A Cooper Flaggasm, NBA Trends, Lorne Michaels Stories, and a Celtics Pyramid With J. Kyle Mann and Susan Morrison

In anticipation of the upcoming HBO documentary 'Celtics City', Bill reveals his 15 greatest Celtics ever (0:51), before talking with J. Kyle Mann about Cooper Flagg as an NBA prospect, a clear top three of NBA title contenders have emerged, a more fun league post-trade deadline, the 2024-25 rookie class, and more (10:27). Finally, Bill talks with author Susan Morrison about her new book, 'Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.' They talk about Lorne Michaels giving Susan unprecedented access, shadowing him for an entire week of 'SNL', Lorne's exit and return to 'SNL', prolific Lorne Micheals quotes, and much more (01:15:29). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: J. Kyle Mann and Susan Morrison Producers: Kyle Crichton and Chia Hao Tat The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit www.rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Bill Simmons?

  It's the Bill Simmons Podcast presented by FanDuel. The NBA season hitting full stride, don't foul out on your chance to win with America's number one sportsbook. Bet on fun markets like live quarter player props and partless. Plus enjoy our new NBA player prop pages, your one stop shop for player props that include FanDuel's exclusive performance trends. Tracking the last five games for top markets. They even do that. The app is safe, secure and easy to use. When you win, you'll get paid instantly. So download the app today. Bet with FanDuel, official partner of the NBA. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Listen to the end of this episode for additional

• 0:44Bill Simmons?

  details. Must be 21 plus and present in select states. Game problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. The Bill Simmons Podcast is presented by FanDuel Sportsbook. We did this big docu-series for Max and HBO that premieres on March 3rd, Monday. It is about the Boston Celtics. It is about eight decades, how they intersect with the NBA and the city of Boston and America and all the great players and robberies and feuds. And we're all really proud of it. So Monday, March 3rd, it's coming. In the meantime, I have a little pyramid for you. Celtics pyramid. I narrowed it to 15 players and we're gonna do it right now. Here it

• 1:23Bill Simmons?

  is. 15 players. And the catch is, it has to be the Celtics version of them. So this isn't like Kevin Garnett. I'm not taking Kevin Garnett's whole career. It's just Kevin Garnett on the Celtics. Anyway, pyramid. Top level, one guy, Bill Russell. I have him as the number three all time guy. 11 to 13 titles, the most important on and off court NBA star ever, relevant. Greatest winner in the history of sports, also relevant. He's at the top. Next two, Larry Bird, John Havlicek. I don't need to make the case for Larry Bird. I have him as the sixth best guy ever. Three shared MVPs, three titles. But here's a fun

• 2:02Bill Simmons?

  Larry Bird fact. MVP from 1980 to 1988. Fourth, second, second, second, first, first, first, third, second. That's over nine years. Larry Bird was amazing. And he, I think he even would have been better now. John Havlicek. In the running for most underrated NBA superstar of all time, eight titles, 25,000 points, played 16 years, which is like playing 25 years now. I don't know how he did it. His three-year peak, 27, nine and eight. His four-year playoff peak, 27, nine and six, was one of the most clutch players of his era, if not the number two clutch guy behind Jerry West. And the greatest thing about him, all-time Swiss Army knife guy, had this whole career as

• 2:45Bill Simmons?

  a six-man. He could play guard, he could play forward, whatever your team needed, he could do it. And then eventually, he ended up as a forward during the last couple of titles. But there's never been a career quite like that, where you're just winning when you come in, you're winning when you leave. And then the next level, so Bob Cousy, if I had to do a Mount Rushmore, he would be the fourth guy for that. Six rings, won an MVP, best non-center of the first 15 years of the league, the first fun entertaining player in the history of the league, that's relevant, first greatest great point guard ever, relevant, 10 first All-NBA's, two second All-NBA's. He was just a dominant player. By the time he retired, he was basically the Babe Ruth of the league when he retired. And then he passed the torch to his teammate,

• 3:30Bill Simmons?

  Russell and Elgin and Wilt and everybody else. But that's the top four. So the other two on that level that I would put, Dave Cowens, who was one of the most important players of the 70s, won an MVP, won a couple of titles. And, you know, the 70s Celtics or the 70s Knicks, those were the best two teams of that decade. And he was the most important player, him or Havlicek at least, for this entire Celtics run. So he's on there. And then Sam Jones, who's another underrated all-time guy, who didn't even really get to start because the league was so stacked. They had like eight teams, nine teams. He was coming off the bench behind Bill Sharman, who was also awesome, didn't get to start till like the last two-thirds

• 4:11Bill Simmons?

  of his career, but is one of the great clutch players in the history of the league even now, and made all kinds of crazy shots. We covered some of them in the documentary. So Russell, then Burden, Havlicek, then Cousy, Cowens and Sam Jones. Then these next four, pretty easy, Kevin McHale, who is one of the 40 best players of all time. And I think if he doesn't hurt his

• 4:36Bill Simmons?

  Maybe even can climb up into a potential, I don't know, in the 20s. I don't think it's out of the realm that he could have been in a KG Barclay area, but was never able to recover from all the playoff games they played. But best low post player I've ever seen, him and Akeem. Paul Pierce. The title changes everything for him, right? If they don't, if the KG trade doesn't happen, who knows what happens with the second part of Paul Pierce's career. Instead, he belatedly develops into this awesome playoff guy, crunch time guy down the stretch. He just has this whole second career. Also really durable and an excellent scorer and went

• 5:19Bill Simmons?

  head to head against LeBron a lot and his teams won against LeBron at, you know, not a, not a super young point in LeBron's career either. So he's in there. Jason Tatum, who I think, right now I have him fourth level and I have him ninth overall. Definitely has a chance to leapfrog a couple of these guys pretty soon. I think, especially if they won back to back titles this year, I think he has to go into the top six at that point. Bill Sharman, who was the best two guard in the league for the first 15 years of the league, Warren's mentioning, just first team All NBA year after year. Good scorer and also weirdly, I think people seem to think he was the toughest guy from that era. He was just cold cock people for the hell. I didn't like the way you said that pick

• 6:03Bill Simmons?

  of me. I'm just punching you. So I'm putting him in there. And then the final level, the last five, Kevin Garnett, who was only with the Celtics for six years, but that 08 team and then the first half of 2009, they make the 2010 finals. They almost make it again in 12 and a beloved Celtic too. I think the most popular Celtics since my dad has had season tickets now since the 73, 74 season. Bird was the most popular and I really think the next two were probably Callens and Garnett in some order.

• 6:37Bill Simmons?

  And I don't know who is ahead of who, but in terms of just beloved by the crowd and the fans, Garnett has to be up there. Tommy Heinsohn only played for like eight or nine years because this was the smoking drinking era. I think they were just having cigarettes at their timeouts, but was an awesome, awesome forward and a big scorer rebounder, came through a couple of times in the playoffs, outplayed some forwards that are really good like Bob Pettit. So he's in there. Robert Parish, 13 years, I think with the Celtics, maybe 14, three titles. Wasn't on that Kareem level as a center, but was on that second level. I think he even had a second team on NBA. So he's on there. JoJo White, another guy really underrated from the seventies. I had him in the pyramid when I did my book in

• 7:21Bill Simmons?

  2009 and had his most famous moment, other than winning two titles was the triple overtime game, which is one of the great performances by a non superstar that we've ever had in the finals. I think he played 60 of the 63 minutes. I went to that game. I barely remember it, but there was the famous image of him just sitting on the court at the end because he was so wiped out, but he was just a really, he was just a top 10 NBA player for six, seven years. And then Jaylen Brown's my last guy. I think he belongs. You win a title, he wins finals MVP. The durability with him, the fact that in the 2020s, this team is just relevant year after year because of the Tatum Brown connection. I think he has to be in

• 8:05Bill Simmons?

  there. So toughest cuts for me, Paul Silas, Dennis Johnson, Cedric Maxwell, Ray Allen, Don Nelson, Casey Jones, Red Auerbach as the coach. That's all I got for you. That's my Celtics pyramid. Coming up, going to talk basketball with Kyle Mann and we are going to talk Lorne Michaels with his biographer. It's all next. All right, quick break. This episode is brought to you by Fire TV. You ever sit down ready to watch the game only to search and scroll endlessly? If so, you need Fire TV. It shows your live games from your favorite teams all in one place, right on the home screen. No more searching. Just sit down and turn on Fire TV. Separate subscriptions may be required. Feature and

• 8:45Bill Simmons?

  content availability may vary. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. I put up a new rewatchables on Monday night. We did Crash. We are going to do another Oscar winner. This coming Monday night, so you can watch that as a video podcast on Spotify. Check out our Ringer Movies YouTube channel as well. That's also where Sean Fantasy will be going live with his big picture crew right after the Oscars on Sunday night on his big picture podcast, which is also available as a video on Spotify, by the way. We're also brought to you by FanDuel Sportsbook. Thirty on thirty lives on our Profit Boost token, which we're doing every Friday the rest of the way, I think, except for March Madness. You can bet on any 30-plus point score you want on Fridays. I tweet out my picks.

• 9:29Bill Simmons?

  I love this because I love just looking at the matchups, how many teams, if you played four games in five nights, any of that stuff, and just try to guess who's going to go off. So be sure to claim the PBT, place your thirty on thirty bet for Friday. Just look for thirty on thirty in the FanDuel Sportsbook app. Don't forget about the Ringer dot com. Don't forget about Celtic City premiering Monday night, March 3rd on HBO and Max, and we're going to have it every week for the next nine. So buckle up because it's a really good one. Coming up on this podcast, I'm going to talk to Kyle Mann, our old friend from The Ringer, about Cooper Flagg. It's time. It's late February, we got to do it, and we're going to talk about a bunch of NBA trends and some other stuff as well.

• 10:14Bill Simmons?

  And then Susan Morrison, who wrote the definitive Lorne Michaels biography that came out last week. I loved it. I just made her come on. We spent an hour and just talked about Lorne. I had a great time. So that's the podcast. First, our friends from Pearl Jam.

• 10:50Bill Simmons?

  Jay Kyle Mann is here from The Ringer. Hasn't been on in a while. Missed talking hoops with them. I was waiting to pull the Cooper Flagg ripcord with him. And, uh, and then this week, Jim Bayheim compared him to Larry Bird. And I was like, all right, let's, let's officially have the convo.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  That was what tipped the scales. You couldn't, you couldn't do it anymore.

• 11:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I was gonna wait till we got to March Madness, but now I, you know, I couldn't even make it out of February. He's gotten better every week. The highlights have been fun. The game situations have been fun. It's crazy that he's only 18 years old and is the all around guy that he's, uh, already seems like he's becoming a Duke. I think people are raising their ceilings of him. I hate the word generational. It feels like it's getting thrown around too much. I think a better word is just unique. There's just not prospects like this anymore who are as good on both ends and as additive all over the place. And I'm trying to debate how excited to get about this because as you know, these are my type of players.

• 11:49Bill Simmons?

  I, I'm just trying to make everyone better. I'm just super competitive. How can I fit in? Like, these are my favorite guys. So how excited do I get, Kyle, man?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, first I was gonna add, you're talking about Jim Bayheim. He, I, I, whenever I watch broadcasts that he's on, he always kind of sounds to me like an uncle who just ate Thanksgiving dinner and he's just kind of leaned back.

• 12:08Bill Simmons?

  He's groggy.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Making groggy comments about the game, like, and he just makes me laugh throughout the games. Uh, I'm glad he's on there though. He's good. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're talking about your preferences and players and things. I mean, what you're describing is winning. I mean, who doesn't like to win? I know you like to win, Bill. I do too, you know? So, and I, I think you're talking about the difference between generational and unique. I, I think what sets Cooper apart is, you know, we have seen, uh, I'll say the buzz, buzzword, toolsy guys. We've seen guys who check a lot of boxes and are two-way players, but I think Cooper, who does check those boxes, and we could talk about him more in detail, something that is unique about him is that I think that he has those things that you don't normally see as an, in an 18-year-old.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  He's carrying one of the heaviest loads in college basketball. Uh, I had it pulled up here. His usage this year is 30.5%.

• 13:00Bill Simmons?

  Whoa.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. And his assist to usage is 0.83, but he's also averaging almost 20 points per game. So you're just kind of like, how is that? So that just tells you that like, he's watering a lot of plants and he's watering his own plants. He's just, he's doing everything for them and still being really efficient at it. But the thing that sets him apart, I think with that wide foundation is that, and I wrote about this on the Ringer not long ago in a profile I did on him. I've already, I'm getting Coopered out because I've talked about him so much pre and mid-college, but he has the potential to evolve, I think, into like a heavy load carrying superstar at the next level. I think some things need to happen for that to, for that to pan out for him. But I think that's what makes him unique is that, and you're right. I think he could go on to any team and he could be like a,

• 13:46Speaker 01

  like a Scottie Pippen type to a superstar, which I think is the most likely scenario for him. But I totally wouldn't rule out him becoming somebody that does, who you just depend on as your hub for everything. Cause he's, he's, he could evolve in so many different ways.

• 13:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. If you're creating a, a stretch four slash forward guy for the whatever, however we play basketball now, it would probably look something like this, right? Maybe you'd make him an inch taller. What is he? Six, seven and a half without sneakers?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  I think he's six, eight. Yeah.

• 14:15Bill Simmons?

  Okay. Maybe he grew. Yeah. So maybe you'd add an inch there, but he's got the long arms. But this is everything you want for somebody next to some sort of big man who could have his hands around the rim and, do, and do all that stuff. When you try to compare him to people, Bird is the obvious one that everyone keeps like Bayham did just because it's, it's a white guy who does a lot of stuff.

• 14:37Bill Simmons?

  There's more Tatum with me than I think maybe, and maybe there's a Duke parallel with them too. But the, the way the Celtics use Tatum now, as a point forward who can defend all these different positions on defense. I feel like that's going to be Flag's destiny. The difference is when Tatum came into the league, we knew he had a chance to be like a special player, but there were so many things that still needed to happen with him. He, he was a scorer. He felt a little Durant-ish, but there wasn't any semblance of the passing game that he has now, or the defensive level that he's gone up to, or even how, how much better of a rebounder he is. Flag's kind of already doing all those things and I just don't know what he looks like when he's.

• 15:18Bill Simmons?

  25 because I assume he's just gonna keep working at his three-point shot and eventually he'll just be like a 40 to 45% three-point shooter. I assume he'll add a couple of low-post things. I assume he'll get really good at passing out of double teams. But for the most part, to be this close to a finished product at age 18, from a skill standpoint, that's what's so unusual, I think.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really, I mean, it's really, really well-rounded. You mentioned, I mean, the Bird thing is funny just because Cooper, I think, as you know, grew up with a heavy Boston connection.

• 15:49Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's the thing. Yeah, he got indoctrinated in the 86 Celts highlights from his great mom. One of the great moms of the last 40 years, just showing him highlights.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Have you ever heard clips of his mom talk?

• 16:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they would be like driving in the car, watching like a DVD player and she had like old Celtic games because she wanted them to play like that.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, those old portable DVD players. Yeah, it's funny because, yeah, he has this heavy kind of Boston connection and I'm sure you would rather be good now than be bad and try to get flagged. It's probably, it's a worthy trade. But I mean, he, he has, if you want to like compare him to Tatum, I think they have body kind of differences that are really affecting the way that they play. Like Tatum came into the league, I think, as more of a guy who leaned towards being like a shot creator. I think he has like a lower center of gravity and he's a little bit more of a wiggly athlete. He has like really big, broad shoulders and got downhill a lot and things like that. Cooper, Cooper, I think, is not quite the wiggly ball handler that Tatum was at the

• 16:54Speaker 01

  same age. But I think the thing that is so promising is when you watch him and you watched him at like Mont Bird and you watched him when he was growing up, A, he's like, he played as a big guy who would kind of be in the middle of the floor and would make those decisions that you and I have talked about on this show myriad times where he will get in the middle of the floor, he'll take a quick snapshot of what the spacing is on the floor. And he was really, really good at making those kind of short roll, like connective passes or come off a pin down. What was really funny is that like Mont Bird used to run this. Very bird-esque pin down on the block for him and they and they still are doing it at Duke a little bit because he's lethal in the middle of the floor right now. So I think if you look

• 17:36Speaker 01

  at the way that he's able to read the floor in that sense, and then you see him kind of fledgling and blossoming as a as a ball handler. Like I said, Tatum is ahead of him, but I think Cooper is way ahead of Tatum as a processor of the floor at the same age.

