A Radical NBA Idea, Wemby’s Musical Comp, Despising Duke, and Baseball’s ABS Revolution With Chuck Klosterman

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Chuck Klosterman to discuss a new fix for tanking in the NBA, before diving into a convo about fixing the NBA product as a whole (2:49). Then, they discuss the development of student-athletes and the draft process (40:15). Finally, they break down Wemby’s game, ABS in MLB, and more (01:05:50). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producers: Chia Hao Tat, and Eduardo Ocampo Sam’s Club | Join The Club of Yes And #ULTRACourtside could get you closer to the game! https://michelobultra.com/courtside MICHELOB ULTRA® COURTSIDE ’25 to ’26. No Purchase Necessary. Open to US residents 21 plus. Begins on October 1, 2025 and ends on June 30, 2026 Multiple entry periods. See Official Rules at https://michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit⁠⁠⁠ www.rg-help.com⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics. A perfect crime film, says the Daily Beast. John Tortore gives a career best performance. Don't miss the acclaimed new thriller, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. Tortore stars as an aging master pickpocket, whose latest score puts him in the crosshairs of a ruthless crime family. It's also starring Giancarlo Esposito, Tatiana Maslany, Will Price, and our guy, Steve Buscemi. See the film that the LA Times calls instantly classic, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, now playing in theaters nationwide.

• 0:41Bill Simmons?

  The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by Sam's Club. We are also brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network, where I put up a new rewatchables episode on Monday. It is the official end of CR Month. We did L.A. Confidential, Me and Fantasy, and Greenwald, and CR, and that's it. CR Month no longer with us. We're doing a one for us next week. We're finally doing Eddie and the Cruisers, so you have six days to go check it out. It's all over the place now on a bunch of different streaming platforms. Speaking of the rewatchables, Wednesday morning, April 1st, 10 a.m. Pacific, you can go to the ringer dot com slash events and buy tickets for our live show that's going to be in San Francisco

• 1:23Bill Simmons?

  on April 8th at the Tony Rennby Theater. It is going to be on a Wednesday night. We've never been to San Francisco before. It is going to be me and CR and Mallory and Van, and we're going to be doing Basic Instinct. Second time we've done it. Way more categories this time. We've never done it in front of a live audience. I think this will be a hilarious podcast. I'm just warning you now. And we really hope we see you in San Francisco. So the ringer dot com slash events. Come see us in the Bay. Maybe we even hit a Giants game the day before. Who knows? Giants Phillies. I think CR likes the Phillies, but we'll see. Anyway, Basic Instinct. Can't wait to see everybody in the Bay. Coming up on this podcast, Hall of Famer of this podcast,

• 2:06Bill Simmons?

  BS Podcast Hall of Famer, BS Pod Hall of Famer, Chuck Klosterman. And it's his kind of year. We're going to talk college sports, pro sports, music, AI. We're going in 19 different directions as always. Let's take a break. Pearl Jam and then Chuck.

• 2:23Bill Simmons?

  This episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast is presented by Sam's Club. It is that time of the year when you just gotta get in your car and go somewhere. Done that plenty of times in my life. Nowhere gets you ready to go. Quite like Sam's Club. Snacks, the gear, super low prices on gas. They got a bunch of stuff that keep you and the whole crew rolling. And here's what you gotta do. You gotta join the club of yes and at sam'sclub.com/yesand. You must be 18 years or older to purchase a membership. A membership is subject to qualifications. Visit sam'sclub.com/yesand for details.

• 3:25Bill Simmons?

  All right. Chuck Klosterman is here on March 31st, 2026. The last time we saw you, you had a football book coming out and we were talking about how it was a great Chuck Klosterman time of the year. There's a lot of things happening. I feel like that's the case right now. As we head into April.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Time of year for me? Yeah, I think this is a good time of year, I guess. You know, NCAA basketball tournament. What else are you referring to though?

• 3:51Bill Simmons?

  NFL draft.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  I guess that's coming up. Sure, yeah.

• 3:54Bill Simmons?

  Basketball playoffs about to, whoa, I lost my voice. Basketball playoffs about to happen.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:00Bill Simmons?

  And then this is right, March, I feel like it's the calm before the storm in a lot of ways. And it's when we kind of go nuts with different theories about things. We get angry about things. Like one of the reasons, we didn't even know we were gonna do a pod today. You texted me last night. You had an idea about tanking. But this is like, March is a month where we complain about tanking. Baseball brought in this ABS thing that I can't wait for you to talk about. But why don't we start with the tanking? Cause you had an interesting idea.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Well, okay, yeah. So I've been thinking about tanking. I just, it's, it's an interesting problem because I feel like in some ways, it's almost an unsolvable problem. Like I said in my text, like it's a little like when they, you know, they're trying to stop teams from fouling at the end of the game. So they're like, we're gonna remove the one on ones. Everyone gets two shots. But there's still no other option, right? That's the only way to get the ball back late in the game. Sometimes you still have to do it. There's no way you can stop teams from falling. I don't know if there's really a way that you can stop teams from trying to lose if we exist in a system where there's a draft like this. And, you know, so you look at Silver's ideas. I didn't think any of them were that great. Did you like any of them?

• 5:15Bill Simmons?

  I didn't. I mean, the flattening the odds a little bit. There's something there, but I didn't think any of them got even 40% to where we needed to get to.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think, I mean, they might be good ideas even, but not enough to actually change anything, you know? And you had talked one time about like penalizing teams with like cap space, but I would guess the players' union would lose their mind about that because that would be less money available for the players then. I thought Mark Cuban's thing about making the games 40 minutes was interesting, but kind of imperfect. I don't know if that would have a huge factor. I also, I don't, you know, you had this idea, I think, of like going from 82 to 72 games, right? That's kind of a thing. But see, I, I wonder what your response would be to this. I don't think that will work for this reason. Like the example, if I recall, you used is that, well, for like a guy like Devin Booker,

• 6:09Speaker 01

  it would go from $75 million a year to $72 million a year for him. So your argument was kind of like, yeah, they won't really miss it.

• 6:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  But the real kind of bedrock issue here is the guy's not caring enough about the games. It's hard to compel people to care more by paying them less. Like even though you say like, well, he shouldn't miss $3 million or he wouldn't. I mean, like, let's say like you went to like Sean and Amanda and said, I don't really like the performance you're doing in the big picture. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to let you do one less a month.

• 6:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  And they might be like, oh, and you'll be like, but I'm also reducing your salary.

• 6:46Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Like, nobody has ever decided, oh, they're reducing my salary. I better get more invested.

• 6:50Bill Simmons?

  It was a flawed argument. I agree.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  So I just, I don't, I don't know if there is like a way to fix this. So then I started wondering, well, what if there was a way to enhance? The tanking experience, if this is an unavoidable problem, maybe make the problem into a benefit. So like what I was saying to you is, okay, so since the All-Star break, I feel like the best night for the NBA was last week, the night when like the Celtics played the Thunder and like Joker had almost a 2020 20 triple double and Murray scored all those points. And I think it was an overtime game between the Wolves and the Rockets. Right. But the second best night since the break was when Bam scored 83. I thought

• 7:35Speaker 01

  that was a fascinating thing. I know there's people out there who see this as some tragic thing, but I thought it was much more interesting than pretty much any other NBA game that has happened in quite a while. Yeah. So then I was thinking, so what if this was the situation? And this is a crazy idea. I don't believe it'll be implemented, but I'm just, you know. So once the All-Star break happens, from that point on, we look at who has the highest scoring percentage or the highest scoring night that year so far. So let's say like at the All-Star break, what was the biggest scoring night prior to that? Like, let's say it was like, let's say Cat had 52 or something. And let's say that the highest score by any individual

• 8:13Speaker 01

  team had been 148. I say that from the All-Star break on till the end of the year, if you become, if you put up the highest point individual total, you get 5% of the cap space from the team you did it against. Or if your team scores the most points in a game, 155 or whatever, you get 5% of the cap space of the opponent you did it against. And this would just be an ongoing thing, that whoever at the end of the year then has the highest point total for an individual and the highest point total for a team would get 5% of the team that they did this because at least it would bring in the idea that you're going

• 8:57Speaker 01

  to embarrass these teams for doing this, that they're going to sort of be humiliated when like Lucas scored 72 against them. And then you play a few weeks later and someone scores 78 or whatever. The rule would have to be that like, you know, you have to win to do this. You can't, otherwise a tanking team might try to do this, like just put a guy at the other end of the basket and see how many points he can score. But I think it would be interesting if they Like create the situation where for the last month of the year, we were just seeing players and teams trying to put up insane numbers for this kind of little benefit that they get from kind of destroying these. The taking teams could still lose. They could still lose the games and get in the lottery and stuff. But it would actually be like, I think people would want to watch these games.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  If you felt that, well, there's a chance tonight that like, oh, um, you know, Donovan Mitchell is going to try to score 80 points or whatever against the Jazz. I think that would be much more interesting than the situation we're in now.

• 9:54Bill Simmons?

  So you're tapping into a couple of things that I like, which is why I wanted to deep dive this. First of all, I, I'm already on record. I liked the Bam game. I fully supported them going for it and I thought the far bigger issue was the disgrace of the Wizards season that's happening. And I liked that they were kind of humiliated. I thought, I thought it was totally fair game. I appreciated it.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And plus that, that the end of that game, the Wizards actually did play hard.

• 10:17Bill Simmons?

  Right, right.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  And that was the only time that they've played hard for how many months?

• 10:21Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Was the last 10 minutes of that game.

• 10:23Bill Simmons?

  Well, so something else that happened that you didn't mention, when you talk about like incentivizing teams to actually care even though they're losing. So in the NBA cup, when they had the total points thing, before it got to the final eight, you would see these, these teams really trying even with a minute left when they're up 12, right? You would like all their best guys were still out there for the team that was losing. Their best guys were still out there. They're still running plays. They're trying to score with eight seconds left and it was kind of cool because there was some sort of end game. So I wonder if, if they were able to put in game kind of penalties and rewards in all these different ways, like what you laid out, or like if you lose by 20 points or more.

• 11:04Bill Simmons?

  Like Milwaukee, I saw some stat. I think, I think they were like 17 and 23 at one point. Now they have one of the, one of the eight worst records. But I think they've lost 20 plus point losses. I think they have something like 14 of their last 17. They just got killed. So if you had something in there, like if you lose by more than 15 points. There's also some other penalty that comes with that. Right? Like you could either do it like there could be bonus pools for every team. That you can, you have, your salary is your salary, but you also have some sort of a commitment to quality of your performance for the season. So if the Wizards are like,

• 11:47Bill Simmons?

  we're just blowing these games, we're throwing them away and it actually costs them part of their salary because they didn't care. Those guys would obviously care more. Or if you add with the teams, every 15 point loss, you lose five ping pong balls or 10 ping pong balls.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  I mean, 15 is kind of a low number for that. You can lose by 15 trying hard. I mean, you can still lose by, you know.

• 12:08Bill Simmons?

  Right. So you'd be down 12 with a minute left and it'd be like, oh no. And that the coach would have all his guys and he would actually care about not losing by 16. Cause they would lose 15 ping pong balls. And even that would be more interesting than what we're doing now.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  I, I, I just, the reason I kind of like this idea that I put forward is because I like what you're describing are ways to sort of mitigate the event from happening. I'm almost saying like the event's going to happen. How can the event become more interesting? And I love it. I love one man teams. I love when some guys trying to score as many points as possible. I think it's really interesting when an entire roster sort of converges on this idea where we get this guy the same basket over and over and over again. I think it would actually like, I would guess you probably like, you probably watched that heat game down to the very end.

• 12:57Bill Simmons?

  Oh, I, I had it on the second quarter because I got a text that Bam had 30 in the first quarter and we had just gotten home from dinner. It's like, what happened?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't.

• 13:05Bill Simmons?

  And then we were on from that point.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  The third quarter or something. It was interesting how this, you know, it shows in your life, like who are the warning people in your life? You know?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  But I, I just, I think it would, and like, I also imagine, so the, like I said, the deal is that it, it, it doesn't keep compiling. So if like, if the Wizards had this happen to them four times in a row, they wouldn't lose 20% of their capital. It's only whoever ends the year with the highest point total or the highest team.

• 13:32Bill Simmons?

  Oh, they would get penalized. So you're talking about rewards and penalties. So if some. Somebody scores the most points, they'd actually get a benefit out of it.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. Like, like, let's say, you know, in this situation, like with, with Bam, how it would be now. The Heat would get 5% of the Wizards' cap space. That way, it would move over to them. There would be no, you know, eradication of cap space. So the players' union couldn't say, well, this is going to actually hurt the players because there's less money available.

• 13:58Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  But it, and, but let's say now at the la- let's say this rule existed now. On the last day of the year still, there would be a chance for someone to steal that. If someone could get 84 or more, then, you know, so it would be like.

