Clippers Punishment, Rookie Extensions, and Mike Schur on Sports Fandom!

>> Coming up on the Zack Los show, we've got the greatest to ever do it. John Hollinger of the athletic, and we've got a lot to talk about. We have an almond Thompson extension with the Houston Rockets. Is that a good deal? A bad deal too much too little. What does it portend for the rest of the class of 2023? We go rapid fire on Brandon Miller, Kyate George, Jaime Hockers, Jr. Brandon Paginski, Anthony Black, Scoot Anderson, Blah Kula Bali, many more or some more. Bryce Sensibar gets involved at the end. Just looking at the landscape, Assar Thompson, another one looking at the landscape in general for extensions, for restricted free agency, Jalen Durin, not in the class of 2023, but impacting Assar Thompson's deal with Detroit. We do all of that. We talk about Ben Simmons. Ben Simmons is back in the NBA with the Sacramento Kings. What, if anything, should we expect it? We also do a little bit of follow-up on the Los Angeles Clippers. The verdict came down last week and re-read the report a couple of times. Follow-up questions, things to look forward to, things to look backward at, all with John Hollinger. Then Mike Sure, yeah, that Mike Sure, from the office from Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99, the good place, many more. He wrote a book with Joe Paznansky, one of the great sports writers in the last 25 years, called Big Fan. This is it. It's about sports fandom and baseball and love and fathers and sons and traveling. And we get into all of that. Plus, we talk about the basketball scene in the office. That's all coming up on the Zach Lo Show. Look too, the Zach Lo Show and look who it is. The greatest to ever do it, taunting me with the Milwaukee Brewers jersey from a 1983 Sai Young winner I'm told. John Hollinger, you know what, John Hollinger? I am happy to throw my loyalties, tepid as they may be to the Milwaukee Brewers once the nationally playoff starts because it sure is how they going to the Dodgers, the Phillies, or my arch national league nemesis, the Braves. So go brew crew. It's been a long time. Yeah. They got to the world series when I was 12. It's been a long way. Age, age will be redacted. Thank you. Okay. You wrote, we're going to do some extension stuff today. We had an Amen Thompson extension late last week. Jordan Hawkins from the same draft class just got traded. I think we're going to do about 45 minutes on that salary. Which somehow involved Taj Gibson being traded again. But I wanted to start with some Clippers follow up because that's the last episode we did was right after the Clippers verdict was rendered. You wrote a column for the athletic following up on it and digging it through the report just like I did. Are you game for a few follow up questions? Yeah, let's go. Follow up question number one. Did they actually get off too easy? David Sampson on Pablo Tories podcast. I think the first person to really articulate this. It's something I've heard from a bunch of front office people on rival teams all of course motivated by pure ethical, moral, non competitive, unbiased, you know, judgements. No, but all actually competitive with the Clippers. And the basic just if it would be and Winhorse talked about it too. Is it really that bad? They're going to get these two picks back from Toronto once this deal goes through assuming it does. And that puts them, yes, still in a big hole pick wise, but not in as big a hole as the otherwise could be. They are lucky as you wrote in your piece that this investigation dragged long enough for them to make that trade and for them to get Keaton Wogler with the number five pick. And you know, there are people around lead that I'm sure you've heard too that say they should have to four fifties raptor sticks because it's the proverbial fruit from the poisonous tree from the very player that they engaged in this alleged corruption with I guess it's no longer alleged. Do you think they got off too easy? Possibly, I mean, the lead could have still gone after their swap with Philly. They could have gone after the extra picked that's coming from Indy, right? So they still had some fruit out there that they could have gone after their second round picks too. So yeah, it was the same penalty as the Joe Smith in terms of the five first, but for what you would argue, I think, was a worse crime. I get all of that. I expect from everything I've heard, nobody knows for sure because we're all waiting on it. I expect the raptor's clippers, Kawaii trade to go through as it was outlined without any adjustments with those picks from Toronto, both of them, and the swaps going to the clippers. So I get it. On the other hand, I think there's like a larger existential cost to all of this for the clippers. That affects their fandom, that affects their standing with free agents and agents around the league, although I guess it shouldn't because players should love the fact that they've been the rules for a player, I guess. But it just feels like existential clipperidum is back. Like this is just a JB franchise, a backwater franchise, a franchise that's going to be playing with one hand tied behind its back from a front office perspective for the next, you know, whatever amount of years. A franchise that has one, as I believe 15 winning seasons in a row, but boy, does it not feel like that, even though this is the great house see on era of clippers, basketball. So I get the fact that yes, their net net down fewer picks than it appears. There's even a chance as Michael McCann said on my pod that like to Joe Smith case, maybe they get a pickback if they're contrite from here on out. That's another wild card we'll see if and when it's Tuesday morning, we're taping this by the time this goes up, maybe Steve Balmer is sued the NBA, in which case they're not being contrite. But I do feel like just the gut punch to like imagine being a clippers fan right now, I just it's just it's your it's just back to the same old same old like JB franchise. And I mean, the thing people kind of forget a little bit, the last CBA was 28 owners against the clippers and warriors. That's true. And you know, they were basically going after Balmer and Lake with that CBA and the aprons and everything and and and trying to rein them in that way. And part of the backstory of how we got there was yes, they were shooting money out of a fire hose, but there was lingering resentment from 2019 and how they got Kauai in the first place because there's always been suspicions that that was not above board. And obviously that's how it's played out. This isn't really a question, but in my immediate reactions to the product to the verdict, I focused on the 36 page walk tell report, the implications for the clippers. And I, although we're talking about it now, I didn't really explicitly come out and talk about how much like this just sucks for clippers fans who are the ultimate losers in this. Their team has been kneecapped in a whole bunch of ways. Yeah, they'll be exciting to watch. Darius Garland and Wogler and Neater Houser when he comes back. And there's like cap space and stuff to hope for. But you know, built talks about this all the time. You have been you, the franchise, the owner have been essentially convicted in what passes as the NBA's court of law for misleading everybody. And there should I bill is mentioned like they should reduce season ticket prices. There should be some recompense for fans who should not have to come and pay full price to watch a kneecapped team. But I don't know that that's just just not how business works. I mean, I guess that's up to the clippers. But I don't know what else you're supposed to do for the fans other than invite them back to watch games at extremely discounted prices. I don't know what else you can do. They, they, it is true. They ultimately bear the brunt of this because now you got to swallow hard and be like, all right, the co-IPG year is over. It led to the only conference finals in franchise history. And an otherwise disastrous outcome across the board. And now we're left with this like Darius Garland's good, but Brandon Ingram's good. Grady Dick is not that exciting. Like what am I supposed to do? Yeah, you gave up 10 first and a two time MVP to make one trip to the Western conference finals, which we will talk about. Follow up question number three. And this is the point that I thought that I had not thought about that you raised in your column. I did think about what if they had won the title at any point during this stretch. Now they did not get close to closest they got was 2021 when they lost to the suns in the conference finals with the value being the sort of highlight everybody remembers from that series. But your point was like, what about the jazz and Mavericks? The two teams at the Clippers beat in what ended up being their longest playoff run. I believe they won three playoff series in the entirety of the Paul George Y Leonard era. Two of them were in this year. And as you pointed out particularly for Utah, that was kind of a turning point series and the beginning of the end of the Don of the Mitchell Rudy Gobert pairing. Now I will say, when you look back at the first round series against the Mavericks, that was the one where the Maves win the first two games infatically in LA go up by like 25 at the start of game three in Dallas under a rainstorm of Luca threes. And it goes from feeling very much like, is this already going to be the end of the Clippers? Like are they going to blow this team up if they lose this series? I'm coming off the bubble disappointment. Very similar by the way to like the 2012 heat going down three to the Boston. Like is this is this already over if they lose this series? And then Kauai rescues them game six of, oh, I've lost my, there it is. Game six, 45 points on 18 of 25. One of the best games I've ever seen anyone play facing elimination. and then game seven kind of forgotten because they won fairly easily twenty eight ten and nine a near triple double with four steals on ten to fifteen shooting to bail out the clippers in that series Utah. He's out after game four the series is tied to two in classic kawaii fashion he suffers a mysterious injury that the team sort of just like neglects to elaborate on for a long time. And they were down O two kawaii leads them back to win games three and four sixty five combined points on twenty three of forty three shooting shirt just like classic peak kawaii stuff and then goes out and I although that is the beginning of the end for the Mitchell go bear jazz. They do lose the next two games without kawaii liner playing parents man goes bananas in game six and then they have another year together where they suffer and even more demoralizing loss to the mavericks in the first round with look at Don Church missing part of the series so that one feels less painful to me but I like I like your idea of like is there recompense for those teams I what what did you have in mind I. They don't do you know the NCAA they they take away wins after the fact that the NBA does really do that you know is there some level of cash compensation or something you know their playoff shares or something that that madz clippers that was the best series that whole playoffs. And I mean the maps after that season like Rick Carlyle left and went to Indiana like what change what changes if Dallas makes the conference finals or finals that season. It's it's a really interesting kind of sliding doors moment and you know I didn't mention in the story but what about compensation or whatever for like Toronto and the Lakers were the two finalists. For Kauai and they didn't want to play hit play Uncle Dennis's game and so they did they didn't get him maybe they wouldn't have gotten him anyway but maybe they would have in their history would have been totally different. That leads to my next follow up question before we get there Kauai being injured in that jazz series I just I can't say this enough. I really like to call I trade for Toronto it's going to make them a lot better I'm super high on the Raptor is going into season I'm not going to spoil my older underpicks I'm doing that with bill and house but I really like that team I really like how they're built and there's that that's all true and I also just don't have any faith that Kauai Leonard can play three or four playoff rounds ever again because you know what he hasn't since the bubble he hasn't appeared in the second round playoff series. See as a finish to second round playoff series since the bubble and so yes I'm high on the Raptors I don't know where you stand on the Raptors but they're being painted is like oh there they could like win the East and get to the finals I'm like I yes they could if Kauai Leonard does something he has not done in seven years. Yeah I'm with you I'm like smashing you over on Toronto on on wins but as well as he played by April they were in two very big important games against Portland that Kauai was not able to impact at anywhere near a Kauai-ish level and I just I just don't think he had it in his body at that point after basically playing all year. That what you said I totally agree on what you said before this led to my next public question why did the Clippers bother to do any of this did they have to do any of this was Kauai Leonard ever signing with the Lakers was Kauai Leonard ever actually going back to Toronto remember he got traded to Toronto against his will the entire year everyone was like well he's going to the West Coast we all know he's going to the West Coast and the Raptors win and they fight for him and they were pissed off about it how free agency transpired. But I like was he ever going anywhere else and once he got to the Clippers was he ever going anywhere else again like why I have not really been convinced like why did they have to do any of this yeah because he so he signed a short contract with the Clippers it was two years in a player option. So it would have been a free agent again in 21 I believe after he signed a 19 so I'm sure they felt some level