Giannis Trade Advice, Duncan Vs. Kobe, Ohtani Vs. the Babe, the Frugal-ish Yankees, and Life After ‘First Take’ With Max Kellerman

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We did Rocky 3, Rocky 4, Rocky 1.

Rocky 2 somehow last.

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Coming up on this podcast. Max Kellerman has been itching to talk sports for basically almost two years.
I think this is the first time he's been on a platform since 2023, just getting takes off.

We had a lot to catch up on. He is going to be launching a new podcast with Rich Paul.
Next week, we'll have the feed. I'll

give you the heads up on Thursday's pod, but you can subscribe to it.

It's launching next week. It's going to be called Game Over with Max Comer and Rich Paul.
And we're going to do it three days a week. I'm very excited about it.
But it's great to have Max.

Always wanted to work with him. Really excited to pod with him every once in a while.
We had a lot to catch up on. We talk about

possible Giannis trades, AD, what's happening in basketball, GOAT arguments, what's going to happen in football this year, what happened with Max at the end there at ESPN. We go all over the place.

And of course, hat to end with some boxing because every time I'm with Max, I got to talk boxing. So one other thing, the Music Box series is coming back on HBO.

This week, we have a great documentary about Jeff Buckley directed by Amy Berg. It's awesome.

So that's going to be on HBO on Thursday night and then we'll be available on

HBO Max all weekend. So get ready, especially if you love Jeff Buckley.
But I think even if you don't even know who he is, I think this is a really, really good documentary.

So excited to have this back. Four documentaries from us this month.
This is the first one. So please check that out when it's up.
All right, we're going to take a break. Pearl Jam and then Max.

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all right? Tuesday morning, Max Kellerman is here. This is the first time you have talked sports on a platform other than than you did some boxing for Netflix.
Yeah.

You're talking boxing on a podcast, but this is, you've been itching to go. It's, you know,

when you have an arm-waving opinion about everything and you're on the sidelines for two years watching stuff, the news cycle is relentless. Yeah.

And it makes this job amazing because like you think of someone like Howard Stern, what he has to do. His show is not based around the news.
They have a little segment.

They have to create something from nothing every day. It's incredible, right that where we have like yannis and the quippers we wake up in the morning read the paper take a big moment

and and the whole outline is already there for you so like that's every single day and it's like oh my god

and so you know my family is sick of hearing about this stuff well i have we're gonna do a segment later all the things you're mad you missed out on over the last two years we'll also talk a little about you've never really talked about how you left and all that we can go into it a tiny bit i want to go topical at the top, though, because we have the weirdest NFL season we've had in a while, maybe since like 2008.

We have all hell breaking loose in the NBA. I haven't talked to NBA on this podcast in a week since before Thanksgiving.

The honest trade stuff, I think, has officially arrived. He's deleting his social media.
Yeah, so just, and they don't look good. And this is the time.
And there's some teams we could talk about.

And then this Clippers thing. compared to the Lakers thing.
And I kind of want to start with the Clippers. Of course you do.
Well, here's why.

I really think this is like the most tortured Jinx NBA franchise we've probably had, even dating back to the Buffalo Braves. Easily.
And this is the darkest moment. They're snake pit.

They're snake pit. This is the darkest moment they've ever had.
And think of all the knee injuries and terrible, terrible things, terrible trades they've made. They've been the

black sheep little brother for the Lakers.

Even in the window when Kobe was sucking up the salary cap and no one wanted to play for the Lakers and they had Blake and they make the Chris Paul trade and never get a game. There's the window.

This is worse. This is worse.

So, combo of the least likable, least successful team you could put together. Like old, unreliable vets who don't want to be there.
Harden was a minus 39 on Sunday night.

Kawhi, you don't know what he's going to play. So they just had this team that I thought was the third best team in the league last year and now is five and six.
52 wins last year?

Yeah, and you know, toe-to-toe with Denver. I thought it went OKC, Denver, and then I would say Clippers third.
Who knew? Like, okay, so this is what's crazy about the Clippers.

This is why you just say snake bit. Okay.
The sports, the basketball gods just don't like them. Yeah.

Personnel. Like when I think about a franchise and whether it's going to be healthy and good or not, first I think about human resources, right? So for example, Jerry West.

spreads his Pixie Ducks dust over the Lakers and they win forever. And then he goes to Memphis and they get good.
Then he comes back to the Lakers and they're great again.

And then he goes up to Golden State. And I said on LA radio at the time, the battle of the five freeway has begun because Jerry West went to Golden State.
They're going to be good now.

That never caught on. You try to trademark it.
Trust them, it just didn't work. Yeah, it didn't happen.
But because the Lakers didn't hold up their end of the deal, right?

But the Warriors became a championship team. Now, Jerry West, even if that's just correlation and it's lazy, that's what we do in sports.
In team sports, you have to make correlation, right?

You don't know if it's exactly causal, but you correlate it. Wherever this guy goes, they win.
Robert Orey always hits big shots in the playoffs, and they always win championships. And

they get Jerry West, right? Like, that's a good idea. The Clippers doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter who you bring in.

When they Ty Lou, that's oh, that's the right guy, right?

It doesn't matter. So they get Chris Paul after the Lakers trade gets vetoed, and it seems like the home run of all time.
And it doesn't matter.

In the end, like they're the Lakers are raising championship banners, and the Clippers are raising like second round.

what are they gonna

so in this case

what's crazy is is is norman powell just much better than bradley beal right like does do talent of all has anyone ever thought that who watched basketball apparently he is the reasons never i i so i picked the clippers to go over it because just because i thought they were really good last year the Beal Collins for Powell, like that shouldn't have swung it this much, but they also got old.

But at the Powell thing, it it was like he had an extension coming and it seemed like they were afraid to pay him because they were trying to keep all this cap space for three years from now.

But he was the third best guy in the team. Was he a second round pick?

No, they got him from, he might have been at Toronto. But I mean, I think he went long second round.
And I think guys like that, there's this,

there's an unwillingness to believe that they actually, everyone couldn't have been that wrong. Right.

I don't know. Bradley Beale's on Phoenix.
They're really bad. He's no longer on Phoenix, but the new team he's on is really bad.
Norman Powell's on the Clippers. They're really good.

And they play defense and everything, by the way.

He's no longer there. They're really bad.
Miami is kind of good. And Miami loves him.

So some. And by the way, the Clipper fans loved him.
He was a guy that he would come in, he'd make two shots, and you could feel a buzz in the arena.

And he just was different than these Harden Leonard guys to have. I think some of it is when I watch them, and I'm kicking myself that I thought they were going to be as good because they're old.

But the

personality of the team, like it's just like this quiet team. Like watching them in Miami last night,

that was when Hardin had the minus 39 last night.

It was one of those games where it's like, this is going to be a loss. Like, they've probably flew into Miami the night before.
Miami's pals can be fired up.

And of course, they're down 30 in the third quarter. Also, Styles make fights.
Like, if you're a

veteran, slow

team against a team that suddenly is playing fast and running up and down. And it's just playing five out, just trying to move.

So you're on the road in Miami,

old slow team, fast team. It's just bad.
But think about, so they have this aspiration scandal that's hugely embarrassing that they're probably going to get penalized for. They have.

You and Pablo good now, by the way. Yeah, Pablo very good.
Yeah, he came on here. He's like, it's like Scooby-Doo or something.
Right? He like Pablo's my dude.

But like, dude, who are you scooby like is if i we would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids dude they did an episode last year on uh ishbia right right

phoenix stunk

and then they so you think pablo is he's

finding out about these guys and then he found out about the clippers they stink and it's like

so so

Well, so that's also a bad way to go into a season with the massive scandal, which is the part I underrated. No question.
I mean, like

the money will find its way to the floor. It'll find its way to competition.
There were these huge TV deals and there are not only salary caps, but

essentially hard caps because of the aprons and everything. And so coaches' salaries exploded because their people are competitive.
They want the product on the floor to be as good as possible.

And they will find out ways. If there's a cap and you have a gung-ho billionaire owner, they'll find out ways to circumvent the cap if possible.
I mean,

Jerry Jones, who ushered in the cap in football in the NFL, immediately circumvented it. Day one, he's like, okay, they voted on it.
Great. We have a salary cap.
Now we have Deion Sanders.

Wait, wait, how's that possible? Well, we're prorating money over time and blah, blah, blah. And so it's not unpredictable that that would happen.

It's unethical, like in a strict sense, but I don't really care as a fan. If I'm a Clippers fan, I'd be like, great, my owner's trying to win and circumvent the cap to make us better.

Well, it also didn't work.

Not only did it not work, but it shrouded the season with bad vibes to start, man. That'd be funny if that was Adam Silver's penalties.

Like, you know, I was going to penalize these guys, but it ruined their season. And now they have to give their pick to OKC.

And we're now in this James Worthy, Len Bias situation with OKC.

James Worthy, it worked out. It ended up.
winning them, I think, three more titles. Len Bias was bad.
Len Bias was the opposite. But I think if, you know, that's a whole

going down that road, that would have been multiple titles for the season. Good for Presty, though, because for so many years, he was clearly better than almost everybody else.

But handicapped by the dumb hardened trade was always the yeah, but with him. Yeah.

Right? For years. Let's reverse the yeah, but.
Yeah, but they still were really good. They just couldn't get over the hump.
And now he's, you know, you can always pick on a sucker.

And now he's, and he's ruthless about it. And

has one of the best teams ever, it seems, seems, and is about to get a lot better. It's crazy.

Well, that's what I wonder with when I look at like when we talk about like Giannis and AD, all these dudes, like, is it even worth it to chase OKC?

Where OKC, who just went 20 and one,

basically without Jalen Williams, he finally came back, you know, last weekend, but they might go like 74-8.

They're going to have the best net rating

probably in the history of the league. Indiana has the best defensive defensive rating.
If Indiana's healthy last year, are you sure that OKC beats him?

It's an interesting question about that game seven because the thing with OKC, I always worry about these young teams when the pressure gets super hot. What's going to happen?

And Indiana came out, was throwing haymakers.

Even like, what was it, tied at halftime, even after Hal Burton left? It's crazy. And he was clutch.
And Rich told me, Rich Paul was telling me at the time. Your future partner.
My third year. Yes.

Like any moment now.

He was telling me at the time, because I was like, Rich, this isn't that hard. Look at the point differential.
They're squashing the league. Like, and the question was, it was them or the Cavs.

And I'm like, it's OKC. It was the Celtics argument the year before.
Yeah.

At some point, you got to trust the math. They're winning by 11 points a game.
They're literally

crushing everyone. And his point was, yeah, but they play in OKC.
You got to take some points off. Why? It's a sleepy town.

Why would you take points off for that? You would think your players are getting rest when they get to OKC and everything. He said, said, There's no energy when you get there.

The teams that they're going to face are not energized.

Like they're already thinking, well, you know, in a couple of nights, we're going to be in LA and we're going to do this and this and this, and there's no juice.

Is this going to be part of the behind the curtain when you have the pod with Rich? He's going to take us behind the scenes of the mentality of NBA road trips. He can't help it.

Whereas like Miami is the opposite. He can't help it.

If you talk to Rich Paul for long enough, you will hear something super interesting based on his his experience, like information that other people don't have, and from a very educated point of view that you have never heard before.

You'll hear something new. Like, I hadn't heard that really.

But watching the playoffs, Indiana, who was a team that kind of played the most like themselves, I thought, through the playoffs. And had a little bit of a horseshoe.
No question. In a good way.

No question. They just, they had a way of good things were happening to them at the right times of games or series.
Yeah. They seem charmed.

But that that OKC team, I don't know. I'm not 100% convinced that they win the whole thing if Halliburton's in that game.
I don't know.

Well, it turns out Jalen Williams was playing hurt the whole playoffs. They didn't even tell us

because he was kind of a little more inconsistent than he usually was. But when your best player isn't on the floor, you know, and it's still close.

The other interesting thing, you brought up the Celtics and then

OKC. And I wonder if this is going to be true going forward.
They both had

super tall players playing real minutes who were actually really good. Right.
Right. Like Chris Dapps Porzingis, when the Celtics acquired, oh, we're giving up our identity, Marcus Martin.

I'm like, are you kidding? You got a seven-foot million guy who can actually play who's joining this team now. If he's healthy, it's a rap.
And they had Horford and they had Cornette and Tatum, who's

one of the top 15 rebounders in the league on top of all the other stuff. How are you going to beat him? And the answer was you couldn't.

And then the same thing last year with Chet, it was like, so that was one of my arguments with Rich when I thought, okay, see what would I'm like, they're crushing everyone.

They're about to get some version of Wemby on the team, right? Like this guy's,

come on. And I wonder if that, if that's something that championship teams are going to need going forward.
It's only two years. It's not a pattern yet, right?

Well, we haven't had this in a while where there's a team. I mean, maybe since the 2017 Warriors, where there's a team, it's like, whoa, those guys are up here.

Like, is it even, remember that year, teams were a little afraid to chase them until, really, until Durant left and then all hell broke loose in the, in the next summer. But if the Spurs get Giannis.

So let's talk about it because

I had some Giannis stuff.

I guess we don't need to talk about the Clippers as depressing as it is.

No, it's just like, I just, there's no outs, and they don't have their pick.

You're just, you're just in a tight spot. Did you like the trade when it happened?

Hold on, which trade are we talking about? Kawhi and Paul George.

No, I I didn't have everything. I didn't like, well, I understood the logic.
I don't think I would have done it, but I understood the logic because it seemed like it was a package deal.

And Bomber, I think, saw an opening because of the state of the Lakers where we can take over. And Kawhi had just won an MVP, a finals MVP on his second team.

Is he going to win a finals MVP on his third team? And it was like the best player in the world. Trying to not have the Lakers get him seemed to be a huge part of it.

I liked everything about it except the Shea piece, ironically.

of course i just because i thought and i think i said this at the time i still defended the trade i was like i get why they did it you get these two guys and paul george was awesome the year before so they're getting like two of the best 10 guys in the league but it was very similar to the celtics in 07

when we got kg i say we like him on the team but we got kg and they really wanted rondo and if you go back and you read about the reports of that, it was Rondo was the sticker and the Celtics wouldn't bend on Rondo.

And then finally, Minnesota's like, all all right, can you give us, float us another pick or whatever it was? And they were able to keep Rondo and they don't win the OA title without Rondo. Right.

And I always thought it was, I remember talking to Doc about this a couple of years ago.

I always thought it was weird that they were going to try to win the title with Paul George and Kawhi, but then not have Shay as a piece of it. But Presty, he was smart.

He's like, no, Shay has to be in the trade or I'm not doing that. Well, because this would have been the anti-Nick.

You know, like I think about the Carmelo trade, where it's well known Carmelo's only good, he had all the leverage, really. I'm only going to go to the Knicks.

And when he gutted their Danello and yeah, and then the Knicks were like, no, what's his name? The GM from the Bronx at the time. Donnie Walsh.
Donnie Walsh is playing poker, right? Like, yeah.

And then, and then Dolan gets involved. He's like, wait, the grown-ups are doing this.
Please don't, don't do this. And Dolan's like, oh, you have to get Carmelo.

And suddenly everybody's in the deal, right? Presty is really smart. And the thing the Clippers were really missing was an actual primary ball handler, not putting guys who

can do it. Yeah.
You know, it's almost like

there's

an obvious desire to do this, like in baseball at first base, where, well, the most players can play first base.

Therefore, they conflate that with the idea that defense isn't important at first base and you have bad defenders at first base.

And it's sort of the same in the NBA where it's like sometimes you get tempted. Well, this guy can do that job.
Right.

That's different than he should do the job like draymond green's not really the point guard he's a guy who can do that and he works in it and he can do it sometimes but just because someone can doesn't mean they should and i think the idea that they could just do it with paul george and kawhi two two-way wings defined roles because you know paul george is the robin and that batman and robin it made a lot of sense they needed kawaii wanted him yeah they needed a guy to handle the ball i mean really the way to do it would have been yo kawaii just come to the clippers like we have a really good young team we have all our picks You just won the title.

Like,

let's just take this one slow. Cause

all the research now is like, he never wanted to go to the Lakers. He didn't want to play for LeBron.
So it was either stay in Toronto or go.

But he had already, I guess, had his mindset, maybe bought a house in L.A. or outside L.A.