• 17:50Bill Simmons?

  Couldn't agree more.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  And if you look at the gap between those two things and you see where Tatum is and you see Cooper's brain, his skill set, and you say, okay, well, what's the difference there? And this is the argument I made in the piece. The difference, the distance there is just his handle. I really do believe that's all it is. And if you look at the way you're talking about his mom, you're talking about his basketball family, if you look at the way he has courted challenges in his career since the time we followed him, every indication is that this guy is a maniac worker. He went to Duke a year early. He left Maine a year early after like two years there where he was just dominating. Actually, it might have just been a year. And he's just way ahead of schedule by design. And he's, he's, he's just an insane worker. So I expect him to bridge that gap and improve his handle.

• 18:35Bill Simmons?

  That's the number one thing with him. And that's the thing you read from literally everybody who passes through his life in some capacities, maniac competitor. They say that over and over again. And the older I get, the more I feel like whether it's football, basketball, name a sport, that's the number, if you really want to be truly great, that's the number one quality that everybody seems to have. Just maniac competitor, maniac competitor, wants it so bad. Oh, he's not that great at this yet. He's just going to keep going and going until he can go up a level. And I'm with you, like, if you were going to use him as a point forward, I don't think his ball handling is good enough to do that in the NBA right now, but he's 18. But it's one of those things that I could just see him. He's like, I gotta work on this. I'm

• 19:18Bill Simmons?

  gonna absolutely be a psycho and work on this constantly. All right, I gotta work on catch and shoot threes. I'm gonna just shoot 10,000 of these until I get it. I just think that's who he is. And, and all the best guys ever, and not that he has a chance to be that good, but all the best guys ever had that. So if you're adding that, Whoever gets him and I'm already worried about the lottery because there's a couple teams where I'm like, oh, man, I just don't want him to go there, you know, like

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Which ones?

• 19:44Bill Simmons?

  Well, I, you know, like, I don't want him to go to like a bad team where we had this NBA infection that we've had for 50, 60 years where we take these great talented players and just stick them in bad situations. Like, like what happened with LeBron in Cleveland the first couple of years where he's on the worst possible team and he turned out to, you know, it turned out great for him, but you just lose a couple of years. The best case scenario is what happened with Bird. There's no scenario like that this year in the NBA that that could happen, but Bird goes to the 79, 80 Celtics and they already have like good players. They go from 29 wins to 60 plus, but they had really good players in that team and he just elevated all of them. So, you know, like, I don't think Portland can get in there, but

• 20:26Bill Simmons?

  I think Portland is, is a team that, you know, if he was on a team like that, that would be really interesting. Philly?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:34Bill Simmons?

  You know, if somehow Embiid came back, if they, if they were able to stay in the top six, San Antonio would be the dream of all the teams. Putting him next to Wemby, I can't think of a better like sidekick for Wemby, assuming Wemby's going to be all right next year.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:49Bill Simmons?

  They have a couple of bites at the apple, but when you start talking about like just throwing them on Washington, I don't know how many of the guys in the Wizards are even going to be in that team in three years. You know, you really want to build around him in the right way.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  That'd be a crazy collection of like athletes, I would say over the, over the short amount of time. Like if they picked up Koulibaly and they picked up Sar and then picked up, which the jury's out on Sar, but I think if, yeah, adding flag to that. The only thing I would, the only thing I would say that I think is a little bit of a twist. You mentioned LeBron and I think LeBron is in this category is that

• 21:16Bill Simmons?

  Yep.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Some players, when you come into, when they come into the league, I look at them and I think there's a lot there, but the conditions and the context of where he goes is really, really going to affect how he develops. Cooper, I think, is a context. Some guys are like, they're just culture setters, you know?

• 21:35Bill Simmons?

  You're right.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Duncan, I'm not, you know, this is like hallowed, get struck by lightning type thing I'm going to say here, but you know, Steph, LeBron, those, those are the types of guys who just have winning habits. They Demand the most of of everybody. I um, I had a funny conversation with, I had a funny conversation with a friend of mine and uh, he'll know uh, that I'm talking about and when I say this, but uh, he was telling, he's a, he's a physician and he was, but he, and he does surgery and he was telling me whenever in his operating room, he said, he sets the tone to the point, at the level of excellence, to the point where the stupid people and the lazy people don't want to be in the room with him because they know they're going to be accountable.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  And I just started laughing and I was just like, that's what great people do is like you kind of, if you're going to be in the room with them, you know, you have to kind of elevate your game. And I think that Cooper is that type of guy, but I think you're right, man. He like, he, he, and I think he's willing to sort of fit into any kind of scenario wherever he goes. And the shooting is going to come along like that, that, that's, that's the only other thing I would add too, is if you go back and people should go watch this, we've known Cooper for probably four years in the mainstream. You can go watch his games from when he was a freshman and a sophomore in high school. He was shooting like set shot in the driveway three pointers. The, the distance that he has come in the three or four years since we've known him is remarkable. Like he was just a run around deer block shots guy.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  When he first came on the scene and he's become a full-fledged handler in college in a tough conference. Well, the ACC sucks, but tough competition.

• 23:04Bill Simmons?

  It's interesting because one of the guys that he reminds me of, he has nothing in common with physically really, but it's KG. Cause KG was seven foot one. Um, their bodies are completely different. I think KG was probably a better athlete. But the way, the way as a help defender and a rim protector and just how he's moving a second before the play is moving and he always seems to know where shit's going. That's the KG quality. I mean, that, that was one of the things that made him so special. He doesn't have the same size. He doesn't have the same arm length. Um, and he's not as like a scary competitor, but he's fierce like KG was, you know, and I think that's another guy who is a good comparison for him where you, you talk to, like we were doing the Celtic stock and we had so many stories from these

• 23:48Bill Simmons?

  people that played on those oh eight, oh nine teams where they were just like, the guy was a lunatic. Like we, we had these random scrimmages and you know, beginning of October, four weeks before the season started and he's caked in sweat and screaming at everybody. And there's, there's just certain guys like that. That's why the fit's going to be so important. Like New Orleans, that one would worry me because of uh, You know, they've been a tortured franchise for 50 years. It just seems like people go there and bad things happen. Utah's a weird fit just because of the players they already have. Toronto was kind of, the other one I was looking at where they have, you know, some interesting offensive players and a couple of Barnes. I don't know what Barnes is still,

• 24:30Bill Simmons?

  but they have some talent and could that be a place where he could go in and he just becomes a centrifugal force? How much is, how much is what happens over these next month here at the AC tournament and uh, and March Madness? Does it affect anything with him and how people are going to feel about him?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Um, I don't think so. I think, I really don't even know what would have to, he'd have to like just totally crap the bed or something. He's, he, there are certain prospects that get to the point where it is, it is, you're just like, you're not having like positive generating, like diminishing returns is the word I'm trying to think of. It's watching him at this point is just not, there's not a lot of point to it because I've seen enough.

• 25:12Bill Simmons?

  Right. Cause you, yeah, right. You've sent in your verdict already. Is he the most sure thing guy you've studied since you started doing this with us?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  I think that he is probably the most, you mentioned KG's active mind. I wasn't scouting back then. I was a kid, but I mean, he, he probably has the most driven personality, other than I would say Wimby is the only other person that I can think of that. When I watch them, I'm just like, there is singular focus in this person and you can tell that they're bright. I just think, and this can transition into kind of some of the broader things about the league and the way it's going, I think, but uh, he, he just has this curiosity about him that I would not bet against. And, and I don't want to overstate when we talk about his handle and things like that. It's not like he's a yakety sax disaster. It's just, he has a couple of different areas where teams are trying to bait him into going.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  And he's getting smarter and smarter about not taking the bait. Uh, and, and there's some ways, I pointed them out in the article that he can specifically, I think, set his man up, uh, to create kind of driving lanes for himself and, and create more advantageous situations. But, um, you mentioned like which team he goes to. I just don't, I wouldn't worry about that.

• 26:23Bill Simmons?

  So you say it doesn't matter. Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Because you can go so many different directions with him, you know?

• 26:27Bill Simmons?

  Right. You could be, and the team you have five years from now. Maybe nobody's on that team from right now. Anyway.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, cuz Wemby was a sure thing, except how tall he was and the history of guys over a certain height. So even though he was a sure thing and he checked every box, he wasn't a sure thing because it's just hard when you get that big and we have the history of the it's just it's too complicated. So it's always in the back. Every time he would land on a foot, anything, you're always nervous. Luka, to me, at least for me, was the surest thing, just watching what he did that year overseas and how sophisticated his offensive game was. And I thought Anthony Davis was a sure thing. I was I was incredibly excited for Zion. I thought, you know, holy shit upset.

• 27:16Bill Simmons?

  But there was always that fear factor with Zion cuz he was so in the air all the time. Those guys always make you a little nervous. Anthony Davis was like, this guy's definitely gonna be on a really good team at some point in his career. You see it at Kentucky. Now, it took longer than we thought, but those are the guys, at least recently, that I think jump out. Am I missing anyone?

• 27:34Speaker 01

  You're right about Luca. I'm trying to think of, I'm sure there are other ones. I mean, these are just kind of the high points.

• 27:39Bill Simmons?

  Well, cuz you look at somebody like Ja Morant, you're like, all right, this is a guy who can't shoot from the outside. He's an electric athlete, but you know, he's in the air, he's banging bodies all the time. There's things that make you nervous. If I if I'm taking a guy like this, I want it to be like, I know I'm gonna have this guy for 12 to 15 years at the highest possible level. And for something, for that not to happen would have to be like a legitimate fluke. It's not a legitimate fluke if like Wemba Yama hurts his nears foot or anything because we see that with centers. But, you know, I think Anthony Davis, to me, it seemed like, man, I really hard to come up with a scenario where he's not awesome.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Luca one you pointed out is a good one, too, and I think that one should be in the group, too. And he has some similarities in terms of the way I just I always try to watch guys who seek who like run away from stagnation in their in their sort of development towards the NBA. Because Luca, every single time in his, you know, the people around him played it really smartly is that when he was at a certain age, the challenge, they were always ahead of the of the stagnation. They were like, all right, we see that he's gonna stagnate here. And they just kept moving him up. And I think what happens in that situation is you just develop. The later you delay problem solving in your development, I think the worse off you are because problem solving and decision making are the most important thing to help you adapt to the speed of the NBA.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And I just think you see some guys like Chris Paul came into the league and his size always was a stimulant, I think for him as a problem solver. Whereas you look at somebody like, like these high school, college guards who are big bullies on the playground who get to the NBA and suddenly they can't bully anymore. You just see them be like for the first time in their career, like, oh shit, I gotta think about this in some way.

• 29:23Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And you see them kind of get bowled back by it. I just think that Cooper, Cooper is so ahead of it on that front.

• 29:29Bill Simmons?

  Chris Paul was a sure thing to me as a point guard. I was, that was like, there was no way he wasn't going to be really good. And Durant was another one from that era that if you actually watched that whole season and watched all the, just how easy it was to get whatever shot he wanted and how unusual of a player he was. It was like, there was no way this guy is going to be awesome. Where I usually get in trouble are the, the, the guys who have the athleticism, but it's hard to tell what the motor is or what the competitiveness is. Or situations like Dwight Howard, it's like, the guy's 18, he's got a Adonis body. I have no idea, you know, would you bet your life? LeBron was an easy one.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:08Bill Simmons?

  You know, in oh three, all you had to do was watch him in high school twice and like, there's nothing like this right now. Six foot eight and a half, like athlete like this, this is going to be insane.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  And it's, it's hard to like not hold it against guys too, because you'll watch players who are 18 years old, like you said, and you're like, how, how competitive is he? I don't, you start to feel a little wishy washy about it. And I think to myself, I'm, I'm, I'm just thinking, well, thank goodness, no one was judging my career when I was 18 years old, because I was just a total shithead and had no clue what I was doing.

• 30:38Bill Simmons?

  Right, you can grow out of it, but, but there are red flags though, like Ben Simmons, that LSU season, and then him just ditching the team with like a few weeks left and it, and it was like, hmm. That didn't go great, you know, like whereas like if it was somebody like Cooper Flagg or if KG had gone to college, like there's just no way they're not finishing the season and being a complete psychopath the entire season. So there's stuff you can learn. I, to me, Flag is as sure of a thing as I can remember. And the best thing about him from an NBA standpoint, you can just see what he's going to be. Like, there's such a clear position that now exists in the way, in the way the league is, that I would just assume somebody's going to end up using him a lot like the Celtics use Tatum. He's going to

• 31:22Bill Simmons?

  have the ball a lot. He's going to bounce around depending on what the matchup is. He's going to be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife, the same way Tatum is. And can he be a crunch time guy? Maybe. Is he going to be better off as a completely overqualified number two? I think he's better than that. But yeah, that's your worst case scenario for him. It's going to be really great. All right, we're taking a break. We got to talk about a lot of NBA stuff here. This episode is brought to you by Audi, the all-new, fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron. A huge leap forward, featuring effortless power, serious acceleration, and the most advanced tech of any Audi ever. Experience technology that puts you center

• 32:02Bill Simmons?

  stage, the panoramic digital stage, plus an optional screen for front seat passengers. That sounds fun. Perfect for watching the latest sports documentary. Maybe I made it. The Q6 e-tron is not just a new EV. It's a new way to experience driving. Learn more at AudiUSA.com. Always pay careful attention to the road. Do not drive while distracted. Sometimes a basketball 30 points can be worth more than 30 points. You can get 30% profit boost from The Ringer with FanDuel's 30 on 30 during Friday's NBA slate. We are teaming up with America's number one sportsbook to give you a 30% profit boost. You can either pick a player to score more than 30 points or bet on our new exclusive 30 on 30 special

• 32:45Bill Simmons?

  markets like any game. Back yourself up, go nuts. I tweet out my picks on Friday. I really like these. I like trying to guess. I do the matchups. I look at who, how many guys, have people played four games of five nights, all that stuff. Try to figure out who's just going to go off, and then you just get to root for it. Whether you want to ride with my picks or make your own? Look for 30 on 30 in the FanDuel Sportsbook app or head to FanDuel.com/BS for your chance to score a bigger payout this Friday. Remember, you can find out how much 30 can be worth with FanDuel's 30 on 30. You must be 21 plus and present in select states or 18 plus and present in DC. Opt-in required. Bonus issued as non-withdrawable profit boost tokens. Restrictions apply, including any token expiration and max wager amount. See

• 33:30Bill Simmons?

  terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Game problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. So I asked you, any NBA trend stuff that you've noticed this year? You're a big style of play, comparing stuff to history guy, as am I. Anything you've noticed this year that jumped out? You're like, hmm, well, this is something.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, over the, this all ties together to what we were talking about with Cooper, and I think it factors into player types and things like that. When you're looking at the way, the two teams that I think, before the season, your pick for the finals was OKC-Boston, right?