of pressure from that but I sort of agree with you like how much when he's already in LA which is the place he wanted to be already got him PG the guy he wanted to play with how much of a flight risk was he really going to be that you had to pay him under the table on top of what you were paying him as a max contract. I mean it's a scenario that if you read the CBA it's almost like they didn't even envision a scenario where somebody could be on a max deal and also getting paid under a table under the table because there's a lot of language in there that oh if the contract looks ridiculous and you know if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck like that. But the the scenario they almost envision was like somebody getting a minimum deal and then getting a bunch of shady endorsement money on the side to be like five times as much as their contract and this wasn't that at all this was a max deal that just had filler on top of it. And yeah like that's separate from the point you made of like my whole like why did they bother doing this is even separate from the point you made about like why did they bother did they really have to do the Paul George trade which cost him shame and all the picks like was he where it was quite really going to be like no I'm going back to Toronto maybe it was I don't know I just have never been convinced follow up number six or wherever we are why did they fight this from the beginning like what when did they know. So all of these Gillian Zucker emails and communications were out there and these executives at other places we're going to start talking to the investigators and why did they not as soon as they knew if they did know at any time. Immediately become contract and they have the easiest fall person fall guy fall girl in the world in Gillian Zucker who they just could have been like all I think you're right. This was a rogue employee will take our medicine and the medicine would have been a lower dosage than they ended up getting from the NBA and that's another question will and we'll see what how they behave from here on out but that's another question i've been thinking about. I think they were more convinced of their cover story and obviously they had no idea how much or it seems likely they did not know what deep shit they were in because. They would have traded all their first this season right. I remember seeing that long be like okay you want to take all our first fine here take take from what's left is he would dig through these scraps see what you can find you know and and they didn't do that at all they even did the do the zoo bought steel which brought brought a pick back. And so they clearly weren't aware of it I think they. I think they were probably too believing in their little cover story about the introductions and then the other thing where I think their lawyers got clowned by the NBA's lawyers is they thought they were going to have another round of this in front of a system arbitrator. And then when kawaii made his deal with the league on the side took the arbitrator out of play and Adam silver became judge and jury. Yeah the league clearly ran an end around around the clippers in conjunction with the players union it's funny I remember mentioning during the season like if I have this investigation over my head. Does game theory suggests that I should do what you're suggesting like trade all the picks where we're going to have to forfeit some of them anyway trade them now get players in the door get good players in the door. Or go get as many extra picks as we can in preparation for this I'm not sure like there were all the theories that the clippers made the hard and deal and the zoo bought deal with an eye on the hammer coming down on them. I've never been convinced that that's 100% sure even 50% true because I think those deals are really are fine to very good like on basketball merits for a team who clearly concluded this core has run its course we're not going anywhere serious. But it is it is an interesting sort of like which which path do you go to follow up number seven which is not so much of a question I think I was guilty all along. In underestimating the de Andre Jordan prior offense part of this it's it's a penny pinching offense compared to what they're charged with now with kawaii it's like a $250,000 Lexus sponsorship that they facilitated for de Andre Jordan who is not the status of kawaii Leonard not covered it around the league. To the degree that kawaii was at the salary level he was a little DJ and I think this was 2015 was quite coveted. And the the small amount I did I just didn't think of it's not that I discounted it I just did not think about it in connection with it at all and the NBA clearly did like this being a second offense was like clearly very important to the league. Absolutely if you and if you read it was clear in the in the report and then I guess I hadn't put together these were the same people that were there in 2015 also it's not like the management turned over. So it was like you knew like we went over this like you guys knew exactly what the rule was and exactly how you violated it so there could be no question about a misunderstanding or anything this was clearly against everything you had been told. All right last thing and it's not really a follow up question is I read the report again last night because I really wanted to sort of parse the language to see like okay who said what to the investigators and where are they getting all this information so I'm going to read you a couple a few key passages that I think illuminates part of that. Passage number one this is page 18 of the report a former executive of one of these companies and these companies means that tronics blowing go or locked in not aspiration aspiration does not come up in the report yet. A former executive of one of those companies told investigators that the consulting agreement entered into by that executive's company. company and the Clippers was highly unusual for at least the following reasons. One, the company was not in the business of providing consulting services. Seems unusual, seems like a great fact. Two, the services contemplated by the consulting agreement were not worth the money the Clippers were paying for them. And indeed were typically supplied by the company to clients for free, seems like a problem. So then we know clue number one is what an executive for one of those companies given an anonymity talk to the investigators. Okay. Number two, this is the real damning one. This is dactronics. In May 2020, the Clippers informed dactronics that it was the team's preferred provider for this project, the scoreboard project, but that the team wanted to agree on a quote, spend back arrangement whereby dactronics would provide some amount of business to the Clippers, which dactronics told investigators is not uncommon in its industry. Ms. Zucker, they're after suggested to a dactronics senior executive that this spendback could be accomplished through an endorsement agreement between dactronics and COY Leonard. So it's not exactly clear where they're getting that information from. Are they seeing emails from Gillian Zucker either on the receiving end by someone at dactronics or from her own inbox, or as someone for dactronics anonymously talking to the investigators. That's a little bit unclear, but clearly one of those things has to be true. Okay, I'm going to continue. Later in May 2020, in a call with a senior executive of dactronics, so there's person number one, a senior Clippers executive, person number two, presumably not Gillian Zucker or Lawrence Frank or Steve Balmer since it's an unnamed person, a senior executive dactronics and a senior Clippers executive specified the precise financial terms that the Clippers expected dactronic to provide to Mr. Leonard in the endorsement agreement, three million per year for two years. That appears to maybe be an anonymous Clippers executive or former executive talking to the investigators or it could be the dactronics executive as somebody, right? Anything striking you from this that's interesting so far? Yeah, I mean, the identity of the unidentified Clippers executive because only three Clippers executives were punished, right? And no former executives or anything, and no other names have come out. Well, that same, that same Clippers executive is about to come up again. In February of 2021, before the end of the first year of the dactronics Leonard agreement, the same senior Clippers executive approached dactronics again. This time the Clippers executive told dactronics that because the team had decided to increase the amount that would spend on the scoreboard, dactronics should correspondingly increase the amount it would pay to Leonard and dactronics does that. So again, those could be emails that they find from dactronics people who, dactronics cooperated, they bent over backwards to cooperate with the investigation. Boingo did not and locked in insurance did not at all cooperate, which is interesting. I never even heard of locked in insurance. Or it could be that same senior Clippers executive talks to the investigators proactively or corroborates those emails. But that's the sort of paper trail there. And I think I can leave it at there. Oh, I just did like this, the text message from Joe Sandberg about the, I don't want to belabor it, but the Clippers pay aspiration to shit ton of money to do sustainability stuff for the forum. And that shit ton of money happens to exactly match the money that aspiration is paying Kawaii Leonard. And because the forum deal is taking too long to finalize, I went over this last week, Joe Sandberg starts throwing bombs. And he says, do you understand how serious this is? This is the ball game. If this isn't fixed, the Clippers Balmer Sandberg aspiration relationship is being burned to the ground. And so is the Clippers Kawaii relationship. And I just thought of, perhaps it's, perhaps it's because I have Mike Sherr coming on the fight after you. I just thought of one of my favorite lines ever in the office and in comedy television is when Dwight Shrewd says, then we burn Unica to the ground when Unica and Scranton are having a rivalry. So I think it's just going to be interesting to see those dots connect as we learn more and more about who actually talk to didn't talk and how evasive Gillian Zucker was. But that's where we are at the Clippers. Any parting thoughts before we talk about basketball? I think everyone was worried that Adam was going to go soft on Balmer and he did not. And I think there's a lot of relief throughout the league about this. Very much so. All right, let's take a quick break. And then we'll talk about some basketball players who play for basketball teams who have not been docked for multiple first round picks. The next big coming drama in the NBA is contract extension season. There are a lot of veterans who have contracts that are extendable at various timetables starting, you know, Steph Curry was just a couple weeks ago. And on and on, there's tons of them. But also the class of 2023, the first round draft class of 2023 are now all out for extensions going into their fourth season. And boy, John Hollinger, it's kind of slim pickings. Victor Webbingama at the top, his deal is done. Number four pick, Amen Thompson, his deal is done. Five years, $208 million with the Houston Rockets, we will come back to that. The following players have borderline zero chance to definitely zero chance from the 30 person first round of 2023, it's signing an extension. Jaros Walker, Taylor Hendrix, Jet Howard, Grady Dick, Jordan Hawkins, who was traded today, Kobe Bufkin, Jalen Hood, Shafino. Remember him? Cam Whitmore waved again this week. Noah Clowney, Derek Whitehead, Chris Murray, O'Mex Prosper, Marcus Sasser, Ben Shepherd, Nick Smith, Jr., Julian Strother, Kobe Brown. Literally half the first round, at least, is either out of the league or no shot that they're signing a contract extension. It's a really like, every draft has its troughs of unproductivity. This is a pretty stark one. We're talking picks that start at eight with Jaros Walker. Let's start with Amen Thompson, five years, $208 million. My first reaction was, that's a good deal. I've always been high on Amen Thompson. I didn't really get the idea that last year was like a disappointing year on his growth curve, which was a popular narrative. It's some of it, the three-point shot didn't come around. Defense probably ticked from defensive player of the year candidate to first to second team, all defense big deal. He's one of the best defenders in the league. It's 20 to 22% of the cap, which is really like, shocking in terms of how high the cap is now, that a $40 plus million deal is only that amount. Him and Alper and Shenguin, as the core young guys on the team, combined to only make up 40% ish of the cap for the entirety of their contracts. That's a pretty good deal. The jazz, on the other hand, who have Kianta and George, they have about 60% of their cap tied up into their two highest-paid players, Larry Markin and Jerry and Jackson Jr. You toss in Jabari Smith Jr. and Tari Eason, that's about 60 to 65% of the cap in four young players. Those guys make a lot less money. So my first reaction was, "All makes sense. "I'm super high and I'm in Thompson. "18 points of game, despite a complete lack of a jumper, "blah blah blah, rebounding playmaking, et cetera." My second reaction was, "When is the last time, if ever?" And this is a great question for you, that a kind of a defensive specialist who's not a center got paid anywhere near this amount of money. And I realize calling on me in Thompson to defensive specialists is not fair. Once again, the average, 18 points and like five, six or seven assists, like whatever it was last year, like he's a productive offensive player. But it's a question at least worth noodling about if your initial reaction is, this is a totally fair deal for the Rockets. Like, I do think offensively he's got to improve to live up to this deal. And I was trying to think of comps and there's