Clippers Controversy Continues With Legal Expert Michael McCann, Hall of Fame Thoughts With Howard Beck, and 'Simpsons' Appreciation With Alan Siegel

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Coming up on a new Zach Lowe show, it's Monday morning.

We got a lot to talk about.

Kawhi Leonard, what's going to happen at the Board of Governors this week?

What do we think of Steve Ballmer's interview with Ramona Schelper?

Did that help or hurt the Clippers?

I mentioned last week that I'm not a lawyer.

Guess what?

We got a lawyer to come on our show today, and it's the sports lawyer.

Michael McCann's going to go through what might happen with Kawhi Leonard, if anything.

Then Howard Beck, what up, Beck, is going to join for some reflections on the key NBA members of this new Hall of Fame class, Dwight Howard and Carmelo Anthony, and the Redeemed team.

I went back and watched the gold medal game against Spain in 2008.

Whew, that was a nail biter.

That was fun.

And then a special guest, the Ringers, Alan Siegel.

We're going to take a little detour away from basketball into pop culture.

My all-time favorite television show.

Alan Siegel wrote a book all about it, full of wonderful anecdotes.

It got me down a deep, deep rabbit hole of laughing very hard at YouTube clips about the peak era of The Simpsons, the greatest creation of American pop culture ever.

We're going to have some fun with that, all coming up after this on a loaded Zack Low Show.

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Welcome to the Zach Lowe Show.

It's Monday morning.

I mentioned last week regarding the Kawhi Leonard situation that I am not a lawyer.

So I went out and I found a lawyer and I found the sports lawyer, Michael McCann.

He's a legal analyst for Sportico.

He's a professor at University of New Hampshire Law School and a visiting professor at Harvard.

Heard of it?

Michael McCann, how are you?

I'm doing great, Zach.

It's great to see you.

It's good to see you too.

It's been a long time.

We go back a long way to like the original days of the Sloan Nerd Conference, which is turning 20th this year.

Did you realize this is the 20th Sloan?

No.

I mean, we were there at the beginning, right?

With Daryl Morey.

This is when it was small.

And

I can't believe the impact that it's had on the industry is pretty incredible.

And to have seen it over that time,

20 years, man, that's a long time.

All right.

So, Kawhi, we're all familiar with the beats of the story by this point, starting with Pablo Torre finds out and this no-show endorsement deal that Kawhi had with a scam company called Aspiration that Steve Ballmer was an investor in, $50 million, which to Steve Ballmer is, you know, like a dime to the two of us, sadly enough for us.

And, of course, Aspiration also was like a founding $300 million plus sponsor of the Clippers.

I talked about it with Kurt Goldsbury on Thursday.

It was kind of my first run at it.

And

here's what we knew then, and I think what we know now after being on the phone about this over the weekend.

And you wrote about it over the weekend, I think, for Sportico, if anyone wants to see the legal analysis there.

Thing number one that I feel like I know, the concern

dovetailing into anger.

from other teams in other corners of the league it is not going to go away.

And I just continue to hear from people who are...

Now, now, you know this is a competitive league right so anytime one of the other 29 teams smells blood they're gonna pounce and say they gotta hammer that team hammer that team but my phone just it's the text the calls just keep coming in from people saying well this can't be a coincidence they've got to punish them for this and this and that people who may may not have actually listened to the podcast who certainly haven't gone back and read the cba in a lot of cases but the anger is is there and i i don't know like I didn't think Steve Ballmer's interview with Ramona Shelburne was like particularly persuasive in any way.

I shouldn't say persuasive.

I don't think it was helpful.

I don't quite understand why he did it other than the general idea, which I've heard in some corners of, well, if he's going to be this bold to get out in front of this before the board of governors meets this week in New York and everybody yells at him about this, well, he wouldn't do that if he thought there was any chance in hell that he or the team would be found guilty of doing any of this illegal cap circumvention stuff.

I guess.

I thought like it was always going to be perceived as like a home court interview with Ramona because Ramona is so tied to L.A.

And I just didn't think it moved the needle at all.

It was the exact defense that you expected, that I expected, which was just plausible deniability.

If there was something that went on, I didn't know about it.

The Clippers didn't know about it.

We're good.

We'll let the league investigate.

Did anything in that interview surprise you?

No.

I mean, and I think, like you said, his tactic was to get ahead of it because if he pauses and doesn't do an interview, it looks like he's strategizing with his lawyers.

And that, I think, in the public specter would lead people to infer guilt, right?

If it looks like he's being deliberative and cautious with his wording, that probably undermines the public relations component of it.

But as you said, there was nothing in there that's going to really change the fact pattern.

The fact pattern is there's this suspicious contract and the onus is on the Clippers.

And I, you know, I think this is a situation where maybe he had nothing to do with any of this, but that doesn't mean no one at the Clippers did.

And I think that's going to be a sort of an interesting feature is that Ballmer is the face of the Clippers, but there's all sorts of people that work there, as we know.

And to the extent there's any improper actions by people below him, and maybe he didn't know about it, who knows?

That's not going to matter to the NBA.

If there, in fact, was salary cap circumvention, even if Ballmer himself can credibly say he had nothing to do with it, that doesn't clear the team.

And that doesn't prevent the team from being punished in a way that involves forfeiture of draft picks and other sanctions.

So, I mean, he certainly is going to make the case that he had nothing to do with it.

And he may be right.

And it may not make sense to him that he would be sort of scheming in the manner in which we've been led to believe.

But that doesn't necessarily clear the team.

And I think that's going to be an interesting feature.

We'll get there.

The other thing I said on Friday that I was sure of at that moment, and we'll see, over the weekend, weekend, the Athletic first reported that the league has retained a massive law firm, Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz, which is one of the

white shoe law firms.

Does anyone wear white shoes anymore?

Is that even a thing?

I've never owned a pair of white shoes that are not serious

to investigate this.

And people around the league owners, other people I've thought to over the weekend are like, this is now going to be a months-long process.

This is not going to be something that's going to be resolved in a week or two.

I assume that's the case.

They're going to pour over everything.

Because the one thing I said at the end of yesterday's podcast, I said, I find all scenarios at this moment, I find all scenarios plausible to some degree.

I find the most nefarious scenario potentially plausible.

I find the least nefarious scenario where this is literally Uncle Dennis and a bunch of con artists at a phony company all getting together for a phony deal.

Clippers had nothing to do with it.

I find that plausible.

And I said, there's a chance we're going to get to the end of this investigation.

And we're going to end up in this very gray area where

there's this trail of just strange, you could call it circumstantial evidence.

I don't actually know the technical definition of circumstantial evidence, but a strange series of

deals, non-deals, whatever, that ends in this strange contract.

And the only thing strange about it, I think, is the amount of money and the lack of work.

The fact that it's with a Clippers sponsor is not unusual.

The fact that it has an out clause, if Kawhi is not on the Clippers, is not super unusual either.

