The Jaylen Brown Colonoscopy Trade (and More NBA Summer Reactions) With Chris Ryan and Kirk Goldsberry

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Kirk Goldsberry to react to the blockbuster Celtics trade that saw Jaylen Brown end up with the 76ers in exchange for Paul George. Then, they discuss the Lakers' offseason moves, Kawhi heading to Toronto, and possible LeBron landing spots! (0:00) Intro (0:31) Jaylen Brown traded to the 76ers (01:08:01) The Lakers' moves (01:25:27) Kawhi Leonard heading to Toronto (01:31:45) LeBron landing spots and other offseason moves Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Kirk Goldsberry and Chris Ryan Producers: Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Chris Wohlers As the Official Beer Sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 26, Michelob ULTRA away $1million in FIFA World Cup tickets and prizes. https://www.michelobultra.com/superioraccess/FIFAWORLDCUP26 MICHELOB ULTRA® FIFA® WORLD CUP 26TM SUPERIOR ACCESS. No Purchase Necessary. Open to US residents 21+. Begins on 12/1/25 and ends on 7/31/26. Multiple entry periods. Visit https://www.michelobultra.com/superioraccess/FIFAWORLDCUP26 for free entry, entry deadlines, and Official Rules. Message and data rates may apply. Void where prohibited. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit https://fanduel.com/playwithaplan to learn more about the resources and helplines 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Tremfya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremfya, proper training is required. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremfya today.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit tremfyradio.com.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Did you know that psoriatic arthritis may progress over time and could cause permanent joint damage if left untreated?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Tremfya, guselkumab, taken by injection, is a prescription medicine for adults with active psoriatic arthritis.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Imagine being a million miles away. Explore the possibilities. Ask your doctor about Tremfya. Tap this ad to see new joint data and learn more about Tremfya, including important safety information.

• 2:32Bill Simmons?

  The Bill Simmons Podcast, live on Netflix, a rare morning podcast. Kurt Goldsberry and Chris Ryan are here. Wanted to mention, we put up the last episode of From Hell on the rewatchables. We did Pacific Kites, and I thought we had escaped from hell last month. But apparently, we did it because I have a story for you guys. So I'm just gonna, can you clear out for me? Yeah, it's all you. Just play some, play some bass as I talk to the audience. So I didn't have a reaction pod to this Jaylen Brown trade yesterday because I was getting a colonoscopy. And it was supposed to be last week, and I screwed up the prep.

• 3:11Bill Simmons?

  And the, the time they had was July 1st at 3:00 PM Pacific time. And if I didn't take that time, I would have gone July 50th. So I'm like, all right, you know what? Like, I can do a Thursday pod. I'm gonna get knocked out. So we're, I'm watching the, the World Cup game. And then go in, had a very similar experience to UCR where the guy said, right as I'm about to get knocked out, he's like, where do you think LeBron's going? I'm like, oh, maybe Denver. And then I'm out. Wake up, and all I want to know is what happened with the World Cup game? And the guy's like, oh, they just had penalty, there's a penalty kick. And actually saw the penalty kick and whatever.

• 3:55Bill Simmons?

  Come out, my wife's waiting to pick me up. And she goes, they traded Jaylen Brown. I'm like, I had just woken up from anesthesia. And I'm not, as you guys know, not really coherent. And I'm like, where'd he go? And she's like, to Philly for Paul George and two first round picks.

• 4:16Bill Simmons?

  And I'm like, I think I'm dead. I think I died.

• 4:22Bill Simmons?

  The anesthesia killed me and now I'm a dead person. And I'm like, and I'm just trying to process it and I it's, you know, it's like I have a head injury. And I'm like, is there more, are there more first round picks?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Did they get the Clippers first?

• 4:39Bill Simmons?

  And she's like, Zoe's really upset. So now my daughter, who likes Jaylen Brown and, and I'm like, all right, can you read me what the trade is? And she reads me the trade. And then I stumble out of this hospital place. So when this trade happened at 3:20 Pacific time, I had a camera in my ass and I had Paul George being rammed up my ass. And that was happening at the same time. And that's how I'm going to remember July 1st, 2026. So we're driving home and I'm like, I'm like, should I do an emergency pod? And my wife's like, no, you're like barely coherent.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  You probably start giving me your social security number.

• 5:20Bill Simmons?

  I was just really like, ah. So anyway, that's, that's my story of finding out the trade. See, our story was a little more pleasant than mine because he had just finished, they talked the Thrones pod.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:32Bill Simmons?

  Van and Jomi, you tell the story.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  No, I was, I had just finished recording with Joe and Mal and Van and Jomi burst into the room. And I was like, it felt like LeBron, but I, I couldn't, I couldn't tell. And obviously after a lot of guessing.

• 5:47Bill Simmons?

  You did not guess Jaylen Brown.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  I did not guess him because I didn't expect us to go back to this well after Horford. I thought it was kind of omerta, but I guess I should have. It's a big time for Browns getting traded between Boston and Philadelphia.

• 6:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we passed, we passed back and forth, 29 year old Browns.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  And.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it was very, I, in some ways, I feel like I'm still living in that moment because I, I'm, I'm processing it. It was also Bill, like, because you were, uh, under general anesthesia for a lot of it. One of the most intense sports days of my life.

• 6:21Bill Simmons?

  Right, because USA is coming up.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you realize after, if you do 14 hours of watching sports and getting the, the social media drip about it, like, your brain is falling out of your ears by the end of the day. So I did England, I did most of Belgium, Senegal, the, the incredible work that all of our colleagues did, talking about making the Lakers white again. And then, um, USA and Jaylen Brown hit in there. It's like, I, I, I didn't, I could barely, my brain was scrambled eggs at a certain point.

• 6:53Bill Simmons?

  Kirk, I, I spent yesterday morning, I was so delighted by how bad the Lakers moves were. I was just torturing all the Laker fans in my life. I did not think the Celtics were going to trade Jaylen Brown.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Karma, baby.

• 7:04Bill Simmons?

  I thought they, I thought they had canvassed the league, not like what they saw. And they're like, you know what? Let's just walk in a room and we'll figure this out. There's not a trade for this. And we could talk for about a variety of reasons why there might not have been a trade for Jaylen Brown. Um, but I was having such a great day. I was gonna get this colonoscopy done. I was gonna watch the Team USA under anesthesia. And, uh, and it was just gonna keep rolling. And I feel like I used up a lot of karma points with all the taunting texts I did to all my Laker fan friends yesterday because I thought what they did was hilarious. We'll talk about it way later. When did you find out about this Jaylen Brown trade, Kirk? Oh, I, I have a boring story. I was sitting in a chair getting ready for soccer

• 7:46Bill Simmons?

  and a typical Shams notification washed across my screen. And I did the thing where I was like, is this the real Shams? This is, this doesn't make sense. So I like, had to verify. I didn't want to be tricked. The most shocking part for me, Bill Simmons, is the fact that the Boston Celtics traded one of their best players to the Philadelphia 76ers. Like, the historical part.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Part of that as a kid who grew up in Pennsylvania, watching Dr. J and Barkley and Moses Malone go against your favorite team of your childhood. Like, this is one of the great rivalries in the NBA. And I was just shocked to see a player of his caliber get traded from from Boston to Philly. And as I sat there, I was like, this is insane. Just because of the two franchises involved. And then the second reaction, of course, is like, they didn't even get the best pick that Philly had. They got older and not younger somehow. And then you're just trying to.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  But it was, it was, I had of the three of us, I admittedly had the the most generic experience finding out.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  He's being shy, Bill, because right after that, he went and got his own colonoscopy. He just, I mean, it was just in a bar in Maine, but he still got.

• 8:54Bill Simmons?

  He got a homemade one.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Back alley style.

• 8:57Bill Simmons?

  The Philly thing, I think it's the greatest rivalry in the history of the league. People would point to Celtic Lakers, but you're just talking about the finals where the Celtics just beat the Lakers every year and then, you know, then they didn't play for a while. Then they played again in the eighties a couple of times. They played in the 2000s a couple of times. That's it. They haven't been in a series together in 16 years. Boston and Philly, every decade have battled in some sort of way. They've had some sort of playoff series. When we did Celtic City, which maybe we have to do a 10th episode now called Celtic City, The Team Is Falling Apart. We did a whole episode built around the eighties Celtics Philly. We did Dr. J versus Bird, all that stuff back and forth. I can't even remember that many times, CR, when when they've even made trades.

• 9:41Bill Simmons?

  Like, I remember we got Dana Barros from Philly as a free agent, but for the most part, like, I, this is certainly the biggest transaction ever between the two franchises.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  I know that, I mean, like, there's obviously the Horford signing, but this is the last time I remember anything like this was like getting Jim O'Brien to coach.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  It's seriously like, you have to go back to like these weird, these weird moments in history, because for the most part, the two cities and the two teams pretty much are like, this is shut off. It was funny, you know, like, other friends, like I, because of the World Cup, I've been in touch with a bunch of of my buddies in England and they're like, can you explain this to me in like Premier League terms? And I was like, this would basically be like Liverpool signing Marcus Rashford if he was coming off of a career year. It's really, they, it's really, really complicated. And for the Sixers.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  You know, they've been star shopping since the Jimmy Butler deal, since they decided to break away from like the draft and develop model to like collate some of those prospects and get, get a star for Embiid. So Butler, Horford, Harden, what have you.

• 10:52Bill Simmons?

  And then Paul George.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Well, this is, and Paul George, but this is the first time they've done it. And I think that the star that the Sixers were trying to compliment wasn't Embiid, it was Maxey. Like, I don't think this is a trade for Embiid. I think this is a trade for the younger core. And, you know, I don't even think that Jaylen Brown and Joel Embiid pair that well together. I'm, I'm excited to be proven wrong, but like, they both like mid-range, they both like having the ball in their hands and kind of surveying the court. You know, it's going to be really interesting to see how it works out in a basketball way. But this is, this is a different kind of trade than the Sixers have made over the last couple of years. I don't think it's just for Embiid's purposes.

• 11:33Bill Simmons?

  He pairs better with the speed of Maxey and VJ. The Embiid thing will be weird. All right. You got to clear out again because I'm going to walk you through my, uh, my thoughts as this happen. First of all, how many hours has it been? It's been, I don't know, 17? This is the most unpopular trade with Boston fans since Mookie Betts. I still think Mookie Betts trumps it.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Hold on a second. One sec.

• 11:57Bill Simmons?

  Way more, God. Uh oh.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:01Bill Simmons?

  Oh, no.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Go ahead.

• 12:02Bill Simmons?

  God, CR. Why?

• 12:05Speaker 03

  You were saying Mookie Betts?

• 12:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that was last season. A more indefensible trade because there was no reason to do it. They just didn't want to pay him and then they gave him away for 10 cents on the dollar. This, we could talk about some of the defenses I've heard. Um, everybody in my life, not only was there no warning whatsoever, not only was Jaylen the centerpiece of a Yanis trade that seemed like it was going to happen a week ago on Monday. But this was, I think, the first Boston trade ever that came out of nowhere, but then had everybody going, wait, that's the trade? What else is in it? Is there a part two? And they're just, there just wasn't.

• 12:45Bill Simmons?

  So, you know, you start thinking, how does Jaylen go for half as much as mid 30s aspiration scandal Kawhi? Right? Your head goes there.

• 12:57Bill Simmons?

  Kawhi hasn't made Kawhi hasn't won a playoff series in five years. Kawhi with the Clippers won two playoff series in seven years and missed more games than just about anybody other than Embiid the last six, right? The last time we everyone's talking about, oh Kawhi, now Toronto, this is the piece that can push him up. Kawhi lost the fucking first playing game last year to the Warriors, the game I went to. This was like the 2019 Kawhi, I don't, I just don't think is there anymore. Anyway, so he goes for half as much as him. He goes for less than Desmond Bain. He goes for less than Jaylen Jackson. He goes for less than Kevin Durant did last year when Phoenix needed to trade him. They got the 10th pick and two movable contracts.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Just note that his voice broke on Durant there, just if we're keeping a score at home.

• 13:42Bill Simmons?

  He went for way less than Giannis. And then during the same day went for less than Kessler, who played five games last year.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  For me.

• 13:51Bill Simmons?

  He had 5,000 minutes last year. Went for less than Kessler. All right, so we have that. We have, I had, Michael Rubin had his white party yesterday in the Hamptons. I know you were invited CR at the RSVP now.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  I think it was at Lakers training camp, actually.

• 14:08Bill Simmons?

  That was the other white party. So apparently one of the Philly owners was there and I'm not going to say who.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  I gotta take this shit off.

• 14:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, take that Red Sox hat off. So one of the Philly owners was there and people were like, what's up with this Jaylen trade? And he was just like, we couldn't believe it either. Like basically saying, we can't believe we were able to get Jaylen Brown for what we gave up. Kirk, I'll start here. Just on the trade itself, which is a 2021 first that seems pretty good. It's at least the Clippers pick. It might even be like a one through eight Philly pick or one through a protected Philly pick. But what would it have cost Philly just to dump the last two years of Paul George's contract? It's somewhere between one first and two, correct?

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's funny you should ask. They were, they were trying to do just that. I think before Daryl left, they were trying to do that. And the answer from what I heard was one solid first, the better first they have, I think. That wasn't included in this deal.

