The Ringer NBA Show - Reflecting on 25 Years of NBA Evolution With Ben Taylor

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

The Ringer’s J. Kyle Mann is joined by Ben Taylor, author of ‘Thinking Basketball’ and creator of the Thinking Basketball YouTube channel to reflect back on the last 25 years of basketball, how the game has evolved since 2000, as well as the new series on Ben’s YouTube channel, "21st Century Peaks". They also discuss unique skill sets of players like Jason Kidd and James Harden while also speculating on the future of the game, including innovative offensive strategies and defensive adaptations.(00:00) Welcome to The Ringer NBA Show!(03:13) Ben’s YouTube series, "21st Century Peaks"(09:02) Reflecting on Jason Kidd’s career(20:03) Issues when discussing James Harden(28:45) Tracy McGrady’s decisive ranking(33:20) What made the 2008 Celtics team special on defense(41:00) Explaining how the Grizzlies were trying to set up their offense last season with Noah LaRoche(45:47) Are screen assists important now?(50:18) Will teams look to copy Tyrese Haliburton and the Pacers' style of offense?(01:00:40) Franz Wagner’s importance to unlocking the Magic’s full potential(01:05:29) How will the 2024-25 Thunder be remembered 20 years from now?Host: J. Kyle MannGuest: Ben TaylorProducer: Jessie LopezAdditional Production Support: Ben CruzSocial: Keith Fujimoto Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How are y'all doing? What's crack-a-laken? My name is Jay Kyle Mann, and this is the Ringer NBA show. We're coming to you with another off-season episode as the sand and the off-season hourglass slowly trickles down and disappears. Basketball's no longer. In the rear view, it's on the horizon, but it's blurry. It's not quite here yet, so that means that we have some time to do one of my favorite things, which is just to ponder the higher mysteries to put on the maester rope here, not that I'm qualified to do it, but this guy is. The guy who's on the other end of the line, one of my favorite. favorite people to talk about the higher mysteries and just whatever it is. Doesn't matter. He's the author of the book, Thinking Basketball. He's the founder of the YouTube channel Thinking Basketball. He's the host of the very successful, very fun podcast called Thinking Basketball. It's been Taylor. Good to see you, Ben. Kyle, did you write that or did you just come up with that off the top of the dome? Improvized it, man. I'm just, you bring out the passion for the art, the craft in me, Ben, and I just got excited. That was amazing. Also, probably the most form. exchange we've ever had in the six or seven years we've been podcasting together.

That was, I'm like, man, should I just get really like, clean with my presentation today? I don't know. Maybe you've set the toe. I wanted to give you your proper respect. I did have your credits written out here. So I kind of, I teed myself up on that, but like I even needed to write your credits down. And I was thinking about it. It's funny that it's funny for me to go from, I remember when you made your first video, because I noticed it, I was so face close. to the canvas on YouTube that I knew what everybody was doing at every moment, you know, when you're locked in. And I was like, what is going on here? And I saw it. I was like,

oh, this is, wow, who is this? And we've gone from there to the other day, I called Ben and it went straight to voicemail. It did one of those, like, you know the person did it. I was like, what the hell is this? And then Ben calls me back and goes, sorry, I was talking to Steve Nash. Come on. That just is a thing that happens sometimes. And I love it. Like, let's talk basketball. You're making, you're embarrassing me. Well, I just love that in this, like, you know, you get to like meet people and you get to be in proximity to people and players at times. You're like, oh, okay. Steve Nash still elicits that response for me.

I got really excited. So very excited about what you have coming with him. Don't want to spoil it. I brought Ben on because I want to talk like big picture where the league is going, where we've come from. These are always the kind of things that we gravitate towards. But I want to start here with you've been working on a series with your co-host. Cody. Great team of people over there at Thinking Basketball. Mike De La Rosa,

apparently a ball himself. But you've been doing a really cool. Mike's apparently really good. Have you heard caught wind of this too? Mike has Instagram highlight reels where he cooks people. If you haven't seen them, they exist. I don't want to be a part of that. But anyway, I'll pass to him.

I am unequivocally the worst player at this point in time on the Thinking Basketball team if there's any debate about that. Yeah, we'll have to get you guys a Drew League team just to see how that goes. But explain what you guys have been doing over there on the series that you've been doing. Well, we noticed at some point that it was the 25th year of the century. And people like to celebrate random round number years where they do historical retrospectives and create arbitrary content around it.

So instead of the, you know, we've done the greatest careers and the greatest peaks and post-merger stuff and going back in time. I mean, honestly, when we came up with the idea, I don't think we realized how much basketball has been played this century in the 25 years. I think both Cody and I thought, well, this will be our chance to talk about the lesser-discussed players, the Kyle Lowrys of the world, Al Horford, the players that didn't quite get the shine at the MVP-level discussion. And we just started doing the project that we were like, no, no, no, no, this is all wrong. There are so many good players this century that people are going to be mad. when we list the first player and they're going to be like,

what do you mean he's 25th? What do you mean there's 25 players better than this guy in the century? So the real conceit, once we start doing a project like this, Kyle, is to use the players as a vehicle to discuss concepts, to discuss changes in the game and value relative to your era and the things that are happening in a conceptual sense that go beyond just the,

classic box score or some narrative about rings or, you know, this guy never get out of the first round or something like that. So honestly, at this point, I don't like ranking players at all, but the vehicle to get into the discussion is where the value is and where the meat is. Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of amused that you, you saw that there was 25 years of basketball, but you still didn't seem to, you still were unable to wrap your mind about how much. was it just that how to just taught me through how that happened I mean where was the point where you were like

I went in looking for this thing and then this other thing presented itself to me I mean is it just you you just felt like you'd overlooked a lot of players no no no Cody wanted to do it and I said okay I was in full offseason mode and I said okay I'll start doing something

and watching historical games or whatever and then I said that's a fun idea we actually have some other ideas for sort of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the century, and we're just not going to get to too many of them because we just became completely entrenched in this series. And that moment you're asking for is like when I went to start sketching out, just not even any deep dive, just like on my phone, like, okay,

I know these 10 guys off the top. Oh, don't forget about those five guys. Oh, no, he was in the 21st century too. Then I was like, oh, my God, I think I texted Cody. And I was like, we have 38 players to discuss. Yeah. What, I mean, aside from the obvious, I think the place that people go, I mean, maybe the biggest.

And this will sort of bridge into some of the other conversations that we're going to have about where the NBA has come and where it's going. I mean, was there any kind of phenomenon that or trend that you feel like maybe you didn't index correctly for going into it and you have like recalibrated or re-appreciated? Because you're going all the way back to 2000. There was a very, very different landscape. what kind of lessons or how have you sort of felt yourself get remolded in the way that you're looking at those concepts that were going on now as they apply to winning? Well, one of the themes of the series that we keep coming back to is sort of the different ways players impact offense when they're on the court. And so kind of like the effect you might have on your team's turnovers as an example.

If you have the ball a lot, you make a ton of decisions, you kind of offload a lot of those responsibilities in many cases. And so what you'll see is you'll see in the classic box score, which we're stuck, Kyle, we're stuck in the classic box score. And I'm trying to get us beyond the classic box score at all times. You'll go check the box score and you'll be like, you mentioned Steve Nash. You'll be like, that's Steve Nash. He committed a lot of turnovers.