not, there's really like, he's kind of dream on greenie in that he has to figure out a way to be a plus offensive player, probably with the ball a little bit more in the style of dream on green. And dream on green is like an all-time genius passer connector. I mean, Thompson's probably not gonna get to that point. But they do, if the jumper never comes, he's got to unlock a little bit more offensively for this deal to pay off because I was trying to think like, non-center defense first guys just don't get paid this amount of money, but I still like the deal. - Zach, Tony Allen never made more than the mid-level exception. - Oh, there you go. - With us. - Do you speak from experience? And it's the thing I worry about with this men deal a little bit is that, so his athleticism is that it's peak right now and it's gonna start, you know, going down. Is the skill level gonna come up in order to offset that? And if not, are you paying $40 million for a guy that you have to like scheme around and the playoffs and kind of mix in and, you know, you might even have to take him out sometimes. Like that's the part that would worry me. You know, both him and his twin brother in Detroit, I think it's the same thing. And how high on the pay scale are you willing to go for that? I mean, I do think he would have had, like if he had gotten restricted for agency, he would have had suitors and offer sheets whatever for sure. So I think Houston, right, like they didn't just hand the max out, which I mean, we've seen teams do that, like just sort of auto maxing any draft pick they hit on, which is also the wrong move. And they showed discipline with Shangoon, you know, last time they went, went through this. I still wondered if it was like a little, a little higher. I actually, I thought he would, because I sort of, we were going to do this episode earlier and then all of the shit happened. So I ballparked him in the high ones and not getting into the 200s. Yeah, it's, it's interesting because to be clear, like I still like to deal for Houston, I'm a believer and I'm in Thompson, but I'm also not a believer in his jump shot. So that leaves me with the fact that yeah, like you are going to have to figure out ways to make him effective offensively in the playoffs when people are not going to guard him, because you also have a center whose game is mostly bound to the pain of Shen glue and becomes a real three point shooting threat and not a kind of token sometimes three point shooting threat. That's a game changer, but similar to a saw in Jalen Durin, who I guess we'll resound with the business at some point. It's, it's just going to be, they're going to be games in the playoffs where it's kind of tough sledding. And you did Raymon comparison comes up again, because that's a guy who made it work in the playoffs with Andrew Bogart and Cavalunia and like true centers, but also sometimes played center. And even when he was playing with the true center, also is playing with the two greatest shooters in the history of basketball. So it's just apples to broccoli as comparison, but I would still do the deal. Before we get to the other rookie guys, we shouldn't we do have to mention Ben Simmons speaking of defense first guys was shooting issues is back in the NBA with the Sacramento Kings on a one year minimum deal. Do you have any re I mean it's it's it's it is like he was a professional fisherman for a while. So like it is just objectively kind of a funny thing to talk about. But it would be a nice story if Ben Simmons could get back to anything like what he used to be, which was at all NBA player once in an all star multiple times. And like why not the King's point guards are currently Darius Acuff. Yeah. And Darius Acuff. So I see no harm, no foul in this for a team that's not going anywhere. The thing that I'll like never the back issues, the health, all that stuff. I said this the last time Ben Simmons was in the league when he signed with the when he get the clip respect him up and everyone's excited. As long as he's afraid to get fouled, I just don't really care about anything else like in terms of like his him. He won't be able to be an impact basketball player. If he plays with a fear of going to the free throw line. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there's always been the questions like just how much does he like basketball in general. Um, you know, maybe a zero way re-ignited his passion. We'll see. I will say for the kid. It's easy to dunk on the Kings because they're the Kings. But they needed another person who could handle the ball. They can bring in Simmons with the second unit. Now monk is off the ball. Now also if you look at their rotation, like they don't have to play Alex caribbean, who was horrendous in summer league. So I do think he like in terms of their roster, he checks some boxes that I think he wouldn't have for some other teams. So the fit is actually pretty good. If he can, if he has anything in the tank. Alright, let's go back to the class of 2023. I think the most interesting guys are all the guards kind of in the middle to lower first round. There's four in particular that I want to group together. Not to George, case and Wallace, Anthony black and Brandon Paginski. Now I, I perhaps too quickly put key off the Georgian kind of a different bucket than the other three, which is not to say he's going to end up signing a deal that's like way richer than case and Wallace's dealer, whatever ends up being the case. 24.6 assists a game, he just reached a level of offensive productivity that these other guys haven't reached yet. And yeah, the jazz again have 60% of their cap tied up into two guys. So if you tie up another 25% of it in key on the George, unless you have Darren Peterson, who's a pretty huge piece like chunk of salary as the number two pick. It gets tight, pretty fast. You know there were reports three, four months ago that the door was like closed on the key on the George extension with Utah. I never believed that was the case doors don't close that early. I think the two sides will talk if they haven't started talking yet. I don't know what affair, but I, I'd be interested in sort of what your system values Kianta has. Obviously the jazz aren't going to give him the max otherwise the deal would be done. And so it's, it's the he's got to accept, you know, we'll see if he accepts something like is, is 30 plus a year too high for him. I think that's like probably where the jazz would maybe think about going. So my system has him rated way lower than that. And I'd be a little concerned about committing to him if I were Utah, given where the rest of their payroll is and Peterson's presence. And I'm just a little concerned that he's like, how good is he really. I guess I'm like, I'm still, I'm still not completely sold that he's, you know, that he's a top three guy and a good team. So how far do you want to go for that? Well, I'm also like hovering over all of this. I should have pressed it with this is like, I don't know what you hear around the league from, from your sources in the front office and agents and all that. There's a general like the way this restricted free agency has played out and, you know, cap space always looks bigger now than it ends up being once we get to the next fiscal of offseason because teams signed extensions and all that. You know, and the apron panic that's gone around the league. There's a general like, could be a tough market next summer for restricted free agents or from the team perspective, like we're happy to take this to restricted free agency if we don't get the kind of deal we want. I think, I think you have to be from the team side. I think that the whole point of committing early is to give yourself a little bit of some extra vig for committing that early and given the player some security. And if you can't, if you can't get that, you might be better off waiting until restricted free agency, especially for when you get below kind of the all start tier. I don't know what's going to happen here with can't they I'm going to make predictions as we get closer to training camp is like yes or no predictions. The next three case and Wallace Anthony black and Brandon Pajemski is a really interesting trio to me. I texted like 10 or 15 front office guys around the league just rank those three and give me ballpark salaries that you think would be fair for most of them. It probably won't surprise you the case and Wallace was universally the number one rated player of these three by rival front office people. I never I did not text anyone with these teams. I didn't want to put them in that position. And generally his like guesses for his average annual salary or what would be fair ranged from 25 on the low end to like 33 on the high end. Anthony black and Pajemski it was like 60 40 with black ranked ahead of Pajemski but some people had pods ahead of black and their fair salaries according to this grouping of people were well below case and Wallace somewhere between a little above the mid level exception like 16 17 18 to like 24 on the high end. Do you agree with that framing. I do agree with that framing. Yes. And I think it's very interesting in all three cases because of the teams positions with the salary cap and luxury tax to that there's more going on here than just the contract with this player. All right, like sell me like case it's just so interesting because their team context are so different particularly case and Wallace and Anthony black. I get the case and Wallace like is defenses much more proven and particularly on the biggest stage than Anthony blacks and Brandon Pajemski's. I think he's regarded as a better three point shooter than Anthony black and has been by percentage I think for their careers. I see their career numbers here career case and Wallace 37% Anthony black 34% now that gap actually kind of shrunk last year Anthony black was 33% on higher volume than case and Wallace actually. And case and Wallace was 35% on lower volume than Anthony black Anthony black drives more you get to align a lot more pull up threes so off the dribble threes Anthony black 35 of 111 case and Wallace only took 47 the entire year. And so there's like a dynamism to Anthony black scheme I think that case and Wallace hasn't quite had to show but he hasn't had to show it because he plays with Shakeel just Alexander a two time MVP. So I think there's an assumption that there's more there than the 13% usage rate or whatever and the piddling number of free throws and assists would suggest, but I do think. And his threes I think are a little bit more above the break than Anthony blacks and a little less open than Anthony black Anthony black is given three so it is not quite the same, but I do think there's a world in which. Anthony black is being a little undervalued because he also hasn't been as available like he just hasn't played nearly as many games let me bring up the career numbers he has played. 211 games or case and Wallace was played to 27 and it was worse last year. No, yeah and and these also started fewer games. There's a world where Anthony black is being a little undervalued I think he's only 22 if the jumper comes up. long. I could see it kind of an interesting player there, but the consensus is that Kaisen's defense is just so good and his shooting is just more proven than Anthony Blacksmith's I get. But I guess I guess you agree with that. And the thunder just going to, I mean, clearly he's going to start this year with Lou Dort gone and have a lot more opportunities with Joe gone and Wiggins gone. I guess they're just going to pay him that amount of money. If you're the thunder given how their cap is set up, would you do, would you offer him say 25 million a year, but it's only three years and there's a player option after year two, so you can get out again. And the reason I'm saying that is because these next two years of the window where the thunder are going to be crazy expensive. It's why they had to get under the second apron this year. They have like a two-year run of blasting through the second apron and shooting money out of the fire hose ahead of them basically. And then on the tail end of that, they got to fix everything and hope some of these other drafts hit by them basically. So I'm wondering if you can offer something like that to case in Wallace that says, we're going to underpay you for these next two years, but then you have your wings early. And you can hit the market as a 25-year-old and get all kinds of cash at that point, whether it's from us or somebody else. And is that a deal that that the thunder would consider and started just to manage these next two years where it's going to be really hard for them? I mean, they've done shorter deals with guys who are not in the big three previously. My intel suggests that case in Wallace would and should turn that down and say that's fine, I'll go under a stricted for the agency. What do you think of Anthony Black? Are the warts that that warty that he's 10 to 12 million dollars per year worse than case in Wallace? The issue you run into here is not just how good is Anthony Black, but how good is Anthony Black on the Orlando Magic? Where basically his strengths are mirrored several other places on that team, and his weakness is mirrored everywhere on that team, right? It's not just that he's a below average shooter. It's that everybody is a below average shooter, right? So he exacerbates an already existing problem. And with their money is so tied up in their top four guys that paying anyone else immediately raises problems for the magic as well. So you can say even as a six man on this team, yeah, Anthony Black's probably worth 20 or 25 million or whatever. I just don't know that Orlando can commit to that the way their payroll is set up right now. Or the only way they can commit to as if they trade one of these other guys in their big four. Well, and that's the thing you mentioned 20 to 25 million and connected to the thing I said about restricted free agency being unkind to players right now is like those 20 to 25 million