• 15:10Bill Simmons?

  So that's a team like Chicago or Brooklyn, a team that had cap space. Please take Paul George from us. We'll give you these picks to take him.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  It's a huge plot point here because it, once you start to do that sort of connective math, you start to say, okay, the Sixers wanted out of the Paul George business, Paul George prison, or whatever you want to call it, and they were willing to attach a pick. So they were going to do this for whatever you could get back, right? They were going to do this and to get a finals MVP, a guy who got real MVP votes this season for essentially that package, it really contextualized it. And I love what you did too, because I was doing the same comparative math with the Kessler transaction and the Desmond Bain transaction. You're like, what is going on? What is going on with Jaylen Brown's value around the league? Because it doesn't stand up to any, any way I would have evaluated his value.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  I was shocked that the market value had dropped this low. But you're exactly right to call out the Sixers wanted to get off of Paul George in the first place.

• 16:11Bill Simmons?

  CR, I'm sure you were intrigued by the thought of getting rid of Paul George, regardless of who came back.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  I got no hate in my heart for him. I was incredibly disappointed by the suspension last year. And not out of any like moral thing. It's just like, that was just like, we were actually, the Sixers were actually starting to put some stuff together when he, when he got suspended. And to have that happen, which is sort of an elective absence on his part, even though we never really got the full story about it, on top of like all of the load management that either the team and/or he were doing for his various injuries, it was just kind of like, I'm tired of watching teams that are like, we're going to just try and make sure everybody's healthy for that second round series that we have. And it's like, oh, actually, you know what? Just, just give me a good, good NBA season. How about, how about that?

• 17:00Bill Simmons?

  Well, you're going to get it from Jaylen Brown. He's going to play 70 games a year and he's going to play 35 minutes a game and he's going to show up night after night and he's going to be a guy that, when Embiid's not there, can be 20 shots for you and play 38 minutes and play bigger or smaller.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  So wait, I have like, here's my main question I want to ask you guys.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  There's a new GM in Philly, Mike Gansey.

• 17:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  There is.

• 17:28Bill Simmons?

  Good name.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Well, he's the president because Jameer Nelson is the GM. And then there's a new owner in Boston. And those differing sensibilities, I think, are worth bringing up. I was kind of joking when they put a camera on me and asked me what I thought of this yesterday. And I was like, this does not feel like Brad Stevens made this call. But I also saw Windhorst yesterday was like, this is a trade made under duress. And I just don't understand this. There is no reason why this had to happen on a Wednesday. There's no reason why this had to be the deal. Was the, I, I, I know that there had been reporting that the Celtics were not getting a lot of what they wanted out of the trade market for Brown. But is there no, you were talking about going to Toscano's 48 hours ago. So like, what?

• 18:12Bill Simmons?

  I wasn't going to go. I was, I wanted my dad to go as a representative of the Simmons family. I just thought, once the honest thing happens, then it gets out. And then they don't get Yanis because they didn't want to put in extra stuff other than Jaylen and two firsts, which I wholeheartedly agreed with.

• 18:30Bill Simmons?

  And then they canvassed the league. There's no trade. The third year, I think, really hurts with Jaylen because it's like 63 million or something. And they were obviously terrified of it. And it, I, I think there's two ways to look at this. Because I, you know, I, I still have a whole, I want to go through my whole, my stages of, of process in this trade. But there's two ways to look at it. One is the analytic stuff, which I want to talk about later. We could talk about that after the break. And the other is that they feel like this relationship was unsalvageable and was going to get worse. And, okay, so why is that the case? Well, you have the 2004, 24, the finals MVP Eastern Conference.

• 19:13Bill Simmons?

  If they just split those, I wonder if this trade even happens. The fact that Jaylen wins both, that's a little weird. The Tatum Brown thing starts to get a little strange. Tatum gets hurt a year later. The timing, that's a complete fluke, right? Jaylen takes over the team. I've talked about it on the pod a bunch of times where he has the car keys. And had an awesome season that I've been watching advanced metrics pick it apart, which is fine. I still feel like wins is the most important advanced metric. And he showed up night after night and went against everybody else's best guy and was great. And I, to me.

• 19:51Bill Simmons?

  The fact that they were so desperate to trade him and by all accounts last 72 hours, they seemed like they were desperate like we gotta, we gotta, this has to come to a head right now. I don't feel like they could put the genie back in the bottle with him was the take that we have now opened this door where this guy thinks he's the guy, he's gonna come back. We have Hugo, we have Shireman, we have more Pritchard shots. We, we don't want to be in a situation where this guy thinks he can average 29 points a game again. We have Tatum who can replace a lot of his stuff and this is going to get worse, not better. That's the only thing I can think of for the logic of this trade because everybody's been asking me the last 17, 18 hours. It's not like they had to do this now. They could

• 20:34Bill Simmons?

  have waited till the season. They could have waited till February. Whatever happened since the season ended seems to have given them this additional urgency and it's maybe some of the things he said, both publicly and privately. The fact that it wasn't a 1A, 1B thing anymore. Like I think Jaylen probably felt, maybe rightly so after last year, I'm equals with Tatum and they just wanted to get out of this situation was my take. Does that make sense as a take, CR?

• 21:04Speaker 03

  It makes sense. I mean, I like the timeline you built there because another element of it would be Tatum coming back, which was supposed to be this heroic act of selflessness and all that. And it almost seems like it just kind of threw everything out of balance. And I wonder if Tatum just says, I'm out this year. I'm going to rehab. And the Celtics have a kind of, nobody believes in us, feel good, 56 wins. We got to the second round. We didn't have enough for the Sixers or whoever they lose to. Like, does this even happen? Is Jaylen Brown like, well, and then next year we get Tatum back and we're going to be in great shape. The thing that I also go back to is Brad Stevens' postseason press

• 21:47Speaker 03

  conference where he was like, we are not going to be playing this way next year. And he seemed way lower on the team than the NBA community at large, where everybody I think was like, pretty cool. You guys really, you competed. And he was like, this, I did not like this. And I guess now we know who he was talking about or what he was talking about because he was probably apparently more out on the two Jays than that everybody else and especially everybody else in Boston.

• 22:16Bill Simmons?

  And it's a bet on Jaylen too that. You know, we can go into what the team will look like next year, but it's a bet that Jaylen can replace all the, I'm sorry, Jason Tatum can can replace all the Jaylen stats and the production and being the number one guy. And then the team around him will fit better than Jaylen Brown being told, go over here now. You're not the number one guy anymore. Kirk, you remember, so I've talked about this before on my pod. Um, when I was, the first year I was doing countdown when Rudy Gay got traded to Memphis. And it became a very important, like Sloan Conference moment. It became this specific tipping point in the old way we talked

• 22:58Bill Simmons?

  about basketball versus the new way. And I was on that show arguing with Magic Johnson, who knows more about basketball than me and has had way more NBA experiences than me and Will Bond. Jaylen was kind of neutral. And I was arguing, I actually think this trade makes a lot of sense for Rudy Gay. I think he's overrated. Um, Memphis, I think turned him into Taishen Prince and for the grievous Vasquez. I forget who else was in it, but the team took off and they ended up making the conference finals because they determined whatever, even though Rudy Gay seems good on paper. And I remember Magic saying at one point, we were arguing about it. You need a guy, you need a closer, you need, and, and I was trying to be respectful, but I was like, the stats say he's not that

• 23:41Bill Simmons?

  good. All the advanced metrics say he's actually not a closer that you're actually, if, if he's your guy finishing games, this isn't great. And that's why they did the deal. So that was this tipping point for that era. Now we're in this different era where even though I voted Jaylen fifth for MVP, I voted him first team NBA, I thought what he did last year was incredible. There are all these like deep analytics now saying like, no, actually he wasn't that good. So as somebody who's at the forefront of the Sloan Conference revolution, where do you stand on the analytics here?

• 24:11Speaker 04

  It's a great question. So the tension is Jaylen Brown now represents this tension. He's going to be the person who gets associated with this. Uh, is this guy, we have him in the, in the Ringer 100 bill is number 14 in the NBA after the season. Um, estimated plus minus over at Dunks and 3 is one of the best sort of nerdy sites going right now has him. At 87th in the NBA. Okay, according to estimated plus minus. So this is, don't shoot the messenger here. That's the tension. All these teams have these models. How impactful is this guy for winning? They measure all sorts of variables from player tracking, things we didn't have 15 years ago during that Rudy Gay era. But ultimately, these models hate

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Jaylen Brown as a factor on winning. You can look at just basic on off stuff. The Celtics had a net rating of 6.5 with him on the floor, and that goes to 10.5 when he came out. And the models just start stewing on these facts.

• 25:06Bill Simmons?

  But with those models, how much does that depend on, did you have a really good bench?

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Well, it does.

• 25:12Bill Simmons?

  You know what I mean? If your bench comes in and is cleaning the clock of the other team's bench, then the on off stuff's gonna get skewed, which I would always use as my defense for Jaylen in Boston.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  And, and I want to come back to that, Bill, because I do think the real reason here is depth and team building in the second apron era. And I think Brad Stevens, as Chris has pointed out, he wants a one 10 pole organization with one giant salary, not two. Because you need to have, the Knicks Spurs finals, those are deep ass teams with dudes who are playing seven, eight, nine, like Jose Alvarado. You need to have that kind of money. And if you have two guys making 35% of your cap in the second apron era, forget it's Jaylen Brown or Jason Tatum. That's just a hard math problem for anybody to solve. And I think that's really at the heart of this thing. I don't think it's about advanced plus minus or anything. It's like, do we really want to have two dudes in their

• 26:01Speaker 04

  30s combining to make 70% of our cap and go out and try to beat the Thunder and Spurs?

• 26:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, on top of that, two of the top nine contracts in the league, just for figure by year, the next three. And maybe, I don't know, maybe they thought that was unsustainable. But then, the counter to that is, well, Paul George makes as much money as Jaylen Brown.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  That's what, that's the head scratcher.

• 26:25Bill Simmons?

  That's the part that doesn't make sense to me. It's like, I get the financial thing, but, yeah, you got, you got out of it after one year, not two. I don't know, CR, that the advanced analytics stuff.

• 26:38Bill Simmons?

  And it's weird because I've always been, I think even dating back to the Greatland days, I think we were at, you know, we were part of the forefront of everything that was changing there. And I still believe in the numbers a lot of the time, but I still feel like there's something about durability and somebody who shows up night after night and can be the best guy in a team over and over again and accept that challenge. The issue is-

• 27:00Speaker 03

  He won an NBA title two years ago.

• 27:03Bill Simmons?

  And they won an NBA title two years ago-

• 27:05Speaker 03

  I don't know, like, what are we playing for, right? Like, I, I, look, I'm also somebody who's, my favorite basketball player ever is Allen Iverson, who is also not beloved by the advanced analytics community. I cannot claim to really understand a lot of the stuff out at a certain point. Um, I think that this is also, as much as it's an analytics story, it's a media story to me. The turning point in some ways in this story publicly, I'm sure privately was much different, was this Bobby Marks tweet that went out about an analytics guy, unnamed analytics guy telling him that Jaylen Brown would be like the seventh best player on our team, not like on a, in the league. And that really got the ball rolling in terms of this debate coming to the

• 27:46Speaker 03

  forefront again. This is all gonna kind of die down, you know, once, once all, all the, on, all the smoke clears. But this has just been a fascinating couple of weeks in the NBA where it, the outside reporting is so speculative, but then like there are pieces of it that feel incredibly well informed. And so going back to Jaylen doing live streams and saying like, this was my favorite year of my career, which also had a lot of context. He also says a lot of other stuff, you know, that we don't need to get into. But there's like, these little nuggets that then get taken and run with. And the idea that this guy went from a pillar of the franchise

• 28:25Speaker 03

  to a, we need to get him out of here with no deadline, contractually, league-wide, whatever. We just have to get him out the door, even if it's to arrival in the division and we're gonna have to see this dude multiple times a year. It, it really speaks to like- I think the tension behind the scenes, but it's so fascinating to me because I want to know how much the speculation around it actually wound up fueling the fire.

• 28:53Bill Simmons?

  I have some thoughts and maybe a couple of answers on that, but we have to take a break and we're going to come back and I'm going to talk about my stages of grief with the Jaylen Brown trade right after this. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. We're in the heart of the World Cup. Look at these little special bottles for Michelob Ultra. Every play matters here. FIFA World Cup 26 for you. The stakes are just as high. Michelob Ultra, the official beer sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 26. It's giving you a chance to win $1 million worth of tickets and prizes. Michelob Ultra, from the pitch to the pour. Superior is worth playing for.

• 29:32Bill Simmons?

  Enter now at michelobultra.com/superioraccess/fifa world cup 26. Michelob Ultra FIFA World Cup 26 Superior Access. No purchase necessary. Opening US Residence 21 plus begins on December 1st, 2025. Ends on July 31st, 2026. Multiple entry periods. Visit www.michelobultra.com/superioraccess/fifa world cup 26 for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details. All right, we're back. So in 2004, the Boston Red Sox in July traded Nomar Garcia Para, who was the most popular guy in the team other than Pedro.

• 30:17Bill Simmons?

