governor's vote, it passes by one vote. This warrior's owner gets super pissed and says, I'm going to leave the board forever because of this decision. I'd rather raise a rim to 12 feet than to do this. Like, imagine how the irony historically of that is really great, like that they ended up coming back. Yeah, it's a warrior's owner too. Yeah, that's a great part. And then in that fall, like Jerry Colangelo, who then was sort of new to this whole thing, but it was kind of the guy.

who was very much on the rules committee. It's like saying, this is not going to change the game that much, guys, don't worry. And I'm sitting here looking at this 30 years later. I'm like, this is the thing that you thought was a salvation. Now your first way you're introducing you to say, like, hold on, guys, it's not that big a deal. You're almost like kind of dampening your own new product. And I think that played a major role in the slow adoption in the first 15, 20 years, where, you know, three years after the 3.1 is introduced,

they're shooting fewer threes than they did when they first brought it in. So that's some context, I think, when you consider that history, it makes a little more sense why it took a while. There's another separate question there as to why it took 35 years versus like 20, but that's, I think, a different set of circumstances. But that, I think, it helps explain why there was just a lot of consternation about this three-point thing that I think led over into those early years in the NBA. How many players at that point do you think were equipped? Let's imagine the league does whiplash stylistically and just goes full bore and there's no adjustment period and they immediately go. What do you think would have happened efficiency-wise? Like how many players do you think were actually ready to play that style?

Because you go back and you watch, I mean, there were some guys like, and also, you know, how many, talking about the ABA, how many attempts per game were going on in the NBA? I guess I guess I'm just kind of curious about how ready players were in general to shoot from that distance. This is an interesting question because when you say ready, what do you mean exactly? Do you mean like they were able to reach that distance accurately in a vacuum? Or do you mean were they psychologically ready to say like, hey, it's okay for me to take this super long shot and I can take it quickly? I guess a little bit of both. I mean, let's assume that they were just ready mentally to take the shots. I mean, do you think that there were enough shooters at that time that could have adjusted quickly and could.

we have achieved like a decent level of efficiency quickly or would have been a disaster? Because I know shooting, it's like that thing about like there were more, there were crazy rebounding numbers in the early days because people just couldn't shoot as well. I was just curious about how many people you thought were ready just from a skill standpoint. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's impossible in some ways to separate the question, the two parts of the questionnaire. And actually, I get into this in chapter 10 in a different context where I talk about just this,

how confidence, shooting confidence, merges with your shooting motion and how, and how you have to like kind of teach yourself to shoot a lot of threes. And how that just changes the way you shoot the threes in general and just the kind of connection between the mental and the biomechanical. I think there were a lot of players really all the way back then or even like before that who like, if you had told them like, it's okay for you to do this. Like we're, you can stand here and we're not going to say this is a bad shot, we're not going to kind of align the floor, like, you can, you can shoot this shot. They would be capable of doing so. I just think that there's such an inertia and such a kind of a feeling of like, we have to get

the ball closer to the basket that I think just took over to the point where like in an actual game, you would have gotten pretty close to what we got at the beginning of the three point era where there aren't a lot of people doing it. But I think that there are a lot more people than that capable of making long shots. Just the same way that like, you know, Dwight Howard makes 80% of his practice threes, right? Like, I mean, you watch like Biggs now, like you would never shoot that in the game, but they can make these shots all the time. I think it's just a matter of there's a lot of hardwiring to untangle. And I do think that it took something like I talk about the 0.5 mentality of the spurs and just this constant

movement, it took like sort of creating a style play where you didn't have time to stop and think about what you were doing that. It had to maintain this flow. That's what it took to be able to get people to just like let it fly and change their emotions to let it fly. It's sort of a virtuous cycle there. And I think the same thing was true in like a much more extreme way back in the day. It's almost impossible to sort of separate out the capability with the psychology of it. Yeah, there's a great point in that chapter about how like I think it was Jared Culver who shot eight threes per game despite being a below average three-point shooter. Garrett Temple, yeah.

Oh, sorry, yeah, Garrett Temple. That sort of illustrates my point, though. You don't even know which below-a-verage shooter you're talking about because they all do. They all do it now. That's the thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's like, and, you know, your good three-point shooters will essentially be shooting the same amount of shots.