• 14:11Bill Simmons?

  So that would be like the Thompson Gervin last day of the season.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Be like that night, except in every city. The last night, the very last.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  It would, yes. And, or, and also, it's like I say, it'd be for the individuals and for the team.

• 14:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  So, you know, so like it wouldn't, so, so there could be some teams who maybe don't have a superstar, but they're like, let's put this all together and see if we can score 200 points, you know, against this team. And, and I, I don't know, like, in a way, it's, I, I feel really weird advocating this because I, I'm kind of in many ways like such a traditionalist about sports and like, oh.

• 14:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  But the NBA is becoming more and more of an individual sport in every way. The way it is played, but also the way it is considered, the way it's discussed. They may have to say like, okay, we're going to have to accept that a lot of the fan base is much more interested in the individual than in the team. And there's got to be ways to sort of make, you know, like, how can we make that? I, I, I, I don't know. I just, I, I think it's very, uh, no- nothing will make me flip to a game faster than an insane point total going on. Even more so than a really close game. Like a really close game, I will too, but

• 15:28Speaker 01

  when it's somebody like a, when someone's putting up some like an insane number, I just, I think that that is, there's, there's just something very unique and cool about that.

• 15:36Bill Simmons?

  So it could be, you could basically do it monthly. Right? So you could have six months where the highest point total of the month gets some sort of reward, highest for the team, highest for the player. I always think whenever I hear these, like, because they would do this when they were talking about what would be the rewards for the NBA cup and things like that. And people always forget, like, if you're the players, if you're on the team, and it's like, if, if, if you win the NBA cup, your team gets a bonus lottery pick, you get the 15th pick. Why would any player on the team care about that? They wouldn't. They would care about the incentives of money, or some sort of like, you get two extra home games the next year instead of on the road. Things like that. They

• 16:18Bill Simmons?

  care about themselves, money, less traveling, less being with their family more, having more bye weeks, like, so you'd have to cater it that way, I think.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it could be, like I say, let's say for whatever reason, they wanted to make the NBA cup really contested. So they're like, if you win the NBA cup, you get the number one pick. That would actually de-incentivize the guys who currently care the most, which is the guys at the end of the bench. It's like, I'm gonna lose my job if we get the number one pick. I mean, now those guys are like, I could actually use that money. Like, I could, you know.

• 16:48Bill Simmons?

  Well, one thing I was talking with somebody about that I haven't talked about in the podcast is why it's so much easier for football to have parity and, and just kind of have the, a team's fortunes flip in one year, where in the NBA, it's really hard. And people think it's because of the salary cap for the NFL, but it's really the schedule. The schedule is the big secret sauce of the NFL, and you saw it with the Patriots last year and Washington the year before. Fourth place schedule, you're just playing the other worst teams. You're, you're not on TV that much, you're not traveling that much, and you can flip it in, in a smaller sample size. We only have to play 17 games. And I'm wondering, like, with the NBA, could

• 17:30Bill Simmons?

  part of this be, all right, well, how would they do that with the NBA? Well, you actually could. You could reward, teams could have more home games the next year if they succeed, and they could be, have home games taken away the worse they do. So if you're, if you're like the Wizards, and you're just tossing away the second half of the season.

• 17:51Bill Simmons?

  Would the franchise be as excited to do that if that meant they had 37 home games next year instead of 41?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so, so some teams would then have

• 18:01Bill Simmons?

  You would just lose revenue.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Or could you could have like 44?

• 18:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, so some team could have 45 home games the next year.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  I mean, to the NFL's credit, I mean, they have been thinking about parity since the early 70s.

• 18:14Bill Simmons?

  Right, since we've ever cared about the NFL.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  That big thing. It was, you know, at a time when I don't even think anyone was worried about it. Like, I don't think in 1974, there were a lot of people expressing despair that like there wasn't enough parity. But he knew that that was the central thing, that if you make a franchise feel like every eight to 10 years, they have a legitimate shot to win a championship, no matter what their ownership does. I mean, that has changed everything. The smaller number of games probably is a factor too. In that, you know, a, a team can start 6-0 or whatever, and they suddenly feel like they're almost there, you know, even if they end up finishing

• 18:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  500 or whatever. And there's lots of reasons why this has happened. I mean, it's just, it is, it is strange how like

• 19:02Speaker 01

  the NBA often makes me mad in a way other sports do not. You know, I mean, because I, when I, we were young people, I remember often almost seeming to advocate for the NBA. Like, it felt like the conventional wisdom was the NBA was bad. You only wanted to watch college. And I liked the NBA as a kid and stuff like that. But it's hard. I mean, it really made me disprove, like, pro basketball is a young man's game with a young man mentality. Because when I, it is so crazy to be, I'll see a game that I want to see, and I'll turn it on, and three of the guys aren't playing, and it doesn't seem that the guys who there care at all. And it's like, how do you motivate? Guys, like, like, it's, it's just not enough.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Somehow, being in the NBA and playing these games is not enough to motivate these guys. And I, I, I, I don't know what to do about it. It's a weird thing. I mean, football has the other, other upside that you can't coast. Like, you will get hurt if you coast. But you can coast in basketball. You can coast in baseball. You know what I'm saying?

• 20:04Bill Simmons?

  I like your point about how that shifted with the NBA where, cause it's been making me mad, basically ever since I had a column, what, post-college. So like, late 90s on, just complaining about the NBA became like its own content vehicle. But in the 80s, and I'm slightly older than you, but you remember this too. The, the NBA was like this cool alternative. They were like dinosaur junior, where it was like, you found people in your life that liked the NBA and you would like click with them and you would, you would be glass half full the whole time. You'd be explaining to people why this was a cool league and you really loved it. And you, I used to have a joke even when I had my ESPN column in 02, 03, 04. I would joke about how I was one of the last 20 NBA fans, right?

• 20:48Bill Simmons?

  And it was, and it was always about like, you people don't get it. This league is so much better than it gives credit for. And now it's the opposite. Everybody's just mad at the NBA at all times.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Well, okay, okay. So I would say outside of 1984 to 1989 or 90, what other periods has the NBA not been in crisis? They always are. There's always something happening.

• 21:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I would say late, I would say late, the early 90s. When it was going the best, it was going the best, but we still had magic HIV and we had Jordan go play baseball as it was going the best.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  I also remember like sometimes in the 90s, you'd watch a playoff game and it would be 64 to 71 or something and it was like, this is wrong. So, you know, and, and.

• 21:34Bill Simmons?

  Well, wait, think about that though, cause we talked, Zach and I talked about this on Sunday night. When they changed the three-point line.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:41Bill Simmons?

  That was the first time you felt like the league was responding to criticisms about. But then if you go back, you could go back to 76, 77, 78, which we talked about a little on. Sunday and the big crisis back then was violence. And even before the Kermit Washington punch, if you go back the first merger season, there's all these fights. And guys, and some of them are on YouTube, like Kermit Washington, Dex, John Schumate. Stuff like that, where it's like fights Kareem punched, I think Tom Burleson, and he punched somebody else. And he punched Ken Benson, broke his hand. Bob Lanier, I think, hit two guys. Detroit was getting all these fights. And it was like, holy shit, we gotta do something about this. So, and then cocaine was in the eighties. So really, this has been 50 years of this.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  It's always, there's always something. I, like, I remember writing in the early 2000s. I had watched a game between Vince Carter and Allen Iverson, and it just seemed awful because it like, like, even though as much as I say I like one man teams or whatever, it was not the best application of that.

• 22:42Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  I, I just, it is sort of just set up in a way to be dramatic. It's almost like, and now they've almost used that as their calling card. Like this idea that you can follow the NBA without watching games.

• 22:56Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  You know, that's, you don't really hear that said about other sports.

• 23:00Bill Simmons?

  Well, the thing, the NBA has become like our family member that's had a lot of issues over the years, but we still love them, but they make us crazy. And it's, it's almost like the son in parenthood, the, the Steve Martin movie. It's like, oh, boy, the NBA is another harebrained scream, scheme.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And when the games are good, like sometimes in the playoffs, they're so good.

• 23:19Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  It's like, and it's so, you know, and it's like, why can't there, like, it doesn't always have to be this good, but it should be able to be half of this. And sometimes it's not even close to half of it. I mean, it's like, the intensity is just gone.

• 23:35Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's what's crazy about this year is you have these four guys who are having like these spectacular seasons, right? On top of Wemby, who we'll talk about in a second, who has just now emerged as this generational guy. And then you have all these big markets that have a chance to win the title or markets that haven't had a chance in a while. And you have OKC going for back to back. And there are a lot of good stories, even like the East playoffs, we have 10 teams. Even if you play the 10 seed, like, are you crazy about playing the Miami Heat in a playoff series? Like, probably not. And yet here we are talking about, uh, what we could fix for the first 50 minutes. I don't know what this is about the NBA that makes us always want to do this.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I mean, it is, it's something about the nature of the game because like I say, it has never not been this way.

• 24:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Like it has never, you know, when you and I first started following this, the games were like, you know, the championship game being showed after the news or whatever on take away. It was like, that was its own kind of crisis, right? It can't become one, it can't become a major sport. People don't even care enough to watch it live. Then it had that little window when everything seemed to change and it was kind of emerged, maybe overtook baseball and all these things. But I bet if we went through all our old podcasts, how many, whatever number there is.

• 24:51Bill Simmons?

  How many we complained about the league somehow?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  The number of times we're talking about problems with the NBA would come up, I, I, I wondered 25 times, but there are 25 examples of us having a conversation like this in the, you know, span of our relationship.

• 25:05Bill Simmons?

  Well, this was one of the things I wanted to talk about today because I was talking on Sunday about this expansion thing, which has just been so weird from Adam with, with the basically saying, yeah, 2020, they're, they're leaking out. They're giving the expectation they're going to be adding these two teams. And meanwhile, they don't have the votes for the teams yet from the 30 owners and they don't know if anyone even has remotely the amount of money they're looking for. And I think one of the things that's bothered me about it and some other people is to push forward with expansion when you haven't fixed all this other stuff. When we have this tanking crisis and you also are putting out solutions that nobody seems to like, right? And also you're, do you have some markets in your league

• 25:50Bill Simmons?

  that I don't think are that stable, you know? And my question that I asked you that I want to talk about is, do you think Adam Silver's job is to run the NBA as a businessman or he's supposed to care about the spirit of the league, raising the level of the league, making the league a better place for fans, which goes back to the old Stern argument we used to have. It was like, is Stern running this league for the owners or the players? And we knew with Stern, it's like, he's running it for the owners. Goodell. Just all the way through has been, I'm running this for my 32 owners. Like even that, right now, they're doing, they're gonna add the 18 game season with two bye weeks.

• 26:34Bill Simmons?

  You can already see they're laying the groundwork for it now.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:37Bill Simmons?

  Nobody thinks this is a good idea. Not one person. We all like football and we're, we'll put up with it. But nobody thinks this is gonna make the game safer. This will make the product better, but they're gonna do it because he works for the owners.

• 26:50Bill Simmons?

  Adam makes it seem like he cares about the spirit of the game and the players. Do you think he does?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure he does care, but he does work for the owners. It's maybe a like, you know, like mountain landis or whatever could be like, I'm doing this for baseball. I don't care what how it affect, you know, it's like, uh, but I, I, I, it's a kind of unrealistic thing now to, to imagine that, that a commissioner would feel like, would, would be empowered enough to do that. I mean,

• 27:19Bill Simmons?

  But would you want a commissioner that cares more about the state of the game or the state of the business? Because it seems like we always get the latter.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Well, we would want it for the state of the game, but that's not like, I mean, that would be like if, you know, who would you rather have, you know, running target? Somebody who's concerned about how much money target makes or will be the best consumer experience? We would all say the second category, but that's not how it is.

• 27:43Bill Simmons?

  Right, but, but shouldn't we admit that's not how it is with the NBA? Because I think the commissioners try to pretend they care. But what's interesting is baseball actually seems like they have cared about the sport and they have cared about the product. And they have been able to make these fixes, which we'll talk about later, and the NBA is not.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Although, I mean, yeah, but you, you think the baseball fixes were for the, I mean,

• 28:08Bill Simmons?

  Well, they came out of necessity because this sport was in trouble.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. It wasn't like, I, I, I don't see that as someone being like, what is, I, I think that from a traditional baseball perspective, that they probably kind of contradict that, but they're like, we gotta have people watch this game. You gotta have people care about these games. The NBA is, you know, has, has, is so kind of into the idea of like player empowerment and it's a players league that they have to be much more vocal about. Acting as though this is for the benefit of the of the guys on the floor. I guess I don't, I, I, I don't, I assume that, that, you know, adding two franchises, I mean, it just, it doesn't seem like that will help the product.

• 28:49Bill Simmons?

