The Ringer NBA Show - What's Wrong With the NBA? And Whose Job Is It to Fix It? | The Answer

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

Chris is joined by Ben Falk from ‘Cleaning the Glass’ to discuss NBA rule changes vs. team and player innovations to get a competitive edge, and how the NBA league office is responsible for keeping pace with the speed at which innovations are found with the use of analytics (06:00). Host: Chris Ryan Guest: Ben Falk Production Assistant: Jonathan Kermah Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Football season is never over. The Ringer NFL show has got all your football needs covered from free agency to the draft and so much more. Check out the Ringer NFL show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Ringer NBA show. It's The Answer. I'm your host Chris Ryan and this week on the show we're asking the question, what's wrong with the NBA and whose job is it to fix it? The people who govern it or the people who broke it in the first place.

Now, that seems extreme. I'm really just trying to get your attention. But I do think that if you've been watching the league this season, If you've been reading about it on sites like The Ringer, or if you've been listening to pods like this one, you know that there is something slightly off with the game. And that's certainly understandable under the circumstances with COVID restrictions,

with limited to no fans in the stands and an incredibly condensed schedule that is likely resulted in a lot of injuries across the league from some of the best players. But beyond those factors, right? There's this feeling, I think, like the court can barely hold the sport anymore. And that technology might be making the game

game worse rather than better. Most fans, Iyer, is saved for the end of game situations where the last four minutes are basically a parade of video reviews, timeouts, and tic-tack fouls. But maybe the end of games have always been stopping start, and I'm just getting old. You know, maybe we're all getting old. But nobody can deny during the rest of the game that there's an increasingly homogenous feeling out there on the floor. Teams are taking more threes than ever. They're basically, that is like the currency of NBA offense at this point. And I was wondering whether or not like this was something that only I was feeling or maybe me and a couple of my old foggy friends were feeling

or whether this was something that was actually an issue, whether like the advances made by advanced analytics and the NBA to discover these really efficient ways of scoring the most points possible was somehow kind of like distorting the game that at least I grew up watching, right? I then came across last couple of couple weeks ago, an episode of the ESPN Daily podcast with Pablo Tori, where he talked to Daryl Morey, I think this is during the Sloan conference,

and Daryl Moore, obviously, president of the Sixers, former GM president of the Rockets, and a guy who's associated with, like, popularizing the advanced analytics movement within the NBA, and Daryl seemed to agree with the things that I've just been saying. Daryl seemed to agree that there are some issues that are facing, the NBA and the sport right now. So for Mori, like the big thing was, was pace of play and especially

the flow of end-of-game situations. He advocated for less replay to get rid of jump balls, timeouts only in dead balls, one free throw, institute the Elam ending. And he also wanted to see possibly a way to nerf, which is a sort of a video game term, nerfing out or nerfed out the sort of power of the three-point shot. Otherwise, the product would become homogenous. he and he and Pablo were having this conversation, and Daryl said something really, really interesting, which was that as front offices get smarter, it's going to put more pressure on league offices

to be intentional about their rule changes, which is essentially front offices are going to exploit inefficiencies. It's up to the league to essentially legislate against the game getting out of whack. And I think when some people watch baseball, they feel that way. You know, you see a cool situation in a baseball game, and then all of a sudden,

all the infielders are on one, side of the field. The likelihood is that that's not going to work out for the hitter. A rally is going to die. There's not going to be these interesting base running situations. There's just going to be a less creative product on the floor or on the field in the case of baseball. Anyway, this whole thing was very interesting to me in the first place.

But then I saw a Twitter thread by a guy I have a lot of admiration for it. Ben Falk. Ben is a former front office guy for the Sixers. He worked under Sam Hinkie. It also worked in the Blazers front office in the analytics department, and he has a website called Cleaningthaglass.com. And if you're a serious NBA fan, you'm sure you've heard of cleaning the glass.com.

It's in this amazing stats website, this incredibly clean experience where you can kind of sort through all these different statistics for players, for teams, for lineups, everything. It's a go-to site for people who write about the NBA, who think about the NBA. Ben was really clear about this idea that it's really up to the league to keep up with the analytics. movement. And I'll just quote his Twitter thread right here because it's the most, you know,

the clearest way of kind of thinking about this. Ben says the analytics movement gets a lot of blame for changes to sports that fans don't like. But there's nothing that analytics does to make the product worse beyond accelerate what coaches and players are, we're already doing. Compete to the best of their ability within the rules, within the rules being key. Gameplay may change in a negative way as a result of statistical analysis, but that's not the fault of the analysis. It's the fault of the rules. The fix, change the rules. So I decided what better person to talk about this than Ben Falk himself.