• 34:07Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if, I think if you look at the way, and I think this will tie to Jimmy's fit with Golden State, too, which I know you want to talk about, this spatial sense and flow, like, we know that in the past, really since video and analytics became really, really ubiquitous and easy to access, I think that the league made a leap forward. I don't even think that's speculation. I think the flow of information just iterated really, really fast. Things were more, the scouting reports got more and more complicated from game to game and more detailed and things like that. So you've just kind of seen the flow of information take a leap up. And I think if you look at the way, I know you're keenly aware of this, but when you just kind of, I noticed this in the finals, whenever

• 34:51Speaker 01

  the Celtics players, I remember I was like watching, there are a lot of people on Twitter who are, we have people who are the former NBA people, the people who I think are actually qualified to analyze mid-series adjustments in detail. There's not a ton of them, but we have some on Twitter. And you were watching the details and you would go down through there and they'd say, okay, there's this, this, this, this, and this rule. For this, this, this defensive coverage and I'm just looking at it and you just, your head starts spinning and you just think how in the world could someone on the court keep all that information in their head to the point where it's like reactionary? And I think that that is something that is setting OKC and Boston, aside from just having, being smart transactionally.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Something that is setting those two programs apart is I think that they are curating people just better than anybody else. I think you're getting good basketball players, but if you look at the types of guys and you're like, why is Peyton Pritchard popping? Why is Sam Hauser popping? Why is, why are these guys working? What is, what is it about Al Horford that's allowing him to, you know? Why is it that Derrick White is, has found a home there? I just think that overall, if you look at organizations and how they are like evaluating people. I think that that is a huge advantage in the NBA today, just because of what we were talking about in terms of the speed of, of the game.

• 36:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the discipline of we know what types of players we want to put together and we're never deviating from this. Right? The Celtics had this last year with Brissette. I really like Brissette, incredibly popular teammate, good athlete. You know, whether he's an NBA rotation guy, I don't know. But they ended the year and they're like, we're just, we're not playing anybody who can't make a wide open three if the ball goes to them. Right? So then they're testing out guy, different guys this year and it's Jordan Walsh gets a cup of coffee. And they started playing my guy, Jaden Springer and I, they just came to the decision like. Everybody in the, everybody in Florida needs to be able to shoot a three. That's what we're riding with. So then they end up with Tory Craig.

• 36:55Bill Simmons?

  And then smart guys who all of them can guard somebody or at least not get completely embarrassed in space. None of them need the ball, need to be like ball stoppers because they already have two semi ball stoppers with Tatum and Brown.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  You could sustain like one or two of those guys, right?

• 37:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you can have one, two, and, and even those guys are trying to get better at it. And that's it. And then OKC, it's pretty clear what they're trying to, they're just getting fantastic athletes. They want the ability to go bigger. Or smaller depending on who they're playing and they want guys who can fit with with Shay cause as great as Shay is, he's another one who is, I don't, I don't think he's the easiest guy to play with sometimes. He has the ball a lot, especially when he's feeling it. You gotta have guys who aren't gonna be like, all right, now it's my turn to shoot. They don't have any, it's my turn now. They don't have any of those guys, right? Shay's team, they all know it. And Chet is such, he's another one who's just so additive. Like, like going back to the Cooper discussion from before.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I think Chet and Cooper have a lot in common, actually.

• 37:51Bill Simmons?

  He's just like, he's just there to help and chip in and he takes nothing off the table. And then Jalen Williams is now their wild card and that's the guy. I think when they get to the playoffs, that's, he's gonna decide series for them because you're not gonna take out Shay. But you can limit him a little bit. You can make it hard for him. You can send doubles at him. You can do all the stuff that teams are trying to do to Tatum over the last couple of years. And eventually you're gonna need the Jalen Brown guy to step up and make some plays and you're gonna need the side guys. That's when I, especially, I don't know if you saw their, uh, them fall apart against Minnesota in that second game. And they'll, and down the stretch in OT, but I still feel like, you know, until you've done there and you have the scars.

• 38:36Bill Simmons?

  And you've lost a couple of those and you have these guys who've just, they've kind of been through a few of those. Like I still never gonna 100% trust it. But then you'll have a situation like the 2015 Warriors where it's like, I don't trust it. And then they're hoisting the trophy, you know, but, but anyway, back to your original point, I think you're right. Those two teams that I think Cleveland, I think deserves credit for understanding who they are. And even that Hunter trade, I thought was such a good trade. They needed this specific thing. They went out and got it. All of their guys complement each other. And to me, those are the three. I, those are the three with Denver is the wild card for the top four.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes you get lucky and a superstar like a Jokic, you just sit him in the middle of your, you know, your planetary diorama and everything falls into place around him. And Jokic, and Jokic takes spare parts and, you know, this, you know, if you handed a professional drummer, a really crappy drum kid, he, he knows how to make it sound good. I feel like that's, that's kind of Jokic. Jokic can repurpose things that maybe one man's trash is another man's treasure. But I think with these teams, these two teams specifically. You know, when you think about the slugging percentage of how many decisions there are within a given NBA game.

• 39:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  And you think about the difference, the margins between a small decision and I think like attacking and vacating space is an enormous thing that can tank whether or not a team is working like with, with the Celtics or with, with OKC. If a guy doesn't have an instinctual kind of feel for, all right, they're loading up on Shay in this situation, ex-player's head is turned, you know, I'm going to go here. And that takes an activeness of mind, I think that, um, but then the other thing is just how, and vacating space is the other thing, it just getting the fuck out of the way as we've seen is, you know, knowing when to do that. But I think in terms of guys getting better too, I think it's gotten super detailed down

• 40:28Speaker 01

  to the point of they know what it takes for a person to like have like a permanence of a concept and they know how to sort of, uh, do that whenever they're working guys out. And guys who aren't reflective people, you're talking about like knowing who you are, they're just not going to be as apt to grow as fast as other players. So I think it's gotten really like psychologically detailed even in that point. And, and I think you're absolutely right about it. It does kind of come down to knowing who you are. Like it's amazing how many teams across the league don't really know who they are. I, I made a joke last year about the Bulls. I was like, the Bulls were like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. They, they were dead and they had no idea.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And you'll look at some teams, some teams who just are, are just sunk cause following these paths that are never going to end up being a masterpiece. And I think that's a really key part of it.

• 41:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, Golden State is a good example of knowing who you are because the Brandon Ingram trade was sitting there for them for.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  And they were like, nope.

• 41:26Bill Simmons?

  Whatever season, they're like, this is the kind of guy that doesn't work out for us. You know, he needs the ball. He's a little bit of a ball stopper. Him playing without the ball is an awesome. Kerr had him in Team USA. Didn't work out great. He basically didn't even, I don't even think he played the last two games, but they kind of held the fort and then they, you know, which ties into, we want to talk about Jimmy. Bringing in Jimmy and you keeping your fingers crossed that he's going to behave himself, but knowing that there's a hoops IQ element with him. But then now there's this whole low post and space and Steph pulling guys away and basically you're able to play four on three a little bit with Jimmy as your low post guy, as weird as that

• 42:07Bill Simmons?

  is. They've never really had a low post guy like that since, I don't know, Durant, if you count him as a, but he's kind of like a medium post guy. David, David Lee going way back. I guess

• 42:19Speaker 01

  I would say David West.

• 42:20Bill Simmons?

  Little Bogut, maybe. There's a tiny bit of Bogut, yeah, tiny bit of David West, but Butler, it's been, and we're taping this before they played in it, but it's been really fun to watch the different spacing they have now. Steph's stats have immediately gotten better. I mean, he's, he's just, it's already had an effect on him. And the more, I loved the trade when it happened. We were really bullish on it. I bet on the Warriors when I was at the Super Bowl to make the playoffs of FanDuel. The more I'm staring at it, like I do, there are some Rasheed Wallace 04 parallels.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 42:52Bill Simmons?

  Where, you know, both of those guys, neither of them had actually won a title but gotten really close. Both of them were just unbelievably talented. Both of them wore out their welcome at their old place and both of them were

• 43:08Bill Simmons?

  a non sexy asset because of what had happened, but they were still assets.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:13Bill Simmons?

  And then it's like, what if we can take this and move this here into this culture with these people? What does this look like? It's very hard to pull those trades off. We've seen a lot of people try to pull off the 2004 Rasheed trade. They might've done it. Despite that, this is a team that had no championship ceiling at all, and now they're a team that we have to at least mention.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a sweet spot of distressed asset and talent that is, that is, that you could bet on in the right scenario. And you also just have to have the culture to sustain something like that. And the Warriors have proven over and over again that they can. But I think the big thing, I was looking at some of the stats through, I guess it was seven games. I mean, there, there are seven three man lineups that Jimmy is a part of that have a plus 20 net rating and only one of them is like actually negative. He's in one lineup that's like negative point five or something. So his impact on it has been immediate. And I think you hit it where, talking about like Durant in the post, I think the big thing is that Steph has not had like a switch partner for a while. Like he hasn't

• 44:17Speaker 01

  had a guy on the floor where if you switch this, this is going to create an issue because you think about, you know, Wiggins had his little run there where he was doing some things and they've had these, they've had, they've had scores here and there, like pool, they could put him in an action for that season and he was, he was making, making lemonade. But I think that he has, that is like the starting point. Really since like Igudala or Durant, I don't think that they've had a guy that could punish a switch as consistently as Jimmy does.

• 44:46Bill Simmons?

  Igudala is a good, good one for that because some of the defense that he brought to the table is, is some of the stuff Butler's doing for them too. I'm really intrigued by them and Lakers are another one. I think he's going to fit in easier with Golden State than this Laker situation. I'm, you know, I've, I've already gone on the record. To me, they're a legitimate contender. But it's a pretty dramatic trade for midseason. The history of the league is it's really hard to make a trade like that halfway through the year and then actually have it lead to you making the finals or better. There's some examples, but not somebody as talented as, as Lucas. And you know, it's, it's just,

• 45:29Bill Simmons?

  the league is so much more fun than it was a month ago because Golden State was not fun to watch. I hated watching the Lakers. And now you have these two that it just feels like we have enough teams. I think Memphis is really interesting because. You know, Ja, Ja will have these games where he's like nine for 25, but he makes the two biggest shots of the game. He's not making threes at all. He still plays the same kind of reckless offensive game that always works out for him. He hasn't really evolved from that at all. But he's still like, they're down six, down a point, or down one with six seconds left. I just feel like he's scoring. He's one of those guys, you know, like in a playoff series, I'm not positive I'd want to see them. And I also don't think they could win the title.

• 46:12Bill Simmons?

  So I don't know. I think the league got really interesting and I was not interested a month ago. How about you?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I was gonna say a couple of things. The, the, the Luka trade, I guess I haven't even got to talk to you about it at all. I was at the Calipari return game, which I thought was gonna be the biggest story that night.

• 46:29Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  And we were sitting there in the post-game presser and somebody showed me their phone. I was, I was like, what? Like, I didn't believe it seriously for like the rest of the night. Anyway, everybody's beating that one to death. But on Ja, he's, he definitely is the separator for them in that sense. I do think that he's suffered a little bit from defensive, like officiating shifting recently, like the way that they've, and that speaks into what's, I think that's what has made Boston and OKC really effective too, is the fact that they have that, they just have this chain, this circular chain link that really doesn't have any obvious gap in it. Because even if you are bigger than them, they're so laterally

• 47:09Speaker 01

  mobile and strong that they can prevent players from playing as big as they are because they move so well, you know, because, you know, a lob threat, one of the ways to stop a lob threat is to physically get in front of them. Like, don't let them jump, you know? And, and I think that, that's another big thing that has really made an impression on me in terms of how to view the league is, A, I think strength is, we had that time where the game spread way out and, you know, offensive players ruled the day. And I think getting, being skinny was something you could get away with. But I think the more that they've allowed defenses to sort of exist, the more I think players like the Celtics have, like

• 47:49Speaker 01

  your Drew Holidays, your lower sort of secondary body kind of guys, I think are having an impact again.

• 47:56Bill Simmons?

  It's fun to think of teams even five, 10 years ago and how they would have competed in the league now, the way how deep everything is. Cause I do think the league is just better. And I think that the teams are deeper in a way that that whole model of the mid, late 2000s, I'm not sure, like the 2017 Warriors would still be awesome.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:15Bill Simmons?

  But you go to like that 2019 Raptors team that won. And I know Kawhi was awesome, but he wasn't as awesome in the last two rounds is I think the, when we think back and we think like, oh my God, playoff Kawhi in 2019. It was like, all right, the last two rounds, not quite as good. They got a really good Van Vliet, um, one series and you know, they patched it together. They had some really good competitors, but I look at that team now and it's like, would that team, would you pick that team ahead of Boston or Cleveland in a playoff series? From what we have this year, I wouldn't. With Gasol and Kawhi and Siakam, I think Ananobi missed the playoffs, Van Vliet, Lowry. I just, I think that's, that's the third best team in the East. So you go back and you look at some of these, like that Bucks team that won in 21.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Did they win now?

• 49:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't think that team could win now. And that Phoenix team that made the finals, built around Booker and CP3 and Deandre Ayton and Bridges and Cam Johnson. Like that team's not making the finals now. There's no way. The league's just better.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Wasn't the West pretty devastated that year too? I mean, and not to discredit. Yeah, it all blurs together, but yeah, the, uh, yeah, I'm trying to think back.

• 49:23Bill Simmons?

  There was a, the Murray injury was a big one that year.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Well, the league's, the league sort of ebbed and flowed between the, the helio thing spiked to the moon, obviously for a while there. And then we've talked about this a lot where I think that we've kind of shifted away from that model. I don't think works as well anymore. I think, and you see, you've seen the shift with the way Cleveland is playing this year. They went from ball, they are a really good example of a team that was maybe probably miscalibrated a little bit in the way that they were so ball screen dominant with Donovan Mitchell. And I would look at that team over the past couple of years and just be like, if they would just play through their big. Now Evan Mobley had to get better. I think that's a key part of the equation, but you know, allowing those guys to move around him. I think they're a good example of the way the league has shifted lately. When you look at the, the way they've succeeded.

• 50:07Bill Simmons?

  I think people think I'm doing a bit in trying to reverse Jinx Cleveland when I talk about how good I think they are. I think that team's really good. I think it's gonna be really hard to win a seven game series against them, especially when they have a game seven. And the biggest thing that's changed, everyone's talked about the, how Mitchell, when they gave him the contract and he's just pulled back enough that it's still his team, but other guys get to shine. Garland's healthy, but Mobley's the big difference. Cause I feel like his three is going in now. You know, last year was like, please shoot that. You're not making that. You, there's no way. It's gonna be an ugly line drive. Now he's shooting with confidence and it's a

• 50:47Bill Simmons?

  team that has four of the best 50 guys in the league. Mitchell's in the top eight. Mobley's probably in the top 20 to 22 at this point. And then Hunter is a fifth guy is nuts. And I gotta be honest, like, everyone's already given the six man award to Peyton, to Peyton Pritchard, who's, who's, it's weird. You have to watch him because his stats are better than Ty Jerome. And part of the reason they're better is because he's had games where he played in place of White or no Jalen Brown and they just let him go off and I'll have like 29. So maybe that's why he should win. I think Ty Jerome's been the best bench guy in the league. Especially in these big games. He, he's like swinging games. Pritchard will have games against certain teams when he

• 51:32Bill Simmons?

  just looks like a, like an undersized guard who can't do anything and, and teams are attacking him. Ty Jerome looks like, it's like, is this guy a $100 million player? What is he? So I, I just don't think that six man of the year is over yet. Cause I think he's been playing great.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Has anybody ever won most improved and six man of the year in the same year?

• 51:50Bill Simmons?