  Nobody thinks that's a good idea, except for people who live in Seattle and in Vegas, and I want Seattle to have a team. I just don't think. I think there's a better way for that to happen.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Why? You've always wanted Seattle to get the team back so much. Why is that? I mean, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have one, but why is this a good thing for you?

• 29:08Bill Simmons?

  Well, a couple of reasons. One is, I think it's a great sports city. I thought they really, really were great with the Sonics. I thought, I honestly felt like that was one of the seven or eight NBA fanbases. And they had real history in the seventies, eighties, nineties.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  It was actually a basketball town where basketball was the most important sport.

• 29:27Bill Simmons?

  It really was. And they won a title. I think if you're taking a team away that won the title, you have to really have a good reason for it. And I thought the reasons they lost the team were outrageous. It basically came down to the Starbucks guy, Howard Schultz.

• 29:44Bill Simmons?

  Not being able to build an arena and just being like, all right, fuck it. And just selling to this OKC group. Pretending he didn't know they were gonna move the team when of course they were. And then Stern, who's now no longer with us. Really kind of wanting the team to move to, to prove a point to everybody else. Like if you don't build an arena, you're gonna lose your team.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  I really like having a team in Oklahoma City, though.

• 30:08Bill Simmons?

  But that, but that's fine. You could have had both.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  I think their geographic location has been a benefit to that franchise.

• 30:14Bill Simmons?

  Hundred percent. And I think you could argue maybe Kansas City should, would be another team that could do really well. And even if you look at a map, like they did this when they were talking about. The teams moving, the conferences. And it's like, shit, well, how are we gonna have 15 East teams? And you look at the map and there's just wide pockets of the country that. Don't have an NBA team even near them. And then clusters of these other teams. But the, the bigger picture for me is like just talking about. Expansion is a financial decision and I, and I think that the league looks at this thinking, well, look how much money we made from the media deal. Well, look at how much money we'll make when we sell expansion teams. And to them, that's the success. But for me, the success is, well,

• 30:57Bill Simmons?

  you have to have fans feel good about the league and the product and what they're watching and they don't. So to me, that's a 50 50 thing and they're only caring about the 50, the, the business side of the 50.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  I, I just thought of something crazy. Would this mitigate tanking?

• 31:14Bill Simmons?

  Uh oh.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  What if they went back to a regional draft?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  So like, if you were in the East, you're in the

• 31:22Bill Simmons?

  Like Will Chamberlain ended up in Philly?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  From the Big East or the ACC or the ancillary conferences around there. Like the teams in the Midwest could draft from like the Big Ten and the MAC and stuff like that. Like, you know, like the Lakers and, and, and the Warriors, like they'd have to, you know, pick from like, you know, the teams in the West Coast.

• 31:43Bill Simmons?

  No, but then you'd have owners, you'd have owners moving, basically what happened with DeBansa and BYU. You'd have owners taking high school kids and moving them into their region.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Well, well, but maybe we could, okay, we got it.

• 31:54Bill Simmons?

  That sounds like a lot of corruption.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  If you're a high school basketball player, you can only play college in the state you're in or from a state that geographically touches the border of your state. So, so like we can, we could just enforce a regional aspect to basketball.

• 32:12Bill Simmons?

  Be tough for Minnesota.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  A kid grows up in Nevada, he's gotta like go to college at like UNLV or in California or something. And then he can only play on the West Coast, you know, everybody'd be like LeBron then in Cleveland, where his whole, you know, that, where his whole life is in one spot.

• 32:28Bill Simmons?

  I still thought the best idea I've come up with is having the lot-

• 32:31Speaker 01

  I really like to limit mobility.

• 32:32Bill Simmons?

  I like, yeah, I like you're very regionalist.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  I like to hurt the lives of these guys, but.

• 32:37Bill Simmons?

  My favorite idea that I've come up with that I think could actually work, but they would never have the balls to do it, is having the lottery for the first, basically like you, you have your top five teams, whatever you figure out the lottery, the order, and then they all put in their name for who they would take first. And then the consensus first guy, it's like the number one pick is Cooper Flag and he just walks up to the podium. He's like, you're, these five teams could be your home and now we're going to find out where Cooper Flag wants to play. And we, we kind of shifted almost bachelor style to the player. I still feel like that idea could work.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Or what if it was like the draft was over many days? So like

• 33:16Bill Simmons?

  Oh, it's a 30 day draft?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Well, like, yeah, like, so, so the first pick happens on the first day, let's say it's a wizard or whatever, and they pick whoever they take. Okay, that guy can go to that team. Or he has like 24 hours to negotiate with every other team with salary going down incrementally. So if he goes to the second year, so like, so he would be, he would be picked by, the only way to get his max money is by going with the team who picked him.

• 33:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  But he could go to any other team for a, a fraction eventually, you know? I mean, that, that could be ultimately very dangerous, but I think.

• 33:50Bill Simmons?

  That, that money thing, that's another thing I've always thought they should do, like, the longer you have the player on your team, like Steph Curry, you actually get tax and cap relief after a certain number of years, so they could try to keep players in the same city more. I mean, this is another issue, the, the player empowerment, which has had mostly good benefits, I think, for the last 15 years, but the, the worst benefit has been these teams that, you know, once their guy decides they don't want to play for them, they're stuck making these pretty terrible trades. Like, Utah's trade for Mitchell was actually, they got a lot of good stuff back, right? So on paper, you'd probably do that, but they also traded somebody who's one of the best 10 players in the league,

• 34:32Bill Simmons?

  who hadn't even hit his prime yet, who was under contract for three years, and that's like, I, exactly the kind of guy you'd want to build around for 15 years? And then you look at the flip side of Sacramento, Fox hates being in Sacramento, the team's a train wreck, I don't blame Fox at all. And, and then, uh, his agent, the Ringer's Rich Paul, starts pushing them to make a trade and kind of steers him to San Antonio, because he thinks that's the best thing for him. So he has every right to do that, Fox has every right to want to get traded.

• 35:04Bill Simmons?

  But there was only one suitor for Fox who's really good. And I don't think that's a good system either.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  I, you know, I mean, any, in almost any walk of life or any kind of employment. If you do things that improve the situation for the individual, it's going to hurt the collective.

• 35:22Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it's going, you know, like, I mean, like in college basketball right now, one thing that I've noticed is a lot of people saying, oh, you know, we complain about, you know, NIL money, we complain about the portal, but look how good these games are. Like college basketball in some ways seems like it's, it's been, you know, playing a level that, that is, is kind of a new kind of apex for it.

• 35:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  That's because all of the good players are at the same 16 to 25 schools. I mean, in the past, there were a bunch of reasons, dozens of reasons why an exceptional player could say, end up at Wichita State or end up at Davidson or something like that. And then, yes.

• 36:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Where did Beasley play?

• 36:02Speaker 01

  What, uh, Beasley went to Kansas State.

• 36:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Yeah. Kansas State. That's never happening now.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I mean, it's still, I mean, Kansas, if you're in a, if you're in a power conference, it, it could still happen, I guess. But the main, it's more, it's more for the mid majors, kind of. It's like.

• 36:18Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  If you got, if you, if you happen, if you've got this great talent evaluator who finds the kid that other people don't realize is going to be great. There's still, it's just like, he's going to end up at Texas or Tennessee or something in a couple of years anyways. Like they're, they'll just, they'll just ratchet up the, we have the portal and you have unlimited money.

• 36:38Bill Simmons?

  I, I honestly don't mind it. I, I think this is where college sports should go, where we have 20 to 30 colleges in football and basketball that are almost operating like a pro league. And they have different rules and then everybody else is an amateur athlete, basically.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  That's because you dramatically prefer the pro game to the college game in every.

• 36:58Bill Simmons?

  I'm just, I, I still feel like amateur athletics should, should still keep some sort of umbilical cord to the past. And right now we don't have it.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Well, you should keep it or should like?

• 37:10Bill Simmons?

  No, I, I like people going to college just to get it, just to get a degree and be part of the campus and stay in there for a few years and play in the sport because they're a big part of every, you know, just going to the school, take, having, having roommates for four years, living off campus. That, it's almost like that's not cool anymore. I know. That's, that's like-

• 37:32Speaker 01

  You're saying you don't like what's going on now. You don't like the situation?

• 37:35Bill Simmons?

  I like what's going on for a certain select group of colleges, but not for all 300.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Well, but, but the reason it's not happening, all 300 is because of those select colleges.

• 37:47Bill Simmons?

  I know, but it, but-

• 37:49Speaker 01

  So that's the, that's the issue.

• 37:50Bill Simmons?

  I'd like to go back to just, we had two awesome conferences and then everything else was just like college sports again.

• 37:58Bill Simmons?

  I guess that's not happening.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, I mean, that's, I know, I, I kind of, I feel like in a sense that is what's going to happen. I think that when these-

• 38:07Bill Simmons?

  The super conferences.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Break out from the NCAA and stuff like that. And then there'll be, you know, so then, but then it will just be like, there'll be the pros and then the semi pros and then so that, so you'll be, I mean, the, there, there won't be that much differentiation between the two.

• 38:25Bill Simmons?

  But there, there isn't now. Like these guys, all right, these guys in the tournament right now, who are allegedly freshmen.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:32Bill Simmons?

  The moment their team gets knocked out, what do you think they, you think they're still going to class? You think they're still on campus? Like they're done.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:39Bill Simmons?

  The whole farce of that, like, we should just own that and make that like, this is pro sports already. We pretend it's not, but it is. And I, I just think we should differentiate it better and go back to, I, I know there's no way to do it because there's no czar of college sports. There's nobody who could be like, why is UCLA playing teams on the East Coast? This is the dumbest thing we've ever done. These kids are flying, you've cross country kids flying 3,000 miles to do a meet when they're supposed to be taking classes. Like, how did we end up doing it in this spot? It's nuts.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Oh, well, yeah. I mean, that, I, I, it is so weird. We're like, even now, even thinking about like the academic consequences of this seems like just almost irrelevant.

• 39:22Bill Simmons?

  Or football going until they're adding more playoff rounds. Football's going to go until February? So you're going to have a same schedule as NFL? We got to take a break and I want to keep going on this. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. What makes basketball so exciting? All the superior skill on the court. This has been the case my whole life. The craziest thing, I mean, Wemby, stuff he's doing every game. There's two, three Wemby moments a game. You're like, I don't know if I've ever seen that. The number one thing for me is when he does the screen and roll. He's going to the basket. Somebody throws him an alley-oop and he just catches it and dunks it without jumping. It's an alley-oop, but it's not an oop. It's just kind of an alley. And every time he does it, I'm like, I've definitely 100% never seen that anymore.

• 40:07Bill Simmons?

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• 40:51Bill Simmons?

  So you mentioned college basketball in the last, when we're heading into the last break. Duke UConn felt like just an old school. I remember where I watched it, kind of basketball ending. Everybody loved it. It was fun on social media. The memes and the videos were coming for two straight days. The camera angles. Bobby, Danny Hurley just seeming like a maniac. Danny Hurley's wife, Bill Murray is somehow involved. It just kind of kept going and going and was awesome for all these different reasons. But the fundamental thing people seem to love was that something bad happened to Duke.

• 41:26Bill Simmons?

  And I, I, I really do think they might be the most hated anything that we have in sports right now. I know like people delighted that the Patriots sucked in the Super Bowl. I know people hate the Yankees. I know there's people that hate the Lakers and the Celtics, but they also have their giant groups of people that love them too. Is Duke the most one-sided hate verse like right now that we have in pro or college sports?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Well, and it's an eternal thing. Like the players can change, the coaches can change. It doesn't, people feel that hatred toward them still. Like with these other, with any pro franchise or whatever, you know, once a team really fails for a while and you know, people, you know, the Patriots or whatever, it's like, if, if, if, when they struggle, people be like, ah, kind of, they'll never forget with Duke. Like the guys who hate Duke, they'll hate them all the time.

• 42:15Bill Simmons?

  But what's weird is I was in college, the last time people actually were kind of rooting for Duke, which was when they upset UNLV.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:24Bill Simmons?

  And then within a year that flipped, I think Leitner had a big thing to do with it, which we did a 30 for 30 about once upon a time, but Leitner is like kind of the before and after his whole career. By the end of his career, people are like, I hate Duke. And it's just stayed that way.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Even when they upset Vegas, I mean, Vegas was an incredibly cool team.

• 42:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  So I felt like most people liked UNLV over Duke, even then, even though they were the favorite. So it's not just, it's not just that Duke is so often the favorite in these things.

• 42:54Bill Simmons?

  I feel like you're remembering that wrong a little bit. Cause Vegas was like the, UNLV was the big bully. They were killing everybody. Like they were doing a lot of trash talking and there was, remember there was a lot of like the older media was getting really upset about their behavior. Are these guys role models? And then upstart scrappy Duke did like the Hoosiers, Norman Dale trying to beat them. And then, but that flipped in a year.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we were younger. So I mean, cause my memory of this was that the two most popular teams from that period was the Vegas team and the Michigan Fab Five.

