The Ringer NBA Show - The Rockets' Reboot, the Lakers' Turmoil, and Repositioning Basketball As International Soccer | Group Chat

Episode Date: May 29, 2019

We sit down ahead of the NBA Finals to go through some of the news that has broken between the end of the Eastern Conference Finals and now. First, do the Rockets need to hit the reset button on their core if they want to win the title (2:45)? Then, the deluge of Lakers turmoil seems to be never ending, but will it ultimately trickle off if they go star-hunting this offseason (22:00)? Finally, we share our observations on NBA free agency and rumblings about a midseason tournament that have us thinking about the ways that basketball is starting to mirror soccer (37:40). Hosts: Justin Verrier and Chris Ryan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Liz Kelly. Fresh off of Talk the Thrones, the Ringer is introducing a new live Twitter after show covering season two of HBO's Big Little Lies. Immediately after each episode, the Ringer's Amanda Dobbins and ESPN's Mina Kimes will be going live to give their initial reactions and break down everything we saw in the episode. And to kick us off, there will be a special season two preview airing on Friday, June 7th at 12 p.m. Pacific. So join Amanda and Mina for Big Little Live every Sunday on Twitter. Basketball is very good. Kevon Looney is a max player. The Lakers should hire Ernie Grunfeld.

Kauai should sign with the Warriors. Basketball is very good. Hello and welcome to the Ringer NBA show. I am Justin Verrier. We got a great show for you tonight from the hit movie Booksmart. Chris Ryan is here. It's funny you should bring up movies because I was just thinking I'm wearing, people may see this in their breakouts, but they can't see it now.

I'm wearing a basketball as very good t-shirt right now. Great merch. The shirt I was wearing kind of washed me out a little bit. And have you ever seen that movie PCU? Yeah. I used to love this movie. Remember when Jeremy Piffin goes up to John Favre and he's like, so you're going to wear the shirt of the band,

you're going to see tonight to the concert of the bands? And he's like, don't be that guy. I feel like that's what I'm doing by wearing the podcast that I'm on t-shirt. Right. I watched that movie at a formative age. So I still live by that whole idea. Like anytime I see- Don't wear the shirt of the band.

Yeah. I will probably still reference that because I still think that's a cool thing. Yeah. That would actually be really funny if you were like a beat guy for the Sixers and you were just like wearing Sixers gear all the time.

I wonder if they do that. It is definitely frowned upon, but I have definitely seen people do things like that. Okay. And I definitely judge them very harshly for that. It's too bad you're no longer a Pelicans beat guy because you could wear a that's all folks t-shirt. I just have those anyway

because I have a vast collection of Disneyland T's. You and Looney Tunes. Let's get into it, man. Is Looney Tunes Disney? No. No, but that's all folks is, isn't that Porky Pig? And that's Warner Brothers, yeah. Bobby? Bobby? Yeah? Bobby has a mic. Yes, that is correct.

Chris is right, the guy who hosts the TV and movies podcast. He's got it. The IP. All right, Bobby is also here. We're going to see how long I make it before I have to take off my top shirt because it's quite warm in the studio. So that's something to track at home if you're playing along. We're going to talk a little bit about free agency because there's been plenty of NBA finals content on the ringer.com.

Darry has already taken off his top shirt and gotten to work. There you can go. That's how the pros do it right there. Let's start with the Rockets. They are officially open them for business. According to Adrian Wozianowski, Woj dropped a story on ESPN today saying the Rockets are undergoing

a dramatic initiative with hopes of reshaping the team into a championship contender. Everybody is on the table that includes sort of James Hardin but it doesn't seem like that's probable, probably not the best idea. I thought it was notable that in the actual Woad's report,

he described it as the possibility of trading all NBA guard James Harden is believed to be extremely limited, which is not the same thing as when hell freezes over or, you know, absolutely not. Yeah, it's not a hard no. Now, maybe that's just information maintenance where you're like, well, I don't want everybody else on the team to feel bad. I mean, I don't understand why you wouldn't necessarily say,

yeah, I guess if New Orleans was like, would you guys like Zion and Anthony Davis for James Hardin? They'd probably say yes. Right. But yeah, that was an interesting element to Woja's report. Look, this has been a fascinating week and a half.

So I fancy myself a bit of a, not quite a Rockets whisperer, but a Rocket's listener. A couple years ago when they signed, when they traded for CP3, and that had come after Darrell Mori had given his, we have to raise our risk profile interview and ESPM.

And by process of elimination, I was like, I think he's talking about Chris Paul. Like, I think he's talking about making a move like that. I even wrote like a thing about it. And about a week and a half ago, or about, yeah, about a week ago, the Rockets began a purge of their assistant coaching staff, including James Hardin's long time,

basically personal coach, Errolin. And they got rid of Jeff Bedzelek, who was the architect of their defense and a couple of other guys. And there seems to be right now a little bit of, like, I don't know this for sure, but it just, by all appearances, looks to be like a little bit of a three-way tug of war.

Between the owner, Tillman Frida, Darry, the journal manager, and the coached Mike Dantone, and I guess even, like, on the side, the star players of the Rockets. Right. The coaching purge reportedly was specifically a result of the tensions between Mori and Dan Tony, right?

Because it seems like, based on the reports, that Mori would have been fined, letting Mike Dantone go, but ownership came over the top and opted into or agreed to opt into Mike Dantonie's option year for this coming season. Yes. And even though Daryl has been rather complimentary of Mike and as recently as I think last summer was like, we would love for Mike to just be here for as long as he wants to coach. And it seemed like in a way, they were settling into an almost San Antonio-ish level of stability.

Like we have our Tim Duncan and James Hardin. We have our Greg Popovich and Mike Dantone. We're going to constantly be moving pieces around these guys to try and create a championship team here in the Hardin Prime window. And then, you know, Tillman gets kind of a little bit more involved. It sounds like he went over the top, like you said, to give Dan Tony this to pick up his option. And Dan Tony's going into a lame,

he's going into a lame duck season with none of his lieutenants. And we had rumors. yesterday from Shams reported that Ty Lou was being looked at as like the associate head coach job, the top assistant job. He's also being looked at by New Orleans. So you've got all this stuff happening. And then this Wode report comes out that essentially puts a for sale site on Chris Paul.

Right. And I want to talk about like what they could do and what are some of the options out there. Should they want to move a guy like Chris Paul, Klincapella, worst case James Hardin. I think the cynical perspective, the reading the tea leaves, which we love to do here, I see this as just a message. I don't know to who, but it does seem like they're out there saying

more specifically that everybody's available. We want to shake things up. You don't put out a story and you don't feed Woj's information unless you want it to be known that this isn't going to be it. You see who calls. Yeah.