  Now, hold on. They traded him for Orlando Cabrera and they also got Doug Minkovich in that, who ended up clinching the ball when they won the World Series a few months later. And this was an incredibly polarizing trade and I wrote a piece for ESPN.com, actually kind of defending the trade because they had tried to trade Nomar the previous winter in the A-Rod thing. It fell apart. He had to come back and it was weird for half the season. There was some advanced stuff with him that he was slipping defensively, that he was starting to hurt the team a little bit, that he wasn't the guy that he was a couple of years before.

• 30:57Bill Simmons?

  And they trade Cabrera for him, who was an excellent defensive player and just kind of fit the team better. Everyone in Boston lost their fucking mind and then it turned out to be a great trade and Cabrera was one of the many heroes, no four. If you're a Boston fan, that's the only thing you're clinging on to right now.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Orlando Cabrera to yourself?

• 31:17Bill Simmons?

  You're just like, ah, maybe this is like the Cabrera trade. I'll give you the stages of grief here.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  This is like the end of The Irishman. It's like, Orlando Cabrera.

• 31:26Bill Simmons?

  Please. So, I hear about this trade, the anesthesia wears off, and I'm watching America.

• 31:36Bill Simmons?

  I think convincingly went 2-0, especially because we were playing a guy down for a half hour, including one of the great free kicks of my lifetime. Did you think he was making it CR?

• 31:47Speaker 03

  I did not think he was too. I thought he was gonna be too close.

• 31:50Bill Simmons?

  The goalie did give him a wide side on the right there.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  He gave him a little bit of space, but yeah, I mean, that and the red card.

• 31:56Bill Simmons?

  I do like the free kicks when it's over on the left because I feel like you can really blast it.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  He put so much. Yeah, that was incredible.

• 32:02Bill Simmons?

  Anyway, I was trying to focus on the game and I'm in three hours of darkness. Some things I wrote down because I wanted to write down my anesthesia thoughts in real time. New owner cheaped out, Brad panicked, Tatum demanded the deal, worst Celtics trade ever. Haven't felt this helpless since they traded for Vin Baker. Those were five things I wrote down during the World Cup game. By the fourth hour, after the game, a little more uplifting after we went 2-0, even though we lost our best player in our team to a bogus red card. I wrote down, take last year's team and replace Brown for Tatum, Garza for Mitch, because they got Mitchell Robinson yesterday.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Enjoy that.

• 32:44Bill Simmons?

  And Simons for Paul George. Wait, are we better or worse?

• 32:51Bill Simmons?

  Starting to get signs of hope. And then I wrote down, didn't PG play as effectively as Tatum and Brown in the round one series? Looked up his stats, 17 points a game, 55% from three. He at least like was a draw with uh with with Brown.

• 33:10Bill Simmons?

  And then after five hours and I had some texts, I'm trying to get faith. I landed on, this has to be part one of a second part of a deal. And I think that's where I've landed and I really wonder if the Trey Murphy piece is going to be the second piece of this. Because I don't think New Orleans wanted, I don't think they wanted Jaylen Brown, three more years of him. And I wonder if George on a one year less with picks and you get Murphy and you get Jordan Poole's expiring back. And that's the end game here. And now that makes sense to me, Kirk Goldsberry. Does it make sense to you?

• 33:45Speaker 04

  I had a similar sort of come around this morning. I could feel my face again after I woke up and I was like, oh, Kate Celtics won 56 games. Is that right, Bill, last year with this team? So assuming Tatum sort of slides into the Jaylen Brown slot and I'm like, okay, that's a 50 win team, right? But I had a similar sort of coming around to it. I'm not sure there is a second move, but that's a great theory. I do think what I said earlier, they value flexibility. The NBA did this to all the teams with this hard cap, second apron situation. Depth has never been more important. The only way to find depth is in the draft with cost controlled guys.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  And overpaying dudes in their 30s is the fastest way to erase depth. And there's no shortage of teams that can can say that right now. So I think ultimately, yeah, the Paul George thing of it all is still the weirdest piece. Like, okay, all that's true, Kirk, but they brought back a 36 year old girl, a 36 year old guy with bad legs.

• 34:47Bill Simmons?

  And that disappeared for 25 games last year because he got suspended.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  So I love your theory. If they can now turn that into Trey Murphy somehow and get Jordan Poole.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  So is PG available to get traded immediately or do you have to wait?

• 35:01Bill Simmons?

  Well, here's the thing, the trade doesn't get announced till I think January 6th. So you have a few days here.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  July 6th?

• 35:06Bill Simmons?

  July 6th. I'm sorry, July 6th.

• 35:10Bill Simmons?

  So you have a few days here to, you know, you can make it a three team or a four team or whatever. Now, if they do something resembling the trade I just mentioned, maybe they won't. Now you're replacing Brown with Tatum, Garza with Mitch, and Simons with Murphy. And then you have your younger guys are a year older and some more Pritchard stuff. And that starts to make sense. If that doesn't happen, and this is just a trade, and you're gonna get a year out of Paul George, and then he's a big expiring next year with picks, and you're gonna make a move a year from now. There is a world where they tell Paul George, like, you're gonna play 49 games this year. And when you play, you'll play like 22, 23 minutes. We're saving you for the playoffs. We're gonna play these younger

• 35:54Bill Simmons?

  guys. We want to keep you fresh for the playoffs. We want you to have one round, two rounds, three rounds, whatever. Well, you'll play bigger minutes. But on paper, whatever Paul George is, whatever we saw, this is, this is, this is where I sound like I'm justifying the trade. I'm not. I'm just saying on paper.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  So the way you're justifying is that if there is a hypothetical second move to be made, that isn't like, we're waiting for Jokic, or we're waiting for DeBansa and Flag to come up, right?

• 36:24Bill Simmons?

  No, it's more like you're using Paul George to get somebody's money back, but ultimately flexibility, which I've been saying in this podcast since the season ended. If they traded Jaylen, I really thought it would be for flexibility. That's why I never really liked the Yanis thing, because I thought it put them in the same position they were in before with these two giant contracts. But with the Paul George piece, and you're looking at, and you're like, all right, maybe we get a year out of him. Less minutes, he's a more complimentary player than Jaylen. Our chemistry's better. We can find out what we have with Hugo and Shireman, more Pritchard, and we'll patch this together because we did this last year. And by the way, maybe, maybe they're also saying Jaylen wasn't as

• 37:06Bill Simmons?

  responsible for last year as, as he got the credit for. That this was assistant thing, it was depth, it was night after night, being able to have 10 guys who were competent, it was the three-point shooting, it was the defense. And that's the only thing I can think of. If that trade doesn't happen, and PG just comes back.

• 37:29Bill Simmons?

  I still think that I think the thing they're risking here is the fans in the city.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 37:36Bill Simmons?

  Paul George not, I, I would say he's been a slightly divisive guy over the years. You're risking Jaylen going to Philly and Philly being really good right away. You're risking all of the Celtics, whatever the team they have now, not playing as well as they thought they were initially. And you're, you're taking a last year, a feel-good thing where everybody liked everybody and like, wow, this is great. I love this team. I love Joe Missoula. I love Brad Stevens. There's Chisholm. Now, if this doesn't work out right away, you're talking about Chisholm walking to his seats before the game and somebody be like, yo, Chisholm, fuck you.

• 38:12Bill Simmons?

  Stevens going into the thing, hey Stevens, fucking traded Jaylen, fuck you. Like, this changes the energy, so they better be right on this CR, because you've seen this in Philly.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:23Bill Simmons?

  When the energy shifts in the cold weather cities, specifically Boston, Philly, New York, it can get dangerous.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that the things that seem to matter to front offices sometimes are just so far apart from what matter to fanbases. And fanbases like establishing relationships with guys. They like seeing guys grow up. They like acquiring new stars. They like developing kind of like a rhythm with the team, a rhythm with the way the team plays. Now that can get stale and you can, you can find yourself as a Phillies fan and be like, I like these guys, but I've been watching this TV show for 10 years now or whatever. But I think that, I think that the danger is, you know, flexibility over, over fandom, you know? And flexibility over who are we putting on a billboard if we're trying to build a new stadium like you guys sound like you are, you know?

• 39:13Speaker 03

  And I think that that's, that's a real, real dice roll. Furthermore, you know, like for as much as you're like, this could work out if it's Trey Murphy. And there's, there's a couple of ways in which this could not work out, you know, that this could go very wrong.

• 39:27Bill Simmons?

  More than a couple. And including Jason Tatum with coming off an Achilles injury.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  With like.

• 39:32Bill Simmons?

  Paul George at 36, Mitch Robinson, who has a big injury history and that, they have all these injury variables.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and a couple of those guys that you bring up on every podcast, like who I still don't really remember watching play. Like, no, I just mean, I, I don't have a lot of like Hugo tape in my head, you know?

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Didn't show up against the Sixers. Like, we're not like ready for primetime. So like, they are really nice regular season pieces. And they're really nice development stories, but I don't necessarily think they're gonna win a second round series for you guys. So, look, I haven't been out of the second round since 2001. So what am I talking about? I'm just saying that like, there is an element to, if you're counting on like, another deal making this right, or this all kind of coalescing in a way that we just don't understand yet, there's also like, a negative side of it. There's a bad side of it.

• 40:24Bill Simmons?

  I would say there's a few bad sides. The coalescing, the betting on guys with injury histories, Kirk. The fan reaction to this trade, which is the single most negative fan reaction. Even Mookie Betts, we knew that was coming for like, a year. This was, I think, way more contentious. I'm sure Brian Curtis, copyright the, uh, now they tell us story. I'm dreading the now they tell us for this. The Celtics don't usually operate that way. They're not a big leaking after the fact organization, but the big question that they would never answer, that if I had a Brad Stevens truth serum, where I'm like, you have to answer, I'm giving you this, I'm gonna give you a colonoscopy and anesthesia.

• 41:09Bill Simmons?

  And then they're gonna tell me this.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  This sounds like the beginning of an erotic film. You giving Brad Stevens a colonoscopy.

• 41:16Bill Simmons?

  By Adrian Lyne.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  From hell, month return.

• 41:21Bill Simmons?

  This back, a disgruntled fan wants answers. The question I want to know is, were you thinking of doing this right after the season? Or did this evolve during the offseason? Because my guess, my thought, is that pretty much everything Jaylen did from the moment the season ended, pushed them to a place that they decided maybe this was untenable, Kirk. Now, you worked for a team. You're always judging the, you're judging the chemistry of the team. You're judging the best guys on the team, the happiness of the team. Like, the Spurs got LaMarcus Aldridge when you were there.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:58Bill Simmons?

  One of the reasons they got LaMarcus Aldridge was because it was pretty clear in that last Portland year. He wasn't 100% happy that there was Dame was becoming embraced, even though that Portland team was really good. It's one of Kurt, one of Zach Lowe's favorite teams. Something was off and they, and then the Spurs end up getting him. So how much, how much do organizations just think about the non-basketball personality shit?

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the, I kept going to that. I don't think people understand like the human element. When you trade a guy, it doesn't just affect that guy and his family. It affects all the, the spouses and the kids and like now everybody's looking over their shoulder. So I know that RC and Pop were like very, very careful with the trade tool itself. Like we don't want to blow up the morale. We want to build an element of trust around here. And again, they had the benefit of a different CBA era where flexibility was, was, was king and they had players who were taking less money, much like Jaylen Brunson, which has enabled the Knicks to find depth this time around. But I think you're right. I think

• 43:02Speaker 04

  there is a human story here where Jaylen Brown had an awkward last few months. I bet there were tensions behind the scene and that's one of the only ways I can explain a relatively great front office making what I consider to be a bad deal to get away from Jaylen Brown is that there must, it must have been very bad behind the scenes, real tension that we may never learn about. If Dan Shaughnessy is not going to write it these days, I don't know who will. But like who is, why did this happen from a human perspective? Cause, cause the numbers just don't add up. Like you can do the double ledger here and it's just like, it screams like you started the podcast with. The Boston Celtics just dumped this dude

• 43:45Speaker 04

  who won Finals MVP two years ago. It was a salary dump.

• 43:49Bill Simmons?

  To a division rival.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  To, to, to their historic rivals. Bill says one of the greatest rivals the league's ever seen.

• 43:55Bill Simmons?

  Well, the, the thing, I always judge these trades by two things. A year later, would you be glad or unhappy that you did it? That's one. And then four months later, would the trade still be there?

• 44:12Bill Simmons?

  I'm guessing if this trade doesn't happen today CR, but we get to the beginning of October and Boston calls and said, hey, Jaylen Brown for Paul George and two picks, you're still saying yes? So why would you do a trade?

• 44:30Bill Simmons?

  Why would you do a trade that's going to be there in October now is the best case for they felt like this situation had gotten untenable behind the scenes. And who knows if if Tatum, who's been, you know, and I've heard both sides of this, he hasn't said anything.

• 44:50Bill Simmons?

  He never went on the Jaylen, this is a big thing in the local radio. He never went on Jaylen's Twitch like, it is true. He never said anything. Now the counter would be, well, if he does say something, then that becomes a story. So he's, he's got to lay back.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Does he say a lot about anything? I mean, I don't really think of Jason Tatum as the most demonstrative star. Like, you know, he does a lot of like, here's my documentary about my, my, my rehabilitation for my injury, but there's not like a.

• 45:17Bill Simmons?