So maybe they could have played poker with him. They definitely could have played poker with Presty.

This is going to the Clippers. This was a gung-ho.

And we can keep from the Lakers. And they just throw everything in.
This trade,

not only is it a a swap this year, they get their pick next year. Is it the most? This trade is like, it's like V D.
It won't end. Is it the, yeah, it's the most

for seven years. It's, it's, is it the most, like, where does it, considering points of leverage on top of everything else, pick swaps, picks, how bad one team winds up the business.

It's the most devastating trade in the history of the league. But you can't.
You can't get mad at them for doing it, though. It's different than the Luca thing.

The Luca thing is like, this trade is an abomination. We all thought it was an abomination when it happened.
This Clipper thing is like, all right, I get it. They've never won a title.

They've never made the finals. They're trying to keep them from the Lakers.
What do they care about six years from now? We got to do this now. Fortune favors the bold.
Yeah.

This was like you're at a dinner with 10 people and you're like, yeah, let's get that Japanese Kobe steak.

And then the check comes and you're like, fuck. But for Paul George, the leverage for the.
for the move was that the thought was Kawhi would only do it if Paul George was there, right?

Yeah, but was that true?

I would not have,

I would have tested that theory. Well,

easy for me to say sitting here now, but you know, well, now, so we're in a similar situation with Giannis.

And

there's the AD piece too. I'm in the camp.
I don't think Dallas should trade AD. I think they should keep them.
They're 6 and 15, but I watch them because I like watching flag.

And I'm just, I have their over for futures. And I just, I feel like it could turn around for them.
The West is like, there's eight, nine playoff teams and then it's a mess.

And they got a guy who looks like he can play a little point guard. Yeah, well, and now Nemhard's all of a sudden playing the Sun Draft to free agent.

Flag can do a little bit, but

I don't know. I would keep him.
I would wait. I don't think he has the same kind of trade value that people think because of his age.
He's got this eye thing. He's been banged up.

He's got a lot of miles on him. Big contract.
There's only a couple teams that could trade for it.

And it gets worse, Bill. That's the problem.
Well, but they're right. For them, it's like, do you trade him before Giannis, the sweepstakes for that happen? Is the question.

It's like, we got to move because everyone's going to be moving after Giannis. We might be out in the cold.

I think you got to move him now because

there's, look, you don't want to trade a guy when his trade value is low and you'd like to be the consolation prize afterward. But I think they have to be resigned to the idea.

We have to target something we like, see if we can get that for ad and if we can we should do it independent of everything else because the the

there is the risk that ad

makes a recovery to the point where he's still playing his normal 60 60 60 65 games a year at us at a certain level but there's also a risk that given the physical stuff given his age 30 he's gonna be 33 soon that it gets worse so 32 and 13 last night yeah because when he because he's great you know he really is But I think you got, like, you got to just, it's almost like a draft where you say, I like that guy.

Oh, you reached for him, but we liked that guy. And they got to figure out something they like and see if they can't get it for him.
And if they can, you pull the trigger, I think.

Were you in the camp of, I can't believe this guy made NBA 75 when that happened?

Let's not forget that, you mean AD? Yeah.

There was a point

not all that long ago where it was like,

can AD replace Tim Duncan as the greatest power forward who ever lived?

That was the 2018 range. Yeah.
When he was wreaking havoc on the Pelicans, he was so good.

And this was before this new wave of the super talls who can play defense and do everything. And maybe it's not fair to KG, but AD was the one.
I'm like, he's guarding the pick and roll, you know,

one guy. And he could like just destroy.
I remember there was a moment. I don't remember what game it was in the 2020 finals

well first of all it seemed like he had a chance to be the finals mvp yeah um and he was wreaking havoc against miami and it felt like a moment like holy shit like but then his next game wasn't that good it was it was like it was kind of sitting there for if he had one more like 35 and 20 there would have been a completely different conversation.

He couldn't kind of get over the hump. I love those moments.
Whereas like Shaq in 2000 was like, I'm here, guys.

Those are so interesting to me, those moments of shifting perception based on this one moment, right? Like I think about. Well, boxing's the king of that.

Mike Tyson, the night he fought Franz Bota, knocked him out in one, knocked him out with one shot in the fifth round. Yeah.

But the interesting thing to me, even though he'd already lost to Holyfield, the interesting thing to me is before that fight, I remember thinking the public would have bet Mike Tyson into the favorite, no matter who he fought in the history of boxing.

Yeah. Right or wrong, they would have bet him that way.
And after that fight, he'd have been the underdog for the first time ever. Right.

So that, that, both of fight, like, you can laugh because, like, who's the, but the entire perception of Mike Tyson completely changed.

I even think of, because you, you know, you geek out on stuff like this, as I do, Bobby Mercer way back in the day, who was supposed to be the next Mickey Mantle. Traded for Barbara for Bobby Bonds.

Eventually, which was a good trade for the Yankees. And then Bonds was traded for Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa.

But Bobby Mercer, if you looked at the trajectory of his career in a depressed offensive era, hadn't really ruled himself out of that yet.

And then had this incredible season where, because people didn't understand advanced analytics well enough at the time,

they didn't understand quite how good he was. And he was like 25, 26.
And he followed it up with a really nice season. But it wasn't like the season before.

And at that moment, people realized, okay, this guy is what he is. He's a sometime all-star.
He's not going to be one of the greatest players ever.

Those little, those single seasons or single games or single moments that completely reshape the way we think about a guy are so interesting to me.

I agree with you about AD. You could pinpoint that moment and go, it was cresting and no.

Flip side, Eli,

who made the semifinalist for the Hall of Fame again, basically based off a couple games.

Well, and if either of those Giants games against the Pats don't go, you're a Giants fan, I'm going right in your wheelhouse there.

But basically, if Harrison just knocks the ball off Tyrese's helmet, or they call it one of the five holds on the play, they don't win that one. That's right.

And then he makes a great play to Manningham. Or if they just whistle to play dead because forward because he had five guys on him and the play was kind of over.
But it's those two.

Now, the Giants fans I know, and I'm sure you're in that camp, is like Eli had some huge road wins. He went at a Lambda.
Here's the thing about, I'll make the Hall of Fame case for Eli.

I think the answer is yes for Eli. And I'll start by saying he was an Iron Man, which is the durability.
Hugely first thing. hugely important at that position.
You never had to worry.

He had more responsibility in his offense than anyone but Peyton or Tom Brady.

He had a huge amount of responsibility. He's playing in an outdoor, windy kind of environment.
Like his stats probably would have been a little better somewhere else.

I think that's the most fair point for the Eli defenders is compare him to Breeze, who get to play in the Superdome for 100 years. Right.
Flip him. And it's not.

Breeze is more accurate and all that stuff. But then here it is.

in terms of clutch so nate silver i don't know if you remember this article it came out five years ago but nate silver wanted to see who was the most clutch quarterback ever right so he it wasn't tom brady who came back from 28 to 3 this is before tom brady did that actually it's how tom brady kept going but so he goes back and he wants to see what's their baseline that they achieve the the kind of level that they play at normally and what do they play at in the playoffs and then you see the difference there and a little unfair because Eli's base is lower than others, right?

So he has more room to go. There's two postseas where he goes 4-0.
Dude, he was

the, he came out so far ahead of everybody else who ever lived that Nate redid the methodology because he's like, come on, Eli can't be this kind of an outlier above Joe Montana and everybody.

Let's get all the Trent Dilfers out. Yeah.

And I'm going to redo the methodology and see who comes out number one. And so when he redid it, it was close.
Eli Manning won, Joe Montana two.

So, so that, right. And that was because when you think it's not just the Super Bowls, he went on the road.
He beat Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers at Lambeau.

Right. Like he was, he had tough matchups on the road for two playoff series and he won two Super Bowls.
You're right.

He also had a little bit of a horseshoe in a good way, much like the Pacers last year. 100%.
A couple moments where it's like, wow. 100%.

How did that, how did that go eli's way butterfly effect right like if a butterfly had flapped its wings in china we're not having this conversation about eli but it didn't right that's actually what happened and he's a two-time super bowl mvp there have not been that many of them and bill the so so i said once upon a time famously infamously because it became a meme oh this is what the universe on the line yeah i want iguadala right the point i was making was Steph Curry, I had seen in game seven.

I was there on my own dime. I just wanted to see it as a fan, right? I wanted to be able to.

And

they had the greatest half-court offense in the history of basketball. They had 73 wins.
They were about to be declared the greatest basketball team of all time.

It was five minutes left in the fourth quarter. That's one of your moments.
I thought you were going to be in the middle of game seven

at home. They did not score another point, and you are the point guard and the best player on the team.
He's carelessly throwing behind the back passes out of bounds. He's scared to shoot.

When he does shoot, he's not hitting.

I can't say scared. I don't know what's going on in his heart, but that's what it appeared.

And the bottom line is that offense didn't score a single point the rest of the way and lost a game seven at home. That, to me, is fate of the universe on the line.
Right. So that's what I meant.

A guy like Iguadala, open shot, not getting his own shot. I have confidence Iggy, if he has the shot, he's going to take it and nail it.
There are certain athletes.

This would be a good segment for you and Rich. Defend your meme.
100%. Defend your meme.
I love it.

That's what we're doing at the rigger, Bill. That's what we're doing.
That's what we came for.

I have a couple. I could probably defend.
Here's the thing with Curry.

But I'm saying all this.

Go back and think of the Patriots in 07. They were about to be called.
They were going to replace the 1927 Yankees, the 72 Wynn Bulls. This is the greatest team in the history of American team sports.

Thanks for bringing this. Period.

And he beat them.

Then fast forward four more years. Four years.
Reggie scored 21 points, 17 points. Because again, Bill, it happened the exact same way.

And this time, actually, the play, while less improbable, was a better play by Eli, actually, when the Manningham passed. Like he did it.
You can't, yes, if anything changes, that's gone.

And we're not, but that's what actually happened. I don't see how you can, you can't tell the story of the NFL without Eli Manning in that era.

You can't dismiss the Iron Man streak, the two Super Bowl MVPs, the road wins against like Hall of Fame quarterbacks at Lambeau.

He's a Hall of Famer. Football is funny because it's such a small sample size for these playoff games.

It lets people like me make bullshit arguments. Well, but Flacco had the greatest postseason of all time.
Yeah, right. So when you start there, like basketball just doesn't have that.

They don't have Joe Flacco.

Oh, that Joe Flacco postseason when he averaged 38 a game in the for 20 games in the playoffs because basketball because you have seven game series it's the right team usually wins the nba we actually know who's really good that's not really debatable we've had two finals in the last 40 years where the right team probably didn't win 1988 pistons and 2013 spurs i think those are the only two you could say i'm not sure the right team won maybe

maybe on paper with the Spurs. Well, I'm just saying they were up five with 27 seconds left.
The game, that should be it. They should have won the title.
Oh, I see what you mean. And the Pistons.

The way it played out, you're saying. Yeah, and the Pistons, I think if Vazea doesn't get hurt, they win.
But it's funny. The Curry thing, I'm a, obviously Curry's my guy.
I love Curry.

It's a tough one to defend. And the only way you can defend it is by basically pointing to other players.
who are awesome, who failed in big moments. Like Magic had the 84 finals, right?

That was just as bad as Curry in game seven. But the bottom line is.

Yeah, the bottom line is Curry was home.

They had won what? They'd won 73 games plus 73. Another three games.
15. Right, because the playoffs are deeper.

88 games. But not only that, to that point in history, it's the greatest offense ever.
You're the machine who did it. You're the unanimous MVP.

You have guys like me on TV saying, I know in any other era, this wouldn't be true. But right now, Steph Curry is the best player in basketball in the middle of LeBron James's prime.
Right.

But in the playoffs, you find out who really is the best player in basketball. And by the end of those playoffs, LeBron James was by so far the best player.

It was ridiculous to compare other people to him. Well, then

Rich and Adam Silver got together and suspended Draymond for that fifth game. But that always helps.

If you have a guy like Draymond Green, and that is the tax of Draymond Green. You never know when it's going to.
What side of the line is it going to be on? LeBron deserves credit for that.

He baited him. It worked.
This would be another good segment.

Let me make an excuse.

So the 07 Pats and the 16 Warriors, I think, had a very similar thing of there was too much pressure from the streaks that weighed on them to a point where I think they were just debilitated.

Golden State basically should have lost to OKC, which is even crazier. And Clay goes nuts in game six.

I was game seven for that too. And that was a very winnable game for OKC.
OKC Durant was bad in those last three games. I think even he would admit that.

Marcellus Wiley used to say this when we were doing the radio show Max and Marcellus here in L.A. He'd be like,

getting off the bus. Who do you like? When you see the athletes getting off the bus.
And a lot it was made of at that season of Cleveland and Golden State. Yeah.

But people like, in your mind's eye, go back. The street that the Thunder were on, you started going, getting off the bus.
That's the best team, in fact.

Super winnable game for them game seven at Golden State. West Crick game was just, it was just

fucking KD choked.

You don't take pleasure in saying that, but how else do you screw up? 3-1. The other one that was in that camp for me is the Miami 27 game winning streak in 2013, the Heat,

where all of a sudden that took a different life of itself, where these weren't regular season games anymore. Now they're playing like these are conference finals level intensity games.

And I just think it takes something out of a team. I really felt like that happened to the Pats.

I thought they, by the time they got to the playoffs, they were a different team than they were the first day.

So, this is the most nervous I've ever been as a baseball fan, was in 98 for the Yankees going into the World Series against the Padres.

120 or 116 regular season, 114 regular season wins.

They're beating everybody in the playoffs. You cannot lose to the Padres, but they swept them.
They didn't win in six, seven games. They swept them.

Wasn't there a call? It was a bad umpire call, the Padre fans. Tino Martinez.
Yeah, yeah. Tino Martinez.
It was strike three. Yeah.

There were always turning points and, you know, the baseball gods were smiling on them.

But like there were also times in those playoffs against Cleveland, El Duque, against like one of the greatest lineups ever comes in and shuts them down for seven innings. You know, I think

it's fair. to say when you're one of the greatest teams of all time or you're in that conversation, part of what

you're being tested on is, can you be that same team when it matters most right and i think a lot of that players failed to test in 16.

i think it comes a lot from the leader i think that the your team has to believe that your guy is the best

steph atoned for that in 22. he did but that was that's the thing just like magic atoned for it in 85 87 88.

but steph deserves all the credit in the world for being the kind of player that you can build a system around that is just wins all these championships.

He was only ever the best player on a championship team, no excuses, in 22. Well, but LeBron had a couple too.
I mean, 09 and 10 and 11.

09, he was great. 10, he was not.
And 11 was just an abject disaster and is probably the thing that hurts his goat case the most. But LeBron James was frequently the best player in the finals.

16 won it back. Sometimes he was the best player in the finals and they won the championship.

Sometimes he was the best player in the finals and they didn't win the championship, but he was frequently the best player in the finals and oftentimes the best player on a championship team.

Steph, in my view, has done that once. I know you can say 15, but come on.

LeBron's second best player is Matthew De Lavidova. It still goes six games.
Steph was 30 and 16. Kevin Lowe.
Yeah, he was, but he was on the floor.

Defender meme is funny. Let's take a break and then I want to talk to Yannis Trades quick.
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Oh, yeah. So, like, for instance, by the time you hear this, Nick Celtics would not have happened yet, but I'd like the Celtics at home tonight.

I think the crowd's going to show up, but you could do that. You could ride some of the teams that have been playing really well lately.
Like it feels like Orlando has been coming on on the flip side.

The Clippers are an absolute train wreck. Maybe go against them.
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Yeah. Turnover, suddenly dessert at 2 p.m.
Doesn't sound so crazy.

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All right, Giannis trades. So the question for me, and we're taping this, it's Tuesday morning.

I think all the Giannis stuff's going to start this week.

If Atlanta got Giannis without giving up Jalen Johnson or Daniels or even Reese Shea, could they keep their team, which has this really cool identity right now without Trey, this long, athletic, kind of scary, young, the type of team.

It's a little OKC-ish. You're keeping JJ and getting Giannis.

Could I get Giannis and still keep my nucleus and actually make a run at OKC? Is OKC catchable if I have Giannis?

And the big trade chip for them, they have the pick that is either the Pelicans first or the Bucs first. It's one or the other, the highest one.
And the Pelicans one is probably going to be top five.