deals, they're just so interesting how they evolve, right? Like, hey, you kind of need a deal in that range to make any kind of big trade. And like, you can't just have all max and all minimums. It's hard to make trades and be when they happen. And you're kind of like, oh, it makes sense. Rising young player 20 to 25 million dollars. And then in a blink, Christian Brown's deal is underwater. Shade and Sharp's deal is underwater. Malik Monk's deal is underwater. Terrence Man's deal way below this went like onto like into the abyss with James Cameron submarine vehicles. Like, they flip, they become hard to trade really, really fast. And I don't think that I have a case in Wallace, but an Anthony Black deal at that level. And he's a six man. His minutes go down. He gets injured. All of a sudden, it'll look like a bad deal. So you're pulling about the magic. Like, maybe my math is wrong or my projections are not right. They just can't pay all of these guys much longer, right? Like, if they pay Anthony Black, they can't play, they can't pay their starting their core four guys. Plus Anthony Black, plus Wendell Carter Jr.'s not super cheap. Like, at some point, something is going to have to give with this roster. And maybe it starts right now with Anthony Black, maybe not getting an extension. I don't know that that to me seems like you at least are able to kick the can down the road for one more year and see what they have with the new coach. And then finally, I think, I think it's good. They made the first hard decision when they moved on from for mose. And now, if it doesn't work with these four with a different coach, I think they have to make harder decisions about, okay, does it really make sense for us to pay over four to a million for France and Palo and Suggs and Bane or, and if not, which who's the odd man out? By the way, Suggs another 20 something million dollar deal that is underwater right now because he just doesn't play enough. And if I'm Anthony Black, that's the deal I look at and say, look, this guy on your team who doesn't play as much as I do by at least a little bit makes X amount of money. I'm not taking a dime less than that. In which case, I bet there would be no deal. Pods is an interesting one to me because I think he's actually underrated. He got the curse of Joe Laker talking too highly about him and too much about him publicly and the weight of like last young guy currently standing at least with Moses Moody on the injured list for a while of like the failed two timelines accidental experiment. 14 points, five boards, four assists a game, 46% shooting, 37% on threes, 53% on twos. Like pretty rock solid as like a fifth to seventh guy on a good team. And yet he's kind of like a lot of the hardcore Warriors fans like all pods, Joe Laker's guys, such a disappointment. I think he's a pretty good player, but they are in an interesting situation where they're set up to have all this cap space. His cap hold is like 17 million, I think, which is right around the big level exception. I could see the Warriors being like, Hey, we like you. We're just not going above that number or much above too far above that number because it compromises our ability to get players x, y and z whoever might become available. And obviously the other 29 teams are looking at Denver, like hungry vultures, even though I believe personally, like I'm going to take Yokech at his word until something else proves otherwise. But I think that's an I think he's a good player. I don't know what is your system your board system have him at. Yeah. So I have him as a 25 million dollar player. So yeah, totally agree with you. And it comes down to strategy for Golden State. I don't think he's quite good enough. And quite kind of sexy enough as an archetype where you're going to get into bidding wars and stuff. So I do think Golden State might be able to buy their time here and say we'll do the cap hold. If we can't get to a deal, we really like. But in another interesting case because I do think long term like Golden State needs to hang on to them. They have like who else do they have in their pipeline? Which is his which is his sorts of leverage. He's represented by Bill Duffy who's one of the great the most powerful agents in the NBA. That'll be an interesting one. All right, let's go to a group of four guys I have in the prove it camp. The law Kulabali, the number seven pick for the wizards has started most of his career for the wizards and guys who are top 10 picks on bad teams who are full-time starters and have the kind of defensive potential. He has 10 to walk into their crappy teams for an office and be like, Hey, I should get all the money, right? Like I've kind of the guy here, but all of a sudden, Trey Young's in town, Anthony Davis' in town, AJ DeBance's in town, Kishan George is really good and probably has supplanted you as a starter like Bill Kulabali. I don't think opens training camp as a starter next season for the wizards and is a career what 31% shooter on mostly wide open threes with like an off the bounce attacking closeouts game that sometimes flashes and sometimes goes dormant for quite a long time because it's a hard it's hard to attack off the dribble when you catch the ball and a defender is 15 feet in front of you being like, Hey, I'm just here waiting for you. Like you can shoot or drive right into me. I don't think that there are any meaningful discussions that really happened. I think they're going to wait till till camp, but that's a prove it one to me. Hard pass. Okay. I just don't see any point in extending him right now. Yeah, unless he takes a cheap deal, right? Which why would you do that? Like a minimum? Wow. I mean, yeah, look, he's what is he? 2021 years old? He is 22 barely, 22 and 44 days. So yeah, I mean, I don't disagree. Oh, minimum, maybe I disagree, but I just hope like no need for Derek lively. It's been a while. And when it's been a while and there are continued questions about your lower body and your health and continued optimism among your representation that like the guy who played a critical role in your finals run is still in there and still could develop into a whale of a player on both ends of the floor. That feels like a recipe for yeah, we'll just everyone will just buy it our time. But I that I was so excited about Derek lively before the injuries and the foot stuff really really hit him. I think you could be a really good player, but that feels like a prove it one to me. I would if I could if I could get him below the mid-level, I might take the plunge on that. I mean, if I there'd be, you know, you'd have the exhibit six or whatever it is where, you know, with the injury protections and whatnot, you might not it might not be full of the guaranteed. But yeah, if I could get like a, you know, a three-year deal of something that kind of money. Yeah, I think really hard about that. I'd be much more excited about that than it would be about doing Naji Marshall at three for 52. Let's put it that way. I agree with you. Like if I had confidence in his health, like if I'm a side jury and Mike Schmitz and I have all the records there and I know what I know and I'm confident in it, I think that that level of a deal is it like I would do that for sure. I don't know their Rich Paul and Clutch are doing that. That said, for as often as Rich Paul gets a reputation, we're playing hardball and taking things to the end with his restricted free agents. He's also done some deals. Shade and Sharp comes to mind. where it's like, hey man, I know you think you're like this level of player, but this is $80 million or $90 million being thrown at you with like no track record of real NBA production. Like you should take that and he's done, you can chart his deals and everyone focuses on the negotiations that go really hard and really for like months and months. There are other deals like that. Speaking of clutch, I believe they also represent Scoot Henderson, the number three pick in in this draft. I have no idea John no idea he had a very interesting year last year when he was moved into more of like a hybrid off ball player. A couple of really strong games against San Antonio in the playoffs the jumper seems to have come along the rim finishing and turnovers not quite as much the defense not nearly up to expectations. But there's something in there. There's something in there and I don't know if the Blazers are going to pay right now to see what it is, but he's an interesting candidate. Would he take like third guard money? I mean, you already have Lillard and Marant there, you already have Sharp making 21, you already have you have Drew holiday making 37 next year at least. And you have to money camera there too if you consider him a guard. So there's just a lot of guys there already. They're not all that are as long term as as good as, but he hasn't really shown himself to be starting level quality. So good, you know, three years of mid level money like that. I can't imagine going any higher than that if I'm if I'm Portland. And I just don't know if that's that's a thing that he's willing to accept right now. And if I'm his agents, I probably I'm not taking that only because sharps already hurt. Marant is a lock to miss a certain amount of games. Dame is coming off and Achilles injury Drew is aging seems like a perhaps a trade candidate. I don't know that I don't think they want to trade them. They love Drew. Everybody loves Drew. But yeah, my point is like it feels like there are a lot of minutes there to be had for scoot if he their confidence in his health and so yeah. By the way, Brandon Miller, the number two pick is a very interesting one. I'm saving that for a separate episode because I'm so interested in him in his place in Charlotte. But do you have any quick thought you want to get off on Brandon Miller? Yeah, he's a different case to me because big wings who can shoot and handle. There's just there's always a place for them on the floor. So you you you don't worry as much about paying a guy like that starter money because there's no fit questions at all. Like he's going to fit no matter what what the other four players are, he's going to fit like that's not the concern. So maybe he's not in all stars. You don't want to pay him like an all star, but there's a level in there where a contract totally makes sense, you know, we talk about these guys making 30 or whatever. Or maybe even a little more than that, but like he's he's right in that window. Yeah, I did to me extending him as a is a no brainer for Charlotte. Max for him at 25%. Let's pretend no escalators or anything or anything. And I believe starts at like 43 a year or 44 a year or something like that. You know, Charlotte strikes me as a front office and ownership group that's not just going to hand you the max that's going to negotiate a little bit. But yeah, if he came in somewhere near Amen Thompson. Or even a little bit higher. I wouldn't be surprised. And like you like I'm a big time believer in Brandon Miller. And I keep saying this. I love con got all the love the mellow got including from me their surge last season coincided precisely when Brandon Miller became healthy and available for their team. Hi, Mayhaka's junior just got to the bucks totally unclear what his role on team is going to be there. Just a mess of players with weird overlapping skill sets. I actually think there's even a chance they start color where and miles turn her together from what I've totally which would kind of marginalize Haka's to a bench roll kind of by default. That feels like a hey, we're just getting to know you let's wait and see. We're not really afraid of, you know, restricted free agent stuff really hurting us down the line. Let's wait and see. But maybe I don't know a six man of the year candidate, whatever. Last year I he was my pick for six man of the year on the fan. How does he look outside that heat weird no pick and roll, no, the roast system that he thrived in last year feels like a way to see to me. If you're the box, can you give him Gary Trent money? Oh boy, I'm so glad you brought that up. We all kind of that that's kind of been like, you know, hey, clipper sting just happened and blah blah blah. I mean, what in the world, man, I've already talked about it, but that's like the most obvious. I don't even know if that's the right word, but like as you know, everybody's been talking about the Gary, I first started hearing about it when I was on my way to the combine in May, like, hey, if you heard about this Gary Trent contract that's coming down the pike, like it's been the, and now it's here three years. No, four years, four years, 64 million. I mean, look, it's 9% of the cap big whoop, but like, you know, I'm okay. Good luck trading that deal. Yeah, and obviously, I mean, the, the, the inside basketball on this for those who don't know they sign Gary Trent to a one year minimum where it went to look like he might be getting more than that. And then he has the, I think he was early bird now, so that they could pay him more this year. So that's where the fishiness of this whole deal comes in. It's just a horrible contract that Milwaukee's books now. Sar Thompson is the last guy that we haven't really talked about yet, and I haven't talked about him in part because I don't even think it can start with him until they finished the jail and during extension, which is still the new contract rather, which is still going on. So that's been painted as like acrimonious and nasty and I'm sure there's been moments of like extreme frustration on both ends. It's also like a coordinate to make mans reporting, which is from what I've heard accurate and actually maybe even a little bit the gap he talked about between two sides of the gap might even be smaller than that. It feels like, Oh, okay, really like we're all then we're pretty close. We'll get it done. It also feels like the kind of deal with whatever frustration might exist now. As soon as pen is put the paper and jail and during begins depositing checks that will eventually equal like $200 million into his checking account, I