So Ben's going to join me on the answer in just a second. I wanted to just take a quick second before we go. If you're interested at all in how basketball has changed and maybe where these changes started, I highly recommend going to the ringer.com today and checking out Mike Piceo's oral history of the best game Mike Dantone ever saw. It's an oral history of a net son's game back in 2006. was considered an all-time classic and was a real snapshot of where basketball was going. So please go check that out and let's get into my conversation with Ben Falk.

I'm so happy to be joined by Ben Falk from Cleaningthe Glass.com. Ben, what's going on? Man, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So Ben is, this site Cleaning the Glass came along a couple of years ago and became basically one of my first stops every day when I open up the internet and I'm looking to see what's going on in the world of basketball and the NBA.

It's just this amazingly, like, clear, clean, efficient way of understanding statistics in the NBA and advanced analytics in the NBA. And it's a real pleasure to talk to Ben. The reason why I have Ben on, though, is because he had a little bit of a thread, a little bit of a Twitter thread that really caught my eye a couple weeks ago. And Ben, so it was basically you reacting to Daryl's appearance on ESPN Daily. And it was a Sloan conversation with Pablo Torre about basically the innovations. that have been happening in the sport recently, in the NBA specifically, but I think in basketball in general,

versus the rules of the game. Do you want to just kind of walk our listeners through the sort of scenario you had in mind when you started talking about this? You know, Daryl, Mori, provocative as always, right? Yeah. You know, he just, he brought up a really interesting point

that I've also thought about for a while, which is that a lot of, I mean, there are people who have gripes about the game in any sport, right? And a lot of those gripes get aimed at what they see as the cause of the bad aspects of the game, which in their minds often gets pinned on the analytics movement. So the best example in basketball is the rise of the three-point shot. So if people, viewers think there's too many threes being taken,

they see that as the fault of the analytics movement. And what Daryl pointed out is that the legal office and basically whoever is coming out with the rules has a lot more responsibility than you think in that equation. And so I just wanted to highlight that idea and kind of flesh out a little bit more, you know, the way that I think about it, the framework there, which is that from the beginning of time, from the beginning of the sport, the participants in the sport, the players and the coaches, have been trying to their best to win the game.

That's just, that's sports, right? And you try to do that within the rules of the game. And that leads you down a certain path. If you discover a loophole in the rules, competitors are going to take advantage of that as much as possible. And it's not the fault of the competitors trying to win. That's how we've set up sports. It's the fault of whoever's making the rules to adjust to it. And that's been true throughout time.

I think what's different now is that the analytics movement, so stats and technology in general, the proliferation of video, the ability to communicate with coaches all over the world, has made it so much easier to find those little areas of the game that can be exploited. And so teams and coaches and players are all picking up on those edges faster. And that means it's incumbent upon the league to adjust to that faster than they would have otherwise. And in your experience, like you've worked obviously in different capacities with a couple of different front offices, notably the Sixers, which I think I'll probably hit you up about some Sixers stuff later in the pod. But in your experience, what is the resistance to change?

So is it that the league, and you said something about this on Twitter, but is it that the fact that the league has this deep respect for traditions and for maybe the records that have been set and not wanting to have a fundamentally different sport for Wilts Chamberlain than it is for Anthony Davis? Or is it that there are bureaucracy and it's really hard to turn a big barge in the middle of a canal? Yeah, I think it's a mix of all of that.

I mean, at the end of day, I have, you know, a lot of empathy for the position that the league is in. You know, you don't want a sport to just be changing willy-nilly. I think you have a lot of different constituents for the league who all have their own incentives and want the league to change in these various ways. They can't listen to everyone. So they have to have some clarity around how they want to change the game. And then, like you said, there's an advantage to not going too far off what it used to be. you know, some of the gripes like that I talked about earlier are from people thinking that the game changed from what they used to like.