Who's running your drafts?

Well, Jalen Johnson's been basically their like point forward and he's been awesome yeah i think when you get to the playoffs i want a point guard you know like if it's a point forward it's got to be

i think of jalen johnson

doesn't excite you

i think in this era you need a guy no i'm with you who can run this is the minnesota offense

but i'm just thinking of

i'm thinking of jalen johnson as a point forward in the playoffs when everything slows down when everything slows down and like it's tempting because maybe the following year you could you get a guy to do what you really need him to do and now you have a suit like you have crazy length positions you have defense you have yeah I think I mean yes the answer is if you can trade if you can center a package around Trey Young and get Giannis you have to do it.

So it would be Gianna it would be Trey Young poor Zingas who's an expiry. See, but they have a super tall.
Right. They got a super tall.
He makes 30, so that's perfect for trade.

They have that bucks pick they have uh 2027 the worst of bucks are new orleans first they have all their own first so they can put together four firsts trey young the poor zingis expiring we'll take kuzma back kuzma will be the tax of the honest trade and for the bucks for your second unit you got a little offense yeah for the bucks it's like hey tre young fun guy to have on your team he's got two years left on his deal then the bucks are just raising the white flag and saying we are now a franchise that knows we're not going to compete for titles, but we can keep fans coming.

And, you know, like if you're from the Bucs, I don't do it. Well, how many draft picks am I getting? Which draft picks am I getting?

Well, you're getting that Pelicans pick, so you know you have a chance to be in the top four

in a lottery that has three potential franchise guys. Yep.
Right. And it's everyone thinks it's the best draft in a long time.
Yeah. And thank you to the Pelicans for giving that pick to Atlanta.

You have some other good ones, too. They have a top 10

protected Sacramento pick.

They have that 2027 worst one of the Bucks Pokés. Like they could put it together.

I guess the question for me with the Bucs is, do you want to get in on this before AD becomes the constellation trade piece for Atlanta?

Like you have Toronto, which doesn't have an asset like that pick, but could put together all their picks. They could put the other contracts.
San Antonio is the wild one.

That's the one. If I'm San Antonio, I'm doing whatever it takes to get Giannis.
That's like a brain-breaker trade. It's a brain breaker trade.
Which is putting Wemby and Giannis on the same team.

It's like.

And

if I'm San Antonio, I have to do that.

That's kind of what I'm rooting for to happen. I want to see it.
So if I'm Milwaukee, because you don't have really any asset that's awesome except for a 2031,

you can swap picks with the Kings.

Except

as a bonus. Right.
No, they have a bunch of contracts.

Yeah, but what are, what is, what is, what is can I get Harper in that trade?

If I'm San Antonio, no, thank you. I'm keeping Dylan Harper.
If it's okay, I'm keeping him. I'm keeping him.
Sure, you'd like to. No, I'm keeping him.
I think he's on touch.

How are you going to get Giannis?

Castle,

I don't really want to trade him either. Right.
But, but it's, that's the thing, man. You got to, as, as James Toney famously said, and I said this on the Crawford Canelo broadcast.
Yeah.

You got to bring ass to get ass. No, I get it.
I get it. They have a bunch of picks, and they'd have to really decide on.

Harper to me is untouchable. Castle,

I should also be untouchable, but I have to give up something to get something. I have to give you at least one awesome asset.
Right.

Your fans can say, well, at least we got that. And draft picks.
And a bunch of draft picks. Chicago

really just has the draft picks. Detroit, Durin's not going to be in the trade.
He's untouchable.

The The Knicks,

they can't really do anything.

I mean, the Knicks would have, unless

they have the

Giannis is better than Cat. You're giving up a bunch of shooting there.
You can't package guys together.

It's too complicated.

The Knicks trade that's not as complicated is AD. No, AD for towns.
Oh, I think the Knicks trade that makes all the sense in the world for both parties.

Yeah, OG for LeBron. Well, but that can't happen, though, because the contracts have to match perfectly.
That's the problem with this apron.

They would have to trade Towns for LeBron is the only way contractually they could do it. They don't have any other piece that could match up with the numbers.

Once you start adding things with this apron, you can't do it. So they can do one for once.
So they could trade Towns for AD right now. The thing about LeBron, and I think I would do that too.

The thing about... I have Knicks fans in my life who are like, I like Towns.
No, thanks. I don't want to deal with that.

Me too. And Towns spaces the floor for a a big in an absurd way.
He's never become the defender in space that it looked like he'd be out of college. But if LeBron could be,

think of him like super Draymond Green on offense for the Knicks.

He becomes the pick and roll partner for Jalen Brunson, and you can play five out with him.

And even if Mitchell Robinson's in, it's going to be 41. Right.
That's true. But for high-leverage moments, if you can keep him healthy and he's doing much less, if he's really the power forward.

Well, you're describing 2024 Olympics, LeBron. Yes.
This is like, we don't need all of you, but we need all, we need your brain. We need your Swiss Army knife.
You can play every position.

We need a spot to shoot the three, right? Like, and with five minutes left in a huge game. Play defense.
I love having you out there.

Yeah, play defense with five minutes left in a huge game, by the way, which he can still do in spurts.

The problem with the Knicks is they will never win a championship when their best player is six feet tall. No one has ever won a championship since the bad boy pissed us.
Isaiah. Right.

Isaiah was the last one to do it who wasn't at least six foot three. I mean, the best player is way up in the six three and a half.
The basket's way up high, right? Like it selects out for height.

So you're not going to, you need to

play

The The Knicks can't have their best player be Jalen Brunson. You need at least another guy guy who in big moments is at least as good as Jalen Brunson.
Now, you're saying this.

Now, you've been on the sidelines for two years here. Yeah.

This is the best Knicks team of your lifetime? Close? Best starting five of my lifetime. Okay.
Easily.

There's never been a Knicks starting five. And I don't mean just like add up all the talent, maybe even then.

But the Knicks of like who the powerhouse Knicks who couldn't get over the hump when I was in high school and college were, you know, led by Patrick Ewing.

Who's the second best best player on that team? Charles Oakley? Jon Starks?

The 94 finals comes down to can Jon Starks hit a couple shots or can

Hakeem Olajuan not get his fingertip on that shot in game six. Right.

But still, when you look at the starting five, look at the Knicks starting five now. You have a superstar point guard.
You have in at the two, you can have one of two legitimate NBA starters, right?

Bridges or Josh Hart are both good NBA starters. You could see either one on a championship team.

OG and Towns and Robinson and like they got a lot of stuff. Don't forget McBride.
McBride, they got a lot of stuff. They're starters.

When you look at each one individually, there's no real weak position.

Maybe there's no position strong enough. to get a couple of positions that are just checked at a solid level instead of a really high level over over the hump.

But there's no real weakness in the starting five where you say, that guy really, they're kind of hiding that guy. That guy's starting because they have a great time.

Hart's probably the closest because that hurt them in the playoffs slash. Unless you watch him every day.
No, I know. But in the playoffs, all of a sudden he became.

If Josh Hart shot a little bit better, right? Well, if he shot a little bit better. The question for me is.

I'm trying to win the title, right?

If I'm the Knicks, am I trying to make the finals or am I trying to win the title? win the title

my team doesn't match up with okc

i don't unless someone they have traffic cop with okc they never know what 70 guys to throw it at brunson right for seven games over two weeks but if it's a gauntlet and that's why i don't know if i'd like and lebron though well the bron is interesting and ad i think is interesting too for them because it just gives them

It just gives them a little more reliable size, rebounding, like the possibility of somebody going off in a... And how do you get an AD? It would have to be Township.

Right. Then you're giving up a lot of shooting.
You're giving up a lot of shooting. For some defense.

And Mike Brown did figure out, it seems to me from watching them, the Brunson Towns thing feels a little more organic than it did last year. Last year, you could see their brains moving around.

We got to figure out Kat.

If I were the Lakers, I would want OGN and Obi. And if I were the Knicks, I would want him instead of Kat to be in that deal because then the Knicks have plenty of shooting.

And I think in high-leverage moments, they're going to be able to get that. So the Lakers got Ananobi and Robinson for LeBron, basically, which I don't know if that's possible with the cap.
Yeah.

And I want Mitchell, like Robinson's not only good, but he's a playoff performer. But Ananobi makes like $15 million less than LeBron.
You have to put it in there.

That's part of the problem with this apron is some of the teams don't have the right contracts. to kind of add together.

That's why Atlanta is so interesting because Atlanta can make any type of trade. And I really like their team.

Like, I, you know, when you think, like, I don't know what they're going to get from Porzingis, it just seems like he's going to be plagued by this mystery virus he had for the rest of his career.

He played one game, now he's gone again.

But when, but he's playing, like, when he plays, he plays valuable minutes and he plays well. Right.
And that was as true in Boston, too.

But if you're thinking, if you're them and you're like, we might have a chance to make the finals. Like, the Hawks have never made the finals.
Yeah. So I think that's crazy.

I think their motivations are maybe a tiny bit different than the Knicks, where the Knicks are like, we have to actually win the title.

Making the finals is fun, but that doesn't ultimately really, the title is what matters. You haven't won since 73.

Who are you telling?

I was born in August of that year. That occurred in January.
I've not had a breath since the Knicks. The Knicks have never won a championship in my lifetime.
So would you rather...

I leaned on your theory about when a fan is allowed to jettison a team in order to come and broadcast in L.A. and root for the Lakers.
I leaned on the Bill Bill Simmons theory. Did it work? Yeah.

Yeah.

You know,

I was able to actually get behind the Lakers because I'd put my time in with the team. I tried, you know, and then really the final straw for me with the Knicks.
The Knicks.

Yeah. The final straw for me with the Knicks was when Oakley got escorted from the garden.
Like,

could you imagine Paul O'Neill getting kicked out of Yankee Stadium? Yeah. Right.
Like, I would stand online. We have season tickets.
I would stand online overnight

around the garden with my brother to get Knicks tickets, right? In the freezing cold, you had to stand, like you had to get there.

If you didn't get there, you know, they went on sale, whatever it was, 9 a.m., let's say.

You had to get there, you know, the night before and just wait all night because the line wrapped around the block. And I did that because of guys like Charles Oakley.

They made, they made you proud to be, Oakley made you proud to be a Knicks fan. And you get that, and you escort that guy from the garden.
Why? Because he doesn't like you as an owner? Come on, man.

So you're back with the Knicks? I'm trying to keep track. This is like, you're like J-Lo and Ben Affleck.
I don't know. When I don't know what's going on,

when you leave the team, right?

Of course, a part of you is always, I'm interested in watching them. I want them to do well.

I don't think that this iteration of the Knicks can win a championship. It is funny that we can divorce human beings, but not teams.

It somehow is more violating to people in your life that you would get rid of a team. I remember Fantasy was doing this for the ringer.
He was like, I'm done with the Knicks. And he really tried.

And he tried to like be like a basketball widow. And, you know, I used to have the

DNA is still there. In New York Radio, I did the Max Kellerman show like 20 years ago for ESPN radio.
And I used to have the abused Knicks fan hotline. Right.

Like, because like they can't, they, but, you know, yes, they can still hurt you because you, you always run back. And that's really the reason the Knicks.

And I can't criticize the current regime that Dolan has in place because they've done an excellent job. There's no two ways.
The Brunson thing was amazing. Amazing.

I don't know how illegal that whole thing was either. And the whole Nova thing, it works.
Yeah. You know, but

like I, you had to make the trade for towns. It was a shame to get rid of DiVincenzo, right? Like, but you have to pull the trigger on that.
It was the right trade. It was the right trade.

And now Randall's not, he gave up pot. He looks like the quickest he's ever looked in his life.
Randall could be a new, could be a new trend. Randall is

there are some players who are really, really good, and yet the real careful observers of them who root for the team that they're on don't think that they want them on the team.

And Randall is kind of like that with the Knicks. Most Knicks fans were like, okay, that might be addition by subtraction because Randall's awesome.

We had the junior version of that with Marcus Smart. It had just kind of run its course.
But in the outside world, it was like, Marcus Smart, it's hard of the team.

It's like, we'll probably get to that. Probably drafted right next to each other.
7-8, I think.

It's funny those guys when you have them and you're watching them day in, day out versus the general public. I've had a few of those over the years.

This is why when I said, I want Iguadala, it was the same thing.

Like, if you asked a real Yankees fan back in the day, bases are loaded, clutch moment in the playoffs, do you want A-Rod up or Luis Soho up?

Hardcore Yankees fans will tell you, I'd rather have Luis Soho up.

Well, I would tell you from a guy that rooted for the team that would have to play those teams every once in a while, I wanted A-Rod to come up. Right.

Unless one of the teams were up 12 to 2. Yeah, right.
Then for then it's like fucking A-Rod's going 500 feet here. 100%.

There are like the idea that clutch doesn't exist, that, you know, of course, look, if you have a guy with A-Rod's talent or Steph's talent, you

give them enough reps and they'll work through whatever. And eventually they're just too good.
But the sample size has to be pretty big for some of these guys.

Whereas guys like, you know, David Ortiz.

Well, plus, we had like Bill Miller was a classic example

you didn't want to see bill miller up with guys on base nah man switch him he was he was getting

he was getting on base he just was

the dodgers had uh had a couple guys like that too last year they did they they were just and you could kind of tell which guys

outs

tough outs like if you're a baseball fan you know exactly what that is the catcher will smith yep who i loved

I just thought he was awesome, like the kind of guy you'd want. That's the thing.

We gave up Schwerber like four years ago, the Red Sox,

and we had a postseason with him. And every time he came up, I thought he was getting on base or hitting a home run.

And then they're like, yeah, we don't need him. We have some first base prospects coming up.

It's like, what about the guy who, as baseball moves toward walks, home runs and strikeouts, is like the fucking poster boy of this. We're going to let this guy go.
Right. And classic title.

There's also like, there's some, it's like this Gladwell type thing from one of those airport books he did. I forgot which one.
Airport books. You know what I mean?

Like you literally, yeah, I got a flight. Oh, look, Gladwell has a 220 pages.

He's a good expositor of some ideas that it's kind of been replaced by reels on Instagram, I feel like, or for the kids, TikTok.

But he's good. He kind of like, you know,

composite. He

reads on an airplane. My daughter would just go on TikTok for six hours.
Yeah.

But it was like, it's kind of a blink. Oh, it was Blink called Blink.
It's the Blink test. And fans know their intuition is often correct.

You take a look at a guy and without looking looking at stats, and I'm all for saber metrics. I've been geeking out on them since I was a kid.

But you can know that that's the kind of guy I want up in this situation, or I want at the free throw line in this situation.

And if they fail, you can live with it because you're like, okay, they're not always going to succeed, but I've seen that enough that, you know, in a blink kind of way, in just an intuitive way, that I'm picking up something about this guy that's comfortable in that situation and that makes me feel confident.

And this is like

the the opposite. This is my dad with Jalen Brown, who's been a great Celtic.
I love Jalen Brown.

But in the last minute of a game, if it's a tight game and he goes to the free throw line, he's probably going to make one of two.

And my dad will mention it. And he, by the way, forgets all the times Jalen made both, but when he goes one of two, like he did the other night in Cleveland.
And my dad will say that.

Selective perception. Yeah.
My dad's like, see, one of two. Right.
Selective perception, perceptual defense, whatever it is. You know, like,

and yet

there's something there's something in your gut. There's something.
And, you know,

especially, I once, there's a boxing trainer, Tommy Brooks, who was talking about Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield. If they would have fought 100 times, Holyfield wins every time.

He said the difference is, and he kisses his arms. Holyfield

loved himself.

And Mike hated himself. Yeah.
Right. There's certain athletes, if they're at the free throw line in a tight game, they think they deserve to hit that shot.

Like you could say, people could say whatever they want about Kobe Bryant. If he's at the free throw line in a tight game, that dude loves himself.

He is going to like, there's nothing in him working against his own success there. Yeah.
And there are other guys, A-Rod,

you got the feeling like he was conflicted inside somehow. I mean, he literally just did a documentary called Alex versus A-Rod.
There, there you go.