  It's a lot of carefully crafted docu-series.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm going live on IG to, to break down the World Cup. I mean, it's just, uh, I don't, I, this kind of stuff is like, what we have replaced reporting with is like, looking at, at, at like tea leaves and trying to be like, well,

• 45:36Bill Simmons?

  I heard a guy told me, right, somebody told me in front of mine.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  And, you know, I, like, that's for better and for worse. But I think that the only, my only counter to this would be, I don't, now in retrospect, don't think Mike Gansey would have waited. Uh, I think this, the Sixers team was going to get changed. I didn't actually anticipate that. I thought that they were going to run it back. And that it was going to be like, this is about cleaning up whatever Daryl did. And we're going to do some depth stuff and we'll, we'll, we'll draft well and we'll. We'll figure out where we're at and hopefully Edgecombe develops and we'll be like a five seed or something like that and Embiid, let's just cross our fingers. But now in retrospect, I'm like, oh, this guy wanted to change the, the face of the team. This guy wanted to, to strip the paint and make it, make it into his own thing.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  And, um, I mean, it's, speaking of reading tea leaves, his brother posted a picture yesterday of Gansey, uh, with LeBron in, uh, you know, in the same Mary's uniform from back in the day, which, you know, is probably horseshit, but as Tony Jones also reported that the Sixers are quiet about LeBron and if that's the game he wants to play, like, hell yeah, sure. You know, it seems like other people have had the joy of cheering for LeBron. I'll take it. Uh, but yeah, it's, I don't think the Sixers were going to sit around waiting for Jaylen Brown. I think this was an opportunistic trade.

• 47:03Bill Simmons?

  I don't think Paul George was going anywhere else. We should mention, Waz and House and I do the worst contracts draft in the beginning of every March.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  We should mention this.

• 47:13Bill Simmons?

  Embiid was one and Paul George was two. And it wasn't even like, it was basically one of those, the draft starts at three, because we know these are the top two. Now, when we did this, Paul George was, uh, was under suspension, didn't know if he was going to come back. It, the Philly thing could not have gone worse and he had two and a half years left on the deal. Now he has two, but, um, I thought he was really good in the playoffs. I said it over and over again. I thought, I, I was shocked by how well he played. Uh, I thought he really bothered Jaylen ironically, and there was a lot of clips about this last night of all these different times he locked down Jaylen 101. Three-point shooting was great. Even in the Knicks series, his stats weren't that bad. Um, so that was, I thought the best he's looked in a couple of years,

• 47:58Bill Simmons?

  but it's Paul George.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  If Paul George was on the Celtics and you guys had won, I think, can't remember what the Sixers streak was or what, we were definitely surging and Paul George got suspended, Boston would implode. Like, talk radio would be, they would have an FCC violation.

• 48:15Bill Simmons?

  I want to talk about the Philly piece in one second. This is my last thing on Boston because I think we covered everything there is to cover from the Boston side. But the Jaylen thing of just being with somebody for 10 years, ironically 10 years ago was when they drafted him. What they had with him and Tatum together, which led to a title, six conference finals. And I was pretty steadfast all the way through, even with the honest thing. I was like, I think this guy's really good at basketball. Like, I don't really care what the stats say. I've watched, watched him over and over again. I just think like, this is a guy, the bigger the stage, the bigger the event. Like, he's, he's gonna be there and he's gonna show up. Now, people could counter and be like, well, what happened to Philly series last year? He wasn't good. Well, why'd they fall apart in three of the last four playoffs?

• 49:02Bill Simmons?

  I just wonder if we're ever gonna see teams stay together like this anymore in the NBA with the way the apron is. If it, this feels, everyone's talking about the advanced metric side and this is like the end of a certain era. To me, it's like the different end of an era. You could see it in the contracts that were handed out. One for seven, two for 14, two for 19. Kessler got one of the only long deals we had. All of the middle class, slightly upper middle class, slightly lower middle class. All of those guys are on one year and two year deals now. Nobody wants two big contracts on the same team anymore. Utah, who really could have used Kessler, was like, wow, you're offering us all this? Great, take them.

• 49:43Bill Simmons?

  And then you look at the, the snow time Lakers now with Reeves making 45, Kessler making 35 and Luca making the max. It's like, that's your team. Those are gonna be your three guys now. So Kirk, I just wonder, like, you, you mentioned the Spurs earlier. If we're running back the Spurs now, Parker gets traded in 2010. He's gone. Like, they're like, shit, we, we have that, we gotta pay that, we gotta pay Duncan. We have to pick between Manu and Parker. Parker just had the off the court thing that happened with, you know, you could Google it. This is the time, let's move him, we'll get younger, we'll get a young point guard. And guess what doesn't happen? You're not one of the best teams in the league for the first part of the 2010. You don't make two straight finals and you don't win the 2014 title.

• 50:27Bill Simmons?

  So I just wonder, is this the league now where we're the NFL? And it's just a different champion every year.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  And it's by design. I mean, this is the first time in league history. We've had eight different champions in eight years. Welcome to the parody era. It is the NFL and it is a direct byproduct bill of the new CBA that went into effect in 2023. And one of the things that I don't think is good is we're starting to see like beloved characters being dumped like Klay Thompson. Like this guy is going to have a statue. He's going to be a warrior hero, but he gets like dumped. So Jaylen's not the first one to go through this, but it's, it's, it's boring, but it's profound too. It's the, the instrument insists on giving the biggest paydays in the league to dudes 31, 32, 35 years old.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  And then they immediately become toxic assets.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  They become toxic assets. We all know, Bill, when do guys peak in the NBA? 28, 29.

• 51:22Bill Simmons?

  We watched the finals. It was all young dudes and guys in their twenties.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. I said in Yanis' piece last week on The Ringer that like, there were two guys among the 25 most minutes played in this year's playoffs that were 32 and older. This is a young man's game in part because the CBA makes it nearly impossible to build a good team around these toxic assets. These guys a little past their prime, they're making fucking $70 million. Like we're reserving our paydays for our guys who are a little long in the tooth. And building a team around that guy in the second apron era is nearly impossible. And I'm not sure if that, that's good for the long-term health of these fan bases and the morale of these teams. So that, that, yeah, go ahead.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  No, no, finish, finish your thoughts, Kirk. I'm sorry.

• 52:09Speaker 04

  Well, just like, I thought it was all embodied by that concept, by the viral video I saw today of a little kid just losing his mind about Jaylen Brown leaving the Celtics. He had a Celtics jersey on. He's bawling and Jaylen Brown actually responded to this kid. And it's just like heartbreaking. It's like you forget about that part of the business, guys. Like it's, it's a morale business.

• 52:30Bill Simmons?

  My daughter who's gone, who really became a Celtic fan legit, like the last few years and is going through all the stages now of when you become a new sports fan. Like the Yanis trade and why are they trading Jaylen? I don't understand. Why did Miami get Yanis for all this stuff? I've seen all those guys. They're not that good. And then yesterday she's FaceTiming me. And I'm, I'm like fucking out of it and she's like near tears and she's like, I love Jaylen. I'm really mad. I don't understand why they did this.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  And you think you're dead?

• 53:00Bill Simmons?

  And I'm like, I'm, I'm, where am I? Is this the afterlife? What were you gonna say CR?

• 53:06Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say that there's a really interesting narrative history of the last 15 years to be written where Maury comes in and introduces a lot of the advanced analytic concepts to the NBA and changes the way teams are assembled. But was actually-

• 53:21Bill Simmons?

  That Shane Battier trade, right?

• 53:22Speaker 03

  But it was actually-

• 53:22Bill Simmons?

  Shane Battier for Rudy Gay, it starts.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  But he is actually in retrospect, almost like, um, what was, he's romantic compared to the way the NBA teams are run now. Like when he was just like, look, I'm looking at the underlying numbers and eight out of 10 times we beat the Warriors, given X, Y, or Z happening. It was almost like this faith that he had. Then you have like this draft capital craze that happens and that's Presti and to some extent the Spurs and you see what happened with those guys. And now it's like it's Tim Connolly's NBA and you're just like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna have constant motion. I am gonna wheel and deal and Katz out the door and Randall is out the door and LaMelo's in. And then if I have to, I'll try and find somebody to take Gobert and then if I have to, I'll do this.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  And it's just like this sort of churn that's been happening. The Sixers have been doing this too, where it's like, we rent a guy for two years and then we send him out. But it's almost like these contracts now, I think what Ganzie did was really interesting is like all the Sixers deals are pretty much on the same timeline. So even regardless of the ages of the players and Bed Maxi and Brown are all up the same year. So even if this doesn't work out, like it's not something he has locked this team into for a decade. You know, it's not like, um, well, now what are you gonna do? You've, you've made your bed and you have to lie in it with Jaylen Brown. It's like, no, this is, this is something that was very, very specific to Brown's deal.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  I don't know if he's gonna be like, if you don't give me an extension, I'm out. Like that's, I think that is gonna be an interesting question for a lot of these guys where it's like, I have two or three years left on my deal. But so if you want me to come to your team, we have to like basically redo it.

• 55:03Bill Simmons?

  Well, I forgot to say this earlier. I do wonder if that's a piece of this Boston side with Brown was eligible for an extension later in the summer. And if they had said no, how would he have reacted? Well, you took care of Tatum. If Tatum was had an extension coming up, you would take care of him. Why not me? And they're trying to avoid all that stuff.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  But wasn't the reporting about going, the reason why the Yanis thing, aside from not including Hugo or whatever, like that? There was the rumor that he was not going to sign an extension with Milwaukee and they were like, well, we're not going to trade Yanis and just be back in the situation with another star.

• 55:36Bill Simmons?

  Well, I'll go further in that because I have information on that that I forgot to share last week. The Yanis to Boston thing was closer than I think people realized. And I still don't think Hugo was ever in the trade. But I do think it got to the point, the Bucks had an arrangement with Yanis. That he was basically going to approve the, they weren't going to trade him without him basically signing off on it. And he didn't sign off on the Miami trade for a couple of days there. And they were talking about extensions with the Celtics. And it came down to, it was like two years, 30% of the cap could be the extension or three years, 35. And the Celtics were, were pretty entrenched at two for 30. And Yanis wanted the three for 35 and they couldn't agree on it.

• 56:19Bill Simmons?

  And that was when he greenlit the Miami trade and Miami throwing Yaka Shoness and that's when it happened. So you can even think from the Celtics thinking there. Back to what we've been talking about a while. It's like, can we compete if we have these two giant contracts on our team of guys in their 30s? And they obviously thought no, so they said no. And then they got out of the Jaylen thing, which they were desperate to do, obviously considering the trade. You mentioned Philly, they have Embiid at 57, Jaylen at 57 and Maxey 41 this year. Embiid goes to 63, 67, Jaylen goes 61, 65, Maxey goes 44, 46.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  Which is take care of our guys. That's all I see.

• 56:58Bill Simmons?

  In year three, you're going to have 178 million for three guys. And I think this is, you know, I,

• 57:06Bill Simmons?

  I've obviously had a lot of critiques about Silver over the last couple of years. It doesn't always please me to do that because I like him and I've had a decent relationship with him. I think the biggest mistake he's made is hammering the second apron thing and basically taking advantage of the players. I don't, I think the players over and over again are just outmatched in these negotiations. They're negotiating against billionaires across the board. They're just going to be outmanned. You're not going to know as much about the future as all of these guys who've made all this money doing whatever. What I don't like and what I think they should put in is the longer you're with the team, you should get some sort of cap and tax relief from it. I've been saying this forever about the Warriors and Curry. Curry's been on that team since 2009.

• 57:51Bill Simmons?

  That should matter. He just shouldn't be a blanket, Curry makes $61 million a year. It should be, he makes 61 million, but because he's, for every year he's been with the team, you get a percent off on the cap or the tax or whatever. So he's at a 20% discount because I don't think fans want this. I think it's fun for, for us, for content, to just watch guys ship around and watch LaMelo leave Charlotte, watch Randall leave Minnesota, Ja, Jaylen Brown. Like it's fun to just watch everybody move around, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's good for the league. I don't think, I, I care about the shit like the fact that Bird and McHale played their entire careers together. I just feel like that era is gone now.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like that. Yeah, I think that, you know, the, if, if you're looking for one reason to understand why Jaylen Brown is on the Sixers today, it's the second apron. It's the, the current CBA. And I don't think this might have happened under the previous regime. And I do think it's worth thinking about that for the long-term health and sort of macroeconomic shaping of the NBA at large. You know, I wrote about it with Yanis last week because I think that was a huge part of what's going on there. And you just alluded to it with the Boston Miami sort of negotiations there. Like this is, the three-point line was the dominant game-changing artifact of the 2010s. The hard cap second apron is the equivalent in the 2020s.

• 59:15Speaker 04

  It's changing the game, but it's happening in the front office as opposed to on the court with shot selection. And I think the teams that learn how to use it the most and learn how to navigate it are going to be the most successful. And right now, that means Bill, first-round picks are way more valuable than they were. Young talent on cost control is a lot more important than it used to be. And like I said earlier, a 33-year-old bit who's not living up to the $70 million we're giving him is the most toxic asset in the NBA potentially, and that, and you're talking about it with Embiid.

• 59:49Bill Simmons?

  Unless you're Toronto, then you're excited, then you're pulling up stuff for it.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that trade's fine. There's nothing to see here.