And so, you know, changing the rules, if that changes the game, then you would still get some of that same kind of, you know, feedback, negative feedback if you're just changing all the time. At the same time, right, without that change, like I was just saying, you end up with, you know, people taking the game in direction that you don't. don't like. So it's this really fine line to walk where, you know, you need to make sure that you have a clear view of what you're trying to head toward and what you want the product to look like. And I think it's very difficult to get those changes through. You know, what I'm arguing for is to say, well, biting the bullet a little more is valuable. And, you know, having a little bit more of a kind of that stronger viewpoint and pushing through some of those changes if you see the need for it can be really helpful to, you know, fix any of these problems that arise. It's interesting you

put it that way because I was going to say to you that, you know, my kind of platonic ideal aesthetically, because it's what I watched when I was probably at my most impressionable age, is a kind of basketball that I don't think anybody wants to return to, which is isolation heavy, one-on-one basketball that was popularized by like T-Mac and Iverson and Kobe. And that's when I was in my late teens and early 20s and watching hoops every night. And I was just, basketball was essentially the most important thing in the world to me, that's the basketball that I was watching. And Iverson is my favorite basketball player of all time.

If some team in the NBA was actually running an offense that looked like that, I think probably people would laugh them out of the league, right? Well, so that's a perfect example. Because I think if you talk about rule changes and the effect on competitors and how it changes the game itself, you know, the shift in basketball over the last two decades

with a change in the illegal defense role the change in hand-checking enforcement is a great example of how competitors adjust to rule changes. And I think, you know, it probably was a very difficult decision for the league to change at the time. And in fact, if you look back, if you Google about the rule changes in the early 2000s and changing the illegal defense rules, so, you know, allowing essentially his own defenses and more subtle help responsibility, you can find a New York Times article, where there are clear, there are people who are, you know, big, big advocates for or just, there's people, you know, big time coaches, et cetera, in the game who were saying that this

rule change is going to screw up the game. Yeah. And the reason why is they said exactly what you said. They said people like one-on-one play. People like isolation basketball, and these stars do their thing. And they were concerned that if you introduce, you know, if you change these legal defense rules in this way, that you would see the end of isolation basketball. It took a little bit of time, but that's what happened. And so when you look at, let's say, the demise of the post up in the modern NBA, it's a perfect example of what I was saying.

So stats and technology help us understand that post play is a little bit less efficient than it used to be because of these changes in the rules. It makes it harder to enter the ball. relative to plays from the perimeter where you can't hand check, you can be a little more physical in the post. So post play becomes less efficient as means for scoring. And teams now have shifted to more pick and roll basketball, more ball movement, more spread out offense.

The whole game has changed because of these rule changes. Now, is it better or worse, that's kind of in the eye of the beholder. I think that the league has to decide, you know, what is it that they're actually going for? and they have to find some way to measure this. I think that they are probably happy with more offensive output, more free-flowing game, more ball movement

that seems potentially for most people more aesthetically pleasing. But there's certainly people who say, no, I liked it back the way that it was. Yeah. I mean, how much do you think if you want to call it a problem? Let me ask you this. You watch NBA this season, do you think they have a problem?

Do you think when you watch the game and, you know, I don't want to pretend like this is what happens every night, but if you see a 137, 128 game, do you look at that and say there's something wrong, or do you say there's something right? So I try to be very careful. I feel like a lot of these discussions turn into

just people saying my subjective opinion is what I think. And so, you know, what I think is interesting in a basketball game is very different from what many other people think. I think that there is a lot of strategic tension, and there's a lot of interesting things that happen on the court. I love the way that the modern game has played and think that there's a lot of interesting tactical aspects where teams go back and forth and have to make difficult decisions.

I think the evolution in X's nose is fascinating to watch. And I think it is, to me, more aesthetically pleasing when you have great ball movement, lots of these multiplayer actions rather than let's throw the ball in the post, or let's isolate on the perimeter, have everyone stand and watch, and let's go one-on-one. But I'm also aware that that can be personal preference.

Yeah. You know, everyone is different. So I think from the league's perspective, they have to have some viewpoint on, well, you know, I think to them it's probably about bottom line in some way, right? And so they have to have some perspective on what actually helps business, what helps ratings, you know, what gets more fans to tune in.

But yeah, I mean, for me personally, I love the way the game has gone. Right. do you find that the proliferation of, for lack of a better term, the advanced analytics understanding of basketball has now become so widespread that essentially every front office is essentially got at least, you know, their finger on that pulse, if not completely drinking that Kool-Aid, that too many teams play too similarly?