But the amount and the lack of work is unusual.

So we we could end up in a gray area where all of that remains as shady looking in six months as it is today.

And yet, part two of the gray area is there is nothing uncovered that directly links that contract to anybody with the Clippers.

And that's the scenario I'm most interested in because that is a gray area that's very tough for the league.

This strange thing happened.

It clearly

has tentacles that reach in different places, but we can't directly link it to not only Steve Ballmer, but anyone with the Clippers.

But it's still something that the rest of the teams are angry about.

It's still an appearance that we don't like and is just not good for us.

What do we do there?

And I said on Friday, you know, there's this one extreme cut type of punishment, Joe Smith being the classic example, where you rip away first-round picks and you fine people and you suspend people.

And then there's nothing on the other end where it's, or just like a little slap on the wrist fine, or a second-round pick and a slap on the wrist fine.

And there's a big area between those things.

I don't, if that's where we end up, I don't know what the answer is for the league.

And if you asked me today, what's the most likely concluding point, I think it would be that, but we're going to, we're going to see.

We're going to have to wait and see now.

The tricky thing for other teams is that while their instinct may be this is bad, the Clippers have, you know, sort of

turned the rules on their head to get and keep Leonard, the reality is the other teams have to be careful because to the extent teams have a duty to police endorsement deals of players, it presents all sorts of conflicts of interest, including whether or not teams should even be in that space, right?

If there's a duty on the part of the Clippers to screen sponsorship deals, endorsement deals between players and sponsors, that's not contemplated by the CBA.

There's no NBA rule on that.

It's sort of making up a new policy, which actually could be bad for teams.

And not only that, I could see the players union saying, wait a second, you don't have a right to be policing endorsement deals.

This is a deal between the sponsor and an athlete.

The fact that the sponsor has some sort of business relationship with the owner of the team, that doesn't allow the team oversight or veto power on endorsement deals.

So this gets into a tricky space that I actually

I think the league will be cautious with this.

And honestly, other teams, they may be rooting for punishment.

They better be careful what they root for because they may suddenly get a new policy that changes how they interact with sponsors.

Let's step back for a second.

You mentioned the degrees of like knowledge that could have been, or

in theory, we don't know anything.

We're going to find out everything through the investigation.

Let's just, you cannot posit that enough.

All we know right now is what we know.

In the investigation, they're going to get documents, they're going to get, who knows what they're going to get.

But there's like, there's like 3.5 different scenarios here, right?

Scenario number one, worst to case scenario for the Clippers.

Ballmer knew about this either at its inception or at some point,

either directed it, knew about it, or learned about it and didn't do anything about it until he got caught.

That's like worst case scenario, worst possible punishment.

Scenario number two is there's like a rogue Clippers employee somewhere who did this without Ballmer's knowledge, without Lawrence Frank's knowledge, without the Basque Operations Department's knowledge.

You said that's also bad for the team.

They could be punished for that.

I agree, but I do think that's a secondary level of punishment.

That's not nearly as bad as like the top guys knew about it.

And scenario number three, Uncle Dennis and some scammers just did a deal on their own.

Nobody at the Clippers knew anything about it.

And that's the scenario that Mark Cuban drilled down on in his appearance with Pablo Torre on a follow-up of Pablo Torre finds out because Cuban has been defending Ballmer from the beginning.

And I thought if people want to watch that, they should watch that.

I thought that was a really interesting conversation slash argument and i thought mark cuban asked exactly the right questions in that

pablo got a little there it got a little testy because i think mark was asking the right questions because mark's drilling down in do we really think the clippers knew about this do we really think ballmer knew about this and pablo keeps bringing up well i have seven sources within the organization One of whom agreed to come on the podcast, the original one, with voice modulation and facial disguise and all of that.

But backed up, according to Pablo, by six other people, anonymous people with an aspiration, that say they were told that this was for CAP circumvention purposes, this endorsement deal with Kawhi Leonard.

And when I listened to the first podcast, I had the same questions that Mark Cuban had in the follow-up.

And I think it's very important for people to go watch it and listen to it because his question was simple.

Who are those seven people?

Right.

Who are they?

We don't know who they are.

Number two, how did they know it was CAP circumvention?

Well, somebody somebody told them who told them did that person know it was cap circumvention was that person just repeating a bad rumor was that person guessing was that person uncle dennis i think those are the exact right questions because it sounds powerful and maybe it is that seven people say the words cap circumvention but mark is is is drilling down on the exact right questions the exact questions the league is going to try to answer And I know you watched that.

What did you think of that sort of back and forth?

Because that's, it doesn't really,

it matters that these people say the words cap circumvention but without knowing how they learned that term who told them that term who told them this was this what this contract was for like i don't know quite what to make of that and mark is right to drill down on that yeah the nba is not going to rely on that let's let's be honest i mean the idea that there are seven anonymous people as you said and as mark said the source of that could be the same person who himself or herself is not authoritative, is not credible.

We don't know.

Maybe this person has been fired and they're spreading a rumor to do damage and they spread it around and it's like wildfire.

We don't know.

And the reality is, is there any corroborating evidence?

Is there a text message?

Is there an email?

Is there a social media message?

Is there anything?

If it's only seven anonymous people, you could find seven anonymous people to say anything.

So I don't, that's not, I mean, it's certainly.

interesting and if there's something there there's something there but we don't know i i totally agree with with Mark Cuban.

And

if I'm the NBA, I need more than that.

I need, will any of these people cooperate?

Here's the other thing.

They're not under any obligation.

First of all, if we can identify who these people are, they're not under any obligation to cooperate with the NBA or the NBA's legal counsel.

And to the extent they want something in return, that creates the problem of they're doing this on a transactional basis.

And they're not reliable sources.

I just thought to boil it down, the most interesting debate within a debate that they had was, I'm paraphrasing it, but Mark Cuban asked Pablo Torrey a question: who do you think is the fulcrum of all of this?

And Pablo responded, well, Steve Balmer's the fulcrum.

And Mark said, no, no, no, no, no, you're wrong.

Uncle Dennis is the fulcrum.

And I think if it boils down to anything, that's kind of what it boils down to.

And the Uncle Dennis stories are like a legion.

You know, he's asking for equity stakes and hockey teams and planes and mansions and all this.

And I'll say this again, like the use of a plane, the occasional use of a a vacation house, a team paying for hotel rooms for agents of people representing their players during a playoff series.

Like all of that is kind of like, okay, like we're going to let that go.

This is something different, but Uncle Dennis has asked for something different many times before.

Can I read you a clause in the CBA that I found very interesting as a layperson?

You got it.

Article 13 of the CBA is the one that talks about circumvention.

Section 2 is the one that talks about what cap circumvention is.

And it's basically like you find ways to pay players more than you're allowed to pay them.

This is the clause that I zeroed in on when I looked at this.