But then when you look at what happens when Steve Nash goes to the bench, his teammates commit more turnovers because he's not out there to take up all of those hard decisions and pressure the defense in a much more effective way where at the end of the play, you're not committing a turnover you're getting a good shot, right? So we've done that with so many different things,

but I think the big ones for me are not just turnovers, but looking at pressure at the rim and what happens to a team's shot profile at the basket when a player is on versus off the floor and then even the three point line or outside shots. These are kind of like the big areas. And I think what has helped me in terms of era stuff or something that's a little new or clearer,

I got a little more clarity, is going, all right, I know the game changed a lot between 2005 and 2015 and 2025, but if you're a player and you go out on the court and you're constantly having this signal where you're like team shot quality is spiking, that's timeless. That's literally the thing we're after when we talk about how good a basketball player is.

And so traditionally we're wired to be like, he scored 30 on 60% true shooting and he had five. The one we used in one of the episodes is like, DeMarreauze, he's like 26.6 rebound six assists. But that's so different than Steph Curry's 26.6 rebound six assists. And the only way you can really understand how different it is is to look at the whole team when they're on the court,

look at the whole team when they're off the court, look at these sub factors of how an offense attacks the defense. I was really struck by your episode where you were talking about Jason Kidd, because Jason Kidd, I feel like is... Time comes for us all, obviously, and I feel like time has come for the rhetoric around his career in an interesting way

where I think, you know, as the league pass accessibility sort of skyrocketed, was distinctly in his, like, he was a micro fracture guy, right? I mean, I feel like that was sort of the, that was sort of the Mason Dixon line in his career, if I'm not mistaken, where he just kind of became a different player. Granted, he started to shoot the ball a little better there at the end. But you all talking about him, his willingness to take shots and just what he played like and what his superpowers were.

That one thing I wanted to add on was every episode, you all do a thing where you say, like what's this guy's superpower? I kind of come at it where I almost feel like the convergence of two things is a player's superpower at times. Like I mean, you all will talk about like a player is like Shea. You all were talking about that was his balance, was his superpower, whatever it is. Like for Jason Kidd, I feel like, you know,

we talk about court mapping, just overall. You all brought up that, I think it was like a Nike, it was like that Nike Zoom commercial, whatever it was, where he has the eyes in the back of his, his head and whatever it is. I feel like kids combination of court mapping and the accuracy of his hands, like his not even with the shooting. For a lot of guys, when you talk about hand-eye coordination, I feel like you end up talking about tough shot making or movement shooting or things like that, skills that are put to the test by speed and things like that. But I feel like

kid in particular, we were joking about his assist. He has this kind of, I told you, I thought he He would be like a supercharged Alex Caruso if he played today. I'll throw that to you in a second for your comment. But I feel like that that convergence to me is his superpower. I don't always necessarily put it on like one trait rather than just like an interesting convergence of two things. I'm glad you brought this up because I think we realized each episode as we kept trying to think of superpowers that we started to almost change our idea of what had to be a superpower.

And at a certain point, I was like, the key thing that, makes these players so great. And when we say they have an outlying skill, it's really what you're talking about. It's the convergence of things. So the classic example is when people say, Steph Curry is the greatest shooter ever. And it's like, you're missing everything. If you think that summarizes Steph Curry, because it's the combination of that with his movement and his ball handling and et cetera, et cetera. And that applies in so many ways. Right. So kid can have eyes in the back of his head, but you have to combine that with something. else. And in his case, it's probably speed at his size. And, you know, so it's usually when we

get to superpowers, it's usually multiple traits with these great players when we get to this level. And to your point, it's often the intersection. It's often the combination of balance speed, size, power, skill, vision, shooting movement, whatever it is, that unlock something. And this, honestly, is like, to me, the most interesting part about basketball, maybe full stop, is all the different ways that you can do it. There's an expression all the different ways to skin the cat, but Cody has banned me from saying that. Is he a cat guy?

Is that why he's no, he's just become a feline advocate or something. And I don't blame him. It's a very old violent expression. But there's there's, there's so many different ways to do it to the point where if you were to ask me like about the future of basketball, I mean, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, some of the shooting stuff was, in this sense, lower hanging fruit. It was right there to be taken. And I wrote about it in thinking basketball to book a very long time ago.

But you and I couldn't necessarily predict the next new way to be awesome because there is really no constraint on that. It could be something that we've just never thought of. And I feel like this is part of what pushes basketball forward. Like, this guy's a great post player. Okay, so therefore the next great post player in the 60s or 70s has to do it the same way. No, it doesn't even have to be a post player. To be a good outside player.

You have to be like Michael Jordan or David Thompson. You can do it. There's just so many different ways to be great. And this is where that the kid, you know, starting with kid, he's one of the players that I was higher on through this pass, getting a better lens, getting more data. We have more data than ever, Kyle, more technology than ever. I've been doing this for years.

I have more tools than ever, more video tools, more access to coaches, more access to players. and you go through something like this and you're like, man, yeah, Jason kid couldn't shoot very well. So he may have been one of the least efficient shooters on his team. But man, when he's on the floor, everyone else shoots really well. And that's the dynamic we want to get after ultimately when we talk about like what's driving offense. And that's a totally different way to drive offense than Shaq or Steph Curry or LeBron James.

Are you hand tracking anything when you're going back? I know you're a big hand tracking guy with analytics. And obviously they're not available to a. us past a certain, I guess 2014 is sort of the advent of tracking data, the second spectrum tracking data. Synergy has some back all the way to 2005,

I think. 2005, yeah. And then, but it's spotty. I mean, a lot of times, it's, because it hadn't been fully embraced yet, how much hand tracking are you going on doing when you're watching some of these old games? I used to always hand track. So I still have my old notebook of

hand tracking that I sometimes cross-reference, but for this particular series we're doing. It's no hand-tracking. It's taking all the technology we have. And like you said, synergy goes back almost to the beginning of the century. We have play-by-play data that goes back into

the 90s. We've got cameras back to 2014. So it's just taking a lot of new information and synthesizing. Yeah. One of my favorite things I was teasing been about this was you guys get into these nerdy laughing lathers sometimes about certain

things. And They just get really wound up And I found myself laughing As I was walking my dog listening But one thing that you all talked about And I think I mentioned how I thought that like supercharged Caruso I just think In the finals in particular

I mean there was one stretch of I forget which game it was It might have been game five at Was game five in indie? I'm blanking on it But there was a game where Caruso Basically shut down the middle third of the floor Like he was like

Ed Reed. Basically, they couldn't do anything. He was obviously playing highly, highly physically. I kind of feel like kid in particular, I'm not trying to make this specifically exclusively about kid, but for the young people to listen to this show, I think you should probably go and educate yourself on younger Jason Kidd because he was such an interesting player. But I felt like he would land somewhere between a Caruso type, probably a better score. Three point efficiency and effectiveness might change who he is in today's game.

and on a spectrum in between that and a guy that when you all alluded to it on the show, I said as I was walking my dog, maybe somebody overheard me randomly say, Draymond Green really loud to myself in headphones. But I knew you were going to say that because that's kind of where my mind is. Do you think that's insane that spectrum I laid out there? Or what do you think? No, I think we have to be careful not to minimize kids' offense

for younger viewers that aren't sort of familiar with him, relative to someone like Caruso and the way Caruso plays today. Kid came into the league as an offensive first guy who had these incredible defensive skills that were just kind of there that I don't know how much they were talked about in the 90s when he was coming up and was really, really big in Cal, but left early. I think when you play on the West Coast sometimes, you don't get the East Coast media. Three point eight steals is freshman year, three point one is second year. You imagine a... I was talking about convergences, though.