• 43:28Bill Simmons?

  Fab Five, I think was the most.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And they were both kind of criticized in the same way. But then, you know, this kind of goes back, we were talking earlier, how like we used to defend the NBA and now it kind of drives us crazy.

• 43:38Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  I think I have this kind of growing hypothesis that like, but basketball is something that is made for a young mentality and that that the sort of the individual nature of only having five guys on the floor, the fact that their personalities are really present and all of these things, it makes it desirable to the way you view the world when you're 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, that you kind of like, you want to, you want that sort of. But then when you become and you mature and become an adult, you see like the way things work in football as more rational and reasonable and maybe how things should be and that you should sublimate yourself to some larger idea where basketball doesn't make that same

• 44:24Speaker 01

  requirement, particularly among teams like we're talking about, like the really entertaining teams.

• 44:29Bill Simmons?

  Wait, let's, let's, let's build this out because I think you're right. I think part of it is basketball, as I've always said, is the most naked sport, right? You're just, you got five guys on the court, you can watch them at all times, you can watch them on the bench, you can watch them when the action's not happening or when it's happening. You can see how they interact with other people. It's almost like a microcosm of being in somebody's office, you know, or, or being at somebody's Thanksgiving table. Like, what's happening with the Rockets lately? I have real thoughts on the Rockets. I've never been in their locker room and I've never talked to any of the players this year, but I watched them on TV and I'm like, those guys aren't connected. They don't like each

• 45:12Bill Simmons?

  other. I wonder if it's the KD burner scandal and no other sport works that way. Baseball's the only one that's as naked. But I think with, with baseball, we don't really see them interact other than celebrating after, you know, home runs or strikeouts. And in general, like they, it's kind of an individual sport. They're all in it for themselves, but collectively it just kind of makes sense. Basketball's not individual. And I think that's the difference. That's what hockey, we always know they're on the same page. They'll play with a broken anything, you know, they they're going all out. Their honor is at stake at all times. Like, we don't worry about hockey players, but basketball players, we talk about constantly.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's like basketball. You said basketball is not individual?

• 45:56Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's not individual, but it is. But you still need your you still need your you need your teammates to succeed in basketball.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:04Bill Simmons?

  Right?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  You know, it was interesting this year. I went to I went to a Blazers Suns game, and I was really startled by the Suns bench. I could not. I was shocked. The guys were all standing, and they were so engaged. It's like, it didn't really seem like a college team. And it made me think like, they could be better than I thought they were, you know? It's like, um.

• 46:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, there's a few teams like that where you can. I love this. The kind of stuff I I still love going to basketball games, and it's the kind of stuff I look at. You can learn a lot just from the behavior of teammates who aren't playing and what happens in the huddles and things like that, that I just don't think in baseball, you would notice in the same way.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, totally. I mean, it's, uh, the, uh, baseball is a just like,

• 46:56Speaker 01

  there's less, there's there will be personalities, but less. I mean, like in in the NBA, it's like having no personality is a kind of personality. Like, Tim Duncan had a personality because he had no personality. For a long time, Kawhi Leonard had a personality by having no personality.

• 47:11Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  When you say naked, that's actually a pretty fucking good description, because it's like almost any persona you have becomes something to be understood through, whereas in in a lot of other situations, if you have no personality, you just sort of disappear into the shadows, you know, like.

• 47:27Bill Simmons?

  That's Darren Peterson.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Happen in this.

• 47:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, people are worried about Darren Peterson, that he has no personality, and he just seems you're the point guard, you're not enough of a leader and a connector. But his personality is basically Kawhi Leonard and it's worked really well for Kawhi Leonard. And I do think you can be that way. Uh, on a, it's like Boozer's been, I thought he was really interesting to watch the last few weeks. And, you know, they had this terrible loss, but I always felt like he was calm at all times. Even if you watch what happens after the most devastating, you know, steal, his brother gives, does the steal. Crazy 40 pointer and all the Duke guys are frozen and he's like walking, he's trying to figure out, okay.

• 48:09Bill Simmons?

  And he's, he starts walking toward the ball. He was the only one that was like thinking, oh, we still have a game. And I always thought like, that quality is going to serve him really well. And granted, I've never seen him in person. I'm just watching him on TV, but that's why, that's why we love basketball.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  I have no idea if he'll translate to the NBA. I was so fucking wrong about Cooper Flag. I guess I'm just like, because my thing is like, I only watch the games. I don't read it. So I like, so when I would watch Duke last year and I'd be like, oh, he's good, but he seems like the second best player on this team. So I was like, I just like that he, I thought he's going to be a very, very, very good pro. Who's not going to be this sort of like, will probably never win an MVP. I now think he probably will win.

• 48:50Bill Simmons?

  I really think that competitiveness, it's the thing that I always use whether to try to decide who's going to be a great prospect.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  And you're probably right, but when you brought that up the first time, I was sort of like, I hear that about so many guys competitiveness. I mean, that's like, it doesn't, it, it, it seems to me like of like a filler aphorism you use about somebody.

• 49:09Bill Simmons?

  But there's two kinds of competitiveness. There's like, oh, he's a competitive guy. There's certain guys that you can just tell minute to minute, quarter to quarter, half to half, whatever. Really give a shit. And I don't know how you quantify it. You can't figure it out in the combine. I felt that way about Castle. Castle was my favorite guy two years ago, right? It was a, it was a bad draft. It wasn't like the hottest take ever, but. I really liked how he carried himself, how hard he played. And I felt like he was in a weird situation on that UConn team because they were really good. They had players all over the place. There was probably more he could have done. So I think when you're, when you're projecting guys, you have to think like, all right, fundamentally, ultimately, is this guy a badass or not?

• 49:53Bill Simmons?

  Like, I feel that way about Burries on Arizona. I just think he's a badass. He's gonna go in the league and I know he's gonna succeed. And I wonder if sometimes it's that easy. I mean, quarterbacks were never gonna figure out.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I was gonna say, like, so Indiana's quarterback, what do you, what, using your kind of sort of like judging their personality.

• 50:12Bill Simmons?

  My stupid Bill thinks. Well, one thing I like with him is he's apparently by all accounts, super smart.

• 50:22Bill Simmons?

  And I wonder with quarterbacks, do we underrate that in some ways? Because think about like even the ones that, like Favre's a bad example, right? Favre's like, just pretty dumb gifted guy, right? Rogers, super smart. Brady, super smart. Manning, super smart. Like, some of the best guys we've had over the last 30 years.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Dan Marino, not an intellectual. I mean, there's so many like.

• 50:48Bill Simmons?

  No, but Dan Marino was football smart, though. Like, he, these guys that can remember like every play that they, you could bring up a play like, week two, your third season, you're in San Diego and they're like, oh yeah, third quarter. Like, there's something about their brain that's different. And it seems like Mendoza has that.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it's an incredibly difficult job and it's a incredibly situational job. Whereas like, you know, like Love, the running back from Notre Dame, wherever he goes, he's gonna be able to basically do what he does, you know? And some places, like bigger holds than others, but like, what he did in college and what he does in the NFL will be the same. For quarterbacks, that is not the case. You're almost always going into a totally different thing and they can also sort of, you know. You know, at the college level, you can kind of twist these offenses around where like a guy makes these same three reads every time. And if he can do that, I mean, I remember watching Kellen Moore at Boise State. I was like, there's no way this guy's not going to be a successful NFL quarterback. I've never seen him miss an open receiver, but that was because he was in a situation where he had a lot of open receivers.

• 51:50Bill Simmons?

  Right, true.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Running across the middle at all times, you know?

• 51:52Bill Simmons?

  I talked to, I got to spend a lot of time with Peyton Manning last year at this conference we were at. And not to, not to talk out of school, I don't think he would care if me talking about this. But I'm really fascinated when I talk to these guys, like when they see the other quarterbacks, what they see and don't see with either prospects or guys in the league. And if you talk to any of those guys, they always say like, the number one thing is when you go to the line, to be completely prepared in your brain for anything that's going to happen. And then to be able instantaneously to realize everything that defense is doing. And all these guys are like, it doesn't matter how talented you are. If you don't have that quality in a split second to know everything that's going to

• 52:34Bill Simmons?

  happen, it doesn't matter how good of an athlete you are. Right? And, and learning that, getting better at that, just, I'm going to the line, I'm completely prepared. I know everything my offensive line has to do, my receivers, but I also know the seven things. And that was one of the reasons Drake May kind of sucked in the Super Bowl. Seattle was basically doing two things over and over again. And he was too young. He wasn't ready for it. He couldn't, he couldn't unlock it. But I just wondered, that goes back to the brain thing.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, like John Gruden used to have that show where he'd talk to the quarterbacks, you know, and that was always intriguing. Cause what you were really watching when you watched that was like, how really, you know, straight, like how smart do they seem when they describe these things?

• 53:15Bill Simmons?

  Right. But then if you don't have the athleticism, you end up being Steve Walsh.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Well.

• 53:20Bill Simmons?

  Or Josh Rosen, or like, pick a guy, like, you still have to have the, the monicum of athleticism to get by.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there may, because there's also guys who can explain the things they can't execute. Those are the guys who end up becoming quarterback coaches usually, you know, but like Kellen Moore maybe being one of these people there. It is, it is such a... It's just unlike you, because you'd ask one time, it's like, why are we still so bad at like deducing what quarterbacks to draft and so you know.

• 53:53Bill Simmons?

  Like Ty Simpson right now.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:56Bill Simmons?

  Now he's the polarizing guy. Like, some people think he might go way higher. It's a little like Jackson Dart last year, and he's become the guy everybody's been talking about, yet he's played 15 games in college.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  It is, I mean, it's such a demanding thing. And I do think that it is, like I use situational. I think it's unusually situational, but there's, that there are probably a lot of quarterbacks who could succeed in certain scenarios and almost none who could succeed in other scenarios. I mean, it's, I, I, you know, we'll, we'll, now someone like Ryan Leaf or whatever, we almost put the totality of his bust on him, right? So that like all his problems really were him and, you know, and, and breaking the law, ending all these things. But it is interesting to wonder if he had gone somewhere else entirely

• 54:50Speaker 01

  and been around totally different people, if he would have had a completely different career in life. I mean, I, I don't think that's unthinkable, you know?

• 54:57Bill Simmons?

  I think that, well, look at Mendoza. He's going to Vegas, they have money to spend. They have, they hired a coach that is a very well regarded offensive coach, Kubiak. Seems like he's gonna be able to have some semblance of an offensive line coming out of the gate.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  But I mean, even if you look at him when he was at Cal compared to Indiana, he was not the quarterback at Cal. He was Indiana.

• 55:22Bill Simmons?

  That's, that's a problem with this stuff. Well, that's like Wagner and Illinois in a year goes from, I'm not a top 100 guy to, I might be the fifth pick of the NBA draft. Sometimes I do wonder with this stuff, like I've just watched it with my own kids. And my daughter's like about to be 21 and my, my son's 18. And they've changed so much year to year in all of these different ways. That it makes me think like this draft process is nuts. How would you? How do you, you're pegging these kids who are 19 and 20 and assuming when they're 23, they're going to be the same people. How do you know? You have no idea.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  But we do this in lots of things.

• 55:58Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  You still find it impressive when some, you know, 40 year old person, it turns out they went to Harvard or they went to Yale. Well, that meant they were an incredibly ambitious 16 year old who was really smart at 16 and had parents kind of pushing them. That's how you get into those schools. It is not a reflection on anything about you as a person outside of what you were like as a teenager. And we kind of do that with tons of stuff. I mean, like with a, you know, with sports, it is, I mean, kind of a glaring situation because the careers are shorter. So what you are at 18 actually isn't that far removed from you at 28, but still a lot, still a lot though.

• 56:40Bill Simmons?

  Right. But in, I think in basketball, like I was thinking about Jaden Ivey this week, who's obviously going through a lot of stuff and seems like he's unraveled a little bit. This guy was a top five lottery pick.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:51Bill Simmons?

  And I don't know if he was a sure thing because he was a, you know, he's a guard. It was a combo guard, but he was somebody, you know, an incredible athlete. People really thought he was, had a chance to be like, I don't know if an all NBA guard, but definitely an all star. Goes to the worst possible Detroit situation, right? At one point they lose 20 plus games in a row. He's playing with Cade, who's better than him. So he's got to figure out how to play with him. Last year, Red is, it's about to happen for him. And he's really starting to play pretty well. Breaks his leg. I was watching the game when it happened. And now is in a tailspin and now is probably out of the league. And it's like,

• 57:30Speaker 01

  You think he's done? You don't think, like if I said,

• 57:33Bill Simmons?

  He's out of the league for now. I think he could come back a year or two years from now, maybe.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Will he ever be an NBA starter again?