So it's a great question. I mean, certainly, you know, every team has someone helping them, breakdown numbers, the extent to which they listen to it and incorporate it into their gameplay, it varies significantly still. I think as far as the similarity of styles, there is a lot of similarity, but I'm not sure that that's actually, it actually has to do with analytics. I think that coaches are very good at seeing what other teams do that works and saying, you know what, like, I'm not going to be stubborn and stick to my guns.

I want to win, right? And so I'm going to take from some, and that's part of the beauty of coaching. And, you know, everyone's constantly trying to learn and improve and learn from each other. And so I think you get this kind of similarity just because of that in the same way that when the spurs were dominant, you know, in the mid-2000s, right, everyone started playing spurs-style basketball. Yeah. But that didn't have to do with stats telling you that. That just was, that's the way these things go. They were just jealous. they say it's a copycat league

that's what that means you know everyone's trying to have the same success that the best teams have and so they they steal they pull they copy from them when people my sense is that when people say that everyone plays too similar stylistically

because of analytics what they're mostly focused on is shooting threes and that I don't think that those two things are necessarily the same you know you can get to a three-point shot in a lot of different ways. You know, the rockets in the James Hardin, Daryl-Mory era, you know, took tons of threes. Sometimes it was later in that time when it was Mike Dantone coaching, it was a lot of

isolation basketball. Earlier, there was a lot of pick and roll, right? You know, that's not necessarily the same style just because they end in taking a lot of threes. So I think that there is, you know, I think that there is enough stylistic variation in the NBA. that said, if what you used to is college basketball, where you have full court presses and complicated zones and all that kind of stuff,

it might seem more similar otherwise. But I don't think that's not necessarily, that doesn't come just from analytics. Yeah, I mean, I, my second favorite sport or one of my favorite sports is soccer. And in Europe right now, you see a lot of teams doing this thing counterpressing. So it's essentially like putting a ton of pressure

on the ball in the opponent's third. So if you lose the ball, you immediately send three guys to frenzy press whoever has the ball in an effort to get a turnover closer to your opponent's goal. It's really cool the first, when it's just four teams doing it. Essentially when you get to see the Don Nelson Warriors or the seven seconds or less sons, and you're like, oh my God, I've never seen a team run like this. And then when all of Europe does it, it kind of starts to feel like that's just what football is, is just people like losing the ball running until they get the ball back,

losing the ball running until they get the ball back. I think that ultimately what it comes down to is the talent slash the personalities of the people you're watching, right? Like there is a different experience watching Steph shoot a three than maybe Pat Connison, right? Yeah, for sure. And I think it's interesting, you know, when you bring that up, I was thinking about in terms of stylistic variation,

just even the difference between Steph and Pat Conantton creates a style. realistic variation defensively. And it's actually a way where, you know, if you say all these teams are the same because they all shoot threes, I actually think it's kind of the opposite. You could say the rise of the three-point shot has created variation where you end up when you have Steph or Damian Lillard out there, like you have to pick them up at, you know, 30, 40 feet. You know, you have to play a very aggressive style of defense just because of the threat

of their shot. Whereas that's kind of the opposite of the way, the trend of a lot of teams we're going defensively, playing much more conservative, playing back, you know, this Milwaukee Buck style defense trying to encourage long jumpers and just protect the rim. So you get this stylistic variation just even because of the talents of the players force that on you. How much do you think some of the issues people might be having with the game right now

or the product right now are actually down to matters of like dimensions and evolutions? Like the court is the same size that has always been. You know, the hoops the same height, the three-point line, like, is where it is. But, you know, I would argue now the players we have in the league are the best shot makers I've ever seen, you know? So is it incumbent on the league necessarily to make small adjustments in terms of you can do this or you can't do that? Or is it more about like, we're going to need to move the three-point line back or maybe make the court wider? I mean, this is something Goldsbury talks about a lot, obviously. Yeah, so, I mean, again, I want to steer a little bit away from like, you know, the problems in the game.

For sure, of course. Yeah. Only because I don't know if there are problems, right? I think there's some smaller things that we can point to that a lot of people might take issue with. But these kind of larger trends, I'm not sure that it's necessarily a negative. But if the league saw it as a negative, again, I think then it's their responsibility to try to change things. So, you know, you could do something bigger like you're talking about with changing the three point line. You know, one of my favorite little things that we all kind of take for granted is, you know, we talk about the corner three as this, you know, the most efficient shot that's not at the rim, right?

