Why Did the Knicks Fire Thibs? Plus, a Belichick Debate (and More) With Pablo Torre

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Coming up on this podcast, I'm going to talk about the Knicks at the very top because

right after we recorded most of this podcast, they got rid of their coach, Tom Thibdoe, who we had been talking, we've been talking about that possibility on this podcast since April.

So, a bunch of things that I found interesting in this.

I'm going to talk about that on the top.

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We're going to take a break.

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All right, I'm recording the top part of the podcast here.

It's about two o'clock Pacific time.

The Knicks relieved Tom Thibodeau of his duties as head coach a couple hours ago.

I was going to have a guess, but you know, honestly, there's a bunch of stuff I want to hit.

I feel like I can do it in 15 minutes and we're just going to go for it.

I wasn't surprised.

Zach Lowe came on this podcast in April.

We did all of our, we did a most intriguing playoff people draft and we got to the hot seat category.

And this was, I think, Zach's first appearance back on my podcast.

And we had a hot seat category and he had a, I forget who he had.

And then I had

Tibbs and Zacted like his whole body.

It was like he got electroshocked.

And I was like, look, I think there's a chance.

You know, I don't, I don't know if it's going great.

And, you know, if they lose to the Celtex in five or, you know, the first round's Rocky, whatever happens,

I think this is in play.

And there were, there were reasons I thought that.

There was stuff that I heard.

There was stuff percolating around.

But then

they beat Detroit in six.

They beat Boston in six.

And, you know, Tatum Tatum goes down at the end of game four.

They're about to win game four.

They're going to take a 3-1 lead against a 60-plus win team.

And then they take Indiana to six, and they were one of the four teams left.

Basketball is reignited in New York.

And the question is, well, then why would you fire your coach?

Well, I think there's one, two, three.

I'm going to give you five reasons.

I'm going to give you a couple of conspiracy theories as well, just

for the hell of it.

Five reasons Tibbs got fired.

Number one,

this is an admission that they actually weren't as close to winning the title as maybe you think you were if you were one of the final four teams left.

Um, and there's previous examples of this, right?

The Warriors in the Mark Jackson year before they hired Steve Kerr, where there was a feeling like Mark Jackson took us from here to here, and now we need somebody to take us from here to here.

I talked about this on my podcast on Sunday with Van and Rasillo.

Um, the better example,

and one that I think is weirdly applicable in a bunch of of different ways here is the 2003 Pistons, who moved on from Rick Carlisle.

They hired Larry Brown, and people were really surprised because Rick Carlisle had done a good job with Detroit.

He's a good coach, as we've seen, won a title in 2011.

He's in the finals this year, ironically, beat the Knicks.

But the question was, did Carlisle take this roster as far as it could go?

And on top of it, could Larry Brown bring us up?

an even further level.

Well, a guy who was intimately involved with that Pistons team behind the scenes, back when he was very shadowy and nobody really understood what he did or what his role was, was Worldwide Wes, William Wesley.

He

was a confidant.

He's a big Larry Brown guy.

He was behind the scenes with those Pistons guys in all these different ways, still close to a lot of them.

I'm not saying he was responsible for the decision.

I'm just saying he was there watching the effect of it.

And I find it hard to believe that him and Leon Rose, who run the Knicks team right now,

weren't thinking about that specific example when they were thinking, did Tibbs take us as high as we could possibly go?

Is there another level for us to go and what has to happen to get there?

Did we max out with Tibbs?

And the case would be season, you played the starters too much, trailed by 10 plus all the time in the three playoff series, as we talked about on my podcast on Sunday.

At some point, you are who you are.

And if you're down 10, 12, 15 in 75% of the playoff games you're playing, that's a really bad sign that you have have to always constantly claw your way back.

And then you got to think about circumstances too.

You're gifted a Cleveland collapse.

Cleveland has home court throughout the playoffs and they won 64 games and Indiana just thumps them.

You're gifted Boston's inexplicable collapse in game one and game two, which I may or may not look at the box scores once every two days.

The Celtics in the third quarter with a huge lead of game one

took 20 shots and 19 of them were threes.

And you just think back to some of the decisions Boston made offensively in that series, how slow they played, how many threes they took, how they didn't use some of the Knicks' weaknesses against them, didn't push the pace, didn't constantly hunt Brunson and Towns.

And those two games are just two of the worst losses combined as a loss in the history of Boston's franchise.

And it's going to be a long time before you get over it.

And that's before you get into what happens to Tatum in game four.

But just how they played those first two games was such a gift to the Knicks, who then went and grabbed it because they're a tough team and they have a lot of talented players.

You also lose out of Milwaukee and Philly.

Orlando gets hurt, all that stuff.

So a lot of things broke in New York's favor.

And yet, I don't think they would have come anywhere close to beating Oklahoma City, right?

So the line for that finals is, I think it's minus 700 right now with Indiana.

I think it would have been higher if it was the Knicks.

So at some point, you have to have an honest assessment.

Are we trying to be good every year?

Are we trying to win the title?

And could we win the title with what we just watched,

with the coach we have, with the way the players responded to him?

And they obviously looked at it and said, we can't.

So that's one.

Second reason,

I think Tibbs,

who I really like as a coach for the most part, and I appreciate how much he cares.

And you could feel with some of the reactions today.

The press was really shocked and in a lot of cases, upset that it played out this way.

He's an all-in all-the-time basketball maniac, like a real obsessive.

And he lasted in the Knicks for five years in a Players League, which we'll get to in a second, why that's an important number.

Didn't really listen to anybody on lineups, just played his guys as much as possible.

There was real dissension that you could feel from March on.

The Bridges stuff was always weird with Mikhail Bridges and him talking openly about playing too many minutes.

And then, oh, we hashed it out behind the scenes.

That was never a good sign.

And then you could see as he started to kind of change stuff, changed his defense in the Boston series, which worked, started experimenting with these big lineups in the third round against Indiana because he realized his players couldn't play seven guys against the pace that you could do against

with how Indiana wants you to play.

And then all of a sudden, Schamet's out there and Delon Wright and guys that really should have been playing all year.

And it's just, when you start changing stuff that drastically in the end of May,

that's a sign.

Like, maybe you didn't use the regular season to your benefit correctly.

And I think that's just undeniable.

We were saying, we were talking about this on this podcast all the time.

Like, didn't understand the rotations, didn't understand the minutes, didn't understand why there was any

desire to develop a bench at all.

See you that.

I don't think that helped them once they finally flamed out against Indiana.

Here's the third reason.

He was there five years, which doesn't seem like a long time.

Well, you've heard about the tenures of the remaining coaches, the longest-running coaches in the NBA right now.

2008, Eric Spolstra.

14, Steve Kerr.

2020, Billy Dunovan at Chicago.

2020, Tyron Liu for the Clippers, and then Mark Dagnod in OKC,

2020.

So three of our five longest coaches showed up in the NBA on those teams five years ago.

And all right, so what is that?

Our owners impatient?

This is the league now.

The players run the league.

The players run the league more than ever.

The money is so high and so crazy.

The turnover and the musical chairs, if somebody's unhappy with their situation, their teammates, their coach, they're complaining.

They have more power than they've ever had.

And it's just a fact.

Like, this is the dark side of player empowerment.

You have guys making crazy amounts of money who, if they don't really like their coach, guess who's not going to win that battle?

The coach.

The real eye-opening one for this was Brad Stevens in Boston because that that last Celtics year he had, the team basically packed it in on him and really seemed like they just were starting to tune him out and he wasn't reaching them in the same way.

And Brad Stevens was an incredible coach.

He only had a seven-year run for the Celtics.

Think about that.

So the run is usually five to seven years unless you end up with

a Spolstra situation.

By the way, Spolstra didn't have a great year this year either.

Steve Kerr,

I think Dagnal will be at OKC for a long, long time.

Other than that, you know, we're going to hit a point where Doc Rivers is like the seventh most tenured NBA coach.

And I think he got to Milwaukee five minutes ago.

I just think this is the league now.

I think there's too many outlets for guys to push unhappy buttons.

The league is hyper-covered.

Every sort of interaction on the bench.

Every quote that comes out of any sort of press conference, it's just, there's just a big spotlight on anything.

And once there's any unhappiness at all,

you could feel it blow up.

And I just think it's, it's really hard.

The Knicks didn't seem that happy the last four months, I would say.

And I thought we talked about this on Sunday.

I was so interested that they lost game six.

And the Athletic immediately had this long, long, as Brian Curtis would call it, the Now They Tell Us piece, which seemed like it was just in their archives for four days waiting to get published.

And it had a lot of stuff.

And the two big losers in that piece were Towns and Thibodeau, as we talked about on the podcast on Sunday.

So there was clearly a lot of smoke here and some fire.

And that's why I wasn't surprised.

It's why I met first mention in April.

That's why I mentioned on Sunday's pod.

I thought it was 45, 55 that he stayed.

And now he's gone.

But there's two other dynamics that I think are really important for this.

Mikhail Bridges.

He makes $24.9 million next year.

They traded five first-round picks for him.

He can leave and sign with another team,

12 and a half months from now, basically, 12, 13 months from now, July 1st, 2026, if they don't sign him to an extension.

They traded the five first-round picks for him.

They got the Villanova connection together.

He's the one that we're pretty positive wasn't that happy this season.

Talked about the minutes.

was just an afterthought offensively.

They were like begrudgingly get him involved.

I thought he had moments in the playoffs, but also had moments where he disappeared.

I can't say they ran a lot of offense for him.

I thought he was a better offensive player than they used him.

And then you saw the way he was harassing Halbert, and especially in game five, maybe they should have used him a little more like that.

But

there was a lot of times where he just felt like the odd man out.

He felt like the drummer in the rock band or the second guitarist.

And

listen, this is a league where players butter each other up.

Players text each other.

You should come here.

People wink, wink all the time.

Agents have off-the-record conversations with people they should be having.

And the moment other people feel like, yeah, that guy might be a little unhappy,

you just kind of have to monitor it.

And he's in a situation where I think he's the ideal third piece for San Antonio, right?

A team like that.

And San Antonio is going to have some flexibility and they have a bunch of picks.

And it's a team like that that can start batting their eyelashes at bridges in a different way.

And for the Knicks, that matters because if he doesn't sign an extension this summer and bets on himself,

now you're potentially screwed.

And I think they have to extend him this summer, period.

They have to keep these five guys together, these four guys, and the town's asset, whether they trade it or keep it.

They have to keep that nucleus together.

And he's a huge piece of this.

So if you sign him to an extension,

It still helps you this year.

Going forward, you know how much money you have.

And he likes playing with these guys.

And obviously, I just refuse to believe that wasn't a piece of this.

I'm not saying he demanded they fire the coach, but you can tell if somebody's all in on their on their coach or not, just as a, as a unit, as a player, whatever.

And this gives them a better chance to figure out this Bridges thing, which brings me to the fifth piece, the extra dynamics.

I think one of the things that was,

I don't want to say underreported about the Knicks because people do about it, but there's kind of quietly

a lot of people in the kitchen.

And I'm not going to say there's a lot of chefs in the kitchen,

right?

There's Leon and Wes built this team and they worked for Dolan, who's the owner who I think really loved the Knicks Renaissance.

There's been reports about him handpicking where every single celebrity and everybody sat courtside every game.

And I think he really was re-engaged, especially when you think from 2022 or 2002 all the way to

maybe 2021.