• 59:54Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Nothing to see here. He just had to leave the country.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  How much did he get paid again?

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Did you see Kawhi at the Blue Jays game?

• 1:00:03Bill Simmons?

  Oh, God.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  It was like Michael Corleone returning to Sicily. It was just like unbelievable.

• 1:00:08Bill Simmons?

  He was there for eight months. It was like he filmed one movie and was just out making the next one.

• 1:00:15Bill Simmons?

  Look, I remember writing about this in my book in the late 2000s about the 80s teams that we had, the Lakers, Sixers, Celtics, and Pistons, and why those teams would kind of never happen again because it was so easy to circumvent the cap, pay guys, keep guys together. And we all romanticized that decade because we got all these guys to stay on the same teams. And when, you know, Detroit traded Dantley for Aguirre, that was like a cataclysmic trade. People were like, oh, my God, they traded Dantley. The Lakers in the mid-80s almost traded James Worthy for, I think it was Worthy for Tarp Lee and some, and a draft pick or something, and backed out at the last minute.

• 1:00:58Bill Simmons?

  But we had, we had moments like that, but they're always about basketball and not the other stuff. And that started a shift over the next. 30 years, we saw free agency change. You talk about these different areas. Free agency changed it in the 90s because once the guys were on the younger, on the shorter contracts, you could see people like Stephon Marbury be like, yeah, I want my own team. And he, Minnesota had him for three years. They had to trade him. Golden State had Seaweb for one year. They had to trade him, right? Then we move into the 2000s and it was about these longer deals that really were able to help a team like San Antonio that could build around Duncan, who was great. But then

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  But if you had a bad GM, they destroyed your franchise.

• 1:01:38Bill Simmons?

  You had a bad GM, you were done for half a decade. Yeah, you were done, you were done for five years. 2010s, three-point shooting changes everything. And then this decade, it's second apron. And CR, like, I, I really don't think we'll see a team go back to back for a long time. And even like Durant and Golden State in 16, I don't think could have happened with the way we're doing this now.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, especially if you add, add the injuries that we're seeing and the kind of, and the wear and tear to the players. It just doesn't seem like a guy like Tatum, who by all accounts takes care of his body as well as anybody in the league, you know, Halliburton, like these, these injuries are destroying franchises for not only the playoffs that they're in, but the year after. I'm trying to, it's, it's, it's a really good point about the way that the league was built was by creating these long-term relationships. And now I think that you've replaced that with the dopamine hit of the transactional nature of the NBA, which is like really fun to talk about and really crazy to just be jacked into

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  the matrix all day long, waiting for signs that so-and-so is going here or this plane landed there. But I don't know if it's super good for the league, you know? I don't, I don't know. I mean, like fandom itself has become a lot more individual. I don't think people are like, I have grown up and decided to dedicate my life to the Steelers or the Timberwolves or the Nuggets. Like, I think they're a little bit more like, I like this guy. I like.

• 1:03:05Bill Simmons?

  It's player-centric. Yeah. I like LeBron. Where's he going? Oh, he's on Denver now? I'm gonna root for that.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  I would not be surprised if next season, there's just like a ton of buzz about Minnesota just because LaMelo has like a real fandom among younger NBA fans, you know? But, uh, I don't, I don't, I just don't know if it's like totally great for the long-term, like, is, is the NBA gonna exist in 25 years? You know?

• 1:03:27Bill Simmons?

  I don't, I honestly, it goes back to. Everything being financially driven, including like the fact that they want to expand, which I think is, I've talked about it over and over again, the last thing we need is two more teams. The fact that everybody has a chance, which is how the NFL was able to grow all the value of their teams, right? Didn't matter if you're in Cincinnati, Seattle, New Orleans, everybody had a chance to win the Super Bowl and you were never bad for more than a couple of years. And now we're back in that. I'll say one more thing about Jaylen and then I really want to talk about the Lakers, just because I want to cheer myself up because I thought what they did was abhorrent.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  Can I just ask you one more thing before you do your eulogy for this? So I think the Sixers are better than they were yesterday morning and I think the Sixers are in a position where if this goes well and if Embiid gives you, if he's on the Paul George 45 games, be healthy for the playoffs, I think this team is way better situated to function during the regular season with a rhythm.

• 1:04:27Bill Simmons?

  Especially if Fylon comes through.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:04:29Bill Simmons?

  If you have a bench.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  And Dean Wade is not a bad pickup. Like that's like, there's a, there's a starting lineup that the Sixers have that I think is among the best in the Eastern Conference right now.

• 1:04:39Bill Simmons?

  Well, you know what else you did, Ciara? You turned Paul George into Jaylen Brown.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  That was, I keep forgetting that. I keep forgetting. I was really locked in on Belgium, you know?

• 1:04:47Bill Simmons?

  Like you had Paul George.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  And that's today.

• 1:04:51Bill Simmons?

  And now you have Jaylen Brown.

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  And look, you know what? Jaylen's got a lot of good ideas. I'm really open to them.

• 1:04:58Bill Simmons?

  Well, one of the things, so I had to obviously feel it did greatness, but one of the things that I really like about the team, as you know, I'm a durability guy, DJ, Maxey, Jaylen Brown, those guys fucking play.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know who that also cares about durability?

• 1:05:11Bill Simmons?

  Forty minutes a game.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  Nick Nurse, because he likes playing guys 45 minutes a game in February.

• 1:05:17Bill Simmons?

  But you, you're basically, you've turned Embiid into the, like, the proverbial all-time luxury. If he plays, awesome. If he doesn't play, yeah, I think you're okay. I think you can patch together rebounds and rim protections and be, you know, not a catastrophe, but you're gonna have these three guys night after night, who are gonna be playing a combined 105 minutes. And, you know, VJ is gonna be way better next year. That was the first thing the Celtics asked for was VJ and Paul George. And Sixers were like, no, thanks.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Bill Simmons?

  I'd rather keep VJ.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Blow up I-95 than do that.

• 1:05:50Bill Simmons?

  Right. I mean, really what you want, and this is why the Celtics valued Hugo so much, is having these perimeter guys who are two-way guys on cheap deals is the single best luxury you can have right now. I think the Sixers are gonna be good. It's interesting with the Celtics title odds were six to one.

• 1:06:10Bill Simmons?

  Really for the entire offseason, they're now 13 to one.

• 1:06:15Bill Simmons?

  They are for 50-plus wins on FanDuel.

• 1:06:20Bill Simmons?

  Do you think they are a minus or a plus on that bet? If you're betting the Celtics to win 50-plus games?

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  I'm gonna say a plus, but I'd be tempted. I think the bones are so good, Bill. You're gonna tell me the price. If it's a plus, I'm in.

• 1:06:38Bill Simmons?

  Minus 135.

• 1:06:42Bill Simmons?

  So, and conversely, the Lakers are plus 200 to win 50-plus games.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Now, is that with Confederate currency or with?

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 1:06:55Bill Simmons?

  They're moving back to Minneapolis.

• 1:07:00Bill Simmons?

  The, uh, the thing with the Celtics, I think they're still gonna be good next year unless the city is so mad and so focused on how much they hated this trade that it gets a little black cloud over it. So I think one of the reasons they did this trade was what happened in 2019? When it was like on paper, look at it, look at this team, Hayward's back. We have Tatum and Brown and Kyrie and Al Horford and we're gonna be awesome. And the egos and all that stuff never, and I think that was part of the fear and why, what leads to this trade.

• 1:07:32Bill Simmons?

  But I also think that could happen this year because of the energy of the trade and people just being mad. If Philly starts out going like 18 and 3?

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Bill Simmons?

  And the Celtics are like 9 and 9 and Tatum's having leg issues and you know, there's this, there's a couple of different scenarios here. We're like, oh my god.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  It's also a complicated thing for Stevens to sell to his fanbase because to make it sound like he's really excited about this trade, he's gonna have to sort of denigrate Brown on the way out. You know what I mean? Like, I think we got better. I mean, I, I, it's a very, very, very delicate dance here.

• 1:08:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Um, all right. Jaylen Brown, quickly. 2024 champion.

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:08:10Bill Simmons?

  Indiana series made the shot in the corner, which was one of the great Celtic shots of this century. He was awesome in the Dallas series defending Luka going two way. His game three, I think he has 30 in game three. They're up 2-0 in the series and both of them together really took it. And that was like the platonic ideal of the Jays together. It was like, if you want to see what they wanted, those two guys in that Dallas game is the perfect part, Kirk.

• 1:08:36Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm glad you brought it up. I was just gonna add, like, on a team with Derrick White and, and Drew freaking Holiday, who did Joe Missoula, yeah, who did Joe Missoula use to guard Luka Doncic in that series?

• 1:08:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  Jaylen Brown. And that's why he won finals MVP. You know, he had a slightly more efficient shooting, um, series than, than Jason Tatum, but it was the defense Billy called out. He is a, he is a serious defender and, and was more than capable in that series against Luka Doncic.

• 1:09:07Bill Simmons?

  And if he, if Tatum wins finals MVP, I think all of this is a lot easier afterwards. Jaylen gets the ECF. Tatum wins the finals MVP, which I think he should have. I said it at the time. I don't, I don't understand why he didn't win it. Um, but I think the problems probably start there. Anyway, uh, Jaylen was amazing for the city. He showed up all the time, never, however, if he ever got weird off the court, never saw it on the court. Um, I thought he was reliable. There were frustrated things about him, which you get frustrated by everybody when you watch them play basketball for 10 years, right? But I, I just thought he was an awesome.

• 1:09:46Speaker 04

  You said he was an incredible guy in the community, too.

• 1:09:48Bill Simmons?

  He really was. And, and honestly, that was the same thing for Mookie, too. Like, you don't get a lot of these, the people that can bridge all kinds of generations and all kinds of different things that really seem to care about giving back. And he was one of those guys.

• 1:10:02Speaker 05

  Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms don't pause for the moments that matter. That's why understanding your treatment options matters. Discover what's possible with Tremfya. Guselkamap. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Talk to your doctor and explore what's possible, or call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Tremfya and visit tremfyaradio.com.

• 1:10:46Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Expedia. You know how at the end of the season, your team goes to Cancun? 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. 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

• 1:11:30Bill Simmons?

  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 26-27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. 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. That's two. CR, you want to stay for a quick Lakers hit? Sure. Okay. They gave Kessler four years, 130 after giving up first in 2031 and 2033 and swaps in 2830. They signed Grimes and Mamu for four for 60, four for 52.

• 1:12:13Bill Simmons?

  They let Kennard go and Sexton for two for 19. A guy that Charlotte, which was like a nine seed was like Kobe White's a major upgrade for us. They have Kessler, Mamu, Luca, Reeves and Sexton, I think as the starting lineup and Aitin Grimes, Vandy and Larravia coming off the bench and Bronny. Want to throw him in there for fun.

• 1:12:35Bill Simmons?

  I'm just dumbfounded Kirk.

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Bill Simmons?

  I, I, you're locked into this team now that I don't think has any chance to beat not only San Antonio, not only OKC, but probably not Utah, probably not Minnesota. I, even if Luca's averaging 35 a game, I just don't see how this is defensively a team that could hold up multiple playoff rounds. I just don't get it. So explain it to me. Kirk had so much trouble explaining it that his, his computer froze. You go CR and we'll go back to Kirk.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Uh, this team feels a lot like the 24 Mavericks and it feels like a team that was built by Luca, for Luca, based on like what he wants to play with secondary ball handler and Reeves. A big guy protects the rim and I guess can flush it, although I haven't seen a lot of Kessler over the years. Uh, I know he's, I know he's a really good rim protector, but it's just a, a strange thing when all the word coming out of the Lakers was Mark Walters is here. We're going to have the front office from the future and Palenka's still there and he's making deals basically based on what his star wants, right? I mean, that's, that's just my read superficially. What do you think?

• 1:13:48Bill Simmons?

  I thought they need to get him to sign an extension, right? Obviously he's signing off on all these moves.

• 1:13:56Bill Simmons?

  This is what he wants. He wants a defensive rim protector. Guys around the rim. And want shooters around him. The part I don't get is the lack of a defensive anybody. I still don't know who's is Quinn. You watched Quentin Grimes for a couple of years.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  He's fine.

• 1:14:11Bill Simmons?

  Your lockdown defender?

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  Cool player. Yeah.

• 1:14:13Bill Simmons?

  Who's guarding SGA on your team?

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:14:16Bill Simmons?

  Who's guarding Anthony Edwards? What do you do when you play Anthony Edwards and LaMelo together? Who's guarding Jamal Murray? I just have, oh, Kirk's back. Uh, I just have a slew of questions. CR, we were talking about, um, the holes that this Laker team has Kirk.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  And that like, this feels like a team Luca built for Luca's purposes.

• 1:14:36Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, for Luca to get awesome stats.

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't like this team at all. Uh, as a guy who leans Spurs heavy, nothing's making me shake in my boots here. We talked about ownership earlier. There was talk, Bill, like when Mark Walter and the Guggenheim bros bought this team for $10 billion from the Bus family, that they were going to turn in the Dodgers of the NBA and be the smartest, most aggressive team in the league. This doesn't feel like that to me. They have spent a lot of money on Austin Reeves, on, uh, Mamu and now on Quentin Grimes. But yeah, like I said, this is a franchise that expects to win NBA championships. I don't see this roster competing for championships against a Thunder team that's going to be pissed off, a Spurs team that's going to be better, and then all the teams in the East that seem to be getting good.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  I wonder whether or not the long-term play here for the Lakers is to swoop in on a disgruntled Boston president and make him the front office.