• 57:39Bill Simmons?

  That I don't know because he's lost a lot of, could he be an NBA rotation guy? Sure, we've seen.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  I mean, he was a rotation guy.

• 57:46Bill Simmons?

  We saw Ron Artest come back. I mean, anything's, anything's possible. But my point is like, if you just played his career 30 times, this was probably the worst outcome, going to the worst possible team, having the worst possible injury. You know, and there's another outcome where he goes to the right kind of team with the right kind of infrastructure and is having a really good career now. So I don't know. This is the tough thing with the draft. I think very rarely with drafts, like Hakeem the beat's a good example. I hope he's not listening. It was just a terrible pick. It was terrible in the moment I was writing about. He went second and I think it was the draft that had, had had a Curry and Rubio and maybe even James Harden. I think all three of those guys were in that draft.

• 58:30Bill Simmons?

  And the Grizzlies were like, we don't know what to do. We don't really need a guard. And they were just like, they took the beat and it was crazy when it happened. That was like, oh, I know this is going to be a bust, but there's other ones. Like, how do you know with Michael Beasley, the guy was averaging, he was like one of only three or four guys ever to be like 25 and 10 in college. The stats were saying he might be an awesome pro. He was just a little dubious off the court. So you rolled the dice and it didn't work.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  He had a career. He played on.

• 58:59Bill Simmons?

  But I mean, he.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yes, but yeah, exactly. Yes. It was not, it was, it was not the career I'm sure he thought he was going to have coming.

• 59:07Bill Simmons?

  I would go nuts. If I worked at a team, if I was like in a front off, like a GM or if I was an owner, I would spend all my time talking to people about this. I'd be like obsessed with how do we figure this out? There's got to be some way to crack it and I don't think there is.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Well, but okay. So you, like you said about, you know, Ivy, like, okay, we've, if we play his career 30 times. You think this might be the 30th outcome?

• 59:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, maybe like 29th. There might be one worse outcome.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  So let's say you did your career 30 times. Say like, what outcome are you at?

• 59:43Bill Simmons?

  I did think about this once, like, would I have, like, the, because I was like, basically a late bloomer professionally. But I was probably coming out of college, like, I probably would have been a first round pick because I'd had, I'd written my sports column for all four years. And I had like a perspective.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  So like a first round pick of like the Omaha World.

• 1:00:03Bill Simmons?

  I don't know, whatever. I'm, I'm just trying to do a dumb analogy.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, keep going, keep going. I want to hear.

• 1:00:07Bill Simmons?

  And then it's like, oh, I'm going to work at a newspaper and I'm going to be on the bench for whatever. And it didn't work out. And I basically had like, not quite jaded ivy, but.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Well, that would have been, yeah, that would not have been the best outcome for you to be drafted. Yes.

• 1:00:21Bill Simmons?

  I would say that the original.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Immediately, if you would have immediately got a newspaper job, even a column coming straight.

• 1:00:29Bill Simmons?

  I think that would have been bad for me.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  College, you wouldn't be, I don't think we'd be talking now. I don't think you'd have that house.

• 1:00:34Bill Simmons?

  But think, but think about this. And so we're, it's actually a 30 year anniversary of this because it was near the end of March 96. Where I left the Herald because I knew I was stuck there forever. You know, I'd probably made a couple of mistakes on my own, but I left and I, I didn't even have a plan. I was going to like freelance. So I'm 26 years old.

• 1:00:57Bill Simmons?

  I'm not working or writing for everybody. And eventually I had to start bartending and I don't think I wrote anything for like 10 months. So my career was like over. And I'm sure there's some NBA, NFL, baseball, there must be. I can't even imagine how many people are like, god damn, like they're at this fork in the road and then they end up just doing something else. But then we're wondering, should I have kept going?

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  It's, you know, it's tough to admit this because like you want to think anything that happens to you is because of merit or hard work. But the biggest factor is luck.

• 1:01:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Like I graduated from college in 1994. If I had graduated in 93 or in 95, there is zero chance that I'm here right now talking to you. There's no chance. I think that if I had graduated in 93 or 95, I don't know if I would have ever written a book. But, but because I graduated in 94 and certain things were lined up that year, everything is different. And it's the same for these dudes. I mean, it's just, um.

• 1:01:58Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's not the same. I think Cooper flag is good no matter where he goes and what happens. Like there's certain guys that whatever happens, it's happening.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Um, but, uh, although, I mean, let's say, uh, so you're saying that you think he could have gone to any franchise and it would not have.

• 1:02:17Bill Simmons?

  I would argue he's in the worst position possible this first year in Dallas. He goes to a team that the fan base is so scarred and upset about the trade that just happened that even as the new season is starting, they're still mad and booing the GM and chanting that he has to get fired. That's how you start. AD gets hurt right away. Kyrie decides he's not coming back. They trade. Basically AD's at some cost. They trade him. They decide to start tanking. I don't, none of that was good. He's playing out of position, trying to learn how to be a point guard when he's not a point guard and, um.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  But what if, what if he stays there? What if it's five years from now and the Mavs have never improved?

• 1:02:57Bill Simmons?

  Well, you could argue this, it's all he's putting thick skin and scar tissue on himself for when they actually get good. I mean.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  But we don't say that about Zion. We don't say like Zion's put on, you know, scar tissue.

• 1:03:09Bill Simmons?

  Zion has different issues though. I mean.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. But I mean, but I'll tell you what, coming out of college, if we could somehow go back in time and someone said, you can put money on Zion being great or flag, I would have put money on Zion.

• 1:03:24Bill Simmons?

  Well, I look at.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  I, I think most people would.

• 1:03:26Bill Simmons?

  Well, from a talent standpoint, yes. I would have been on flag because I, I thought the way Zion played made me nervous, even though I thought Zion was incredible, but the all the in the air guys make me nervous.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  I'm sure you did stuff about Zion coming out of college. I'd be curious.

• 1:03:40Bill Simmons?

  I thought he was awesome. Yeah. But I, I thought I was all in on flag. I just thought, um, I actually didn't think he was going to be this good offensively. But when you talk about situations. It's funny, like the best situations that anyone entered the league in of the guys from the last 12, 13 years are Tatum and Brown in Boston. And I wonder if it's one of the reasons Brown's been so, he's gotten better, like he's in year 10 now, he's gonna make an all NBA team. But he goes to that first Celtics team and they were good, remember? They made, they made the Eastern Finals his first year. He didn't even play that much. He was playing like 12, 13 minutes a game. He was a bench guy. He got to watch. It was almost like Mahomes sitting on the sideline for a year.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Better than Wemby's situation.

• 1:04:25Bill Simmons?

  No, Wemby doesn't count. Wemby's like.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think he also got put in a perfect situation.

• 1:04:31Bill Simmons?

  It was pretty good. Duncan is probably the standard for this.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Well, but that's.

• 1:04:35Bill Simmons?

  Duncan joins a really good Spurs team. They tank for one year. He's next to David Robinson. He's got Popovich. That's about, that's about as good as it gets.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  As well as when Minyama's playing, I still feel like they're kind of bringing him along surprisingly slowly.

• 1:04:51Bill Simmons?

  I love it. I, I love that 29 minutes a game is the best.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  And I would, I would be very.

• 1:04:58Bill Simmons?

  Wait, hold Wemby because we're gonna take a break.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  My hope is that they get into the playoffs and they're like, we're gonna unleash him now. He's playing 35 minutes a game and we're gonna see what kind of numbers he puts up now. And like, you know, or I, I, I, I, cause it does seem as though they are still like, he's like a, he's like a horse and they're still not letting him run full speed. They just will not, they just, just little glimpses. He'll gallop. That's it.

• 1:05:24Bill Simmons?

  I have thoughts on this. We're gonna take a quick break. So every Wednesday I look through the NBA slate. I try to find us a really fun parlay that we could all do together. And of course, we always do it on Fanduel. I love betting on the NBA on Fanduel. Easy to build by bet. I know I'm gonna get my winnings instantly. So we are in the last two weeks of the season, which means we could throw together a lot of big favorites that are going against teams that are no longer trying to win and add them together with a team that we like. And I keep looking at that Atlanta Orlando game and Orlando's in something of a free fall, coming off a 60-point loss. And Atlanta seems like the easy pick in that game. And yet I wonder, is this like a playoff game for Orlando?

• 1:06:08Bill Simmons?

  So that might be one I do, or Boston Miami, if everyone in Boston is playing. It'll be one of those two, but the bet will be live in the FanDuel Sportsbook app Wednesday. Don't forget to use a profit boost token to increase your potential winnings before you place it. FanDuel, play your game.

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

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• 1:06:55Bill Simmons?

  So you talk about Wemby and how they're kind of easing him along. I think there's a real reason for this, and I've noticed it seen in person a couple of times.

• 1:07:05Bill Simmons?

  He's so tall and there's so much room for error when he lands or steps on things or he's up in the air. That I, I think they've decided like during the regular season, the less time he's on the court, the more we're gaming the system our way, that's something bad. Now, he's worked on it. I've talked about how he's worked on falling. You know, he's worked on just being careful, like when to kind of jump in traffic, things like that. But he can't stop his body once it's up in the air because he's so fucking tall. And that's how, that's your worst case scenario is he's up and he lands and he's so big and he lands the wrong way and he bends the wrong way. And I just think, I think what you said before the break was right. Like it's like a horse they're gonna unleash.

• 1:07:50Bill Simmons?

  I think, I don't think it'd be more than 34 minutes.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  At some point, he's got to go for it. Like it's like it's, it is like you, you, you can't say it's like he's too fragile to ever use. Like at some point.

• 1:08:01Bill Simmons?

  He's not fragile though. He's been, he's been pretty durable.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, but. With exercises or whatever, because that was always the big fear with guys that hides their, you know, hurt their feet or whatever.

• 1:08:10Bill Simmons?

  I mean, when Windhorst started writing about him a while ago and talking about all the, Wemby's basically, I don't know, like a musical prodigies or what other artists, whatever people would want to put in, like somebody who realized early in life that they're going to be special. And basically, all these decisions that he made from almost being a pre-teenager on, like, all this stuff is gonna happen to me, I gotta be ready. He's like, learning how to fall, he trains his legs, all the exercises he does, learning how to speak English, right? His English is the best, I think, of any foreign guy that's come in the league who's been a star, because he was practicing it forever, knowing that at some point, I'm gonna be a superstar in America, and I have to be bilingual.

• 1:08:54Bill Simmons?

  It's been calcu- calculating's the wrong word, but the way it was calculated-

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, no-

• 1:09:00Bill Simmons?

  -was really smart.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Like, he's a little Taylor Swift-like. Like, he made a decision at a very young age that, like, everything about my life is going to, in some way, be involved with success at this one singular deal.

• 1:09:15Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  So, everything about me, even the things about my personality that have no relationship to basketball, they can't in any way contradict basketball. I can't get really into something that could somehow damage this. I can't, you know, I can't love pastries, or whatever. Whatever the case may be, whatever choice he's making.

• 1:09:30Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  But these are, you know-

• 1:09:32Bill Simmons?

  Wait, I really like that Taylor Swift thing. That's a good one. I haven't heard that one before. I think that's a really good analogy. Somebody who had success early, because he's overseas, people know who he is by the time he's 14, 15, and he's already competing.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  And he recognizes his being successful.

• 1:09:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Like, it wasn't like he was not in the basement. He's on the main floor.

• 1:09:51Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  He's not working out in the basement.

• 1:09:53Bill Simmons?

  And also, somebody who's been stared at, because he's incredibly fucking tall, somebody who's just been stared at differently every moment of his life, basically from age 13, 14 on. When did Taylor Swift hit? Like, 15?

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  I mean, she was very-

• 1:10:09Bill Simmons?

  14, 15?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  She was meaningful. I think she had records at 13, but like-

• 1:10:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  But I still, I don't love how often Wemby's on the perimeter. I love it so much more when he's closer to the basket, but I guess that's just how it is. It's just crazy to-

• 1:10:22Bill Simmons?

  I know, but that's their, Chuck, that's their super sauce.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:10:26Bill Simmons?

  They have this, like, hammer.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Bill Simmons?

  They have this hammer that, when it's like, the biggest game of the season, or it's a game seven, or they're down 3-2 on the road, or in a game six, like, they can start moving him closer to the basket. The other team panics when he's within 10 feet. If he's posting up, like, they, the defense is just completely changing every strategy they have, once that happens.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess, yeah. I still don't know, like, how complete his post-up game is.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Like, like how, I mean, he looks good when he does it, but it's the regular season and sometimes he's, you know, I, I, I would, I would really be interested to see like what his bank vault of moves is.

• 1:11:04Bill Simmons?