Wasn't a fun 20 years to own the Knicks and be named James Dolan.

So, you know, he's in there.

He's got his buddies in there.

He's a typical rich guy owner.

So you're worried about him.

Jalen Brunson's dad is an assistant coach, Rick Brunson.

And Tips can say all that he wants about.

No, no, it was great to have Jalen's dad there.

Was it?

Was it awesome to coach Jalen Brunson, but also have his dad be your assistant?

We see so many times in NFL and NBA specifically when you have people

coaching staff and then somebody leaves and somebody gets the job.

And then you hear afterwards, like, oh, man,

that wasn't great.

And that person shanked this person.

I'm not saying Rick Brunson shanked anybody.

I'm just saying that's a weird dynamic when you then add.

Carl Anthony Towns comes in.

His dad is super involved, right?

You have the Villanova guys as a group.

These guys have all this history together, right?

Jalen,

Josh Hart,

Bridges.

So you have all these different little factions.

You have family members.

You have people that have real connections to Wes and Leon, like Rick Brunson, who's one of Wes's oldest friends.

You just got tentacles going everywhere.

And Tips is rowing

the same way on the boat with a lot of these people.

But then once that starts to shift,

that gets a little dicey, right?

And the Knicks, again, are locked into these five guys.

Once they do that towns trade for Rando and Defincenzo, and they break up those contracts and they break up the flexibility manage them.

Now they're in the towns business.

Now they have to figure out how are we going to have a team built around five guys, two of whom are the really smart teams are going to attack constantly.

See that as well.

And then

I just don't think that was great.

And I think they did a nice job of pretending that everything was hunky-dory, but obviously not because Tibbs just came within two wins of the finals and got fired.

So there was some real stuff going on here.

There's some conspiracy stuff, too.

Again, I'm taping this.

It's 215.

It might have already been emotion now, but Johnny Bryant, who I think is an assistant that some people like there,

he was named one of the two finalists for the Sun's job.

That happened five hours later, Tibbs got fired.

I'm just flagging it.

There's a J.

Wright possibility that I think I floated on my Sunday podcast, the old Villanova coach.

Does he want to coach again?

I don't know.

Mike Malone's sitting there, but the Johnny Bryan one, I think that's the one I

would probably shove the chips toward that bet.

Whether that's a good idea, I have no idea.

But if you're trying to get everyone on the boat rowing one way and you're worried, you're going to lose them in the Suns, maybe.

The deeper conspiracy stuff is they're about to trade towns for KD and KD doesn't want to play for tips.

Again, don't aggregate that.

Do not aggregate that.

I'm just saying, it's if you're trying to figure out why would they fire a coach when they're two wins away from the finals, if they think they have a move coming,

did KD want to play for a certain coach?

Did Giannis want to play for a certain coach?

I have no idea.

Do not aggregate it.

Just pointing out, like, maybe a month from now, that part will make way more sense.

Like, oh, of course, because this guy was coming in and he wanted this guy.

That's how the league works, unfortunately.

My guess would be Johnny Bryant, but in general, like Tibbs lasted five years.

There were real cracks there in the last year that you could feel and you could hear when you talked to different people.

And

I think this is a complicated team's coach because you have Brunson, who took less money to stay with the team, at least for two years, whose dad is one of the assistants, who I promise you, he's not going anywhere.

You have this huge towns contract that's got four years left after this, after the season that just ended that ends with 61 million.

Do you keep that?

How many teams would even even want it with the second apron stuff?

You have all the second apron stuff looming, repeater tax stuff.

And you don't really have a ton of ways to make this roster better, except for some of the lower mid-level exemption stuff and whether potentially they would want to

trade Mitchell Robinson, which I would not do.

And could they be a Giannis team?

Anyway, there's a lot going on here, but this is the NBA in 2025.

You can coach a team to a four seed.

You can win 10 playoff games.

You can look back at an Indiana series and go, holy shit, if we hadn't blown game one, we'd be in the finals right now, which I think is a fair thing for the Knicks to think.

And you could still lose your job.

And I have a ton of Knicks fans in my life, and they're pretty split on this.

I have some people in my life who are like, thank fucking God, this is Mark Jackson, Larry Brown, all over again.

Thank God they did this.

And then I have some other people in my life who are like, this seems super dysfunctional.

And every the Knicks, we loved that team two years ago.

And since then, they've traded for Carl Anthony Townsend.

They fired Tibbs.

So in the span of 13 months, we went from, we love this team to, what are we doing?

We'll see where it goes.

But the most important thing is the Knicks are relevant again.

Not only are they relevant as a team that wins games and has really good players, including one of the best 10 players in the league, but they're making news.

And it's not news like this terrible thing happened.

They did a stupid trade.

Oh, my God, why'd they do this?

Although, I guess why'd you fire your coaches?

Why'd they do this?

But you know what I mean.

The Knicks are relevant in a different way, and there's a moment here.

And the best case scenario is this is 03 Larry Brown and the Pistons.

So

one other thing I wanted to say for the finals before we take a break, because I wanted to make a finals pick really quick, and I really wanted to do OKC in a sweep, even though I, as you know, I respect Indiana.

I've been picking them every round or picking them as a possible upset or saying Pacers and six are the best bets, et cetera, et cetera.

I think OKC is an absolute freaking juggernaut.

To have a chance to go 84 and 18 or 84 and 19, you were in a list of six, seven teams in the history of the league.

They have a chance to have one of the best seasons ever.

I don't think any of us would say that's one of the greatest teams ever.

There's a performance slash in their prime slash.

They don't have one of the best seven, eight to nine players of all time at the absolute peak of their powers piece that they don't have.

They might have it two years from now.

But this is a truly great team.

And I broke down on this pod a few days ago about all the way they're just torching people at home in the playoffs.

They're eight and won in the playoffs.

The one loss was by two points, and the other eight wins were like by 233 points.

So they just kill teams.

And I really wanted to pick a final sweep because I thought, Everyone's going to pick OKC in five.

Can I zag?

Is there a smart zag, actually?

But man, you go through the history of finals sweeps.

There's been nine in 78 years.

Let's start there.

So you're batting about

11%.

I wasn't good at percentages.

Last one, 2018, Goldstate over Cleveland.

Think about that series.

Cleveland should have won.

Cleveland could have won.

LeBron played the best game I've ever seen him play.

They squander that one and then end up losing in four.

But that first game was pretty close.

Like to sweep somebody in the finals, you have to be so much better than them.

2007, San Antonio over Cleveland's a good example.

LeBron drags Cleveland to the finals.

The team sucks.

San Antonio's last really great Spurs year of Duncan's prime.

They kill him.

0-2, Lakers over the Nets,

which we get, that was the last gasp of that awesome, awesome Shaq Kobe run.

They had just snuck by Sacramento.

There was some buzz with Jersey that maybe watch out, Jason Kidd, and then the Lakers just killed him.

Houston over Orlando, which was an upset.

Houston wasn't even favored in this series, but that was yet another.

It was like the J.R.

Smith game, a fluky moment of Nick Anderson missing four free throws in a row and swinging the karma of that series in a way that I've almost never seen anything like that.

You really have to compare it.

It was like

that first Indiana New York game from a,

that was was so amazing that I actually think the series just swung.

So anyway, they end up sweeping.

The Pistons killed the Lakers in 89, and that was a, we have arrived as the new champs.

The Lakers were on their last legs in a lot of ways.

They had some injuries.

I don't think that necessarily should have been a sweep.

83, the Sixers killed the Lakers.

And then pre-merger,

Warriors killed the Bullets.

The Bucs killed, I think, the Bullets.

And then the Celtics, that was in 1971.

Warriors were 75, and then the Celtics, their one sweep during the Russell era was 1959 against Minnesota.

In all those cases,

pretty great teams.

So you have that piece.

18 series have ended 4-1.

And then if you're talking about like biggest odds and how it played out,

just this century, teams that were favored by minus 400 or more, Denver minus 430 in 2023, they won in five.

Golden State was almost 1,100 in 18.

They swept.

San Antonio was minus 450 and 07, swept.

Lakers were 7-1 favorites against the Pistons in 04 and lost the series 4-1.

The Lakers were minus 750 against the Nets, and they swept.

Minus 2,000 in 2001 against the Sixers.

They lost the overtime game, won the rest.

That was 4-1 and then 4-2 against Indiana, which was a dumb line.

LA was minus 800 in 2,000.

I think four to one is the move.

I hate doing it.

It feels very bandwagon-y.

It's plus 190, I think, on Fanduel.

I think it's the move.

I think Indiana gets one of these games

and maybe even on the road,

but they're going to play zone.

They're going to push the pace.

They're going to do that thing that they love to do where they play with such a fast pace, you get caught up in it.

I'm like, we can play this too.

And now you're on a track meet with them.

But I think big picture, this is just just such an awful matchup for them because um their best thing is their guards and the ball handling goal and okayc that's their best thing is basically making life miserable for guards that's the number one thing that's how they killed minnesota with mike conley that's why they struggled a little bit against denver because jokic basically became the guard um but just in general this is like okc does everything indiana does way better And this for Indy to win even more than one game, they would have to have win one of the first two, have a game three or game four, because OKC is a little more vulnerable in the road because they're young.

We saw that in the Minnesota series, the Denver series, even in Memphis when they fell behind by 20 plus.

So I think OKC takes one kind of haymaker from Indy in the first two games, maybe fights it off, kills them in the other game.

They'll win one of the first two games by like 28.

Then game three, maybe that's the one Indy gets.

Come out.

Indiana's going nuts.

OKC is feeling it a little bit.

Indy's playing with crazy pace.

Then OKC figures it out and they win in five.

So I'm going to say OKC in five.

And it's boring, but that's my official 2025 finals pick.

I'll be rooting for Indiana because I want this to be a long series.

Anyway, we're going to take a break and come back with Pablo Torre.

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All right, we're taping this Tuesday morning.

Paul Botori is here.

We're beefing.

Yeah.

Big beef.

What camera can I look into just to stress how angry I am?

It's such a beef.

Hello.

We know a lot of the same people.

We have a lot of mutual friends.

We have a disagreement about this Belichick thing, and I thought it would be fun just to argue about it.

Yeah.

Embrace debate like old school 2010 ESPN.

Jamie Horowitz.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

We can do, we can do PTI from hell and make Tony Kornheiser disappointed in both of us.

I do want to stress, A, thank you for having me in your lovely studio.

Yeah,

brand new.

We got Sly.

We got Swayze.

Yeah, I wish I could say that I flew here for this specifically.

If people are wondering why I'm in LA, I was here for other things, other fancy, highfalutin things.

You were here for an award show.

I was here for the Peabody's.

And so when I was alerted to the beef that I had yet to engage in from a podcast that was six days ago, that's right.

Nobody said anything.

That's right.

Not a great investigation by my part.

Yeah.

Just to figure out when and where this was said.

But I was there, like pathetically, like looking at my phone as very serious journalism was honored.

And I was like totally distracted.

So fuck you for that.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

You know, ruining

the crowning journalistic nomination of my life while being questioned for being a real journalist, which is what both

Bill.

I know, but let's talk about that because I didn't feel like I was doing that.

I felt like I was questioning.

Is this the table?

This is the table, by the way, where Chris and Van were like, Bill.

This is the table.

But since it's funny, we brought you to the scene of the crime.

I was questioning the story more than the journalism, but

I think that was probably my disconnect with it was.