It's probably why I said it on my mind, but he, there was, he's working against himself there there's something in him that's working against himself and ortiz the opposite the opposite manny the opposite manny would just go in these spenders where he would just go 30 for 58 for two weeks i'm a yankees fan yeah you don't have to tell me twice and as great as manny was ortiz is the guy don't want to see him a dustin pedroya you can keep that's how we flip that's how we flip the rivalry because of ortiz well no you flip you flipped

you flipped the rivalry literally with a flip The

rivalry flipped in a regular season game in 2004 after the Yankees broke the Red Sox heart in 2003 when Jason Varitek started a fight with

July 27, 2004.

He started the fight with

the game ender. He picked on A-Rod.

A-Rod was in the right. Varitech was in the wrong.
He bullied him, but then he won the fight.

Before it got broken up, he got the better of it. And as a Yankees fan, I'm not saying this in retrospect.
I'm telling you at the time, I thought, uh-oh, that's bad. That's really bad.

It's bad for the psychology of the team. Getting back to Steph Curry, Magic Johnson, and all that stuff, it reminds me

when your best player has a quality about them that makes the team feel like that guy. We have that guy, we can't lose.
It does something to the team. And

Steph, I don't think had that for a lot of his career. He's one of the greatest players ever, but I didn't get LeBron did.
I got the feeling like with LeBron on the team, he'll

start later. Right.

After the Dallas loss, he started getting that thing. The team believed Derek Jeter had it, even though there were other players better than him on the team.

Kobe Bryant had it, no matter what people want to say, which is why

I think it is also ridiculous when people say, oh, Kobe's like the eighth best player ever, the 10th best player ever, and kids from his generation lose their minds. That's not an unfair ranking.

But why I would put him over Tim Duncan is because I think that it is close, I think, between those two. Is that

Kobe's team believed

if he had a shot to win? You're just going to win. Kobe's team believed that they would win.
I'm going to leave.

The Tim Duncan slander. Do you think it's slander to put Kobe ahead of? I just think he's the most underappreciated superstar of all time.

I've made this figure since Kobe and Duncan are neck and neck. I think that's not slander.
I think they're neck and neck. Kobe's the closest thing we've seen to Jordan, right?

Probably the close in any sport. Tell me an upper echelon of the game.
I have Kobe like 10th or 11th all time. Okay.
I don't think that's unreasonable. But Duncan has to be

Duncan's seventh.

And I don't think it's debatable. You think it's not debatable? I don't.
I don't. You think MJ

LeBron?

Kareem.

Russell? MJ, LeBron, Kareem, Russell, Bird of Magic. Oh, Heda Chamberlain.
Okay.

Chamberlain was a loser for most of his career. And all the, I wrote a whole chapter in my book about this.
He didn't, I mean, in a loser. He's traded the Celtics.

The Celtics had every good.

You know, it was never getting traded ever. Tim Duncan.
Yeah, right. Okay, fine.
Ever. Fine.

I think I agree with what you're saying about Wilt. And they used to say, I never got to see Wilt play, really, but I used to hear if you needed points, he'd give you assists.

If you needed assists, he'd give you points. Okay, fine.
You could put Bill Russell ahead of him, not have him five. So I'd have Wilt five.
You have Bird and Magic right after that. Fine, whatever.

So you think Duncan is right after Bird and Magic? I do. And guess what? I think Jokic is coming, but yeah, I don't think it can only be with one title.
Agreed. Because now we're in the titles.

I don't love the ring culture, but it's really tough to put a one-title guy in like the top eight of all time.

But I said this last month to Legler. I think he's the best offensive player I've ever seen.
I wasn't there for Wilt, but of anyone I've watched in my lifetime.

Jordan was the best player I've ever seen.

He was a better offensive player too, Bill. I don't know.

Yes, of of course, Jokic is going to shoot better because in this era, you're going to take those shots. I'm saying he does everything he does.
It doesn't matter who's on his team.

He is just, his team is going to score points. He will figure out what do we need today.
I'll do that. And he's just going to.
I've just never seen a guy like him in person.

I saw, I was there for the entire Jordan thing and saw great Jordan games. You think Jokic is a good offensively as Larry Bird?

You have to say for his era, because of course his skills improve. And as you know, Larry Bird Bird is my favorite player of all time

and my sports hero.

I think he was a better offensive player because of the size is what makes it better in his, like, okay, in an absolute sense, all the athletes are always getting better because they're building on what came before them, right?

True. Okay.
But I mean, for his, so this is a thought experiment I do.

In the one sport that's measured objectively, we know track and field that guys are getting better because better means faster, right?

There's no debate. It's track and field and cars are the two things that were at.

Stop it. 1963 Porsche versus a Porsche now.
Exactly. You can't compare the cars.
So the 10th best sprinter in the world today is much, much better than Jesse Owens. Yeah.

But that's a ridiculous statement to make because we're not,

there are two different eras. Who's the greater, right?

This is the Bob Kuzi argument. Sure.
This is why I get mad when Koozi just gets cut out because it's like, oh, he played a million years ago. It's like, well.

At that time. At that time, he was the most important basketball player we had until Russell showed up.
and he was the best guard of the first 15 years of the league.

Like that has to matter a little bit. Absolutely.
And I would say that Jokic in his day,

as great as he is, I'll take Larry Bird in his day. Larry Bird.
It's a good argument because Larry had three straight MVPs and then 87 was his best season.

I remember as a kid, and my dad loved Larry Bird, which killed me as a Knicks fan because he said the Celtics

play, the way they played reminded him of the Knicks championship teams, like the unselfish way they played.

But I was like, all I knew is Boston Celtics, Larry Bird, get out of here with that dad, right?

But inside, I remember thinking, and I'm a little kid, I'm thinking, I'll never see anybody this good again.

Like the whole thing with Bird and Magic came because Magic was able to adapt and he played longer and he had this weird prime that just kept going even as he kind of adjusted as a player. In 90, 91.

That's what Bird really only had the nine years and then his body started to break down.

Magic had like 11. When they were both at their best, had

slightly better. And that was kind of, that wasn't really debated.
You know, in fact,

like the guy who Larry was compared to early, it's a little revisionist history now because it's perfect with the college stuff and everything, was Dr. J commercially.
Right. Right.

But you have that behind you over your right shoulder.

Bird versus Dr. J.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. The converse ads.
Well, that was his. Philly was their rival.

It was funny because the Lakers, they played them in the finals those three times, but Philly was the, that was the hump to get over year after year. Dude.
Yeah, yeah.

You know, but, but at any rate, he's another one who slipped through the cracks of history now. He, yeah, because the ABA, but in the ABA, he was God.

I would say the first six, seven years of NBA

in person,

he was unbelievable to see in person with like his fucking Freddy Krueger.

going into the lane with one arm, all that shit. He could nobody

were like, they were different they were different so that's why i think jokic is in that conversation with them because he is of what he does

he can completely change the identity of guys who if they didn't play with him would have had completely different careers and that's you know that's a different list the first time he had a shot at it he has you know if there's a guard on your team who's a b plus but in the playoffs he becomes an a plus yeah and i know jokic wasn't quite in his prime yet but you can't rise to that same level in that series That's, you know, that's like LeBron against Dallas.

But

he loses two Murray playoff years because Murray gets hurt right before the playoffs. And as soon as he had a shot and they get Aaron Gordon, they get the right kind of third guy.

Honestly, last year, what he did against OKC

was pretty amazing just to even drag that series to seven games. And Gordon had a big piece of that too.
He's an incredible player, but I'm Jokic. But I'm with you.

He's a guy who like one championship would make it like Aaron Rodgers.

Aaron Rodgers just winning one Super Bowl ain't going to cut it in the all-time arguments because his talent suggests, like, wait, you're with Drew Brees and them?

You're so much better than those guys, right?

But this is why Curry's 22 is so important. So important, because that's the first time he was the best player on either side.
TV did him. He championed ever.

There's no way they win unless he goes crazy. For me, that put Curry in the, in, like in the top 10 ever conversation, regardless of position.

So the thing with Jokic and Duncan and Bird and Magic is I think it's actually impossible not to win 50 games if you had those guys in their peak. And this is the part that things Kobe,

who

I've kind of come around,

especially when I wrote my book versus what the 09-10 was so important for him, those last two titles.

But those middle three years in the Lakers, when it was like, all right, dude, now you have to carry us. The team's not that good.

And they just weren't, even even in 06, like when he drags them to 45 wins, there's no 45-win 10 Duncan season. So, so there are different ways to look at this.

If I have nothing, I have garbage on my team, and I want to get my team as close as possible to winning a championship, LeBron James is the answer to that, right?

I would throw Jokic in there too, though. Okay.
But Jokic had that year after Murray, I think. I can't remember if Aaron Gordon was on there or not, but you go back and you look at the roster he had.

Yeah.

It's like, how is this a playoff contender? You can take it. My pick all time would be LeBron.
If you have something, that's fair. If you have something on your team, my pick is Michael Jordan.

Because every time Michael Jordan ever played with one other all-star, except for when he came back for 20-something games,

he won. He never didn't win the championship in under seven games.
I mean, he almost won in 90 before Pippin was Pippin. Right.

Like, by the way, and then they go to seven games against the defending back-to-back champions. Pippin gets the migraine.

otherwise, maybe he wins right there.

The point is with Kobe, not that

so he's more like Jordan. Give Kobe something to work with, and he's going to take you as far as you can go.

I still feel like there was some behind-the-scenes stuff with him that had to sort itself out over the years with his personality. And there was too much written about what a tough teammate he was.

It's the hardest thing to put into context with his career because his own coach

was writing books about how impossible he was to coach, right? And then they hashed it out and they really figured out an unbelievable relationship over the second part of it.

But that's still, you have to look at the first half of the screen. You have to count that in at least a little bit.
So Bill James once wrote about

Carl Yostremsky and Stan Musual, you know, and showed all the all the ways they were similar, Musual on a, on a higher level, right?

Have there ever been two superstars

where they're among the greatest players in the history of american team sports both and one of them was such a close replica of the other kobe is is in terms of his size his position his game his accomplishments the how effective he was well he also studied jordan and and actually

six foot six and play shooting guard and have the same coach and everything but he you have the greatest play i think michael jordan to me is clearly and by far the greatest athlete who ever lived, like in his sport, the greatest athlete who ever lived.

Everyone wanted to be like Mike, right? There were commercials. No one, like the next guy who came into the conversation who actually made it an argument, had to do something different.

It was LeBron, right? He's like kind of the first postmodern player where he's like, I'm magic and Michael.

Kobe was the Dr. J.

Yeah.

Kobe was the first, was the only guy really with the guts to say, I'm going to, you know, people misuse the word emulate all the time, right?

They think it means imitate, but really it means imitate in a way that surpasses. You're trying to surpass the original.

Kobe had the guts to try to do the same thing the greatest of all time did, better than the greatest of all time did it. I don't think he got there, but he was basically Michael Jordan.

He was like Michael Jordan minus a hair, right? But damn, that's good. That's so good.

Well, and then he used some of the career advantages that his era had to try to beat him, which is what LeBron's doing too.

Like Jordan basically, he's comes in in three years in college, age 35 is like 42 now.

That's when he won the 98 title, right? It's like, oh my God, he's 35.

And now, you know, he can play 20 years. And that's why, like, even you look at the football, like why Rogers, who seemed like he was done last year.
It's like, maybe he's not done.

Like, who knows with all the shit we have. And now you watch him like, oh, yeah, he's done.
Yeah, he's not.

He has to at least keep the door open for him not being done. He hasn't been great in like three or four years.
We got to take another break.

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This episode is brought to you by CarMax.

When you buy a car with CarMax, you call the shots.

You want to test drive every car in the lot want to shop while you watch the game want to match your car color to your sports team want to shop online and store both it's your move every step of the way and support from their helpful no-pressure associates is there whenever you need want to drive car max shop now at carmax.com we didn't really solve the honest trade thing i don't i i think this the reason i think it will be the spurs if he's traded is because the opportunity is there that you're going to irresistible.

It's irresistible. If I'm trying to win titles or make finals, I'm doing the way LeBron thought about the decade in the 2010s.
Like, I'm staying in the East. I have a much better chance.

I don't have to see OKC. I don't have to see Wemby.
I don't have to see Houston. Where would they rank if Wemby turns into what we think he might? If he turns in, take the median kind of thing.

Can Wemby play like two months straight? That's the problem. He's gigantic in a way that you just don't know about his health.
But Giannis and Wemby together would be amazing.

And maybe like the greatest pair ever. They have a chance.
Easier to make the finals if he can pull off Atlanta and not.

Detroit would be the other one, but if I'm Detroit, I'm just not doing anything crazy. I really like my team.
I'm not winning the title this year. We talked, Zach and I were talking.

We did a pod a couple weeks ago. And I used to have what would Belichick do as the mantra back when Belichick was throwing 100 miles an hour and just knew the roster and when to get rid of guys.

And now it's what would Presty do? And you have to look at these NBA teams and be like, all right, if Presty ran ran Detroit, what would he do? And he'd be like, he wouldn't trade for Anthony Davis.

That's not happening. Marketing.

Huh? Marketing?

I don't think he'd do anything. I think he'd look at it and go, let's have an awesome year.
OKC is probably going to win anyway. Let's go into the summer and really figure out what.

This is like with the Celtics.

I remember talking about it at the time. They lost again in the playoffs.
And it was like, given the age of Tatum and Brown, let's say,

and I said at the time, now they won the very next season. But I said, let's say over the next three years, they make the conference finals twice, the finals once, and they don't win anything.

You're basically AKC in the early 2010s. Well, by then, your two best players are 29 and 28.
Yeah. And they may win four championships still.
Like, everyone's in such a rush.

You know, if you have a nucleus you believe in, let it bake a little bit. Give it some time.
30-team league. All right.
This segment is called Topics Max is Mad He Missed Out On. Yeah.

Then we should mention you were on ESPN for a while, you got bought out as part of the buyout. This happened, also happened to Zach.
This has happened to a bunch of people.

It happened to me, sort of, where my last five months when I was there, when they weren't going to renew my contract, and it was kind of a staring contest, I was like, fine, I'll figure out the ringer, I'll take this time.

They didn't buy me out, by the way. They just

wrote out my contract, right? Right. You wrote it out.
Yeah. So it's, but you didn't get to work.
No.

You missed out on some topics. Yeah.

I asked you to send me a list. I'll go through them quick.
Or you can stop me whenever you want. Number one, Hal Steinbrenner is too poor to own the Yankees.
Yeah.

I mean, you've been itching for two years to talk about this. I think Hal is doing, I think he cares.
I think he's a good owner. Like his intentions are good.

But he's worth a couple billion dollars in a sports environment now where

the richest owners are worth 10 times that.

And so he's running it like a business that he needs to profit from, not just where he enjoys the increase in the equity, but he wants to see a profit, right?

And as a result, he has turned the Yankees into a generic powerhouse big market team. The Yankees have won.
I don't insist the Yankees win the World Series every year.

I'm not actually insane, but this is my number one sports team out of all of them, right? I do insist on the following, though. They win more than anyone else.

And they certainly win more World Series than the Red Sox and the Dodgers. They're They're two traditional rivals in the American National League.

In this century so far, which is a quarter of the way through, the Yankees have won one World Series, the Red Sox have won four, and the Dodgers have won three.

The Yankees are failing. They're failing.
They are a powerhouse team every year. They're excellent.
They're generally well-run, good, generic, big powerhouse, big market team.

That is not the New York Yankees. The New York Yankees were,

by far and away the number one franchise in the history of American team sports. They went from 1920 to 1965,

winning half the World Series ever played, right? Even then, after that,

they were a powerhouse again in the 70s and they had the greatest dynasty in the history of modern baseball in the late 90s. They won four out of five World Series.

They came an out away from winning five out of six World Series. It was insane.

And from that point, basically, and the only reason George Steinbrenner is very overrated also, and I liked him in a way, but the only reason the Yankees got great was because he was kicked out of baseball.

They couldn't trade away their prospects. You know, that's why.

He was colluding with the other owners when Jack Morris and these guys were available and he didn't sign them.

When the Yankees were in an inflection point, they could have been a powerhouse again and they weren't because he was in cahoots with the other owners

to stick it to the players um

but

the the the yankees brand which doesn't just mean hey we're top notch it means we're the best by far we are the standard that every other sports team aspires to to be

he's he's frittering it away well it's funny because the same thing is happening in boston where we flip it Right.