think everyone's going to be fine and move on with life. And then a sartonson's deal comes down the pike and I expect it to kind of be like like this where the we're changing Langdon goes to a sartonson and his agents and is like, hey, you know, we're trying to build a team here. Cade makes X during makes X defensively your a plus plus plus plus offensively like your brother. It's just a little bit walkie at times, but we believe in your playmaking. You know, there was all this talk at the beginning of last year, we're going to give them the ball more and see what he can do that didn't really come to fruition. Right. That's that that's going to be a very interesting one. I don't what is your system say on him. Yeah, I mean, it's it's kind of it's a little bit like it's a lighter case of his brother, right? So my system isn't quite as bullish on a sartr. I think there's less there, as you say, as an on ball player, but again, elite defender transition player. Can you pay that guy 30 a year? Absolutely. If you're paying that guy 40 a year, are you worried does it compromise you in other ways? Yeah, I think you start getting into that. I think a men's deal actually sets a little bit of a high bar for a sartr and his value like when I wrote this out, I was like, yeah, 165 for a sartr and I don't know, I might be on the low end of that now. I think I do that if I'm the pistons like 5 165 150 something like 30 a year because the offensive questions are real and again, Durin is also just 22 years old developing offensively maybe may have turned 23 by now. And so like their development will rise together and even so I don't see either one of them becoming like a quality shooter. So you're going to the development is going to have to be how do we coexist as passers, cutters, rebounders, screeners, you know, how do we put together more tic tac toe kind of sequences and then kill people on the glass and kill people on defense. That's the formula and they'll grow together in that sense and that that 3035 it sounds like depending on your perspective from a sartr perspective, it probably sounds below market from casual fans perspective, it probably sounds like holy shit that amount of money for a guy who averaged whatever points a game. Yeah, I think it's fair and again like it's $165 million like you can egos get involved and like where am I on the salary hierarchy gets involved, but it's still a crap ton of money. Yeah, and feels like fair ish to me, but again, until they get done with Durin and see what his number actually is, I don't I don't think that they can even start to do this. I agree with you 100% there you got to get during the finish line first john holinger anybody anything we didn't cover that you were dying to talk about self nerdy extension guy rice sensible yes. I've always liked rice here's the thing about, but I think I looked up his stats because I looked up Cody Williams stats for like the last 20 games of the season, because he had like a little bump and I was like a Minnesota. I was like, right since my average 24 points again for like a month and a half and I remember some of those games and they were, you know, pretty tangtastic. The deal will get on the court and score now sometimes he's going to score in ways that are going to drive little hearty to kick a hole in. score is stable, like six of 50, you'll take 15 shots in five minutes. Uh, the defense and playmaking may not be where they want it to be. But there is like something there. So if would you go to him, like, where's your like, I'd do this if I were you, Todd, given the rest of my cap questions. Is it 12 million? Is it below the mid level? It's 10 million below the mid level. If I could do three for 30, three for 33, something like that. That's probably where I'm happy. He's, he's 38% career on threes. Yeah, he can shoot, man. He doesn't really pass. And he doesn't really play enough defense. But I don't see any reason why at least like he's, he's not, he's not a non passer who doesn't see the passes. Like he'll throw some pass or like, oh, yeah, he gets the basic reach. He's got to make. He just likes to shoot defensively. I'm not sure what's there. But I agree with you. Like that's a good number. And I would do that. I haven't even looked up who is agent is. But that's that I'm glad you I'm glad you brought him up. All right, John Hollinger, the best ever. Do it. What's coming up for you at the athletic? Let's last week you wrote about the Clippers. You wrote a couple piece. You contribute to another piece about the Clippers. You're contributing across the board at the athletic. But you have your own column. What are we writing about this week? So I am bagging away and all my season preview stuff. I'm going to be running about some off season moves about some teams that I think are going to go under. And then we'll get into my as we get closer into training camp and stuff. You know, my exact predictions for all the standing so people can laugh at them in March. I love those columns. I read the over under one religiously because I want to see I at the same time I'm prepping for the big over under podcast. So I'm going to do with Bill and Joe House. And so I have my own predictions. But I don't have the formulas behind them that you do. So when yours come out, I'm like, let's see where we jive and where we don't jive. I believe last year we were aligned on a couple of key teams, all of which went wrong. I believe we were aligned on I believe we were aligned on Boston under which was not good. Yeah. We might have been aligned on Indiana under. I was I was under on Indiana which so that worked better. Yeah. And I believe we were heavy on golden state over which also which also failed badly. But it made me feel better that someone else was seeing some of the stuff I was seeing. So it's always it's always a great read. And you don't you predict like every playoff round too. Like don't you do a bracket and or is that something you do closer to the playoffs? No. So I don't do that until the playoffs start. Yeah. And Hollinger and Duncan weekly podcast with the great Nate Duncan. Always one of my Peloton listens if I'm not doing my Peloton movie. Zach's Peloton movie update the last one I did was the French connection, which I had never seen before. A plus love the French connection big black hole on my list. So that's my that's my movie update. John Hollinger. The brew crew. I'm all I'm all for. Let's go. Let's go. This is the year Zach. It's it's it's a great story. And there are really fun team to watch. They're not fun to play against from a met's perspective, but they will be they can be my official national league team wants to play off start. I'll see you soon, bud. All right. Thanks, Zach. All right. It's time to welcome in a special guest. Mike Sure. You know, I'm from the office Parks and Recreation. The good place. We did a whole podcast. Me, you Jen Statsky about the good place back in the day. Brooklyn 9. 9. One of my favorite underappreciated shows shout out Captain Raymond whole one of my favorite characters of all time. And you are the author of this book right here. Co author with the legendary Joe Paznansky big fan two friends 82, thousand four to 90 miles and the wild wild wonderful sports. We love you are part Mike Sure of Zach went on vacation and read some books month here at the Zach Lo Show. And this was one of the books. How are you doing? I'm great. Thank you for having me. This is a absolutely delightful meditation on fandom. A subject that has been newly close to my heart as a reinvigorated once insane, then lapsed, now kind of a different sort of insane Metz fan along with Mike clinically insane daughter. It's a beautiful book in which you guys try to figure out sort of why do we all do this? What what choices do we make in life? Which choices as fans are binding? Why do we love these silly things that we can't control? Why do they continue to linger in our life when other childhood pursuits vanish away with time? And you guys went to all sorts of different sporting events odd ball events all around the world trying to talk to fans about why do you do this? You go to the world darts championship. You go to a midnight baseball game in Alaska. So I'll start there. What's the best single thing you went to for this book? Well, some of it we, you know, really carefully planned. Like the midnight sun baseball game is this like semi pro baseball game. They play at midnight in Alaska on the summer solstice when the sun never goes down. So they play at baseball game at midnight with no lights, which is really beautiful and kind of special. We had a really kind of magical night there. Just experiencing this very strange event. But some of it was unplanned. Some of it was just like, let's just go see what this thing is about. I went to see, I went to the Olympics in Paris and ended up seeing USA Serbia, which I, for my money, I don't think I'll ever see a better basketball game in my life. A more exciting basketball game. A more sort of like meaningful and moving basketball game because it's LeBron and KD and, you know, Booker and Embed and all these guys sort of in staff at the end towards the end of their careers, having this moment where they all were playing for the same thing for the first time in a meaningful way. And whether it was one of those events where I didn't know I was about to see the greatest basketball game of all time. I went to see Wembee in his rookie year because I just had to see him play live. Those were, in a weird way, those were the more meaningful moments than the ones we planned, like the World Darts Championship or, or I, you know, I went to my first Liverpool match. I've been a Liverpool fan for 30 years. I'd never seen them play. The unexpected moments were the more, were the more meaningful ones to me because that to me is the essence of fandom. Like one of the reasons we do this is you just never know what you're going to see when you attend an event. And I, you know, in my, now, whatever 40 plus years of fandom of a bunch of different sports, my favorite games that I've ever seen are the ones where something came out of the blue. And I just was like, oh my God, I'm so glad I was here. You know, that, that is the most meaningful fan experience to me. What's an example of that that isn't in the book? I mean, when I was living in Boston or actually right after I moved to New York, I went down to Fenway, I'm a Red Sacks fan to see a Red Sacks game. And before the game, there was a message on the, on the scoreboard that said Happy Birthday, no more garciapara. And I was like, oh my God, it's no Mars birthdays in late July. And then he hit three home runs in the game. And the crowd was just like losing its mind. It was like every time he came up, it was like that we're just seeing something special and interesting at, you know, the, the one that I do write about in the book is I went to see a Red Sacks Dodgers game at Dodgers Stadium with a bunch of Red Sacks fans. And it was the game where Shohei Otani hit a 483 foot home run to right center. And he hit like what he hit the ball. We were sort of behind home played off to the first base side. And so we had a perfect view of the ball just going supersonic and entering the ionosphere. And he, like the ball landed over the, the designed the sort of old 60s deco designed outfield. I don't even know what you call it. It's a stanchion. It's like the way the stadium is built. I've been to hundreds of Dodgers games. I've never seen a ball hit there in batting practice like it to see someone do something like that in live action in a game, even though it was the team I was not rooting for was still like, I'm so glad I saw that, you know, I saw Freddie Freeman's grand slam in game one of the series. Yeah. And I, I just giggled. I just, I remember just giggling and laughing. I mean, first of all, because the Yankees lost always great. But also like, I just was like, Oh, this is one of those moments. This is, this would be played on a high lay reels for the rest of time. And I was actually here. My son was not with me. I have an 18 year old son. And I had not given him one of the tickets that I got to the game. I'd gone with friends instead. And he's still to this day has never let me forget it. But it's just those moments are so magical. And it's like sometimes when your team, your Mets fan, you understand this. When your team is suffering, you do ask yourself the question, why do I do this to myself? What, what is the point of this? Like I, it makes me miserable. And the answer is those moments, those times when you just can't believe what you're looking at. It's just, it's, you know, it's unbelievable. I'll tell you the other one. Since here at NBA, Guy, first and foremost, I was at the Nuggets Clippers playoff game when Yokech threw the shot up at the end of regulation. And Gordon tipped it in with less than 0.1 on the clock. And not only we were there, we had gotten my agents tickets and we were in the front row. We were on the floor. And Yokech took that shot probably six feet from my face. Like I watched that ball head toward the basket from the same exact angle that Nicole Yokech watched that shot head to the basket. Like my son has a video of it. He was taking a movie the whole time. And it's, we watch it like once a month. We just block you that up and watch it because it was so incredible. So those are the times when I feel like fandom is, is worth all of the, you know, Sturman drawing that we associated with. I think, I think I texted you during or after that game because I saw you on TV. and just yet another great moment in Clipper's history that you have in person. - Dave had a lot of them. - So you have now put in two. I was gonna ask you, in the book, you mentioned three iconic kind of games and I was gonna ask you to rank them as spectator experiences from, like, not best to worse, but just like what if you had to pick one, what was the best to be at? You mentioned USA Serbia, that was gonna be one of them. You were at, I believe, Clipper's Spurs game seven in 2015 when Chris Paul hits