You were doing real journalism.

That's the point of your show.

My thing was I thought it was stupid.

Well, just like Belichick, like ultimately, he's a guy in his mid-70s.

I guess he's never coaching in the NFL again at this point.

He's dating this 24-year-old.

And I, it kind of feels like he's lost the steering wheel a little bit.

Well, you said a number of things that I think are very interesting.

Right.

And which is kind of why I've devoted a disturbing percentage of my life, admittedly, to this.

Like Jordan Hudson, this is a sentence that I'm not proud of saying either, but Jordan Hudson tweeted or retweeted about me saying I need a hobby, a new hobby.

She's not wrong.

So you, so it was pretty polarizing even within your circles.

Like, why do you care about this so much?

On the episodes we did, we've done two of them in a docus style, you know, way in which I basically unbox journalism for friends.

They made fun of me.

So this whole thing of like, I, of course, I'm here to acknowledge the absurdity of guy who won an Edward R.

Murrow Award for an episode about trans athletes also being the guy who has like this.

You know,

the reason I'm like a dog with a bone on this

speaks to some of the some of the things you just said.

And one of the things that I found baffling was that you just depersonalized Bill Balichek into a guy in his 70s.

I'm like, Bill, you more than anyone else know why Bill Balachek is fascinating.

And why the archetype of him, who was the paragon of discipline, privacy, do your job, defensive strategy, public relations mastery.

The guy had in his office at Gillette, Sun Tzu, the art of war.

You know, the battle is won or lost before it even begins.

Right.

And so just him as this unique archetype in American life, not just sports, but American life that you personally, of course, have a deep understanding of.

Six Super Bowls.

I'm told he's the greatest coach of all time.

I think he is.

Well, in that case, we should consider him significant enough to fact check, certainly interrogate when when it comes to why is he acting the opposite from the way that Bill Simmons remembers him.

Well, I think the thing for me is it felt like you did the podcast for whatever reason, and it's a dopey thing, but I'm the same person who just did a Rewatchables episode about Alfred Justice with Steven Seagal.

I was going to say, you did criticize me on a heaven can wait-centric

movie that came out in 1978.

That's right.

So, and also, like, when I was doing my mailbag once upon a time, when we talked yesterday, it's like, yeah, I used to obsess over a bunch of dumb shit and try to answer questions like this.

Well, used to?

Well, maybe you still do.

We both take stupid things seriously.

But I guess that the difference here is I felt like you were then dining on it and doing a bunch of things.

And that the media tour was what bugged me more, which I'm happy to discuss.

So I have questions for you.

One of the questions I have.

Because now I guess I'm part of the media tour.

I was going to say, which camera can I break the fourth wall into?

Jesus.

Why did it bother you?

The media tour.

The quote-unquote media tour.

And I can explain what that was even from my perspective, of course.

Okay.

Because I think if you're going to do a story like this, to me,

there's kind of a fun element, right?

This is like in a Nicole Smith.

What was that guy's name?

If one of your producers can yell the name of that older man in the wheelchair who looked infirm.

It seemed like you were so serious about it.

I was like, why is he treating this like Watergate?

Ultimately, who fucking cares that this guy is dating somebody who's 50 years younger than him who wants to be on his work emails?

Is this actually an important story or is this just a fun story to get clicks?

I feel like that was my issue.

Is that fair?

You are not alone in that.

More than more than fair, it's, I would say,

a popular perception of what it is that I've done.

If you only consume it via the aggregated, and this is now where I sound like you.

Yeah.

I am bothered by the aggregation insofar as it did not lead people towards the story, which was exhaustively reported, citing 11 sources in which we are, in fact, laughing at the story and ourselves, insofar as, of course, part of what I do in taking stupid things seriously is apply real award-winning investigative journalism, but to stories that real people find fascinating.

So, the thing I'm bugged by with you, beyond the

thought this was like a beef squash.

Well, we'll see by the end.

We'll find out together.

We're going to be fine.

The thing that I am baffled by more than 10 years.

I'm going to have David Chang come in and throw some

kimchi at some knives.

He's cooking in the back.

He's going to cook for us after this is done.

Chang is very, is very, I'm sure, bothered that the two of us are.

No, he, not only is he not bothered.

Bulgogi beefing.

First of all, Chang loves conflict.

Yeah, he does.

He's a dark guy with a lot of dark things inside him, but he's also like, you guys should just do a pot.

It'll be fun.

But okay, so to torture the metaphor here, right?

The recipe of why I actually wanted to do this.

Yeah.

It was important.

It is important.

So I'll just give you the very brief log line of this.

Well, tell me what you think the most important thing is before you do the log line.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you think this is important because you feel like this guy is losing his marbles, but he's also in charge of a North Carolina football program.

I think this is important because Bill Belichick himself is a significant figure and he is the highest paid employee in the state of North Carolina.

He makes $10 million a year in taxpayer money.

And also

might be making that money back for the school.

Well, we shall see.

Did you watch a lot of North Carolina football last year?

But this speaks to actually the real reason why I'm interested: this is not merely a, wow, an age gap relationship story.

Because frankly, this is not, my podcast is not a puritanical one in which I'm saying,

they should find someone more in their age range.

That's not what it is at all.

You can't be in the moral authority.

No, no, no, no.

What this is, though, is to me a story in which one guy who we understood to be the actual archetype of one way of living life in America as a a public figure.

Deeply private.

Do your job.

PR, fuck the media.

Is now pivoting after he's thrown out of the NFL bill, as you well remember, right?

And has to launch a half dozen media enterprises that he hands to a woman that, yes, he met as we reported on a plane when she was, and this was not known until we reported it, 19 years old.

And he says, you're going to be my gateway into public life.

And then the CBS thing happens.

And that's when the floodgates open.

So to me, there is a media story.

There's a business story.

There's a college sports story.

There's a public money story.

There's an NFL story.

The question, by the way, of why didn't the NFL want Bill Belichick?

What we reported.

Well, please, I don't want to filibuster the whole time, but like, why does it think Bill Belichick wasn't brought back?

He ran his course.

I think Kraft probably shit on him to the other owners.

The question of if I bring in, you own a team, it's a $5 billion, $6 billion business.

You bring this guy in who thinks he's better than you, who doesn't want your opinion on anything, people just don't want to do that.

So, what I have been reporting is that it's also, it's also the case that people did not trust who Bill Belichick wanted to bring into their building.

And so, this question, which you know of.

So, you think that was the case a year ago?

What we report in the second episode is that, and I found, I mean, this is, there's a thing on the website of

the New England Patriots, still at stadium, called a fan cam.

Okay.

And we found Bill Belichick's seats.

He has a row of seats right underneath the overhang near the 50-yard line.

And they're his seats.

And we found Jordan Hudson sitting there in November 2021.

So you could say.

I think what the record was that year.

It wasn't good.

Year after Mac Jones.

It wasn't good.

And so what I've been hearing parallel to this is.

Cam Newton season.

I can't remember.

I'm sorry you on how shady.

I've tried to balk out the entire 2020s.

Yeah.

I don't think about 2020s.

Yeah.

And by the way, parallel to this is that I've also heard that by the end, Bill Belichick wasn't exactly dialed in in the way that even people on the Patriots wanted him to be.

Right.

And I mean, from above and below.

And so the question of,

and this speaks to the larger question of Bill Belichick, the guy is a football genius without question, without question.

Yeah.

But his coaching tree, right?

Think about the branches on it.

Yeah.

Who does he got?

Seriously, who does he have?

Well, he does a lot of his own shit.

I think a lot of people have gotten jobs because of him.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But it worked.

So I don't know what's the criticism.

But this is the story is that Bill Belichick, freed from the NFL, in which he has been terrible at picking people around him to support him who could stand on their own two feet.

And in fact, are these Ramora fish, right, attached to him and his business.

So you don't like third place Miss Maine?

Well, second runner-up, I believe.

Second runner-up, that's what we say.

That's what we say in the world of tough class.

I was rooting for the novel.

The betting markets, the betting markets.

Were there odds?

I was hoping that there would be a Bill Simmons super boost from Jordan Hudson.

Same game Parliament.

Same game Harley.

Could have done her with what other words?

Yeah, exactly.

I would have tried that.

But the question is: okay, this guy who teams already knew to be bad at developing

supporting talent from a just managerial perspective.

And let's just, I will name them so you don't have to, right?

Matt Patricia, right?

Josh.

Oh, he's terrible.

Josh is overqualified offensive coordinator, underqualified head coach.

Your guy, Mike Lombardi.

Yeah.

I mean, he needed

skill to get this job at Carolina, to get a job.

Yeah, but that's just people taking care of whatever.

I mean, we know a lot of people who do that.

No question.

Maybe even in the media.

Maybe even, maybe even people that we both know or used to know and like.

So no question.

But the point is, when it comes to Bill Belichick now leaving the Patriots and being trusted with staffing a building, teams didn't trust who was around him.

And one of the people who was around him, I'm saying, as early as November 2021, and certainly by the time of the ring camera, which was released in November 2023, but happened to be taped because, again, I took a stupid thing seriously and went to the Airbnb after summoning an army of geo-guessers.

You know what a geo guesser is?

Like these guys.

I didn't listen to that podcast.

I know.

I don't think you listen to either podcast in full.

Well, I'll say this.

Can we just establish that?

Well, first of all.

It's okay.

It's okay.

But I just want to.

I think the disconnect here is I didn't understand part of the point of this podcast is you will investigate something no matter how stupid it is.

But also I will make the case as to why it's actually worth your time.

You think this one wasn't stupid because of all these things, the case you're laying out with Belichick.

My thing is, where's the line when you when you deep dive something like this?

Where's the line where it's like, all right, I probably shouldn't do that versus, no, this is fair game?

Like, let's say Popovich, like, Popovich has, I think, a stroke, right, in October, November.

And then it's like, is he coming back?

Is he not coming back?

If you would just dove into that, why aren't they telling us the truth about Greg Popovich?

You could have done good journalism about it, but is that a story you would want to do?

I would say no.

And we haven't, incidentally, although there have been rumors that I think both.

So I think this is an important distinction, actually.

And I thank you for letting me articulate what journalism even is anymore.

Because you're right, like the Columbia School of Journalism might not co-sign everything I'm doing from a just topic selection perspective.

Right.

But that's why I launched this independently.

You know, like I wanted to pick the stories and investigate the stories and prove that these stories, according to my own curiosity and journalism, were worthwhile.

So Popovich, for instance, yeah, I don't think that, I don't think that private medical records for a sick man

justify a deep dive multi-part investigation.

I would agree.

But give every other ingredient that we've been talking about with the Bill Balichek story in there.

And it's like, yeah, I want to make a docu-style treatment of something that legitimately, I think, has connections to real stories that we've been covering without full knowledge for years.

And so, a parallel one to this, by the way, and I'll bring it up because people have criticized me for it as well, is the question that was at the heart of the whole Stephen A.

LeBron beef.

That was the other time I felt like.

So to me, right?

I don't should, because to me, that's about Kobe's widow and maybe decisions that she made at the funeral.

And why are we talking about this?

Well, I think to get to that impression, you got to explain why it's plausible that that might be the takeaway from any understanding of this beef between Stephen A.

and LeBron and what really happened.

And so to me, like what I like to do is, because, Bill, I know that you know lots of stuff you don't say into a microphone.

Right.

Me too.