  Cause wow, the double, the double dip?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Would he have a, would he, how much of an argument would he have for that, do you think? Cause is it just, did he, is it, did he improve? Or is it that he got into a context where he's properly seen? Cause I think he's improved. He's obviously worked at his game. I don't, I don't think that's ever happened, has it? I'm trying to think of the double dipping on the major awards. We've had, we had a rookie of the year MVP before, right? Didn't Wilt?

• 52:15Bill Simmons?

  Oh, Cade, Cade's the favorite on Fanduel and I think that's justified.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  For most improved?

• 52:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. The leap that he made. Now that this is like, usually most improved is either one of two things. It's either I was here and now I'm here. Or it's like, nobody was even fucking talking about me last year. Now I'm here. Cade. Becoming a top 10, top 12 guy in the league, which I think he is. You saw it like, you know, you seen it during this win streak. You saw it last night like, that's probably the winner. But yeah, Peyton Pritchard is my, is he's plus one seven. Oh, Beasley. I forgot about him. He's three to one. And like Ty Jerome, Ty Jerome's 50 to one on Fanduel. I'm like, is there a better sub than him? I guess they have Amen Thompson as a, as a, as a six man candidate.

• 53:02Bill Simmons?

  That's a weird one. I feel like he's a starter, but what do I know? Beasley's been, I guess Beasley's a good choice too. That my point is, I don't think Pritchard has that award locked up by any means. Beasley's been amazing for Detroit. He's, if he'd played like this on Milwaukee last year, they might've been able to survive until Yanis came back.

• 53:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they, the defensive player of the year, Moby is the favorite for that one too, which, you know, some of this stuff's going to play out. And then rookie of the year,

• 53:28Bill Simmons?

  which is just grisly. Right now, Castle's the favorite, but this is among the worst rookie of the year candidacy classes.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Are we in Michael Carter Williams territory where?

• 53:38Bill Simmons?

  We might be. Well, that was tough because he just had fake stats on a team that stunk. But yet I still like this rookie class. Where, where do you stand on it? You obviously did a lot of work on it last year for us. Do you happy, unhappy, medium, unclear? Where are you?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  I, I, I think it's spun forward in the way that we thought it would. It was a class, it was a draft class, a high school. It always is driven by the high school class because we, they, if they could draft them, they would. But they want to use the college buffer to get a good, get, kick the tires and see what happens when they go up, level up in the competition. You saw some shift, you know, I mentioned like Isaiah Collier was a guy who was ranked really high in the class. Somebody, you know, out, out in LA that I assume you got to see some. And sometimes you see shifts there that happen, like Reed Shepard obviously ascended in that year and got drafted. But overall, we knew that that class lacked like a generational foundational type of superstar. So I, I'm not super surprised that I, I expected that to spin forward into summer league, which it did. Summer league was just like, no, we, you know, there's some guys here that we like.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  But, and so, no, overall, not terribly surprised.

• 54:43Bill Simmons?

  Are you surprised by Shepard though? Cause you were pretty. Pretty high on him at least being like a bench guy right away, right? I'm kind of amazed he's not playing at all for Houston. I don't really know the reasons.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can make the argument. You'll hear people talk about, you know, how much time do they have? Eme, obviously, it's a high bar for a rookie to play for Eme.

• 55:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  And just, he wants to, he wants to win. That's his mentality. And you look at them and what their goals are in the short term. Reed just doesn't really fit them right now. I think the big thing is he really needs to play. I was surprised they, they brought him out of the G League so fast. I've heard some people kind of talk about the, the quality of the G League right now, which is a riveting conversation, but.

• 55:23Bill Simmons?

  Quality being bad?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:26Bill Simmons?

  It's bad, right?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  That it's down right now.

• 55:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. It seems like it's the worst it's been.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I've been shocked by the shooting. I mean, I didn't expect him to shoot so poorly, but I don't know. You would think that if he was doing the things that he does well, that he would get to play because you keep hearing people make that argument about, yeah, that. But Dillingham too, I thought would come on a little earlier, but I think we've seen some signs that he's going to be okay.

• 55:48Bill Simmons?

  Signs the other night. I'm, I'm all in. I'm, I haven't sold any of my Dillingham stack.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 55:53Bill Simmons?

  I like that he's, he seems like a great teammate and a real competitor too, which I like.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know what, you know what I realized after, after we had finished the draft work last year? I was like, Nick Van Exel. I kept saying, he, he just.

• 56:05Bill Simmons?

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  I said he was in the Nick Van Exel spiritual lineage and I was like, that's perfect. He's the guy, maybe you don't lean on him heavily because you could fall down and kill yourself, but you know. You, you, here and there in spurts, he comes in and he's obviously really talented, him and Ant. I don't know if he's going to solve Minnesota's problems or anything like that, but I, I still believe in, in Rob.

• 56:24Bill Simmons?

  Who's your favorite non-Cooper flag college guy right now?

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. Let me, uh, pull up my list here. Uh, I mean, of the, let's see, the guys at the top.

• 56:38Bill Simmons?

  I'm fascinated by the other Rutgers guy. And I know he's either going to break hearts.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Ace?

• 56:44Bill Simmons?

  I'm fascinated by Ace. I don't know what he is. And if I was a GM, I think I'd be afraid to be like, all right, this is my third pick. I'm going all in on this guy because. There's a chance it just is not going to translate to the NBA in the right way, but there's another alternate universe where it's like, this guy seems legitimately unstoppable.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:05Bill Simmons?

  And what, what is this going to look like if he just figures out a couple of things? I, his offensive, the shot making is just really unusual. I, I don't want to compare it to Durant because I, that's, that's like, you know, sainted ground.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:21Bill Simmons?

  But there's some stuff he does where I, I just don't, I don't think he'd be fun to play with, at least not yet. You know, it just seems like the ball's going to him, he's shooting, he's one of those guys, but there's some shot making stuff with him.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:35Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  The Durant, with Durant, the thing that always kills me is with people when they talk about him, the dribble shooting is the thing that set him apart at his size, you know? And the difference is, you just don't, you just don't see guys that can handle and shoot it like that. But then, you know, later down the road, we saw Michael Porter Jr. Come along, who obviously had a lot of, I, I think he's more like MPJ personally, because MPJ at the same age was very similar in that he had this gigantic mallet that was very useful in every single situation. And for MPJ, it's continued to be useful, but every single situation was a nail for him because he had this thing that he could just rise up over people and hit shots. And Ace has that. Now I have some, my comp that I've made is that I think that, I think that Ace is sort of like,

• 58:19Speaker 01

  he could be a Jay McDaniels type with the MPJ shot making.

• 58:23Bill Simmons?

  Oh.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Like I think.

• 58:25Bill Simmons?

  You think he could be that good defensively?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  He, I mean, he's a weak side disruptor and I, I think that the defense could come a long way. I, I think that he's still kind of learning the game. Like you talk about problem solving in the way we were earlier. I think he's on a new frontier, so it's going to be really interesting. I would not lean on him to be a decision maker for me, like going to the basket, things like that. There's not much proof that he's going to be somebody that can pass out of a situation where he gets loaded up against, but you're right, his shot making is crazy.

• 58:52Bill Simmons?

  He's a, he's an extension pink slip guy. You take him and you're either, it's going to work out and you're getting a four-year extension or you're, you're going to be on NBA TV in a year. It is a risk reward pick, but I am fascinated by him and his teammate's really good too. I mean, his teammate is a way more traditional. This is the kind of guy we've seen succeed in the NBA over and over again. I don't, I don't have a lot of takes on, on him.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  On Dylan?

• 59:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  He fits more what we were talking about before that body, that sturdy, lower body type. He's, he's a big guard. He's a great finisher in the lane. He's really crafty.

• 59:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he's, it's, he, he'll, he's going to be a really good NBA player. I don't know if he's going to be an all NBA guy, but he'll be good.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's one guy that I would be fascinated for you to watch just because I want to hear your opinion on it. Because he has a lot of the traits you like.

• 59:39Bill Simmons?

  The foreign guy?

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Not, well, Jaeger Demond earlier in the year, I texted you, I was like, you gotta watch this guy run ball screens. He still is fun to watch, but uh, he slipped a little bit because of some of his scoring issues. But the other guy that I would say is uh, Derek Queen from Maryland. I think you should watch because he is a very, very like, has crazy hand eye coordination for his size. He's a really smart, like handsy defender. He can pass the ball, uh, but he has this kind of slow mo. I said he, he, he has some sort of uh, this is a dangerous one. I, I hesitate to say this, but he has some kind of Diao kind of qualities to him. Where, where he's a little, he's a little laissez faire and that every once in a while he'll, he's 6'10",

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  he'll just drive baseline and rifle a left-handed pass through a tight window to somebody on the money. And um, he's, he's somebody really fascinating that I'm curious to hear your take on when you get to watch him.

• 1:00:37Bill Simmons?

  I've, I gotta say, I've been impressed by Duke, just the team, the team that they have. Like I, they have a bunch of guys that I could just see on NBA teams down the stretch, but I admittedly have not watched. I mean, one of the wrinkles for me is I've never watched women's college basketball during the regular season before. And I've actually watched, I've watched women's college over men's college a couple of times, which has been really surprising to me. But, so I feel like I'm not as versed on the men as I usually would be at this time of year. But I have watched a bunch of Duke and um, for them to not at least make like the final four, final two, I just feel like something. Really bad would have had to happen during a game like they just go ice cold. They just seem really complete.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  They have a guy on their team that I think you would like named Seon James, who is built like Drew. He's, he's a big like, uh, and when they moved him into the starting lineup, they played Auburn, who has been sort of the favorite for the year. They played Auburn at home and they moved him into the starting lineup and their season just changed. He's, he's, he's a smart player. He can guard multiple positions. So he's somebody that I expect to be pretty instrumental to whether or not they win. LeBaron Filen is another one too, that I would throw out that I really, really like a lot for, for Alabama. But, uh, yeah, I could, I'll, I'll, I'll wait until you circle around and we can.

• 1:01:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I'm just starting. There's finally, we finally have more time to watch stuff. Hey, so I want to talk Celtics a little bit because we got the big documentary Celtic City coming on March 3rd, Monday on Max and on HBO. You follow the history of the league. You try to intersect it with the guys we're watching now. Is there anybody from all of the different Celtics errors that you would have loved to have seen in 2025?

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Oh man, that's a great question. I mean.

• 1:02:17Bill Simmons?

  Bird, Bird, you can't count Bird.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember when I was making that Indiana travel video last year. I think I was texting you about, I was going back and watching some of the Indiana state footage. And I, and I was just thinking Bird absolutely would have translated to today.

• 1:02:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  No problem, just because of the space, you went to talk about spatial intelligence. Um, I mean, over the, over the decades, um, I think Ainge is a pretty fascinating player. When he was younger, uh, just seeing the way that he was able to, uh, just obviously a really smart player. Dennis Johnson, I'm, I'm a big fan of, I think in the era of ball pressure, he would have translated. Um, I'm trying to think of this, the, uh, do you mean over the?

• 1:02:57Bill Simmons?

  How about McHale? Cause I feel like McHale is now a unicorn that will never happen again because whatever version of McHale happens in 25, that guy's just shooting threes all the time. It's up, which started to happen to McHale and near the end of his career. He started stretching in form more. I just don't know if a low post guy would ever have that arsenal of moves anymore because you'd, you'd be, it would just be banged in your brain to shoot threes and clear space, get out of the way for other people. I don't see it happening again.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  He's somebody that I think would probably, this kind of reminds me of our conversation when we were like creating the all time fun team. He's somebody that I think would have probably been the fulcrum of a like big guy driven offense with movement around him.

• 1:03:44Bill Simmons?

  Like a little Shingun, Shingun on Houston tiny bit?

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, because if you had the right guards around him, he was such a dominant one on one player. He would have been pretty, Shingun is an interesting, I don't, I don't, where would you, where would you compare Mikhail and Shingun as passers though, I think?

• 1:04:00Bill Simmons?

  Mikhail became a better passer because he played with Bird. There was that osmosis thing. I think if Mikhail's on another team, he's probably like 1.1 assists a game. But I think when you play with somebody who's just always making extra passes, there's no way you don't start doing it. It's one of the great things about basketball. Yeah, I guess, like you would have, Mikhail would have been a center. You would have put shooting all the way around him and just tried to get him on the low post with space and that, that would have been a good one. The types like the Parrish types, you know, those guys now, they're, they're just valued completely differently in the league, you know, because back then you owe, every team needed one or you needed a center to guard the other centers.

• 1:04:43Bill Simmons?

  And now those guys are like 15 to 20 million dollar players. And then, or you'll see a team like the Lakers. They're just like, I guess we're just not going to have a center. Or it's somebody like the way the Celtics use Porzingis and Horford as like these stretch fives with size that, you know, ideally you can kind of play them off the ball and then have them come flying in on the paint. It's just, there's not a lot of Parrish types now. Detroit probably plays the closest to what an old, older era team plays like, right?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Bill Simmons?

  With, they have size and rebounding and they're tough and nasty. They have a couple shooters and then they have one really good offensive player and they're just kind of, it's like a 1991 type of team.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they've gotten, well, they, we knew this in the past few years was for the player type that Cade was and where he was in his growth, they tweaked some things to help him out. It was, it was, I was, I kept calling it the crowded elevator. It was, Cade, Cade was just like, there are just too many people on the elevator. Can you please get off? The other one I was gonna- In making this documentary, did you feel any kind of burden? I'm not trying to interview you here, but did you feel any kind of burden to represent somebody that was maybe not properly represented in the younger generation? Because I think of like a Havlicek, if you look at his stat lines, so balanced throughout. Was there anybody that you felt like a burden to be like, we really should focus on this

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  guy to bring out, you know, to shine a light on his like legacy?

• 1:06:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we had a few of those. Havlicek's definitely one who was incredibly important player to the league in the 70s, especially is one of the legacies to Russell and the Celtics, but also like as the ABA is getting more and more fun, he's one of the few stars they had left. Reggie Lewis was a big one.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Bill Simmons?

  And we hadn't really seen that. You know, we have a lot of Reggie stuff in the last third of the series. And I just think he's one of those that kind of came and went. People remember he died, but they don't remember how good he was and how important he was to the Celtics. That was another one. Then there's a little like, there's moments as you go through where you're trying to explain the impact of somebody. Cousy, I mean Cousy is a big part of the first episode. How important he was to the league? You know, that the league just wasn't entertaining. You know, they didn't have a shot clock for eight years and it was just, it was just a bunch of, you've seen some of the old videos, like it's brutal and it's just a lot of big guys and it's a lot of set shots and running hooks.

• 1:07:15Bill Simmons?

  And then Cousy comes in and he's easily the most fun player in the league. And he's the most fun player in the league, probably for the first 15 years of the league, until Elgin and Jerry West and Oscar kind of get going.

• 1:07:30Bill Simmons?

  And the way he ran fast breaks and just some of the old footage, it's like, it's impossible not to enjoy. The way those teams played, it's so different. It's the same sport, but has no correlation to what we're watching now. Everything's about three on two, three on one, two on one, four on two. Can we get a layup? Can we get a layup? Can we get a layup? And that's like the driving force. Now you're running the same plays and the guys are splitting out to the corners. And Koozie be running and he'd be like doing like over the head tosses to somebody in the corner. It's just pretty different. So yeah, there is some pressure with some of that. Just to explain like, hey, here's why this person was special for four minutes.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, the context is just so infuriating whenever you hear people talk about like the history of the league. Because if you like talking about Koozie, people just drive me nuts because they'll go back and use the lens of today and watch the way he's dribbling. The officiating of dribbling is like one of the things that single-handedly changed the way the game is played. Like it just blew the walls down. I had a clip of

• 1:08:25Bill Simmons?