Now, I imagine some of that has to do with being open and not, but that was really interesting because it kind of took us like to the moment that we're in right now, right? like where pretty much everybody is shooting threes and it's like it's encouraged whether you're like you know this this season especially I've seen like Andre Drummond shooting threes I've seen the Andre Jordan shooting threes I've seen just like players that I never would have imagined trying to hoist it from up from down there doing it and it's just like it is it is such a signal shift right

yeah and more importantly they shoot it like they don't just like pause and shoot it right they're not thinking to shoot it it's just like they're kind of open they shoot it And so like you can imagine like being a defender and being like how am I supposed to know if this guy's a 40% shooter or a 35% shooter or a 30% shooter may all just look the same in real time. Yeah, you also like you make that point about Marcus Smart too. Yes. Just the fact that he has a confidence to shoot that shot means that defenders are going to respect it just like because they know that he is not somebody who's necessarily going to make another decision. Now that can be maddening at times. Right.

Yeah, it's like a weird thing. But by the way, Marcus Smart, I think it's shooting in the 20s right now from three really bad. I believe the Celtics offense is like 51 points or something better with him on the floor than went off. So it's still holding up. How much did your research sort of? Because, you know, the NBA obviously is one facet. It's the one that we focus on and gets a lot. And it's been sort of central to the growth of the mainstream growth of the sport.

How much did your research take you across leagues and levels? because I know, you know, in the 90s, there were college teams. I mean, I know Kentucky, Rick Petino teams, you mentioned the late 80s, Knicks teams with Patino. They were taking over 20 in the mid-20s, threes a game and doing it fairly efficiently. How much did your research take you across levels of basketball? The answer is not much, not because it's not important, but because I knew that if I advanced beyond the scope of the NBA, it would just be impossible to wrap my head around

a coherent structure. I would have just gone too far down. So, like, that's the other reason why, like, at the beginning of the book, I actually wasn't even thinking necessarily about college. I was thinking, like, how much WMBA does this need to have? And I just made the decision early on that, like, I needed to keep it focused, the NBA for my own sanity.

But, yeah, I think there's plenty of room for another book. Because the other thing, too, is, like, in basketball, and generally things move downstream, where the NBA innovates and it moves down. Not always, but generally. I guess, like, you could argue, like, that it actually starts in Europe and then goes to the NBA and then moves down. But, like, I feel like college football kind of tends to move the opposite way.

Like, there's more innovation in the college game and the pro game. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's just me making stuff up. I don't know. But I think that combined with that and just, like, my own sanity, I kept it pretty tight to the NBA. But, yeah, there's so many ways you could. go off from this where you could talk about college teams and pro teams and, you know,

there's a little bit of international stuff with like Tim Duncan screening that I talk about and some of the other defensive coverages. But yeah, generally I tried to keep it pretty limited in scope just for my own sake. Because, I mean, just summarizing so much MBA history into that match, it's like hard enough, you know. Experiment was getting a little too big for the lab. Texas people would contend that high school football is like, like where all football's innovation comes from. There you go.

They're very proud of that. Maybe this is like the purity of the game thing happening all over again. I think the downstream thing makes a ton of sense for the NBA, though, because it seems like, you know, especially now with AAU, the way the culture is, like, it's just kind of geared towards trying to make the NBA. So you are going to, like, as a player, as a trainer, as a coach, like you're kind of looking for ways to meld those, like, build yourself into that shape to get to the league.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, like, that's a whole other story. You've written before. Probably. You've written a lot of stuff. The shape of basketball player. I'm pretty sure I cited, like, at least one of your pieces to this effect on the book. Like the Draymond Generation piece, Bruce Brown, Gary Payton the second.

I thought that's what you do. Yeah, that kind of gets into more of like where we are now, right? Which is like the way that defenses have had to react to the three-point shot, right? And like, that's another really interesting part of your book as well. well. The general, like, I loved all the whole chat, like everything on defenses in general, just like the way that they've had to evolve alongside offenses as well. One of my favorite parts about it was just like Roy Hibbert, who is, he's like an avatar

for this revolution in a way where like he, is somebody who is no longer in the league, largely because of the pace and space revolution, he just couldn't keep up. He became too slow, but there was a time in the, you know, like early 2010s on those Pacers teams where, you know, Roy Hibbert and the Pacers figured out a way to defend pick and rolls just two on two. And a lot of it was because of his size, his verticality, his positioning, his smarts. But really good point you make in the book that I never thought about before is a way that Hibbert then kind of. Hibbert and also, you know, like, Hibbert becomes, and this kind of goes for all the players, right? Like Hibbert, Draymond, they become the symbol,