The only reason it's that way is because when they wanted to move the three point line back, they didn't widen the court, right? So if you kept drawing the three point line the same distance there, it wouldn't be room to stand without being out of bounds and shoot a three in the corner. and so they had to kind of, you know, make it a little bit shorter. And so a three-point shot in the corner is closer to the rim than it would otherwise be because of this kind of dimensional problem. And so you create this little bit of inefficiency in the game, which people figure out, you know, the spurs maybe the first team to really figure it out helping fuel that run. They were incredible at generating corner threes.

They shifted their defense to take away corner threes. And, you know, all of a sudden, that's the way the league goes. The corner three becomes a big thing. But then it's funny, it's interesting, you know, coaching high school basketball. You come from an NBA mindset and you think like, oh, the corner three is valuable shot. The arc is the same thing all around. Yeah. And so there's no, you know, so, you know, if you coach high school basketball, you play against a team.

Some teams might help incredibly aggressively off the corners and give up corner threes as a style that you would never see in the NBA. But it's just a factor of the length of three point line in the court. So I think there's no question that changing those dimensions would change. the outcome. Now, the league might say that's a little bit too drastic, and that's not something that they necessarily want to go to. But that's one example of something that they could do to completely shift the style of play. So let's talk about it not as a problem. Are there things that you think are especially working right now that the league or the analytics community or whoever, we should leave alone because they maybe just need some seasons to work out like the

kinks in it, you know what I mean? So, for instance, like, I think one of the reasons why people maybe don't love the tremendous amount of threes being taken is that a very few number of players hunt for calls on those threes, right? So is there something about the, I guess, the, like, execution of these plays that maybe is actually not the problem, but like an issue, rather than the choice to shoot the three in the first place, for instance. We can talk about, let's say, you know, getting foul on three-point shot. That's another example. That's another example. example of this, where the rules have created the situation where there's, you know, something that can be exploited by intelligent players and teams. And so, you know, I mean,

someone like James Harden, for example, is just an incredibly intelligent player and clearly has put the work in to figure out how to exploit these little, the way that the game is refereed and the way the rules work. And so, you know, when he draws all these three shot fouls, as people try to contest that step back that he has, I mean, it's not, when you get three free throws, you know, so an 80% shooter, that's an expected 2.4 points, right, for every time. I mean, that's an incredibly efficient shot that you can't get any other way. So in that sense, to some degree, the penalty is out of whack with, you know, or the penalty to the defensive team is out of whack.

And that's a situation where drawing a foul on a three is unbelievably valuable. So intelligent players and intelligent teams have figured out, hey, maybe we should hunt these calls. but that's something that can be changed. A good example of that is, I believe that the clear path foul, you know, it used to be that it was one shot in the ball to the team that was fouled.

And I think even, at least I think I've seen him take credit for it, Mark Cuban was big in pushing the league by saying, well, let's do the math here. So, you know, you foul a player who's about to get two points, almost guaranteed. and they get a 75% free throw, let's say, on average. And then they get the ball back and a dead ball possession is worth, let's say, about a point on average.

And so they're expected to get, you know, 1.75 points. So that's less than two points. Right. So why don't just do it all the time? Yeah. Right. So it's still smart for us to file, even with a clear path foul. So they adjusted it to make it two free throws and the ball back.

And so it's things like that that you can tweak. These are small things that you can tweak. Another example that the NBA has tweaked is that rip-through. foul call. It used to be they were calling that in the shooting motion. And Kevin Durant. The Kevin Durant. That's what I was going to say.

Another really smart player who figured out this kind of thing, this area of the rules, figured it out Chris Paul was doing it all the time. Now if you watch, so now they've turned it into a non-shooting foul, which is a great, great tweak. It's taken it mostly out of the game. But the smartest players, so Chris Paul still does this. And Joelle Embed, I've noticed, does this all the time. if they're in the bonus, he'll do it.