  You're talking about the carrying.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they used to, it was so strict. Your hand had to be directly on the top of the ball. And you know, I made a video at this one time. You just watched over the decades, the hand, the hand went from the top to kind of on the side to totally on the side to under. Now it's, and I think it's been a good thing. I think it promoted self-expression, which is what the league marketed itself on and exploded. But I just think Koozie is one that is funny to watch. If you imagine a game where you had to dribble the way that he did, it was pretty creative. Granted, the league wasn't, I don't know, integrated or anything like that.

• 1:09:01Bill Simmons?

  It definitely was that. Well, you had, so you had the dribbling thing. You had the sneakers, the fact that they're playing and you know, just these rinky-dink converses. And, uh, and then it was really, really physical. You know, you're just, people are just like, it was more like hockey. They called them cagers, you know, the first 15 years of the league. So it's a, it's a different sport. The other thing with the assists, like they're scoring all these points. You only got an assist if it was like the guy is catching the ball and like laying it, or the guy is catching it and shooting immediately, or they didn't count it. So

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  I've heard old guys complain about that.

• 1:09:36Bill Simmons?

  Oh my God. I mean, they complained, they must complain about so many different things, but uh, like the equipment they had, the money they didn't make. All the statistical rules against them. But uh, but yeah, and then, you know, it's, it's, we try to use the Celtics as a lens to look at the league and the sport and how it changed and how it intersected with America and all these different ways. Um, it is, it is hilarious how the footage changes over the years. Even you watch the stuff from the eighties like that, like we have a big part about the Boston Philly series in 1981, which is like probably my favorite series ever. But that becomes, it's just a UFC fight. It's like a 10 man UFC fight. There's no spacing at all.

• 1:10:20Bill Simmons?

  Every time somebody goes to the basket, they're just getting clobbered. And it becomes this kind of hybrid of like rugby, basketball and UFC by the fourth quarter. And that's like, you were just, you wouldn't really see that. We see elements of that sometimes with the big tense games, but not like that. There's not, there's not, there will never be another series like that. I don't think.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting. I was watching some games. I think I was trying to watch something for Jerry West one time and I was just amazed at the way he and Oscar Robertson would drew, A, I was amazed at the pickup point. I think that is something that has really evolved now with the threat of the deep three point shot. Teams just pick up way higher than they did in the past. You'd watch.

• 1:10:59Bill Simmons?

  Oh yeah, you're right.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  You'd watch legitimate stars with the ball like a Jerry West, who today, if Jerry West dribbled up the floor, he would be a threat from, I would say 28 and in, I mean, like, like legitimately would take those shots. And you would watch him dribble literally to the, to the elbow before he gets contact. And he'd pull up for that jumper. And I wonder if some of that is what you're talking about, just the clogged lane so many times that that shot was just available. I mean, Oscar Robertson did that, did that a lot too. But I think the pickup point is something that has really, really changed over the decades.

• 1:11:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's how the 85 Lakers won the finals. They just stacked it. And if you watch some of the footage from that, Danny Ainge and DJ, they're not just wide open from three, they're wide open from like 18. So Lakers are so packed, they're just not letting Mikhail and Bird beat them. And they're just like, take those 18 footers all day. And the Celtics kind of didn't know how to respond. And when you watch it now, you're just like, why didn't you guys move back? You would have just had wide open threes. You would have made one out of every three. The points per possession would have been more, but you know, nobody, nobody really thought that way. They, there's some, there's a lot of good stuff. I think for the basketball junkies, I think they're going to be, uh, they're be pleasantly surprised. We were able to pack a lot of stuff in this thing. Is that, you believe in the Pistons yet? By the way, I forgot to ask you about them.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  I think they're in, they are on the path toward that young teams need to be on, which we've talked about in the past. Whenever you have a young team, you have a coach, you have sort of your startup CEO who comes in and is just trying to make everybody feel good. And then you're like, all right, we need, we're going public. We need a real CEO and you go get the person. And I think they did that. So I think we're in the phase of they're going to be entering the playoffs. And then you, it's sort of like Orlando did. You get, you enter the playoffs, you get the data read back on that. And you say, this is, because the playoffs define everything. You, you always talk about fourth quarters in the playoffs. And it's like, those things come back and this is, this is what we saw. This is what happened. This is the map towards what we need to do. So that's kind of, that's where they are in the process right now for me.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  So we're going to see what kind of, the way teams play them, and then that's going to inform the moves that they make. So they're on the, they're on the path. Detroit fans, they seem to hate, think I hate Cade. I don't really understand that. But, uh, yeah, so, but they're, they're, they're on the right track. So.

• 1:13:15Bill Simmons?

  It's a tough one. Cause, and Marcelo never wavered on Cade, but last year.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Neither did I. I don't understand it.

• 1:13:21Bill Simmons?

  But I think, you know, it, it, he was a different guy than he was this year.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Bill Simmons?

  And everyone's admitting really from the last couple of months, anyone who listened to any of our stuff or any of the stuff we were doing. Like it was like, something's really good is happening with Kate Cunningham here. And it keeps going and going and going. And the veteran shooters they put around them, I think is a good model for how to build a team. It's interesting though, like right now they're sixth.

• 1:13:49Bill Simmons?

  They have a chance to bump to four or five. If I were them, I'd want to be in that sixth spot and I'd want to play the Knicks because I think they I think they could give the Knicks a shitload of trouble. They're they're a really tough, physical team. They they're probably if they're not the best rebounding team in the league, they're in the top three.

• 1:14:10Bill Simmons?

  I just would want to see them in a playoff series and it's probably a year too early. It's probably like what Orlando is like last year was like, oh, watch out for these guys. And then they shoot 20% in a game seven. But when you can rebound and you have veteran shooting and you have one guy that you can go to in the last five minutes, I just I'm taking you seriously. So I knew they were going to beat the Celtics last night. No Jalen Brown, third game and fourth night. It's kind of a bad matchup. Celts are kind of stuck in the second spot like that felt like a loss, but it's still a really nice win for Detroit. Like they've won eight straight. I'm taking them. I'm taking them seriously as at least a first round upset threat. I think you have to think of them that way now.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're they're in that position where they're they may not beat the Knicks, but they're in the position to like really take a bite out of them when they, you know, as they enter the next round, which is, you know, they're definitely not going to be a pushover. And I think you're right about they have these they had the guys that were athletic, you know, Assar and Jalen Durin. Durin is somebody that I was really high on. I couldn't believe the way he got stolen in that draft. He was somebody that very obviously fit the archetype of somebody that could switch and he's just super athletic. So sort of a poor man's Bam type of type of archetype guy. And then the shooting, a lot of the times that's the simplest answer. You got a downhill guy, just add some space around him. It seems like it's not rocket science, but teams Pistons finally did it.

• 1:15:28Bill Simmons?

  I mean, they're top five net last 15 games, they're plus 7.6. It's like you're if you're in the top five for a 15 to 20 game stretch at this point of the season, I think you have to be taken seriously. Anyway, all right, Kyle, man, I'll well, you'll come back at some point when we're in the March Madness throws, but it was good to see you as always.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Likewise, good to be here.

• 1:15:52Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Excitement is in the air. That's right, it's the start of NBA season. I can't wait to get together with friends, share some Michelob Ultras and watch Tip Off. Plus, as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting you closer to the action with experiences that make you feel like you're courtside to actual courtside tickets. Enter now for a chance to win at michelobultra.com/courtside. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Opening US residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1st, 2026. Ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details. This episode is brought to you by Expedia. You know how at the end of the season, your team goes to Cancun?

• 1:16:37Bill Simmons?

  Sometimes earlier than expected? Sometimes after blowing a 3-1 series lead? But what if you went to Cancun? With Expedia, save up to 30% when you bundle and save. You can book the flight or the hotel now, then book the rest later. In all fairness, though, hopefully your team doesn't go to Cancun. 1-2-3 Cancun. Or if they do, you go with them. Expedia, the one place you go to go places. Sign in to save, savings vary. All right, Susan Morrison is here. She works for The New Yorker. She wrote a big biography on Lorne Michaels that came out last week or this week?

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Last week.

• 1:17:10Bill Simmons?

  Last week. And how long were you working on it? Because it felt like this was like almost a decade's worth of work here.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  It was just about a decade, yeah. Just about a decade.

• 1:17:18Bill Simmons?

  How did you convince him to do it? Because you got some, I mean, you spent an entire week behind the scenes in an episode Jonah Hill hosted last decade. But also, it just seemed like you got a lot of Lorne time, which is pretty unusual.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  I did, and I know, I recognize how unusual that was. And that's, I think, I mean, it's, it's, it's worked for me. Well, basically, after the 40th anniversary 10 years ago, I started thinking about the show and the enormous impact of Lorne himself. You know, nobody has been more responsible for what makes, you know, generations of Americans laugh, what we all think is funny. And, you know, it was a huge legacy. And I knew Lorne a little bit because I worked for him briefly in 1984 on the new show, which was his one spectacular public failure, his attempt to do SNL in primetime. And I was just a kid, I was a munchkin then, you know, but I had a front row seat to

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  this interesting situation and I made a lot of friends there. Even though I switched to journalism, I kept in touch with all those people. So I would see Lorne maybe every eight or 10 years and we always said hi. And so I decided, I knew Lorne wouldn't say yes to having a book written about him. So what I did is I wrote a proposal, sent it around. I was surprised by the interest it generated. There was a big bidding war. I signed a deal with Random House. I had not promised them Lorne's involvement. And then I wrote a note to Lorne and I said, I'd love to come see you in your office. So I went to see him and I said, Lorne, I've just signed a deal to write a book about you and the show.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  I don't need anything from you because, you know, I'm connected in your world and but if you would like to talk to me, it'll be a bigger and better and richer book, you know, which your legacy deserves. And, you know, the truth is, he looked like he was going to faint. He was surprised and he doesn't like to be surprised, as you know, if you've read the book. But he was incredibly polite, as he always is, and we chatted about this and that for a while. And he said, let me give it some thought. And so a few days later, I followed up and we met for a drink at a bar in a hotel. And I thought we were going to, you know, be negotiating. That's that it would maybe be like, well, this and that.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  But as often happens with Lorne, people say that sometimes you sit down with Lorne and he starts a conversation, you're like, wait a minute, I missed the previous conversation? Like, he'll just kind of leap ahead. And that's what happened. We sat there, he was drinking his Belvedere on the rocks, and he just started telling stories about his childhood, about his parents. And I realized, oh, he's going to do this. You know, I didn't have a notepad or a Tape recorder, so I would run the lady's room and write stuff down. Forget it. And, you know, he asked nothing of me. There were no terms. There was no deal. He just, I think, you know, he liked me. He respected the magazine. I think he knew there was going to be a book written about him.

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  Better be written by me than, you know, some kind of entertainment business hack who was going to turn something around really fast. And so then I just started visiting him in his office. You know, a couple Friday nights a month and we would have these leisurely talks. And it was very civilized and really fun and, you know, talk to everyone else in his world. And the charm, the real charm of it for me was that I didn't have to deal with any publicists. And that can really be the backbreaking part of a project like this. I think that, you know, once word went out that Lauren was talking to me, all these people just said, sure, you know, and everyone loves to talk about Lauren. So, you know, after we had done that for a year or so,

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  then I realized, okay, if I'm going to write this guy's biography, you know, you want to avoid it being like a death march through the years. You know, 1986 turned to 1987, turned to 1988. And I'm a magazine editor, so I wanted some of that up close in the room material like you have in a magazine profile. So I said, you know, how about if I just come to the show one week and just stay at your elbow and watch everything? You know, so I can convey to people the magic and the insanity of how this show comes together every week. You know, I kind of related to it a little bit because it's not completely unlike the way we put together an issue of The New Yorker. You know, we have a weekly deadline, a lot of crazy egomaniacs, you know.

• 1:21:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  So, and he let me. And so I was able to sit there through all these very intense, usually confidential meetings and got to see all the complicated levers that he has to push and the egos that he has to solve. And it was, you know, I sometimes said to my editor, this book could be, you know, published by Harvard Business School. I mean, it's a funny, interesting book, but it's a real management bible too. So.

• 1:22:15Bill Simmons?

  I was shocked that he let you hang by his side for an entire show like that, especially they're having pretty candid conversations about Jonah Hill was the host that week. And the psychology of getting a host to either buy into a sketch, or sometimes like him not wanting to promote, uh, mid nineties. Lauren didn't want to promote it, even though Jonah Hill had this movie he directed. He's like, ah, we don't do directors, we only do actors. But all the little tidbits you got from that, I just couldn't believe he allowed, he allowed you in that inner circle. But do you think part of it was because he knew the book was coming out so much later than that episode? That it was okay? Like if he had done it and it had just all run like a week later, I think that would have been weird.

• 1:22:56Bill Simmons?

  But seven years later, it seemed okay, cause there's a lot of other stuff in there too. Like they're having problems with Leslie Jones that week. And she's hitting that point where she's probably outgrowing the show and everybody's realizing it. But you had all this stuff in there that after seven years, it seemed more benevolent than maybe in 2018.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing I'll say is certainly Lauren, neither Lauren nor I knew that it was going to take that much longer.

• 1:23:20Bill Simmons?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  I mean, I, you know, I, I, I, I, the book took this long just because it took this long. You know, I interviewed hundreds of people. I have a demanding day job. You know, I did all the weekends, but still I, I don't think, I don't think Lauren's that strategic. I don't, I don't think he's thinking like, oh, this will be some years. I think he just felt like he, again, it was a great honor for me that he just trusted me. And I did say to him at the beginning of that week, I said, I know how this goes. You know, if somebody blurts something out that's really, you know, controversial or disgraces themselves, or some confidential thing happens that you would like to be off the record, let's check in at the end of each day and you can tell me.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  You know, that's the way at the magazine, we would maybe deal with it if we had a journalist visiting at a meeting or something. But he never did. He never said, oh, you know, when so and so blurred it out, blah, blah, blah. Let's, let's erase that.

• 1:24:14Bill Simmons?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  He never did. Um, and you know, but again, I think it's that, you know, he respected me as a, as a journalist and, and knew that I wasn't gonna, you know, I wasn't out to hang anybody or burn the place down and, um, And I'll tell you the truth, I mean, there were a handful of things, particularly with Saturday Night, the party after the show where people were wandering around, you know, a little blitz, blabbing things that, you know, and I, I mean, just because I'm a, you know, I'm a good journalist, but I'm also not out to nail anybody. And I think I probably protected a couple of people here and there. But, but the book is really true to what happened and to my experience. And I, as I said, I felt honored by being trusted that way.

• 1:24:54Bill Simmons?

  Well, because if you go back to the eighties and there was that great book that Helen Waingrad wrote about the first 10 years of the show. And as they're finishing that up, Woodward comes out with the book about Belushi. And they talk about in the Saturday Night Live book that came out about the 10 years, like, there was a chill with those guys because they felt like they were burned by the Belushi book. They'd given Woodward all this access. And then he just steered the book toward basically the cocaine downfall of Belushi. And it seemed like they were, they basically made it seem like Lauren kind of scaled back right at the end. And he hasn't really done anything since. And I was wondering, like, did he feel like, all right, was it, because you even have a quote in the book about basically, he's like, the less talking you do about how well you're doing, the better off you are,

• 1:25:38Bill Simmons?

  which I thought was interesting. But then at the same time, he's letting you do this book.