There's that. But I wonder if you throw in James Hardin because you don't want to upset Chris Paul too much in case he ends up coming back, Klinkepella. But you want, everyone to know that like this wasn't acceptable and perhaps you want ownership to know like

I have I still have the power to do this I could do these various things so I don't know I wonder how much they can shake things up because if you look at some of the key pieces they have in order to kind of like change the guts of this whole team let's say that James Hardin they're not going to trade him because I don't know how you can ever find anything like approximating his value it literally would have to be something like Davis or Zion yeah I mean and now he probably has a lot of miles on his on his legs at this point he plays a very laborer intensive style. So I think he probably will age worse than maybe we even expect. I think he's 29 right now. But Chris Paul, one of the biggest worst contracts in the NBA right now, three years,

124 million left. And Clincapella, who is a good player, an above average good player, who in the regular season is versatile enough to guard big men and still play a little bit more out in the perimeter. As we saw in the postseason, you can't really play him that much. And, And as we're seeing across the league with the Warriors specifically and what they're doing with the center rotation with Kavana Looney basically like on a rookie contract, he's springing whatever, you can, you want to, if you're going to pinch pennies, it's going to be at the center position. Yeah, it's, it's interesting that this story is happening now as we're in the midst of all this creative tactical thinking, which is an extension of the creative tactical thinking we've been

seeing over the last four or five, six years. Which the rockets have bred more than any more than the rockets. the Rockets of Bread, but never seems to actually inform people's actual roster building decisions in the beginning of the season. So we're almost seeing like while we are in the midst of we're going to see some wild smallball lineups in the finals over the next two weeks, you know, are teams really taking the lessons that they learn? If you feel like you're the Rockets and you're within touching distance of going to the finals,

game 6th this season, game 7 last season, same Warriors team, same Warriors problems, all those. this year without Durant, I guess, in the elimination game. Like, do you really want to undo what you've done here? And where you had this Gordon, Capella, Tucker, Hardin, Paul, core, and you've shown that you can basically build a bench on the fly by finding guys more or less off the street to play in Dantone's system and to play Mori Ball and to be effective?

I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting to watch some of this big men thought going on where it's like, okay, well, next year, you wouldn't want to trade Capella because he's on this affordable contract and he's 25 and you could only get better. But maybe he's hit his ceiling as a finals caliber player. I think there's just the chasm between regular season and playoff basketball and what you want from your roster and how you approach just your game planning is just wider than ever before. Yeah. I mean, the Warriors Rocket Series in particular was an example of how you just like everyone who cannot do like the one little thing and

most importantly, shooting, is going to get played off the floor at some point. Capella, who is, by all accounts, everything you'd want in a prototypical

2019 center. He is big, but he can still run the floor. He creates vertical like vertical spacing. And spacing, as we know, is just like the name of the game in the NBA right now.

But even he cannot stay on the floor. I think it's also interesting that, yes, they have been able to show that they can almost create role players on the floor, a lot of the guys that we saw in that Western Conference semifinal series

were just guys they picked it off the street and they did just as well as some of the guys from last year, all of those guys are free agents. So it's one thing to go out there and like hit gold, but as we saw going into the season, Mori isn't without his faults. He tried a few things

and they didn't work out. And I do wonder if that's possible in general and if people are going to try to recreate what he just did because he showed that there are these undervalued assets just hanging around. So I guess what I'm basically trying to say is them trying to do what they did this season

will be much harder next season. Absolutely. So is he getting ahead of it once again and saying, well, actually we need to do something completely different? Yeah, I mean, this is sort of the hard part about being directly, having the warriors directly in your path is that the warriors are actually, you can't duplicate that.

There's no duplication for the, series of lucky breaks that they got in terms of Steph's injuries, finding Clay and Dre out of the lottery or at least like, you know, finding undervalued guys like Clay and Dre, and then the spike happening when you can get Durant and Durant being in the mindset of, I want to go to basketball heaven, right? Right. So we just did this whole thing, the whole back and forth on the site about Durant and Kauai, and we'll get to that later on the podcast. But that's not a replicable model to follow. You can't. I mean, like, it's cool that the,

The Hawks are sort of like, yeah, we're resized. I get what they're doing. I get the qualities that they're trying to emphasize. But the flip side of that is sometimes when I look at the Rockets roster, I'm like, this is just Lob City Part 2. This is a maxed out starter heavy lineup with a bunch of journeymen on the bench. And a Chris Paul led lineup can win you 50 to 60 games, but has limits. It's bleak.

I mean, tell me I'm wrong, right? that you basically sub in Hardin for a much better Blake Griffin and frankly more durable but still like has some of the issues with like over reliance and you're basically like dependent on this one player executing your entire offense and then you've got all the other stuff that goes along with Chris Paul I think Hardin is better than Blake ever was

and that's probably the difference there but you're right I mean but we've seen how far that gets you Clint is essentially the modern DJ where he is a lob machine and that's all you get from it. Gordon's a more useful two-way player probably than JJ. It's not an exact thing, but in so much as this team is now completely committed without blowing it up,

is committed to a roster where they're like, this is exactly how far we get. Well, I think the Warriors and Kevin Durant's decision is interesting to bring up in context to the Rockets because if Kevin Durant is no longer there, the window is elongated a little bit more for the Rockets because then the Warriors, Well, that's the other question.

So you have that one game six where you got perhaps the best opportunity possible, where Steph Curry did not score a single point in the first half, and you still lost that game. And so now I'm left wondering, well, is that just another outlier situation?

Is that just another version of 0 for 27? And should they not worry about that and just keep going along the same path? On the other hand, as you kind of said, the warriors are doing what the rockets want to do even better. Like, even at the Rockets best,

they're in that small ball lineup with PJ Tucker and the Warriors, on the other hand, have Dremond Green doing that, and if Dremont is going to stay, like, slim and active

and not getting technicals. Even if he only decides to do that in March. Yeah. So, but I do think if you want to keep this team together, let's say that Chris Paul, you cannot trade.

Okay. Because if you want to go through the options, it's very limited. It's literally, like, either a poor return or it's, it's offering the Lakers a consolation prize for missing out

Haley just wrote about this on the site. It's a consolation prize for missing out on maybe any of the big free agents and you just basically say like Paul for Coosmo or whatever it is. Right, because the Lakers have cap space and they could effectively punt their cap space and just except Chris Paul.

Probably make LeBron happy, although who knows, you know? Right, not when Chris Paul isn't around for like half of the games and can't do what he wanted. Right. The only ones I could come up with that were even in the realm of possibility

were Paul for Blake Griffin if you really want to bring Lob City thing together. I mean it would come down to... Does Paul have a no trade? No. No, because you have to have a like four years of service for the same team, I think it is. I see. Okay. And I don't think Blake does

either, although he signed that contract. So that's complicated. But let's say that all those don't matter. Those two are traded straight out for each other. I'm kind of into it. You're into it? I mean, the Pistons, like, what do the Pistons need? I don't know, like, what that team, like, would help that team be any better or worse, considering the contract crunch.