And others who want the league to really dig in on this and make sure that there's no grounds for punishing the Clippers here will also dig in on.

And I want you, and we're going to put it up on YouTube.

I think it's like Section 2, Clause D, blah, blah, blah.

And it reads: A violation of Section 2A or 2B, the circumvention clauses, a violation of section 2A or 2B above may be proven by direct or circumstantial evidence, including, but not limited to, evidence that a player contract or any term or provision thereof cannot rationally be explained in the absence of a legal contact.

Now, Kawhi's contracts, I said this on Friday, none of Kawhi's contracts with the Clippers.

were ever suspicious to me.

I didn't care about the four-year thing.

I don't care that he didn't sign for the full max the last time.

He's been injured.

He's been unavailable.

He wanted to be in LA.

The whole league knew he wanted to be in LA when he left for LA.

None of his contracts have ever been suspicious to me.

So scratch that.

Scratch anything related to the contract being suspicious.

A player.

A violation may be proven by direct or circumstantial evidence, including, but not limited to.

That not limited to, to me, suggests it's not limited to, but I'm a lay person, that I can look at things other than the player contract.

Now, I don't know what the combination of not limited to and circumstantial evidence actually means.

Can you help me understand that?

What is that saying that investigators can look at?

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things there.

One is that the role of circumstantial evidence is evidence that doesn't directly prove an assertion, but one can use it to reach a conclusion.

that's consistent with the assertion itself.

So the idea is that we think he did it.

This evidence, maybe the endorsement deal, if he didn't perform any services and wasn't required to, we can rely on that as circumstantial evidence of salary cap circumvention.

But what this does is it really is like a burden shifting mechanism.

It puts the burden on the clippers to say, okay, we have this suspicious thing.

Explain it.

Tell us, make sense of this in a way.

that doesn't lead us to believe that you circumvented the salary cap.

So this is kind of like a guilt,

you know, you're guilty until you prove you're innocent type of mechanism.

It doesn't mean that the Clippers will be found guilty, but it gives the NBA a lot of latitude, a lot of discretion in assessing all sorts of things, including, you know, Pablo's podcast.

I mean, there's all sorts of sources of evidence that could be used to draw inferences, but at the same time, it tells the Clippers, look, there's this suspicious thing.

We don't think Leonard did anything.

He got all this money.

Explain it to us.

Doesn't mean you did anything wrong.

Maybe it's Uncle Dennis, but explain it to us.

So it puts the onus on the Clippers to provide, for instance, evidence, to provide a timeline, to provide text messages, to provide any sort of written narratives that the team has.

It puts the onus on the Clippers to provide maybe testimony, maybe from officials at the team.

It basically creates a workload issue for the Clippers that they're going to have to prove themselves innocent.

Yeah, that's one of the interesting things about, you know, I read a text message on Friday from a GM telling me, like, you know, what I'm hearing from my peers around the league is

this is enough that the Clippers kind of have to prove to us that nothing nefarious happened here, which is not how the legal system is really supposed to work.

It's supposed to be the other way around.

So this is like a gray area.

The other clause that I told you I wanted to dig in on is just above that in the circumvention thing.

And it's a little longer.

We're going to put it on YouTube if you want to read it, but I'll read it to you and you can tell me what you think of it.

Yeah, get that coffee going.

it shall constitute a violation of circumvention for a team or a team affiliate to enter into an agreement or understanding with any sponsor or business partner or third party under which such

sponsor pays or agrees to pay compensation for basketball services, even if such compensation is ostensibly designated as being non-basketball services, to a player under contract for a team.

That I think

doesn't come into play yet because that seems to me to be saying

a team or a team affiliate has to come, has to sort of direct disagreement with a sponsor to pay money to Kawhi Leonard.

There's no evidence that that has happened.

Obviously, that's what the league is looking for.

Let's go next part of the clause.

Such an agreement with a sponsor may be inferred.

That's a legal, that has a legal definition, I assume, inferred.

I know what it means in English, but you're going to tell me what it means.

in legalese.

Such an agreement with a sponsor may be inferred where such

from the sponsor is substantially in excess of the fair market value of any services to be rendered by the player for such sponsor.

So

in English to me, that means such an agreement, i.e.

an agreement that could run afoul of circumvention rules, may be inferred, implied, assumed is what that means to me in English.

If the dude is getting more money than he should get by any reasonable measure,

That appears to, that little clause there appears to hang out and suggest to me, like, it doesn't matter if we can prove that the team directed it or orchestrated it or even knew about it.

We can still infer something from just that little piece of evidence.

Am I reading that right or wrong?

Because

you could stretch that far if you want, but maybe inappropriately far.

I don't know.

No, I think your read is correct.

I mean, I think a couple of things.

One is that the Clippers will say, we're not the sponsor, right?

The sponsor is not a good idea.

To be clear, no one thinks they are.

And they're not aspiration is aspiration.

The Clippers are the Clippers.

Kawhi's contract is over here, and that is separate from Kawhi's deal with aspiration.

These are separate things.

I still think there has to be some linkage between the Clippers and Aspiration for it to be salary cap circuit.

But if it's just a sponsor that decides it wants to pay a player X amount of money to do nothing, which is what maybe this was.

I don't know, but maybe it wasn't.

Do we know if Kawhi Leonard requested to do any services?

Do we know if the company's financial woes made it so that they weren't interested in having sponsors do work?

I mean, there are all sorts of variables that we don't know.

I don't think the sponsor or a third party providing money to an athlete with no connection to the team whatsoever would be salary cap circumvention because there has to be some linkage to the team that this is part of some plot.

If it's just pay somebody a gift, I mean, that's a tax issue.

There's all sorts of legal ramifications to that.

But that to me, that strikes me as outside the scope of the team.

Is there any part of the CBA or the Constitution,

any other legal or rules-related issue that we are overlooking here that I haven't mentioned that you've been hearing about or digging into?

Is there anything that we're missing?

I mean, there are general conduct provisions both in the CBA and in the League Constitution.

I don't think they're at play yet because we have a specific provision that's more relevant here,

the circumvention of the salary cap.

There are obligations on the part, as we know from Steve Ballmer's predecessor, Donald Sterling, there are obligations on the part of owners to meet the business standards of the league, including in their contractual work.

Again, I feel like it's premature to go there, but that's another source of law that could apply if they think Ballmer did something nefarious.

Explain that.

What is that source of law?

I didn't understand it.

Sure.

So Articles 13 and 14 of the League Constitution go into ownership obligations, including not pursuing business agreements that stake a position that's adverse to the league.

And here,

if in fact there is some contract between the Clippers and the sponsor to circumvent the cap,

one could interpret that language to say, well, that's a business agreement that's taking a position adverse to the league.

I don't think we're there yet.

I feel like

that's a bit of a, you know, if this was a law school exam, this would be a student who wrote that I would say, you know, stick to the more relevant provisions.

All right.

So what, so what happens now?