but then everybody else copies it and he becomes a trend, right? So what Hibbert did kind of became a trend, and then it forced offensive players to react by working on their three-point shots off the dribble and stepbacks, because the way that, you know, the Pacers had gamed it out was that if you can force guys into mid-range jumpers, that's great. But now all of a sudden, if they're taking three-point jumpers,

that math problem changes. And that's essentially what, what's favorite packing as well. Pretty much that and combined was just the pace jumping up. I mean, I remember the year that they were really good, the Pacers, they had like a calendar year that was split between two years when they were dominant. Like, it was like 2013, like 2013 calendar year encompassing the second half of one season and the first half another, they were like the best team in the league.

There was like, I remember a game at the end of that stretch where they played, I think, Phoenix with those three guards that the Phoenix had. and that weird bloodso-druggage team or whatever. Who was the third guard? Thomas, right? No, was it Brandon Knight or was it Tom? Yeah, it was Thomas. They traded for Brandon Knight.

So I remember they played a game that year, the regular season, and Phoenix just kept jamming the ball down their throats running up the sidelines off makes, like getting into 21 action on the side, you know, within four seconds. And like they just tore the paces apart that game. It was like the first time I kind of noticed that was like, oh, there might be a blueprint here. like again eight years later that's just what everybody does now so yeah um the shooting and the pace just sort of it's just amazing it's almost like Roy Hibbert was like the vine of um you know a basketball where it just for a really short stretch it was like a great innovation

Elon can get rolling back in the league he was like the bridge that so many people went over that it eventually collapsed yeah yeah it's sort of the early adopter thing where the early adopter like the most indie crusty band that invented the genre that you like is like you have to know some dude at a record store to tell you about it. I appreciate it fully and then people come and do it better, you know, or polish the idea.

Yeah. Yeah. Like Don Nelson is basically that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to say something about Don Nelson, I think we'll kind of be a little controversial. I think he was he almost was too, he was too conventional for his own goods sometimes. He had this like weakness for like he

needed a center all the time. He'd have these teams that were like awesome small ball and then he'd trade for a bigger player and screw it all up. I mean, the Warriors, like you traded Mitch Richmond for Billy Owens to get bigger. He didn't want Tim Hardaway initially. He wanted to trade up and draft Chris Washburn. Tim Hardaway was a backup plan. You know, Dallas, think about all the stiffs that he had on that team. You know, he almost, it's the same way how Dan Tony, I think you pointed this out, like how Dan Tony always says he wishes he went further with seven seconds or less.

not that he sort of felt pressure to moderate. I think Don Nelson was kind of secretly the same way. I think Steve Kerr was also, I think he had said at one point that the Warriors kind of wish that, or not the Warriors at the Suns, he was a GM of the Suns at the time. And they wished that they had kind of stuck through the guns and not traded for Shaq. Absolutely. I mean, think about how crazy it is that like the Seven Second Seconds or Less Sun's team is traded for Shaq. I mean, I don't think we, that's kind of underrated and just the whole like what the hell

happen their thing. It's like the I think that trade does not get enough attention for how weird it was and just what it's said about the figures involved. It really seems like the entire like establishment like the league the historical league and the people that were kind of in it in the 80s, 90s, 2000s

were kind of over there with their arms crossed kind of waiting for this experiment to fail. Absolutely. I've been studying a lot about like Nash. Curry coming into the league when Nash was the MVP and still people were resistant to the idea of this tiny dribble shooter who was not a physical player got all his points facing up. And it's like, it's just an interesting thing that for them to trade for Shaq, I would

imagine for some people in the league in their mind, they were probably like, yeah, this was bound to happen. This was a fad. And, you know, the sun's thing, it's over. It's not going to work. I don't know. That evolution is really interesting to me. Yeah.

Also, just like, I just thought of this right now. But the fact that the warriors missed out on Dwight, Howard and that's why they went for Andre Aguadala. That's true. Yeah. It looks very different if if they end up landing Dwight, especially that version of Dwight who then

went on like was that was post-Huston, right? Yeah, it was the year after Houston. The year before they were trying to sign DeAndre Jordan and they used the amnesty clause on who they use them on Charlie Bell, I believe. Someone who was just a stupid amnesty clause just so they could give

DeAndre Jordan an offer sheet that he didn't sign. Like imagine how different NBA history would have been if that happened. There's so many sliding doors moments. It's crazy. I mean, Draymond Green's emergence was an accident. Yeah.