I think they just need people to go to the gym and they're kind of, I have no idea what the plan is there, but I don't think the last three years of Chris Paul at at 45 million or wherever he's going to be at in that last season. Right. Is, you just keep like, grab up. They want a point guard. They almost traded for Mike Conley. Do you have any other ideas for him? The only one I came up with was Paul for Otto Porter. because the bulls are out there hunting for a point guard.

But it seems like they found something with Porter on the wing toward the end of last season. So I don't know why you do that. Porter's a lot younger. And even though he's way overpaid, he's still a serviceable player and he's the type of player that every team wants. I find it fascinating. I don't know.

I don't know. And also, you know, we go back, you start to get into a question where I think when Hardin was traded from the Rockets, from the Thunder to the Rockets all those years ago and began this journey, there was a little bit of a, you know, Houston sees this huge potential in a guy that the Thunder, or maybe if not undervaluing, are clearly like seeing him as extra to, as the third option outside of Durant and Westbrook, which in retrospect, obviously, pairing Durant and Hardin in Oklahoma City

probably would have led to a championship. Yeah. And I say that as a Westbrook fan. But Hardin has not been remarked upon as like an unhappy start. partially because he has always been basically the culprit. Like any failures he's had, it's kind of been drawn back to him, whether it's like lack of effort on defense,

lack of good conditioning. It's hard to really point at him over this last season. I mean, he literally carried that team by himself for the opening few months of the season and didn't really dip off that hard in the playoffs. I don't think. Did you think so? No, I mean, there were some games where it seemed like he wasn't as effective, but then like he got poked in, like he almost had his eye poked out.

Yeah, right. I mean, I don't know. Maybe you couldn't see. I have no idea. So the idea is at the end of the semifinal series with the Warriors, he said, I know what needs to change. You know, something paraphrasing, but he said basically that. I don't, we still don't know what that is.

Yeah. And the only response kind of we've seen from the rockets to that is to get rid of the guy who he has worked with, I think since he was at Arizona State and definitely in Oklahoma. Irverland. So I don't know anything about why Irv Rowland was dismissed and I don't know anything why they got rid of Bedselik who they begged to come out of retirement last year. It's interesting that we've come to this point and it'll be a fascinating summer because I think also a lot of these moves

that the Rockets could make are dependent on tons of other things happening. Like the Lakers striking out in free agency makes them more interested. I mean, that being said, Rob Polinka could just be like, I want him. You know, like, I don't know. But if you're a rational Lakers would probably, like, wait to see if they could get Butler, Leonard, Clay, anybody before they went in and paid off the end of Chris Paul's career here. Yeah. Before we get to the Lakers, which we're going to talk about, I do want to talk about Klincapella really quickly.

Oh, sure. I think like we look at Chris Paul and say that he's the problem. And it did seem like based on some of the reports that trickled out over the weekend, that there was some tension. I think it was an athletic report that there was tension between Hardin and Paul. Yeah, especially during game six, apparently. Shams reported that. I don't think, as we kind of just covered, I don't think there's anything you could do with Paul.

I think you just eat the contract at this point in time. And if you can maybe get some team that's desperate, like a Detroit situation, like what Detroit did with the Clippers and gave them basically B-level players and a couple draft picks, you do that every time. I wonder if Capella is just as complicated to trade at this point. I think in some senses, I think he's their best asset. And in others, I think like he's just as problematic in a trade. Because who in the NBA, as we just discussed, needs a rim runner.

Right. So who is going to openly want a center making that much? Because the rockets, if we're saying, need to take this next step. They need to bring in a loony type who they just find on the street, like what they did with Austin Rivers, essentially, to soak up center minutes so they can get to the point where. They have all this, like, this wing heavy team with PJ Tucker at the center and all this other stuff. I think actually, if they figure that out, I think they're fine. If they figure out what to do with Capella. If they figure out what to do with Capella and then they really increase their wing down.

Yeah. And don't you think, though, at the end of July, when we find out who the Knicks get, we find out who the Lakers get, we find out if the MAVs add anybody, they can do something with that? They can find somebody who's just like Capella is such an upgrade from the, the zero that we have in the front court right now that we'll work with you here. The question is, are the rockets doing a soft reset or are they trying to build to make a run at the finals again?

If they're making a run at the finals again, if they're not doing a soft reset, if they don't think they need to cut like the found, redo the foundation here and keep build a new house around Hardin, then I kind of just think they should run it back. Yeah, I think what they have clearly works. And at the very least,

the Warriors will be a diminished version of what they have been in years past. They will be, there is an opening there. And like if you're going to have a team built around James Hardin and if you can't do anything with Chris Paul, those guys aren't getting any younger. I mean, 2934, I think is what their ages are. I think you have to go for the now. I do think something as simple as trading Capella for like a Torian prince and Mason Plumley's expiring contract. I don't, I don't think Prince helps them that much.

But I think those are the type of players if they just get that around them and then. So you think what, so why not? why not deal Gordon then? Wouldn't Gordon be more attractive? Gordon, perhaps. I know he's in the last year. But he's an expiring and he's also older. I think like a team like the Hawks,

you could trade something perhaps not as valuable long term for something that helps you down the road. And Capella is the only piece on the rockets that has any sort of like long-term runway. So a team like the Hawks, who just needs to make it to the playoffs, they have a different like trajectory

in perspective. guy like Capella really fills out around John Collins, who's not much of a defender, and all of a sudden you have this nice young core that, hey, maybe we make the playoffs next year. Maybe we get farther than we ever imagine. And they have those two picks, so, yeah. Okay, so we'll see.

So I stepped on your beautiful transition, but we will... Let's talk about the Lakers. Let's talk about the Lakers. Because this is another question of, like, where are the Lakers at in terms of harsh rebuild, soft reset, star hunting, role player building. No, but you know what I'm saying?

No, that's great. Because that's the same question. They offered Tailu a job and they tied it to LeBron's contract. They were like it's three years because that's how many more years LeBron has. That's obviously what they are viewing

the next three years of this Lakers of the Lakers. As the LeBron Lakers, we did everything we had to do to get him here. We've gone through all of this. We're not hiring some coach for five years just because he wants it.

This is the team. So that to me indicates it's all in right now, which obviously they would love to be all in if anybody would take their money, but no one so far has answered the phone call. I wonder whether or not they're making a similar mistake, though, whether they should try to be like, hey, we have the guy. Let's make smart decisions around him rather than lose our minds trying to get big names. Right. I think the Likers issue is more that everyone in the organization hates the people who are running it. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that's the other thing is that the, like, the Lakers are tearing themselves apart.