  Well, he's got, he already has a little bit of that Embiid. I could just shoot a 20 footer over you and you can't block it. He's got like a little jump hook and then he's got this hook, this little turnaround where he leans over the guy, but he's usually like seven inches taller. And the guy can't block it because Wemby's basically in his face. He's got this little George Gervin spin move the other way, that finger roll move.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  I've, I've seen, you've seen all those things, but I want to see like what, like it would be interesting.

• 1:11:33Bill Simmons?

  Like a turnaround?

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Just like, well, I don't know. I would just like to see what it looks like if there'd be a quarter of basketball where he's playing against a big dude and it's, he's on the block and they just keep going to him, going to him, going to him and going to him and see what it's like. Like, could this happen in a playoff?

• 1:11:48Bill Simmons?

  Have you seen him in person?

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, uh, in person, no, I have not. I have not seen him in person.

• 1:11:53Bill Simmons?

  I, uh, I would highly recommend to anyone who likes basketball.

• 1:11:58Bill Simmons?

  It's, it's the must see in the sport right now and it's the, the biggest must see we've had in a long time. I don't really remember the last time Curry was probably the last one where it's, you just gotta go see this. You gotta go watch him warm up. You gotta go through the whole thing. I know it's funny because we were doing all that face of the league stuff. I forget when that was, the one of the dumbest conversations ever and it's still dumb. But I think the overriding.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Face of the week?

• 1:12:23Bill Simmons?

  Face of the league. Everybody's like, who's the face of the league? We don't have a face of the league. Could Jason Tatum be the face? It was like, this is stupid. Why are we doing this? And my attitude at the time was you know it when you see it. You know it when it's happening. And it's happened this year with Wemby. He's the number one attraction in the league. He's, you can feel it in the games. People are going early to watch him warm up. He's, nobody leaves their seat when he's on the court and he's the most compelling guy they have. And it happened in the span of six months.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, I guess, I guess. The face of the league thing, that's just, that, that just seems to be like what they talked about when there was nothing else to talk about.

• 1:13:02Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  You know, because sometimes they just have things that they gotta fill space and it's like, well, it's, because no one can really even properly, like you say, properly describe what that means. You know, it's like, you know, when you see it like pornography or whatever, but you know.

• 1:13:15Bill Simmons?

  We, we, we don't say that with like. We weren't saying that about music in the late eighties with like, alternative music. Can Michael Stipe be the face of the, face of the week?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Music does have its own version of that, which is defining something as the biggest band in the world or the biggest artist in the world. And it's

• 1:13:34Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  And artists and bands feel like they can sort of say that sometimes, even if it only lasts like two months. Like, yeah, there's like, there is a Counting Crows, I think, documentary or something.

• 1:13:47Bill Simmons?

  That was mine.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Was it?

• 1:13:49Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Well, no, I don't think it's that one. This is an old, earlier one where he was talking about going to Japan. And he's like, you know, we were like the Beatles there. We were like, you know, the biggest band in the world. I was like, well, maybe you were that weekend or whatever.

• 1:13:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:03Bill Simmons?

  You have any other Wemby thoughts? Cause I had a couple of other quick things for you.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I, I think it is, I, interesting that he sort of like defenses half of the game. So he should be the MVPs like already sort of in a, in a way, kind of very formally making his argument without like, it's not like, he's got a lot of bravado. He's like trying to like logic it out. And I, I think now, you know, in 2026 or whatever, I think that argument he makes is better than it's been in a while. You know, I wouldn't have said that in the past, that, that, you know, it seemed, it seemed like offense was 80% of it. And then, you know, but now it is different. I mean, it's like there, when the games get serious, the

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  defense intensity is pretty, pretty central, you know, it's like, you know, in a way that I remember. But so what, I mean, I would, who, who are you, who are you gonna, like, I assume that

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Shay's gonna win MVP, right?

• 1:15:01Bill Simmons?

  I think he is. And I, that's, I don't know who I'm voting for yet, but that's who I'm leaning for.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  It's, it's tough to vote against. I mean, I, I watch him play. I feel like long stretches go before I see him miss a shot. I know he misses shots. I know what his field goal percentage is, but whenever I watch him, he seems to never be missing jump shots. He just seemed to all go in.

• 1:15:19Bill Simmons?

  It's shocking when he misses. That thing you said about Wemby on defense. I was saying this to somebody the other day about, because we never got to see Russell, but we read all the books about Russell and we saw the documentaries and clips of him and how everybody over and over again would be like, there was just nothing like this. He just blocked everything. Like he, he drove guys out of the league, guys who had like, oh, this is my little, my little, uh, skyhook that I have. And Russell would be like, um, you're just never making that against me ever. And the guy would just be done after that. Um, I've never seen a better defensive player than Wemby in person. Now I've seen defensively impactful things that like,

• 1:15:59Bill Simmons?

  Jordan and Pippen together, seeing that feel, kind of feels in my, in my head, like what Wemby's like now, where watching those guys together when they were aligned, I've never seen anything like that. And Wemby is like that for me too. I did see Manu Bull, I saw Mark Eaton, I saw some of these taller guys and how they can have even go bear to a lesser degree. So it's not like we haven't seen versions of this, but this is the most impactful I've seen.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  You know who Larry Brown says is the best defender he's ever seen?

• 1:16:27Bill Simmons?

  Who?

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Wilt Chamberlain in 1985.

• 1:16:32Bill Simmons?

  Really?

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  That he watched him play a games at UCLA against Magic and all these dudes.

• 1:16:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  At one point, he blocked seven consecutive shots from like all the, you know, at whatever age he was, 40, whatever or something.

• 1:16:47Bill Simmons?

  It's finally circled around for Wilt, where now all the, all the bad stuff with the Wilt experience kind of fades away over the years. And now it's just like incredible to look at everything. And then the story, the positive stories last, the stats last, all that stuff.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  I mean, his, his stature in my mind is rising. I now think that prior to the merger and sort of when the NBA changed in the late seventies, I think Chamberlain is the greatest basketball player of all time.

• 1:17:13Bill Simmons?

  We've, we've been arguing about this since I've known you. Uh, quick topic, ABS. We could probably end on this.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Oh, you had a bunch of interesting, you had some weird theory you wanted to throw to me?

• 1:17:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but I didn't want to go longer than 90 because I wanted to save stuff for the next time. But we should do ABS, which has completely changed baseball in five days. It's changed the experience of watching it. I think it's made it better. It's something for everybody. Like my buddy Hench, who's a complete maniac and is, I'm on multiple Boston threads with him and all, I'm on, I think I'm on four threads with him. But is always like getting, loves getting upset and riled up about stuff. ABS is like his Venn diagram because there's always something to get upset about. Either the initial call can be the worst call and you're mad at the umpire that you can't believe you missed it. The challenge that you got

• 1:18:09Bill Simmons?

  a strikeout and then the challenge happened and now the strikeout's gone for your team. That's terrible. The guy who does the challenge, but he missed it. The guy on your team, like Roman Anthony Hadwin, you know, he does this and it's like, no, you were actually wrong. And now I've lost a challenge. And it just brings all this stuff to it. But what's interesting is how the fans react to it, especially in the home games where it's like, oh, that's not a strike. And they'll show it and it's like, not a strikeout. And the fans like cheer like a, like a hit happened. I think this has been a home run. I love ABS.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I, my position on this is pretty clear. I don't like the inflammation, employing technology for officiating. I think it's dumb.

• 1:18:54Bill Simmons?

  Okay, let's hear, let's hear the case. Did you like it for tennis? It made tennis better?

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  I mean, tennis is kind of an interesting example. That's one I never think about. I, I just don't think we need to do it. I don't think it's necessary. I think that the, that, I mean, and then this will, this will also make no sense. It would almost be different if, if we went to complete technological officiating, that there were no umpires, there were no referees.

• 1:19:25Bill Simmons?

  We might be going there.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Well, that's going to happen eventually. Somehow that, I guess I would be. A little more comfortable with because it would almost be like saying like, well, okay, we're the, the sport is different now. The sport, there's no human element to the way the sport is sort of governed.

• 1:19:40Bill Simmons?

  Well, what's the good thing about it? What's the good thing about having like the Red Sox? One of the reasons they lost Saturday's game was there was this umpire CB Buckner, who's just an all time bad umpire. And I think he only got 88% of the calls right. So one of every nine pitches, he just missed. And it's like, how, how is that? How is, how is that better than just having an automatic strike zone where we just know each one is?

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  I guess, I mean, it's, it's just part of it. I would say that is just part of it, that, that these games are played by people and they're governed by people and that's good. In the, in the same way, you're, you know, there's going to be errors in baseball. There's going to be got, you know, there's going to be errors in officiating and umpiring. And I, I, it, it just, I.

• 1:20:27Bill Simmons?

  It's funny because I feel like I'm arguing against you, but I, I like 90% agree with you. I'm just saying I like ABS, but I, I think this is not ruined basketball, but made basketball worse. Like this constant doing of stuff.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Or, I mean, it, it, there.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  I mean, this is, it, it, so it's, I'm, I'm making an argument that even it feels weird to make, even though it's what I believe sort of, which is that when I see the, like the idea that like, you know, it's, it's, it's a pitch, right? You know, yes, it can be the difference between an out and a walk. I realize that, but it's a pitch and it's sort of that. So this is too complicated to just handle with us. We can't do this. We can't, we can't fucking watch a baseball and make a decision. And these games that ultimately, yes, money is on the line. People are gambling. These guys care a lot. They are exhibitions. These

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  are social constructs. Do we really need to use cameras and lasers and all these things to understand whether or not it's two and two or the guy's out? I, it doesn't, it seems dumb to me. It's like, it's just, it, it's, you know, we're, we're. Like, like, I, I, I'm trying, I, I'd love to come up with some like, perfect analogy for it. But it's like, I mean, I, you know, well, here's, this is not a perfect analogy, but it's something similar. It's like, sometimes you hear people wonder why music from the sixties and seventies and eighties seems to just not go away. And that, and that the music since then, for whatever reason, seems to be more disposable and it shouldn't be.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  It shouldn't, you know, if anything, it should be an improvement because they have that music kind of look back on and use. But I, I think part of it has to do with that, when, when it was, when there was less ability in the studio to fix everything and make everything perfect and like, use, you know, find ways to, to make the vocal ideal every single time. Like, the, the things that we heard in music that were imperfect are actually the things that sort of humanized it and made us drawn to it. And now we're seeing this sort of this perfect version of music where every vocal is perfect. Where every, you know, where they will just punch in the guitar or the keyboard or the drum or whatever it is until we have a perfectly sculpted thing.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Something about that, subconsciously, we understand to be sterile and sort of distanced from us and not really human. And I think that now, the reason it's not a perfect analogy is because one is art and one is sports. But, and these are, you know, I, I, I think that things that we do that distance, the, the, the, the sort of the visceral human element from sports probably make us feel less about it or care less about it. The outcome is we more accurate. We, we, you know, we will, we will have a, a, a more sort of a precise understanding of who actually won this or who actually lost.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  But it's like, I, I, I think that it makes it less important and less meaningful and, and less real. So I, I mean, that's, that's a kind of a ex- you know?

• 1:23:47Bill Simmons?

  This is, you're not the only one who feels this way.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Bill Simmons?

  I think the difference is. How do we avoid calamities and things that swing games versus how do we strive for 100% accuracy? And I think the NBA is in this, in this mess right now.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  I, the first thing to do is to remove the idea of the word calamity from what we just described.

• 1:24:08Bill Simmons?

  But it's.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  How is it calamity?

• 1:24:10Bill Simmons?

  Well, remember Mike Renfro?

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  That we would, that was the last discussion we had.

• 1:24:14Bill Simmons?

  I know.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  No, it was really weird.

• 1:24:15Bill Simmons?

  This all starts with Mike Renfro.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  We had that discussion. I feel you walked away from that, or we walked away from that with you sort of making the argument that like, it would have been better if we could have used instant replay in that scenario.

• 1:24:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, because Houston could have beaten Pittsburgh.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  We would not be talking about it at all if that had been the case. If we had instant replay.

• 1:24:35Bill Simmons?

  You like bad things because then they're more interesting.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Well, sometimes, yes. Sometimes things are meaningful because they were imperfect. And then if they, and if you ironed it out flat, we would, there is absolutely no way we would be talking about Mike Renfro this many years later. If they'd have been like, we checked it. It was a touchdown. Even if, even if Houston had won that game and beaten the Rams in the Super Bowl, that would still be, would not be something we would care about the way we do about the human problem that was, the manifestation of a guy having to make a decision about something he saw in real time. That's what sports is.

• 1:25:11Bill Simmons?

  I know. And in the NBA, you're really feeling it because they only have it's replay for some things. But then if there's like, sometimes goaltending, they'll just miss and then they'll replay it after the commercial and be like, whoa, they missed a goaltending on Kada. It's like, guess what? We all lived. It's fine.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:25:28Bill Simmons?