What, what can Wachtel, this law firm, actually get from the Clippers?

What are they obligated to get?

What is this process like?

They can get a lot from the Clippers.

The Clippers have an obligation to cooperate, including everyone who works there, including Steve Ballmer.

So in terms of demanding emails, texts, narratives, they'll probably demand some sort of timeline that the team will have to fill out and provide a context as to

not only this sponsor, but all of its sponsors.

Because they want to figure out, is this particular contractual relationship different?

Obviously, Steve Ballmer invests in all sorts of things, I'm going to guess.

And I think as a broader point, the fact that we now have private equity buying into leagues and teams, this is sort of an interesting twist to it, right?

Because you have all these owners of teams now through private equity that, you know, they have business relationships that could potentially create complications in terms of player endorsement deals.

So, my guess is that Wachtel will say, look, you've got to provide a timeline and you have to meet with us.

You're going to have to meet with us in person.

We're going to ask you all sorts of questions,

including about conversations with Kawhi Leonard, his representatives, Uncle Dennis,

everyone, just to ensure that you were in the clear.

And also, were you on notice?

Did you have any, let's say the Clippers say, we weren't involved with this.

That's one thing.

But if

they were given a hint to say, hey, look, you know, this deal is a little weird that Kwai Leonard has.

Did you bother to look into it?

It could turn out that the league says, okay, this is not salary cap circumvention, but it's some form of negligence that the team didn't do its due diligence.

This goes back to your point of finding them and taking away a second round pick.

This would be consistent with that, that

they didn't do a good enough job.

To me, that's really interesting because if I were another team, I would say, let's be careful here because we don't want to be policing our sponsors and what they do with players because that creates this due diligence obligation that we don't currently have.

Do we have to, we also don't, for privacy matters, we can't review an endorsement deal.

between a third party and a player.

We don't have the legal capacity to do that.

If you want us to do that, that's one thing.

I could see the union pushing back saying, well, wait a second, you don't want to suppress players' opportunities for signing endorsement deals.

It gets into a tricky space that that

I think could be interesting to look at.

I'm going to do something foolish now.

Can I do?

I'm going to do something very foolish.

I'm going to predict what's going to happen.

Okay.

And I'm going to do this knowing that it's stupid because we don't know what this investigation could find.

Anything ranging from nothing to everything.

It could find anything you want to think think about finding, it could find.

Here's what I would predict.

I'm going to predict it finds no smoking gun, no email, no text, no nothing from anyone at the Clippers, from Ballmer on down to the equipment manager, saying,

do this for this cap circumvention purposes.

And if that is, in fact, what they don't find or what they find/slash don't find,

I'm going to predict that still,

because of the diligence and just appearance issues that you're talking about that they get a slap on the wrist like a second round pick and a million dollar fine or something like that my next prediction after that my second most likely scenario would be they find nothing and there's no punishment at all but i think that there'll be that this is just me blindly as a stupid lay person guessing if they find something or if they find something If they find a smoking gun, forget about it.

If they find just anything that resembles that, there'll be, I think, something bigger than what I'm suggesting in terms of a punishment.

I don't see a Joe Smith scenario.

This would just be my blind, what is it, September 8th, beginning of a long investigation prediction.

I bet they don't find a smoking gun because I just don't think anyone would be that dumb.

And I do find the Uncle Dennis theory like somewhat like pretty plausible.

But I still think the league, because of the reaction, because of what the depth of specifics that Pablo has uncovered, I think that there would be some sort of slap on the wrist.

What do you think of my prediction?

How stupid am I?

No, I think that's a very reasonable prediction.

I might, I might, right now, my instinct is sort of on the nothing side as, I mean, again, I could be wrong.

I just feel like we need to know a lot more before we even get to any sort of punishment.

And I also think teams might be rooting for something now.

They really should think through

what a penalty is.

for a team not policing a sponsor's work with the player.

I feel like that, to me, that's a problematic area.

And, you know, the league is run by lawyers, right?

This is a league that's run by really sophisticated attorneys who have been at

elite law firms and the white shoe, right?

They've worn the white shoes.

I think the union will start to weigh in that this gets into an area of to the extent players' endorsement deals could be constrained by some sort of due diligence requirement.

If I were the union, I would be thinking about that.

This reminds me of the NCAA stuff with NIL and collectives.

You know, the idea that they should be able to sign, college athletes should be able to sign deals that pay them.

I mean, it gets into a similar turf, but I think you're right that right now, unless there's some smoking gun, this looks like either nothing or, you know, the second round pick, you were negligent.

You should have done more or you were on notice.

I mean, here's the thing.

Maybe they were on notice that there was something nefarious and they opted not to look into it.

They're going to say, well, we don't have the right to do that.

We can't get into conversations between players and their endorsers.

But the league could say this was more suspicious.

There's a weirdness to how Kwai Leonard joined the Clippers, his uncle.

I mean, there's been all sorts of like red flags in this.

And maybe there's some sort of punishment called for.

But it would be, like you said, you know, the second round pick type of sanction.

This is not Joe Smith.

I mean, I think that's really clear.

This is not Joe Smith.

Joe Smith was, obviously, as we know,

it was on paper.

It was on paper.

It was on paper.

And it was like, you know, pay him less to pay him more later.

I mean, that was the team as the payer.

This is not them at all.

But I do think, to your point, just the long history of murmurs, and not even murmurs.

They like murmured, it was murmured out in public in 2019 about Kawhi.

And just, again, the depth of how ridiculous this whole thing looks that Pablo has uncovered, this ridiculous scam company, this ridiculous contract, this strange player who never says anything.

I just think the anger from other teams, despite the concerns you're outlining about, like, oh, this could get turned around on us somehow in a way we don't anticipate, I just don't think that's going to go away with time.

And

forget it if something is actually found linking the Clippers.

That's a whole different ballgame.

We should be clear about that.

But I just think the anger is not going to go away.

And I guess we'll just have to see sort of what

the investigation finds.

Because again, it could find nothing.

But I just think, I guess what I like,

this could become a huge deal.

It could be something that we look back on and say, well, it was interesting, but it didn't really lead anywhere.

But

it's certainly interesting, right?

I mean, like, it's, it's, and it doesn't, just the optics of the deal, the sponsorship deal itself are so bad and strange that it's, it's something.

And I guess now we just wait, right?

Yeah, it's totally weird.

I mean, why would a sponsor, if this is all reported correctly, why would it pay all this money for nothing?

That is not what sponsors do, right?

You're signing Kawhi Leonard.

He's a public figure.

He's for your brand.

If you're paying him nothing and the expectation is that it's nothing, that is really problematic.

Doesn't mean the Clippers did anything wrong, but it sure looks like there's something,

it's irrational behavior.

And it makes me think.

that maybe this is the the uncle's uh i mean we don't know right but there's something odd about that now maybe the company is going to say, we didn't, you know, we were running out of money.