Well, you're doing the curious thing.

And it's important for me to use this network of strange weirdos that I've gotten to know, famous people and GMs and owners.

You do know a lot of weirdos.

My Rolodex over, I mean, I started Sports Illustrator as a fact checker.

Yeah.

I've collected since then through ESPN and otherwise, a bunch of people who, for some reason, trust me.

And what I want to do is take these nuggets that you both, you and I both find fascinating

and turn it into reporting insofar as I can actually report them out.

And so the LeBron thing, LeBron not being at Kobe Bryant's memorial, right, on paper, in isolation as an aggregated headline, is so beyond the pale, right?

Like it's bad taste.

Anybody can mourn how they wish.

And all of that is true, right?

On some level, in isolation, that's true.

But to me, the story was: wait a minute, how is it that the most public celebration of a man's life at Staples Center, live, Beyonce, Jimmy Kimmel, right?

Every celebrity, every, it was a royal, it was a state funeral.

And so the question of Well, and also there was reporting that he was there.

And there was reporting specifically that he was there that was strange because no one could provide any indication that there was consensus around it.

It was all very confusing.

So the hook for you is you felt like this was a piece of the Stephen A.

LeBron thing.

It was a thing that everybody was arguing about in public, but no one had reported.

Right.

And so I was like, I'm going to report this out.

That's when you're like, that's how it feels like an episode for me.

And in the episode in full, just to be very clear, on my show, I do explain all of the context and the reasoning such that people who are skeptical about my ethics or my motives understand why I think it's interesting.

And all I can do is hope that they find it persuasive.

And if they don't,

the ethics are one thing because you're doing real reporting.

Yes.

The motives are where you open yourself up a little bit because from afar, somebody could look at it and go, you're just doing this because you want quicks.

Okay.

So

I'm sure you've heard that.

But Bill, I think everybody who's ever made something online has heard that.

True.

It's like, unfortunately, the death of the classifieds in newspapers, the death of the cable bundle in television has led us as independent media people to have to subsist by basically putting onto an altar.

your content and hoping that the sun god that is the algorithm shines upon us.

The algorithm is getting worse.

It's and it's worse.

And so to me, it's like, yes, we have to play the game.

And it's not, look, it's not Hollywood where it's one for me, one for you.

It's not what I'm doing here.

I believe in every episode to a degree that is almost disturbingly sincere.

Yeah.

But to me, the whole game here is if I'm going to do a Peabody Award-nominated episode about why it is at the end of their lives on death row, all of these sports fans spend their last words, literal last words, shouting out their favorite sports team, which leads us to an episode in which we go to a Supermax facility in Texas and a man named Charles Flores, who was unjustly sentenced because of police hypnosis, ends up being the character.

Like, that's not going to be as popular as the Belichick stuff or the LeBron stuff.

You're doing the Belichick stuff to get people to listen to the.

We need to.

That's how I feel with the Star Wars rewatchables setting up Out for Justice.

I just want you to acknowledge that you just compared my Peabody nominated journalism to your Star Wars.

I was using an analogy.

Noted.

I'm a Star Wars fan.

So I have.

No, I get it.

It's a one for us, one for you.

But it's not even specifically just that because it's not, look, you know, I'm trying to think of the Hollywood example.

But wait, are there, I mean, are there ideas you went down the road with and you backed off?

So what are the reasons you back off?

Because I don't think I could get it on the record.

I I don't think I could report it.

I don't.

So, even more troublingly, I think the question of like, what is journalism today?

To me, the fundamental question,

the difference and key distinction between gossip and journalism is that we are definitively saying we have reported this and we believe based on all of these sources and facts and bits of research that it's true.

It's not, I heard this thing, might be true, might not be.

No, we are rigorously investigating something in order to say we are here to publish this so for balance check then

you're reporting and you're trying to determine these things are true so the things that are true are teams backed off for him in the nfl partly because of this weird jordan hudson situation you believe they were aware of this had questions about the ring cam video I don't think they knew necessarily that she was at a game in November of 2021, but I do know that lots of people around the Patriots knew that, that she was around.

See, I would say the thing that was more, I'm not to sidetrack you, but the thing that was more troubling with Belichick

was the way he was doing that job.

And I've talked about this on the pod, where he's basically doing everything.

At some point, because of your age, it does not become sustainable.

Correct.

And he's trying to do all the draft, all the free agency, every single aspect of everything.

And the proof that he couldn't do that was in all the moves from basically like 2017 on with the roster, the draft draft picks, the free agent signings.

It just felt like, and that was, I still felt like he was an excellent coach.

But the other stuff was submarining the coach, which was him.

And this is why I think this is a story.

So I should say this on our call, and we're going to jump around here.

So forgive me, but like, when you called me and saying you should come on my show, I reminded you that I emailed you.

Right.

So the media tour, just to close the loop on that briefly, I responded to incoming requests because people found the story fascinating.

Because Because the New York Times, Vanity Fair,

certainly every, you know, NBC, Good Morning America, everybody wanted a piece of

it.

I mean, I'll check one.

Well, that's it.

But it actually seemed like some people just took the story and didn't credit you for the reporting.

Also, that.

I thought that was an interesting wrinkle to it, where you started the ball rolling and then...

It just became its own story, but people would have mentioned the podcast.

So part of what's weird about doing investigative journalism in this way on a podcast is that people sometimes uh just assume that i'm also simply aggregating and so they're just facts that are exclusive to my reporting that people just started reprinting in papers of record and i'm like this is strange i've again i asked for it i'm doing podcast investigative journalism but it's not it's it's it's been funny to watch how that's a last seven eight years thing you think so i do i do just like i think that's uh

Yeah, I think social media plays a big part of that.

The Apple News, where, you know, people just click, oh, what's that story?

And like some pick a generic magazine and they basically just have the bones of a story.

I think AI grabs some of this stuff too.

Well,

I know that all of this feels harder to

fact check.

And so fundamentally for me, the question is, what am I fact checking?

Is it interesting?

Can I solve this mystery?

Can I advance public knowledge, even if that knowledge is mostly interesting to sports fans who take sports very seriously?

But politics are like this, by the way.

So there are lots of Trump stories, for instance, where the story itself is deeply stupid.

Yeah.

Like, the actual thing happening is stupid, but if you consider the people important,

you're like an interesting development in our understanding of this very significant American.

And that's my perspective on how sports is both smart and stupid.

And you know, this

is in a building that is premised on your empire doing something very similar to that.

Slastlin's staring at you right now.

I mean,

that is a great one.

I feel many great Americans gazing upon me as I try to figure out, am I doing something that is worthy of attention or cravenly seeking it because I'm a creature of the internet who wants the algorithm to love me?

Right.

I am not unself-aware about the way in which it's really hard to disentangle those two premises.

But what I told you in the email was like, Bill, I think you'd be uniquely qualified to have a view on this.

And it's because of everything we've gotten, unfortunately, because at this table, while talking about heaven can wait, you said I was pretending to be a journalist.

I didn't say that's not what you know what I meant, though.

No, I'm just making fun of you.

But my thing was, if you were approaching it like this was like important journalism, and I just didn't feel like it was.

But do you understand, though?

I understand it better now.

That's why I wanted to talk to you about it.

Yeah, yeah.

So I get why you're doing what you're doing, but you have to understand how I was seeing it.

Whereas like, it just seems like you're thirsty and you're trying to get quicks and then doing a bunch of interviews about the podcast.

So, so, and I like Belichick, and there's a small piece of this that felt a little mean to me because I don't know what's going on with him because that's over here.

Shall we talk about what's over here?

I think we should.

I think this is kind of alarming how this has gone for the last couple months.

And again, I mean, obviously I'm a lifelong Patriot fan.

I really admired everything he's built and stuff.

And

something about this makes me uneasy.

I think this is really weird, which I guess is the whole point of why you did the podcast.

Thank you, Bill.

Thank you, Bill.

But I think there's there's other stuff that was weird that happens in sports where I'm like, eh, maybe leave that on the side.

So the question is whether.

But you're making the fact that he's the highest paid employee in North Carolina, like those, all right, maybe.

But what if I told you now, again, not to quote 30 for 30, you know, language back at you.

What if I told you that Bill Belichick's own family has been deeply concerned about this?

What if I told you that his inner circle of actual coaches on staff, including a certain Mike Lombardi, is deeply concerned about Jordan Hudson and her presence in the building.

Who's the one, Edelman or Gronk?

One of those.

Somebody said on a pod.

They've all somebody, somebody who was kind of in the circle

talked about it being concerned.

I thought that was, and then there was some Instagram stuff, too, with

who is it?

Like somebody's wife or somebody's the people around Belichick, professionally, personally, as well as the administrators at North Carolina, their life behind the scenes has been shaped, reshaped, blown up by having to deal with Jordan Hudson.

And when they hired Bill Belichick to this job, they thought they were getting New England Bill Belichick.

They got,

I cannot stress this enough, something like the exact opposite.

When it comes to PR in this way, is now the thing we're stressed out about.

This guy who could handle the media alone by saying nothing has this person who's on tape at CBS.

And I can tell you, by the way, I don't know if I've made enough of a deal on my own shows about this.

Wherever she goes, shows.

Well,

what I'm trying to say is, wherever she goes.

I mean, episodes.

Episodes.

Okay.

I didn't know there was a show out.

We're doing a spin-off.

We're going to spend off just

me stalking Jordan Hudson.

Pablo Torre finds out what life is like in general.

That'd be good for an algorithm.

Yeah, it would.

Unironically, it would work.

But I don't want to do that.

But what I'm saying is, every time she shows up at an interview with Bill, like what she did on the Pivot podcast.

Again, I'm so deep in the lore here, so forgive me if I'm just like,

part of what happened after my reporting was that North Carolina had to clarify, she doesn't work for us.

She's not going to be around here.

She is only handling Bill's personal stuff.

And I ask you, right, in this era, can there possibly be a distinction between Bill Belichick, person,

and Bill Belichick, the face and head of North Carolina football?

Like, how can you, when you're promoting a book in which, nope, that's Bill over here, of course,

it's also Bill Belichick, the North Carolina representative.

And so, the idea that there is any sort of dividing line, some wall between the two is part of the farce.

And when it comes to her in interviews, what I was trying to say is, everywhere she goes, CBS, these media ventures behind the scenes over that offseason at NFL Films and Malcolm, New Jersey.

Yeah.

All of this.

Blew up the hard knocks deal.

Everywhere she goes, there is a trail of wreckage that suggests that the man who is basically undefeated against the media and press conferences is not only losing the public relations war, he is self-destructing.

And he hasn't coached a game.

And so behind the scenes, all of these people are like, again, family, coaches, people around the building that hired him.

And again, the chancellor at Carolina wanted him.

A.D.

Bubba Cumming.

Bubba Cunningham did not.

That's his actual name.

His real name is Bubba Cunningham.

It's a bit on the nose.

Sounds like a movie script about Belichick and A.D.

Bubba Cunningham.

A lot of this story is on the nose in terms of like, wow, it's really like that.

Yes.

So there is a picture of the story.

But it goes back to the last couple of years of the Pats when it felt like the wheels were starting to come off a little bit.

And they bring in Jared Mayo.

Kraft anoints Mayo as the successor

and is still on Belichick's staff.

And it seems like it's going to be one year, two years, three years, whatever it is.

And Belichick stops talking to Mayo basically by all reports.

And it's just super weird.