I mean, that's why I think when I looked at Caruso's college stats, they have an interesting sort of parallel there where he had really high assist numbers and really high steel numbers, and it's just producing stewarding offense and also stewarding it away from the, you know, on the defensive end. Well, I think the interesting thing, what makes Draymond so unique is that he is so great defensively. So when you kind of use them as a de facto point guard or a playmaker or you run sets where he's initiating not to score necessarily but to feed the offense and make a decision, you come back on the other end.

You just get like one of the best defenders ever. Kid's a great defender, but you can't do that with a quote unquote center. You can't play kid at quote unquote center in your lineup, probably, I think. So what does that mean for like being a guard in today's game? how many guards can come into today's game and not be primary scoring threats, not have good pull-up shooting, not have... I mean, we talked about it.

He was actually a slightly better outside shooter than I think people realized because of his nickname. But what does it mean? I mean, just what does it mean if you have a prospect coming in now and you think about this throughout the year? And you can go under his high ball screen and there isn't a real threat.

The defense is going to be happy if you start launch and pull up threes because he doesn't shoot him at 34 to 37%. I think this is a, Cody on the episode said he's gone by the way of the dinosaur, this archetype, probably because of this kind of stuff. So that's probably the big question. And when you try to connect that to Caruso, Caruso is a pretty good connective tissue passer and that kind of player. But, I mean, just as you said, he's on one end of the spectrum because he doesn't,

he doesn't provide a lot of pressure on the ball offensively when he has it. initiating offense. Well, yeah, Draymond's same kind of thing. Unless Draymond's doing the Magic Johnson thing, he can do some live ball kind of manipulation, but so much of it is like, you know, going, taking this energy here and rerouting it here at a high level, right?

And Kid did have a lot of that transition stuff. I mean, you think about somebody like a Josh Giddy, granted Josh Giddy, I'm trying to think about it, but he's not the defender the kid was. Lonzo has had, Lonzo has had, he's the closest, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think Lonzo is the, And a lot of that was said around the draft, around the time.

I've always really liked Lonzo's game for that reason. And, you know, I guess just in today's game, those guys shift a little bit more from the, there is room intolerance for them to be the, to be the, as Cody was saying, like, the archa typical, archetypical in the way that they would be a primary today that archetype is, it's still out there. It's just repurposed a little bit. Is who's, who has gotten the most, who's incited the most rage? I know you're always at war with the real hooper crowd, and I'm always just sitting back either laughing

or just patting you on the back and saying it's okay or who have you been warring the most with? I think there's a group of people that have lost their mind about our assessment of James Hardin. How? How in 2025 could that be true? The data is... I don't know.

I don't know. Yeah. What do you think in particular gets misunderstood about him while we're on this peak thing? Yeah, I shouldn't say I don't know. I mean, it's clearly because he puts up a lot of points and assists. And it used to be, we used to have sort of a telescoping, I think, as a community on the slash line in the box score. So that 255 thing, right?

Like that's how we would describe players and reduce everything they did down on the court to their individual, quote-unquote, production line. I think the next stage of evolution for that, which has sort of become a trap to get stuck in, if you're a quote-unquote stats-driven kind of analytical fan or analysts, is, okay, well, let me look at something a little more polished, like his scoring rates and his efficiency, his true shooting percentage, I'll take into account his threes and his twos, and James Hardin gets to the free throw line a lot. Then the other thing that's paired commonly with this is the team's offensive ratings.

So, okay, so I look at the rockets, and they have good offensive ratings, and it's like, James Hardin is doing everything. because he has like 30 points and 10 assists and good offensive ratings. Ergo, how can James Harden be behind players that have lesser stats? Now, I'm simplifying, but I think that's where the impulse comes from. And for me, as we talked about, I thought extensively in his episode, but I guess not. I guess our mics were muted and that didn't come out. You mean to the public?

I would say I was rhetorically asking you, Ben. I wanted you to present it again, but saying people should go, Well, no, I'm just saying that. I thought you were taking a shot at me. I was like, you didn't listen, Kyle. No, no. I'm saying, I'm saying, here's the thing, Kyle. I don't like being negative about the great players.

So, so part of our show is we talk about weaknesses and contexts a ton to the point where for just about every fan base, we're a wet blanket. I mean, I don't know if you know this, but there was a period in time where Steph Curry's fan base hated me. Unthinkable. Yeah. I just want to point out that we have been a wet blanket for every single fan base probably at one point in time. And it's because we spend a good amount of time either contextualizing or trying to balance strengths and weaknesses or trying to balance good situations and bad situations. And that people can be very sensitive to that. I understand that. It's not as fun as purely championing or purely cheerleading or things like that.

And I think that's why it feels really fun when we get underdiscust, underrated players who we get to spend a lot more time explaining why they're better than, you think they are. The inverse of that is when you have players like Adrian Dantley historically who have the unbelievable stat lines and you kind of have to be the wet blanket and be like, well, I'll tell you why I don't value that stat line because I'm not focusing on that stat line. I'm focusing on all these other things. And here's what we see with all those other things. So in the case of Hardin, the biggest single thing is the difference between the regular season and the playoffs. And I don't know why at this point there's resistance to that, given that we have a lot of years of data of things being different between the regular season and the playoffs.

But as I said many times on the episode, if we were talking regular season only, I think he is one of the great regular season offensive players of the century. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. We've talked, we've joked about what if sports.com, I think, before where it's like, Dan Lee was one of those guys and just be like, that's my starting three. And you just get the raw box numbers and be like, yeah, it blew you out, 170 to 72. too. Now Harden is, the big thing for Hardin is, you talk about noisiness and statistics. Obviously, that's a, you know, a phrase that is used on all fronts, not just basketball, but it's interesting that the noise of, there is noise in the preparation, I think, that doesn't necessarily read in, the only way it really reads is when you compare playoffs regular season, right, where we talked about how Hardin leaned into this,

you know, back in 2013, 2014, we have all these things converging, like the analytics movements, the style of play of like, okay, the game's becoming a lot more three-point footwork. A lot of these things are sort of coming together to produce this style that he naturally was really good at, that he had these abilities, this ability to draw fouls in the paint, that he, that he had these tendencies that, you know, on a night-to-night basis in terms of the turnaround of your preparation, let's say you're playing San Antonio on, you know, Sunday night, and then you're going to, you're like, oh, shit, I got to start looking at film for, you know, and it's in February and you're like, we're seeing the rockets on Tuesday night.

I got to start focusing on James Harden or whatever it is. And it's like when you're in that kind of turnaround, the types of things that he did were just, and a lot of the helio guys are like this, whenever you're not looking at them in like a compact sequential situation of like, okay, he got me Tuesday. Now I got to play him again Thursday. that sort of flow of data is where you just start to like the you can the constraints just sort of come in on Harden. It's also you know super well documented um at this point so I'm not going to regret you for where you had. I thought you gave him a bunch of uh praise and I think on the on the wet

blanket thing I think whenever you're like pursuing a hierarchical hierarchy whatever of I can you say that word um a hierarchy of all the best things in one place naturally you're going to have two through comparison, it's going to happen. I mean, and some of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, well, go ahead, comment on that. Well, I was going to say this is the part of rankings at this point that I just loathe, because especially in basketball culture, there's so much sort of religiosity attached to each player or each team that even if something's, like, some of these players

that we get more complex about are really interesting players. and I don't think either Cody or myself really care where they rank at the end of the day. We're more interested in like, actually, did you know this guy that averages 50 points a game? Isn't like twice as good as a guy that averages 25 points a game? That's the thing that's interesting. But what's not fun is that, well, we're having that conversation about the two people that happen to average 50 points a game. Someone in the audience is going, this guy hates Will Chamberlain. I got to get him.