So, right. So ESPN dropped the story. It's funny because this is not the first story. And while it provided some colorful details and almost just re-enhanced, like, our understanding of what a mess, everything there is. So Baxter Holmes were a story. Had a lot of colorful anecdotes. But the message was essentially everything that you kind of, like, expected or, like, assumed was happening. that front office kind of was. It seemed like Magid Johnson didn't really know what he was doing.

And at some point, it was called a fearmonger. Yeah. So the guy who... Sounds like an unpleasant work environment. It's one of those stories where you usually see a behind-the-scenes thing like this and you can kind of sense from reading it lightly where the sourcing is coming from. Oh, totally. And everybody in this Lakers story looks so bad that I have no idea who's the sources. Now, I think the sources were probably not a lot of the top people. Sure, obviously, yeah. Because a lot of it was made that these are coaching sources, and clearly the coaching staff that has now been thrown out,

doesn't have any reason to hold back on what was going on. Polinka, Johnson, Jeannie. Well, I thought it was really interesting that Stephen A stuck up for Kobe Bryant and the sanctity of his reputation. And it's totally, like, Kobe Bryant has never been an unnamed source in any stories throughout his entire career. That has never happened. He has never leaked information to a report.

throughout his bank fault. Yes. Yeah. Everything is in house. Yeah. I mean, at this point, there was probably just so much information out there that it was going to happen eventually. And I think some people were probably just saving their own skin.

Yeah. And meanwhile, you know, and I thought that the little anecdote about Rich Paul going up to Adam Silver and being like Luke Walt, I don't like Luke Walton as a coach here basically was just like and then Adam Silver corroborated that today. Oh, did he? Yeah. I didn't see that. Yeah.

He's like, yeah, I think he just wanted to sort of say it out loud. And I was like, what are we doing here? I like, I like the idea

that these people are having the same sort of like shoot the shit conversations about like what should teams do that we are right now. Yeah.

Like Adam Silver just has takes about like Chris Paul. He's like, you think Chris Paul's done? You're in the silver mine with Adam Silver. Yeah.

Thinking, uh, I think of, I think of Kwaish leave Toronto. Yeah. Why am I? I don't know why it's making that sound

macho man, Randy Savage. Yeah. But that was my idea. Adam Silver is a sports talk radio host. Yeah, it's on the Mad Dog Network. Well, let me ask you this. Before we get on to the Lakers,

what was like, who came out the worst in this story? It's really hard to say, I think Polanka probably. Probably. I think Polenka because there's just not a, like, even the Linda Rambus stuff was like, there was a line in there where it's like, Linda Rambis is actually pretty jazzed about being thought of as like the hand of the king here.

Right. There was no counter narrative to, Rob. There was no like four GMs being like, I've never had a problem with Rob. It was like they told Magic he was going to stab him in the back. He got stabbed him in the back. And now nobody knows if Rob can pull them out of the spin. Linda is currently at the Ivy right now. Just sipping my ties like fuck yeah. Go, yeah. I know. Go Lickers. No, yeah. I mean, and it's not like Jeannie has anybody to answer to. Like there was the story ended on a section about how like Jeannie is kind of tarnishing her father's reputation. and everything he built. But who does Jeannie have to answer to? Yeah. Other than like Adam Silver

and it's like, he can't really do anything. She owns the team. I thought that that was sort of, that felt a little bit more magic base because magic was the one who was just like, you know, if Jeannie wants to sell,

I'll be the first in line to buy and, you know, all that. I mean, this is their only business. This is a family business. Is the story, they're not getting sold. Yeah. That's not happening. It's also probably a cash machine. Absolutely.

Because of the only good. Yeah. They're just incredibly popular regardless of how, like, just terrible they've been in the best. If anything, I almost feel like the torturedness of the fan base is like increased the passion. I mean, the PALS. Like if they were Portland for the last five years, I think that way. Like now, instead they're like, yeah, but in three years we're going to get these guys. I think a lot of organizations are just as screwed up.

It's just that more people care about the Lakers. We are all more plugged in. And now they have like five or six or 10 beat writers following everybody around and asking anybody who will listen. Like, hey, did you hear anything? It's a beehive, man. It's way more interesting when Magic Johnson, one of the greatest players of all time, is being mean to people than it is like David Griffin.

Yes. Who's anonymous to a large portion of the fan bases. So all this being said, the thing I really wanted to ask you about was as we go into today, so it's Wednesday, and I think today it was reported that Anthony Davis was going to meet with David Griffin today. I don't know whether that was the first step in reconciliation

or the last step in, no, I'm really serious. trade me. I'm not resigning here. I don't care if you guys got Zion Williamson. And some reports that Gentry, Alvin Gentry, the coach of the Pelicans, is particularly enamored with the Lakers Corps, with a young package that the Lakers it offers. That would be Ball, Ingram,

Kuzma, I believe. And pairing, putting those guys together with Holiday and Zion, I think he's a playoff team, probably. Yeah. Depending on, you know, Ingram's health, Bonzo's health. Kuzma whether or not he wants to play I guess all of those guys wanting to go play in New Orleans jelling Zion being as good as

we think he can be in his first year all that stuff but I think that there is a legitimate case for that Pelicans team being a playoff team Oh yeah and if they get the number four pick as well thrown in there I think that's a pretty good Oh yeah yeah And it doesn't really like Limit Zion at all you could do whatever

you want in the front court you pair them with the center Also you could then if you want you can reroute Engram or ball You know like you could maybe you could maybe say we'll decide where Lanzo's going to go and we'll we'll reap the benefits of that. Yeah, I don't disagree with Gentry. I think a lot of them fit. And in particular,

Lonzo, I'm trying to remember, but it seems like Gentry when I was down there in New Orleans is pretty head-glowing praise for the way Lanzo plays because he plays exactly how Gentry has played his entire life as an NBA head coach, which is pushing the pace and getting everyone else involved. And Drew Holiday has effectively moved off ball. And so you want more of a traditional point.

they've tried other guys like a Tim Frazier, like Alfred Payton, Rajjan Rondo. So those, they all fit. But we wrote about this in our NBA rumormonger live blog,

which is continuously updating until God knows where... Until our eyes fall out of our heads. Yeah. I think there's a few things, like a few caveats to this sort of dribble of information. I think the biggest one is that

it clearly benefits the Pelicans to keep the Lakers involved as a suitor for Anthony Davis. Yeah. I think the narrative had just swung too wildly in one direction. direction. And if you're the Pelicans, maybe you don't want to trade for the Lakers, whether it's because of their players or because of like hurt feelings that happened as a result of what

happened at the trade deadline. But if that possibility is out there, I mean, it definitely makes the Celtics think twice about putting Jason Tatum on the table. It makes the Knicks think twice about putting that number three pick on the table. It's just, there's no reason you want to shut down. I mean, it's the same situation, but it's negotiating from a place of strength versus a place of weakness. And I think if I was David Griffin and I was talking to Anthony Davis today, I'd probably say, like, look, like,

I would love you for you to give this a fair chance. Play with Zion. See what it's like. New administration, new medical team, new attitude. Gail wants this team to be everything it can be. New Orleans loves you. There would be no better story than you saying, like, I'm committed to New Orleans.