And at the same time, apparently he's with this Jordan Hudson.

These are the things that are all happening outside of public view.

Yes.

Yes.

When Kraft said.

But

I think it was weird with them.

And look.

I mean, Wickersham wrote about this in 2017.

I got mad on my podcast about that because we're protective about the pats, right?

And I get that.

And Wickersham's reporting was dead on.

I've had him on many times to talk about it.

But

the Garoppolo thing, Alex Guerrero, there were all these things, Kraft versus Belichick, all these things where people were like, there's a problem, there's a problem.

And everybody was like, we're fine, we're winning, we're fine.

And then it all leads to the dynasty and Belichick writing a book where he doesn't mention Kraft.

And also the Apple TV documentary.

That's what I meant at the dynamic.

It's called The Dynasty.

Yeah, that Apple documentary.

In which it's so the public relations war, right?

There's Kraft, there's Balichek, now there's Jordan Hudson.

There's everybody trying to control a story that has been deeply embarrassing for everybody involved.

And it reminds me of something that Seth wrote in his book.

Seth quotes Bob Kraft saying,

Bill Belichick was an idiot savant.

And I believe that the more I learn about Bill Belichick outside of football, there is this notion of a guy who is a total genius at football, who has proven in terms of who he surrounds himself with, the decisions he makes, how the people around him are afraid to deal with him, even as they are literally in the same room watching Jordan Hudson, rolling their eyes, some of the coaches on staff.

I believe that there is a great deal of this man being a genius and also a fool.

And if that feels rude because Bill Balichek is someone you revere, I just ask you to do the thing.

Revere is strong.

But Jordan Hudson is trying to do this thing where it's like, there's personal bill and professional bill.

And for right now, I will do the same.

Yeah.

Football bill, genius.

Personal bill, utter super fund disaster.

And that's what the story is.

Well, you could feel some of it last year with all the

media stuff that he did, where all of a sudden he was on like five, six different things.

Is any of it good in your view?

I thought there was some inside the NFL stuff

that was interesting.

But for the most part, he seemed to me, this is a problem a lot of times when coaches do media for a year or two years, they don't really want to say anything because they might be coaching again.

And I thought it, I thought he was very safe, which was, we talked to him about a podcast.

My fear was,

are you going to be too safe?

Because we've seen that over and over again with people.

That's why Doc Rivers was amazing to have on pods.

He didn't know if he was coaching again or not, but he still said shit.

He still was like the doc that you would hang out with if you weren't doing a pod.

pod.

Right.

I never felt totally that way with Belichick.

What I have been told from people who worked for, I mean, at this point, I'm talking about a half dozen humans that dealt with Bill and Jordan together at these media ventures, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I talked to 11 sources in total, but I'll be more specific to these media things that launched last offseason.

They explicitly encountered Bill Balichek and Matt Patricia using the media to audition to get back into the NFL.

And they were deliberately, de facto tanking.

No one understood why Bill Balichek in the pre-production meeting was one thing.

And then on Mike, he was so bland as to destroy the very premise of why they were paying him all of that money.

And it was very clear by the end, he and Jordan Hudson had a plan for what this was going to be.

And throughout that,

it was so bad as to, I mean,

be admitted by the people who were responsible for the idea.

Like talking to them now, they all know this was disastrous.

And in fact, I found it fascinating that like Peyton Manning's not having Bill Balichek back.

That was just announced this past week.

I thought he was

on the Manning cast.

He's gone.

He's off now.

Where he was good was when it was talking about in the past, when he could talk about like LT, Ed Reed.

And that's when he'd really open up because those guys were retired and they weren't somebody he would potentially be coaching or coaching against.

Where was I thought was

planned?

And where was long snapper monologue Bill Belichick, the guy who loved the minutiae of like, oh, wait a minute, a left-footed punter?

He's charismatic almost, right?

The stuff of the specifics and the history of football, he's so good at.

But what we saw was a guy using the media to get back into the NFL and now at Carolina.

Openly using it.

I mean, so

I would say even frustratingly and almost irresponsibly, given that he was entrusted as the host of shows, in one case, with Matt Patricia as his co-host, speaking to like

the Ramora fish kind of dynamic of like neither of them wanted to be good at media.

They wanted to be NFL coaches.

I thought there was an idea for him if he really wanted to have an awesome podcast and committed to it.

I think it would have been amazing.

What's your pitch?

No, I just think when he was doing all these different pieces of what he was doing, but what he really cared about was the NFL films, footage, the breakdowns, kind of teaching people about football and what was happening in the moment, I think would have been really good, but I don't also don't feel like he wanted to do it.

He wasn't going to talk about weaknesses.

He wasn't going to be like, here's the problem with Trevor Lawrence.

Here's why he struggled for five years.

Look at his mechanics.

Here's how I would attack him if I was playing him.

He wasn't doing any of that.

So once.

Once I realized that, like in mid-September, I was like, I'm not consuming this anymore.

But I think, you know, you could argue it worked.

Like he got, he got like four or five different paychecks, right?

Like his, it seemed like his goal was to make a ton of money for one year and then come back and get an NFL coaching job in February.

And that did not happen.

Well, in fact, the contract with Carolina has this fascinating buyout clause that just passed.

So congratulations to Bill Belichick for not exercising his $1 million buyout clause to get out of Carolina.

It dropped after June 1st from $10 million to $1 million because he was trying to engineer an escape hatch.

If the NFL said, you know what, we watched a half dozen Bill Belichick media ventures, in which, by the way, the COO of Bill Belichick Productions is Jordan Hudson.

So, is that your reporting?

Oh, that was out there.

That was on LinkedIn.

That was her on her bio being like, I'm the COO of a company that's not incorporated as an LLC anywhere, but was de facto the person you had to negotiate with.

And in fact, Bill Belichick requested, after calling her brilliant to various media partners, hire her for six figures.

Like, this was not just she's the girlfriend and she's very young it's she's running the business and his even more crucially his public persona which is the key evolution here private man becomes public figure and how he does it is so illustrative of again all of these industries media business college the nfl on and on and on that we've been talking about This episode is brought to you by Yahoo Fantasy.

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Can we go big picture on journalism stuff?

Please.

Because these were your bones initially.

Where'd you go?

You did Columbia Grad?

No, I went to Harvard and I was a...

Where'd you go to grad?

Or you didn't?

You just went right in.

The Sports Illustrated Fact-Checking Department

after college.

My origin story is that.

Well, I just remember hearing from you when we were doing Grantland and you were doing Jeremy Lynn stuff.

And I was like who's this guy and then it was like he's 23 i was like jesus it was one of those it was one of those uh franchiseola still you know makes fun of me because i was the guy like with this story who emerged kind of out of nowhere for a bunch of people and had these scoops that were beating

the certainly for jeremy lynn like the new york media ecosystem but also the national because we had kang at grantlin who was doing great stuff and you were doing great stuff and it was like the two of you felt like you kind of owned the story for i don't know, how long was that story, a month?

It felt like it felt like two years.

It felt like it's still going for me, actually.

No, it was two weeks and change in terms of his actual run, but in terms of his actual significance as a figure.

Yeah, a month, a couple of months.

But Kang was writing, I think, very thoughtful, like some reportage, but like a lot of essayistic stuff.

And I was the guy who had.

The Jeremy Lee

sports.

Yes, because again, I have this weird Rolodex of people.

He was a freshman when I was a senior in college.

Ryan Fitzpatrick was there when I was there.

One of the first interviews I did in college, I was covering the heavyweight crew team and I interviewed then

Olympic rower Tyler or Cameron Winklevoss.

I don't remember which one I did.

Social network guys?

Yes.

Wow.

One of the Winklevi was one of my first interviews.

Winklevi.

So anyway, the point being, I went to Harvard.

I wanted to go to law school.

I did the thing where I had a panic attack taking the LSAT because I wanted it too much and you had a panic attack yeah man like for like an actual one

i i need i need there's an asian person in here and i just need them to affirm me as somebody who is reasonably having panic attacks during tests i need i yes but you were taking the test

yeah yeah and i'm thinking i don't think that's ever happened the only time

I don't think that ever happened to me taking a test, probably because I felt like it probably wasn't going to turn out that well.

I was going to say, Holy Cross, playing on like beer pong.

You didn't like have a...

I had had 2.5 freshman year.

Way enough, though.

Oh, God.

Yeah, look, I cared deeply about school.

So you're going to be a lawyer or like there's an alternate world in which I am a lawyer right now.

So if you don't have a panic attack during the LSATs, I probably go to a law school that I dreamed of, and I never do journalism full-time because I did not.

First one in my family, born in America, parents from the Philippines, like structure and a roadmap towards American success in some conventional graduate school way was absolutely the gravitational force in my life.

And because I failed, not failed, literally, but like because I bombed a test, which is a nightmare for me,

I had to figure out what do I do in this gap year.

And in that gap year, I said, the thing I've been doing for fun this whole time is writing sports.

And I'd been an intern at Sports Illustrated because I love sports and have always been a sports fan and nerd and fan of writing.

I mean, I'm also somebody who read Sports Illustrated growing up and like worshiped these long-form bonus writers, you know?

So, fact-checking Gary Smith and Scott Price and Tim Layden and all of these guys, Tom Verducci, like that was my job.

And I nerded out on it.

I had to cross out every word in their stories to make sure it was true.

What an incredible

dissection of how to do this job at the highest level.

And so, for me, when did you go to ESPN though?

2012, the fall of the Jeremy Lynn year.

ESPN.com or magazine?

slash.com, but Chad Miller.

I was doing five jobs.

I know.

I was going to say you were.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of long-term memory from that era.

We were living very different existences at ESPN.

Mine was just tired all the time.

That was one of my existences.

Two small kids.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, yeah.

So I remember.

But to be clear, I also grew up reading you.

Thank you.

I mean, I didn't say it was good.

It was really good.

Genuinely, though, like the idea of, wait a minute, I could evolve a medium into something that feels more like me and my sensibility.

Like the progression of what I went through from like Harvard to Sports Illustrated to ESPN to getting on to Around the Horn, RIP, and then PTI, and then doing like cable political news now and doing other stuff.

Like, I've been waiting to do something that feels more like my own sensibility.

And so to get from wherever I started, guy who didn't want to do this professionally to a guy who cannot imagine what it would have been like if I had gotten the score I wanted on the LSAT, in which I'm not in this room right now.

A terrifying sliding doors possibility that I never have to do this.

Why couldn't you have done what you want to do with ESPN Daily?

I don't understand that part because that was a daily podcast with a lot of resources.

So did you like make a mistake with how you attacked it or you felt like it was too entrenched with the idea?

I wanted to do, as soon as I realized what,

so to credit the New York Times Daily as like the original sort of format that ESPN Daily essentially looked at and said, we want one of those, the idea of a two-way conversation into which you slide docus style elements, interview tape, scoring, editing, structure, all stuff you know from documentaries.

That was so eye-opening to me as a host and producer that I realized I wanted to do this for stuff that I reported instead of stuff that other people did.

So you just basically have reporters coming on and you're just setting them up and they're talking about their reporting and you're basically just a cruise director.

Yeah, cruise director.

I'm like smooth.

It was like, but by the way, and part of it is why couldn't you have changed that, though?

So

I really liked doing that because I was truly like getting to do a, in my ambition, an even better execution than the written piece was because I would pick like this story could be something that's three-dimensional and has like interview tape and can make this into a docu style.