We couldn't ask them to do stuff, and we were worried about these other problems.

But it certainly is not a scenario that

it is interesting.

I'll go to your point.

It's an interesting, odd scenario that warrants attention.

Well, the Clippers have already been indirectly punished by having to deal with Kawhi Leonard's health issues for six years and winning three playoff series in six years and watching the Thunderwin the Championship this year.

But it's going to be fun.

I have a feeling I will be leaning on your expertise again.

Thank you for educating me on these circumstantial evidence provisions in the CBA that are interesting, maybe applicable, maybe not.

All I know is what we don't know today outweighs what we know, and we will just have to wait and see.

Michael McCann go back to teaching the young minds of America, the next generation of lawyers.

We need them.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Zach.

Appreciate it.

Great seeing you.

Let's do it again.

This episode is brought to you by Samsung.

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All right, shifting gears.

Hall of Fame weekend.

Some interesting NBA personalities and legacies inducted into the Hall of Fame along with the great Sue Bird, Adrian Wojnarowski, Billy Donovan, others.

What up, Beck?

What up, Zach?

All right, sir.

Welcome back from Croatia.

Your vacation photos looked spectacular, as always.

I remain jealous, and Croatia remains on my

bucket list of vacation destinations.

Eventually, I'll get there.

Everyone comes.

Everyone comes eventually.

Okay.

You know what I did not see?

You know what I did not see, but I was waiting to see?

Somewhere in that photo roll that you and your wife post?

I did not see the foofy, like, green drink that you claim not to drink, but there was one that she did send to me once because you had clowned me for drinking foofy drinks during a drunk with power pod.

I'm not going to comment on any of this.

I'm not.

I'm certainly not going to tell the story of when Charles Barkley made fun of me for like six consecutive minutes at a bar in in Denver using language that can't be repeated here for my drink orders.

So I'm not going to comment on that.

It's my podcast.

You can get the hell out of here.

Fair.

Two guys were inducted into the hall that I think are always fun to talk about because of what they were and what they weren't.

And we'll start with Dwight Howard, who

got into the Hall of Fame, first ballot, first attempt.

And

I was a voter for the top 75 all-time thing that the NBA did on its 75th anniversary.

Were you?

I was, yes.

Dwight Howard was a no-brainer on my list for top 75.

I was kind of aghast that he didn't make it.

Was he on your ballot or not?

He was not.

You can be aghast at me.

I'm aghast at you.

How did he not make it?

Not the first time.

It's been, what, five years or more, four years, whatever it's been.

It's hard for me to remember how I was doing all the cutoffs.

I don't...

I try not to have any regrets over these things.

The one regret I think I have is that I did not spend more time trying to determine whether, how much deference to give to the original 50 from the 50th anniversary team.

And I think there was a, a, just a, uh, a bottleneck of modern day players that were trying to squeeze on for those last 25 spots if you defer to those 50.

I did eliminate one member of the original 50, which was Lenny Wilkins, but I was not comfortable.

crossing out more of them.

And

it speaks to how difficult the whole task was, Zach.

And the thing with Dwight was he was in a category for me with some other guys

who were like the multiple-time defensive player of the year types, who were like mostly defense, not offensively minded players, but who obviously made a huge imprint on the league

as defenders, as defensive anchors, as elite defenders, all-timers.

So, like DeKembe and Ben Wallace and Dwight, and there was this whole category.

And

I was trying to figure out, I said, like, some of them are all of them.

And how do I distinguish even between them?

And you're weighing them against like all these offensive offensive freaking dynamos.

It was hard, is what I'm saying.

Also, and we'll get to this.

Dwight has a complicated legacy.

Not saying he doesn't belong in the hall, not saying he didn't belong on the 75th anniversary team.

Even if he didn't make my ballot, I wouldn't have had a problem with it if he made it.

Just saying

both the guys we're going to discuss have complicated legacies, which is why they're fun to talk about because it's not that clear-cut in some ways.

Not only did he make my top 75 roster, I was not an MVP voter back when I was writing for a now-defunct Sports Illustrated blog in 2011.

He would have gotten my MVP vote in 2011 over Derek Rose, who won it, and over LeBron James, who was sort of the analytical darling choice.

I wrote a comment about it then that I would have picked Dwight Howard for MVP in that year.

He was in the middle at that point of five straight first-team all-NBA appearances at center.

He made eight all-NBA teams in all.

He's a three-time defensive player of the year.

And I saw over the weekend, so I'm like, well, you know, that was when the East was cruddy.

The East has always been cruddy.

And B, that was when like the center position was dead.

It was so easy to make all NBA teams.

No, it's not true because I went through: here's, here are the second team and third team big men.

It's not like there's no Jokic, there's no Embiid who, if he's healthy.

Here are the second and third team all NBA big men.

And I don't know what the hell we were doing as voters with positions here, as you'll see, in the five straight years that Dwight Howard was the first team all NBA center.

2008, second team.

On the second team, somehow were all three of Tim Duncan, Amari Stademeier, and Dirk Nowitzki.

All three on the second team.

Not all of them are centers.

All three of them are big men.

On the third team, Chris Bosch and Yao.

That's like not bad.

2009, second team.

Yao, Tim Duncan.

Third team, Pau Gasol, and Shaq.

Shaq's getting old.

I get it.

He's still Shaq.

2010, second team, Dirk and Amari.

Third team, Tim Duncan.

Andrew Bogad hit his best year ever before he got injured.

And Pow Gasol.

Pow Gasol, pretty good NBA champion, et cetera, that year.

2011, second team, Amare, Dirk, and Powell, all on the second team somehow.

Third team, Lamarcus Aldridge, Al Horford, Zach Randolph, somehow all on the third team.

2012, second team, Andrew Bynum, Blake Griffin, Kevin Love, all on the second team.

Third team, Tyson Chandler, and Dirk Nowitzki.

It's not like the DeAndre Jordan charity era and all of that.

Like, there's some good players players on there.

Two quick things.

One, I'm going to

excuse myself from any blame or credit or anything for any of that.

And also, because I was during the years I was at the New York Times from 2004 to 2013,

I was prohibited from voting by Times rules.

So I take no responsibility for any of what you just went through, including the MVP.

Small forward, Zach Randolph, making it the 13-hour MPA.

Like, how did that happen?

Real quick, when did the league switch to the front court, front court instead of with a center?

No, I don't think that was ever a thing for all NBA because

they went straight positionless now.

They were straight positionless now the last couple years, but back then, I'm pretty sure it was still two guards, two forwards, and a center.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

So a center had

so Dwight's not, it's not Dwight versus Amari.

I mean, Amari eventually became a center.

It's not Dwight versus

like depending on how

the league defined people's positions at that time, was Duncan eligible at both center and power forward?

Probably, especially later in his career.

Powell was probably eligible at both.

But it left voters with the decision on

who to put at the forward spots and who to put as the quote-unquote true center.