Like, it's not about Will Chamberlain. It's about the fact that Will Chamberlain happened to play this way. at a certain point in time, or James Hardin is the one that went to the Rockets and ended up giving us this like, hey, what if you just did everything on all the possessions? And then you would get all the points. But I think if there's a single stat to summarize

sort of everything we've talked about for the last half an hour and the sort of apex of this conversation, it's something along the lines of Hardin's teams at his peak when he was in Houston, his teammates' true shooting percentage when he was on the court always went up about two to three percentage points,

which is good, which is good, but the best players ever will get you over 5%. And so as an example, when we compare that to like, what happens in 2002 and 2003 with Tracy McGrady

when he's on the court versus off the court for Orlando, his teammates' true shooting percentage goes up like five and a half points. And so when you take into account the fact that Hardin is generally a little bit more efficient and McGrady can be a little less efficient, the overall team change is similar. But I want to understand Kyle like, okay, how much of that is from you taking all the shots? What effect are you having on the system?

How much easier are you making it for not only just your teammates, but different types of teammates. Teammates who cut to the rim, who get to the basket, who spot up shooters. How much easier are you making it for them? And when we stack that up, it's those kinds of numbers that I'm interested at the end of the day. Because as I said, regardless of your era and regardless of your box score stats, some guys can improve their teammates shooting percentages by four percentage points by doing it one way. And some guys can do it the other way and have totally different stats. And that's what I'm after.

What is the overall lift? Yeah. You said something in particular, but I mean, I'm not trying to make it specifically about the McGrady thing, but you all talked about him. He gets... People are shabell. shocked by the way that he was in the top 25, which I thought was really weird because I thought...

I thought it would have been the opposite. Exactly. I thought we were too... People lionize him in a really interesting way. Yes, I thought we were too low on him, and Cody reads more comments than I do. I try to not read too many comments, but, you know, it's like

this idea that people are mad about it. I'm like, well, which way are they mad? Are they mad because we're too high or too low? And that's the other thing about rankings that's so weird. You're just trying to go through and talk about the process, really, and analyze what you're seeing and share not only the extra film time that we get to put in

because we now do this all the time, but the extra data that we have. And I was kind of stunned that there are people who think Tracy. There are people who just don't think Tracy McGrady is very good. I think he's been subsumed by some of the, this efficiency mindset that I was talking about where you focus heavily on the player's individual true shooting percentage, and that's sort of that here's another way to look at it.

there are some players, and we'll get to them later in our series, but there are a lot of players who you go into the playoffs, and their true shooting percentage goes down like three percentage points, and fans go, ah, you see, played much worse. And you're like, but that's just his shots. What about his screens and his cuts and his passes and his decisions and his defense, which is half the game? And then we also have the context of those shots in a very small sample in the playoffs.

And then we have the opponent, which is different than, the regular season. So these are the things we're trying to figure out, but if you reduce the game to just how many shots someone took, you're going to fall into that trap of just, it's almost like turning it into baseball, where you think people are just taking at bats in an isolated manner, and that's what determines how well someone played basketball. Yeah. Yule brought up something interesting about his footwork in particular, before we move on, that I thought was about he had an odd finishing repertoire when he would get around the basket. And you were all, we're trying to account for what what what is up with this distance between the gracefulness of him as an athlete

and the explosive dunks big runway athlete that was a big term in the spring with the draft stuff that was going on but um and then the odd uh it wasn't quite where you all thought it would be in terms of the rim finishing and and you all were talking about that that the footwork was playing a role in that i think it's i also think it's just the era the spacing the rules to the rules of the time Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we didn't have the gather stuff. One of the most fun things about rewatching games in the 21st century is sort of the very gray ambiguous bridging of the gather step and how big of a deal that actually is for on-ball finishing skills. Because at this point, it seems that young players, they're already native. They've been trained to come in and, you know, like I think of someone like Brandon Pajamski a couple years ago. You're going to have the Euro step, the Pinoi step,

you're going to the pause step where you're decelerating. It's like Kyle Anderson pausing his steps and going to absolute zero speed with the last foot hanging in the air. And so what that means is you know in advance, you're going to be able to play a game without dribbling a basketball. Whereas the spirit of the rules 30 or 40 years ago were almost everything is about dribbling the basketball except the very end of the movement.

And there's a bridging in this sense. century where some plays are two and a half steps, some plays are three steps, some plays, some plays in some years, broadcasters are like, that's a travel. Sometimes it's called a travel. Sometimes the players argue. Sometimes the players don't argue. And then you get to the 2010s and the 2012s and start to see the gather. And then one day James Hardin's forcing the league to codify the gather by being like, no, no, no, the dribble doesn't start until you put two hands on it. And now because when I put two hands on it, then I get two steps of any, like I could jump to Mars if I had the ability.

Any direction I want to go also. Yeah. So that's a really fun thing and it jumps out, it jumps off the screen when you watch McGready because he's doing it this old way despite being like 6-9 with these huge long steps and this crazy vertical pop. And I

honestly, that might be one of the reasons why it's so many reverse layups because you combine that with the traffic and he's just got to get in there and time up. He just has to leave his feet. Yeah. He just gets to a chasm and has to jump. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, obviously, the where we came from is going to be an interesting place to start going into this now, which is where we're going. You know, finding an edge is something, you know, where are the edges?

Because in the flow of data, I feel like, you know, there have been these little milestones where people have found low hanging fruit to them or just found new ways to exploit. And you'll see people have, can you think of like an obvious edge that somebody thought of in terms of data and or scheme that like really disrupted the league back then? Because I feel like the, I feel like the analytics one gets talked about so much that we don't hear as much about during that first 25 years. Was there an edge there that really stood out to you defensively or offensively in your research? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the 08 Celtics were the team that represented sort of. a tactical counter, a tactical jump forward where it's like,

there was a period of time where the defense was ahead of the offense. In terms of shot selection, skill, who's on the court, we understand how to clog up the paint. You don't have shooters. We understand how to rotate and take powerful or valuable stuff away. The offense started to get going a little bit in the 2000s, but Tom Thibido and just this idea of like, hey, there's no more zone defense anymore.

So we're just going to constantly shrink the court, overload the side, push the ball to the sideline. All these things that became commonplace in the following years, that was a huge one that, you know, you can argue how much analytics is driving that because you have to give up something defensively. But when the Celtics put, when the Celtics put that, I mean, other teams did it, but when the Celtics really codified it and made it at the base of their defense in 2008, they had an advantage, I think, over offenses at the time. You're talking about pushing the ball towards the sideline? What specifically are you talking about just to be really clear and simple about it? Well, I think the two biggest things they did conceptually on defense were to bring extra defenders over to the ball side. So if we have a pick and roll with two guys and we try to artificially go create space by sending the other three guys to the other side of the court, now we have a lot of room to work with.