  And then it's like block charge. Let's look at this for four minutes. Like, I just can't believe how stupid some of this stuff is.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  And, and you know, or just like.

• 1:25:37Bill Simmons?

  It's okay if we called the block charge wrong. Let's keep the game moving.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  I mean, because yes, we are, we're like, we're doing this. We care about these sports. I know someone could listen to this and be like, well, they don't care about the outcome. Why are they watching these things? But like, it is crazy to me when you're watching a thrilling basketball game, late in the game, a guy hits a jumper, they're now up one. Oh, we gotta stop to see if it's point seven seconds on the clock or point four seconds on the clock. Yes, I know if it's point two seconds, you can't catch and shoot. There's all these reasons for it. But it kind of takes something that's just electrifying and be like, okay, now let's go do our taxes for 10 minutes and then we'll come back and make this decision. I, I don't think it is improved sports. I just, I don't think, I don't think.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  That that that these things have have been a real like and then they still sometimes get things wrong and then they seem doubly uncomfortable. Well, we actually did all, you know, we actually looked at the thing again and it didn't change anything.

• 1:26:37Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's funny because some of the people that hate all the advancements like technology are already predisposed to hate ABS, stuff like that. But

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  I I'll admit, I haven't watched any baseball yet this year. So maybe if I saw this.

• 1:26:49Bill Simmons?

  No, you gotta watch it.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  The fact, I like the fact that you say like that, um, you know, that the the player has to like hit his head and do it himself.

• 1:26:57Bill Simmons?

  You gotta do it immediately. You can't take

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Definitely think, I think it was actually, maybe Nick Wright had said this, had this idea that like in the NBA, when a player like twists his finger, like go check it, like that should be enough to trigger it because so many of those guys are wrong.

• 1:27:12Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  I mean, those those guys are wrong all the time.

• 1:27:14Bill Simmons?

  And then you lose like, you lose two points if you're wrong.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Well, no, you you lose the challenge. Like, like, you know, like Luca will ask for something to be changed.

• 1:27:22Bill Simmons?

  It's an automatic loss?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:27:23Bill Simmons?

  I mean, it's like, you know, Luca, I I I mean, I'm sure you've, but you've talked about this before. It's demented.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  I can't imagine a guy whose game I should like more, who as a player I hate. Luca is my least favorite player in the league. He complains on every, you know, that really terrible Clippers team was like that, you know, they they had like Chris Paul and all.

• 1:27:47Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah. They're and Blake Griffin, they're mad about everything.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  He's worse than all of them.

• 1:27:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  He is worse than that entire team. And sadly Joker's starting to become a little that way, too. He used to never complain. I see him more and more complain about this.

• 1:28:01Bill Simmons?

  Well, Joker has Joker has reasons because he's just getting annihilated game after game. I think he's just fed up with it.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Well, also, I believe

• 1:28:08Bill Simmons?

  His new strategy of guarding him, just beating the shit out of him.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  I I guess it's, I believe he is right when he complains in a way, which I never believed with Luca. Like, I never believe it, you know?

• 1:28:18Bill Simmons?

  Well, so you're talking, because you tapped into something interesting talking about. You like the human element of it's okay if we screw up some calls. That's what human beings are like. Like Sora just basically was a huge bust, right? I don't know if you followed that at all. But OpenAI spends all this stuff on Sora. And when it's happening, it's like, look how amazing this is. We'll be able to take all of these characters and things you like. And you could make videos out of them right away and everybody's gonna love this. And it turns out it was just an incredible amount of money. And a lot of time and energy and all this time that the company was spending to make this video product that people didn't even really like that much and weren't using that much. And they were like, cool.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Didn't really want.

• 1:29:02Bill Simmons?

  Didn't really want. But which is, which is the metaverse too. Where Zuckerberg spends tens of billions of dollars, whatever he spent to try to create this alternate universe people could go into. And people were like, I'm good with the one I'm in. Thanks anyway, though.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  And it's just like, these are like steps, right? So like they're creating this universe where we can live this other life. And people are like, well, that sounds kind of fucked up to begin with. And then if they even try it, if they go into it, they're like, well, I guess this is something, what's gonna have to happen is they're gonna have to keep failing and making these steps and failing, making these steps and failing until they come up with something that when people use it, they're like, oh, this? Oh, I've always wanted this, as it turns out. You know, it's like that, that's how it's gonna be like, no one's going to want this stuff until they see something and they're like, oh, I guess I didn't realize that it was my dream to have this sort of experience. I mean, you know, I, I, I remember with all these things, the Pontivo came out and

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  it was described to me and I was like, when am I gonna need to freeze television? Well, why would I ever need to stop television? Like, you know, it's like, it seemed so idiotic to me.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, at one point I used it in a way like, and it was like, this is actually what I needed. And now if I, if I'm ever at a hotel and I can't freeze the TV, then I'm angry about that. This technology that I couldn't even envision 30 years ago, I'm now upset about if I don't have it at all times.

• 1:30:28Bill Simmons?

  I think the funniest one for all of these, that's impossible to explain to anybody under 30 years old is how we never knew the score of games we were watching. Like if you went into a bar or you walked into the living room and your dad was watching a game and there was just no score and no time, there was no context to any of it. And then occasionally they would just flash it.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  But you know what? That, that has inadvertently, I'm glad we have that, but it has inadvertently led to greater social isolation. And here is why. Because it used to be if you walked into a bar and the game was on,

• 1:31:05Bill Simmons?

  You'd ask somebody.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  You'd have something to talk about with the person right away that would never be seen as a weird question. You'd be like, what's the score here? And they would tell you. And then maybe you could tell if the guy wanted to talk, cause he'd be like, oh, it's 21 14, but Steve Barkowski's hurt or whatever. You know, then he's like, oh, you want to talk about this? Now it's like you have nothing to ask the person. You have nothing to speak to.

• 1:31:28Bill Simmons?

  That, that was a big loss. Cigarettes was another one, a huge loss. Cigarettes were an unbelievable social connector. They never.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  A great, a great way to.

• 1:31:36Bill Simmons?

  Lung cancer, million, million bad things, uh, uh, bronchitis.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  You want to talk to somebody separate? You ask her, do you want to have a cigarette or whatever?

• 1:31:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  If you don't smoke that much, maybe she only smokes. You act like you do so you can go. It was a, it was, I used to go to, to like shows in Fargo when I was first covering music there. I didn't know any of the people in the scene. It was kind of weird to stand there. So I would just smoke cigarettes. It was something to do.

• 1:32:01Bill Simmons?

  Or, or the group, the group outside having cigs and you ask somebody for a light and you're, and you're off and going that. So you lose that and you lose asking people for the score. I don't, and then plus people, more people on their phones now when they're in public, which we didn't have either.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Drinkless now, all these things like, all these things that in a vacuum, you could be like, well, it might be good for society, but when you put them all together, it's just as people never talking to anyone about anything and never needing to, and then getting to this weird point where it feels like an imposition if they do. Like not, and I'm not saying I'm totally different from this. I just find that I think I used to be much more open to random conversation than I am now. It happens so rarely that when someone just starts talking to me sometimes, I think they're crazy.

• 1:32:51Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Like maybe this is an insane person.

• 1:32:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but you must get recognized by some people.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Oh, well, that you can always tell that you can always tell I you can usually you can usually tell if a person's coming to talk to you and they know who you are as opposed to they're just talking to you because they're normal, right? It should be normal. It shouldn't be weird for someone to start talking to me in line at the grocery store. But then it happens so rarely now that you kind of think it's weird when it occurs. I don't I don't know.

• 1:33:19Bill Simmons?

  Some people have that natural welcoming. My wife's like this.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  My wife is too.

• 1:33:24Bill Simmons?

  People just.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like if she sits on an airplane with a stranger, that stranger's gonna talk.

• 1:33:30Bill Simmons?

  Hundred percent four hour convo. Yeah. And other people just give off the I'm probably gonna just read this book. Welcome to We Kept the Receipts presented by TaxAct where we look back at our predictions, figure out who deserves a victory lap and who is completely off base. TaxAct helps you with the actual receipts, like the kind that you can use for tax deductions or credits and the ones that help you get your maximum refund every tax season. So let's see, I'll give you one good one and one bad one that I had before the basketball season. I was really bullish on San Antonio being good. And I think I think their over was like basically 43 wins. I thought they would go over that.

• 1:34:12Bill Simmons?

  It was one of my locks and I just thought this Wemby thing was gonna happen faster than people realized. I did not think they were gonna be a finals contender, but I did think they were gonna be really good. So that was a good one. Conversely, I just assumed like everybody else that Phoenix was gonna stink. It felt like a rebuilding, revamping year for them and meanwhile, they're gonna be like the seventh seed in the playoffs. So not only did I miss this one, but their owner taunted me on Twitter about it. So you win some, you lose some. We kept the receipts presented by TaxAct. This tax season, make your max refund the one prediction that actually pays off. Visit TaxAct.com to learn more. Conditions apply. See TaxAct.com for details.

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• 1:35:24Bill Simmons?

  Last thing and then we'll go. This is a quick one. My son has been going backwards with music.

• 1:35:32Bill Simmons?

  My son loves music. Is he back to the 40s now? No, he, he was, he's been listening to classic rock. Okay. And he was listening, so he, I almost wish like there was videotape that I could have just sent you each time where he'd come over to me and be like, Dad, Velvet Underground was pretty good.

• 1:35:52Bill Simmons?

  The other day he came by, he's like, I've listened to all four Led Zeppelin albums.

• 1:35:57Bill Simmons?

  I think I liked three the most, four second, and just started going through Led Zeppelin. I was just thinking like. Did you tell him there was more than four? Oh, he knew, he had just, he'd gone the first four.

• 1:36:09Bill Simmons?

  But I was thinking, when I really loved music and got into it in the early 80s, right? And it was like, my dad was listening to Bob Seger and Springsteen and a couple of these other ones, and then the Simon and Garfunkel concert album. And then from there, it's like, well, I want, I need my own. And you start listening and buying stuff. And we only really had like 15 years of, so this is 1982 for me. We only had like 15 years of albums to go back and check out. So I remember like Bad Company Greatest Hits. Remember getting that, you're like, oh, greatest, or like Steve Miller had the greatest hits one, and Elton John had a greatest hits, like greatest hits were a good way, we didn't have Spotify back then. Good way to kind of learn the best of different bands.

• 1:36:53Bill Simmons?

  But then we had this incredible 80s for music, and then the 90s were even better. And we had all of our, all this new music that we spent more time listening to. But now if you're my son, and it's 2026. He has 60 years of modern music to go back and listen to. And I wonder if that's part of the reason there's less of a necessity to listen to new music than there used to be. Because you can just go backwards and has this also happened with movies?

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely, that is the case. I mean, it's, I would, that, particularly since like, because modern music, modern rock and pop and hip hop is still operating in the same kind of modality as the previous music. It's quite difficult for it to surpass it.

• 1:37:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  I mean, they're making, you know, they're using the same instruments with the same sort of length of song is basically the same, verse, chorus, verses still sort of the same structure. Like, it's like, so you're, you really are competing against the best of everything because it hasn't changed enough. I mean, that's why when they talk about the slow cancellation of the future, this is part of it. I mean, it's like, if the future continues to be retro reinterpretations of the past, well, it is, it's, you know, it's pretty difficult for anything to be more interesting than the interesting thing it's trying to replicate, you know?

• 1:38:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  But you're, but you are right, if it was in the early 80s, you know, the, the expectation was, well, you really only have to go back 20 years. You know, you're getting the beginning of the Beatles in and you're getting all music going forward. So it's like, you know, that, it was, there was a lot of music there, but it was possible. Now it's that much more difficult. Plus, we've also sort of expanded the possibility of things that were once not seen as remotely canonical, being things that you're supposed to know about if you care about music. You know, like, it was, there, there are many, it would have been very possible. If say you like, you were the music in the early eighties, someone would be like, well, there's some shit you don't gotta worry about. You don't gotta worry about ABBA. You don't gotta listen to those records.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Well, now, if your son is really into pop music at any point, you would be like, you need to listen to these ABBA records, too. Like, I mean, there was a whole bunch of things that almost anything, that any kind of cultural tenacity now seems more important. That, that, that it's important enough to revisit, where there are many things, even like talking about Bad Company, whatever. Like, there was certainly a time in the eighties when I would, if, if we would have been hanging out and you would have listened, wanted to listen to Bad Company. I would be like, what the fuck for? Like, why would we listen to this? Now, it doesn't seem that way. Now, it seems like, well, there's some meaning.

• 1:39:41Bill Simmons?

  I feel like we just would have argued all the time.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  I don't, it's, it's hard to imagine.

• 1:39:48Bill Simmons?

  I don't think we would have had, we, we would have been bonded on basketball and football. And I think musically, we just would have been completely different with everything, other than Van Halen, who we both would have loved.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Well, I, I mean, it depends what age we met.