So I think there was some ambiguity.

My only point is

you're not, no one is going to be able to diminish Dwight Howard's career and first team all-NBA run by saying it was a bunch of clowns behind him on second and third.

But we were long past.

So the interesting thing with both Carmelo and Dwight, both of whom we'll discuss,

they are part perceptions of them and arguments about them, and I am participating in that argument to an extent by pushing back on you, is that they were caught between eras in various ways.

In Dwight's case, the caught between eras part is that

he arrives when Shaq is, you know, he's he's drafted in 2004.

Shaq has just taken the Lakers along with Kobe to their fourth finals in five years.

Shaq is still an incredible force.

We have gone through this whole era, this really a golden era of centers with Shaq and Ewing and Morning and Rick Smitz and

Akeem Alaji.

Ajahn Robinson.

I get all of this.

I get it.

Yeah, you get it.

I want listeners to understand Dwight comes along at a time when centers, it was not just this preeminent position and a really important one.

They were offensive hubs.

And this then goes to the Shaq clowning Dwight all these years, right?

Shaq wanted, and I think a lot of fans wanted, and people around the NBA times wanted, Dwight to be more of an offensive force and a hub the way that Shaq and Morning and Robinson and Ewing and Akeem all were.

That he was an elite defender

and almost single-handedly made the magic relevant for all that time

is a huge accomplishment on its own.

But he did not fit the archetype that we had become used to.

So when people

take shots at him or wonder if he could have done more, I get it.

I get why the criticism existed.

I'm not saying it was all

justified.

And I certainly Shaq

went overboard in all this, but I get it.

If you look at Dwight's, like, just look at the offense, right?

Like his all-time rankings.

He's 10th in rebounds all time, 13th in blocks all time.

That says enough right there about the impact he made.

And obviously he took the magic to the finals.

He's 53rd all-time in scoring, 19,485 points, but still almost to that 20,000 mark, which is elite in itself.

Five rebounding titles, two block titles.

I was looking at like his field goal attempts per game, just as a basic, you know,

old school metric.

The most he ever shot was 13.4 field goal attempts per game.

Two years, 10-11 and 11-12.

He ranks, but for his career, he's 9.7 field goal attempts a game, pretty low for an all-timer.

That ranks 140th among all Hall of Famers, tied with Manu Giannobli and Slater Martin, and just above Tony Kukoch.

If we ranked Dwight by his highest average, the 13.4 that he put up in two different seasons, he'd still only be 94th in a tier with Chris Mullen and notably Bill Russell.

Bill Russell obviously offset his lack of offensive production with a bazillion rings.

And Dwight has this weird career arc, right?

You and I discussed this on your pod once years ago, I think.

His first two years, because he comes in as a teenager, he's putting on muscle, learning the NBA game.

He's growing, he's acclimating.

So two years of acclimating, eight straight years of just sheer

dominance, especially as a defender, right?

All NBA, all defensive.

Straight all-star appearances.

And this is something that can't be underestimated, especially when we talk about, especially when we talk about Carmelo.

Sure.

Four top five MVP finishes and one MVP runner-up finish.

Carmelo Anthony had one top five MVP finish in his entire career.

Like that, that speaks to

you are universally considered one of the three to five best players in the NBA.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and do the defense of Dwight Howard as offensive fulcrum that everybody does.

It's true, Dwight Defenders.

It's true, Dwight Defenders, and I would consider myself a prime Dwight defender.

That, yes, his gravity as a role man, his screening, his slip screens, his speed, his power as a dunker.

Yes, it was the centerpiece of an ultra-modern NBA offense that got the magic to the finals.

He created shots for others without touching the ball.

I get all that.

Yes, Dwight Defenders, in those prime years, he averaged 20 to 21 and in his best year, 23 points a game.

That's a lot of points.

Yes, Dwight Defenders, by the end of that, by his absolute apex in the right matchups, he was starting to develop, if not a sophisticated post-game, an effective one.

I went back last night and I watched game six of the 2009 conference finals against the Cavs when the Magic made the finals.

He had 40 points in that game.

And with Jameer Nelson injured, they threw the ball into him in the post like 25 times.

And Zedruna Sagowskis and Anderson Verigau and Ben Wallace, God bless them, had absolutely no shot.

Dwight had 40 points.

He was spinning around them, hitting jump hooks.

Now, those guys were slower and older.

And against the Lakers in the finals of Bynum and Powell, and Lamar Odom, too, took some turns defending Dwight.

He only averaged 15 points a game and shot 49% in the finals that the Lakers won in five games.

All this to say,

there was a roadmap to Dwight becoming a more effective post-player that maybe got cut off by the fact that starting towards the end of his magic career, he starts suffering back injuries, after which he's never the same guy again, including in the disaster, are we having, now this is going to be fun Lakers team with Nash and Powell that sucked and then he leaves after one year when kobe in the free agency meeting says i'm going to teach you how to win dwight and say yeah cool i'm going to go to play for the rockets now and then he just changes teams all the stories come out about how he farts and he likes candy and he becomes kind of a punchline those back injuries

much like in a in a much higher class version in terms of nba legacy much like john walls knee injuries sort of torpedoed whatever chance he had to evolve as a play now i don't think he was ever going to become like a polished offensive player the jump shot the bank shot that he flirted with was like, it went in sometimes, and it was ugly.

I'm just saying, there were times when he was a more sophisticated offensive player that people can give credit for.

And the last thing I will say is the East was cruddy.

I saw my guy Hollinger wrote over the weekend that the East was loaded when Dwight made the finals.

Dude, the East was not loaded.

Okay, the East had three good teams: Cleveland, Boston, and Orlando in that year.

And Boston lost Kevin Garnett towards the end of the season.

And Cleveland, I mean,

what they did around LeBron was like a crime against humanity, how they constructed that team.

But, and then there's a 12-win gap between Orlando and the next team.

So the rest of the East was poop.

But

Dwight Howard took a team to the finals that was starting.

I'm not talking about coming off the bench.

I'm talking about starting Rafer Alston, Haydu Turkigloo, Rashard Lewis, and Courtney Lee.

That team made the NBA finals and beat an ill-constructed but still 66-win Cleveland team to get there.

Like, you can tell me that the center position was down, that the East was, as it always was, down.

The flip side of that is that Dwight took a team that had no business on paper, and Stan Van Gundy and his coaching, obviously a huge help too, to the NBA Finals.

And they're like a Derek Fisher barrage away from being 2-2 in that NBA finals.

He's never got back there again.

But I'm just saying, the center position being down, the East being down, you can flip those arguments around and be like, look at the team this dude had.

And they made it all the way to the final because he was that good which is why i would never argue against him in the hall of fame and i would never against argue against uh the 75th anniversary team he is an all-time great

and listen eight years we we talk about and i say this the weird career arc right eight years of dominance followed by eight years of just like bizarness

and farting, volatility, fucking around, bouncing from team to team, teams bouncing from team to team because teams just wanted to part with him.