We have the four World Series this year through 2018, and then the team's kind of being run the same way the Yankees are being run. They spend enough money to

spend enough money to make it seem like they're spending enough money. Right.

The stadium's packed. They're making shitloads of money, but something's not...
It's not as dire. It's not like...
Because you guys are like someone's house poor. Where's the bus?

Because, no, because your house poor, your owner is team poor. Well, because, yeah, because he is the Fenway sports group where they have Liverpool and the Penguins, all this shit.
Too much.

But we're not just... The Yankees aren't house poor for baseball.
The owner is actually, by the standards of Major League Baseball owners, one of the poorest Major League Baseball owners.

But these less wealth than the others. Mark Walters are these guys who take over teams and are

worth $20 billion immediately, can hire freedmen or whoever they want to play money ball with money, right? And crush everyone every year. Well, this is what I'm worried about with the Lakers.

The Lakers, for the last, really since the good good doctor got sick, they're being run by the fucking succession family.

The bumbling bus, they just stumble into, they already had Kobe.

And then, you know, they're terrible for most of the 2010s. LeBron just decides I'd really like to live in Los Angeles to get him.
Then Rich is running LeBron's life. He also has AD.

He's like, AD wants to go to the Lakers. I'm going to make this happen.
Now they have those two guys together.

And then right as it's about to fail again, here's the Luca Dodgers straight out of nowhere. The buses did nothing.

And now they're being run correctly by the Dodgers owner. It's going to be a problem.
Let's spend on scouting. Let's spend on consultants.

The buses drove away Jerry West. Like, what did they do good other than have these people fall into their lap? Well, the irony of Dr.

Jerry Buss, who, unlike Stein Renner, deserves every accolade he gets. He's an amazing game.
He's the greatest owner by far history of American team sports. Not close.
I mean, I remember.

Definitely the greatest basketball owner. It's not even an argument.
It's not an argument.

I remember when he showed up at the Lakers practice, and it was when they had traded for Nash and Dwight Howard, and it wasn't going well. And

we had him on the show, and I was wondering why he showed up because Steinbrenner would have showed up. Yeah.
We demand to win.

And he's like, I just wanted to make sure that everyone was getting what they needed. I wanted to see if anyone needed anything that they weren't getting.
Right. And this guy was, he was unbelievable.

Like his whole tenure was unbelievable.

It's so hard to win in professional sports at all this guy not only won but wanted to win in a certain style that makes it you're already it's already impossible now you're forget it you can't do that because you have stipulations how you are going to win i want it to be exciting i want

he did it to the point bill when i was a kid i think the the celtics had 13 championships and the lakers had like six

Now it's like they're neck and neck all the time. Yeah, because they count the Minnesota titles.
But they caught up.

They caught up to the Celtics. That's like someone catching the Yankees.
The Celtics were more than double ahead of everybody else.

The problem now is because they have this incredible player, Luka Doncic.

And they also have Reeves, who somehow wasn't in the Luka Doncic trade, which for reasons that will never, 50 years from now, I'm going to be, I'm hopefully alive wondering why he wasn't in the trade.

But can you win with Luka Style? This is something Rich and I talk about. Like, you know, it's like James Harden 2.0.
I think he's better than Hardin.

I I think he has a chance to be better than Hardin was. But can you see that? There's some good signs, though.
He's already made the finals as the best guy in a finals team, right?

But Harden got super, got farther than he should have.

You know, it took the worst shooting performance ever for him not to make a finals by the whole team.

So

I thought the Lakers were going to be like a play-in team. Me too.
I didn't know. I didn't think, I thought maybe not even a play-in team.
Reeves and Luca are averaging, I think, 63 points a game.

Dude, J.J. Which is, I think that might be the record for two teammates.
I don't know if two teammates have ever been over 60, much less. J.J.
Reddick, man. Like he, that's my mind goes right to J.J.

Reddick.

The job he has done when LeBron wasn't there and sometimes Luca wasn't there

defensively. And like the team is playing,

his attention to D, like, because think of what a head coach has to be. You have to be a leader.
You have to get people on the same page. You need buy-in.

Well, did you see that play last night when LeBron was talking to the Sun's bench during a blowout? And they called the play and JJ got pissed and he called timeout. And that

really bothered me, man. That LeBron, like, I understand why JJ was so pissed.
Yeah, but I think they respect him. They have a pretty weird team, right? Nobody wanted DeAndre Ayton.

The guy, I think, two franchises were like, we'll pay this guy to go away, basically. He's been excellent.
They have Reeves and Luca, who are just two defensive liabilities.

Like, Like, there's no other way to put it. And then this hodgepodge of role players, and they didn't have LeBron for

15 games. LeBron or Luca at times.
And they were playing defense with a team that shouldn't be able to play. They had a little schedule luck, but not a ton.
Well, recently.

But I watched them and I'm like, the team likes each other. They're really well coached.
And they have two awesome offensive options at the end of the games. And as long as Aiton

is okay.

His number one pick for a reason. Like, you know, he was not like he was in the finals.
He was going against Yanis. He wasn't a bad player.
He did some things very well and they're exploring.

Nice reputation. But it reminded me of like one of those old where the Yankees would go grab somebody.
It was like, oh, that guy has a shitty reputation. But back to the Yanks.

I think the thing the Yanks and Red Sox have in common is, yeah, you're doing fine. You're making money.
You're in the playoffs.

There's this other level you could be at that the Dodgers have figured out.

Where the Dodgers are like, they're spending the craziest amount of money, but I think they also make money in they're winning World Series. They figured out the Far East.

I feel like that's something the Yankees would have figured out 20 years ago.

And they tried. They signed a bunch of Asian players, right? But they would have figured out like, there's so much money over there.
This could be a pipeline for us.

And the Yankees took unheralded guys compared to some of the Japanese superstars like Tanaka, who was great, great under pressure.

Like it's a shame that guy never won a World Series because he was such a great pitcher. And it was a good one.
And history will forget him, right, compared to some of these other guys.

And that's a shame. No, you're right.
The Yankees and the Red Sox are stuck in this, in their generic powerhouse big market teams. We're like, oh, shucks,

the playoffs are a crapshoot. Meantime, the Dodgers find that

blue chip guy. And they're like, we don't care what it costs.
We're going to get that guy. Getty Mookie was brilliant.

One of the greatest players of all time. Signing Freeman was, that's right.
They didn't really need to have to do it. And the Red Sox were allegedly in the mix, but not really.

But they didn't need Freeman. 10 years ago, the Red Sox get Freeman.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yamamoto, same thing. Like, they didn't technically need Yamamoto, but they were like, fuck it.
This guy's amazing.

Let's get him. Freeman is a perfect example.
Hall of Fame guy toward the end of his career, but it ain't over yet. He's still near enough his prime.
And you want him in any playoff series.

Oh, in any game. Incredible playoff performer where the Yankees look at a guy like Gold Schmidt, who was never as good as Freeman, but

like maybe, and okay, we'll get him. Maybe he can have a bounce back here.
Come on, on a short deal. Really? How about pushing your chips to the middle of the table for the Surefire blue chipper?

Well, my buddy Jacko, my college roommate, die-hard Yankee fan, who hates Hal Steinbrenner with the passion of seven sons.

Um, he thinks that Cashman and these guys would rather kind of strike oil with the Trent Grisham kind of signing versus actually like going to just get Yamamoto.

It's almost like he, it's more, he feels better. It's more, just Jacko's theory.
He feels like it's more impressive to land these like unheralded gems.

If you're looking for a GM, a cashman's a very good GM. He's not good enough to be the Yankees GM because, again, as a Yankees fan, I insist you must be the best.

If you're not the best GM, you shouldn't be the Yankees GM. But he's fine.
He's good.

He can, he does things like, if you are looking for an athletic, highly drafted, like high-draft position, disappointing disappointing outfielder who you can get on the cheap.

Nick Swisher or Curtis Granderson or

Grisham, you just brought up. Cashman's your guy.
You'll be like, wow, he really picked up that good, useful outfielder who's actually, look at that.

He has 35 home runs, gave up very little to get him. Boy, that's great.

You know what? Sometimes you pull the trigger on a Garrett Cole trade, even if you have to throw in one of your overrated prospects that you'd like to hold on to, right? Like, and they, he doesn't.

You have to like, whatever. So, so this is the Clippers got it wrong when they pushed all the chips in for Paul George and Kawhi Leonard.

And the Yankees get it wrong when they never push all their chips in for, I mean, the real thing is you have to identify the right target. The Dodgers say, Mookie bets.

Freddie Freeman. They're also really good at getting rid of guys

at the perfect time.

And some of those those guys ended up on the red socks where it's like oh we got bueller yeah it's like yeah the dodgers weren't that interested in keeping him i wonder why well because he's not oh we traded for dustin may oh he's not good anymore either that's the thing getting back to presti like yeah guys in the league don't like presty you know why you lose he's better than you yeah you will lose the

one the dodgers didn't want anymore i want my team to ever deal with sam presty and the thunder you will lose that trade yeah you want your team to get to that point where the other teams and that's where belichek was forever.

I think the Celtics with Danny Ainge got to that point where it was like amazing anyone was trading with Ainge.

But that's where you want to be. And the Yankees and Red Sox are just not there.
No. And both of them have good pieces, but I don't know.
I don't know why the Dodgers wouldn't just

keep winning titles, which brings us to the next thing you want to talk about because this all happened since you've been on the sidelines.

Otani

versus Babe Roof. Otani's an incredible sport.
We should mention you care about baseball. That's your favorite sport.

No, no, no. That's not true.
Baseball is not my favorite team sport. The Yankees are my favorite team.

That's fine.

Baseball is my favorite team sport. But you're a big history nerd and you remember all the stats and you're one of those guys.
So Otani is getting thrown around in the Babe Ruth conversation.

For obvious reasons. Yeah.
Left-handed hitter, great pitcher.

What Otani is doing in this day and age is harder than what Babe Ruth did in his day and age.

But to suggest that that Otani is the greatest player of all time, Otani is not the best player in baseball today. Aaron Judge is measured, regular season, regular season.

Aaron Judge is measurably, objectively much, much better than Otani. Even when you throw in the pitching? Yeah, including the pitching.
You add everything up.

Judge has more value because he's so much of a better offensive player regular season.

But what Otani is doing is

harder because

the more homogenized the league becomes the harder it is to get a crazy deviation from the mean when babe ruth is playing in a against you know it's not an international game yet not everyone has day jobs playing against white guys right there's not a yeah there's there's not a lot of there's not a lot of diversity or you don't necessarily have all the diversity you you will have

players who just suck worse than other players will suck in other eras and players who are incredible more than other eras will have incredible players.

So what Otani's doing in this day and age is just unbelievable. But that's the level of difficulty of something and how great a player is are two different things.

For example, it is rarer to hit for the cycle than it is to hit three home runs in a game. But three home runs in a game are obviously better than hitting for the cycle.

Otani is not the best hitter in the game. And people are a little bit lazy with this.
I remember watching Wade Boggs at a certain point, and he was hitting like 320

at that point in the season. And the announcer said,

there's Boggs when he was with the Red Sox in his prime, hitting 320, right where you would expect. And I thought to myself, or he was 330 even.
I thought to myself, wait, stop.

I know 330 sounds like a very high batting average to you, but that is not where you would expect Wade Boggs. 360 is where you would expect Wade Boggs.
There is a difference, right?

He's that much better at hitting for batting average, at least than everybody else.

Don't get lazy and say, so Otani is one of the best hitters in baseball. Babe Ruth wasn't one of the best hitters in baseball.
The distance between Babe Ruth and the second best guy was a chasm.

Babe Ruth was so much better at the plate than everyone in baseball. That is not Otani.
Even though it was easier to do that then, if the fact is, that's what happened as a pitcher.

It's not just that Babe Ruth was maybe the best left-handed pitcher in the league.

It's that under pressure, his record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched in in the World Series stood longer than his home run record,

his single season home run record.

So it's not just that he was maybe the best left-hander in the American league. He was also the best clutch pitcher in baseball history at that point, probably.

So yes. So you're pouring everybody a glass of Settled Down Juice.
Settled down. Otani's incredible.
You may never see another Otani.

Like we didn't see another Babe Ruth for 100 years, whatever it is. And what Otani's doing is amazing.
He's not in the conversation with Babe Ruth. Not in the conversation.

He does have something that I don't think Judge completely has.

Judge is probably the closest of just owning a ballpark when he's up in a big spot.

It hasn't happened since

early 2000s Bonds. And I don't get the feeling.
Bonds was the last guy when he just was walking from the on-deck circle. Judge has it somewhat, especially because of his size.

It's just different with Otani. No, I think when Judge comes to the plate, it's Judge.
I think when he's at the plate with the results in the playoffs,

I trust Otani more. Something about, yeah, and Ortiz, even Ortiz, who was unbelievable, but it's Bonds in the early 2000s.
And I think we both think Bonds is a Hall of Famer.

Well, the Hall of Fame is ridiculous. I'm not going to let that for a second.

This was another thing was on your list. The Hall of Fame is an easy one for the PED era.
It's not hard. Why does this escape people?

If it is very obvious when the person started juicing, and it's in the statistical record,

I can look at someone's stats, especially if I can couple it with a sudden and dramatic change in their appearance. Yes.

That is much more compelling evidence than a receipt from Balco, which could be forged. Also, in the 90s and 80s and even 70s, when guys were doing steroids, it was way more obvious.

You can see it in the red. Seiko, everyone knew.
Red. Everyone knew.
By the way, you can kind of see it in some of the old boxing. Which ones?

Well, it's just the guys, the water steroids were the guys, their necks would get bigger. Like, I'm just

I once asked Shannon Briggs on the radio, who was at this point probably 260 pounds, great guy and a talented fighter. I was like, I know that this is not an either or, but I'm going to ask anyway.

Steroids are a human growth hormone. And he goes, I've never been caught on a test, right? Right.
Like, so, but, but bonds,

what you can, you can forge a receipt from Balco. What you can't forge is a player in, you know, 12 weeks or 16 weeks putting on 30 pounds of lean muscle and his forehead bulging.

What you can't forge is a, you know, fake, is a guy whose home run to at-bat ratio in the same ballpark in which he's always played, no exterior changes,

doubles at the age of 35. Right.
It doubled. Barry Bond, but no, but Barry Bonds is a Hall of Famer because he was already one of the two or three or four greatest left fielders who ever lived.
Right.

If he gets hit by a bus in 1999, he's in any way. He's in the first ballot hall of famer.
Clemens gets hit by a bus in

he's borderline. Yeah, yeah, because I guess.
When he went to Toronto, he was in decline. He meets the Toronto Sy Youngs.
He was in decline.

And then suddenly he goes to Toronto and back-to-back pitching triple crowns or whatever. That probably gets it.
And who knows what he was doing?

I think with longevity and everything, Clemens deserves to be in. Maguire is an absolute no.

Sosa's an absolute no because I can show you, I don't have to go through it now, in their record where they fundamentally became a different player at a certain point where they're

split all these guys in. You would put them all in.

I wrote this, I think, for ESP in the magazine, maybe in 06, 07. Just put it on the plaque.

It's a Hall of Fame. It's a museum.
I'm supposed to bring my son, my grandson, whoever, and teach them about baseball. We're not going to have the most cheating.

What am I rewarding, though? The guy's already retired, and I'm putting it on their plaque that they cheated.

I have a problem with it. And also, how do we know, like, all these sports? I don't know who's cheating and not cheating.
Because the drugs are better.

Fundamentally, Maguire and Sosa, when you look at what they had done in their career, how it was trending, the kind of player they were, were not Hall of Famers.

And then they suddenly became first ballot Hall of Famers. That's fair.
Bonds was already a, let's say, a 440 on base, 650.

So what did he do with Piazza, who's never been, we never figured it out one way or the other? Piazza in his minor league career, I don't think ever slugged 500.

And then eventually he was playing catcher

for 140-plus games a year and hitting 40 home runs and hitting three whatever. And his on base was over 400, is slugging over 600.

You can do with Piazza what you want. But you don't think this is happening in other sports now?

Of course it is. Of course it is.
That's why I just think the guy it was easier to figure out who was doing it in baseball because of the what the drugs made people look like.

And, like, but like, but I just want to just like with Otani or with Boggs, no, he's not usually at 330, he's at 360. There's a difference.