• 1:15:31Bill Simmons?

  Brad Stevens?

• 1:15:34Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  After Chisholm made him trade his beloved Jaylen Brown, Brad Stevens puts himself up for for front office free agency and joins Lakers.

• 1:15:44Bill Simmons?

  I really doubt Chisholm made them do anything. If anything.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  I know, just screwed it up.

• 1:15:48Bill Simmons?

  No, no, I'm saying like, if anything, I think he's probably guilty of maybe should have thrown his body in front of the trade versus telling them they had to do something. I, the bigger question for me, you know, Kessler, four years, 130, played five games last year. I like him. Like he's a rebound and block. There's good advanced metrics. Should any center with the with the current setup we have, other than Wemby, be making more than like 29 million a year? Is it defensible? The Celtics are paying 20 million total for Mitchell Robinson, Garza and Cada. Right? And Cada has some extension coming next year, but it just feels really easy to to get bodies. Even Puck Forty on the Knicks, like, did you get him CR?

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  We did.

• 1:16:33Bill Simmons?

  I don't mind him for 15 minutes a game. I feel like there's a lot of those guys. And is the difference between somebody like that and then or, you know, the Lakers are paying $41 million for Ayton and for Kessler next year. How is that a winning formula?

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  Counterpoint, as a Spurs guy, watching the Luke Cornet minutes in the last two or three rounds of of the playoffs, we were holding on for dear life. And Luke is a good player, like, no disrespect to Luke Cornet. But yeah, like, if you have a really good, solid backup, like the ability of Oklahoma City to have Hardstein and or Chet out there, I think it is very valuable. Obviously, there's a guy in Denver that's worth a ton of money who plays the center position. But yeah, I like some of these dudes, but.

• 1:17:21Bill Simmons?

  See, I always count Jokic. I don't even know what position he is. I guess he should count in that Wemby thing, but.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:28Bill Simmons?

  You could tell me he's any position and whatever.

• 1:17:31Speaker 04

  But Kessler, this is a massive overpay. Let's not lose sight of that. This is almost like a Rudy Gobert deal, but Rudy was like a multiple Defensive Player of the Year award winner at the time. And he is impactful. If you have Rudy Gobert and he's age 31, you're going to be a top five, top 10 defense automatically. And that's been the side of the court the Lakers have been trying to build for years. But you said it in passing, you're a durability guy. The biggest question with Walker Kessler is, is he going to play more than five games? Is he going to play 20 games? He's been struggling with the same shoulder thing since college. So it's a huge risk on a player that hasn't sort of demonstrated that durability, let alone the competence to be a dominant center in the Western Conference, Bill.

• 1:18:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, and you could see, like, Portland. I was really surprised they didn't want to make Klingon the best guy in a Jaylen Brown trade.

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Bill Simmons?

  You know, it's different than the Hugo situation where Hugo was being treated as a throw in in that trade. I value him. Klingon is the main piece to get Jaylen Brown. Probably isn't holding me back, but I don't know, CR, maybe teams are looking at this as like, if Kessler is going to make four for 130 and Klingon can do a Kessler impersonation for nine million a year, maybe that's one of the best assets you can have. I also think, I wonder if Indy.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  But that's where you get into like, was Luka Doncic like, yeah, you know, just get whoever you can get for nine million. I'll make him work. No.

• 1:18:54Bill Simmons?

  Well, they had Deandre Ayton and obviously weren't happy about it.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, Ayton's a very specific proposition, but like, it sounds like this was a team, like I said, that's been built instantly to suit Luka's preferences and his preferences were obviously like a 2024 Mavericks, even maybe even earlier vintage of that Mavericks team where he's got a diving, like rim running center, a secondary ball handler and shooting everywhere. And then let's worry about defense when it's time to worry about defense.

• 1:19:24Bill Simmons?

  So you think Indiana, who gave up two firsts for Zubats and basically a 50 50 chance that one of those picks was going to be five through nine in this draft and then it came up tails. But Zubats on a way better contract than Kessler and the price for these guys is two firsts. So you think Kevin Pritchard was going to the office today like, hey, I told you guys, see that Kessler deal? It's a little more defensible. I still, do you agree with that Kirk or no?

• 1:19:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's a good comp. I mean, they played like Russian roulette with that lottery pick and lost. And I'll always remember that, that deal with, but.

• 1:20:06Speaker 04

  Dude, I don't, I don't know what the Lakers are doing. I don't care about Kevin Pritchard right now. By the way, I do love to wa- I can't wait to watch the Pacers next year. No, no, there's nothing there, but what are we doing? What are we doing with Walker Kessler? We're the Los Angeles fucking Lakers, dude. Like, we go after George Mikan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaq, like, and Anthony Davis, by the way. Like, what are we doing? Walker Kessler? How much? We're the fucking Lakers. Like, where is that swagger? And, like, we don't get Walker Kessler. We get, you know, Nikola Jokic. We get, we get the biggest guy available. And it feels like they took a lot of their own flexibility out with all that draft capital bill. So I just,

• 1:20:49Speaker 04

  yeah, I know it's, it's, it's, it's a small sort of silver lining for your day yesterday with your colonoscopy and then Jaylen Brown.

• 1:20:57Bill Simmons?

  They started out great.

• 1:20:59Speaker 04

  But the Lakers seem to have fucked their up, their, their future a little bit, in my opinion.

• 1:21:04Bill Simmons?

  See, if, if, if Utah's willing to trade Kessler, I think Utah's one of the smartest teams we have. That would make me nervous.

• 1:21:15Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:21:15Bill Simmons?

  Why are you trying to trade him? You're this young rebuilding team. You already have a ton of picks.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  I have, I have the same feeling.

• 1:21:20Bill Simmons?

  Why are you so excited to trade Kessler?

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  I'm very excited about the Jaylen Brown trade. I have the same feeling about trading with Brad Stevens. I'm like, I really hope, I really hope that, that Brad Stevens just, like, hit his head, and this is what's happened, because, like, I don't want to be in, on the wrong side of these deals. I also, Verno made a really good point that I happen to agree with, which is, like, it's very strange that that's the market for Walker Kessler and Jaylen Durin can't find a job.

• 1:21:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Bill Simmons?

  Well, this goes back to my question about, should any center except for Wemby and Jokic, if he, if he is a center? I guess he is. We'll count him as a center. I feel like he's, like, point guard on offense. I don't know what he is on defense. But Jaylen Durin paying him $40 million a year. I just think is prohibitive to everybody. If he gets that, God bless him. But it feels like 25 to 30 is the range for guys like that that are like good centers, but they're not game changers. And then I guess Giannis, if you consider him a center, which I wouldn't. So Utah has Triple J, Markkinen, Bailey, Peterson, George, and then Sensabaugh, Filipowski, Collier.

• 1:22:27Bill Simmons?

  So they took a step back from maybe, oh, wow, could this team be a six seed if Peterson's good? I do wonder if they would have taken Boozer if they knew that this Kessler trade was sitting there. I wonder if that changes the dynamics of that at all. Cause I think it was a little closer. So you like it with what they have. And I just think if I'm doing the Kessler thing, I think I would just rather have Boozer. But we'll see with Peterson. They obviously, they were all in on him.

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  Wait, did it cross your mind yesterday too with Danny Ainge, who's a main character in Boston history? Would he have done this Jaylen Brown deal? Cause it's interesting that Danny's fleecing the Lakers, in my opinion, on the same day that this Jaylen Brown thing is going down with Brad Stevens.

• 1:23:13Bill Simmons?

  I think Danny would have traded Jaylen a year ago when Tatum got hurt.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  He would have been like, here's a soft rebuild.

• 1:23:21Bill Simmons?

  I think he would have completely blown it up. And I think he would have traded him and I think he would have thrown away last year completely. And probably been proactively a year or two soon on it. That, I mean, the bigger question is, was there even a Jaylen Brown trade last year? You know, I don't know what was available last summer, but well, so so Lakers were all confused by that. Not to mention the, a team with three white guys.

• 1:23:52Speaker 04

  Three.

• 1:23:52Bill Simmons?

  I had, I had a, like a team that's being led, their three best players are away. I had this great email, I gotta find it, from somebody who went back over the course of history. This is from Jason Downey.

• 1:24:06Speaker 03

  It's from JD Vance.

• 1:24:08Bill Simmons?

  JDV in Washington, no, Jason Downey said, "The last time a team with three white guys as their best guys won a championship was 1958, St. Louis."

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  Who could forget?

• 1:24:19Bill Simmons?

  If you go two white guys, Bird or McHale or Cowens and Hondo, can Luca Reeves and Kessler overcome three quarters of a century of NBA history?

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:24:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm gonna go no. That's a no for me, dog.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  See if Fanduel will put that up.

• 1:24:34Bill Simmons?

  Snowtime Lakers. So then, the Celtics concurrently get Mitch Robinson yesterday for 3 for 47, which I thought was a great deal. The Knicks would not go over the second apron for Mitch.

• 1:24:49Bill Simmons?

  They've spent a lot of money over the years. We've seen title teams do this, Kirk. 2011 Dallas, most famously with Tyson Chandler, where they're just like, nope. Won the title, holding the line, we want flexibility. 2008 Celtics with Posey was another decent example of just didn't want to head into all the tax shit.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  Nuggets, right? Didn't they do that kind of with Brucey B? I guess probably there was no way they could match that.

• 1:25:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they basically got poison filled with them. There was an Ariza Lakers situation when he got hot in the finals, they let him go. Defensible or no to you that they let Mitch go?

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  I mean, it's the theme of our podcast in its extent. It's like, this is a hard cap world. Like, we're living in a hard cap world. Unless you're the Cleveland Cavaliers last year, the only team that dared go over this rule, the second apron. I don't think they had much of a choice, Bill. I do think, you know, as somebody went to the NBA Cup last year and watched Mitchell Robinson essentially beat the Spurs, that was like a premonition for how the finals would go, in my opinion. He's such an important part of their culture. That bench unit that I think got us from the Tibbs era to the Mike Brown era and obviously got us to a title level. But depth is very, very expensive in the modern NBA. And this is exactly what we can can can start to see from a title team.

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  Like, yeah, your second best center is gone. And to your team, I think it's a great addition for a team that struggled with rebounding down the stretch and in some of those playoff losses. Mitchell Robinson is one of the best rebounders, if not the best rebounder in the league right now, and he showed it in big moments. So I like it for Boston. I'm not surprised to see to see New York not not being able to afford that many good players.

• 1:26:33Bill Simmons?

  CR, I'm not going in over the second apron and getting crippled by all these different things for my seventh or eighth best player. I'm just not doing it.

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  I just think everything is like context. If like, if Sam Presti did this, everybody would be like, ah, see, he knows. But it's James Dolan, so they're like, you cheapskate, like, goddamn, how can you not bring Mitch back? You know, like, it's.

• 1:26:56Bill Simmons?

  James Dolan was riding such a high after the title and then the speech came out that he gave to the team. And if he had just gone away to like Australia right afterwards, he'd still be riding a high.

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  I know, but it's like, it's the same kind of thing, you know, like, I think we were giving Tim Connolly the benefit of the doubt because he's a really good GM with the LaMelo trade. I know that you didn't like it, but he obviously had his reasons. But then people are like, what is, what is Tom Dundon doing with Portland? Why do they have five guards? You know, like, everything is just sort of about like this sort of narrative architecture around it.

• 1:27:29Bill Simmons?

  That was my favorite Jaylen trade and the one I was rooting for was with Portland. Yeah, with Drew Holiday coming back, Kamara and a couple picks and just call it a day. And I think that would have accomplished a lot of what the Paul George thing is, but obviously Portland didn't want him.

• 1:27:44Speaker 04

  And that's the recurring theme over and over again.

• 1:27:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, people just were turning down Jaylen left and right.

• 1:27:50Speaker 04

  Portland was really sticky with the young, those young players with Milwaukee too, Bill. And then when you add in the fact that Giannis, I don't think would have wanted to extend in Portland. But yeah, I heard that they were not willing to part with their young talent in in either deal. But yeah, it would have been better to get younger if you're the Boston Celtics, but they they they instead got older.

• 1:28:13Bill Simmons?

  Do either of you have a, the Lakers as a playing team or as a playoff team?

• 1:28:19Bill Simmons?

  The way it stands right now.

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  I think so because I think they'll be a good regular season team. So if they're all healthy and if they, if they don't suffer like two months hamstring, Luca, you know, I think, I think that they will play well on a night to night basis. Yeah.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  Hamstring Luca or calf strain Luca. Bill sent me on the wild goose chase about calf strains and hamstrings last year, and I do think that's the right thing to bring up. Like, that's no small assumption at this point with him or Austin Reeves. But yeah, if Luke is playing, they're a playoff team.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  If they lose two of those three guys for any significant amount of time, I think it's going to be quite difficult.

• 1:28:51Bill Simmons?