That wasn't the plan, you know? So a lot of things have to go right. You talk about with Nelson as well, just how, you know, those, the we believe Warriors team. I love the way you talk about small ball because it's not necessarily about playing small. It's about, you know,

finding different ways to make up for all the needs that you have on a basketball team, whether that's rebounding or shooting or defense. It's not necessarily about, you know, positions as much as it is having players who can fit together and fit every need. Like one of the things that I had never really thought about or known about was Billy Knight's Hawks. And tell us a little bit about Billy Knight and his vision. Yeah.

I almost feel a little bad bringing this up with the, with Billy and I felt like I maybe was a little hard on him, but I just thought it was such a great illustration of this positionalist thing being such a short hand is he's a GM of the Hawks from about 2002, I believe, until the mid-2000s. He's the guy who built the Joe Johnson, Josh Smith, Marvin Williams teams very slowly over time. But they were bad for a very long time. And he had this idea that like everybody should be six seven, six eight, six, six, You know, what the Raptors have now with Vision 69, he was almost the proto version of that. And he kept taking in the draft these kind of versatile, like kind of toolsy, athletic 6 to 6-9 dudes over and over and over again.

You know, he got Josh Childress, Josh Smith in 2004. He takes Marvin Williams over Chris Paul and Darren Williams in 2005. He takes Sheldon Williams over Brandon Roy in 2006. he takes, who else did he have on that team? He took a, he passed up on Mike Conley in 2007. He's constantly taking these. He trades for Joe Johnson instead of trading for a point guard. So he thought like, hey, he was quite a one time saying something like 6'8 is the perfect

height for a basketball player. But those, what he didn't understand is that he was just drafting for size. He wasn't drafting for attributes. So what he was doing was almost no better than what people were saying you have to have a center that looks like this and a power that looks like this and whatever he was just being similarly inflexible.

And the reason that the Hawks never, he also hired Mike Woodson, who was like a traditionalist coach. So like I don't know why he, he just never, they never came together. And I think people look back at Billy Knight now and sometimes say, wow, he was ahead of his time to imagine if he was around today.

But there's a big difference even between Billy Knight saying, I want only 6-8-Dos and what the Toronto Raptors are doing, where they say, yeah, we want this height, but we want attributes. We want, like Chris Boucher, for example, it's basically a spot-up shooter with like a little bit more to his game this year, right? He just looks, it doesn't look like it, but that's who he is. And so they have, even the Raptors are sort of bundled with skill sets first and size second. And what really happened in Don Nelson was maybe more of someone who understood this was it's about how it all scales up together.

It's not about having certain size and certain positions. It's about can our five players collectively feel what we need? Can we build a structure around our star that is unique to our star? Can we re-bundle things that we would already be kind of putting throughout the lineup in a very rigid way and just mix them around in a different way? And Billy Knight, the Hawks, they never, I mean, eventually they sort of got decent because you keep stinking for so long, you get good players. But, I mean, they never had enough playmaking. They never had enough shooting. They never had, you know, enough interior play.

They just sort of had a bunch of generalists. And, you know, that was the mistake that caused them to be built so slowly and to miss out on players like Chris Paul and Brandon Roy and Darren Williams and all these. other great players that they missed on. Yeah. They were just kind of redundant and only like it feels like what the problem that the Hawks had last year was where they just had a bunch of and Schenck had the same vision, right? Like he loves 6A interchangeable versatile basketball players, but versatility is a key word there, right?

Like last year they ended up just having a hodgepodge of dudes who were 6, 7 and 6 8 and they all wanted the ball in their hands. They all wanted to create out to pick and roll, right? And now, you know, with Murray it feels a little bit more balanced because he's somebody who's also going to, you know, protect the rim a little bit. And he's a great playmaker. And, you know, you can like slip hunting. Yeah.