To say when Bonds was a mid-400 on base, mid-600 slugging guy, so people understand you can't really do better than that, hardly. That's like one of the greatest ever.
He did it every year.

He then went from that at the age of 35

to a 600 on base guy, 800 slugging guy. It's like in the comics, if, you know, Captain America was this like skinny little guy who took Super Soldier serum and it maxed out human potential, right?

But it's as though, it's as though. It was the limitless drug.
No, no, it's as though Bonds, instead of being, what was, what's Captain America's name?

I forget his name in the comic books, but it's as though instead of taking the little weakling guy and giving him the super soldier serum, you took the biggest, strongest, best, best athlete in the world who was Barry Bonds and gave him Super Soldier serum.

It makes a mockery of the game. It seems like it made his eyesight like 2010, 25, like 20/5.
Like he, I mean, what was the one year his on base was like 600. And some of those were intentional walks.

Most of them. But it just seemed like he knew where every pitch was going within an inch either way around the strike zone.
That's the craziest baseball stat I think I've ever heard.

That year, it wasn't the 73 home run year. It was another year that he was going to be able to get to the 2000s.
Yeah, there was like an 02, 030. 47 home runs because they

Every time the bat left Bonds's shoulder, every time he took a swing, it was almost a 50-50 proposition whether he missed the ball entirely between these two outcomes. It was almost 50-50.

Missing the ball entirely, getting an extra base hit. He was just about as likely to get an extra base hit every time he swung as he was to miss the ball.

So, anyway,

so Bonds is a first ballot hall. He should have been a first ballot Hall of Famer in spite of the the steroids and everything, but he is not the greatest hitter of all time.

In other words, it's demonstrable that Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, now Aaron Judge were better hitters than Bonds at Bonds' very best until he started changing.

And then Bonds became the best, but I don't give him credit for that because it wasn't him. It was him plus.

But he's still a Hall of Famer. Clemens borderline because of longevity he's in, because he was a borderline Hall of Famer at the point where it was clear something was going on.

McGuire and so no way. And so on, right? Like this stuff ain't that hard.

Do you have any Mahomes when the GOAT stuff started for him? I think you were on the sidelines for that. And it was a little early.

Well, I'd said it after the first preseason game I saw him before he started

before he was going to be the starter that year. So his second season, I was on first take and I said, I know it's one preseason game.
but I will tell my grandkids that I saw Patrick Mahomes play.

I tell you that right now. I'm going to tell my grandkids I saw him play.
Mahomes has something that Brady never had, which is this.

To say you're the Michael Jordan of a sport doesn't simply mean you're the greatest of all time. What it means is you put your eyeballs on that guy and you say, that looks different.

I haven't seen anything quite like that yet. I haven't seen that.
That's

my eyes are telling me that's something new.

Then you look down at the stats and you go, oh my God, that verifies what my eyeballs are seeing. 40 touchdowns, four picks, whatever.
Right.

Then you look at

how far his team is going and they're winning tons of championships. Yeah.
That's how you become the Michael Jordan of a sport. Now,

is Mahomes near Brady right now? No, of course not.

Brady beat him head to head when Brady was old and Mahomes was young, even though Mahomes didn't have an offensive line, but still Brady never looked the way Mahomes did, as bad as Mahomes did in that, well, he looked incredible in that Super Bowl in certain ways because he had to make spectacular plays, but his team got slaughtered.

Because

Mahomes has since then also not looked good in another Super Bowl, right?

But Brady,

when we remember him, it's like, oh, this guy's got something. But he was kind of like Jeter and Peyton was like A-Rod.
I remember right in those columns. 20 years ago.

That Jeter was right because they were like Russell Chamberlain, like same kind of. Same thing.
If you look at the numbers, one guy's better, but if you watch them, you know which one you're better.

If you're life dependent on it for one game, you're not picking the guy with the numbers. And then Brady,

who was also like Jeter and Kobe, a little overrated in the clutch early on in the sense that like the highest level of clutch to me is the Mariana Rivera strata or the Michael Jordan strata.

You are the best who ever did it. And in the biggest moments, you become much, much better than yourself.
Who's the best ever? And it's shocking if you don't come through. It's shocking.

So like Mariano Rivera has the lowest adjusted ERA in the history of baseball for pitchers with over a thousand innings.

His adjusted ERA in the postseason is one-third of that, or his ERA in the postseason is one-third of his regular season ERA, which is the lowest ever. Yeah.
Okay. That Michael Jordan, the same thing.

He got better. Kobe, Jeter, and Brady, I think, are on a level where people think of them as clutch because they just stayed who they were under pressure.

I don't think early on Brady elevated under pressure. I think he was still just a really good player.
Well, he had the ramp, first ramp Super Bowl. Well, he was

a field goal with 35 seconds left. Yeah, because he's a clutch player, but I've been to the Super Bowl.

But did you feel like his performance when you watched him week in and week out got better in the playoffs? No, that was Brady. He would do stuff like that.
What I'm saying is...

I trusted him completely in the playoffs. Obviously, right?

What I'm saying is a thing happened to Brady midway through his career where he started putting up Peyton Manning numbers and he started actually elevating in the playoffs, like to come back against Atlanta.

The Butler game. The Butler, exactly.
That's when, right around then, it tilted, but they still needed to play on defense. But he scores those last two touchdown drives against an incredible defense.

He went from Jeter Kobe level with that stuff to Jordan Rivera level. By the way, the Eagles Super Bowl,

500 yards. Yeah, and I think they had, what they had, 40 points somewhere around there? Really, that Super Bowl came down to a Brandon Gray.

It was the first team to make a defensive play is going to win this game. And it was the Eagles who made the defense.

The other crazy thing with Brady was they never really, I mean, he looked out, or didn't look out to draft him, but Gronk was like the big, the big ad.

And then Edelman turned in, but they never, it wasn't like I watched what the Bears did for Caleb Williams, where they're spending first-round picks, trading for guys. Never had a situation like that.

Brady is different in the sense that when you put your eyes on him originally, it wasn't like, I've never seen this before. Oh, my God.
Then you look at the stats. Oh, my God.

That verifies what my friends are.

There was was something about Brady when he got the job because I remember being in Boston that year and all we did was argue about Brady versus Bloodso for three months.

And I was in the Brady camp and I think I was writing for Ace Paint at the time. So I can back that up.
But

there was a polish to him.

Everything he did was just really high end. Like the play actions were perfect.
The way he handed it off was always on time. Like his, the passes, the guys always caught it.

You could just kind of tell, like, oh, there's something different. This guy just does everything well.
I don't know what he is, but he's something.

Whereas Bledsoe was the classic, overpaid, good say, he was like a lamello ball almost, even though we'd win something. I'm not going to mention the executive because I like this guy a lot.

I was doing Around the Horn at the time. Oh, and I said, Was it Eric Radhol? Nope, it wasn't Radha, who was never actually doing Around the Horn when I was.
Yeah, okay. But, but

I remember saying, I think Brady's better than Bledsoe. And this executive told me, you can't say that on TV because it was at the time where you, and I was like,

have you been watching? Like, Brady.

brady's who you want so so brady is the goat obviously in football but mahomes has a chance to do something brady really wasn't in the running to do brady like through his prime was brady better than montana montana was 4-0 in the super bowl montana 13.5

exception he's the tim duncan of nfl he's just been cast aside Cast but but better than Duncan in his sport. When 1990, by the time he won that fourth one, we were like, Montana's the best.

We'll never see another one. And now he's kind of gone.

But Brady outlasted Montana. You can't put Montana ahead of Brady because Brady did it for so long.
But at their best, Fate of the Universe on the line, I don't think I'm taking Brady over Montana.

I think Brady would even probably take Montana over Brady. I don't know.
I think to me, it's a toss-up

is also such a cool dude. He really was.

Everything about him, first of all, his name is Joe Montana. He's getting away with this shit.
Joe Montana? You have the nerve to actually be the greatest who ever did it?

And your name is Joe Montana. He was doing it during this time when quarterbacks just got the fucking shit beaten out of them.
He was so tough.

I follow a couple Instagram accounts where they'll just show old hits sometimes. There was this hit on Jaworski that I had forgotten about.

When he gets hit from behind and then he gets the Giants, it's like it's unbelievable. Is he dead? What just happened? It's unbelievable.

Yeah, Lee Hannah had a bad one against Jim Burt was the bad one with him, where I think he got knocked out in the playoff game. I'll remind everyone, by the way, speaking of Montana,

oh, the Chiefs are cooked this and that.

There was a year that Montana won the Super Bowl, you know, with the catch, right? Like that year. At one point, I want to say he was six and five, something like that.

They won the Super Bowl that year. Like,

Brady set a standard. You win seven Super Bowls.
It's just insane. The Tampa one really pushed her over the towel.
Tile. Plus, beating Mahomes twice.

The Tampa one,

the fact that is it Brady or Belichick is along with is it MJ or LeBron, the greatest sports debates of the 21st century. Yeah.
And we have an answer to Brady Belichick, which shocked me, right?

I just always assume NFL is a coaches league. Belichick's good no matter what.
I don't think we have an answer. Dude, he went to the Bucs.

It's not that he had a good run like Montana did, right?

It's he didn't get to the AFC championship game like Montana did. He won the Super Bowl.
And Belichick Belichick has not been back to the playoffs. I get it, but the 2000s, Belichick gets the edge.

He just does. He put together those rosters, the defense and the special teams, and the attention to detail and the way he did the roster.
But could he have done it? This is more important than Brady.

Because Matt Castle won a lot of games. They didn't make the playoffs.
And by the way, I know, but you lose your quarterback in the credits of the

season. Could he have done it? And you look at the backup quarterbacks.
My argument always, of course it's Belichick.

Imagine putting Drew Brady in the middle of the year. I think Brady gets it in in 2010s.

I think he was more important in the second decade. I think Belichick was slightly more important in the first decade.
I agree with that.

The roster, like all the guys, the way they looked at how to build like a chemistry, the locker room, getting the guys like the Vrabel, Rodney Harrison, over and over.

But that's not the debate is. Also, he had the balls to bench Bledsoe for Brady, which nobody would have done.
I'm not taking away. He never gets credit for that.

I'm not taking away Belichick's credit for that. I am saying that Belichick was the undisputed greatest NFL coach of all time.
Don't even compare anyone to him. I still feel that way.

I think Andy Reid is in the conversation. Bill Parcells is in the conversation.

There are other people in that conversation in retrospect. Andy Reid.
But

Andy Reid lived in the NFC championship game. And then as soon as he gets his hands on like a...

great, great, I think McNabb was a great quarterback, but he gets his hand on a roster with real talent, lives in the Super Bowl, lives there. And it's hard, like Bellichend.
He needs Reed.

He needs at least two more before I'm ready to entertain that combo. Reed? Yeah.

Here's the problem with Mahomes for the GOAT combo. He can't throw the deep ball anymore, and it's just a fact.
And the stats back it up. The Ivan's back.

He overthrows them when they're open, though. Like, I just don't think he's had that good of a year this year.
He hasn't this year. And he didn't really,

last year was the same thing where it was good enough, but it wasn't to the same standards he had for those. What was was the first in the last two years, really? Five or six.

He's his best target. No, his best target.
I would take Rice and Worthy on the Patriots right now. They're better than the Patriots receivers.

I mean, I saw him hit Rice with a dime in this last game that they lost that maybe they don't lose if Rice

ball is in his hands and just drops the ball, right? Like you can't,

Mahomes does not have the same. threats on the field offensively, receiving threats that he used to.
His favorite target is old and not as good anymore.

I don't know if there's a Tyreek Hill made Mahomes case. You could kind of float out there.
Except that when he left, they still won a Super Bowl.

I know, but it's just with the stats when you look at the. But you're talking about the deep ball.
Yeah. Right? Like, get them some real deep threats and let's see the deep ball.

They're worth these pretty fast. All right, we'll take one more break and then.

Wow, we've, we've been going a long time. You have 20 more minutes in you? All right.
Dude, we're talking about sports.

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Well, we said we were going to talk about you leaving ESPN and you weren't able to talk about a lot of stuff. And a lot of other people were talking, including people you did shows with.

How frustrating was it? for you to sit on the sidelines, be talked about, but not be able to talk. That doesn't bother me at all.
Okay. You're talking about me.

Like, I'm not sweating anybody like that. But I was very flattered that, you know, because if you go off the air, you're not sure that the sports world would care, right?

Like, but people seemed to care. I was like, oh, look at that.
People are thinking about me. I was very flattered by it, to tell you the truth.

And in terms of the stuff that went down behind the scenes, there were things said to me in private

early on

that it's not like anyone said to me, Hey, this is top secret. Don't repeat this.
But I think there's a general understanding that if someone's talking to you in private, it's a private conversation.

And I wouldn't repeat that unless they said it was okay to repeat what they told me. Yeah.
So that's what I could tell you about like the behind the scenes stuff on first take, for example.

But in terms of like, I'm not, I'm really not worried about that stuff, you know, like

that. but you're so stephen a you're in a relationship with where you're doing a show together for how many years four

five five years you're with this dude every day seeing him in the mornings you're commercial breaks you're hanging out sure and then the show ends or the the show ends with you and he moves on with other people and then you know and i i should say i like stephen a and i've always gotten along with him i didn't love how he handled the aftermath you leaving where it's basically like i told you the show would be better i just thought because I think you're really talented.

You and I have known each other for a while. Whether it meshed as a show perfectly, I don't know the answer to that, but

I just didn't think that was the right way to handle it. If you're doing a debate show and you're a competitive person,

why would you want me as a partner? That's bad. You want to go 15 rounds every day with Mohamed Kellerman? That's just bad.
You know, it's embarrassing, you know? So you think that was part of it?

He didn't want to put the time in? Or just want a different type of show?

What's your take on

what you want to do with put the time in?

It's, you know, it's a debate show.

You're ready to roll on. You know what topics? You want to like, like, like, if you're,

I have an idea. This is what I want to put on TV.
I want to spar Bud Crawford every day for 15 rounds, and I want everyone to see it.

Eventually, you're going to say, I don't want to do that anymore. And you bring in some other people in a rotating cast.
Yeah. Yeah.

And

that's one aspect of it. There are others.
In other words, that's what I could tell you from my point of view. Yeah.
And I also think that

if you make a calculation that if you can be perceived as a solo act, really, that you can get paid at a certain level that you can't if you're not a solo act, then you'd like to be a solo act, or at least perceived that way.

Well, so like Mike and the Mad Dog are a good example of a show where it was the two of them together for a long, long time.

And then all of a sudden, whatever happened, happened. Mike got his own show and he stayed on top for

six, seven years. Do you know who he wanted to be?

Did you get the call?

Oh, yeah, that was the plan. I was supposed to go over and work with Mike.
Yeah. Interesting.
Because I got the call. Who else got the call? I don't know, but we had like come to an understanding.

So you're going to leave ESPN and do it? I did leave ESPN.

But not to do a show with Mike. Yeah.

You did the show with Mike? No. So what happened?

Again, my

interpretation of what happened, my analysis is

I think he realized at a certain point, they're not going to make me take a partner. Why should I take a partner? Because I'm beating the hell out of the guys across town by myself.

I think when he thought they're going to make me take a partner, then it was like, okay, well, I'd like it to be with that guy. And then when it was like, I don't need a partner.

Yeah, that's too bad, though, because I actually think he long term he did need a partner because it's always good to have people to play off of. Look, I don't need a partner either.
No.

But I like having one because I find conversations more interesting than just talking into the wind, you know.

So over the years, you had Brian Kenney,

Jim Lampley, Marcellus Wiley. Marcellus for a while.
Great partner. And in fact, I've become good friends with the people I work with because I like, Bill, you know better than anybody.

We're getting away with it. If you're in this business, you're getting away with it.

We're talking about sports.

You've been doing this anyway.

Come on. It's your job as a guy, like an average American guy.
It's your job to follow sports. It's like literally what you have to do.
You have no choice in the matter, right?

You got to find out what's going on. And so.

How to make that experience even better? Hang out with your friends and talk about sports, right? Like, why would you not want to do that?

It's interesting because

Stephen A. was the one partner I've ever had over the, over like years

where I didn't feel like a relationship was really forming.