What's your favorite memory of Dwight Howard's season with the Charlotte Hornets?

You have any good memories of that one?

I can't literally,

I can't think of, I remember the trade when he went from.

I can't picture it.

Yeah.

I can't picture him in the Charlotte uniform, Zach.

He goes Houston to Atlanta to Charlotte to Washington to the Lakers to Philly and back to the Lakers.

Champion with the Lakers.

Champion with the menu.

Champion with the Lakers.

Averaging 12 minutes a game in the finals.

Valuable minutes.

He played well.

Dwight played well.

It's that back end that I think makes it hard for people.

Again, I'm not justifying anything on behalf of the people who don't want him in the Hall of Fame or who say he shouldn't be.

I'm just saying he has a complicated legacy because you follow that eight years of dominance with eight years of just mayhem.

And

maybe some of that was the back injuries.

Some of that is his personality.

A lot of it is things that he did, right?

Remember when he really wanted to force a trade to

the Brooklyn Nets?

He was going to play with Darren Williams, and then he suddenly opts into his option year mid-season, panics, decides not to be traded.

Then in the offseason, demands to be traded again.

The Nets and Magic can't come up with a trade that suits both, so they trade him in that 14 deal to the Lakers instead, and then everything that happens from there, right?

He clashes with Kobe, he clashes with Dan Tony, he goes to Houston by his own decision.

Great with Hardin until he wasn't, then clashes with Hardin.

Like, he had a lot of clashes.

There was lots of clashing going on.

And so, when we're assessing the totality of a guy's career, and if we're going to have the arguments that we have because it's what we do in sports, it's fair for people to note all that stuff, too.

It does not disqualify him from the Hall of Fame that he could.

These are tier,

if you did the Bill Simmons pyramid, these are mid-pyramid guys.

And I don't think anybody would argue with that.

The last thing I'll say about Dwight is this:

he never really evolved as a passer out of the post or anyone you could run an offense through from the elbow.

That's a knock against his offensive versatility for sure.

His rebounding, going back and watching some old Delight games, his rebounding, I think, was an underrated part of his defense.

He was not only a monstrous rebounder, he was not just a go up and get it rebounder.

He would hit people and box them out.

And not only that,

he was so big and so strong, and his elbows so pointy and dangerous that people would just like not even go in there when he was there.

And his speed, I think, was an underrated part of it, his offense.

Like, he's just outrunning these big men up and down the court over and over again and getting sucking in the defense and getting threes for other people.

So, hats off to Dwight.

Great career.

Congrats on the Hall of Fame.

Carmelo Anthony.

Ninth all-time or 10th all-time in points in the NBA.

So, sort of the anti-Dwight, actually.

They're almost like polar opposite Hall of Fame kind of players.

All-time great scorer.

It's actually sort of interesting how quickly he has become an antique kind of player.

So looking back at his career, typically 35-ish percent of his shots were long twos.

And he shot them well.

Like he shot them at a 45 to 48 to 44% rate.

That's very good.

So, but like 35% of his shots were long twos.

Last year, according to Cleaning the Glass, one player in the entire league shot greater than 24%, forget 35%,

shot more than 24% of their shots from long twos.

Can you guess who it was?

DeMar DeRosen.

DeMar DeRosen with a bullet at 39% of his attempts being long twos.

Next most is Joellen Pede at 24% and Chris Middleton at 24.5% in limited action, obviously, last year.

I mean, first of all, that shows you why all the old heads love DeRosen so much.

And second of all, like how much of

how antiquated stylistically Carmelo's game already would be.

Now, but he's indisputably one of the greatest scorers of all time.

Unlike Dwight, who's whatever you put him in points, like way down the list, zero first-team all-NBA appearances for Carmelo Anthony.

Four third-team appearances, two second-team appearances, one top-five finish in

MVP voting.

And his legacy, I think, unfairly for quite a long time was all the times that the Nuggets and then the Knicks lost in the playoffs.

And if you look back and look who they lost to, you are hard pressed to find any series they lost that they quote unquote should have won.

They lost to the eventual NBA champion, unless I'm missing something, four times.

The Spurs in 2005 and 2007.

The Lakers in 2009 when they made the conference finals, Carmelo's first breakthrough run, were twice in that series, game one and game three.

The Nuggets are down by two in the last 30 seconds of the game, and Trevor Ariza steals inbounds passes to seal the game for the Lakers.

Didn't go great there.

And then with the Knicks lost to the Heat in 2012, when I think that's a series where Amare punched a fire extinguisher container case at the end of it.

And, you know, like they were underdogs in all those series, and they lost all those series.

I think the interesting thing about Carmelo is

he was never a great defensive player and often not a good one.

I think if there's the main knock on him is the playmate, like Dwight, the playmaking just never came.

Like these six, eight wings now

have to be playmakers.

His career averages in the playoffs, 23 points a game, 2.5 assists, 7 rebounds.

He was always a very good rebounder, 41% shooting, 32% on threes, 43.5%

on twos.

That's just like not super duper elite playoff performance.

And I just think he never,

like you can sit here and say they never,

all these playoff losses were teams that they should have lost to, and they did.

And that's very fair.

You just never got the sense that he took a team and really elevated it to a level above where it should have been, with the exception of maybe the 54-win Knicks in 2012, 2013, who lose to the Pacers in the second round.

And we don't need to go back and how he got to the Knicks.

Could he have just gone there as a free agent instead of making them trade all this stuff to Denver?

But like, I say all this to say

they're so different as as players, Dwight and Carmelo.

Their legacies are so sort of complicated by the limitations of their game.

And you can nitpick them here or there, and God knows I nitpick Melo during his prime.

When that dude was cooking, like, there were few things more exciting in the NBA than Carmelo just reigning long twos and step backs and the footwork and all that than

that.

I mean, he was thrilling to watch at his peak.

And if you appreciated that aspect of the game, and it has become now an old school aspect aspect of the game, right?

Like, why was Michael Jordan so awesome?

Well, yeah, early in his career, it's because he could just jump over everybody, but Michael Jordan had some of the greatest footwork for a guard, a wing of all time.

And

there was an artfulness and a grace to Michael's game and the way that he could create space for himself and get shots off.

And Carmelo, like Kobe, like others who came in on the heels of Michael's career, like that was the model, right?

If you were a dominant wing player who was great with the ball in your hands and had phenomenal footwork and could just manufacture in the post, in the mid-post,

an ISO ball was absolutely, you know,

more than acceptable back then.

And Carmelo was really fun to watch if you enjoyed that.

The thing about Carmelo, I mentioned about Dwight

being a victim to an extent of

being caught between eras, right?

The era of all the great bigs, especially offensive-minded hubs.

And then he's coming in at a different time.

Carmelo's, the eras he's caught between,

in 2003, he's coming into the tail end of ISO ball, right?