the buzzer shot to win the series, basically. And at Yankee Stadium, I believe, Pedro Martinez strikes out 17 in a complete game, one hitter. I actually, one of my very good friends was also at that game and still, like, is still talking about it. It's 1999, I think. What if you had to pick one game to, like, relive from scratch? Like, you could have raced in front of your memory and go again, which of the games is it? - It's got to be the Pedro game. I mean, that was at a time when we really felt as Red Sox fans, like, we were never getting out of the wilderness. Like, we were never gonna beat this team. They were at the absolute height of their power and they had just steam rolled us, like, so often. Like, in the regular season and the playoffs, they beat us again in the playoffs that year. You know, they would win the series that year, they won the series the next year. Like, but I write about this in the book, like, that game was the first time where I was like, oh, we have a guy that they're scared of now. Like, that's never been the case. And just that feeling was so meaningful to me at that moment that like, oh, we have a weapon that we can deploy against the evil empire. I will say that the Chris Paul buzzer beating layup. That was a year, if you remember the series, I believe, that was the like five four matchup. That was the first round of the playoffs, right? And those two teams were both so good that no one could believe that this was a first round matchup. This felt like a Western conference finals into a matchup. >> It might even been, it might even been three six, like the Spurs and the Game 82 randomly to the Pelicans, I think, and it completely warped the seating so that these two teams who were clearly title contenders had to play. And what I still call it, the greatest first round series in the history of the NBA, there are some other candidates. But that's one of them. >> That definitely one of them. And I will say that the thing that that game gave me, there's a long chapter in the book where I just write about my history of NBA fandom. Because like you said about the match, like I was a huge NBA fan in the 80s. It completely disappeared from my life in the 90s. And then when I moved to LA and started going to Clippers games, not Lakers games, Clippers games, and Steph entered the league, I, it started to come back to me. And that game, more than any other game, I would say, like lit a fire in me for the NBA. Like I was all in on the NBA after seeing that game live. And since then have been an insane fan. Like I watch pretty much every regular season, Celtics game, either live or on tape delay. I watch every playoff game I can watch. I'm like all in on the NBA. And it was in large part because of the experience of watching those two teams play in that game. So as a, as a singular event, the Pedro game, pretty close to that is the, is the Clippers game as the Chris Paul game. And then USA Serbia is obviously like, will always be special to me. But it, that only happened because I watched Chris Paul hit that layup. So that would be roughly, I would say, the order of be living them over again. All right, a lot of this book is about the nature of fandom, how we pick our teams, why we pick our teams, when and life we lose touch with teams. Can we pick new teams, et cetera? One of my theses of life is you can't pick a team as an adult. It's just not possible. Like I, and really care the same way. Like I have all these dad friends who are like, I decided I was an Arsenal fan eight years ago. And now I live and die with Arsenal. I'm like, no, you don't, I just don't think that that's possible. I think you have to pick a team as a kid for some particular specific reason to you. Where you live, who your dad or mom is a fan of. Some, there has to be some organic connection. And then you are stuck with that team for the rest of your life. You can't switch teams, you can't pick new teams. You actually go through the exercise in this book of trying to become a fan of a team as an adult. And you go very enthusiastically about it. You pick a women's college basketball team. And you realize it just doesn't take. So do you think it's like, is there any circumstance where it's possible to become a fan as an adult in a real, non sort of put on way? Yes, a qualified yes, right? Like if you have never gotten into soccer before and you watch the World Cup and you got World Cup fever and you're like, I want to follow this sport now. And you poke around and you look around at the Premier League or the Bundesliga or whatever. You follow a player that you loved and you adopt that team. And you're already, you're predisposed to sports fandom. I think you, I'm going to give some grace to folks who come to things late in life. But I also agree with you that part of, I think, what sports fandom does is it taps into something very childlike inside us, right? And it's like a feeling of helplessness. Like you love this team so much. And there's nothing you can do to help them. That's why we're superstitious, I think. That's why we wear the same hat or wear the same shirt or whatever. That's like a very childlike thing. And so I think that the bonds you make to teams when you're a kid are more intense and more powerful. I would also say that I do allow for switching teams under certain circumstances. Joe Posnansky, who I wrote the book with, has been a Cleveland Browns fan all his life. The Cleveland Browns finally just stabbed him in the back once too many times. And he went on a quest to say like, I need a new team. Now what's interesting is he didn't find one. He found that even when he tried just like us in the book, when we tried to adopt a new team, it kind of just didn't take. Like it's too deeply ingrained in him. In the book, what happens is we decide to see if we can become fans of a sport. We get a random number generator and a list of all the colleges in the world and all the sports. And we ended up with the Idaho State Women's Basketball team. And it was like, all right, here we go. Like we're going to be fans of this team. We're going to root for them. We're going to watch them play in Poca Tello when they take on, you know, Missoula State or whatever. And but after like a month of like really trying, it just, we were like, this isn't real. We're not, it's falling flat. Like I grew up in Connecticut. Yukon Basketball men's and women's. It was the biggest thing in the world. I'm a Yukon women's fan. I'm a Yukon men's fan. Like I'm not going to be able to just transfer that intensity and that emotion and that level of caring to a new team. I just don't think it's quite as possible as it is when it's something you're given or adhered or are born with or regionally is given to you. So I would say I mostly agree with you, but there are certain circumstances where I feel like people are allowed occasionally to choose a new team. - I guess I would amend it by the, because I was very like ever like the diehard Knicks fans had a love hate relationship with the bandwagon, Johnny Cumblyley Knicks fans in this magical first time in 53 years to have a run. And I was very forgiving of the Knicks bandwagon fans, like especially the ones that lost touch with the team for 15 or 20 years and jump back in. Even the ones that just like I never liked basketball before in my life and now I love this Knicks team. Knowing it's not going to mean the same thing to them as it is to the diehards, but I don't, I don't think you can switch teams. I just don't think it's possible to develop a loyalty to one team in one sport as a kid and then switch to another team and another sport. But I guess so the adopting it to you, like I tried with soccer. Croatia has this guy, Guardiol, my wife is Croatian. I follow, I guess the Croatian national team, I'm a fan of, but that, it's not the same. It's like once every four years thing. They have this guy, Guardiol, who was in 2022, was like a young up and coming superstar that all the Premier League teams were like trying to get transferred to them. Now I was like, you know what? Maybe it's time for me to pick a Premier League team. I'll pick whatever team he goes to. But then it was going to be Chelsea and everyone was like, you can't be Chelsea. Chelsea's the Yankees, you can't be them. Then he ends up going to Man City. I'm like, what am I going to become? They're the best team in the Premier League. They win every year. I'm now going to be a Man City fan. And so it didn't take for me. Yeah, it's hard because you run into problems like that, right? Like when I chose my Premier League team because of the 98 World Cup, because Michael Owen, I was rooting for England and because they have a long history of failure. And as a Red Sox fan, I identified the long histories of failure. So I became a Michael Owen fan and that led me to Liverpool. And I was just like, all right, I don't know anything about Liverpool, but I'm all in on Liverpool. Then John Henry amazingly bought Liverpool like a number of years later and it was just this wonderful coincidence. But if I had, if he had played for Man United, I wouldn't have chosen them because Man United at the time was the Yankees. And like I Beckham played for Man United. And when I was looking for a team, I was like, well, that guy's like great. And he's roughly my age. And he is like the famous. And he's, you know, he's got this movie that about with his name in the title. Like that was an obvious choice for me. But I just couldn't do it. I was just like, I'm not rooting for the New York Yankees of the Premier League. Forget it. So I got lucky when it came to that. And it's a little bit like if you are in that position where you're trying to find a random team, you come up, you hit these problems like the ones you just described where you know too much about sports to be like, Oh, I'll just accept whatever this is. Sometimes it just doesn't work that way. And I know a lot of people, do you know, the Tom Hanks story about Aston Villa like this is one of my favorite. So Tom Hanks, he writes about this in the introduction of the book. Tom Hanks is doing a movie and he goes to England to do press. This is years and years and years ago. And he has jet lag and he turns on the TV and he's watching highlights of soccer, which he knows nothing about. And he sees that one of the teams is called Aston Villa. And he's like, what a weird name for a team. Aston Villa. So he's doing the press the next day and they say, what are you going to do while you're here in London? And he goes like, I don't care about any of this press. I just want to see Aston Villa play live. And it just out as a joke. And all of the, you know, not knowing it was a joke, all the press was like, why Aston Villa? What's going on? He was like, they're they're my favorite team, you know. So then he gets reached out to from the Aston Villa front office and says, do you want to actually see a match? Come on up. He goes to the Aston Villa stadium, watches a game and is hooked for life. And to this day is like the world's biggest Aston Villa supporter. He goes to games every year. They celebrate him as they're like celebrity. He is to them. What Spike Lee is to the next? Like he's just this, he's like this avatar of their team. And so, you know, there's no one way that you inherit these things or choose these things. Sometimes it's random chance. But it, it doesn't always take and it, and it, and it, you need something special to some magic sauce to happen if you're an adult in order for it to really become part of your life. I just don't fundamentally believe you can care that much as you about versus the team. You're a hardliner. I love this. I love the state. Well, but I've never felt more spoken to than when you describe different journeys of fandom. And one of them is called the bell curve where you have a peak and a decline. And you describe it like this in the book. Something you discovered in over time, your fandom grew and grew until one day of peaked and then slowly fell back to earth. Maybe you fell in love with comic books as a kid, but then you got married and had kids of your own and comic books took a backseat to the rest of your life. You remember those things fondly, but now your, now your fandom lies dormant. That is exactly what happened to me with the Mets. And I wrote about this in 2015 for Grandland. My most, my most painful moment as a sports fan. I was like an absolute batshit in St. Mets fan, like in college, on through like my mid 20s. I watched every game when I was home. I had the wild card standings, like on my whiteboard in my college dorm room. I was refreshing, net scape windows wet back when that was the only way to like see pitch count updates in like Mets games in college. And then like I got a job and a wife and a kid. And then the Mets made the World Series in 2015. And I was living in Long Island City, Queens. And the whole city was on fire. And I was like, man, I don't even know like one guy plays for the team. And it was so painful. But then you describe the double peak when you get the reinvigorated peak laid in your life for later in your life. And that's me now. I got back into the Mets two years ago. And I got laid off from ESPN. And I had nothing to do. And I made a decision like, I'm just going to go back in. I'm back in now. I'm going to stay back in and that's, that's okay. And that's what may be forgiving of the bandwagon X-Fans. But then you find this woman Linda Holmes who works at NPR, who is me. She was a Philly's fan as a kid. She lapsed out of it. They won the World Series when she was nine years old. The Mets won the World Series when I was nine years old. She tried to pick a new team. The Astros. She found herself emotionally unable to develop another loyalty. And then she went to a Philly's game. And she was like, I'm I'm back in now. It comes back so fast every part of it, the rules of the game, the style of the game, but also the sense of community like the first Mets game I went to when I got back into it. Edwin Diaz came in and I'm standing up. I'm high five in the people behind me. We're