If not, give me the benefit of the doubt. Don't go walk out of this room be like, I still want to be traded. And I will work in earnest to find the best deal for New Orleans. Because I'll tell you what, and we're going to talk about this in a few minutes, it's one-year rental season. It's definitely like, I think the market for Davis is going to be crazier now than it was at the All-Star break.

Because I think teams are looking and they're saying, man, maybe we can put together something on the fly that can make the finals. I think that's a good point. And David Griffin made a big point of when he got hired to suggest that he, he has a good working relationship with Rich Paul. I think the instant interpretation of that was like, oh, maybe they'll bring Anthony Davis back. And I'm sure he would love that.

And I'm sure the Pelicans would, like, there's no way they can approximate the same value of an Anthony Davis that they can in any of these trade packages. Anthony Davis, Zion Drew Holliday is one of the best teams in the league. But having a good working relationship could also mean that they'll just work together in order to get Davis what he wants and to make sure the Pelicans don't end up with just Jalen Brown and Marcus Smart in a draft pick. I don't think Clutch is going to stop signing players. Yeah, they have Dears Garland!

Who's already showing up in Instagram photos with LeBron James? I think that David Griffin knows the day is long. And it's like, I got to make sure that even if this is a huge setback for the organization to lose its franchise player, probably its best player ever, if not the second best player next to Chris Paul. Or is I.

Or is I. How are the Hurricanes? even for as much of a setback as that would be, to completely cancel out my relationship with Clutch at this point in NBA history is idiotic. So we can work something out. And I don't believe that they will hold onto Davis until the trade deadline. I definitely support

and I think it's a good maneuver to suggest to everyone out there that they are willing to do so. But I don't know what happens when they get to the buzzer on February, whatever it is next year when the trade deadline hits. and they have to trade Davis lest they end up with nothing. Like that's not going to happen.

I don't think so either. When you have the potential for like fringe all-stars like Ingram and Tatum and all these other guys. I guess you could make the case that you gave it your best shot and wound up with something in return versus we gave him a full other season somewhere else to have like success outside of New Orleans. Right.

And as we've seen some of these guys just sway based on the most recent events. and so there could be a possibility where he plays next to Zion, him and Drew have a good relationship. They win a bunch of games to start the season. It's like, hey, I actually like this. This is not bad. They go like 10 and 2 to start the year. Like, it'll get hot.

I like hitting the Jimmy Johns down the street. Like, this is all working out for us. That's a good place to talk about our next thing. We're going to talk a little bit about football and its relation to the NBA and some of these free agents and how they're kind of ushering in this new story age. So we're going to take a quick break, and we will be right back. Today's episode of the Ringer NBA show is brought to you by Draft Kings. After a long and grueling regular season, the basketball finals are finally tipping off this week.

We get to see whether or not Kauai is actually the reincarnation of Michael Jordan as he takes on the Golden State Warriors. Not single-handedly, he's got an incredible supporting cast with Kassal, Lowry, Seacum. But what we've seen from Kauai over the last couple weeks has been one of the most remarkable. individual performances in playoffs history, and he is playing one of the most remarkable teams in playoffs history or an NBA history, the Golden State Warriors, who with or without Durant are pretty amazing. And they are going for their third straight title at Draft Kings.

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The game inside the game eligibility restrictions apply. See DraftKings.com for details. Today's episode of The Ringer NBA show is brought to you by NHTSA. I'm not going very far. I'm in a rush. It's too uncomfortable. Sometimes I just forget. Don't kid yourself.

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I don't know what they call us that. Who calls us that? Bobby. Okay. That's what happened last week when you weren't around. Bobby was just going off the chain. I had to cut out so much of what Bobby said in the podcast. You kept looking over at me, expecting me to answer a question that sharks had no idea what you were

talking about. My favorite thing... Like, what do you eat at the airport? He's looking at Bobby and seeing the fear in his eyes that he has to come up with something because I'm just literally like lobbing anything in his direction. Right, Bobby? Right. Also, I have to turn my talk back up.

It's a whole big thing. I do like the button. Having to hit a button before you like have to talk, it's like a power move. You should think about a career in AM radio. Soundboard? I'm not that far off, man. All right, let's talk about free agency and soccer and some other stuff that Chris and I wrote about on the ringer.com today. It's called a rational conversation. Maybe you've heard of it.

Yeah, we've done a few of them. They're all a little bit tortured. They're all like, I went and looked back at them and they're all like a rational conversation about the future of sports. And they're all like a little bit over a lot. But inside these discussions, Justin and I often will just kind of like happen upon a couple of things happen. where we're like, this kind of feels like it's an idea. It's like a thing that's happening, maybe across basketball, but maybe also like across sports in general. So we were talking about the jumping off point was the idea that both NBA finals teams

could be losing their best players in about a month so that the Warriors could be losing Durant with all due to Steph Curry and that the Raptors could be losing Quile Leonard. And how weird that was. how weird it is that NBA finalist teams would be worried about their best players walking. And I started thinking a little bit more about it and it kind of just feels more and more like the transactional nature of the NBA

is reminding me more and more the way European football works, European soccer. Which is, if you don't know, as a transfer system. So essentially, if Justin was working at another website and I really liked Justin's writing, I could go to that website and say, like, what's it going to cost

to basically buy Justin's services from you. Max or nothing. Now, obviously they were not in the world in which, like, you know, Joe Jacob can just splash money at New Orleans and buy Anthony Davis. Like, that's not Real Madrid. That's what, but that is what Real Madrid would do, right? But the bigger thing I'm talking about is the way in which players

decide when it's time to move on from a situation. Now, it's a little bit harder to understand the ins and outs and the kind of details of what happens in soccer transactions, because as Brian Curtis wrote about on the ringer today, the English Premier League and European soccer in general is a little bit more opaque. There's not a lot of player availability. The gossip you get is almost entirely anonymously sourced, although clearly briefed by agents or whatever.

Agents are huge in soccer. They get fees based on orchestrating these transfers. Imagine that. But players tend to view their careers as like in cycles. So I have a cycle at Barcelona. This is Namar I'm talking about. Namar went from Brazil to Barcelona. It's a controversial transfer.