I started calling these things, and this is very lame, but documentaries, like conversations that also felt like documentaries.

And that was the sort of medium that I still work in now.

But I found it to be something that left me too busy to do the passion projects where I was like, man, this format is so perfect for me.

If I can evolve it and report these myself and being a cruise director, in which I have to bring energy and smiling and selling stuff that sometimes I didn't want to do as much as the other stuff, that became something that I would have done, frankly, if I think, to be very blunt, ESPN cared more about it.

Right.

And it was just sort of like, but in their way, they care about it because they gave it resources, but that doesn't mean they cared about it in the correct way.

I would say, I believe that they liked the idea of it.

They were like, no, this is it.

And you have resources for it.

Do this.

Yeah.

And by the way, it no longer exists, right?

So Nina did it, then I did it.

And then there was a rotation of people who did their best with a staff that was overworked.

And in the end, it's not around anymore because I don't think they ever fully understood the potential.

And so for me.

You're saying ESPN didn't understand the potential of a podcast?

In that way, our lives are quite similar.

In that way, you and I

are so different.

No, it's crazy.

It's crazy to see what has left ESPN in the world of podcasting from a pure cynical self-interest perspective.

The podcast you have now, did you spitball it with Rideholm at all?

Yeah.

Oh, Eric and I, I mean, look, because what you're doing, I don't know if he told me this, but he wanted me to do this show in 2009 called Bill Simmons Investigates.

And I still have the email.

He sent me this long email.

He was basically like, we're taking your mailbag and just investigate the dumbest things.

And I think this could be a TV show.

And at that point, I kind of, I kind of knew where I want to do Grant Lane.

I wanted to do a bunch of, I didn't want to do a TV show, but I always thought it was an interesting idea.

And it was a great email.

And I didn't know if that was

what led to part of what you're trying to do.

Not that, not the idea, but a piece of it.

Eric mentioned this to me, like maybe a year into the show.

Because it was a great idea.

Dude, the whole idea of using journalism to solve stupid and/or serious and/or smart, funny mysteries is,

it's funny.

Like, I talk to people, like, I'm using journalism to solve mysteries.

And some journalists will look at me and be like, You mean do journalism?

And I'm like, Oh, yeah, I'm kind of just rebranding what journalism is.

Uh, but that's kind of the point.

It's a great, I mean, look, my brother helped me come up, my younger brother, who is not sports fluent really at all, except Toddenham sports.

He loves Toddenum football.

He He helped me come up with the name Pablo Torre finds out.

And I think that only once the name crystallized did it become clear that this was a through line through my curiosity.

And so the whole idea of, yes, I'm going to investigate something, solve a mystery, that,

man, I think the name ended up crystallizing the ambition in a way that I only realize in retrospect.

But I would have loved to have subscribed to Bill Simmons Investigates, in which I don't don't know how

to do what you would have done, but I don't know how I could have done it for ESPN.

I don't know how I could have written my column.

It would have been, I mean, I can tell you that like this thing is my second child, this show.

And I take it.

I think that's the way you have to do it.

Yeah, it's the way you have to.

Honestly,

it's probably unhealthy, honestly.

But like the Belichick story to me is such a thin slice of my brain, but the thing that everybody wants to talk about.

And meanwhile, I have like these other things that I'm like working on right now that I find to be, in many ways, so much weirder and more important.

And, but by the way, I

reached out to you

when we did the LeBron tape, the Knicks video to recruit LeBron, the Sopranos secret video.

Oh, I already knew that story, though.

But I, I got the tape, Bill.

You can actually watch the video.

You can see James Gandolfini and Edith Falco in this weird apartment acting like a Super Sweet 16 video for LeBron James at the behest of James Dolan, in which the next face you see after they play this scene, in which, by the way, yes, turns out the Soprano subreddit was very excited about this.

They're alive, like they're in the cinematic universe somehow, looking for an apartment.

The Soprano subreddit is still going?

I mean, as a metaphor, maybe for the topic at hand, yes.

I didn't even know it existed.

I didn't know that

it still went going.

It sounds great.

So, the point being, though, that like that video, in which, by the way, the first face you see in this episode, and we got the whole video, is Donald Trump.

James Dolan assembles a murderer's row of people.

And in that list, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Harvey Weinstein.

Like you see all of it.

And then we also got the.

Harvey Weinstein.

I mean, wow.

Yeah.

We also got my favorite part is that they also, and no one had known this before, they did versions of this for Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosch.

And so we have the alts where it's like the same script, but they swap out the names.

And it's just like the comedy of, again, behind the scenes, how does the team that has everything lure LeBron James?

And the reason I reached out to you was that you've long been on this thing with the Knicks and LeBron, where the Knicks messed it up.

Well, part of it was, I think they, Donnie Walsh was running it.

He was in a wheelchair.

And he was in a wheelchair and they wheeled them in and it, and it just wasn't great.

Well, the missing piece.

I think they were like, wait, this guy's running running the team.

He seems old and weak.

But the missing piece is that enrolls, Donnie Walsh and this contingent.

And again, LeBron has everybody visiting him in this hotel, in this, sorry, this building.

And into the boardroom, it's these delegations.

Yeah.

The SUVs roll up and it's the Clippers and it's all these teams, right?

Sterling.

Didn't really win the room over.

It was tough for him.

But into the room walk the New York Knicks and the lights darken and they press play and this video starts.

And so the missing piece was like, what's it actually like to have seen this?

What I can tell you is that after I published the episode, people in LeBron's camp were like, thank God people finally understand what that was like.

They didn't have the tape either.

But again, because I'm a kind of unhinged dog with a bone on these like sports culture mysteries, I take it as a point of pride that I got to finally close the loop on one of these ongoing, yeah, like urban legend, but actually real stories.

So, like the lottery stuff,

like the frozen envelope.

Have you done that one yet?

So, I've been

doing reporting around this.

I'll spoil a little bit of it.

I just know that there was one NBA owner I talked to recently who was absolutely convinced this is rigged.

It was the easiest one to rig because it was seven envelopes.

You, I've I studied it.

I remember doing a mailbag thing about it at some point.

I studied it.

There was one that seemed a little bent, but that footage was really grainy.

And the way apparently he could have done it, if you were going to do it, I don't even know if that you could do it.

And by the way, it would be massive fraud and a whole bunch of terrible things that come out of it.

But if you froze one of the envelopes and made them extremely cold and your finger, like you can see his hands going in there.

And if you just felt the one and you would know that's the one, that's how you would do it.

I think with now with the ping pong balls, I don't know how you would do it.

Well, I think there's still, well, on the frozen envelope theory, I talked to David Falk, who was, as you know, Jordan's agent, Ewing's agent also.

And I asked him about NBA conspiracies, specifically that and the gambling, you know,

alleged suspension, retirement, Michael Jordan, you know, which you've talked about also endlessly.

It's very surreal, by the way, to get these conspiracies directly from you at this table, having heard you.

Well, those are, I mean, those are the two most famous ones.

But so I asked David Falk about them.

He's the agent for both men.

a unique perspective.

And he says, the Jordan one, that's bullshit.

It doesn't make any sense.

But the Ewing one, he says, I could kind of see it.

And I'm like, okay.

And so we have this conversation.

And the whole thing about conspiracies in the NBA and in life.

This triggered conspiracy bill, by the way.

He's like, I've noticed right now.

I felt the temperature change.

The barometric pressure in the studio has shifted.

I didn't realize he was going to show up today.

It's an honor to meet you.

Yeah.

Conspiracy Bill.

He's right here.

The thing about NBA conspiracies and conspiracies in politics and life is that the difference between truth and plausibility is an interesting distinction.

Because if you have either truth or plausibility, people care.

And so now we've come all the way back around to the difference between gossip and journalism, between clickbait and something that's popular, between algorithms and curiosity.

Like, yes, these are hard things that have eaten the brains of everybody.

in America because there are incentives to be dishonest in the service of some larger conspiracy.

But sometimes, sometimes there is truth.

And that's what journalism is.

Sometimes you learn things as the years go on

and you get a tidbit.

And you go, and then it makes you revisit.

Like for me, I forget when Shaq did this.

Shaq told the story, might have been on a podcast.

about how David Cern asked him if he wanted to be warm weather or cold weather before the lottery.

And he said warm and then orlando and he's like

just that's a thing that happened so then you hear that and you're like wait a second and now you have to go backwards and revisit um

you know the especially 84 where or 85 the lottery i think that it's by far if you look at all the teams by far you into the knicks was the best case scenario for them the jordan one

Here's the part that's never added up.

Yeah.

And if I had to put a ratio on it, I would go 80-20.

I think he actually, like, there was no chicanery.

He just, he was upset about his dad and retired.

Every story about this dude, which we revisit now because we have to argue about the goat

contractually, all of us, like once a month.

Every story is about what a homicidal competitor he was, most competitive guy ever, competing on everything,

be in the airport, waiting for bags, and he would pay off the baggage handler because he had to win that badly.

And we're all supposed to accept accept that he just shut that off and left basketball after he'd won three straight titles

because he had nothing left to prove.

So were you homicidally competitive or are you the kind of guy who can just shut it off because you have nothing else to prove?

I've never reconciled those two things.

I think that is one of the things that's most fascinating big picture about sports to me.

Here you have the greatest winners, right?

So we start with Balachek, we get to Jordan.

The greatest winners who have assembled everything that everyone else lusts after.

Yeah.

And still there are these gaping holes in what makes them feel fulfilled.

Right.

And that to me is why sports is, sports is both the perfect metaphor for everything else.

It's also just on its own fascinating.

And the Jordan stuff, I mean, look,

I think that

when it comes to, I mean, I'm the type of guy who found,

this is the other story that I did where people were like, this is beneath you.

And I'm like, I got bad news for you.

This is eye level for me.

For months, right?

I'm seeing these stories about Marcus Jordan dating Larsa Pippen.

And I'm like, on one level, unbelievably superficial, empty, vacuous, tabloid trash.

For someone who's an NBA fan, who grew up watching the Bulls.

The idea that Scotty Pippen's ex-wife is dating Michael Jordan's son and everybody around them is like having to deal with this.

And on top of it, Pippin and Jordan had the fallout after the last dance.

Like,

and so the timeline was not merely, wow, interesting through the lens of history, actively contentious now, informing our understanding of how Michael Jordan operates, how Scotty Pippen operates, who cares about what, the power dynamics on a team being re-litigated decades later in public through their loved ones and former loved ones.

Right.

So, what I did was, and this is, again, my insanity, is that I listened to every episode of the podcast that Larsa Pippen and Marcus Jordan were hosting together, which very few people remember.

How many episodes was that?

I think they did about a dozen.

It was called Separation Anxiety, and it was horrible.

You listened to all 12 episodes of that?

I'm a journalist.

Oh, my God.

Like, were you doing other stuff?

Were you playing video games?

How do you just concentrate on that?

Just horrible.

Just know that parenting a child while having that in the background is probably something I'll get sued for by my daughter.

Yeah, yeah, fair.

But what happened was we did all of that.

And then the coup de grace was I invited Marcus and Larsa together onto my show and interviewed them and got to talk and confront them about this story.

And it resulted in a number of New York Post headlines in which they called me miserable and that I was unfair to them and all that stuff, which is okay because they shouldn't necessarily like what I have to say to them.

But the question of is it true and interesting and significant for a certain quadrant of people that actually is in my audience?