count I'm like making the strike out motion like your friends with these people because you write in the book about how one of the reasons or sports fans is to find a niche community of people like us. And when I was in high school, everybody was the Yankees fan except like four of us were Mets fans, and we would like read prospect or magazines about Paul Wilson and Jason Isringhausen. And it was like Bill Pulsifer. And Bill Pulsifer, who was my favorite of the three generation K. They were called. And and we and that's that bond. And you immediately developed that bond with strangers. But I felt so seen like I felt like a phony getting back into the Mets after being out for 15 years. But I feel the opposite now. I feel like it's an actual organic way to go through life and Linda Holmes, I want to have her on because her experience is just like mine. And now she's insane about the Phillies again. Completely insane. I mean, this is what you're talking about really when you talk about like how it doesn't work the same unless it's something you had when you were a kid. Like when you're a kid and you have a fandom that's intense, even if it goes dormant, you're basically like the winter soldier, right? Like at some at any more of the Manchurian candidate, like someone can wake you up and reignite that feeling and that fire. And that's what happened to me with the NBA. Like that's from this section I when I'm writing about my NBA fandom. That's what happened to Linda with the Phillies. That's what happened to you with the Mets. Like that cannot happen unless it was baked into you when you were very young. And you have that that sense of like a timeless connection to something. But how fun for you? Like it's I mean, obviously the Mets are a mess and they you know, it's not great. It's not great. But it doesn't really matter because now you're back on this journey with them. And if they can figure it out and Steve Cohen can throw money at the right guys instead of the wrong guys, you're going to feel what you always wanted to feel when you were a kid, which is that feeling of like, I care about this so much and they came through for me and they made me and all my friends in my community happy. Now here's the twist that you're going to like. My dad is from New Hampshire. He is a lifelong diehard Red Sox fan. What happened? So when I was about six or seven years old, I was like, I love baseball. It's time for you to pick a team. And he padded me on the head like a like a 76 calm dad. It was like, look, I don't think you should be a Red Sox fan. No, no, it's just, no, but it's just like, it's just going to mean painful. Yeah, for the rest of your life. Here's what I'm going to suggest. First of all, you can't pick the Yankees. They're banned. You can't pick them. They're evil. Good for them. Good for him. He's like, how about a national league team? Here are your two choices. The Mets are the local teams. It's like 83 or something 84 or your mother is from Pittsburgh. And actually the first game I ever saw was a three of a stadium. And it was Mets pirates. And it was around this time. And I say, I said, whoever wins this game will be my team. And the Mets won the game. But my, the point of telling me this is, as I'm lapsing out of the Mets, I so badly want my father to see the Red Sox finally win the world series. Right. That in 2003, 2004, I became emotionally invested in the Red Sox during the playoffs in a way that is perverse as a diehard fan of another team. Like I cared for those brief moments, I cared too much. I just, just I wanted to see them win for him. Right. And I like couldn't go back right away to being a diehard Mets fan because I got, I got emotionally conflicted. And in your book, you write about the Aaron Boone homerun. Please tell for people the prank that multi-time Zack Lo Show low post guest Joe Mandy played on you and the ones at the writers room of the good place or where wasn't. Yeah, I believe it was the good place. Yeah. So we are the good place. We had, we would find people come in and say, have you seen this funny thing on YouTube? And we would watch it. And if we liked it, I would bookmark it and put it on the bookmarks bar. And then if we were banging our heads against a wall and trying to come up with ideas and we're getting nowhere, I would just like randomly play one of these videos. And it's the same videos. You know, it's the Rodney Stanger video where there's like the news report about a missing girl. And they say, we're looking for this man Rodney Stanger. And instead it's a, what comes up on the screen is a picture of like a hamster holding a sign. And it's like, that's not Rodney Stanger. You know, and just these little bits of like internet to try this that, that, you know, everybody passes around. So I would click on them a lot and we would just watch them and enjoy them. So one day I had to leave the room for some reason. Joe Mandy, Minnesota, Timberwolves, Fan, Legend, Joe Mandy, went to the computer and changed the URLs that were linked to all of those, you know, bookmarks on the bookmarks bar. So that every single one of them linked to a video of Aaron Boone hitting the home running against the Red Sox, the 11th inning of the seventh game of the game of the ALCS in 2003. The worst moment of my life. Like, and I understand that that means I've had a very good life. But that really was the lowest moment of my life. So I get back into the room. We're talking, we're talking we're talking after a, I don't know, half an hour. I just randomly click one of the links. What comes up is the Aaron Boone home run. I meet like my, the blood rushed to my head. My eyes went black. My adrenaline and cortisol spiked and I cursed at everyone in the room. As they were, by the way, laughing because they thought, ha, ha, what a funny joke. I yelled at all of them and I stormed out of the room and immediately was like, that is not a rational response to this at all. That's the child in you, though. That's what's in all of us. And by the way, since that moment, they won the World Series the next year. They won in 2007. They won in 2013. Like that wound should have completely healed. But because of how of that, what, what it made me feel in that moment, seeing that image, I just had no ability to modulate my response. And so I came back in after eight seconds and was like, really sorry. That was not a proof. I apologize. And everyone was like, I remember the looks on their faces, which were like, Oh, we thought this was going to be funny. And it was not received as such. So like, that's what this thing does to us. That's part of why Joe and I wanted to write this book is like, I mean, it was a, it was so visceral. It was so fresh in my mind, even whatever was 15 years later, that I couldn't control the way I reacted. And that is a very, like, what else in our lives is like that? It's almost nothing, I think. I, that game is one of my flashball memories as a sports fan, even though I am a meds fan, I remember exactly where I was. I was at the lion's head tavern on Amsterdam Avenue between, I think, one tenth and one eleventh or something. Yeah. I know it well. I used to live up there. And same tavern where I once failed in an attempt to hit on Julius Stiles, but that's a different story for a different day. It didn't go great for me. Shockingly. You might be shocked to find out. It didn't go well. But I was obviously cheering for the Red Sox. I had talked to my dad like before the game where he was, where he was going to watch it. How was he feeling about the game? I was there with like six friends and it was the, maybe the most electric non-stadium atmosphere for any, any game I've ever watched. It was like 50, 50 Yankees fans, Red Sox fans in this bar out of control. And then, you know, Boone hits the home run off tomb wake filled of all people. Why did it have to be Tim Wakefield, just like a unbelievably lovable guy. And all the Yankees fans started chanting in unison, 19, 18, 18, yeah. And in that moment, I'm not even a Red Sox fan, but I, I will say one thing I never did was I never wore Red Sox merchandise. I never let myself do go that far because I'm a meds fan. I get that. But I'm so devastated for my dad. I hate the Yankees so much. These got these Philistines are chanting 19, 18 to me. And honestly, there was in my soul somewhere sprung up this impulse that, of course, I did not act on because I have other parts of my soul that put it, pushed it down to like pick up a bar stool and slam somebody in the head with it. And just conjuring that image in my brain was like, I'm kind of disturbed that my, even a little part of my brain can picture myself cracking over this, this Yankees fan, cracking more of the head with a bar stool, but that's my air and Boone game memory. Can I tell you a story that's not in the book is on 9/11, was living in New York. Obviously, like the world just absolutely changes and a flash, devastating, like terrified, exhausted, like people are coming to my, I lived on 16th Street and a bunch of people came to my apartment and we all gathered together and tried to make sense of what was obviously a senseless moment in our lives. And after like seven, eight, nine hours of just like watching TV and trying to figure out what the world was, was like now. We realized none of us had eaten. So we went, there was a restaurant on my corner. We went out and we sat outside and we just ordered some food and we're just, you know, ambulances and fire trucks are rushing down 7th Avenue and it's just, it just seemed like we're just in a days, obviously. And I'm sitting there and all of a sudden, you know, there were a bunch of people out on this patio and all of a sudden I hear someone go, 19, 18, and I was like, what is happening? And I realized I'm wearing a Red Sox hat, which I almost never did in New York, in the year 2001. I'm wearing a Red Sox hat and someone is taunting me and I look over and I see a guy like four tables away smiling at me and pointing to the hat like his, where the hat would be on his head. And I looked at him like, what are you doing? And he goes, Red Sox, Sox. And I swear to God, I know this is crazy, I, for the first time all day, I felt better. I felt better about the what was happening because it was like the life goes on. The planet is going to continue to spin. Yankee fans will always taunt me for being a Red Sox fan. The rivalry is intact like it was the first thing that day that happened that was normal. And I think about that all the time about like in the, in the midst of the worst disaster that any of us had ever confronted, it was like also Yankees fan's hate Red Sox fans and Red Sox fans hate Yankee fans. And I, I think about it once a month, I think about what happened that day and think about how odd it is that that's the thing that made me feel better about the worst tragedy that the US had faced in my lifetime. That's incredible. Um, I know you got to go, let's, let me just ask you, it told me for a couple other quick ones. Sure. The thing that I, I feel like is going to be a generational divide to some extent is, um, fans of, of, we are fans of teams. I think a lot of young people are fans of players more than teams like I'm a bronze fan. I follow him wherever he goes. I know a little ball fans who follow him wherever he goes. What, can you relate to that at all? Is that curable? Like I do think that Nick's winning the championship cured that for like a bunch of people in the trusted area are now just Nick's fans, so maybe it's just winning, but I cannot relate to that. I guess Kobe is maybe like the apex of that fandom, but he never switched teams. So it was never, it was never tested like that. I can't relate to that at all. I don't understand it, but do you find that you hear that from like your son's friends sometimes? Yeah. I mean, I, when I was first getting into the NBA in the mid 2010s, I, I mentioned this in the book too. I brought my son, the first player he loved was Steph. And I brought him to school one day and he was wearing a Steph Curry jersey and he ran out to the playground. He was probably in second grade or something or first grade. And he started playing, you know, playground basketball with his buddies. And they were all wearing Steph Curry jerseys. And I thought, this is L.A. man, this is like the center of the basketball universe. None of these kids care about the Lakers, the Lakers weren't any good at the time. And these, these kids love Steph Curry. And I think that for young people, because everyone is more accessible now, they can watch highlights of every player on every team every day. I do think there's a little more of that that they bond with players and then follow the players and choose their teams based on the players. Now will that continue throughout the rest of their lives? I don't know. I'm sure some of those kids became Laker fans or got for a bit, Clipper fans, but, but you know, I, that's not something I grew up with. You chose your team based on the city you lived in or who your parents are rooted for. But I do think that because players have much more individualized personalities, they have their own social media, they have their own media branding that is out there. I do think a lot of young people are just like, that's the guy I like instead of that's the team I like, which I'm with you. I don't understand it. I guess it's probably more of a basketball thing than anything else because basketball superstars drive winning so much more than for single player and in other sports. And they move more now, right? So like you don't, they don't, you don't get a chance to settle into a team for more than three years because like, I mean, Kevin Durant is one of the 20 greatest basketball players of all time. How many teams has that kind of played for? Like, you know, a lot now, and staff will never change teams. So if those people became warrior fans by being step fans, they'll be warriors fans for at least as long as they play as LeBron. I just know like a lot of LeBron fans and like, so wait. Now you're a Laker's fan and you after like living and