His dad was involved. There were some weird payments going on. Barsa had probably one of the best teams of all time when Namar was at his peak, the Suarez messy Namar team. They won the treble. They won the double the next year. And then things got a little stale. And Namar decided he wanted to go to PSG,

Paris-Satjerman, which is one of the three. richest teams in the world, and they paid him an insane amount of money, and they pay them, I think, a billion euros a week as his wages. They weren't very good, right? Is that my under? They were, they had been bought by the Qatari investment fund. So it's like the, basically the, the investment arm of the Qatari government. And they have unlimited wealth, essentially. So very quickly, they were able to ramp up that team. Now, there's this thing in Europe called financial fair play where you're only supposed to spend the money. Essentially, you're, supposed to spend the money that you make, not just some benevolent billionaires like,

here, take it all. But there are ways around that. Yeah, I was going to say, how do you police that? Yeah. But the point being is that Namar left one of the great sides in soccer history to start a new chapter. And typically in the NBA, you look at Durant, you look at LeBron. That stuff happens, but it has some kind of like understandable narrative behind it. Like Durant wants to play in a better basketball situation. LeBron thinks he can only win titles away from Cleveland because of the dysfunction and he wants to have a new experience. Then he comes back to Cleveland because of unfinished business and then he goes out to L.A. for the last chapter, right? Like, we can track that. But with

Kauai, with Durant, with Kyrie, I feel like it's getting a little bit harder to parse it. Yeah, it's more muddled. And it's more, it's very interesting. But I feel like it's harder to kind of project what is going to happen for better or for worse because a guy like Kevin Durant who made a pretty well articulated case as to why he was doing what he was doing three years ago is now kind of like well you could just keep winning finals probably if you stayed in it's it's hard to imagine a team beating the wars at least in the next two seasons if you stay in Golden State which used to be the ultimate goal yeah and it would make sense you open the new stadium you you prove that the Warriors are the greatest team of all time.

You win five titles. Right. But it seems more likely than not that he will go somewhere else, likely somewhere, nowhere near as good as Golden State basketball-wise. Right. I think for a while there was a clarity of motivations, or at the very least, we wanted our stars to pursue the same thing, and they seemed to get that.

Yeah. I mean, I brought up that, like, there seemed to be a Michael Jordan architect, not only the type of players, but in terms of how single-minded all the players were about not only winning titles, but winning more titles than anybody else. It was a chase, and everybody was in on the chase.

Kobe best represented that idea, and he was in terms of popularity, probably the successor to Jordan. Yeah. And LeBron, who grew up in the Kobe NBA, when he went to Miami, yeah, he changed the paradigm in terms of how teams are built, the league at large,

and yet he was still after multiple championships. He had the famous quote, not one, not two, not three. Yeah. The whole idea was for him to be on the same level with Jordan. Clearly, years later, we are still comparing him to Jordan and probably the back half of his career from now until when he stops, whenever that is, it will be a race against Jordan.

Yeah. It just seems like there's been, perhaps there's just like so much distance from that idea. Maybe it's just like things cycling, but it just seems like today's players just aren't as consumed by that. So, yes, they want to win, but they also have other motivations, which is like it's healthier and it's totally fine. But it is a departure from what we have all known to be the case with these guys. Yeah. And I think that, you know, with regards to European soccer, there's a lot of different avenues for success.

So you can win the league in Italy for three years in a row or four years in a row, however many times Paul Pogbo won it with Juventus in Italy. And then you can be like, I'm ready for a different challenge. Like I'm ready to leave Italy and go somewhere else. And that you play in a different league. You play for Manchester United. You play in England. All this stuff happens. But it feels a little bit different because you're basically saying,

I'm no longer competing for Syria and the Copa del Italia or whatever. I'm going to compete for the Premier League and the FAA Cup and then also the Champions League with a different challenge. That's not the case for basketball. There's only one trophy. And we're going to probably talk about the idea. that's an idea that Adam Silver is clearly thinking about. And we can talk about that a little bit.

But in basketball, there's only this one trophy. And, you know, maybe winning it changes you. Maybe knowing what it feels like to win the finals, changes your relationship to that being the be all and end all of your playing career. And maybe Kyrie and Durant and LeBron have arrived at a place in different ways where they're like, that's important.

And I'll have to deal with a lot of, of shit if I don't win it. But for me, I'd rather live in New York, or I'd rather just not be in Boston, or I'd rather not play in Cleveland for the rest of my life. I'd rather live in Brentwood. And there are all these different kind of, I just think that that's a really interesting wave. Now, the thing I thought was fascinating that you said in our rational conversation was Kauai. He is the absolute opposite of Durant and Kyrie in terms of like, he's not online at all. he's not liking or or getting anybody's comments or anything. He's just doing exactly what they hired him to do.

And he stole my leave. Yeah. There's a clarity there where it's almost transparent that this was probably a one-year partnership. This was a cold business agreement, not some chase for some higher power, as we were saying with LeBron, who wanted to win the big one for his hometown team,

not for Durant trying to reach basketball Nirvana by sacrificing isolation opportunities for moving the ball and playing just bringing his game to another level. He went there because they traded him and he was going to do the best

he was going to work to the best of his ability for as long as he was there. And pretty quickly we found it in the season that it's all but assumed that he will leave and we'll go to the Clippers. And I know that's not something that Toronto fans want to hear

and they will constantly get in my mentions and say that that's we don't know that yet, but I mean, the clippers certainly have operated as if this is assumed and it is going to happen. Yeah. It almost creates clarity. Like, you don't have to worry about, well, what if he's here for this one season, he's going to do his best job and then he's going to move on. And it's worked out. And I don't know.

I wonder if it's also partly because Kauai is so standoffish with the media, because he's just not a celebrity. See, I'm reading it in a different way now, though. I read him in a different way. Last year with the Spurs, I think the conventional wisdom was like, look at this clown show. Like he's got Uncle Dennis. Right, right, right.

He's got an eight, his other representative doesn't rep anybody else. Like they're trying to force their way out of the most stable organization in the league after that organization has earmarked him as the, you know, as the next in line for a legacy that includes Tim Duncan and manager nobly and David Robinson and all this. and he's throwing it all away.

And they traded him to Toronto. And through everything, he has just kind of hit all these marks, including basically turning into Michael Jordan over the last six weeks. And when it's gotten seriously emotional out there, and he hits that game winner against the Sixers, or he does what he does against the Bucks in game seven,

and people are prompting him and being like, so does this make you want to stay? Do you love it here? is this amazing? He's just like, well, this is a cool city. Right. And this is an incredible experience. Those stickers are cool.

He's not getting goaded into the things that so many players wind up doing. That's how Kyrie winds up in front of a bunch of season ticket holders being like, I want to be in Boston for a long time. And then three months later being like, the fucking world is flat. And I hate all the kids. You know, and this is how you kind of go on this yo-yo ride. Kauai has kind of just sidestep that. He's like, you think I'm boring.