And just like, you know, you can put Hunter into more roles where like he, you know, can do some of the things that a big man does as well. And it just feels, it just feels a little bit more balanced this year. Whereas like, yeah, just in the past, like, it was just like the, the, uh, the congruency between the modern day hawks and, uh, and those hawks was just something that definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

It felt like Schling was always trying to rebuild the warriors with Troy. of Steph and like all the other guys is and I think yeah to your point you have to build a different structure there is no warriors trade is not Steph and you can't find the guys the warriors had um before we let you go we want to kind of talk about some of the modern consequences of the spaced out era there's a bunch that I put in the dock but I was just kind of curious what your favorite favorite talking point has been so far when you say consequences what do you mean like kind of like the things that people didn't see coming just the league the league as it as it looks right now right like whether it is you know the the bucks or the cabs or the raptors with these defenses that are using height and speed and you know just to just to try to suck up a space in the NBA or just like the reimagining of the big man position with like yokech and NBA yeah yeah I mean I think the thing that's interesting is happening now I don't know what you got did you guys see that play that the Celtics had the other day where they do this thing where they roll the ball up the floor and let the clock run did you see how they I think they're playing the pistons

and they had Grant Williams almost standing in front of Jason Tatum almost like protecting him. And then a business player kind of came to the ball. And Grant Williams from like 75 feet from the floor essentially slipped what was essentially a pick and roll, took a pocket pass at half court and found a corner shooter. Did you see this play? No, I need to see this. It sounds amazing. It was I think against Detroit.

I bring that up just because one of the things that I think is interesting that's, I think it's poised to happen and it's already starting to happen is that there's no more room to mind in the half court because you have like the back court line is a cap on how far you can go. But there are ways that you can kind of extend the court in certain situations and almost think of basketball is as much a full court game and a game that's kind of not offense or defense but is just sort of in between. I've noticed a few teams this year full court pressing. I think Portland has done it.

Miami has done it. Toronto obviously has done it. Whether it's not necessarily to get a steal, but just sort of to kind of slow the advance into the four court, I think there are a lot of teams that with offensive rebounding are essentially pinning their opponent in on the baseline where they're saying, okay, we've again extended this space we can use out here. I write in the book about George Carl had this great idea like 10 years ago where he's like, let's station guys out of bounds. And let the opponents follow them so that like when we drive to the basket, there's no rim protection.

They're basically like jumping into the basket. Did the NBA immediately legislate that out? They did. Yes. Yeah. But that theory inspired, I think, a lot of the dunker spot stuff with the bucks and some of these other things that teams are doing where it's like, let's like kind of make people, let's put people further along the baseline.

And so you have to, I'm going to jam the basket and we're going to just kind of pin you in behind it. I think you're seeing a lot of that with offensive rebounding with Toronto and with Memphis and some of these other teams. It's sort of just more of a full court game in different ways. Like how you space and how you kind of, what you do on offense almost plays more into your defense than ever before. I think you might see a little bit more. I mean, even something as simple as like, you notice that out of bounce play that, at the end of games where they'll send a guy way in the back court and have him like sprint up. Like all those sorts of things are just little ways that we are trying.

We can't really extend the borders of the half court anymore, but we can do some things to make it more of a full court game. I don't know exactly what that will entail. But that's like an interesting thing to watch. And then just sort of the major consequences that the league is, I think James Herbert wrote about this for CBS sports. The league is getting taller, longer, more freakish, just at all positions,

which makes sense to me. You know, you double the playing surface. You need guys who can get whose arms cover more of it. So I think there will be this kind of arms race for arms, so to speak. And just the concept of a 3 and D player. Like that's one of those things that made a lot of sense. Nobody ever talked about that like 10 years ago. It was like five years ago.

It was like this like new age thing. and now to be a 3-and-D player is completely obsolete. Like, what does that even mean? Like, it's just one of those ideas. It's like the Roy Habert of basketball terms. You know, the interesting thing about, like, the acceptance of ideas, and that seems like that's kind of the major. I was also going to tack on that, like, the Hawks drafted Dante Smith in that range,

and I witnessed him jump over a person in a high school basketball game one time. Just a little late it go. That's a hell of a flex right there. I was not on his level. So looking at sort of like the way the NBA is today, I was going to ask you if there are any kind of paradigm shifts left. That's an interesting thing. And I think you addressed that.

But overall, like what would you say comparing the way the league was resistant to ideas? What do you think the culture of like idea acceptance is like in today's NBA? You know, it's so funny you bring this up. I do think there is universally, universally history proceeds in spikes. and you talked about the adjacent possible concept. You know, another way I think of it is there's, in one chapter, I talk about like kind of this study with Morse code

where they call it like a hierarchy of reading habits, I think is what they talked about. It was like eventually you get to a level where you are really good at reading the individual letters and then suddenly that becomes automatic and you get really good at it. And so it is like this series of like kind of level, it's like these jumps leveling off,

jump leveling off, jump leveling off. I think that in general we have come out of a jump. Like these last eight years is a jump. It's one of those spikes. And so it doesn't even really matter like how receptive people are to new ideas. History always tells us that what to use like, I was texting Seard about this, but like you're a fan of the Silicon Valley show, right? The show on HBO.