The Celtics are like, you can't do that. We're just going to bring a third defender over and park them right in the lane. and then we're going to zone up the weak side with our other two guys, and then we'll recover. And like I said, that was not a novel tactic. They weren't the first team to implement. It's not like you were watching the game, and you're like, what are you

doing? They just did it all the time. They just did it all the time, and they had it totally dialed in. And then they paired that with coverages that, again, became commonplace for defending the screen. They didn't invent it. It existed before. But if you're on one side of the court

and you're setting this ball screen, they're going to push the the ball handler to the sideline and force him to stay on the sideline. And those were probably the two biggest things. Again, just an X's and O's jump defensively. That's probably not really, like you said, we talk about the analytics side of it,

but there's stuff happening defensively as well, I think, during this period that drove the game forward. It's a arms race that just keeps, keeps escalating. It's incredible. Do you, you know, fast forwarding to now, I think I know the answer to this,

but do you still think, who do you think is ahead right now, offense or defense? I think the offense is still ahead. I think the offense is still ahead. A lot of the work we talked about this year, especially with like looking at what the thunder are doing, is how can the defense combat

some of the offensive advantages that they've created by putting more skill on the court, understanding the value of shooting, stuff like that. As an aside, it's always cracked me up back in the day. It was so hard for me to sell people at how valuable shooting was. And I'm just like, but the, it's basketball. Back in the day, when are we talking? Oh, I'm talking like 15 years ago. Okay. Yeah, 10 to 15 years ago. Before it really took hold, you would talk about like, yeah, shooting is a really important skill. And people would be like, yeah, I don't know about that. It just, it's amazing how hard it is to sell stuff. I'm so, I mean, yeah, I mean, the NBA on, you know, the T&T crew, you know, the jump shooting team.

Right. That was a major, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, you know, cartoon shaking their head moment. I mean, it's hard to imagine it before. Yeah, that's, that's funny. The TNT guys, a lot of them from the 80s and 90s, right? I mean, yes, one of the, one of the biggest things that the Bulls won six championships in the 90s, and they kind of took this stranglehold on the culture. to the point where there's still some of it in the air today.

Like, back in my day and blah, blah, blah. Well, one, the triangle in Phil Jackson emphasized spacing and try to create space for players and the right advantages based on space. It just wasn't driven by the three-pointer. But two, a key development in Michael Jordan's sort of, you know, golden arc, the hero's journey story from a X's and O's standpoint, is they got better players that could shoot off of his on-ball gravity and his ability to collapse the defense.

So it's like you go back and you watch the really early bulls and, you know, no shade on these people. But you're like, man, Brad Sellers. He's just, they're going to leave him open every time. Right. And then you change that into, oh, Horace Grant can make the jumper from 18 feet. That's kind of like his money shot. John Paxon, Craig Hodges, B.J. Armstrong.

Then Steve Kerr. That Steve Kerr guy. Yeah, he's out there. Like this was a huge theme of putting shooters around these players. So these ideas, and that's honestly part and parcel with most of the basketball history, there's some shell or germ of something that would become evolutionarily more dominant that just wasn't fully actualized or realized. So it's always funny to me when the old heads get like cranked.

They're like, like, you want shooters. You played in Phoenix. You in particular do. Yes. Well, your MVP year in Phoenix was literally, let's take more threes. Let's unlock Dan Marley. can have more space in the post and kick the ball out. So it's been there, it's been there forever in a sense.

You think Marley texted him during that time. It was like, hey, man. If I, if I were, if I were, if I were Marley, I would have just, I would have just sent him an audio note like, like an audio message and just said, hey man, and just left that hang and let him figure it out. Is that what you mean when you send me those messages? Just, hey man. I love sending an audio note.

That's one of my favorites. You know you're really my friend when I get like an impassion. when you get an impassioned audio note from me. Usually... Dave Age was on that team, man. I mean, come on. Come on. That team was full of shooters.

That 93 sons team. That 93 sons team made over 1,000 threes. They might have been the first team in NBA history to make over 1,000 threes. I'm not... Someone can look that up. Fact, yeah. We have an internet. You can look stuff up now.

We have an internet with you. We have several intranets. It's fun, though. I mean, talking about the modern thing. I mean, you go and you look. about you talked about the inkling of something that would the shell of something that would evolve and expand into something else something small and it's interesting to me that it's like sometimes it's a full-blown philosophy that didn't quite expand to the extent that it could have like

you know the sons get brought up a lot as like a touch point or the concepts with the Celtics one of the more interesting ones that got talked about this year in particular let's bring it to the present hardcore to the present here um Memphis this past year hires now that we've lost all all the young viewers of the 93 sons, yes. Well, you know, the Grizzlies, it was documented in the basketball sense that, you know, Memphis hires Noah LaRoche, this really innovative player development guy who comes in and wants to incorporate this new, you know, you made a great video about this. Coach Daniel made a really good video about this about their, well, just why don't you, why don't you go ahead and explain the basic premise of what Memphis was doing and then we can kind of jump off from there? Well, they're creating a ton of space to essentially allow players to isolate more, where the game has become, you know, if I'm in trouble, someone come and set a ball screen.

If I have the ball, someone bring up a second player, we're going to play the pick and roll game, we're going to try to create advantage with that screen. Teams have used pick and roll for a long time, but they realize, you know, over the last decade or something, that, man, what an advantage to always be able to bring up a second player to the screen and try to create these two-on-ones or four versus threes downhill or things like that. Memphis kind of zigged when everyone presagged when everyone was zinging in the sense that they will push players away from the ball to create more space. And I think that's the biggest hallmark of what they did that makes it unique.

There's some stuff about res spacing and rotations. Well, that's the most interesting part. The entire off-ball setting sort of, you know, it rotates. It's like a wheel. Yeah. I mean, like the, if your guy, well, just as an example, if your guy drives towards the right slot, like drives towards the right elbow, the guy in the right corner would, is he in the short corner or in the corner?

I think if he's in the corner usually and he's going to then cut to the baseline. Yes. And then the guy on the wing is going to cut to the corner and fill that space and that allows space for the ball. And the other thing that's doing is it's trying to mess with the help defense. So all that movement behind the play, yeah, it's a huge part of it. It's trying to take advantage of the fact that defenses have tried to catch up by saying, okay, we know you're pick and roll tricks, Luca.

We understand, like, you're going to come off. We've got to worry about the pull-up shot. We've got to worry about you getting downhill. We've got to worry about the roll pass. We've got to worry about you spraying to the shooters systematically, one pass away or skipping it to the corner. And when that is the sort of stationary position in the offense, the defense then can go, okay, we might be.

at a disadvantage, but at least we know where everyone is. Exactly. We're going to take that away from you, basically. I mentioned zoning up the weak side with two players. That's a heck of a lot harder to do when the three players behind you are moving, cutting, and screening. And so that is the other big part of the Memphis component. I'll add one more thing that's a little less like drawing X's and O's on the radio kind of

stuff. The game of basketball is an invasion sport. You're trying to get as close to the hoop as possible in most cases, right? So creating that space and asking the defense like, all right, are you going to let John Morant just play one-on-one 40 feet away? Or the guy who I thought it helped a ton was Jaron Jackson Jr. Because he would come down court and he's a big, handily against other bigs.