I actually answer all of your questions, honestly. Well, I think that's what brings me back to the whole celebrity idea. I think, like, the fact that he played in San Antonio, which is one of the smallest media markets in the country, even though they have been successful, like, I don't think we ever learn much about them. The PR staff there is very protective over, like, access and all these other things. Unlike even Kyrie played in Cleveland, but they were functionally one of the biggest teams in all of sports for the past couple of years. So we know all the little bits and pieces of Kyrie's personality. And so we've built up this one of the biggest. of information, we didn't know anything about Kauai, which is why it was so surprising when he wanted out and why Uncle Dennis became such a side show because this guy all of a sudden was talking to Woge and feeding information to reporters and it's like, who is this guy? Like, I do wonder if part of that is that we just weren't all that interested in him yet. And even in Toronto, like, I can't speak for how much of a celebrity he is locally outside of those like stickers that say that like, hey, if you stay, you could eat for free.

at Tim Hortons or wherever you want to go. But in America, in the U.S., like, I think he's still largely anonymous. I think that's partly his own doing. I think that's probably because he is in Canada and we just don't have as much exposure. Yeah, and I know that there was some chatter about, like, part of the reason why he was maybe pushing for the San Antonio thing, which obviously was largely based around a disagreement about his medical treatment and the Spurs assessment of his injury versus his own and the second opinions he was getting versus, like, like how he should be managed and the trust that broke down there. There was also chatter at the time that they just felt like his endorsements were not going to be satisfactory.

I think he also signed. I can't remember whether or not the extension that the one that he signed that was like five year 90 or whatever the first time, whether that was like a little bit of a hometown discount and there were some bad bad feelings over that after a while. Do you do you remember that at all? I can't remember the time. So I'm not telling tales out of school. I just can't remember if it was kind of like, you know what? you got him kind of cheap now.

And now we also can't make that money back with endorsements or whatever because we're in San Antonio and nobody knows that this guy is. Look, I mean, I think most people would agree he's the best basketball player on the planet all around. Right now? Yeah. He has been. All around. I mean, like, there are better, better scorers.

There are guys who can do more highlight-level stuff. But I've watched him destroy the minds of like Ben Simmons and. And Janus in some regards. The stat about him guarding Janus and the net reading was, I usually don't go nuts for that kind of stuff. That was awe-inspiring. Yeah, the only one close is probably Davis. And as we've seen, like, it's tougher for a center to make as much of an impact as a wing in a clutch, a clutch crunchine situation. So, yeah, he has very few peers in that regard.

But the, I mean, the endorsement thing is interesting. I mean, to the point about him not being celebrity, he is a new balance guy. I think that has a, it's a signpost for how we view these kind of stars. And I do wonder, especially in light of what we were talking about with EPL and all the other stuff, like how much that is becoming a factor and how teams are moving, because we were talking about this briefly, it does feel like the influence of shoe companies manifests more in soccer than even basketball. And it's pretty omnipresent.

It's kind of more, it's almost more like college hoops where teams are sponsored by Adidas or Nike, or New Balance or a couple of other places. Do the guys that they get, do they have to wear that equipment? It's different for different guys. I think their kits are sponsored. I think that the shoes are sponsored usually. I don't know.

Like, I think that Nike is Barsa, but Messi's Adidas. There's something like that, but it's not as big as, it's not as big of a deal as it is. because they don't do a lot of press in Europe. Those guys, like, Messi doesn't talk to people. Like, that's what Curtis wrote about.

Like, there's not a lot of interaction. Like, it's way a little bit more behind the scenes there, but, you know, they want to be on the cover of FIFA, and they want to be the global brand ambassador for Gillette, and they want to be the face of the Royal Bank of Scotland or whatever. Like, they get big endorsements. And typically, you get a better shot at that if you're at Arsenal or Manchester United

than if you're at West Ham or Everton, you know, smaller club. So yeah, it does matter, but I don't know if it has like the one to one ratio. Also, personally, I just think that sneaker culture is more part of the fabric of like a larger American pop culture than cleats are in sportswear is for soccer. The other bit about soccer that I did want to talk about was from this Mark Stein newsletter that came out yesterday. So obviously Justin and I and everybody at the Ringer have been trudging along on the playoffs and we've had highs and lows watching it, like in terms of

boredom and entertainment varying levels. But something that Stein talked to Silver about was the idea of introducing like basically a lead cup. Stern Cup. Yeah, the Stern Cup. In England they have two domestic cups that they play for.

One's the league cup, which is for just the teams that are in the top few divisions of English football. And then there's the FAA Cup where like you can have a hub team that plays on Sundays, but it's like the U.S. Open. You can try and qualify for the AFA Cup.

Does basketball need another trophy? Does basketball need some other layer of excitement? Because I think that, I think it would be great. I think I'm 100% in because you can tell the, there's just not enough of interest for 90% of the fan bases. Like, you're not going to win the title and you're not going to sign a free agent.

So you can either take a, tank to get Zion or sit on your hands. Yeah. I mean, the conversation as recently as a few years ago, the dominant one was like, do they need to play this many games? And I think that's still something we talk about, but perhaps not as often, if only because there's just not much you could do when owners have 82 games of revenue, they're not going to scale back to 62 if there's no way to recreate that sort of kind of cash generation. When I see something like this, it's like, why not? The only real reason and Silver kind of hits on this is because of tradition.

It's just not something that traditionally American sports have done. But it makes a lot of sense because the few things that we've been discussing about lately are, yeah, there are a lot of dead zones in the season. I mean, post-deadline, like, was there really any sort of game that stood out or any sort of, like, maybe a few guys changing teams? There was actually, like, I think post-deadline, my favorite game was a Thunderblazers game that I think Paul George went off in in March. And just imagine if that was part of some sort of like secondary tournament. But there's just way too big of a parting of the seas that happens then where it's like half the teams are just basically shutting it down if they're out of playoff contention. The NBA's version of relegation is really that fight to get the eighth seed, which is usually a fight to just get your head kicked in by the one seed.

I would personally like to see the first round go back to best of five. I think that could add offer like, A, you'd get through it faster, and B, it would offer like the slight chance that an 8C could go on a heater and beat the one seed. Again, you have to come up with the added revenue. Right. A couple games. I mean, would you, yeah, I guess that's true.

The one thing that's kind of cool about the way they do the FAA Cup in England or a lot of these league cups is that for the opening rounds, like basically the kids play. Like you basically would have your bench playing Now, I don't know necessarily whether or not that would defeat the purpose of introducing something other than the Larry O'Brien trophy to compete for as if, like, well, you're basically watching Zyre Smith and T.J. McConnell compete for it instead of Ben Simmons and Joel Embed. But there are different ways to do it. I do think that basketball has risen to its prominence in American culture right now. Yes, largely because of the players, but also because of its willingness to be open and a little bit more adaptable to the changing times. And that's something that Silver talks about a lot in Stein's piece, which is like, I don't want to be the last guy here.

Basically, I mean, he doesn't say this, but it's like, I don't want to be baseball. Yeah. I don't want to be here being like, well, this is just the way we've done it since after the Civil War. So that's how baseball is played. And people don't want to watch guys stand around on a mound for a minute and a half. They want to see action. They want to see stuff happen. Right.