I think that's kind of that that's what I enjoy is like, yes, it is kind of envelope pushing to take this seriously, but if I can prove to you that it's worth your time, then I think everybody got what they wanted here.

So you're basically taking

somebody's on a text ride with four of their buddies who love sports and there's this Larsa Pippa things happening like, what the fuck is going on with this?

That's an episode for you.

For me, group chats and texts from people who are like, I don't know if I can say this or I heard this is a huge source of just incoming ideas.

And the question is always: can I do this responsibly and accurately and rigorously, such that I can still plausibly be considered a journalist by the Murrow and Peabody people, while also satisfying my friends who I use as like these proxies for my audience.

Like,

I like to take stories seriously, but not myself so seriously.

And that's why I'm here, is to say, like, yeah, please do laugh at me.

Like, I am not here to be insulated from criticism.

Just know that I am so bizarrely prepared to discuss it if you have questions, that all I ask is the ability to explain maybe what people did not hear or listen to because it got clipped out because that's the game, too.

And I am not fighting it.

I just want people to look at the stuff in totality.

So if somebody wanted to do an episode about how Kornheiser didn't leave his house for four years other than to play golf once a week,

do you bat that around with somebody else?

Or is it just like an instinct?

Like, I can't do that.

That's not going to work as an episode.

The first question I ask myself is, does voice-modulated Bill Simmons still discernibly sound like Bill Simmons?

Bill Simmons, AI in French.

Can we get you?

I'm going to spot AIB.

It's different languages.

We had to.

It's going to be great for a lot of us.

I can't wait.

We turned down.

I mean, not that this is a noble position, but we turned down, there was an offer from a tech company that will remain nameless to like, hey, you have an archive of shows with people talking in this conversational way.

Can we pay you to train our AI bots?

And you're like, no.

Yeah, that sounds.

No, you can't.

And by the way, parallel to that is this media tour thing.

Like Harvey Levin and TMZ asked me to talk to him about Pellchek.

And I said, I don't think I can do that.

I think my standard for the lowest brow programming I can do is the Bill Simmons show.

And so that's why.

That was a dig.

We were getting along so well.

What the hell?

This is the higher end of the show.

Sure, when you founded Grantland, wasn't that fun?

That's the spirit of what I do is honestly like, we have so many friends in common because

your coaching tree said I would do the compliment thing, right?

Your coaching tree, unlike Pelichek's.

It's a tree.

I don't know what kind of, what kind of tree is it?

I don't know.

it's a lot of a lot of great people have passed through my life and i have become friends with them in part sometimes because i first encountered them through things that you had made and we then went on to become friends who then text me what the fuck's happening with you and bill um and which i say i don't know i'm not sure he knows what my show is but i'm happy to explain it uh but then also it is the recognition that

who you choose to surround yourself with is kind of the through line in all of it in the reporting i did with Ballot Check, in why I'm here with you.

And to the degree that, you know, the media is a bizarre, chaotic industry that I now am trying to navigate as an independent training wheels entrepreneur with a show.

Yeah, man, I'm like,

I could use good ideas.

I could use help.

I could use people just saying, hey, they do stuff that is like this that you might enjoy.

So are you getting pitched ideas and concepts?

And you're like, ah, it doesn't pass.

Ah, maybe.

Like, what's the, what's like the incubation process?

I am.

My staff makes fun of me.

Like, we have a staff?

You do realize you have two producers over there who are like, no, but I mean, what's like, what's the staff?

I mean, we have them in the credits of every Friday episode in which we shout them out.

But I tried to make

researchers, like all kinds of people.

We have a couple of people who are devoted.

Everyone does more than one thing.

But yes, I wanted to make a mini newsroom because what I can't do is we do three episodes a week.

We call Pab Otori's Deep Pockets.

I mean, Dan Lebetard's Deep Pockets, man.

I'm using his money to fund a weird project that no one really asked for, but is the thing that I'm like trying to make sustainable.

I am somebody who wanted to hire people to simulate what feels like a modern newsroom, tongue-in-cheek, but not, in which, yeah, I get tips, but more than that, I'm like perpetually.

pressure testing these ideas that I have.

So my phone, my Slack channel is just an endless stream of me pitching my staff ideas like, I think we should do this, but we got to make these calls.

Can we do that?

I found this weird nugget buried in this other thing.

There was this bankruptcy filing.

This is a breadcrumb for a future episode.

There's this bankruptcy filing that I think everybody would find fascinating if I can get to the bottom of it.

These are my skill, if I have one, is hopefully trying to discern whether someone who's not me would find something that I find interesting.

Chang's golf career?

You know what I wanted to do when you got, got, you agree with him at a golfer?

Chang was supposed to be.

I was.

Was Chang.

Chang was, his dad wanted him to be a PGA golfer.

I was walking around with like

torn rotator cuffs, getting like Tommy Johnson.

I mean, he filmed 35 straight weeks of Netflix episodes and his body literally broke down.

I wanted to do the episode,

and I've talked to him before about this, and I'll just spoil it because you have first dibs.

Yeah, like the secret world of food at Augusta beyond like the stand in front, but like the secret,

you know what I'm talking about.

They don't, they just don't do.

I mean, I guess you could.

They're not, you're not going to find any of that from Augusta.

Oh, oh,

this is why, yeah, this is why I do what I do.

Oh, so you think you could?

I think I'm going to wear a trench coat and David Chang's gonna be the top part, and I'm gonna have a mech suit underneath.

We're like Mission Impossible, like a David Chang.

One ticket, please.

Yeah.

We walk into Augusta together.

Yeah, man.

I'm, I, yes, by the way, I, I love doing stuff.

And this is going to sound very retrograde and edgier than I think.

I love doing stuff that people don't want me to do.

Like, if I find something interesting and the people in charge of it are like, no,

now I'm like, well, what do you got to hide?

Why don't you want people to know that there's a secret special like food court for rich people, the Illuminati in the back of Augusta?

You know what would have been a good episode that you can't do now?

I was obsessed with this for like two years when Stern was commissioner.

Apparently, at every NBA party, I think I've talked about this.

He loved pigs in a blanket,

and they had to be at every NBA function and party.

And there was this one party where they didn't have NBA pigs in a blanket, and he freaked out and was really upset about it.

And I was like, this sounds amazing.

I don't know if that's quite an episode, but David Stern's obsession with Pigs in a Blanket feels like the formation of something.

I hesitate to inform you that I would have greenlit that.

I don't know if there's enough.

It feels like there needs to be a second piece to it.

What kind of pigs in a a blanket?

We're talking about the microwavable kind.

Does David Stern want like super bespoke?

So somebody told me that.

And then at like, I don't know, nine months later, I was at one of those functions and they had pigs in a blanket and I was watching him eat it.

And that was the most riveted I've ever met in my life.

I was like, he's eating the pigs in the blanket.

And there's a trend.

There's a metaphor there for Scott Foster somehow.

You know, I was like, yeah, you got to.

By the way.

I'm sure you've had this experience, but like when you do stuff that the NBA doesn't love sometimes.

Oh, I hadn't had that experience ever never yeah but the number of calls you get like just even uttering scott foster in this microphone i'm gonna like tim frank if you're listening i'm sorry that i did this but like yeah man i i would love to to make a pigs in a blanket metaphor for uh nba officiating and the dial they turn to get an outcome not explicitly to conspiratorially rig a game but just like

more scoring less scoring More fouls, fewer fouls, just like big picture stuff.

This has been out there for a bunch of years now, and I think people are at least a little bit aware of it.

You know, that's, there's a reason they released a ref assignments the day of the game.

There was also ref stats that I think some gamblers took advantage of in the 2000s.

But just in general, teams can complain.

This is the big thing people need to understand about officials.

Teams can complain about how a game was called.

They'll send the things and then the league will tell the officials for the next game, like, they're getting away with too much stuff.

They can't do that.

Or they'll give them some sort of directive that will then shape the next game.

And it's one of the reasons the games will feel a little differently.

Like if Nees Smith, and we're taping this four-game one of the finals, if Neese Smith is just hounding SGA and he's just bumping him and touching him, and it's like crossing the line, but they let it go, the league will then tell the rest for the next game, like, here's footage of Nees Smith, you can't let him do this.

Points of emphasis.

That's the good version of this.

There might be some more sinister versions of it, too.

So I think it's true in the past, maybe not now.

Well, I think it's inevitable that the NBA, because you officiate games at the end differently than you do at the beginning,

is inviting an arbitrary, I know it when I see it, standard, which is up for interpretation, judicial interpretation that varies depending on what the instructions are of that game.

The thing though, about, and I love this, this is a thing I have looked into and that I want to do something with, but again, I'm happy to just talk about it a bit.

the complaints that teams make to the league.

Pointed with video.

What I've been told is is that the teams that complain the most often, I'll name two of them.

I'm curious if you're surprised.

One is the New York Knicks.

The other is the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Just like which teams file the most complaints because of stuff that causes them to think we got jobbed.

And it's, I'm told, reliably, those two teams are among the most

offended and yeah, liable to file paperwork.

Conspiracy Bill was on alert for game six of Nick's Pacers.

And it was interesting.

They let basically Brunson and Halliburton get manhandled the whole game.

So they basically just, because Halliburton was dripping the ball up and there, Bridges and

Ananobi were like clubbing him as he's just dribbling a straight line.

I was like, Jesus, but they were just as physical with Brunson.

I think it's better.

I think social media has really evened it out.

Because the darkest moment other than Donaghy and other than the Art Test Melee of the 21st century for the NBA, I think was that 06 finals and how appalled everybody was by how it was officiated.

Sure.

And I think Wade shot 25 free throws in game five, but it just

didn't sit right.

Cuban staring down Stern after a loss, which has never happened before since in the history of the league.

Him just from the court staring at him, stink eye.

Do you miss David Stern?

I do.

I think he was starting to really lose it at the end, and it was time for him to retire.

And obviously, people come and go.

I mean, from the planet or from the jobs,

for jobs and from the planet.

There was something about how he shepherded stuff that I thought was maybe it belonged to its own era.

He just didn't put up with shit.

You know,

what a

I think Adam Silver has succeeded in ways that are indisputable financially.

Not with the slash CBA.

Although maybe that's not his fault.

Wait, what's your take on tripling the CBA?

No, it's not the money they made.

It's what it did competitively to the league with all the aprons.

I think it's really going to badly fuck up the league.

So to that point, by the way, as we're looking at the second apron, basically doing something that the NBA has always needed more of, which is reduce the

platform in the most expensive settings for superstars to be even more important, right?

Like, that's the thing about Second Apron and Adam's tenure, I think, is that it's just very funny that he learned at the knee of David Stern and operates behind the scenes so differently.

And I think David Stern, what would WWDSD, what would David Stern do?

Is a question I ask myself very often when it comes to.

It's funny when people get to that point.

Because I actually think Belichick was at that point.

How people put together their roster was almost like would you sign this guy for 85 million well would belichek do that probably not and he had hit that point at least through the mid 2010s and then it kind of faded away but i think stern was for the most part had really good instincts um i thought near the end i thought he lost i i will never understand the okayc seattle thing that's oh oh oh when he was running the team or when he relocated the team No, when he let the OKC guys buy Seattle to steal them and steal them away.

I'll never understand why the conflict of interest with the New Orleans owning that franchise

remains just an amazing thing that I still marvel at, man.

Yeah.