And he's starting to get that Yonis runway like 40, 50 feet away. And the amount of space, unless you're going to build a wall, the amount of space that you then put your defensive big man in to try to guard like 35 or 40. How's that, Kyle? You grow up one day. You want to play in the NBA. You get to 6, 10, 7 feet. You want to go to the gym. You put on some muscle. You're turning 50 pounds. You make it to the NBA. You work on your shot. And then they go, go guard this guy by yourself 40 feet away as he comes downhill. Well, I heard some NBA development coach talked about one time that there is a pretty clear line of delineation where that separates some guys.

the Evan Mobley's and the Kevin Garnett types, the Anthony Davis is who can't put together more. I think he said two lateral steps. They can't fire their hip laterally more than twice in a row. So you're asking somebody and you're positioning against like, Jarney gets in the paint and gets those little push shots, those little, yeah, that's one of his bread and butter shots. But yeah, I mean, I think you're just kind of you're putting,

I think putting bigs in, this has been a big thing. People talk a lot about, you know, scheme versatility with like what a big is able to do out there at the level of the screen. But I think in that sense, having players that can stress, you know, stress them. I mean, that's why Chet, I think, is going to be, Chet is so effective with that stuff is that he's able to beat so many other bigs. You were talking about them stylistically, screen assist, this played out will kind of jump to the ending of how this experiment went and then go forward even more. But, yeah, screen assists here. like Indiana was at 6.9 screen assist per game and Memphis was at 5.1 so pretty big gap down there at the bottom. They weren't depending on screens. But my question for you is that like is that applicable is that a full blown philosophy if there's any coaches out there they're probably like hitting the steering wheel right now. Jesus now. Is it is this a full blown philosophy or is this is this an inkling of a shell of something that could expand and be you know added to a Luke and roll pick. a Luca pick and roll

philosophy. You're creating really big. We'll find out why. But it's just something that you can apply to a star player. And if we have time, I want to talk a little bit about star player philosophy. And how to use them and things like that. Or is this something that could be applied in that sense,

if it's not a full-blown philosophy? I love that you, I love that the 50-minute mark that you think the coaches are the first people banging their steering wheel in this podcast, based on some of the things that I said. They were in before that. They were in all the way. Yeah.

The coaches were the last group we had to alienate. Sorry, is this a full-blown philosophy? Look at Cleveland. Cleveland added a lot of movement to their offense. And in fact, one of the things Cleveland did specifically in the pick and roll game, we did a really fun video in collaboration with the NBA on the NBA channel with their associate head coach Johnny Bryant talking about this. If you run the pick and roll and the ball is moving toward that side that we talked about earlier

with a guy on the wing and a guy in the corner. Cleveland right out of the gate this year was like, we're going to cut the guy on the corner baseline and we're going to slide that guy in the wing down to the corner. And we're going to do that to mess with those stationary principles, those help principles on defense. And we talked about, it became a subplot on our pod.

Like, how effective is this going to be in the playoffs when you get to see it a lot? And, you know, the jury is still out on that to some degree in terms of like how effective is it for the 2020, or 2026 version of the Cavs offense. But what we did see was other teams adopting this tactic. So to answer your question, going all the way in the other direction,

all the time, the way Memphis essentially did, might not be viable because you're leaning, you become predictable. You lean too much into one thing, and then you can find a counter to plug it up. And what you really want, which I think is what made the Golden State dynasty so effective,

is you want built-in counters, You want reads, read and react, options on the play, and say, well, if the defense takes this away, we go in this direction. And that's what's interesting about just this Memphis concept in general. If you use it a little bit here and here and there, hey, we're not going to screen, we're going to play in space, or we're going to move or we're going to cut. We're going to cut multiple players when they used to stand still.

That's when I think we're going to see something that will stick going forward. The only reason why these things don't stick for a long time, Kyle, is because if the defense gets to a place where they just learn how to really take it away and defend it super well, then you just see offenses run less and less and less because they start searching for better ways to create an advantage. But I do think that's where we're going to see it. I do think we're going to see more movement that we've continued to see away from the ball and these kinds of cuts to mess with tags, help defense. And then I really like having some possessions where, hey, instead of just every time we set a ball screen,

like we're going to space or play off ball differently, and that's what the Pacers did. It's a shame we've made it 54 minutes and haven't talked about the Pacers because they were one of the great offensive teams in league history. They were one of the great stories in league history. They're one of the great runs in league history, and they embody a lot of these principles offensively

for countering these kinds of things. And maybe, to me, the finals were a possible sneak preview of what basketball might look more like in three to five years. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, I'm glad you said, that. I mean, that's what you're talking about? I mean, what are you? Well, you said, I'm going to think I'm going to

you up for where you're going with this. What do you mean? What am I talking about? Oh, it's all just, I'm trying to set the table for the master here. I'm trying to let Mozart play here. You said something to me in the finals. Boris Dio is not here. I don't see him anywhere. You said something to me in the finals when we were talking about Halliburton, and you said he's trying to be a 0.5 guard, not a

And this is well documented. His style of play, his eagerness to, willingness and eagerness, both, to get off the ball quickly to sort of feed into, I was thinking of as, you know, you're obviously looking to create an advantage. And Tyrese is

like, I'm going to create an advantage at the beginning of this rope. There's a, there's a, there's a slack and I'm going to pass it to you. And, you know, it just kind of goes on down the line. I was, I thought about this when I was writing down. I was sitting outside of this, uh, this, uh, this coffee shop one day and lightning struck a light pole near where I was sitting. It was loud as fuck.

Seriously? Yes. And I watched, I was in position to watch this string of light poles down the street on Reckin Ridge Street in Louisville. There's a reference, the local reference for the Louisville people. And it just went down the street. And I just watched the energy start there and kind of go down. And I was kind of like, the most fun offenses are the ones that go that way,

where they're like, okay, we got this offense. and it goes this direction. Is there something about the Pacers play in that sense in the fact that they have a 0.5 primary? Is that what it is? Or is there something else unique about them other than, I mean, they also just play hard. I think that was pretty funny how Carlisle was talking about.

That's a separate thing. We'll get to that. Does it have something to do with them having a 0.5 primary? Or is it something else? There's a great podcast with Caitlin Cooper. Yeah. And Carlisle talking about random office. And so I'll start with that plug in the sense that

I think the jury is probably out with a sample size of one. I don't think we can give a strong answer with just the Pacers team because there's a couple different things going on there. One of them is the personnel that they have, their system, and this ability to quote-unquote play randomly where it's not a set, they're getting down, and they're saying, okay, here's some principles we want to follow. And those principles are like a lot of ghost-stores.

screens or blur screens coming up to the ball and acting like you're going to set a screen and then streaking across the middle of the court. The thing that we talked about in the big video we did on their offense in the playoffs was how much they use the space between like the foul line and say the logo at half court. You know, we've heard of about the logo three where Trey Young's feet are on the edge of the logo. That 15 foot band of space is there, it's like air traffic control. They're just running guys back and forth across there and playing horizontally. It's like a half pipe. It's like a, it seriously is like a half pipe that they jump on to like a skateboarder. And they're like, you know, it's, but no, I mean, it's, uh, every, but everything's live too. That's another thing. If everything's live and you're utilizing that space on the court, then you become is in. I mean, that, but that's where something. Yeah. But that's where the point five part comes in. Because when you're connected to the whole system like that, having a guy at the, the centralized, you know, the guy bringing it up more often than not. able to say, okay, here's

the start of a smaller advantage that could cascade into a bigger advantage. And just constantly playing like that at incredible pace, you know, Knicks fans were tortured by T.J. McConnell coming down the wing and running these

quick little hurry up two man and three men and go, run the baseline, come back across the leg. How does T.J. McConnell score 12 points in a row in three minutes when he does this. And it's like, because this is, this is the offense. This is what happens.