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  Yes, it's true that he has always had a policy that there isn't much to be gained by talking to the press. You can be quoted out of context, you know, all these things can happen. And they did feel burned by Belushi, by, I'm sorry, by Wired. A lot of people, including Jim Belushi, told me that they felt that they had been misquoted in the Woodward book and that things were taken out of context. You know, I mean, that kind of, that happens a lot in this business. I, you know, I, I'm not in a position to fact check Woodward's book, but I, I mean, I was really careful, you know, I've been working at The New Yorker for 30 years. I was really careful in the research. I had a fact checker, check everything, you know. I, I think that there was a level of comfort with how I was going to be doing

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  it. But you're right. I think that the only reason that he kind of went against his usual dictum, which is nothing to be gained by talking to the press, is that It was right after the 40th, the 40th anniversary, remember, it was a beautiful show. It was very emotional. I think Lorne was a little softened by it. And I think he felt it, that they were celebrating the 40th. And Phil Hartman was gone and Belushi and Gilda and so many people and Tom Davis. And I think he thought, God, it's going to be even a smaller group at the 50th. I think he was, for the first time, really thinking about his legacy, you know?

• 1:27:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  And I just happened to kind of get him at the right time. And I definitely felt that he was reflective in a way that isn't maybe his norm. I mean, you've interviewed him, you've talked to him. He doesn't, he's not naturally that interior person. So I think that it was just good timing. He also, you know, I'll say, I think he's a little bit superstitious, which I love. And when we met that first time in his office, you know, I told you he knew me from the 80s. But I told him something he didn't know, which is that when I was 16 during the first season of the show, I took the Metro North train from Connecticut and was in the audience for one of the Elliot Gould shows.

• 1:27:52Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  Which was magic. And it was one of his favorite shows from that season. And I think there is something that kind of, that sparked something in his brain. It felt right to him, you know?

• 1:28:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I felt that same way when he let me do the pod in his office. I think he knew, like, I love the show. And, you know, it meant a lot to me and I had a lot of history with it. What struck me when I interviewed him, first of all, his recall is amazing.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:28:15Bill Simmons?

  I was really surprised by just how specifically he could remember stuff going back to the 70s and 80s, like it happened yesterday. But the thing that you mentioned earlier about how this book could be like, almost like a business class for management, that was that his, his sense of...

• 1:28:34Bill Simmons?

  How to direct people, how to nudge people, the different points of a career you hit,

• 1:28:41Bill Simmons?

  knowing what the shelf life is of a relationship with somebody and whether they're going to leave, or actually whether they're going to stay under the umbrella and just kind of stay there, or they're just going to go, and are they going to come back? It seems like he's probably put more thought into this than just about anybody, because a lot of people have managed successful companies. Not a lot of people have managed a successful company that also has to do with all the things that come with fame and managers and agents and the temptations and, you know, whether you stay loyal to the infrastructure of the show, or you leave and you do something else. And it just felt like he had put like an extraordinary amount of thought into it. And that was one of the things I loved about your book is like, it's really in there.

• 1:29:22Bill Simmons?

  Like, you really feel like all these different examples of like, it's time for them to go, or they're going to find out the hard way that they shouldn't have left. Like, it just seems like that's like one of the legacies of Lauren, basically.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, one of the things, Chris Rock was a great source, very smart guy. And he said, think about it, this guy has been hundreds, if not thousands, of people's boss. And if that doesn't make you an expert on human behavior, you know, what does? I mean, he's, he's, he's almost like a shrink. He's seen so many people go through this weird crucible, right, of change. You think about like Bill Hader comes from Oklahoma in his early twenties. His only job had been working, you know, and it's an assistant on Iron Chef, right? And you see these people, and then they become famous overnight. You know, Lauren says he's the world's expert on watching people get famous.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  You know, and very often, he, he, he's fully aware, there's like an asshole phase. You know, you become a big jerk for a while.

• 1:30:23Bill Simmons?

  What is this thing, like, if it lasts, if it lasts more than 15 minutes, you just stay an asshole, or you had some quote like that?

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he knows how to shepherd people through this. But in terms of, like, the management approach, I think that, I think it's largely intuitive. Like, I, you know, I remember Judd Apatow, I hearing once about how when he was a 25-year-old or 26-year-old. Young showrunner, working on Ben Stiller's Fox variety show in the eighties, which is a great show that got canceled right away. He was terrified. He didn't know how to manage people. He was holed up in his office, reading, you know, Management for Dummies, like trying to learn how to do it. Lorne never did anything like that. I think he, a lot of it is intuitive. He's got great EQ, but also, and this was the fun part about researching the book.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  I mean, sometimes I think he's almost like a young character out of Dickens or something, like every stop along the way, every bad job that he had, he nonetheless learned something important from it. Like you can see him going through the first 30 years of his life, gathering the little individual skills to becoming a producer and learning.

• 1:31:33Bill Simmons?

  Well, and especially his interactions with stars. Yeah, just like, oh, I learned this from Flip Wilson. Oh, I learned this from Lily Tom, and he just takes it.

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. And the other thing that's unusual about him is that not only is he good at dealing with those kinds of incandescent creative egos or narcissists, but at the same time, he's a guy who has the mellow confidence to be able to deal with the suits, you know? A lot of, Conan O'Brien said to me, you know, in the Game of Thrones of show business, you know, Lorne will be the last one standing. And if you think about the number of administrations of NBC ownership, he has outlived. Mike Schur, the SNL writer who's now creating a lot of different shows. I quote him talking on a podcast once about, you know,

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  what it's like to work for GE. You know, GE owned the network for a long time. And he quotes the network or pretends to quote a network saying something like, gee, how come our laser-guided missile department is doing so much better than our fart joke division?

• 1:32:41Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:32:41Speaker 02

  So you're working for people who are basically making toaster ovens, you know?

• 1:32:46Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  And he knows how to kind of ride it out when those people turn into pests.

• 1:32:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you did a good job with this, because there's a couple eras with that. Where he just trusts the infrastructure and that there's going to be upheaval above him. And if he could just kind of hold on to the steering wheel. And like the thing he says over and over again to people is you just gotta stay on the air. You just gotta keep it going. How do I stay on? Because all like, it's the most famous stage for this was probably the Don Olmair era, the mid 90s.

• 1:33:15Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:33:16Bill Simmons?

  You know, he's trying to get rid of the show and Lauren could have like escalated it, turned into nuclear war and maybe he gets bounced, but he just kind of, just kind of held the fort.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  What happened, what Conan did, you know, with the Tonight Show, when, when he made this social movement out of.

• 1:33:31Bill Simmons?

  Which Lauren hated.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that to me, that Lauren, that was like exactly what you don't do, you know, what you do do is you just keep your head down and, and ride it out. And the stay on the air thing, again, to look at the lessons that he garnered along the way. In the, in the, in the 60s and 70s, when he was working in LA on variety shows. You know, he was on Laugh-In, but he knew that the cooler show was the Smothers Brothers. That's where Steve Martin wrote and Rob Reiner. And he kind of wished he were on the Smothers Brothers, but then the Smothers Brothers basically allowed themselves to become martyrs. They wouldn't let up on their, um, envy, on their Vietnam stuff, you know, they, they had Pete Seeger on singing Ways Deep in the Big Muddy.

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  And the president called Bill Paley and got them taken off the air. And, and Lauren, I think, always felt like, yeah, they did great material, but they didn't, you know, they didn't get to stay on the air. And if you're not on the air, you're nowhere.

• 1:34:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you have a couple of good stories about the shelf life of the moment you have. One of them was the Smothers Brothers, right? Where it's like, they were cool and then you fade, you turn into something else. And also, you know, he could feel it probably happened in the early 80s when Letterman became the cool show, which you talked about too.

• 1:34:46Speaker 02

  Yes, that's.

• 1:34:47Bill Simmons?

  SNL's all of a sudden a little late and Letterman is now the new person. And I mean, one of the great things about this book, I, I knew so little about that five year stretch when he wasn't on SNL. And just like grabbing all of these different ideas and things and really.

• 1:35:05Bill Simmons?

  None of them worked out, other than just getting Broadway video to buy a bunch of IP from the show, which turned out to be really smart financially, but all the creative stuff, none of it really worked out.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you could, that, you know, he thought his TV life was over then. He thought, oh, that I did my TV thing, now I'm gonna have my Mike Nichols moment. You know, he always wanted to make a film like The Graduate, and he thought that was his destiny. You know, his grandparents owned a movie theater. He grew up besotted with the movies. And, and what's interesting is that, you know, he was working on an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. You know, he was, he had bought the rights to Don DeLillo's, oh gosh, you know, the one that Noah Baumbach just made, White Noise. And, you know, these are really highbrow pictures. They weren't like Animal House, which is what you might have expected him to do, you know, go in a boffo comedy direction. So that didn't work out. And the

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  thing, the only thing he did during those years that brought him pleasure is he, he wrote Three Amigos with two of his best friends, you know, Steve Martin and Randy Newman. And he described that to me as like, the one time where he just followed, this is what I always pictured it to be like, you know, like George S. Kaufman staying up all night with the Marx Brothers, drinking too much coffee and fixing the third act. And I think he realized that, you know, he, he doesn't, he doesn't want to sit alone in a room with a typewriter. He wants to be brainstorming with his friends. He likes a clubhouse. You know, his whole life, he's been looking for a tribe. And so that's what made him go back to SNL in 1985.

• 1:36:39Bill Simmons?

  But it also, I mean, you laid out, part of why he went back to SNL in 1985 is it didn't seem like he totally knew what to do.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:47Bill Simmons?

  And this was like the one thing that he knew he was good at, and he had tried all these other things, and it just never totally fit.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  Oh, he was horribly in debt. He'd lost his own money on the new show. He had a mortgage, his apartment. I mean, this, the idea of Lorne, you know, in financial distress was something that he, you know, it almost reminds me of Scarlett O'Hara, you know, I'll never be poor again. Because when he was 14, his father died suddenly, and his whole life changed. And there was financial uncertainty, it was... His mother was depressed and you know, he's one of those guys with catastrophic thinking who kind of lived his whole adult life to make sure that never happened to him again. So when he was presented with the offer to come back and save SNL after five years away, he first he didn't know what to do. His pride felt a little wounded like, oh, is that just going backwards?

• 1:37:36Bill Simmons?

  Well, we should mention they're probably, the show's probably dying if he doesn't come back.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  Yes, they were gonna yank it. They were gonna cancel it.

• 1:37:41Bill Simmons?

  He's got that guilt trip part of it too.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  So it was save your baby or we're gonna kill it. And so he asked for advice from two mentors. And he always had a lot of mentors in his life in the same way that he would go on to be everybody else's mentor. So the first one he asked was David Geffen, who was his first agent way back in the day. And Geffen said, you know, Lauren, you should not go back and take that job in New York. You know, you've done that. Someone who wants to be you should do that. And I love Lauren's response to that because he's very honest. He said, and he said, well, you know, I always kind of liked being me.

• 1:38:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  So then the second person he asked, much more sage, an older man, Mo Austin, who was the chairman of Warner Brothers Records. Mo was a much more clear-eyed. He said, look, you're great at that job. You love New York City. There are very few big entertainment jobs in New York City. It's a perfect fit. You should go back. And, and I think that the penny dropped and Lauren realized, yeah, I'm good at live television. And you know, Jim Downey, one of the longest-serving head writers on the show, has a great way of summing up what he thinks Lauren's strengths are that make him so good at live TV. He said, Lauren's a guy, not that great at term papers, really good at tests.

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  You know, in other words, a hard deadline is necessary for him. You know, with movies, he could kind of noodle around with rewrites and never actually get to the end of it.

• 1:39:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I liked that part of the book.

• 1:39:15Speaker 02

  As he always says, the show goes on because it's 11:30 no matter what.

• 1:39:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I liked how you laid that out, that some people, their weakness is they can't stop tinkering with something. You know, and it could be anything, right? It could be a magazine feature you're editing. It could be documentary. It could just somebody that never feels like it's done and they can't make final decisions. But when you, when you're out on Saturday, 1130, I, one of my favorite things about your book was that process of going between dress rehearsal and, and you laid out everything that happened in that Jonah Hill show from dress rehearsal.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:46Bill Simmons?

  Right till when they go live, when Lauren turns into like a different human and he's just like, all right, here's what we, and it's like the one time all week where he's just, he has to make decisions.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  No, people have told me, and this, I'm pleased, but as people have told me that when they're reading that section of the book, their heart starts pounding.

• 1:40:04Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  And when you're in that room and think about it, every, it's a, not a big room. This is the ninth floor office. Every square inch of the carpet, I mean, people are on there kneeling on their knees because there isn't even room to sit down Indian style.

• 1:40:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  Everyone's crammed in there. It really is like a scene, you know, they're about to go into battle and, and you could just, you can feel the tension. It's, it's thrilling and that's obviously what makes the, drives the adrenaline and the, you know, magic in the show that, that tension. Because many people have critiqued it over the years and said, wait a minute, you know, why don't we just pick the actual seven sketches on Wednesday? And then we don't have to have this whole Hunger Games rigmarole.

• 1:40:46Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  But I think Lauren knows that keeping that creative tension and the competition and the, that that is good for creativity.

• 1:40:57Bill Simmons?

  Well, one thing that was, and I'd never really thought about it correctly until I read what you wrote, but like, I never thought of all the factors. I would always think like, oh, he'll just pick the seven funniest things. But the stuff he's weighing about like, is this cast member in the cast too much? Did the audience respond in the dress rehearsal? Are we going to have the right amount of energy in this part of the show? So he's like, he's on some different plane that it seems like only he can see this, which makes me wonder how anybody can take that job after him, even though he's 80.

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:41:27Bill Simmons?

  But like, how do you come in and there are all these other factors beyond just what's funny, what's not funny? Now, maybe. Somebody would just approach it completely differently and be fine, but I just hadn't thought about it before.

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's Steve Higgins calls it like five dimensional chess. He's thinking, do I keep the host happy? Do I make sure like the show I was at, you know, I think one of the reasons that, you know, one of the sketches got canned is just because it was these huge movie theater seats. They were just too damn hard to get in and out of the doors. So like next, you know, and.

• 1:41:59Bill Simmons?

  And it's like 20,000, 20,000 dollars down the drain.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:42:03Bill Simmons?

  They say no thanks.

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  Have time to get the prosthetic head on, you know, um, and there's so many things that, you know, all week, I mean, and this is, this probably is a decisive management choice. One of the things that's so cool is that all week long, Lorne is soliciting opinions from everybody and not just the writers and the cast, but you know, the costume assistants, the pages, you know, he wants to hear from everybody. He likes to think of it as an egalitarian enterprise, that everyone is as necessary as everybody else. And I know that sometimes in meetings even, he has a sheet of paper and he'll jot down every time someone has spoken. Cause he wants to make sure everybody in the room says something.

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  And then, so he's, he's metabolizing all those points of view all week. And then there's a moment after the dress rehearsal, when he walks up this little cinder block staircase. It's like the least glamorous place in the building, up to his office. And I just thought of this now, it's almost like, do you watch Severance?

• 1:43:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:08Speaker 02

  You know how they go in the elevator and then they go, and the, you know, it's like he goes up the staircase and he becomes the other guy. So then he's in his office and suddenly he's not thinking about what everybody else says. It's just him. It's just.

• 1:43:22Bill Simmons?

  So the whole week is about him peaking for that hour.

• 1:43:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then he goes up the stairs.

• 1:43:26Bill Simmons?

  Make sure it's fresh.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  He becomes Superman and then he's the decider and everything that comes out of his mouth, like it's him, it's him, it's him, it's him. And so to see that transformation, like it is really, it's really interesting.

• 1:43:39Bill Simmons?

  Well, one of the great things about that week you spent with, with the show was the show that's in dress rehearsal and then gets, or the sketch that gets bumped is this Beavis and Butthead sketch that they couldn't figure out. And then they ended up doing with Ryan Gosling last season.

• 1:43:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:54Bill Simmons?

  And it's one of the best shows of the decade. And it's like, holy shit, that's the same sketch. It was dead for five years and came back.