dying with the calves after living and dying with the heat and they're like, yeah, that's just how I roll. Oh my god, I don't, I don't get that at all. Yeah. A couple of fun ones from this, from the book, you and Joe draft things often on your podcast and in the book, you talk about how you drafted fruit. I'm very passionate about fruit. So I made my top five fruits, but what was your number? You have a argument in the book. I think it's grapes versus blueberries. Yeah. You are a team blueberry. I think in that argument. I was, I believe I was team Blueberry and Joe was team grape, but specifically red grapes, not green grapes. Do you have your correct blueberries or better than grapes? Do you have a number one fruit before I unveil my top five? Oh, I think it's blueberries for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was because I think the versatility of the blueberry, the number of different things you can use it for on parallel in my opinion. Here's my top five readers listeners can debate it if they want to. Number one, pineapple, controversial choice. And the only one among them that violates my rule of I difficulty accessing the fruit I was just saying, like mangoes get out of here with mangoes. I don't want them being pineapple ones strawberry to peach is now jumped blueberry for three. Wow. Although the rightness can, you know, it's various blueberries for pair five. I think pair is the most underrated fruit. Okay. Now, when do you say pair, though? Are you going hard, crunchy pair or soft, mushy, soft, soft pair, soft pair? Interesting. See, I only eat a pair if it cracks like an apple when you bite into it. I love them both. I love them both. We're asking me to pick. That's what I'm picking. I mean, that's a, that is a wild list, man. I mean, you think you could, yeah, you would have to do a lot of work to defend that list on the podcast with me and Joe, for sure. Well, I would, I'm happy to do it. I mean, if you're impugning pineapple, I don't know, let's tell you it's delicious. I'm not impugning it. I'm saying as a number one draft choice, you're re, this is like the, this is drafting Ted Ginn Jr. in the first round. Like, this is, I thought you were going to say Anthony Bennett and I was going to be like, don't, don't do that to pineapple. Don't put that on pineapple. It's not dark. But it's also candy. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a cut. It's a reach. Like the other GMs are going to be questioning your pick. I would say for sure. That's fine. A fun thing number two, you have a great chapter in the book about finding, I mentioned finding community with my fellow Metz fans as a kid and how, how affirming that is and how important it is. You have a great chapter about Steely Dan and Steely Dan fans and you, how you made fun of Steely Dan fans, but they find their community. I know nothing about Steely Dan, but it just, you mentioned in there how you have, you love this onion headline about Steely Dan and the onion headline is Donald Fagan defends Steely Dan to friends and it just shows the guy with a beer like shrugging and being like, what? And Donald Fagan defends Steely Dan to friends is such a great onion headline. Onion headlines are little bits of comedy masterpieces. Do you have a favorite onion headline that you know like off the top of your head or one that spoke to you? I mean, beautifully the onion has done more for comedy in the last 25 years than almost any other institution. Like that book, our dumb century, if you haven't read the book our dumb century, run down walk. There's a bunch of them. I mean, they seemingly amazingly come up with new ones like every week to the day. Still happening. Yeah. I mean, in that book, our dumb century, this is a involves some cursing. But the headline from like July of 1969 is like, holy fucking shit, man, lands on fucking moon. It's like, it's just the whole articles written that way. I've just like, oh my god, look, which has happened. It's hilarious. There's a one of one favorite one I think about it. Every sporting event ever 10 is from that same book. It's a headline from like early in the 20th century. And it says like, like, like non-malotic, un-singable tune becomes America's national anthem. It's not like impossible. It is to sing that song and how un-catchy it is. Yeah. I mean, I am an absolute onion stand. I think that that staff has been incredible at making jokes for so long. I'm very indebted to them as a fan of comedy. I'll give you two of my favorites. This one, I don't even know why it's funny or why I like it. The headline is just the photo is a guy with long hair in an ugly shirt holding a bong and making like a very angry point. Like he's pointing and like making like shouting it so much and the headline is hippie will tell you what the real crime is. I don't even know why that's funny. I just love that one. And then when they wrote this article and it's like a little paragraph article, I honestly was disturbed and how much I identified with what is supposed to be a satirical embarrassing onion article. The headline is and again, I identified with this as a real problem in my life. The headline is man concerned. He spread himself too thin between eating sandwich watching television. And I'm like, yeah. And he has the man has quoted. I looked away from the screen for five seconds because some of the meat was coming out from between the bread. And I missed some stuff on the show. Like that's literally me watching the wire 20 years ago. It's like I can't I guess I can't eat a sandwich and watch this at the same time. I just I wanted to give the onion a little shadow. Fantastic. Is there anything we did not cover from your? I mean, the whole book is filled with you go to a grateful dead show at the sphere. You make Joe Paznansky play Pickleball, which I absolutely love because I have my own, I would say, negative experience with pickleball personally. And there's also beautiful sport, beautiful like old school Paznansky sports writing in there, particularly a moving part where you talk to a blind NASCAR fan and go with her to her first race in person and the sensations of the track. She walks on the track and realize that it's bank deep and steeper than she thought. There's a lot of beautiful stuff in there, but is there anything we didn't want to talk about that you want to hit? No, just that I, you know, it was a really fun way to spend two years. I mean, Joe, like you said, to me, is the best sports writer out there. And when I had the idea for the book, I the idea and the idea of doing it with Joe were simultaneous. Like I, I was like, if Joe doesn't do this with him, I'm not doing it. Because I just wanted his perspective on this stuff, his perspective on sports and my perspective of sports are very different. Like he's been immersed in a professionally his whole life. I've just been a fan and I really thought that the book would benefit from having two different angles on this. And it was a real joy to like take this thing that I've cared about so deeply my entire life and do what it mounted to like a, like a journalistic investigation of it. Like that's really how we approached it was like, there's this is a question here and we are going to investigate the question, which is, why do we love this? Why does this mean so much? Why do we love it so much? Why is it such a crucial part of so many lives? We talked to an actual academic who has studied this his whole life and he said something I've that's really sort of stuck with me, which is like if sports were just like fun and diverting that would be fine, but it wouldn't explain why this means so much to so many people. You're talking about a billion people more or less across the world who are driven to seek this thing out and care about it. And if that's true, then that must mean that it's meeting some kind of basic psychological and emotional need that we have. Like it's needs are being met by sports and to really dive into that aspect of it and really investigate that and end up being a very meaningful experience for me. I lied. I have one other question hit me because we have since we're a basketball podcast. We have to talk about an important basketball moment in American history, which is the pickup game on the office. The the image of Stanley dribbling with his hand flail pointed out behind his back and dribbling with his his other the dribbling end is just flat and he's just bouncing the ball off the floor and he's crouched over is an iconic goofy instantaneously hilarious image. Yeah. How how did that is did he just did he just do that unprompted? Was he instructed like dribble in a goofy way? Because that the rest of the scene is very funny. Michael Scotts very funny in the scene. Obviously like shooting airballs being mad and not really knowing how to play but pretending that he does. But that image that's the scene like 50 years from now that's the image people remember how do you how does one land upon that? I you know I don't 100% remember but I'll tell you what I think is the case which is just you know that it's part of Michael Scotts kind of low level basic like racism that he suffered from which was that he drafted Stanley the only black member of the. It is a gas exactly. Yeah and so that was the story point and I think probably what it said is simply you know that he passes the ball the Stanley Stanley starts to dribble and is terrible at dribbling and then Leslie David Baker did something funny and that would be my guess I mean sometimes you know I as you well know I played Moe is on the office and in the in the first episode it's there was a stage direction that said you know Moe's runs out of the room and I don't know why I ran the way I ran which was really weird in my my hands are sort of like straight out my palms are straight out and I stiff and I and I I was just like all right I'm playing a weird guy I'm going to run weird and from since that happened people have come up to me go like why how did you choose to run that way and I'm like I didn't I didn't know what I was doing I'm not an actor I just kind of like did something that I thought in the moment was maybe weird and funny and I would guess that that's what Leslie did in that moment I don't think it described in the stage directions how he should dribble badly I think it just said he dribbles badly and then that was an actor making a funny choice by the way did did they really drive a car into a lake Michael Scott and did the yeah Steve Crowley it looks like that was your episode yeah yeah that was there it was wild now I'm just being a jerk and making you stay longer but like I rewatch the scene today because I was reading like just refresh my memory on iconic office scenes and and episodes and I'm like it pretty much looks like this really happened no yeah and then you have to get it in one take right so like like can you take us behind that process a little bit especially since it's your episode yeah that was a story that Jen Salada had found who's a writer on the show had found this a story about how multiple people at the time when GPS was new had trusted the GPS over their own eyes and had just they had seen that there was a lake in front of them or a river or something but the GPS was telling them go this way and they were just like okay I guess the computer knows what it's talking about and had driven their cars into water and it so the story that we were telling was about Michael losing his confidence as a salesman losing his instinct and then like just trusting the GPS and so that's what happened so what what you do in that situation is we found this kind of ramp that led down to like what was I think a little mini reservoir or something and so you do the scene you do the dialogue with Michael and Dwight a bunch of times and they accelerate and then he just stops the car and the accelerating stops cars so you get the scene and then you put stunt drivers in there and there's divers who were literally with scuba gear under in the water at the time the case anything goes wrong you put stunt drivers in and they it's like all right let's make sure we get this because we only can do this one time and you get four cameras or something on four different angles and then the stunt drivers just drive the car right into the lake you get an old crummy cars because you're gonna ruin it for the most part and they just drove it right in I think we I we may have done it twice I think we maybe did it twice because they didn't go so far in that the water filled the car they like they they we got it in far enough so that it was like clear that that's what it happened and I think we maybe pulled it out and did it one more time we're climbing out of the car in the water so then you then you leave the car in the water you put that minute and then they climb out so you the actual stunt of driving in is stunt drivers and then after that you get and that's why you have divers in the in the underwater so in case anything happens to the actual the Some performers know what they're doing, but the actors are at a little more at risk. So you make sure that they're safe, you know, the magic of Hollywood. All right. Well, I can talk to you for a million years about your shows, but you have to go make another show. Mike sure. The book is with Joe Pasnansky. Big fan. It's right here. It is awesome. It's it's, it's a breezy read, but it's super fun, super moving at times. It made me think about, why do we still love these things, but not like GI Joe or something from from. We're kids. It's a great read. Thanks for your time, bud. Thank you, buddy. This is really fun. All right. That's it for today on the Zack Lo Show. Thank you to John Hollingshire. Thank you to Mike Sure. Thanks as always to Mike Billy and Jonathan on production and thanks to you all for listening to and or watching the Zack Lo Show. We'll be back on Thursday with another episode as the NBA season gets closer and closer and news on contracts and other things begins to trickle in. Thanks again for listening. 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