And I don't know what you say to, a lot of NBA fans out there when they're just like kind of out of the running way too early in the season. You don't even get like a Kansas City Royals in basketball. You don't get some team that put together a miracle season and makes a run.

That really rarely ever happens in the NBA. The playoff teams are usually the playoff teams. Yeah. And as you mentioned, I think Silver has been progressive and while he has to adhere to his bosses who are the owners, I think you've seen on the margins, things start to loosen up. And this is like a good sign

that they're at the very least thinking about these sort of problems. I do wonder if you could just plop a tournament in there and the only benefit would to win some cup that we don't know what the value of it is. There would have to be some sort of incentive. $10 million in salary cap space. That'd be good. I also wonder if draft pick compensation.

So if we're so concerned that the worst teams are gaining the biggest advantage in terms of lottery odds, even though they have flattened them to the point where in this past lottery, it seemed to really shoo. shaking things up. I do wonder if what if lottery odds were dictated by a tournament. So yeah, if you're the Spurs and you have been just a model organization for years, regardless of like what frontier players you have leading your team each year, but you are still succeeding, there should be some reward for that. And so while maybe the Warriors only get richer,

I think there are trickle-down benefits that would perhaps chill tanking in a way that even this current system does because as Roger Sherman wrote for us right after the lottery happened, they're still going to be taking happening is probably just a few spots higher. It would take a while for any kind of league cup

no matter what the incentive was to compete in it to develop any kind of like resonance with probably with teams and fan bases and you really would have to obviously negotiate Will if load management is such a major issue like what happens if you're adding games on without subtracting. I get all that. But introducing tournament basketball at this level,

I think would like singe people's eyebrows off. Like I think if you had LeBron in a tournament and playing an elimination game every night, that's fucking sick. I would watch, I would lose my mind over that. And what's the big problem of this playoffs? What's that? What's the big problem of these playoffs?

That we do not have LeBron James. in them. This is a way that you ensure that all of your best players are playing in competition. Or, I mean, you're telling me that if Phoenix upset the Warriors in Golden State because the Warriors were being sleepy that night and Phoenix all of a sudden was like making a run at it, but like Toronto was still in it. And you know, if you're Golden State, if you're Toronto, if you're the Bucks, if you're whoever, it's like a bragging right to be like, we won the double. We won the league. we won this league through the playoff system, which is incredibly demanding,

but we also won this knock-em-out tournament, too. We're the best team out there. And if teams like the Warriors do want to sit their guys, if they do want to take the same approach as some of the soccer teams, as you're mentioning, like they want to just kind of punt that and focus on the bigger goal, well, then that opens up opportunities

for some of these younger teams, like you're saying, as Phoenix, to perhaps reap those benefits and they earn perhaps a better draft pick to help the core. The best teams tank the tournament, then there's no point in having it. But if you include, to everybody else, that's still pretty interesting because you have all these unknown variables

where a Devin Booker could drop 70 and all of a sudden, like, they're the hot team running through this tournament. I just think it would be cool to have an opportunity for all these teams outside of the Golden State, Houston, Toronto, whatever, like the top six teams, they're really the only ones that are in contention anyway to give them something to play for and to see so many basketball players in competitive situations down the. the stretch. Yeah. In some regard.

The subtext of what Silver said in this article was Stein and what he's kind of been hinting at over the past couple months and even perhaps longer than that is there is a problem coming up. That once this current TV deal is up, the way that people consume the games is going to be completely different. We're already starting to see it. A lot of people that we work with, including myself, they're just, they're streaming games. They're not going to be going to their cable package and they're going to want it on demand.

They're not going to want it when this is happening. happening at this time, especially if the games are regular season games when it's Blazers Thunder on a random Sunday. And even if it is a good game, I could catch that later and catch up with it. Sure. And you could tell the way that, like some of the things that Silver says, he's basically trying to plan for this. It's a fork in the road. They have a baseball style season with an NFL style industrial, like media complex around it. We're constantly looking for storylines. We're constantly identifying winners and losers. We're constantly talking about who might leave and who might stay. Coaches on the hot seat. It has.

that kind of passion around it, but the actual product is closer to baseball than it is the NFL. The NFL gives you 16 chances to watch your team, and that's it. And then if they get to the playoffs, you're essentially addicted to that until it's over. The NBA, you can go in and out. You can feed in and out. And I think that you could blame that on our attention span fractured society, but it's also just a reality of the fact that if teams are bad, people, stop paying attention. And if the access to watching the Warriors or watching the Raptors or watching Janus or watching Hardin or watching Luca and Christops or whoever is going to be next season,

is that much easier, then you're just going to lose, you're going to lose interest in the magic. To bring it full circle, if this is a superstar-driven league, and it's only becoming more star-driven and the stars are clustering together. And we're worried that it's getting too far, that these guys are dictating too much of the league. And it's just like, it's becoming a little bit ugly in the ways that the machinations of them trying to maneuver where they want to go. Right. It's because in a long season, those are the biggest attractions. They are the biggest entertainment.

They are the cost certainty. We know that if we watch one of their games, they will be entertaining. I don't have the same thing to say about the Sons. If Devin Booker isn't around, even if he is, it's probably going to be a bad game. So why would I turn in? You need, tune in. You need reasons. Not when you can literally watch a YouTube video that says Devin Booker highlights

versus the Bulls. Right. Yeah, and that takes six minutes of your time. It's a pretty dope video. I've seen it. I had a great track behind it. All right, we're going to wrap it up there. The finals is on Thursday, so enjoy that. We will be back next week to talk about...

Do you want to give your prediction? You want to do it? In our group posts on Monday, I said, War I was in Six. Me too. They're going to win it in Oracle. I think that the Raptors are going to be feisty, man. I don't know.

I think we ultimately assume that the Warriors based on how they've been playing recently and just like, history, recent history and recent results that they don't have a shot. I don't know. Kauai is on one, man. He's like, he's showing signs. I'm actually, I'm really excited to see just how

on one he is because he beat the Sixers and I was like, wow. Then they beat the bucks and I was like, whoa. And if he can beat the Warriors, I'm just like, make some room on Mal Rushmore, man. Yeah. It's a bummer that like some of these injuries are popping up. Like, for as much as like the Warriors would love to have to rant, like OG and Ninobe would be great to have because the Warriors are going to force the Raptors to play

smaller. And I think the rappers have a potentially devastating small ball lineup with Siakum and Anobi and Kaui and Kauai that if Kauai stays, I think that's a really good team next year that we're kind of probably sitting on. If he stays, I think they could be right back there. I think they could be very good. Yeah. So we'll see if he could do that. But we will be back next week to talk about probably some of those games and more about free agency for Chris and for Bobby. We'll see you next time. Basketball is very good. Basketball is very good.