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  I know, I know. And I remember thinking, you know, Louisa, Louisa Carey and the amazing makeup and prosthetics guy, he worked all week on those heads.

• 1:44:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  And Lorne wasn't completely getting it. First, he said, oh, I feel like it's just kind of Coneheads redux, you know? And then he also didn't understand why Jonah kept being in profile, which he thought looked really awkward. And then somebody had to say, no, no, in Beavis and Butthead, you always see him in profile. But it just wasn't really gelling. But yes, I mean, I, kudos to the writing staff to hang, that they hung on to that.

• 1:44:34Bill Simmons?

  But they must, I mean, they must have like 10 of those a year where they're like, I can't believe he didn't pick that one. Let's just like save it and circle it back.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  Well, I saw it in dress. And I'll tell you, it was a whole lot better when Gosling did it. So.

• 1:44:45Bill Simmons?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, there's reasons he didn't do it.

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  But you know, another thing that was fun to learn, like, I didn't know that the cowbell sketch existed.

• 1:44:53Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  Before Walken and that they did it. They tried to do it when Norm MacDonald hosted. And yet you can see, like, can you imagine anyone but Walken doing that now? No.

• 1:45:03Bill Simmons?

  Right. Well, you, I mean, going through the years, one thing I appreciated was he was really, really grateful for some cast members that popped up at the right times. And the guy that he really effusively praised was Dana Carvey, who I still feel like is the most underrated star of the 50 years.

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  I do too, yeah.

• 1:45:23Bill Simmons?

  He doesn't get mentioned in the Mount Rushmore, but he should. And he was basically, Lorne has these different quotes where he's like, this guy was a machine. This guy could do everything. We wrote, we were able to ride him. Yeah, for the late 80s, basically. And it seems like he felt that way about Ackroyd. He felt that he wasn't there for Eddie Murphy, but Eddie's in there. Will Ferrell was like that. Was there anybody else that he talked about where it was just clear Lorne was like, this is a Mount Rushmore guy for me?

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  Phil Hartman. I think Phil Hartman, definitely. I mean, and all of these people you just mentioned, like, they're, they're actors, you know? I mean, they're really in it. They can. You know, somebody described Ackroyd as the kind of guy who kind of zipped himself into a character and disappear into it, you know, very different from like the way Belushi performed, which is he's always a Belushi-esque character, you know.

• 1:46:12Bill Simmons?

  Right, he's a force of nature. Well, you had that great thing about Ackroyd about how if they needed to do the sketch in three minutes instead of three and a half, he would talk faster to make them move it along.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  That's right. I think that among the women, I think, well, I think Jan.

• 1:46:25Bill Simmons?

  Kristen Wiig has to be, right?

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  Kristen Wiig definitely. And one of the things that's amazing about Kristen Wiig, and I started, when I started watching, re-watching the shows more carefully, you see that what she does that's different from a lot of comedy performers is her acting, everything she does is so small. You know, she does so much with less, like just little movements of her eyes, or even like if you look at her Denise character with the forehead, like it's, it's so subtle.

• 1:46:52Bill Simmons?

  Right. Hater, Hater said once to me that the unbelievable thing about her was every single character she ever did was slightly different than, there was no like, oh, I'll do this and I'll just have a wig on. It was like each thing was slightly different than the other thing. Like she was just re, just inventing new people each time, which they were like, how does she do that?

• 1:47:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, I think definitely. I mean, I think Kate McKinnon is a great actor. I think Jan Hooks was just incredible. And she also tends to, I mean, of course.

• 1:47:25Bill Simmons?

  She got shoved under the rug. Yeah, I'm with you. I almost, I did my all time cast and she was the one, I was, that was like one of the toughest cuts for me. Because I just feel like for four or five years, she was a man, could do anything. I also like the people that can sing and perform and do sketches and do characters. Like there's like some sort of total package thing that I think only a few of them have really pulled off, you know?

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things that I loved, you know, getting, because I hadn't really gotten it until I spent a whole lot of time there, is that, the thing is that all of them, at the end of the day. They're just theater kids, you know, they're all people who did guys and dolls in high school, you know, even like Lorne, there's a, there's a bit in the book where Lorraine Newman described how once she was with him in the seventies and she had just had a bad breakup. And he, and Lorne launched into that song from West Side Story, Forget That Boy.

• 1:48:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:23Speaker 02

  Like the idea, you know, I mean, I, my, I have two daughters who were theater kids. So I'm very familiar with this type, but all of them, you know, I remember seeing Colin Firth interviewed once about how much he loved doing, you know, the scene in ABBA where he's in the jumpsuit and the, and the platform shoes because everybody who's an actor, they just want to do that, you know? And it was also very interesting to hear Lorne talk about, just to see with all of them, how, you know, the audience is always projecting onto SNL, you know, they want it to be a political show or an anarchist collective or whatever, but it's really show business. It's just show business. And that's why often when you see these scenes shot backstage, you'll look down the hall

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  and you'll see a couple of showgirls, a man dressed as Abe Lincoln and a llama, you know, it's, it's like that scene, I don't know if you're as much of a Beatles nut as I am, but like in Hard Day's Night, there's that scene in the theater where John Lennon's going down the stairs and he runs into a showgirl.

• 1:49:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  With a headdress and like, yeah, even the Beatles, it's just showbiz.

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  There's something I kind of love about that.

• 1:49:29Bill Simmons?

  We're going to take a break and come back and I want to talk about Lorne as Confucius.

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:49:35Bill Simmons?

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• 1:50:20Bill Simmons?

  All right, Lauren is Confucius, which seems to be a recurring theme with everybody who's been in his orbit. He just dropped shit like, I just, I took down some couple of things from your book that I screenshotted. He was talking about Belushi taking Chevy Chase's overnight fame the hardest. And he said, there's a certain kind of person who, if they're not famous by 26, they're going to burst into flames, which I thought was like, yeah, he's, he's probably seen that too. These people that come on the show and they're like so anxious to have it all happen. But it seems like, he seems to feel like, except for the rare exceptions like Carvey, you almost need two years on the show before you can become who you are. Like what, what did you find out when you're researching the book?

• 1:51:02Bill Simmons?

  Like what's the, what's the arc of a cast member to actually be really good on the show?

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  Well, I think that, um, I think he really likes and respects the ones who come in there and survey the scene and figure out, okay, this is how I can be effective here. Like plenty of them, and again, they're young, you know, they, there's no orientation. There's no instruction packet. Like it's sink or swim. You know, you have to figure out, okay, who can write for me? Who can I write with? How am I going to get on the air? And the ones who can sort that out, you know, are the, are the ones who are really going to make it.

• 1:51:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Well, then there's someone like Kristen Wiig comes in and she's just immediately, you could tell like, she's, she's going to be on the show for seven years.

• 1:51:45Speaker 02

  There are a few shortcuts, like, and this began with Billy Murray, when, you know, when he started on the show in the second season, he had a good first show and then he just kind of disappeared. People didn't like him, audience didn't like him because they thought he was a Chevy replacement and he wasn't so cute as Chevy. But, you know, he was playing like second cop parts. So Lauren and he devised this idea that Billy would come on the show. Behind a desk and just address the audience and just say, hey, I'm not cutting it here. I don't know. What's the matter, people? Don't you like me? And he talked about his dead father and everything. But that did it, you know, he connected with the audience. They really liked him and he was in. And that kind of began this tradition of one of the time honored ways that that new cast members

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  kind of get get their footing is to go on Weekend Update.

• 1:52:34Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  As themselves and say their name into the camera. I mean, think of Adam Sandler when they did his first Thanksgiving song, you know? He was not really thriving so much on the show, but then he came in. He was himself. He looked like himself. He did his funny little song. Everybody knew, oh, I know that guy now. And the week I was there.

• 1:52:52Bill Simmons?

  Eddie Murphy did that too. It's Raheem Abdul Muhammad. That was the first time he did that. That was it. He took off.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  So that so that works, you know? And the week I was there, Melissa Villasenor had one on Update and that she broke through. So, you know, there are a lot of different kind of shortcuts. Some people are just so good at it. You know, look at Tina Thompson. He's been there forever. He just, you know, I think he recognizes it as a good thing. Lauren will often say that, you know, agents, people's agents and managers are the menace because they'll suddenly start getting like movie offers and they'll say, hey, get out of this place. You gotta leave, you know, it's time to leave. And Lauren, you know, does a lot of sidebar conversations with these people. And what he what he says, another one of his co ends is, you know, make them,

• 1:53:39Speaker 02

  let them build a bridge that's strong enough so they can walk across it and walk away. But.

• 1:53:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that was another Lauren Confucius thing.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there are so many of them. And some of them, what I love is some of them actually can't figure out what the hell they mean. And writers and cast spend years talking about them. And one that a lot of people mentioned to me is something he would say, well, you know, there's people who build the house and there's people who buy the house. And you have to figure out which one you are. And everyone is like, what the hell does that mean?

• 1:54:11Bill Simmons?

  But if I'm both.

• 1:54:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you had the one, I mean, this is another one. We was talking about Chevy Chase. When he said, the idea that you could feel things for somebody and then you run out of it. I realized so people burn out of relationships. And he said that about, um, he said that about a family member, but he was talking about Chevy Chase. Like sometimes the professional relationship, it just is what it is. It's supposed to be four, five, six years and then it's over. And that's, it's like real life.

• 1:54:47Speaker 02

  And you have to walk away. Yeah. And I think it was, you know, when he started the show and had the original not ready for primetime players, they were just kind of supposed to be in the background. Nobody was supposed to become a star. You know, no one was supposed to become famous. So when suddenly Chevy was famous and he was on the cover of New York magazine, that totally messed up the ecosystem. It created, you know, it was a loss of innocence, to use one of Lauren's favorite terms. And everyone got jealous.

• 1:55:14Bill Simmons?

  Fame back then too. It's 30 million people watching the show potentially on a Saturday night. It's just different level.

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  And so it was very painful for him to see this tribe, this family fractured. And then, but when Chevy did go, as painful as it was, again, this was one of these lessons that he had to internalize. He realized, okay, this is going to happen again and again and again. And so he sort of inured himself to it. But he also realized that, you know, like George Steinbrenner or like any sports team, you have to keep bringing in rookies. You have to seed the team. And that's something he learned the hard way, you know, but, but he, he, that's, that's how he's kept it going for 50 years. That there are always new people.

• 1:55:56Bill Simmons?

  I think that's one of the reasons I connect with the, the whole structure of the show, because it's a lot like sports.

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:56:03Bill Simmons?

  You have to constantly think about like, all right, this person's taken off. I probably only have them for two more years. Now I got to develop a bench behind them. Uh, another thing that I loved, we, I shouldn't mention this, uh, three minutes ago, but his, his hatred of agents and managers and how. How just their agenda doesn't align, you know, they're, all they're doing is just trying to get whoever the most amount of money possible. Yeah, they don't care about career. They don't care about relationships and how he tries to navigate that. But it's like one of the few things he can't hide his contempt for, which is like these people.

• 1:56:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, he says, I think I, somewhere in the, at least one place, he says in the book, agents are morons, you know?

• 1:56:42Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  And the thing they, they all hate more than anything is when agents get tickets to the show and they're in the audience. I mean, people have told me that, you know, because they're so jaded. I mean, you want the real fans. You don't want an agent. So you'll look up at the balcony and you'll see a bunch of, you know, CIA agents and their dates asleep.

• 1:56:58Bill Simmons?

  They're half asleep. Yeah. More stuff.

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  But about the Steinbrenner thing.

• 1:57:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  And this, I, I found myself wondering if this had something to do with your affinity for the show. You know, Lauren, he is a sports guy. I mean, loves the Yankees.

• 1:57:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  Goes to the Knicks. He's a big hockey guy and he uses a lot of sports metaphors all the time. You know, he uses a lot of baseball metaphors. When Will Ferrell was talking to me about Lauren's style, he said, you know, Lauren's like, he's like a baseball manager. He knows you've got to keep the highs not too high and the lows not too low because it's a long season. And a lot of people, you know, use sports talk to talk about how the show works. And the other thing people say is that the closest thing to SNL on television, because it's live, is sports.

• 1:57:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:57:47Bill Simmons?

  Well, yeah, it's like a live sporting event. Yeah, well, you had stuff in there about how a compliment from him is, it's rare. So when you get one, it means something, but it is, the, the cast members that succeed the best, I've talked about this, it's like a basketball team where when you play basketball, it's not just about, oh, clear out, I'm going to score. Like you're, you're trying to make other people better. You're trying to connect with people. You're trying to move without the ball and set picks. And those are the people that always do best on the show. Here's another Lauren quote, "The trouble with a thankless job is that no one thanks you." But you could put the shit in like, in like fortune cookies.

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  I know. Wow, that's a great marketing idea. The paper back.

• 1:58:28Bill Simmons?

  And he talked about why he's devoted to the show. When it takes every ounce of my strength to get it on and there's nothing but resistance and nobody seems to give a fuck, then I want out because you can only give up your life for something greater than you. So far, it's been worth it. Now, he's 80 and he's still giving up his life for the show. But there's other reasons for that, right? Like, the moment he's not running SNL, you're not getting your calls returned in quite the same way. Like, there's a power that comes with the show that I think he's aware of.

• 1:58:56Speaker 02

  I think it's so much his whole life and his whole personality. I don't think he's gonna leave there unless it's on a stretcher, you know? And he always says that if producing's done well, you leave no fingerprints. And that's true. And that's sort of why he's been behind the curtain all these years. But at the same time, his fingerprints are on everything, you know? Every one of them has absorbed his sort of gospel and his sense of values about the show. And not just about the show, but about how to live their lives, you know? In addition to all of his comedy rules and axioms, he teaches them how to live, how to live in New York, how to order in a restaurant, you know?

• 1:59:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he's paying for like new teeth for cast members and all kinds of things.

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

  And the gifts he gives are so, like, you get the, people have told me, oh, he gave me this really great luggage or Simon Pierce glassware. And you sort of feel like he's ushering them into the good life. I was with Jim Downey once when he opened this box. It was an Hermes, big orange box. It was an Hermes sweater for his birthday. And he was so intimidated by it, you know? He Googled it and saw how expensive it was. And he said, I have to get a safety deposit box for this.

• 2:00:08Speaker 02

  Way to wear it.

• 2:00:10Bill Simmons?

  He had a story about, that you have in the book, that I'd never heard about when Ray Charles was on the show. And he was gonna be reunited with all these people that he had done all this great stuff with. And he's like, are you excited to see them? And Ray Charles said, most of them owe me money and wasn't excited at all. And he's like, all right, I'm gonna tuck that story away, too.

• 2:00:28Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:00:29Bill Simmons?

  That down the road, you know, these special relationships I allegedly have might not be so special 20 years from now.

• 2:00:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, again, that's the sort of keep the highs not too high, the lows not too low. I mean, he, he, there's a way in which all these people, they are his family members. He's recreated the family that, you know, he lost when his father suddenly died when he was a child. But there's also, you know, it's also business. I mean, he man, he walks this very fine line.

• 2:00:55Bill Simmons?

  Right. Well, and also when he went, when he stopped doing SNL after the first five years, you have a thing about, yeah, the phone's not quite ringing. The same way.

• 2:01:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:05Bill Simmons?

  There's some Conan O'Brien stuff in this book that I've believed and felt for a while that you really got into. And, you know, not like in a New York Post Page Six kind of way, but it was, you know, that he was the one person, he did The Tonight Show and he moved to LA and he kind of left Lorne out of it, which has been atypical for everybody who's passed through the universe. And it seems, it seemed a little chilly. Could you feel that when you were reporting it?

• 2:01:30Speaker 02

  I did feel that. And I thought, I, there was so much regret surrounding it. And I mean, I, I wanted to.

• 2:01:36Bill Simmons?