I am. Seart says she hasn't seen it all. I've seen it multiple times. Just exposing all the things I haven't seen today. So there's this guy named Darth Vader. He used to be a Jedi name. So one of the things I love about Silicon Valley is that the way that show arc goes is that you essentially realize that Gavin Belson and Richard Hendricks are essentially the same person in an inverse. Like Richard becomes Gavin and Gavin becomes like the whole show is just sort of this paradigm of like the innovator becomes the established which drops the innovator.

And it just sort of that's the thrust of the show is that's the lesson. that I think is teaching you, right? I mean, is this an accurate reading of the show? I've always believed that. I think so. I think among a lot of commentaries, yeah, I think that's one of them for sure. Yeah.

So I think the one thing I cite, too, is like three years after the Warriors break the record for three-point shooting, they're like the leaders in mid-range shooting attempts. And they're the ones being like, actually, like the raucous, you're the two extreme ones. So I think there will always be,

what often happens is when there's a spike, what becomes renegade quickly becomes the mainstream and then there's going to be another person

who comes out around and is going to do something renegate and they're going to be shunned from a different

perspective because of what mainstream is now and I think you know I don't know what that's going to look like

exactly but I think that that is maybe it happens in a more truncated timeline now because of

technology but I think that that's going to happen the NBA too like we're at the point where like

sort of the way that was retrograde retro in, or not retro, Renegade in 2014 is now everybody plays that way. Like I almost look at like the clippers

is like a team that like is so mainstream now and that they just like don't have it. They only have one center on their team. And like I look at them and I think you all may want to like kind of get bigger, you know? Like you're optimized for 2020, not now. I guess a long winded way of me saying this is that it almost doesn't matter.

I think there will be a period where like there will be another innovation. I don't think it will. will be as significant as this because there's, again, less, there's just not enough court to fill. Like, we basically doubled the court. But there will be resistance to it. There will be somebody who's willing to go the extra mile to do something nuts. And history will repeat itself.

There will be another Don Nelson. There will be another Daryl. There will be another John McFlendon. There will, you know, that's a be. And I just think it's just how innovation works. You know, and I think the NBA is no exception. That feels like a good place to leave it. By the way, this is only kind of like we talked about some of the stuff in this book.

There are so many fascinating just wormholes into periods in NBA's history that I never really knew about. And I think, I think Mike, you're just, you're so good at just being able to read the game and detail the tactical history of it in a way that's really unique. So if anybody who even enjoyed a little bit of this podcast, you will love this book. Where can we read it? Thank you. Well, you can read it in print. You can buy it on Amazon. You can go, I would love it if you went to your local bookstore and bought it.

You can buy it on bookshop.org anywhere you get your books. I think there are some libraries that have it, but you can also order the e-book or the Kindle. I would prefer the hard copy just because it's nice to read books. Good looking book. It is. It is. Buy the hard copy, folks. Buy the hard copy at your local bookstore. Engage in the tactile world, folks. Get out there. Live your life. Be present in your own life. And yeah, thank you guys for having me on. And, you know, certainly both of you are cited in the book and the reference pages for different things you've done.

So you've, in small ways, influenced a lot of the content in here. Well, I'll be looking at the index and gloating immediately after this. That's great. I wasn't going to assume anything. You're in there for the crossover video. you did. Oh, yeah. We'll have to talk ball handling a whole other time. I got a Doug Mo thing I need to send you. That's chapter 11. Check out chapter 11.

We didn't talk at all about that, but I love writing that chapter. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff, for sure. We'll have to have you back sometime. Would you ever write another book before we go? That's what I wanted to see that. Let's see how this one does. Let's see how this one does. Let's put it that way.

All right, cool. It's one of those things that sounds really awesome when you're done with it, but then you forget. it that it was hard while you're doing it. But while you're doing it, you forget how cool it is when you're done with it. So it's kind of like writing. Yeah. That sounds a lot like my miserable existence all the time.

It's like how kids always want to be adults and adults always want to be kids. It's a good one. All right. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Chris for producing. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week.