And I like to go to work and, and,

you know, you could feel a little bit watching it. And it was hard to tell how much of it was theater and how much of it was like, oh, these guys just don't get along in the same way.

Or whatever you feel about who you're working with and what the situation is, to me, a cardinal sin is betraying that on the air. You should always be thinking about making the show entertaining.

Right. And I do think it reached a point on that show where it was like, come on, dude.
We're, we, we, the first priority is to make good TV.

Well, it's becomes, I mean, good TV is like professional wrestling, right?

Right. Both guys have moves.
You guys sell the other guy's moves. Of course.
And I think we've all been in situations who've done this where you're with somebody who, or on a, on a bigger show

where people either selling your moves or they're not right exactly right and but he's a showman like like he would i never had to worry about when the little red light came on that it wouldn't be a show but it would be like you don't want to be undermined you know is that a fun show to do like did you like doing what was it two hours a day of just five days a week of having to react and just be like preserve the moment and stuff the issue with that show is this what is a hot take a hot take is a counterintuitive conclusion that on TV, you're going to just state your conclusion.

You do analysis about a subject. You come to a conclusion that's counterintuitive.
So when you say it, people are being like, what are you talking about? Give me 90 seconds. I'll explain it to you.

Oh, at least he has a point of view. If you have,

if there are 12 topics a day and you have 12 hot takes on those topics, because by and large, There's a consensus about sports. This guy's good.
This guy's not as good. Whatever it is.

This team is in the right direction, the wrong direction, whatever it is.

The consensus is usually correct, right? Yeah. Sometimes, some small percentage of the time, aha.
In fact, what everyone thinks is not true.

If you have a counterintuitive conclusion about every topic in sports every day, you are insane. Like,

Skip Bayless is very entertaining, and I always enjoy my interactions with him privately. Yeah.
He's

insane, right? Like, you can't, you, you have 12 hot takes a day. Unbelievable, right? Right.
You've come to 12 conclusions that go against the consensus every single day that you're going to.

But Stephen A. has no hot takes.
Stephen A.

almost never, I can't think of any counterintuitive conclusions that he ever reaches. That's not his job on the air.
His job is to be the big reactor to a counterintuitive conclusion.

Reactor.

Just

he's there to hear the crazy conclusion that his partner has come to and actually be the everyman with a loud voice. Like, you are crazy, right? And do it theatrically.

So there's a lot of pressure on his partner to come up with a counterintuitive conclusion about everything. Now, how do you do that? Well, you're just making it up.
You're doing it for TV.

No, what you do is you take a topic and a good producer will start to drill down on the topic and say, okay, so you agree about this. So Mahomes is a great quarterback, but what does he do well?

And what does he not? And you keep going down until one or the, until you get a divergent opinion. Well, actually, I think he is good at this.
No, I think he's good.

No, actually, the most important player on the, we both think this is going to win. This team is going to win the championship.
We both think this is why.

Drill down. But no, actually, the key player is other than the superstar is this guy.
No, it's that guy. Actually, Draymond Green is the second most important player on the Warriors, right?

He's actually the pick and roll partner who does all the dirty work. Victor Rembanyama is the best player in the NBA right now.
There you go. There's a counterintuitive conclusion.

But you keep digging until you get a divergent opinion and there is your argument. But there was a lot of pressure on that show.

Like Stephen A's opinion will not diverge into counterintuitive almost ever. So his big take will be, but he'll deliver it theatrically, is Steph Curry is the greatest shooter that God ever created.

Who does not know this? Yeah. Everyone knows this.

A counterintuitive take would be, actually, you know who the best shooter on the Warriors is? It's Clay Clay Thompson. Because when you, I'm making this up.
I don't believe this.

I thought it was Steph. But because when you say greatest, you have to talk about high leverage moments too.
And I have more confidence in Clay hitting a high leverage moment three than I do Steph.

Something like that, right? You have to, that will never happen. So there was pressure on that show for me to keep getting

until you hear something you think is crazy. This is the perfect example of what you just said.
Jalen Brunson is the best nick of all time. There you go.
Do you believe that? No. Okay.

Then you can't say that. It's arguable, though.
But you have to keep digging until you find the thing that Bill Simmons thinks is actually

on those shows. If I say that in a production meeting, they're like, that's amazing.
They'll go

segment two.

You should not say the thing you don't believe. You know, you should stick with.
And that's so the difficulty with me on that show.

was it was a lot of work to keep digging until I said the thing that I believed that would also get a reaction.

But on top of it, they're telling you Cowboys, Lakers, Knicks, Yankees, like it's all the big teams

over and over again. That's the red meat.
You fish where the fish are. Like right now, the Cowboys having a little run.

It's perfect because it's actually reasonable to talk about them. I remember when I was doing Countdown,

they're trying to make us lead with the Lakers all the time because that's coming from Bristol. Of course.
Lead with the Lakers again. It's like, well, can we lead with Memphis?

They just traded Rudy Gay and the team's better. I would say it's really interesting for us to not do not lead.

No, no, talk about Kobe. Can he make how high can they get? And then we'd have to do that segment again.
Of course. And that's kind of the ESPN Red Meat philosophy.

By the way, the first thing I said on First Take that drove everyone nuts was, Tom Brady is going to fall off a cliff, right? I remember that. And that made me angry.
Yeah.

And I, well, the part that I didn't like, and I apologized about it the next day, and they didn't like it on the show when I apologized, was I said, he's going to be a bum in short order.

But I was just being kind of, I was talking the way you talk in a barbarian.

I didn't really mean a bum. I just meant a guy, just a guy, a jag is what I should have said.

But it was just based on every quarterback who ever lived. Is this a defender meme? Yeah.

Yeah.

But I was wrong about that because on every quarterback who ever lived after the age of 40 or 41, they fell off a cliff. Yeah.
He kept going. The odds were that I was correct in that.

He's still around right now. Right.
There'd be the fine.

He's just going to keep getting hurt, have small injuries, and his body's going to break down the way Carl Malone stayed once upon a time. Correct.

But when I said that about Brady, they loved loved it because that would get traction, right? Because you still remember it 15 years later.

Well, it's what can cut into a social media clip, which unfortunately is a lot of the economy of these conversations. Right.

Like you say things on your podcast, I'm sure, all the time that get repurposed. And it's like,

because when you, because again, if you, if all you see is the counterintuitive conclusion and you don't have the prop the analysis of how you got there,

then it sounds, did you just sound crazy? Well, a good one is like we do, we always do the NBA over-under pods, which I've been doing since ESPN where the wins, the over-unders. And you go over-under,

you're hoping to, like in the NFL last year, I went 27 and 5, which will never happen again. Right.
This year,

I'm probably closer to 17 and 15 this year. It's not still not bad.

But you're making the case for each team. You're not going to be right about all of them.

And then if they, like, I thought the Vegas, I couldn't figure out who the seventh AFC playoff team was going to be. And I was like Vegas, Indianapolis, Jacksonville.

So I just went with new coach Pete Carroll following Antonio Pierce. Easier schedule.
Maybe that's nine and eight. I picked them.
Sure. They're going to go two and 15.
Right.

You could cut out the argument I made for them into a clip, and it's probably going to be really bad.

But you could also take the argument I made for why the Pats, I thought they could be a playoff team. It's, you can cherry-pick all this stuff.
But if you hear the explanation.

Go crazy about it, is my point. By the way, let me say something else about that.

If you do real analysis and you always come to the intuitive position, your powers of analysis aren't very good right you're you're affected by you're overly affected by group you're talking about it's like that you want to have a smart zag you every so often well just i don't think you even have to look for it just if you're really thinking about something now if you come to that counterintuitive conclusion you're in a room of 100 people and 99 people think you're wrong you should absolutely double check to make sure that you believe what you think you believe because the chances are you're wrong and they're right but bill sometimes you check and you check and you check and you go no in fact i'm right and they're wrong.

And that's great. And you could, you know.
Well, it's funny. When you talk NFL, there are some things that are reliable every year, like the new coach following a bad coach.
Yep, a little bump.

The bump combined with the easy schedule. Like that was why the Patriots checked every single box for, I know this is crazy, but it seems like they could be a playoff team.

And here are all the reasons why. Right.
The Bears are when it gets a little.

A little stretchier because they're in a hard division.

Who knows if Ben Johnson, we've seen Mike McDaniel, we've seen some of these offensive coordinator geniuses, all of a sudden they're not good when they get a head coach.

Who knows if Caleb's going to be good? The Bears history outdoors.

I picked them to make the playoffs. I didn't feel great about it, but that's one where there was a case and now the case looks awesome.

So all year I thought the, because I've been watching, been going to some Rams games with Rich and

I think they have a great quarterback who, remember when I was saying, if you have to believe you have that guy on your team, one of the reasons I think teams fold against guys like Brady is because when Brady marches the Bucs down the field and throws a touchdown, if you don't have Matthew Stafford on the team and we had to find out about Stafford, then that already even proposing quarterbacks have,

of course, I'm going to lose to Brady. That's what the Patriots have right now.
Stafford went right back down the field.

So they have that guy at quarterback. They have a great third-down defense, especially, I think, the Rams.
They have a great coach, all that stuff.

So all year I'm saying, I'm thinking, I don't have a platform to talk about it. I think the Rams should be the Super Bowl favorites.
Here's a counterintuitive one. And well coached, too.

He's a great coach. Yeah.

How about right now? Who would be your hot take team to win the Super Bowl right now? Hot take team. I got one right on the tip of my tongue.
What is it? Texans.

Sal and I talked about that Sunday. Oh, yeah.
So I was doing it from the context of, who am I the most afraid to play in a playoff game with my young, precocious New England Patriots?

And it's like, you know what? I want to see the Texans. No one wants, because if you have a defense that's peaking at the right time and you have a quarterback who might be that dude, right?

Have you seen evidence in the past where maybe he could be that? Right.

And a coach that the players, like a leader of men guy, you know, like they got all those things. Yeah, the Bears are the wild card to me in the other.

conference just because of the way they ran the ball in Philly kind of broke my brain. Yeah.
It's like

that could actually, yeah, that could actually work in January for at least one upset. I don't know if it could work round after round, and I don't trust Caleb, but that's

not nothing.

No one feels sorry for you right now. You got the coach and the quarterback.
That's all you need. And the quarterback is so young and you're set.
Like Patriots fans are set.

You're going to be a little bit more. I was just texting somebody about that the other day.
Like

barring something crazy happening. Once you have the combo, it's like, this is 12 years.

This is it. We can always, you can patch around these two things, but you need the two things.
Do the Bronze Bulls have that combo? Is Bone Nicks a combo?

I'm not quite there with them. Are you? I don't know about Bone Nicks.
I will say that there have been certain coaches on my mind recently. I've mentioned J.J.
Reddick. He's on my mind a lot.

I just, I'm so impressed with what he's doing.

Sean Payton is just unbelievable what he's done to that franchise, a mess of a franchise. And that's like,

it's not an accident. It's a a culture rebuild.
It's an accountability. It's looking for certain guys.
Like all the guys, if you study all the guys Rabel signed, they're all like locker room guys.

Like Spillane brings in. Spillane, Mac Collins,

Moses, like all these dudes who were like well liked on the teams they're on. Harold Landry, he knew because he coached him.

And he just, he wanted the team to be unselfish, got rid of some guys from the Belichick era. In some cases, just because they were part of the Belichick era.

Like they traded Keon Wade, who I actually think was like decent and now plays every snap for the Niners, it seems like. But he was like, you know what? This team's moving this way.

I want guys that are swimming all the same way this way. Sean Payton.
Sean Payton, same thing.

The Broncos remind me of the old Patriots, like the early Brady Patriots, in the sense that they give you a sense that you're in the game.

Like there are a dozen teams in the NFL right now who think we almost beat the Broncos. No, you didn't.

You know, like I have this theory in sports and it applies to boxing, but it applies to all sports.

The great offense will always be overrated when it comes up against mediocrity because mediocrity has nothing to stave off the offense. So it gets overwhelmed.

The great well-rounded fighter or team will always be underrated when it goes up against mediocrity because it will beat them, but it'll beat them the way a chess master beats someone, which is you tighten the vice, right?

Like you accrue all these small advantages, and in the end, you win, but it seemed competitive, or at least like the other team was saying. That was Pat's Giants last night.

And that was they they could have put up 50 and they were like, yeah, let's save some for next few weeks. It's the greatest show on turf.
Right.

It's like the great, well-rounded team or individual athlete needs

another great to go up against to really show you what they have. And what we've seen from the Broncos, I think the reason people are not maybe convinced about the Broncos is because they're that.

because they they they are a team that will figure out a way to win. And until you see them under pressure in the playoffs against another great team, you're not going to believe it.

But I'm not convinced that they won't do it.

Yeah, so I always keep track of wins, losses, and then either or games.

I think they have five actual wins where they beat the other team. Buffalo has eight.

To me, Buffalo is still the team I think for some reason has gotten written off a little bit, mainly because of that Thursday night Houston game. They don't have a lot of weapons.

They don't have a lot of weapons, but they still have

a great, great, great player,

decent infrastructure. They've been in a bunch of big games, so they're not going to be scared.
So, I don't, I mean, I honestly think this is the hardest season to figure out in a long time.

The Pats are finally favorites in the AFC. It took forever because it seems like they're probably going to get the one seed.
Yeah, but that's the only reason.

The Texans, even the Buffalo, one of the reasons I'm so high on the Texans is because I saw them on a short week, right, for Buffalo do what they did.

Just crushed it.

The problem is the Chiefs are probably not making the playoffs.

I'm not ready to say that. They're two back from those wild card teams.
I will believe

dead and buried, I'll believe. And they've lost to three of the teams that they could potentially be an entire end.
So it's like pretty grim.

There was a middleweight champion in the early 1900s named Stanley Ketchell, one of the biggest punchers of all time. He was shot dead when he was 24 years old.

And I'm forgetting who gave the quote, famous newspaper guy, I think, at the time. I'm forgetting who it was, though.
At his funeral, they said, start counting to 10.

Let's see if he gets up. Let's see if he gets up.
That's how I feel about Patrick Mahomes. Start counting to 10.
And when you get to 10 out, I'll believe he's out of it. And not until then.

I'd be delighted to see them not make it. I don't want to see them in the playoffs either.
Of course you don't. You have ulterior motives, though.
Texans is my number one.

I don't want to see you in a playoffs.

What it comes down to at the core is you want Mahomes out of the conversation. And if

Brady thing? Of course. Of course.

If they can, like what Mahomes and the Chiefs have done, by the way, in a tougher division, Brady and what Brady and Belichick done will never be done again. But, you know, I'm a results guy, Max.

But like, two years ago, I was ready to entertain the Mahomes and the GOAT conversation, but Brady never went like nine and eight. Entertain it, but that doesn't say what you're rooting for.

Brady never went nine and eight.

Because what a much easier division, though. And all you have to do is win the division, you get a buy in the first round, right? Like, I'm not diminishing what they did.
It'll never happen again.

It's never going to happen again, especially since they did it in an era of great parody. In fact, it just doesn't seem like that.
I don't think it can happen again. It'll never happen again.

But the Chiefs, Patrick Mahomes' career, he's never not been to the AFC championship game. I know.
Dude. It's a good GOAT resume thingy.
I mean, ridiculous. Can we talk boxing before we go quickly?

Just because I barely have anyone to talk boxing to other than Van and a couple other people.

I love the fact that you, like, you're, to me, a good bellwether in terms of what the sports fan in America cares about.

The fact that you know as much about boxing as you do always made me feel good as a boxing fan because it meant that like it's it's at some level, it's still important.

Well, I mean, 70s and 80s, it was as important as anything. Yeah, Manix always calls me Big Fight Bill because I show up for the big ones.
I might not be watching that the zone fight of mid-July.

Manix is my guy. Mid-July, maybe I'm not showing out for the flyweight championship and Riyadh.
Sure.

But I watch all the big ones.

Who's, as we head into 26, who is our number one draw right now?

Who's the number one draw in boxing or who's the best fighter in the world? Give me draw first, then best fighter in the world.

Draw? Did Crawford? Might still be Canelo Alvarez. You know, if you have the Mexican fan base in North America,

you have a lot.

Anthony Joshua in England will still bring him out for sure. I meant draw from like public being excited about a fight.

Because I think Canelo had. The American public? Yeah, just everybody.
I mean, to me, did Crawford grab this with beating Canelo? Maybe.