And if you don't react. John Mullaney, everybody's live. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think it was the Knicks game. There was one of the Knicks games in the playoffs in Madison Square Garden, maybe game one or game two, where he comes down. They run the same set as they like to do, really hurry up, get, getting a ball out of the basket or off a make, off a miss, I mean.

And like, Andrew Neesmith just sprints right in front of him. And it's like, what the hell is he doing? Is he going to set a script? green, is he cutting to the corner? And what that does is it creates a moment of indecision for the defense. And if the defenders miscommunicate, boom, there's your micro advantage

that you've created. And now if you have enough space, if no one comes and helps, T.J. is going to get a layup or he's going to get into the paint. If someone comes and helps, then you kick it to the next guy. And if he's got the three, he takes it. If not, he's attacking a bigger, now a more scrambled defense. And to your

point, there's been some great offenses like this, you know, the beautiful game spurs of 2014, they didn't create the biggest advantage ever off the first screen. But all they needed to do off the first screen was create a small advantage and then start moving the ball around the court, spacing everyone. Similar concept in terms of getting that that bolt of lightning hitting that tower outside your coffee shop and just, oh, let's see how you got to have the right poles to keep it. Yeah, I mean, exactly. And I was just kind of fascinated though when you were talking about this.

This is something that I kind of look at the frontier where basketball could go. And I think it kind of touches on criticizing things that are already good and just in the sense of could they become greater even historically great because I think OKC is an interesting example of this where if they

let's start with Shea. So She's the MVP of the league, obviously. Another thing that Carlisle said on that pod that got me thinking about this is about how many catching hole players there are in the league now and he mentioned how Kobe was still such a huge influence. That's another pod. Maybe I'll have to do another away game on your pod so we can do another one of our future players things that we love to do. But I think in terms of style, you look at him and you all mention how

he plays so much like Embed. And it's like, Shea has such a down, an implied downhill game that you can forgive him holding the ball and staying in the middle because even though he's not spraying the ball with the first advantage and getting off it quickly and seeing the energy, build momentum as it goes around OKC's offense. He's so incredible at staying in that spot, getting off it when he needs to. You know, great finisher, obviously, great with his mid-range game,

but also the foul, you know, generating the fouls. He and Embed kind of have these things in common where I'm like, you're smiling already, but I mean, for OKC in particular, during that finals, I got thinking about this. I was talking to Rob Mahoney about this.

When it happened, I was like, the fact that they have a player like Jailen Williams who could mature into a full-blown first-action guy who could create an advantage on his own, you can see a world where they could repurpose their fucking MVP in a way that is going to level him up because they have the luxury of this other guy that could create a huge advantage and go in a more 0.5 direction. But I'm just kind of wondering how much the league is going to adopt that, Ben, when you have these guys that have such implied downhill pressure, like your Janus's, your Zions, your Lukas,

is this something that you see becoming ubiquitous, or what did you mean by that when you were talking about the league going this direction? Did I say the league's going in that direction? That was a lot. Well, you said that you could see it go. You did say that. Check the tape. Jesse said that.

All right. If you said, I said it, I believe you. Comment, I guess just kind of weigh in on what you're thinking about. Yeah. In terms of how primaries are used, because I think that's a fascinating thing. Well, I mean, coming off the Pacers offense and going to the Thunder offense is totally different offense. Yeah.

And of course, sometimes I think fans forget that offenses are built around the ingredients that you have. You can't cook a fish stew if someone brings home beef. It's just not going to happen no matter what you do to the recipe. I guess maybe now you can do some and Tyrese can't

and Tyrese can't choose to play like Shea. He plays like that because of it. Yeah, he plays more like Curry, honestly. Yeah. He just not even close. So the lineups that they usually construct and the talent that they have and Shea's talent. I think it makes

sense that they've structured the offense the way they have. That's important to say as a starter, because I think the answer to your question, Kyle, is probably something like, it depends on the other skills that the players have. And this is why Cody and I spend so much time talking about diversity of

skill and on-ball and off-ball. Ironically, like, you mentioned Kobe and some people talking about his influence, I think people do the same thing with Curry. They think, well, I should shoot from 40 feet. And it's like, well, if you really were to imitate him, you should become like an endurance athlete and just learn how to run. You study Jerry Rice, right? Like, that would be the way

to mimic him. And similarly with Kobe, Kobe gets known, I mean, certainly out here in L.A., like for decades when you throw a little thing in the trash can, people yell Kobe, which I always thought was really funny because they always miss. I was like, when I moved here, I didn't quite get it because it's very hard for people in offices to make a little rolled up pieces of paper. But my point is, they mimic Kobe's shooting a lot. And it's like, the thing to mimic with Kobe is like how active he was off ball and the geometry of his game and the fact that he actually had a lot of gravity, he just didn't stand around.

So that's the answer to your Shay question. You can only do that if the player, A, is willing to do that. And B, has those skills. I don't, it's certainly not a knock. to say that the floor has been set up to activate Shea's best assets as an offensive player. But I do think we have to be, and this is where we're the wet blanket, like we have to be sober and realize you can't just assume that that means then you could run Shea off 20 baseline actions a game and cripple the defense that way or that he can,

you know, run into movement threes constantly. And he's a he's a catch and shoot weapon 28 feet away or something like that. The player has to have skills that allow you to then say, okay, Jalen Williams can't run around and do all these things. But Jalyn Williams is actually really good with the ball as well. So maybe we can start to push the offense forward and get something even more if She's off ball more and J. Dub is running more pick and roll. I mean, I'm just being hypothetical at this point,

but that's the direction you'd have to go. I postulated to you, though, that the magic were another one that came to mind for me where I was like, is there a world where, you know, if he has to do, you're sorry checking your habit. I mean, if Franz moves into it more of a credible on ball role, I could see a world, a world where the magic, the highest version of the magic's offense, what do you think about them? You're just like, all right, let's get shooting and spacing around Palo. But there's so much writing on whether or not Franz can make that leap, because if you think

about if he's an advantage drawing player, granted it hinges on Palo be unable to. to shoot catch and shoot threes and things like that and playing off the ball, which he hasn't really done at a time. But if he's able to do that and then you bring in this incredible downhill force of Palo, maybe instead of at like the 18th second mark on the shot clock, you bring it in at the 11 second. Everything happens so quickly in the NBA. It sounds like no time at all.

But these skilled players, that's another thing that gets underrated. You watch college and you watch the NBA. It's wild what they do with the time. But I mean, you made me watch college and I was the first, I was like, what are they doing? What's going on? There's a lot of kicking it. It's like the difference

in a movie in the 70s and a movie now. You're just like, why is this movie three hours? Don't do this. We don't need this. So, no,

but I just think that's an interesting example, but you're absolutely right because, I mean, Tatum's another guy, though. I mean, there's a lot of players that I think could be optimized in this way.