He'll never do it another time. But if you're in the bonus where he's still going to get free throws on a non-shooting foul, he sees that arm extended. He's going to do the rip-through move. So all of these things, though, can be tweaked and changed subtly. And so exactly like you're saying, if what you don't like about threes is just people exploiting,

you know, the foul call on threes, then it's possible, you know, maybe on a three-strap foul like that, you only give two free throws, right? I mean, you can change these things and tweak them and see what happens. So I would imagine that if anything is going to get legislated soon, it will probably be something like the leaping into a guy or the kicking out. Just essentially like establishing a lot of contact on those long jumpers. The only thing I worry about, again, to bring soccer back into it is that in the last 10 years of soccer,

like you really do see, I mean, like they call it, it gets ridiculed as diving, but what I think it is essentially is like taking professional fouls. Like if you feel contact, go down because then, you know, the play resets, but also like you might get this other player in trouble, which they can only get in trouble so many times in soccer. And also like, you know, it's like the benefit of not losing the ball in your own half is far outweighs like the displeasure a fan might express because you fell down and pretended like your ankle got hurt for five seconds

and then got back up, miraculously. I do wonder whether or not you can put the genie back in the bottle is essentially what I'm saying. I'll say that like, you know, even, even my tweets weren't necessarily a criticism of the league because I'm coming out with all these examples of ways, things that they've tweaks that they've done that have been effective. I do think, I mean, they're still flapping. I think there's less flapping than there was when they got very aggressive with fines. And, you know, and I think that there's even more that you could do potentially, you know, particularly, you know, in the course of the game,

where if there were something, you know, I don't think they want to get too far in this because it's very hard to determine what exactly is a flop. But if there was some kind of egregious flop that ended up in a tech during a game or something, that was a negative impact, then players would stop doing it. I think that that's kind of the beauty of this model,

is if you tweak the rules in the right way, you're incentivizing players to do things, you know, the right way, what they care about is winning. And so, you know, I don't know enough about soccer, but I would imagine that there are probably rule changes that they could make. They have diving cards. Like basically guys get carded for diving. I think it's the problem with football is that essentially, you know,

that you get two yellows you're out of a game. So you have to be really kind of sure that the guy did it, essentially. Now, there's a whole technological aspect of soccer, which is also, I think, starting to invade basketball a little bit with this thing, VAR, which is essentially like this instant replay. but almost anything significant that happens in a football match now is under intense video scrutiny. And I think that that actually has also sort of started

to slow down the end of game situations in the NBA, which is the thing that Darrell and his conversation with Pablo really focused on was this idea of trying to make the end-of-game experience as free-flowing as possible so that there was more drama. And that included bringing in everything from the Elam ending to eliminating jump balls. do you think the end of game situations are unfairly scrutinized, or is that really where people are like drawing a lot of their displeasure

and then applying it like sort of widescreen to the entire sport? Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny because I think back to even when I was a kid and I was, you know, becoming a basketball fan, and I would hear the complaint from, you know, my mom be like, there's two minutes left in the game, can I just finish watching? 25 minutes later. Exactly. No, no, no, there's a half hour left.

Two minutes doesn't mean two minutes. So, I mean, this has been an issue for a long time, you know, even before replay. To me, it kind of stems from another one of these weird things in the game that we just take for granted, which is intentional fouling. Where fouling is supposed to be a penalty to the defense. And yet at the end of the game, it becomes an advantage. And so you get this, like, giant game of tag breaks out, right? At the end of a game. And, you know, we kind of all accept.

it and there's potentially value to it because maybe the team that's behind has a better chance to come back. Maybe there's more suspense because of that. You know, you're lengthening the game. You're adding more possession. So there's, there's really more of a chance for kind of some of these dramatic moments. But it's also bizarre. And, you know, it lengthens the game in these ways, which can be a negative for a lot of people and slows down the action. So again, some of that is in the eye of the beholder. You know, what exactly are you going for? You know, what's your goal at at the end of all this, but I think you could easily make a case to try it out and see. And, you know, one thing the NBA has been great at is experimenting in the G League and, you know,

trying some of these different things and seeing the impact. And so that would be an interesting example of something to try in the G League is being much, you know, enforcing a lot more or trying some different rule rule tweaks to eliminate intentional fouling at the end of the game and see what would happen. I wanted to ask you a little bit about actual basketball this season before I let you go. you know, one of the funniest subtle things that happened in Daryl's conversation with Pablo is, I feel like he took a subtle shot at the amount of three's Utah takes. Just, just like a little, like, he's like, you know, then you got somebody like,