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Wait, we don't have a lot of of time left because you got to fly to LA.

Gotta find, yeah, hold on ahead.

I had more topics for you, though.

Um, we got to talk Kornheiser, yeah, because I've never really talked about him

on a podcast with somebody who's actually worked with him and spent real time with him.

Because I think it's hard, he's a hard person to explain.

And it was interesting to think about him in the context of around the horn ending, whether that show would go to an hour.

And I heard those rumors, and I was like, there is no way in a million years Tony will go to an hour unless they pay him some ungodly sum.

And even then, I don't even think he'd want to do it.

Dollars per minute is the stat that Tony Kornheiser values.

Yeah, he's like, I'll do it, but here's the price.

But anyway,

you know, I first did TV with him in 09.

And I'm sure you remember losing your PTI virginity as well when the date, when the day, I was September 09.

When were you?

Oh, my gosh.

I think I filled in.

This must have been five or six.

Bill, I'm old now, man.

I don't remember the exact mid-2010 somewhere.

Yeah, exactly.

No, no, no.

It would have been 2013, 14, probably 2014.

So I did four days.

I flew to DC.

I was still writing my column and I was completely terrified.

And Kornheiser

basically walked me through like a young puppy on a leash on the sidewalks and helped me.

kind of bait and just sold everything I did.

And by the end of it, I was like, all right, I think I actually understand the mechanics of this now.

Now it's going to take years to figure out how to do it.

But I get it.

It was like one of the best educations I ever had in four days.

He's the, he's my goat.

Tony Karnizer is to me the greatest of all time.

And I say that not because

whatever, he would appreciate that.

I say that because when it comes to a teammate on TV who presents as very hard to win over,

once he agrees that he can trust you,

he is the best salesman of the person across the desk from him in the history of television.

And he's smart and he's funny and he's quick.

And for all of the things we've been saying, the through line of this episode is also,

what happens when you get older?

His fastball is still humming, man.

I know.

I don't like when he says, like, oh, nobody wants to see me on TV.

They want to get rid of me.

I'm like,

and he's wrong about that.

He is so sharp still.

And in not a, I'm grading on a curve because he's like my TV grandpa sort of a way, but merely in the way of I've done a lot of TV at this point, and he is still

so fucking good at it.

And see, that's the age difference between us because I always called him Uncle Tony.

I'm grandpa, and you called him grandpa too.

Lolo is very grandpa.

We're in a different generation.

Yeah.

He went to my wedding.

I'm not surprised.

I invited him and he said, I'm going to leave at 9:30.

And he left at 9:29.

And I'm amazed it wasn't 9:30 exactly.

Well, he so I he went around and shook everyone's hand because it was also kind of like he was the guest, he was the celebrity guest.

Yeah, and everyone loved it.

Tony Kornizer to be as just what he is in real life is so much.

Anyway, he doesn't want me to say too many things in public about what we talk about personally.

But my God, he's so fun to talk to.

And the fact that we share him in common as a person that we adore and will be both confused when we have to recap why we did this show.

We probably should have done it sooner anyway, because I've had a good time.

Yeah, man.

But yeah, the thing with Tony,

I think my favorite thing about him is the phone will just ring.

You have very few people where you just get a call.

And I'll be like, all right, I know this is going to be 30 minutes, but I'm excited for it.

And then he's just, there's no hello, how are you?

He's just right into the conversation.

it's always like hold on what is going on with dot dot dot and then it's just you're just kind of doing a show with them it's the best but that's why like you know i i actually think pti is now underrated for um

people don't understand from a pure metric perspective the highest rated show in the daytime lineup still still we talk about all the other shows a lot still number one doing doing stories that are like 10 11 hours old compared to like the advantage get up and first take have, by the time it gets to those guys, the story's like done.

There's been now in the podcast era, there's a million podcasts that are out every day, and people have already reacted and done their thoughts.

And then those guys come in,

and they're to me that the two of them together,

it's like an old married couple that still like works 100%.

It's a lot inside the NBA, it's the same way.

Like those guys just still work as a group.

Yeah.

And that's just the way it's chemistry.

It's chemistry.

You can't fake it.

Again, you do know it when you see it in that regard.

And Eric and Matt, producers of PTI, and the staff, and Tony and Mike, they

take it, again, they take it seriously, but they don't take themselves in the way that they do the show so seriously.

And Tony and Mike.

No, but Tony takes one thing seriously.

And I can't speak for Mike because I think Mike's easygoing.

Like he would have gone to an hour and been fine with it.

Tony is very committed.

He's pot committed to the structure.

Oh, yeah.

He won't change.

They haven't.

What's really interesting about that show, they haven't really added anything to the structure.

It's still done the same way, that fourth segment with the birthdays and racing throughs.

That's from 2004.

I don't know how many years it took them to figure it.

Tony will not touch that and he will get mad if you even suggest it.

Tony refuses to say the words, pardon the interruption.

Because he just never liked the name.

He always says, welcome to PTI, boys and girls.

He noticed, just like he is, I mean, when I say he can say himself seriously, I mean in the sense of he's willing to be laughed at

and will be the class clown and perform.

And that is a key trait I find in television.

But he's also so deeply devoted to

why PTI has worked.

And I think it's because he and Mike see this as an extension of their journalistic selves.

You know, they're not in locker rooms anymore.

They're not at press.

Mike's still,

but they still have the DNA of it.

I mean, Tony wrote some of the better features of the late 70s and early 80s.

Like he has a whole era that nobody even remembers anymore.

I was talking to somebody who is not a sports fan, but just read randomly.

They were doing research on it.

The Rick Berry one?

No, but Rick Berry being an asshole and that being a sports illustrated feature is an all-time great story.

I thought that was probably the best thing to write.

What were you going to say?

So I didn't know about this one, but while in LA this weekend, someone who's a big star, bring it full circle again, a Star Wars fan, was like, Tony Kornheiser for the Washington Post, for the style section, did a piece about the Empire Strikes Back.

And I'm just like, and

this person didn't know that Kornheiser did this and like got this column that was so funny and smart and all.

So, like, from like 1980?

Yes.

And like, Tony has been out here doing the shit that we say.

We're innovating new forms of media and it's culture and sports colliding.

Tony's been out here doing stuff for whatever year.

I mean, it's crazy, 50 years.

Yeah, he had, I remember the last couple of years out of ESPN, he had this whole thing.

He kept saying, like,

and I was like, you know, pretty close to him at this point.

And he would always be like, well, when Leba, when Tony, when Mike and I turn it over to you and Leba's hard,

and I'd always, and finally, I got mad at him and I was like, you got to stop that.

I don't want to take over PTI.

That's your show.

You guys are going to die with that show.

Nobody wants to take that show.

Nobody wants that responsibility.

It's your show.

Like, stop even thinking that.

That's that's the thing: is that as much as Tony likes to talk about take over the thing,

they're the show should die when they don't want to do it anymore.

I think nobody should take the show over.

I agree.

Come up with another idea.

I also fully think that the show will die when they die.

They literally have to say,

I mean, they're not going to stop doing it.

Wilbon was doing get up the last couple weeks.

Like, Wilbon's a lot of motor.

Wilbon's available.

Wilbon's motor is a remarkable thing.

As a prospect, Wilbon,

I don't think there's been a lot of people at that age who've done,

who've done it this way.

I was always, the year I was doing the countdown with Wilbon and Magic, those guys were just machines that could come to life on camera.

And we could have, we would be like, they would give us like this big meal, you know, they'd give us, because we were taping the show would be like 4.30, 5 o'clock.

West Coast time, and then we'd have to be there for the basketball, come back in.

So they'd have food and those guys could eat like entire dinners and go out there two minutes later and just light up.

Yeah.

And I was like, that's a skill I'm not sure I will ever have.

And by the way, I'll just have a small salad because I don't want to be in a food coma and seem like I'm luggage on this.

Yeah, farting on air is probably not the best.

Yeah.

Anyway, so I, so you agree with me that show should die with them?

Look, I is the one they don't want to do it.

I think that should be it for the show.

I don't think there's any following them.

I don't think that that show could be done without.

I think as a film, as a fill-in,

love being a substitute teacher.

Right.

Have no illusions that PTI should be mine or whoever else is once those guys leave.

I wouldn't want that burden.

Like,

talk about being set up to fail, you know, just being set up to disappoint people.

Like, yeah, I'm not Tony and Mike, and I miss them too, would be how I felt every time I would fill in as the hypothetical place.

I'm sorry I'm here.

Yeah, like I also wish they were still here.

Yeah.

It's better when they're in person though, which we were talking about before we started.

Like, and that was one of the things COVID really fucked up because the Zoom made it easier.

I used to interview everybody.

We had all these people coming in and then people asked why I don't.

do the interviews as much anymore, which I think we're going to change because we're building a couple of studios.

But

I just didn't like doing it on Zoom.

It's even like you and I talking today, it was like, we could have done it on Zoom, but as you were here, and it was like, let's do it in person.

It would be way better.

Yeah, it's like we could have a phone call in which both of us immediately start yelling at each other, which is what happened.

But then it led to a conversation that to me, I think, clarified that even if Bill Simmons, guy I grew up reading, may not be a subscriber to my show, Conspiracy Bill absolutely is.

And I'm so glad that Conspiracy Bill's now, he's aware of

like and subscribed, Conspiracy Bill.

He's intrigued.

Yeah, I can tell.

Well, what, what show, what episode would you want me on?

What would be like,

oh, I like the way you're thinking, Conspiracy Bill.

No, what episode, like, what would be the best use of, it doesn't have to be Conspiracy Bill, it could be Bill, but what would be the dream episode for you?

There's, there are actual answers to this that I will tell you about as soon as we're done recording.

Oh, interesting.

I don't think that I'm not going to take you up on something that might actually be worthwhile.

I'm like organizer.

I don't really like to travel anymore.

I've noticed.

You made me come to, can I say the neighborhood we're in, or is that my doxing you if I say that you made me come to this?

Well, we're at the Spotify Studios in downtown LA.

Very convenient.

Well, that's why we're building studios elsewhere to try to fix some of this.

In all honesty,

I am very glad you asked me to do this.

I'm too.

I, you know, because I felt like.

You know, when we do like any pod, we have these little asides.

You get caught up.

You're trying to make the host laugh, whatever.

And then sometimes, you know,

as I explained, I didn't love the Belichick stuff, but I get why you did it.

So I think I have a better understanding of the whole thing, which is the whole point of why we wanted to talk.

What you're saying is that Bill Simmons finally investigated.

Bill Simmons investigated.

Pablo Torre, thanks for coming on.

Appreciate it.

You're very welcome.

All right.

That's it for the podcast.

Thanks to Pablo Torre for coming to downtown LA to talk to me.

Thanks to the Knicks for doing something interesting for the top of the podcast.

And thanks to Eduardo and Gahau as well.

You can watch this as a video podcast on Spotify.

You can watch it on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel as well.

And don't forget, New Rewatchables, New Prestige TV podcast.

I'm on those as well.

I'm going to be back on Thursday with a big, juicy, fat podcast right after game one of the NBA finals.

In the meantime, if you want more basketball, listen to Zach Lowe.

I think he has a new podcast.

I think we moved it up to Wednesday and the Ringer NBA guys as well, the mismatch.

Russil is going to be on Friday.

So we got a lot of basketball content for you this week.

A lot of stuff on the website as well.

I will see you on Thursday night.

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