But you've got to have the luxury of having the right personnel, like you were saying. We have to go, so I don't want to get in too much trouble. But if you're suggesting that the magic, centralize and run more stuff through Franz Wagner.

I 100% endorse this. Okay. I didn't know that was one of your stances. All right, man. Well, other than that, I mean, yet with the edges, though, I mean, that was the other thing that I was thinking. Let's see, the other thing was the homogene in the NBA. We were kind of hitting on that. We hit with the styles and things like that.

The emulative ripple I have written down here. The Kobe thing just fascinated me. The fact that he said that. I was doing the math because the average age in the league right now is 26. half. And I was asking a friend of mine that coaches, I was like, when can you realistically implement and emulate an NBA player? And I felt like it was in that like 13 to 16, 17 age range, where you're like big enough and strong enough. And I was like, okay, Kobe was in the league for, last time he's in the league was 2016. Like, everything, you know, I'm just doing the,

and, but he's had such like an interesting lasting impact, even after he retired, right? in a way that players don't normally. I just felt like the bell resonated for a little longer than it normally. Well, maybe culturally, but I feel like... That's what drives it, man. It's not basketball. It's always culturally, because if they're emulating, if they're emulating the best basketball thing,

people will be just watching Yokic all the time or just emulating stuff. Yeah, yeah, but the thing with Kobe specifically is, I mean, he left the game right at the precipice of the most radical change we've seen since at least the shock clock, if not earlier. So that's the counteracting force where even with someone like Jason Tatum, I mean, I remember Kobe did the detail video on him. And then he just started taking a bunch of long twos for like the next two weeks. Right.

And so it's like that style is there's so many other forces influencing skill and style and things like that that you're not necessarily going to get. Players aren't even really given the green light. Only a select number of stars are given the green light to say, go give us that third level in the mid-range. Go take hard shots. Go explore the studio space, if you will. I always said to be careful because I know I'll get some kind of like DM or something saying,

I hate Kobe. It's totally not that. It's more what you're talking about. Is that like that mindset, the way that it isn't, and the way that you're saying that about him leaving the game, I don't know if I'd really thought a ton about that, is that there is a sort of lionization of him that is juxtaposed with the way the league change where people can like see that line of like, man, I like that better than I like what we're

doing now or just this, you know, mono-e-mono at the slot. That's more basketball than what we're seeing now. Yeah. Any other kind of broad thoughts about the, about the edges or anything like that? That's it. I've gotten myself in enough trouble for one day. The coaches are hitting, the coaches were hitting this steering wheel earlier in this episode that you got the magic fans. There's a lot. I don't think if the magic got in this position where they had two superstars and they were both kind of setting each other up. I mean, I don't think they're going to be mad about that.

If their path to success, if they get to success and it, and, you know, Palo is in a different role, I think they just want to get to success. You know, I don't know that the magic are just like, it has to be Palo. I think they just want to win. Yeah. Oh, last thing I want to ask you about defense and then we'll go. You mentioned how the 20, 24,

25, Thunder, this is more of a future looking forward thing, kind of thing to. They were next door neighbors with the O4 Pistons in terms of relative defensive rating per 100, as you said. Right next door to them was the 64 Celtics. Those teams relative to their... Huh?

That's a good company, yeah. Well, relative to their era, you know, those teams were dominant in similar ways. But they were, you mentioned how they were radically different in their process. 20 years from now, you know, that Pistons team

was 21 years ago. 21 years from now, how do you envision if I forced you to make a prediction, Ben, How do you see the team, the next dominant defensive team, 21 years from now being radically different from the one we have now? Ooh. Radically different? Because this one's radically different than the Pistons.

I mean, rules are going to drive it, most likely, right? I mean, that'd be the place to start if they change to that extent. Yep. Well, rules are definitely going to be one of the factors. The other big factor is going to be the offensive strategies that continue to move forward in the arms race we mentioned. So with that said, I think you're going to see

Oklahoma City's horizontal components and the speed components, but I would imagine that you also probably need length and size and maybe it's too hard to do with really smaller players or maybe the players get smaller. I don't know. One of the secrets to Oklahoma City's success, it was the first video all year we did on them

back in November, October, or whatever at the beginning of the year was, these guys are listed at 6-2, 6-3, 6-4, but they all have seven-foot wingspants. It's ridiculous. So you get the best of both worlds because you get a combination of incredible speed in these smaller, agile bodies,

horizontal length, which is what you want. Gap closing. Yeah. Yep, gap closing, exactly. And then you get enough verticality from, I mean, from all of them in a sense, Jalen Williams is a really good rib-protecter. for his size and his position. Lou Dort has a little bit of it.

Alex Caruso has a little bit of it. Shea has some of it. And if you can put the lineups where they put an actual rim protector on the backstop, Chet Holmgren or Isaiah Hartenstein, those were the lineups that had started to put up the cartoonish defensive numbers. So, yeah, it's hard to really look 20 years in the future

and say, will it be some big tactical change? My guess is we're going to see more hybrid zone, man, kind of stuff where they're bleeding together. So it's not a pure zone, but it's not a pure man. And I also think the other thing that's coming 20 years in the future is what I guess I'll just describe as disguised coverages. So in football, over the years, you know, you come out of the huddle, so it's a different sport, but you want to disguise what you're doing.

You want to make it look like a blitz when it's a zone or vice versa. And I think basketball hasn't tapped into that where defensively. Because dummy action on offense is very much a thing. But here's what happens defensively. There's a free throw, and the coach on the sideline yells, you know, zone. And then everyone goes in zone. And if the offensive players aren't paying attention, they come down the court and they go, ah, they're in zone.

And there's like five seconds where they're like, ah, we're going to, we've got to set up our zone offense. And then the second time down, they just saw the zone. So they know it's a zone. And they know it's a zone every time from then on out until they destroy the zone. And then the coach is like, we've had enough zone for those four or six. or eight possessions. But if you can have different zones, different rules, one-two traps, all kinds of different stuff, and you just are disguising these and you have signals or you start in a possession in a way it looks like a zone and it's a man, that element of psychological

confusion I think has not been tapped into with defenses. And I would expect to see that in a cutting-edge defense in 15 or 20 years. Well, I told you, I think there's going to be a rebound back the other direction where I think we're going to have playmaking screeners. That's what like I think we're going to have guys who are so intuitive off ball that are going to be able to process those things at a high level granted on like a Draymond level or I mean, I don't know. I mean we already have kind of the like the one first pass, whatever it is, this triggers us to go back to this. I guess that's sort of disguising it.

You see some of that stuff at the college level. But yeah, it's all, yeah, all right. Well, Ben, I've taken up enough of your time. go over and check out the 20 it's 21st century peaks right is that what you are calling 21st century peaks yes yes in addition to all the other great video work that ben is doing on his channel and on the MBA's official channel you do you have a are you allowed to speak of the project that I alluded to and I mentioned Steve Nash or do you want to keep that a secret it's not a secret anymore what you let you without my signage have just let the cat out of

the back we will have a watch along as part of our historical watchalong series with Steve commenting on the game we're watching on. It'll be, yes, it'll be fun. And he said some things that blew your mind that you told me about. So that's all very excited. Steve Nash. My mind has been blown. That's why any any complaints about this podcast appearance, you can blame on that. Bonafide genius, Steve Nash on the court. Ben, thank you for, thanks for coming, man. Appreciate it. Thanks, Kyle. It's always fun.