  On both sides?

• 2:01:38Speaker 02

  I think so. I think it was, I think there was real pain. I mean, Conan is always the first to say that if Lorne Michaels hadn't looked at him at one point and said, you, you know, he would never have had this. And think about it. Conan wasn't even a performer. You know, he was a writer.

• 2:01:55Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  To get a writer like this and give him this huge platform. And the thing that's so sort of sweet about it is, you know, the, there's, I think there was a sort of a bit of a road not taken aspect to that for Lorne, because he started out as a comedy writer who maybe wanted to perform. But, you know, and, and Lorne exalts writers.

• 2:02:13Bill Simmons?

  But became a really fun performer on the show in a, in his own weird way, which you, you covered nicely. He became a character somehow.

• 2:02:21Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, I think the Lorne character is as big a character as church lady.

• 2:02:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25Speaker 02

  So, so, yeah, he, he gave the keys to the kingdom to Conan. And I think Conan, you know, it. I think it's, it's, it's, uh, most people in the business feel that Conan and his camp made a tactical error when they did not insist that Lorne be made executive producer of The Tonight Show in L.A.

• 2:02:46Bill Simmons?

  Well, but they also broke the rule where he found out from somebody else, not them, which seems like the one way to really cross Lorne.

• 2:02:52Speaker 02

  And I know those guys. I know, you know, went to college with Conan and I know Jeff, Ross's manager, and I do think they have some regret about it. They were very young. They were very caught up in it. These big shots at NBC were saying to them, no, no, no, you don't need Lorne Michaels. You don't, you know.

• 2:03:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you're gonna do it in L.A. You don't need Lorne. He's in New York.

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  It was this activist NBC management at that time who didn't really, you know, they kind of wanted to elbow Lorne off the stage. So, but, but as Jeff told me, and I, and I quote him in the book saying, you know what, we didn't jump in front of the truck for Lorne, so why should Lorne have jumped in front of the truck for us? And Lorne would never have admitted like, you know, having his feelings hurt or that they should have done it differently. But everyone in his camp feels like it was a faux pas.

• 2:03:39Bill Simmons?

  Well, and I said this at the time when all that was happening because we were doing podcasts about it. And I just don't think what happens to Conan happens if Lorne's involved. He was too powerful and he meant too much to NBC. And if, like the whole Leno, that it just wouldn't have happened. I think, I think Conan's protected.

• 2:03:56Speaker 02

  It was a disaster. But the thing, the kind of beautiful thing at this point is, you know, Conan is now king of the world, king of podcasts. You know, he's just doing so great. I'm so happy that Conan has landed where he has. And he and Lorne are on very, very good terms. You know, it was great to see Conan at the anniversary show. And I think there's a lot of real, real honest, ongoing affection between the two of them.

• 2:04:21Bill Simmons?

  Couple other things that I loved. When he brought Rob Lowe in for Wayne's World, he likes to hire people who've just had a flop because they work twice as hard. Like, who else would think like that?

• 2:04:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely right. It's true. Who would have thought of that? Yeah. No, because that was right after the sex tape. You know, Rob Lowe was in disgrace.

• 2:04:41Bill Simmons?

  Conan said about Lorne.

• 2:04:44Bill Simmons?

  A lot of people, myself, this is to you. A lot of people, myself included, think that Lorne has a secret. And Lorne has made a career out of letting people think he has a secret. I think Lorne's real secret was to communicate to me, you have to figure out this show. He's basically saying, I actually don't think Lorne has the secret, but he'll have like a really good thought starter that you can then take and run with it. That's how I interpreted that, right?

• 2:05:08Speaker 02

  I think so too, but I think also it's that Lorne has unconsciously or not cultivated this mystery and power that makes everybody want his good opinion, want to do good work for him, you know? It's, and that is the secret. It's this power that he holds over these people.

• 2:05:30Bill Simmons?

  That they just trust his take on, if he's really passionate about one thing, they'll trust him.

• 2:05:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Jon Hamm told me that there isn't a day that goes by where he doesn't think, what would Lorne do? You know, and he curbs the impulse to pick up the phone and call Lorne and ask him, you know, over when it's really important, but a lot of these people live their lives that way.

• 2:05:52Bill Simmons?

  You had a lot in the book about the imitation game with Lorne, which has started like, God only knows, since the seventies and how aware Lorne is of it and how many different iterations there were and all these different, you know, the writers would have their thing and then Bill Hader would have his thing and it would just go on and Carvey and all that stuff. And Lorne, it just seems like he's fine with it, right? Cause you make fun of the boss, that's what happens.

• 2:06:16Speaker 02

  Well, one of the funny things Lorne said about it to me, he goes, he said, yeah, you know, it's the most American thing there is, making fun of the boss. And then he said, of course, they don't really do it much in Canada because nobody's that successful there.

• 2:06:30Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, it, see, that is consistent with another one of his many theorems, which is the 12, you know, the infinite monkey theorem, which is how he views the essence of comedy writing. It's that old joke about, you know, you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a bunch of typewriters and eventually one of them will write Hamlet. But there was a sixties comic named Stanley Myron Handelman who changed that joke to say, put the monkeys in the room with the typewriters. I went back a couple hours later and they were just fooling around. And Lauren thinks that there's this incredible wisdom in that and that that's what you do with comedy writers. That's why you have them writing all night long when their defenses are down, when maybe they're drunk.

• 2:07:13Bill Simmons?

  Their guard is down.

• 2:07:14Speaker 02

  Seventies, you know, fatigue is your friend, he'll say, and because you want them to be at their goofiest. You don't want to be too, you know, self-conscious when you're writing comedy. You want to really, it's like pure id, I guess. And, and I think he recognizes that all that time they spend making fun of him, it's like lubrication for comedy, you know, loosens them up. And, and Paula Pell even said, it kind of helps you deal with the fear, you know, the fear of Lauren and the fear that you're not going to get on the air. It makes you just sort of loosen up. And again, he's a smart enough manager of people to know that if that works for them, fine, you know. And he also told me, and I wish I had kind of pushed harder on this, he said that he does this too, that

• 2:07:59Speaker 02

  he's a really good mimic of the people at the show. He just does it at home, but.

• 2:08:03Bill Simmons?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:08:04Speaker 02

  Never got it.

• 2:08:05Bill Simmons?

  Like just have family members?

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  I guess. That's volume two.

• 2:08:09Bill Simmons?

  When do you think he realized that he was just going to be on the show and this was it? Like what year? It was somewhere between probably late eighties, early nineties, where he just, all right, this is my life. This is what I'm doing.

• 2:08:20Speaker 02

  Well, I think a real turning point came after nine 11, you know, because the, the whole nineties, the mid nineties were a terrible time for him with almost getting fired by Donald Meyer. And then the show picked up steam with all the great, you know, political debate stuff that Jim Downey wrote and everything. And then nine 11, it was, it, it was the moment that I think the show emerged as a kind of an important American institution.

• 2:08:48Bill Simmons?

  And a New York institution too, like simultaneously, right?

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it brought it back to its roots. This was a, you know, it was the first time in my life that America seemed to like New York, right? And New York suddenly was kind of fucked up.

• 2:09:01Bill Simmons?

  Even me, I hate New York and even that I remember rooting for the Yankees in the playoffs, hoping they'd get one for the city.

• 2:09:07Speaker 02

  So, you know, the way he conceived of that moment with the firefighters and Mayor Giuliani pre-disgrace, you know?

• 2:09:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:17Speaker 02

  And had Paul Simon sing that song, like he just had this producer's knack for navigating that moment, doing something that was so beautiful and profound and also funny, you know? I mean, as he says in the latter part of my book, when he's talking about doing the COVID show, and you know, you just always have to, the show has to show up and you have to demonstrate, remind viewers that there's a decency to the show. And I think that it was that moment that the show and Lauren himself just kind of were, you know, it was kind of a Hall of Fame moment. They weren't going anywhere. He's never really been under threat since then.

• 2:09:58Bill Simmons?

  It's interesting because when they missed the moment, which I think you wrote in the book, that after Trump got elected, when the way they started the show, it just didn't work. I didn't think it worked in the moment. I think people behind the scenes didn't feel like it worked and now I don't think anybody looks back and thinks, oh, what a great moment.

• 2:10:14Speaker 02

  Some people told me, oh, I love Kate McKinnon singing that song, but I mean, I thought it was kind of wet, you know? I thought, I just thought it was.

• 2:10:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it just didn't work.

• 2:10:22Speaker 02

  Some people liked it. But again, I thought, the reason I thought that was interesting is because it showed how finely calibrated his ability to kind of deal with the sort of millennial sensibilities on his staff are.

• 2:10:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:37Speaker 02

  He knew he had to give them something. They wanted to do this. He didn't like it, but he let them have it. And it like, it reminded me, a funny anecdote that I love in the book is, I'm walking with him through the theater district. We passed the Mean Girls marquee, that's the show he produced with Tina Fey. And he was disappointed because his friend Margaret Trudeau was in town and he got her tickets for that night. And he was angry because the lead actress had called in sick that day because she, her dog had eaten glue and she had to take the dog to the vet, so she wasn't going to be in the show. And Lauren just shook his head and he said, if it was Patty Lepone's dog, it would be dead. You know? It's the idea that, you know, because he's a real showbiz guy, the show must go on.

• 2:11:22Speaker 02

  And the fact that his friend Margaret Trudeau was going to have to see an understudy. Didn't like it.

• 2:11:29Bill Simmons?

  Couple other things. You were talking about Ann Beats when she came back for the anniversary show. And he's kind of saying like, oh, her career didn't kind of go the way maybe she thought it was gonna go. And he said, you were like so many others who started the show, Beats, Michael said, didn't understand heat. They didn't understand that you're hot for about two or three years. And if nothing else happens, you go to the back of the line again. Which it seems like he was painfully aware of with himself, too, right?

• 2:11:56Speaker 02

  That's just what, yeah, I mean, he learned that after the first five years. And so again, he's just like this guy. He's got this lesson book that he and he remembers. Think about the rest of us and so many people we know, we repeat our mistakes. We do the same thing over and over. He doesn't. He somehow learns from his mistakes.

• 2:12:14Bill Simmons?

  What's the most fair criticism you heard from him, from the people who were interviewing? That was like a recurring criticism?

• 2:12:21Speaker 02

  Of him?

• 2:12:21Bill Simmons?

  About him, yeah.

• 2:12:24Speaker 02

  Gee, let me think. You know, I think that there are people who just feel that sometimes his aloofness can actually be cruel and cold. You know, there are definitely people who feel that way. There are same number of people who say like, oh, you know, when my wife got sick, he called and fixed the insurance. And, you know, so it's, it's both.

• 2:12:48Bill Simmons?

  Right. He paid for funerals. He paid for Michael McDonough, McDonough's funeral, even though, oh, Donahue, even though he didn't like him.

• 2:12:56Speaker 02

  But I do think that that sort of icy management thing, which you, you know, there's the book deals in it. I think mostly that kind of peaked in the 90s. You know, you have Bob Odenkirk moaning about how, why the hell is this guy in charge and everything? But at the same time, you know, Odenkirk and Lauren are now good friends. I mean, what there's a lot of in Lauren's life, it's, you know, the way people you know in 12 step programs and like make amends. You know, Lauren gets a lot of letters from people 30 years later saying, I can't believe I was such a jerk when I worked for you. Now I know how hard your job is because I've had to, you know, be a director or manage people or.

• 2:13:33Bill Simmons?

  Well, you're dealing with the ambitious people in their 20s and 30s. I mean, I'm sure, I look back at some of the stuff I did like way back when I'm like, God damn it. Why did I do that? And I'm sure they have a lot of those moments, especially a pressure cooker where it's Hunger Games every week. Everyone's pitted against each other. He said, you have this near the end.

• 2:13:53Bill Simmons?

  You can't spend the last half of your life watching the first half of your life, which is how he felt about nostalgia. Is that one of the reasons he's still working at age 80?

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  I think that's true. He doesn't, I mean, he, I think these anniversary shows mean a lot to him, but he isn't on a nostalgia trip, you know?

• 2:14:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:10Speaker 02

  He is really in the moment. He's never like, oh, those were the days. It was better than he's, you know, I think he probably thinks that the utility of all the fanfare over the 50th is to get more, read, get more viewers for the 51st and 52nd season. He's always charging ahead. He's thinking about the next cast. Earlier this season, you know, I was talking to him about how this current cast is really big. It's a big cast again.

• 2:14:40Bill Simmons?

  It's too big.

• 2:14:41Speaker 02

  And he said something like, yeah, well, you know, it always takes like two or three years for the kind of new cast to sort of settle. And it just struck me that as he's about to settle the 50th, he's thinking about, he's thinking ahead. He's thinking about making the cast work. And I think that's part of the secret of it. You know, he doesn't, he doesn't look back. And again, why it was all the more special that when I talked to him right after the 40th, he was in this sort of rare sweet spot of thinking about the past and the future and his legacy. And I mean, I think there's a lot of warmth in him that, that he's, he's letting come to the surface a little bit more now. And, and that is kind of lovely.

• 2:15:21Bill Simmons?

  Well, the biggest thing that's helped him is that there hasn't been a kick ass threat competitor to come in. And I always thought Netflix, I, I just can't believe Netflix hasn't challenged him yet, but I think it's because Sarandos loves the show so much. He just doesn't want to challenge Lauren.

• 2:15:37Speaker 02

  Yes. Sarandos is one of those guys who sends him a Father's Day greeting, you know?

• 2:15:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:41Speaker 02

  But it will be interesting to see, right? Sarandos is behind this new, you know, Netflix's first foray into late night television with the John Mulaney Show coming.

• 2:15:51Bill Simmons?

  Oh, and that, and comedy too. They're like at the, you know, they have this whole Netflix is a joke week out here. And the one thing that's missing is like an SNL type show, but I just don't think they're doing it until Lauren leaves.

• 2:16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think that's right. I think at this point, there's so much, so many issues of respect and karma that nobody's going to try to, you know, nudge him off the stage that way.

• 2:16:10Bill Simmons?

  Well, congrats on the book. I had you for an hour. I could have gone longer, but

• 2:16:13Speaker 02

  It was really fun.

• 2:16:14Bill Simmons?

  I thought I thought it was so enjoyable because I'm so fascinated by him, but the the management and perspective on success and and loyalty and all that stuff. I just thought it was really cool. I love the way he laid it out and the behind the scenes stuff with that Jonah Hill show was just awesome. Like as a diehard SNL person, like I just I thought it was so interesting.

• 2:16:34Speaker 02

  Well, and and once I got to really know all those personalities, just to see, you know, somebody Larry, I just did Lawrence O'Donnell's show and he said it was sort of like the office, you know, like a workplace comedy. I mean, just seeing like the way he would manipulate Colin Joe's this way and the way he would get Jonah Hill to not to shut up and the way he was like, it's really interesting to watch.

• 2:16:55Bill Simmons?

  Well, congrats. Go get the book.

• 2:16:57Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:16:58Bill Simmons?

  Thank you. Good to see you. All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Kyle Mann and Susan Morrison. Thanks to Kyle and Gahow and Sarudy. As always, don't forget, you can watch this as a video on Spotify. You can watch it on YouTube on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel. You can watch all of our rewatchable stuff on the Ringer Movies channel. And we have Celtic City. Get ready. Monday night, March 3rd, HBO and Max, Episode One, a nine week journey about the Celtics and basketball and America and Boston and life. So that's happening. Enjoy the weekend. I'll see you with Russillo on Sunday afternoon. We're gonna tape, I think, right after the Denver Celtics game, which should be a barn burner. So enjoy the weekend. See you then.

• 2:18:04Bill Simmons?

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• 2:18:47Bill Simmons?

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