I think the hardcore fans certainly are interested in Bud Crawford.

I think, I mean, my answer is Crawford. The guy who I'm most interested in watching is Crawford because he is this generation's goat.

People, well, how could you be the greatest of all time in this generation? There are some guys that make a certain impression on contemporary audiences. Yeah.

That you can't tell that audience anything their guy was the best, right? Crawford's one of those guys. He's like the

boxing fans who watched Crawford in this era might pick him against anyone ever when all is said and done.

Well, I remember, and you're obviously the hardest hardcore boxing guy, but I've always had boxing people in my life.

And there was somebody I was friends with in the 90s who would get so mad if anyone thought Roy Jones wasn't the best fighter.

Like there's certain guys that resonate with the hardcore people where they're like, they'll actually want to get in a fight. If somebody's like, yeah, but what about?

It's like, there's no what about. It's Roy Jones.
Roy Jones at one point. At one point, Roy Jones.

If I would have told you, remember what you were thinking when Mike Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks in 90 seconds. I'm sure you watched that fight, right? Oh, my God.

My mom hadn't even brought down all the pizza and wings she made for me and my friends yet. And the fight was over.

So what no one was saying at the time, but everyone was thinking, was he might be the best fighter of all time, right? Like everyone would say Muhammad Ali, but it's almost out of respect.

What people were feeling is that.

And if I would have told you on that night, there is a junior middleweight amateur who's only a year younger than Mike, who will never come close to actually losing a fight, who will be the champion at middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight, jump up to heavyweight, beat a top five guy, and one day open as a two-to-one favorite to beat Mike Tyson.

You would say that is not possible. If what you're saying is true, you're describing the greatest fighter ever.
That was Roy Jones. Yeah.
At the moment he beat John Ruiz.

Had he never melted off 25 pounds of lean muscle to go back down to light heavy where he was never the same again. Well, and then he got cold cocked.
And that's why.

Guys are never the same after they get cold cocked. But like if you, he didn't melt off 25 pounds of fat.

He was all muscle. He melted off 25 pounds of lean muscle and was visibly not the same guy.
It wasn't just the Tarver knockout. He fought a guy, Glenn Koff Koff Johnson.

He got abused every round and knocked out.

Roy never lost a round. Even if you think, well, someone could have caught him.
He was up eight rounds to one, right? Like not that anyone did catch him.

If he would have stayed at heavyweight and fought, let's say, Holyfield and Tyson, and at that point in their careers, let's say he beats those two guys. He would have beaten Tyson, huh?

He would have beaten Tyson. Tyson had.
His off the off-the-ring stuff was insurmountable at that point.

If he did that, even forget Holyfield, just Tyson Tyson and retires, he would be considered hands down the greatest of all time. But that's not the way it happened.

Well, you're describing my Billy Corgan theory.

If Billy Corgan, they put out the melancholy double album, and then he's just like abducted by an alien and is never seen again.

We're talking about him reverentially as one of the five most important musicians we've had.

And Roy Jones, if he just, after the Ruiz fight, just is in Roswell and it gets zapped up and he's just gone and we don't know what happens. Him and Ray Robinson is what people would be talking about.

But Crawford is, Crawford is like, you know, there was Floyd Mayweather before Crawford. There'll be another guy after Crawford.
Once upon a time, there was Ray Robinson.

And everyone who lived through those eras will say, no, that guy. Crawford is this era.
That guy. You're not going to, you know, especially if he wins one or two more big fights and retires.

He's in the conversation. It goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning about the moments that could shift you one way or the other.

Like if Haguer just knocks out Leonard in 87 and retires,

his career is remembered, I think, completely differently. Instead, it's like people almost bring up the Hearns fight and that fight, and then him just disappearing and moving to Italy.

He was so mad he lost the Leonard decision, and it just completely changed how the career is discussed now for you. You want me to do two minutes on Hagler right now?

I mean, I could do two hours on him, but.

So Hagler.

is a hard-bitten

learning his craft by paying his dues guy. And Sugar Ray Leonard is the uber-talented Wunderkind who wins the Olympic gold medal.
The appointed Ali's successor by Howard Cook. He has seven-up ads.

He turns pro. He makes $50,000 in his pro debut.
Hagler's on the undercard. He makes whatever.
He makes 120th of that, whatever it is. And nobody would fight him for three years.

Nobody would fight Hagler. He had to go into the middleweight lion's den of Philadelphia.
All the black middleweights who were being avoided, the black murderers row,

Benny Briscoe, Bobby Boogaloo Watts, and

Eugene Cyclone Hart and all these guys. And he lost to them and then he rematched them and beat them.
And then he rubber matched some of them and knocked them out.

And when he emerged from that era, he was a killer, right? But he was, they fought for their first world titles on the same card, Leonard and Hagler. He got robbed by Vito.

Leonard got a million dollars to beat a great Wilfred Benitez by. 30 seconds left in the fight stops him in a close, tough fight.
Hagler beats Antifermo, gets a draw. Leonard gets the the title.

Hagler makes 40 grand. Leonard makes a million.
So this keeps going on. Finally, when he gets to fight Sugar Ray Leonard after Leonard made him 40,000.

So you left that fight and beats Minter for the title and it's basically a riot and they're throwing bottles.

I'm just editing details.

Nothing went right until the Hearns. Nothing went right.
And even Leonard has a press conference in the ring.

Hagler shows up inside because Hagler thinks he's going to announce he's coming back because he had the detached retina, Leonard, so he retired.

He's going going to announce he's coming back to fight me. And instead, Leonard announces his retirement.
Invites him. Invites him in rounds.

I actually, I had Ray on my podcast when I was at ESPN, and I think I asked him about that. So it was kind of like fucked up psychological warfare.

So he invites him to the thing, makes it seem like he's going to announce it. And Rem tells him no payday.
I'm sorry. It'll never happen.
And Hacker is like, what? Why am I? Sugar Ray Leonard had made

$11 million for fighting Roberto Duran, $13 million for fighting Tommy Hearns. Back when the highest paid team athlete in sports was Dave Winfield, $2 million a year.

Leonard's making five and six times as much in a night. Leonard's making 700K.

And Leonard's making 13 million. So Hagler sees this, sees it, and finally Leonard, when he gives him the shot, right? Hagler's the champ, but Leonard's giving him the payday.

He says, all right, I want a 12-round fight instead of a 15-round fight. And I want whatever it was, thumbless gloves or, you know, because of the retina.

But the main thing was the 12 instead of 15 rounds, because that was in an era where it could have been either one.

And Hagler agreed to it because Leonard said, instead of us each taking 14 million, you take 15, I'll take 13.

He knew how much that would mean to Hagler. He purchased those three rounds

where Leonard won the fight. I mean, Leonard won the first four rounds.
Everyone agrees. So now Hagler has the next eight.
And all Leonard has to do is win two and get a draw.

Hagler didn't win seven of the next eight. He won most of them, but not seven of them.
And so he ran out of rounds in the end.

I think I've argued about this fight with more people over my life than any other sporting event. Hagler-Leonard.
Yeah, because I think Leonard won.

And I thought Hagler was off his game the whole thing. He was off balance.

I just don't think he fought a good fight. More psychological warfare.
Leonard, the pretty boy, like Hagler, destruct and destroy for Tommy Hearns. He's going to go right through him.

Against Leonard, he wanted to show he could outbox him. He even talked about that a little as the fight approached.

So instead of coming out southpaw, and Leonard had a hard time, he comes out Orthodox, gives away four rounds, turns Paw in the fifth. Now it's a different fight.

But Leonard wins a couple of those rounds late and gets a decision. I talked to Hagler.
But it was, by the way, Duran did that to Leonard in the first fight. In the first fight, yeah.

In the Montreal fight, because he basically just challenged his manhood for four straight months. And then Leonard's like, I'm going to fight this guy.

That was what Klubberlang was based on in Rocky III, insulting the wife. That was all based on Duran.

But Duran, I always thought, was the reason Leonard came out and fought Hagler because after Duran fought Hagler and lost to him close, he told Sugar Ray after the fight, you get him, you'll beat him.

And I think that's why Leonard took away. Well, Leonard always said he never was going to fight Hagler until he saw the Mugabe fight and saw how much punishment just, and that fight's incredible.

That's like that. If I was going to do a starter kit for

boxing fans to learn about the 70s and 80s, I would like Hagler Mugabe would be on there. Great fight.
It's so good. I mean, the number one would be Foreman Lyle.

Just, I'm not going to tell you who wins. Just watch it.
I got one better for you than either one of those. Corrales Castillo.
Oh, yeah, that's a great one. Corrales Castillo one and Prior Argueo one.

Prior Arguello won't be incredible. It's also a good, that's a good legendary Knights.
I like the fact that you have

Leonard Hearns one here. It's my favorite fight.
It is. It's mine too.

And I think that was actually...

All things considered, the highest level of boxing we've ever seen. Like two impossibly great fighters, no excuses at their very best in a 15-round fight.
Tommy Hearns, well,

as close to unbeatable a fighter as you could possibly imagine. Sugar Ray Leonards somehow figured out a way to get it done in a fight he was losing.

Well, and the fight switched gears five times. Exactly.
Yeah.

I did that close circuit in the Boston Garden with my dad and

most of the people there rooted for Hearns, and I was fucking outraged. I was so mad because Ray was like my guy.

I remember before that fight reading in a magazine, Emmanuel Stewart, who's Tommy Hearns' trainer at the time, talking about

how Dundee was saying, Angela Dundee, Leonard's trainer, saying, this is how, why Leonard's going to win. And Emmanuel saying, this is why Tommy Hearns is going to win.

And I was a big Leonard fan as a kid, too. And

when I was done reading what Emmanuel said, I was so scared.

He said, it's going to feel like Sugar Ray Leonard is in a tank and it's just filling up with water. And I thought to myself, that's exactly what this is like.

I still can't believe he won i believe i i like herns we talked before we started taping i was saying how herns was like the

i think i might have written this somewhere at some point but he was the other team in the best sports movies that's great and he just like you kind of needed he just there was that he was a freak you were talking about mahomes before about i've never seen this before like we've never seen tommy before the six foot 147 guy who hit like a tractor who who could outbox you because he had a 78 inch reach and could box and could jab and is an amateur wasn't a puncher.

He was a boxer. Well, that was the frustrating thing about the Leonard fight.
It felt like he figured that out over the second part of the fight. Like, oh, I'll just box Ray

had hurt him in the body with that left hook. Yeah, like 50.

Then he finally, Leonard finally got him. But yeah, it's the roller coaster of that fight.

I'm happy that Tommy now, in retrospect, at the time, it was like, well, he lost to Leonard, then he lost to Hagler.

He's not, but I think as time time has passed, his position all time, like he's seen as other than like Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard, he's the greatest wealth weight ever, probably.

You know what's a great fight that is a great fight for a different reason than people think it's a great fight? Is Tyson Douglas? It's actually like a great fight.

Like, forget about the biggest upside of all time and all that stuff, and just how amazing that was.

How well Douglas boxed the fact that Tyson is like down and Douglas on that night is about as much as you would want from a heavyweight. Like he total package, right? Left, left, left.

He's got size, quick rights, he can throw uppercuts. 100%.
And he showed a lot of heart getting off the canvas and finishing the job. It should have been done.

He was always a talented guy. He just was never really motivated properly.
Well, we could talk boxing forever. So your podcast with Rich is starting next week.
You tell me.

It's starting next week. Great.
We're starting it next week. It's happening.
We're going to launch.

We're going to launch the feed later this week so people can subscribe.

And then you and Rich, a guy you've known for a long, long time, and you told me once upon a time about maybe three months ago like i was trying to get you to do something for a while with us and you're like well i'm down the road with this other thing and it turns out it's rich and i'm like rich is how is this going to work and then we all went to lunch and i got it within 10 minutes i knew that the thing about knowing you for a while and knowing rich for a while is that

If there was any issue, it was easily fixable. It was like, that's something that could happen.
Yeah, I mean, that part, I was more concerned, like, how is Rich going to

be a host on a podcast? Like, this guy is like one of the biggest power brokers in the NBA. Is he going to be forthcoming? But it's like, the bottom line is he's a huge sports fan.

He's like a one of us. He's going to have takes on everything.
And by the way, you guys have the chemistry. Is brutal with his own clients.

Like, in the sense that he will tell you, Rich will tell you what he thinks. And

he manages to do this thing, even when he was like a source for me, right?

When I was, when I was on ESPN and he he was an agent, he manages to do this thing where he's never positioning you in a way that's going to burn you. Like if Rich gave me information,

I never had to worry about, I'm going to get burnt by this because he's giving me this information to position me for his client, right?

Now, sometimes it was beneficial for his client, but it was the truth.

If Rich tells the Celtics, you could trade for AD, he's not going to re-sign here. He's not telling them that because it's not true.

Telling them that because it's true.

That's not the plan. and so so he's he's manages to be extremely straightforward and honest even when the honesty is highly critical even of people he works for and with

uh and also maintain good relationships because people know it's coming from the right place so we're gonna go it's gonna be three day three times a week in the middle podcast of the week probably a guest yeah at least for part of it we're gonna try to get some uh some some i mean turns out rich has a pretty decent rollodex of possible guests, but

there's a kind of bringing different people in to hang with you guys that I think is going to be a piece of this. It's funny.
One of the reasons that

we're with you is because I have done lots of stuff that has been repurposed as podcasts, right? Yeah. Marcellus and I, we did a radio show in LA that did great as a podcast nationally.

We were beating most of the national podcasts on ESPN as an LA podcast.

And we're by far like the biggest local podcast. And I've done TV shows that have been reperted.
I've never done a straight podcast. So like you're the guy for that, like 100%.
Thank you. But when

even things like, okay, we should do a guest on Wednesday, when we first started talking about that, it didn't fully occur to me when you have a guest on a podcast, that's the show that day.

Well, it could be most of it.

But it's not like a segment. It's not like the guy's going to be on there for five minutes.
Right. It's not PTI, a good five minutes.
True.

And even something like that, when you haven't been through it, I wasn't thinking that way. I was like, yeah, we could just do a guest on this day, on this day.

No, no, actually, when you have a guest come in and sit for your podcast, that's kind of the show that day.

Well, it's going to, so we're going to, it's going to be a video pod and it'll be part of the Netflix thing we're doing. And

yeah, I have high hopes for this one. I think it's going to be good.
I'm glad you're talking sports again. It's great to have you back.
I missed hearing your voice on things. Thank you.
Thanks.

That's that's really, you don't know how people feel about that. If you're gone, the world goes on.

And it was nice to hear like around the industry and from sports fans that that uh they were still thinking about me to the extent that they think about you know anyone in you know talking about the sports the only person who's bummed out is how steinbrenner

he's gonna be taking some hits i don't think he's i'm not as down on him as a lot of people he's just not rich enough yeah he's only worth like two billion what if right like if the if the guy who was supposed to run the yankees doesn't end up falling apart with the Steinbrenner's daughter.

Yeah. That guy, what was that guy's name?

uh whatever that guy's name was he was supposed to run the yankees and he actually would have been good at it and then how didn't really want to run them and kind of progrudging

working out and yeah hank wasn't happening but i i my suggestion would be sell the team

or how about sell it sell 30 of it and bank some of the money so you don't have to be cheap anymore right other what's the relative of the yankees i don't know it's probably like a 11 billion

10 billion 30 is 10 billion you think oh i'm sorry so see i don't need i don't need Hal Steinbrenner to be worth 5 billion. I need the next owner of the Yankees worth 20 billion.

Well, maybe you do like what the Lakers did, where you sell a piece and then five years later, that person. That's something like that.
That's what you do. All right, Max, good to see you.

I look forward to your pod. Thanks.

All right. That's it for the podcast.
Thanks so much to Max. Thanks to Gahal and Eduardo as well.
Don't forget new rewatchables, Rocky 2. It is up.

Don't forget about the Jeff Buckley documentary we have as part of our music box series on HBO. That's going to be Thursday night.

I'm going to be back with this podcast on Thursday, putting up late because I think this Lions Cowboys game is a big one. So, House and I might do our football side

before

or after that Lions Cowboys game. And then we have a big guest.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but it seems like John Cena is going to be on. So that's going to be Thursday's pod.
I will see you then.

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