  Luca's plus 650 now for MVP on Fanduel. Wemby's plus 210 is the favorite. Goes Wemby, SGA, Jokic, Giannis, Edwards, Tatum sixth. Jaylen Brown, still 100 to 1 CR. You're talking about the all time FU season by somebody.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  Just Maxi throwing in mallet hoops the entire game.

• 1:29:14Bill Simmons?

  There's a dark side of this Lakers season though, that I'm maybe I'll have to grab on to as I search for answers and happiness. Kawhi to Toronto?

• 1:29:26Bill Simmons?

  For Ingram and Dick and two firsts and 31 and 33 and a 27 slot.

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  Is it just crazy that he's, that they're allowed to do this before they settled this entire investigation?

• 1:29:34Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  It's just crazy.

• 1:29:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:29:38Bill Simmons?

  Well, I've heard this. So, so what would Adam, would he just say, you're not allowed to make a trade involving Kawhi?

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Make the investigation a little bit more expedient if possible, like throw a couple more lawyers at this thing. Like, whatever it is, whatever you're going to decide, like, it seems strange that the main character of this controversy is now allowed to go to Toronto and is this, is like, I've seen people say this is kind of almost a shadow punishment, you know, or, or whatever. We're basically, I don't believe it either, but I, I just find this incredibly strange that this was allowed to happen.

• 1:30:16Bill Simmons?

  Can I give you some Kawhi stats?

• 1:30:18Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:30:18Bill Simmons?

  It was interesting watching everybody talk about him. Like, this is the missing piece for Toronto. Now they can make the finals.

• 1:30:26Bill Simmons?

  We just get sports amnesia sometimes with guys. Kawhi played for the Clippers for seven years. In the bubble in 2020, they lost in round two in seven to Denver. They blew a 3-1 lead. 21, they made the West Finals. He broke down halfway through round two. So basically, he had only won two playoff series up to that point. 2022, no playoffs because he's hurt. 2023, lost in five to Phoenix. He broke down in game two. That's round one. 2024, lost in six, round one to Dallas. He played two games. 2025, lost in seven to Denver. 2026, lost the first play-in game to the Warriors at home where they blew a big lead. And he was terrible in the second half. He's played 11 playoff games in the last five years.

• 1:31:11Bill Simmons?

  The last time he was part of a winning playoff series was May 2021. Why are we talking about this guy like it's the 2019 Kawhi and he's back? He's not that guy anymore. I don't care. I know he was good. I voted for him for second team NBA last year. But as we talk about over and over again, regular season's here. Playoffs are here. And he hasn't shown up in the playoffs for the entire 2020s. He hasn't made it. So why, why is it going to be different this year, Kirk?

• 1:31:38Speaker 04

  It's not going to be different, but here's why. It's the same shit that makes Jaylen look bad relatively. These, these models, like the estimated plus minus, which is a great tool. But if you look at it right now, Kawhi is always a top five, top six player in that list. But to your point earlier, durability is a skill. And a lot of times these models like fail to account for the simple fact that you have to play a lot to be a great NBA player.

• 1:32:04Bill Simmons?

  Right. You're almost better at playing 10, 15 games less a year. So you look better in the models.

• 1:32:09Speaker 04

  Well, that's like what Paul George like looked great in the playoffs after he got his 25 game break. And I do think that's one of the reasons the league is skewing so young is like Julian Champagny played over 100 games of NBA basketball this year. Like, and, and many of them in the playoffs, like this is insane what we're asking these athletes to endure. And many of their bodies just simply can't handle it disproportionately older bodies with pre-existing injuries like Kawhi Leonard. So I, I'm not surprised. I would bet very strongly he won't survive another grind like he did in 2019. When he, by the way, wasn't 100% then either when they won it all, but he was seven years younger than he is coming back.

• 1:32:49Bill Simmons?

  He was really good last year. They lost the first playing game to a team that then lost by like 20 in the second game CR.

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  Uh, my, my takeaway from this transaction is just that the Clippers have returned spiritually to the pre lob city era. That this Darius Garland and Brandon Ingram almost feel like pre lob city Clippers to me. And I appreciate that. Maybe that is the Clippers punishment.

• 1:33:16Bill Simmons?

  We're back, baby.

• 1:33:17Speaker 04

  As Brandon Ingram.

• 1:33:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Yeah. So the Clippers traded Kawhi Harden and Zubats. They got Garland and Wogler back Ingram.

• 1:33:27Bill Simmons?

  Matherin, I guess.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:29Bill Simmons?

  Greedy Dick.

• 1:33:30Speaker 03

  Truly pre lob city's Clippers. Yeah.

• 1:33:33Bill Simmons?

  Greedy Dick. Is about as oh, four Clippersy as you're gonna get. Isaiah Jackson, three unprotected first, one swap. Way more cap space. I'm still not sure why they didn't get involved in the Jaylen thing, but what do I know?

• 1:33:48Bill Simmons?

  I am still confused why Kawhi was so excited to return to Toronto. And I do think this is, if I ever did another basketball book, this would be another great NBA what if for me.

• 1:33:59Bill Simmons?

  If he just stays in Toronto, he could have stayed with Siakam, Ananobi, Lowry, Van Vliet, Powell, Gasol and Ibaka in 2020. And they probably would have gone back to back would be my guess. Instead, he jumps to the Clippers, forces them to trade SGA and all their picks, aspiration scandal. Kirk, he won four playoff series in Toronto and two with the Clippers.

• 1:34:21Speaker 04

  That's wild. As part of the front office that sent him to Toronto, it's almost a full circle moment.

• 1:34:28Speaker 04

  Don't trade great players to your rivals. Like I remember the, the Lakers were calling us in 2018. Can we get Kawhi Leonard from you? And Pop was like, fuck no, we're not trading. Our best player to the team that we think is a real threat to our, our championship hopes over here. Um, and, and you know, so we sent him to the Eastern Conference to Toronto where it's, it, for many reasons, but one of them was like, we're not here to help our rivals in Los Angeles. But one of the things, Bill, we knew back in 2018. He was gonna end up in LA a year or so later. He was gonna go to Southern California. So I'm actually kind of surprised, given that, the emotional reasons he wanted to be back in Southern California, that now he's back in Canada.

• 1:35:12Speaker 04

  Of all of this stuff, it's like, dude, I thought you wanted to live in LA. Like, I thought that was the whole thing.

• 1:35:17Bill Simmons?

  It does, yeah, and he was living in like an hour and a half outside of LA too. And seemed like you loved being in California. It does, I can, Conspiracy Bill has, has, has done some deep dives. I'll just say that. Conspiracy Bill has, I'm like, who's doing the aspiration scandal? It's like, we're working on it. We'll give you our verdict. Conspiracy Bill's gonna look at this over the course of the summer. This episode is brought to by WeatherTech. Whether it's a pumpkin spice coffee that goes splat in your seat, or a weekend tailgate that leaves your trunk full of gear and who knows what. You're gonna want WeatherTech in your vehicle, whether you call it fall, autumn, or spooky season. Whether the mess is your fault, the kids, the dogs, or the weather's fault, you're gonna want WeatherTech for American-made floor liners and a cargo liner that laugh in the face of fall weather.

• 1:36:02Bill Simmons?

  Visit weatherTech.com today. 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 you are 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 content availability may vary.

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  All right, quickly LeBron, last year, right? Like, this is great. That this is, here we are, here we are 15 years later, we're still waiting for LeBron.

• 1:36:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I read a Brian Curtis Trade Rumors piece, how he said we're in the Trade Rumors era for Greenland. 2014, he wrote it, it was 12 years later, and it was a very, very, a piece that saw the future in a lot of different ways, including that we're probably gonna be here for the rest of our lives with LeBron. He, he decided not to return to the Lakers.

• 1:37:03Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:37:07Bill Simmons?

  I wrote down, he decided not to return to the Lakers like I decided not to return to ESPN. Thought that was funny.

• 1:37:16Bill Simmons?

  Anyway, then we all knew where this was going. And, uh, and he left.

• 1:37:20Speaker 03

  Where is it going?

• 1:37:21Bill Simmons?

  Well, with him not being on the Lakers.

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like where is this?

• 1:37:24Bill Simmons?

  For six months.

• 1:37:24Speaker 03

  Because first of all, I just have to say of our, our, our Ringer Podcast Network colleague, Rich Paul, it's been doing a wonderful job.

• 1:37:31Bill Simmons?

  The Ringer's Rich Paul.

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  Having all of us play a game of Clue about, you know, with like, he wants to go somewhere that has both good indoor and outdoor golf, you know? And it's like, everybody is like, looking up Topgolf like locations across the country.

• 1:37:46Bill Simmons?

  Well, he wants, he wants winning and he wants to be happy.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  Sure, sure.

• 1:37:51Bill Simmons?

  Um, wouldn't have guessed that.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  I, uh, I find this fascinating. I almost find it kind of fun. You know what I mean? Like, we're not going to get to do this that many more times, probably than ever with him. So I'm, I'm down to go one more last time around the carousel.

• 1:38:06Bill Simmons?

  Kirk, I'm going to make a prediction.

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Bill Simmons?

  I think this goes on for a lot of the month. Because it will get, um, stories day after day and conjecture and podcast content when podcasts are dead in mid-July after everybody has gone with wherever. I just think this, my, my guess would, this keeps going and going.

• 1:38:26Bill Simmons?

  Something, and I've seen, and we did, I did something with Zach about it on Sunday. Where could we go? And I thought San Antonio made the most sense, but they signed Tobias Harris, so that's not happening.

• 1:38:37Bill Simmons?

  Denver is a team that I think we always thought would be fun to see him and Jokic together. There's no history there. I haven't seen this possibility mentioned yet. Hold on to your seats.

• 1:38:48Bill Simmons?

  What if he doesn't pick anybody?

• 1:38:52Bill Simmons?

  Until like January, February range? What if he just says?

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  The Roger Clemens.

• 1:38:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, what if he just says, you know what?

• 1:39:00Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna take my time with this one, guys.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  We're golfing a little bit.

• 1:39:02Bill Simmons?

  I wanna watch the league.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna play golf for the next six months. I'm gonna stay in shape. I wanna make like a February, March, April, May, June run, a five-month sprint. I own every single record there is to own right now. It's not like I'm playing for maybe, did he get to 40,000 points? I don't remember. I don't even, he has so many records, I don't even know what the records are anymore. Does he just say, you know what, I'm gonna wait. I'm gonna wait to see who's more unhappy with their team in December, in January, and early February, and I will just have people keep talking about this for the next six months. I think it's in play. What do you think of that idea?

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  I think that that would be a sensational media story. And given, now, I think that there would be some resentment that would build up of like LeBron's holding the league hostage and all this stuff. But the idea of him being like, let's see who's surging in January, and I will come in as like the great arm off the bench, you know? And if anybody can keep himself in playing shape, it's him.

• 1:40:06Bill Simmons?

  It's the Roger Clemens move, as Kirk said.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Bill Simmons?

  I'm still here.

• 1:40:10Speaker 03

  It's a great move.

• 1:40:10Bill Simmons?

  I'm still gonna be in awesome shape. I don't care about regular seasons anymore. I'm gonna pop in and out with somebody for four or five months.

• 1:40:17Speaker 03

  And also, I think that it's worth noting, like, the math on like, who would he be offending if he did this, right? Like, he's played for several different teams, as we've talked about over the course of this pod, like the rivalries, the state of rivalries, and you, there are no-go zones and the NBA is kind of falling apart. So yeah, like, why not? If Denver's rolling, I could see him going to Denver, but in January, you know, like, if...

• 1:40:43Bill Simmons?

  Well, especially if the market's not as robust as maybe they're pretending it is. And he's looking at lower-than-mid levels or...

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  So the only thing I think this would do is that if he does announce that this is his final season, which I guess everybody is assuming, that this would kind of diminish the victory lap.

• 1:41:00Bill Simmons?

  Or maybe he hasn't decided that at all. We don't have any intel on that. Like, the one of the reasons I've always thought he was gonna go to the Warriors is I thought it was gonna be a two-year deal lined up with Curry and lined up with Kerr. And they'll be, I was calling it the Expendables, but they'll just sell out everywhere. And it'll be this kind of appreciation two-year tour, combined with the fact that they'd be pretty competitive if they could get everybody to stay healthy at the same time in April and May. But that didn't happen right away. So I'm wondering why, because I think the Warriors were ready for it to happen.

• 1:41:34Bill Simmons?

  And now it's on hold. So the Miami thing makes no sense to me. I think that would be so weird. You're gonna have Bam and Giannis and LeBron all the, like, what is that team? Are you winning a title with that? Also, Pat Riley basically like called him out when he was leaving in 2014 and was basically, without saying it, saying like, you're taking the not cowardly way out, but you're bailing on this after one loss.

• 1:42:03Speaker 03

  What is LeBron playing for? Like, what is LeBron playing for financially and what is LeBron playing for emotionally? Is he playing?

• 1:42:10Bill Simmons?

  He's playing to compete, which is weird because he was just on a team with Luca, who we have as a top five or six bringer 100 guy. And Reeves, who's a top 35 to 40 guy. So it's not like he couldn't have competed on the Lakers. It's just the real issue is you can't compete if you're paying a 41-year-old guy $50 million a year anymore. So he has to wrap around his head like, where am I in this current ecosystem? I can't be one of the best two guys on the title team anymore. I just can't. So what does that mean financially? So that's what makes me wonder.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  Where do you want him to go? Where do you want him to go?