everybody's going to play like Utah. And it was almost like, this is like the Ramon saying someone is playing too fast and loud, you know, like it was just, we all become old somehow. But what have you thought of the Sixers this year? Because you used to work there. You're in Philly. You know, I'm sure you watch a lot. this is sort of a kind of weird dress rehearsal

as they wrap down the regular season. I feel like they're just trying to get everybody healthy. And the Joel MVP campaign seems to have kind of like, I think, honorably shuddered. What have you thought of their season? What do you think of their chances in the postseason? Yeah, I mean, it's been fascinating to watch just because they haven't really had the full team,

full healthy team for that long. When they have, I mean, the starting lineup, that they've played has been phenomenal. And that should give Sixers fans a lot of hope. You know, I think this is even something that if you look back, you know, at the history of Ben and Joelle, when they're surrounded by shooting, things look a lot better, right? And so, you know, when you have Seth Curry, when you have Danny Green and Tobias Harris

with those two guys, I mean, that lineup has been great. You know, I think that they've developed some depth. The addition of George Hill will help all. lot. And so it's really, you know, it's going to come down to can they get healthy. Can they get there, you know, in a groove at the right time? And I think just because it's been a weird season in the NBA, that's kind of, you could say the same thing about almost every single championship contender, right? It's just who can kind of can really coalesce and put everything together. I think there's a lot of these teams that are, you know, biding their time to just like, let's just get to the playoffs,

you know, let's get there in one piece and healthy and go from there. This is the first season I can remember where it almost seems like teams are getting dinged for consistently playing well with all their players healthy for the entire season. It's almost like, oh yeah, well, I know what Utah is. I've seen them all year, even as they like are on like at various points, record setting paces. And I almost like, I almost think the Lakers and to some extent the clippers and the Knets and the Sixers and these other teams are getting more of a benefit of the doubt because it's like, well, they're just tuning it all up before they really show you what they can do. Whereas like, you know, the bucks and the jazz and a couple of the teams that have been pretty consistent this

season are probably almost like, well, that's a known quantity. Right. For sure, for sure. I do think one fascinating thing about even last season and this season as well is, I mean, I don't even really know what to make of it. Like I read an article, you know, on cleaning the glass after the bubble last year. And I was saying, you know, our nature as analysts of the league is to look at that and to kind of pretend it's just like any other season. But obviously it was very different environment and that could have had all kinds of effects. And I think the same thing this year, it's really hard to know what to take out of this to say,

you know, if I were working for a team and I, you know, wanted to inform how we would play going forward or the types of players would go after, maybe there's some things to take from it, but you would want to be very careful because it's just so odd in the history of the league these two years and what matters and, you know, how the regular season versus the playoffs and all that kind of stuff. And, you know,

we've seen that even to the discussion we were just having. you had this, you know, before the pandemic, you had the Bucks kind of being like, okay, we're the dominant team. We've had this dominant defense that's all about protecting the rim and giving up threes. And then, you know, a flame out in the bubble,

which may or may not have had to do with that defense at all. Yeah. And coming into this year, we have this interesting aspect where a lot of the teams that have given up a lot of threes are worse than you would have thought. So it's almost like flipped back to the way it used to be, but how much does that have to do with, playing without crowds, you know, shooting is up in general this year.

Is that just, you know, all of a sudden, everyone's become, you know, a marksman in more of an empty gym? You know, there's a lot of things that I think are up in the air and just big question marks. And to some degree, that actually makes the playoffs pretty exciting. You know, when it's a question mark as opposed to more of a foregone conclusion, I think it's, it's wide open and there's, you know, who knows what's going to happen. Yeah. And also, I mean, when we get to the playoffs, I think that there is going to be a real, a real change

the feeling inside of those gyms, especially if people are starting to get allowed on a more consistent basis back inside of arenas, there might be some arenas that are more full. You might, you're a home court advantage. You might have 2,000 people in there. You're the guys, and when you go on the road to a lower seed, you might see 7,000 people in there. I really don't know how it's going to work out. It's going to be fascinating. Ben, thank you so much for joining me, man. This is a really interesting conversation. This is a lot of fun. All right. Take care. Thanks to Ben Falk for joining me today. Check out the ringer NBA show for basketball audio content all week long. We've got real ones. We've got group chat. We've

got Ringer NBA University. Obviously, we've got the answer. You can also check out Kevin O'Connor and Chris Vernon on the mismatch twice a week and Ryan Rosillo and Bill Simmons giving you NBA pods all week long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.