• 1:40:01Bill Simmons?

  Maybe Police. I don't know. There would have been a couple.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  I didn't like the Police when I was, I mean, it depends if we were really young, if we were 13, I don't know. If we had been 18, it would have been like, do you like drinking? We're friends. Like, that's all, I mean, I was very open to people when I was 18. Like, if they wanted to party, that was all it took.

• 1:40:19Bill Simmons?

  You know what else?

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  You know, I had, I had, I had friends who had nothing in common with me at all, except we went to these places Friday night and Saturday night, and then sometimes Thursday and sometimes Wednesday. Like, that was all, that's all it took. That's all it took to be friends. You know, now, I don't know how that, you know.

• 1:40:37Bill Simmons?

  You know what's the best for that is restaurants. People who work in restaurants, you're thrown together, almost like you're in, like, people in a prison, how like, the people in Shawshank would become friends. Just, they had nothing in common. They're just like, hey, you wanna hang out in the yard? Restaurants, because you're on the same schedule, and if like, this guy also smoked Marlboro Lights, you just became friends. That was all you needed, that we both go to bed at four in the morning and...

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, nobody wants to work in an office, right? If everybody has the option of working at home or going in the office, everyone would say, I wanna be at home because then I can like, I can do my laundry, too. I can do the thing.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  And yet, I mean, I'm sure I would have want my whole life, if given the option of not going to the office, I would have taken it. And yet, 90% of the people in my life who are important to me, I met in an office. My, I like, I, I, I'm so lucky that I was in, you know, the opposite spin and office in Akron, the office in Fargo and the office in my college newspaper. Those, it's like, there's this kind of intangible loss to these things. So this kind of shifts we've made in society that again, like I said earlier, better for the individual, much better for the individual in that singular experience, much worse for

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  society as a whole. These things that help, you know, it's like, like my, they won't wait when the, when the Walkman came out, you know, they were like, oh, the Walkman, you know, it's gonna be terrible. It's gonna be people walking around, listening to music in their own world.

• 1:42:09Bill Simmons?

  I remember that.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  It'll be, yeah. You know what? They were fucking right. That totally happened. That totally happened. When they, when MTV was out, what were the critics saying? Oh, it's gonna change, you know?

• 1:42:19Bill Simmons?

  Like everyone's stupider.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. It totally happened. All the criticisms of television from the 1950s, they did happen. All like, all of these things that are seen as like, you're so out of touch. This new technology is great. How good, everything people are currently saying about AI is going to happen. Like, like all of, like, maybe not to the full totality of we live in a dystopia, but all of the things that we think will probably be a manifestation of this socially, I think that will be, that they will probably be true. Like, that's, it's just because it always seems that way, right? The people who overreact are the ones who are right later.

• 1:42:57Bill Simmons?

  I'm more optimistic about that. Um, we just did, I won't say the movie, but we did a movie that was really big for next rewatchables. That was really big in the 80s. And we were talking about, uh, basically what you said before about when these things that would happen in the 80s. Sometimes these movies you liked, you liked because they were always on. And you eventually talked yourself into them. Right? And I was saying, and I made the comparison about in music, when people listen to albums and we actually had more time to listen and talk about different albums, we also had less stuff to do. Eventually, like the seventh best song on the album to become your favorite album, favorite song on the album.

• 1:43:43Bill Simmons?

  And stuff like that, which was also what was happening with some music and TV shows in the eighties. But now everybody moves so fast from one thing to the next. I wonder if the same kind of devotion will be there for these different things. I think, I think about weird shit like that now.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it is.

• 1:44:02Bill Simmons?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  I remember I wrote a thing for Grantland, which was about sort of the idea and the problem of nostalgia. And one of the points that I was sort of making, which I do think is true, is that part of the reason that we feel nostalgic for things from the past was not even necessarily because of our experience with it or what the thing was, it was the pure repetition of hearing a song over and over and over again.

• 1:44:30Bill Simmons?

  Or a movie or anything.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  Or over and over and over again. And, uh, you know, I, I, I think with music, it is unlikely that that will happen with video experiences. I don't know, because it does seem like, I know with my kids, they still are very comfortable rewatching things that they like, that they'll just kind of, you know.

• 1:44:52Bill Simmons?

  My kids as well.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I think there's a natural thing of it. I mean, I used to, there were many, many books that like novels that I read multiple times when I was young. I can't imagine that happening now, like me reading a new novel and then be like, I'm going to read it again a year. It just doesn't seem like that happens. But when you're young, you're really like that, you know? I think you're almost teaching yourself how to understand the thing. Like, like Season on the Brink, I read that book. I bet at least three times in high school. And I do think that a lot of the way I think and write about sports is really based on that text. Because I was like, well, this is how it's supposed to be done. This is the, you know, and, and I'm not saying that's the greatest book ever written, but I, I loved it.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  And it was sort of, it was like, you, you have to, I like the book Animal Farm. I read the book Animal Farm so many different times in my life. And I think that at some point you read these things enough that you kind of think like, well, okay, this is the structure. This is how it's supposed to be. This is how it's supposed to work. You know?

• 1:45:52Bill Simmons?

  I'm glad you said that because I, I've, I've probably mentioned this in the past a couple of times, but when people ask like advice for writing, like tips, what are your tips other than? And you just tell them like, just keep doing it every day. Like this is the number one thing. Never stop, keep going, keep pressing. But the, one of the things that I loved that I think really made me better was I had probably, I don't know, eight to 10 books that I would just read over and over again and kind of study what they did. And they were books where the writing style wasn't even really like my style in certain cases. Like my favorite book ever was Breaks of the Game, which I really made an effort to read every 12 to 15 months

• 1:46:31Bill Simmons?

  just to, because it would kind of reset my brain with, and my style was nothing like Halberstam's style. And the style of that book was nothing like what I was writing, but I would get a lot out of it. And I don't really know why. And it was the repetition of the choices that he made were really helpful to me. And, and I don't know, it's just, it's, it's like putting on an album you've heard a hundred times and it would just make you think about stuff.

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  Hunter S. Thompson supposedly used to literally retype Ernest Hemingway's stories.

• 1:47:03Bill Simmons?

  Really?

• 1:47:03Speaker 01

  He would, he would, yeah. Cause he wanted to, he wanted to know how it felt to write like these short, kind of crisp sentences, like how it would be. And he would, so he would literally retype them on a manual typewriter. Now, I've never done that, but I understand that idea. I, you know, I like, yeah. When I was a music critic, so many records I reviewed, you know, having listened to twice or three times, especially in newspapers. Sometimes it'd be like, get the record. I don't think I know, like, I really don't understand any record until I've played it 500 times. And when I, when I mean understand it, I mean, not make a decision of whether or not I like it or if it's good or bad, like, or for me to really like.

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  Being able like to have thoughts on it that are both meaningful and original. You know, it's like, it's gotta be, it's a lot, it's a lot of times before you really understand things. And everything about our culture is trying to stop people from doing that. They're like, you don't even have to read the thing anymore. You can just type this thing and it will give you a synopsis of everything that's been written about it. I mean, it is like, like we are moving in a direction where deep understanding of things is not just becoming rare, but like irrelevant, like stupid, like why would you, you know?

• 1:48:22Bill Simmons?

  There's more answers to, there's more, more ways to unearth things. Like even, I mentioned my son earlier getting into music, which is fun in its own right. Cause he just comes in with these takes knowing nothing. So like, he thinks Smashing Pumpkins are just better than Nirvana, which is an interesting argument to have. But he just likes their songs more and it, he doesn't understand why they weren't bigger than Nirvana coming out of the nineties. So I was explaining to him all the time.

• 1:48:48Speaker 01

  I mean, that's real taste though.

• 1:48:50Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  Like, like when, when, when somebody has an opinion like that, a young person's like, that is like, it's not found knowledge. They were not convinced to think this, like my, my son, one time was telling me that he was like, these late period George Harrison songs are as good as the Beatles. And at first I was gonna be like, what the fuck? But I was like, no, actually what he's, it was like, this is a good thought he's having.

• 1:49:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, it's like he.

• 1:49:16Bill Simmons?

  It's an unsullied thought without any, without reading or hearing anything else.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Like, like, you know, like, you know, when you, uh, like, you know, when, before you take mushrooms for the first time, they tell you, well, you'll be able to think anything you want. And in your mind, you're like, well, I can already think what I want, but you can't. There are things in ourselves that stop us from having certain ideas. So sometimes when a kid is listening to music like that, or your son's listening to music like that. There's like this kind of enforced ceiling of collective knowledge does not exist. So he can actually think whatever he wants about it. I, I, a guy interviewed me once for a book and he was saying like, you know, it was, he was much younger than me. And he was like, you know, it was really interesting because I went back and I love Nirvana and I loved Soundgarden and I loved Alice in Chains and I loved Stone Temple Pilots.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  I thought they were all great, but I guess Stone Temple Pilots is terrible. And I was like, no, actually you were right the first time. Like what you, you were actually just listening to the music. There's people like me who is listening to the music and also taking in all this other ancillary bullshit that was affecting the way I was understanding it. It's like you understand it for real, you know?

• 1:50:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, my son, it's a good point. My son, um, he even found a Smashing Pumpkins song that I didn't know about somehow called The Boy. And it was, it was one of his favorite ones. And he's like, do you know this one? It wasn't on any of the albums and I somehow missed it. I really liked that band.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  They have a lot of records.

• 1:50:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah. So it was on like a re-release thing or whatever. And it was, he was right. It was like one of the best seven or eight Smashing Pumpkins songs that I've heard. Um, but I, I like that he deep dove and I think that's one thing. I think the, from what I've, what I've noticed from my kids, they really like something. They go all in on it. And then it kind of goes to the next thing sometimes, but then other things stay. And that's, that gives me more hope that they'll circle back to the things that kind of resonated the most, which I, I would hope that's how it keeps going.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  I just, I, it makes me nervous. It makes me nervous.

• 1:51:24Bill Simmons?

  You're rightfully nervous. All right, we'll end on that. We'll end on that disappointing, uh, topic. Uh huh. Football, how'd your book do? Good? It seemed like it did really well.

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  Relative to other books, it seems to be doing great. It's hard as hell to sell books now, especially not fiction ones. But yes, I was very pleased. I mean, I'd say of, of all of the books I have released. The this like, uh, release, however you look at it, was probably been the most fun since the very first one in a lot of ways. Like it, it has went great. I think I did like 25 podcasts or something. It's

• 1:52:00Bill Simmons?

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  It's just crazy how it is now, but that's just how, that's how it is, you know?

• 1:52:04Bill Simmons?

  You were like a borderline podcast whore. I was watching it from afar. I was like, wow, look at this guy.

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  Well, I just went on whatever. I mean, it was like, they kept saying, you wanted, they want you to be on this one. Will you be on it? And I'll be like, well, why not? Like it's because these, what also is shocking to me, uh, maybe not shocking, just maybe predictably surprising. A podcast can be extraordinarily popular and yet completely unknown to every single person who doesn't actively listen to it. Like i- it is just wild. It was not like, there's been nothing else like this. Where like, you know, you could be somebody like, you didn't watch the TV show Dallas, but you knew Dallas was a popular TV show. Or like, you didn't like Nickelback, but you knew Nickelback was huge. There are all

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  these podcasts with massive audiences that every single person I mentioned them to would be like, what? Well, I've never heard of that. I've never heard of it, you know? It, it, and then we know it's in New York, doing some of these and like you're kind of in Chinatown or like on, on that Lower East Side. And like, every time you see like a dilapidated office building, you go in it and it's all podcast studios. That's like, like how many podcasts are being put out there? It is just a, like, it's bizarre. It'd be like, I mean, it must've been like, you know, when they always say like, you know, at one point, like the city of Chicago had like 152 daily newspapers or whatever. That's kind of what it's like now, where it's just like all these people being able to do this, you know? It, it is,

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  it's fine. There's nothing, there's no downside to it, but it's strange.

• 1:53:38Bill Simmons?

  I think that's a good analogy though, cause like you think about whatever time that was in America when every city had seven newspapers, but if you lived in another city, you didn't know anything about the other seven newspapers in like Boston or Chicago. It's kind of what it's like. All right. Chuck Klosterman, great to see you as always. Thank you for the time. Uh, I will see you during the NBA playoffs.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:53:58Bill Simmons?

  All right.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  Bye bye.

• 1:54:00Bill Simmons?

  All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Chuck, thanks to Eduardo and Gahal. As always, don't forget theringer.com/events. Tickets go on sale for our rewatchables live show in San Francisco on April 8th. So on April 1st, 10 a.m. Go there, get tickets and we'll see you in the Bay. I'm going to be back on this feed one more time on Thursday with one more podcast. See you then.

• 1:54:43Bill Simmons?

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