• 1:42:44Bill Simmons?

  I want him to go to San Antonio. I thought that would have been awesome.

• 1:42:48Bill Simmons?

  Denver is just fucking weird enough that I would watch every league pass game. And then, uh, Golden State, I think, would be super fun. Cleveland is the one that doesn't make any sense to me, and that might be one of the most likely outcomes. You're gonna have him and James Harden on the same team? And if you put, if you put LeBron on last year's Cavs team against the Knicks, which just put him instead of Wade and Struce getting all those minutes. Does the series change? Do you think the Knicks lose that series?

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  I don't think like Wade and Struce for the problem against the Knicks.

• 1:43:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, so I don't, I had the Cavs scenario. I don't know, Kirk, that one seems lame to me. I don't think that gets him anywhere.

• 1:43:31Speaker 04

  It feels right in my gut, though, like the part where he's doing a victory lap in the Cavs jersey and the goal isn't to win a championship. So I think that's really the fork in the road. If this dude wants to win one more title, it's not Cleveland. I don't think that puts them over the hump. But a place like San Antonio or Denver that is a player away, a chess piece away, like, so I think we're going to learn about, a lot about his motivations by when he chooses and where he chooses. Because I do think the story, the movie, the movie story is going back to Cleveland. And I feel like that's the way for him to be the most beloved athlete in Ohio history and to just make sure that... Probably is, so it might not, but I know it's lame, but I do think if I had to

• 1:44:13Speaker 04

  guess, that's where this goes. But if he chooses a place to go in, I mean Philly, Minnesota, Denver, San Antonio, there's a lot of compelling choices where he could be the fourth best guy. And hell, he would make every team really good.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  We kind of sad LeBron's career ends watching LaMelo take 35 footers.

• 1:44:33Bill Simmons?

  Minnesota would be an insane move. I think if I'm going to do that, if I'm going to latch on to a team, I'm waiting until December to do it. That's not going anywhere. I want to watch all these teams. I want to play it out and have a good time and do the, is he retiring or isn't he? And I'm just in the news all the time, which is, I think, one of the things that's attractive. It's the dialogue about what's happening with him that seems to be at least partly addictive to him and everyone in his circle. What's he going to do next? What's he going to do next? We knew he wasn't coming back to the Lakers.

• 1:45:06Speaker 04

  The reason I love that, Bill, is like, again, the 82 game regular season is an obscene amount of basketball for an older person to try to endure. I like this. This could actually set a template for Kevin Durant going forward, or Stephen Curry going forward. It's like, I don't need to be out there until Christmas. Like, this is ridiculous. I'm just gonna get a hamstring injury.

• 1:45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and training has become, and, and sports science and training have gotten so good that I can keep my body in playing shape even if I'm not playing.

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I'm more likely to be relevant in April, May, and June if I'm not playing October, November, December meaningless basketball games against, you know, Orlando on a Tuesday night.

• 1:45:47Bill Simmons?

  He has 43,440 points. He has so many records, I couldn't remember if he had 40,000 points or not. He has the games record, he has basically the minutes. Name a record, he probably has it or is in the top five. So the regular season, I don't think helps him as much at this point. I think what would help him is, how do I, how do I stay in the mix?

• 1:46:10Bill Simmons?

  How do people, how are people continuing to talk about me as I try to do this golf side thing that I'm trying to do? And then, can I just parachute into a good situation? Because I'm wanna, I mean, the thing with LeBron is he could fit in any situation and be like fun LeBron like he was before Luca got hurt in the Lakers. So just like, plop me in here, I'll figure it out. And then becomes this huge asset. And maybe he'll watch Minnesota for two months and be like, yeah, I feel like I could help those guys. I'll go in there. Or maybe he'll watch Denver and be like, oh shit, Christian Brown looks healthy this year, huh? So anyway, I, like, I, that makes way more sense to me than him talking himself into being on the Clippers and playing with Garland and Wagner. I just

• 1:46:55Bill Simmons?

  don't see him doing stuff like that. Couple other really quick things, then we'll go. Miami loses Powell because of the honest trade. So I feel like he has to be added to the honest trade. The guy made the All-Star team last year. Basically, they lost everybody on their team except Bam and Mitchell. I feel like the Yanis sweepsstakes ended up just, there's gonna be some piece written about all the teams that affected negatively. And then Detroit feels like it's kind of blowing up their team. And that we're, we're, right now, it's 9:41 Pacific time. But they lost Harris. They replaced him with John Collins, who's fine. I don't think he's as good as Tobias Harris. I thought Harris was, on last year's team, their number two guy they went to anytime they needed a basket.

• 1:47:40Speaker 03

  And was also like the veteran culture setter. Guy who's seen it all and like here to help Caden Durin and then and then you bring in John Collins, who seems like I have no idea like what what kind of duty is, but it just seems like kind of more of a rent a forward situation rather than like

• 1:47:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it's like a three year deal. That's really a one year deal.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:59Bill Simmons?

  And they seem paralyzed by all this Stern stuff, but it's weird to me that if they had this moment coming with their team where they're gonna have this great reckoning, why didn't they go harder on last year's team? They extended Herter, which I thought was weird too because I don't even remember him playing in the playoffs. So I don't, I don't know what to make of what they're doing, Kirk. And why, why not try to go after Jaylen Brown would be, be the other word. If that's the price, couple first round picks and some salary cap flexibility, which the Celtics didn't even get.

• 1:48:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the, the Durin, they might end up with Jaylen Durin still on their team and that relationship is going to be strained now. So, you know, there's a case for why aren't we just putting our armor on Jaylen Durin? Yeah, you had a bad playoffs, but you're all NBA 22 year old. We're not getting another player like that in Detroit. So if it ends up with like this quasi strained relationship with Jaylen Durin and some number that is insulting to him, that's not great either. But this is a 61 win team, Bill, that was on the rise. And it feels like I had them down in my biggest losers of free agency so far because it feels like they're not getting back to 61 wins, right? Next year, like the

• 1:49:08Bill Simmons?

  They lose Stewart, they might lose, who knows?

• 1:49:11Speaker 04

  Beef stew, yeah.

• 1:49:12Bill Simmons?

  Robinson, they wave, might come back, they lose Harris. This team was successful and they just, I thought they were a score short. Favorite signings really quick. I thought Oubre to Indiana for two for 17. I really liked.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  They're gonna, they're gonna like him.

• 1:49:27Bill Simmons?

  Indiana's gonna be good. Like if they, if they get Halliburton 100% back, I know he battled shingles and stuff, but I really liked that one. I thought Kennard two for 13 in Phoenix was, was a fun one. And then Harris to San Antonio, I just really liked. Although if we, if we go backwards and we think about that finals.

• 1:49:50Bill Simmons?

  If they have Tobias Harris, who's losing minutes Kirk at that point? So we lose all the Carter Bryan minutes and we lose Champagny or the two?

• 1:49:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, but Champagny is tough because he'll make eight threes in a game and just win it. I love Julian Champagny and in related story, the Spurs added three years to him and that's a great story because he was a scrap heap guy. Now he gets paid. But it just gives them optionality and I think Tobias as a shot creator, like the Spurs look terrible on offense a lot. Like the, the offense just doesn't look good. It gives them another shot creator. So I think.

• 1:50:23Bill Simmons?

  Somebody can take 10 shots a game where there's 10 or less seconds left in the shot clock.

• 1:50:28Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. So I like it for them. It gives them optionality and looks and everybody on that team is still getting better as you know.

• 1:50:35Bill Simmons?

  I didn't understand the Barnes thing in relation to, to that, but.

• 1:50:39Speaker 04

  They just love HB.

• 1:50:40Bill Simmons?

  I get it, but could they love him for one year for 2 million? Not one year for eight? We still don't know where Peyton Watson's going. We don't know where Matherin's going.

• 1:50:51Bill Simmons?

  My favorite free agent that's left is, well, I have two, Rui Hachimura and Simons. I think both of those guys, I really liked Simons last year and I think he's at least a 10 to 15 million dollar player. I thought there was a chance the Celtics would bring him back.

• 1:51:10Bill Simmons?

  And then Hachimura, I was surprised that wasn't the guy San Antonio got Kirk.

• 1:51:15Speaker 04

  Well, there were, there were.

• 1:51:16Bill Simmons?

  I actually thought that made more sense to them. Yeah. Do you agree with that CR? Who makes more sense Tobias Harris or Rui?

• 1:51:22Speaker 04

  Rui.

• 1:51:22Bill Simmons?

  For what they, what they have.

• 1:51:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think that San Antonio is probably Kirk would know way better than me, but like a lot of your calculus has to do with what they expect. Harper and, and Castle to be next season. So I, how that relates to Rui versus, versus Tobias, I don't know, but it seems like it would have been an excellent addition. It's sort of strange that he's still out there. I don't know. I don't know where he's going to wind up.

• 1:51:47Bill Simmons?

  And Kenrich Williams is the other one that.

• 1:51:51Bill Simmons?

  She's clearly somebody that could be one of your nine guys in a playoff series. Like he might be your ninth guy, but he could be. So Uber is out and then we're starting to get in the slim pickings range. We'll see if somebody gives Tarius and a. RFA, but for the most part, I guess, so the biggest storyline left is what happened with Jaylen Brown? Why'd they trade him?

• 1:52:12Speaker 03

  And where's LeBron going?

• 1:52:13Bill Simmons?

  And where's LeBron going? And then can Peyton Watson get some sort of deal somewhere that will force Denver's hand? But everybody's at a cap.

• 1:52:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and how long does the craziness go? Like, is there anything that could happen in the next three days that then triggers somebody else to be like, you know what, actually, I also want, I don't, I don't want to be here, you know? But I, I think that this felt like a fever for the last 10 days, and now we've sweat it out, and we'll have the end of free agency and go into hibernation.

• 1:52:38Bill Simmons?

  You know what I really blame over everything else? Me doing CR month.

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  It's possible. It was the, it was the first domino.

• 1:52:45Bill Simmons?

  I do CR month. Within a month, the Celtics have blown a 3-1 lead in a playoff series to the Sixers, and then we're trading the Sixers' Jaylen Brown in a trade where we get Paul George back. And it all starts with CR month. It all starts, much like Jaylen and Jason, CR getting the steering wheel for a month has just completely thrown the ringer apart.

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  We also traded you A.J. Brown into a football franchise in crisis. You know?

• 1:53:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:12Speaker 03

  And, and he thought he was gonna go play for Vrabel. Is he gonna play for Vrabel? I don't know. I mean, like, it's, there's a lot of things up in the air in Boston. You hate to see it.

• 1:53:23Bill Simmons?

  It really is. We lose the Maple Leafs lottery pick.

• 1:53:27Speaker 03

  Oof.

• 1:53:28Bill Simmons?

  The Red Sox season has been an all-time disgrace, and just when things were getting better and we swept the Yankees early, goes out with elbow trouble.

• 1:53:37Bill Simmons?

  Grim times. It's also like 130 degrees in Boston this week, apparently. Anyway, all right. Kirk Goldsberry, enjoy the, enjoy the July 4th. CR, this was a true, true pleasure. Thanks for being such a pro.

• 1:53:51Speaker 03

  Thanks, brother.

• 1:53:52Bill Simmons?

  Thanks for jumping on here in the morning. Thanks to Gahaw and Eduardo and Chris and everybody else at Spotify. I'm gonna be back on Sunday at some point with some sort of live show. And then the next rewatchables is gonna be Ali, which is coming on, um,

• 1:54:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:06Bill Simmons?

  on Monday. You can watch that on Netflix, actually, the next five days, but that's our ninth Michael Mann movie, CR.

• 1:54:12Speaker 03

  I can't, I can't wait for people to hear it. I think if there's one lesson and one thing we want to leave people with as they head into July 4th, it's make sure you get your colonoscopy.

• 1:54:20Bill Simmons?

  Make sure you get it, but don't do it on July 1st. And then CR, possibility we'll go live Monday night after Team USA. We're talking, we're talking about jinxes, non jinxes, all that stuff. Congrats on Harry Kane.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  Great, great day of football yesterday. It was really awesome.

• 1:54:38Bill Simmons?

  Legendary. Anyway, all right, guys. Have a great weekend. Thanks, everybody who watched.

• 1:54:44Bill Simmons?

  Must be 21 plus and present in select states for Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino, or 18 plus and present in DC, Kentucky, or Wyoming. Game problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MYRESSET. Call 888-797777 or visit ccpg.org/chat in Connecticut, or mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope is here. Visit gamblinghelplineMA.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24/7 support in Massachusetts, or call 8778HOPENY, or text HOPENY in New York for Louisiana, call 877-770-7867.

• 1:55:21Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Searchlight Pictures Wild Horse 9. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, I like those guys, star in the sharp-witted comedy thriller from Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh. Writer-director of The Banshees of Inisherin and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, set in the 1970s, filmed on location on Easter Island. Malkovich and Rockwell play CIA agents Chris and Lee, who are caught in a dangerous game of secrets and survival. Also starring Steve Buscemi, another one of my guys, Parker Posey and Tom Waits. Wild Horse 9 is being hailed by critics as a revitalizing shot of pure entertainment and easily one of the best films of the year. Don't miss Wild Horse 9, only in theaters November 6th. Get tickets now.