Like the league has just now changed the rules to try to eliminate two guys standing on one side of the court and illegal defense rules allowing

forcing the other eight to stand on the other side.

The league is trying to get more ball movement.

Mike D'Antoni's sons are about to take off.

So we're at the tail end of ISO ball, pre-analytics, pre-player tracking, pre-per-possession stats.

We're not even talking in per 100 yet.

We're not talking about efficiency all the time.

That word never even comes up.

We're just talking about field goal percentage.

We have no effective field goal percentage, true shooting.

We have none of this.

And he overlaps with Kobe, like the classic gunslinger type.

And I just think that Carmelo, over time, starts to look worse and worse under the scrutiny of newer tools, newer understanding, different kind of analysis of the game.

And then there's the other things you already mentioned, right?

He was kind of an indifferent defender.

He could be a ball stopper, which again became more more of a problem

in this era than it was in a previous era.

And he wasn't a particularly efficient scorer, and he wasn't a particularly willing passer.

But

when he passed, that was always the frustrating thing is when

he took the offense and when he decided,

I'm going to be LeBron White and I'm going to start whipping these passes to the corner and hitting the roll man.

He would have these games with six or seven assists.

You'd be like, man, he sees it.

Like, is it a matter of willingness?

Like, he doesn't see it quite like lebron or luca see it but he sees something

so when mike dantoni uh and and carmelo were together here in new york right now i'm still a nick's beat writer at that time

you know this was still the peak too of lebron and carmelo discussions i wrote that story you know years ago 2015 16 whenever about the the kind of a friendship slash rivalry between them carmelo and lebron when they first arrived and then eventually just the burden was on carmelo but they were being viewed in contrast to each other constantly from the moment that draft happened

And Carmelo suffered in part because

he's a big wing like LeBron, and who has the ball in his hands a lot, like LeBron, but he's not built the same way LeBron is in terms of being a really playmaking, assist-minded, I'm going to orchestrate everything kind of player.

D'Antoni went to Carmelo at one point, because remember, before Linsanity happens,

the Knicks had no point guards.

This was how Linsanity happens.

They had no point all the time.

Chris Duhan, I can't believe I will not stand for the Chris Duhan and Pablo Priggione and old man Jason Kidd erasure, although that's later.

Duhan was the prior season.

But yes, eventually we get to Kidd and Prigioni.

In between those things, though, it was Tony Douglas,

a creeky.

Tony Douglas.

A creaky Baron Davis, a creaky Mike Bibby.

I'm doing this off the top of my head.

My brain.

My brain, you know, there's this whole science about how your brain takes in new information and it has to eject old information to fit the new information.

My brain ejected tony douglas like a ref ejecting rashid wallace like i completely forgot about tony douglas it's perfectly uh justifiable um so dantoni in in in in lieu in light of all this and in light of the fact that he and carmelo have not quite figured out how to uh get on the same page philosophically with regard to the offense yet remember mike dantoni is all about the the ball finds energy the ball finds energy and with the sons that was pinging around and nash is orchestrating

He wanted Carmelo to play more like LeBron.

And it was not an unfair, like, oh, be like LeBron.

It was more of a, look, we can put the ball in your hands all the time.

You can run high pick and rolls.

You can find guys.

You're a very good passer.

You will have the ball in your hands as much as you want.

And we all know Carmelo wants the ball in his hands a lot.

And Carmelo didn't want that model of offense.

He wanted to back guys down.

He wanted to ISO at the elbow.

He wanted to, you know, jab step.

He wanted to do what he does.

But that was antithetical to Mike D'Antoni's make quick decisions with the ball.

The ball finds energy.

It should ping around.

Player movement, ball movement, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And eventually that leads to Mike D'Antoni forced out, quit, whatever you want to say.

Um, but there was a moment there, and there were moments, by the way, like I think Carmelo had like a 10 assist game once, and we went to get a very good passer out of the post, could read the hell players out of the post very well.

And I remember talking to him after the game, and he's like, Yeah, maybe I should do that more often.

I mean, he had this moment of reflection where it was kind of like, Yeah, I could be more of a playmaker, I could do more of a, and then he immediately reverted to like, you know, 1.2 assists per game kind of thing.

For his career, he's at 2.7 assists per game, game, which if you take

the 52 players who finished with 20,000 points in their career, everybody in the 20,000-point club, 52 of them, he ranks 39th in assists, and that's between George Gervin and Shaq.

And if you look at him versus like all the other Hall of Fame type wings, right, LeBron's almost an unfair comparison, but Bird, Drexler, Jordan.

I'm going to put Giannis in this category because he's mostly been a small forward.

He handles the ball a lot.

Kobe, Durant, Elgin Baylor, all these guys average way more assists per game than Carmelo.

I don't need to go through all the numbers.

He's in a tier among the elites.

He's in a tier assist-wise with mostly like centers and power forwards.

Power forward where he eventually landed, power forward where he did not want to be.

Yeah.

Where he did not want to be, by the way.

Something else he pushed back against

that Dan Tony and others had wanted him to do was like you could take advantage of a lot of guys by playing as a small ball four.

So yeah, he's another guy who

clear-cut, obvious Hall of Famer, incredible scorer, fun player, great dude, by the way, great to cover, always accountable, always available, wins, losses, otherwise.

He was great.

Loved covering Carmella for the couple of years that I was still on the beat with him.

But it's a complicated resume.

And, you know, toward the end, he was getting booed at the garden.

Well,

they all turned out.

At times, once a nick, always a nick.

Yes.

I'm glad you mentioned the positional thing because that's what made him so fun to watch when he was at his apex.

He was too big for threes.

He could beat the crap out of him in the post, and he was too fast for like that first step against power forwards, it was over.

Like, forget about it.

A couple other mellow things before we go.

Another thing he never got in comparison to LeBron was on a stacked team with his peers.

And part of that was the decisions that he made with his contract in the line with LeBron, Bosch, and Wade.

Part of that was one of like a top three what if in the entire history of the NBA is what if the Pistons take Carmelo Anthony instead of Darko Milichic.

Like that's that's like an all-time, like the whole league is warped by that.

And he was also, and part of the reason why occasional ball stopper mellow was so puzzling was he's also a top four

all-time team USA player to the point that FIBA Mello became a thing.

It was a completely different player.

And I would be remiss not to mention the Redeem team in 2008 also was inducted into Springfield this weekend.

And Carmelo was among the players who saw the floor in the fourth quarter of the gold medal game against Spain, which I rewatched.

And let me tell you, Howard, I remember that game being tense.

Holy fuck was that game tense.

In the fourth quarter, Team USA is up nine going into the fourth quarter.

Spain, immediate 7-0 run.

It's 91, 89 with eight and a half minutes left.

There's a famous Kobe three.

A four-point play, actually, against Spain's own defense that gets the lead up to 108.99 with 3.10 left.

And in the telling of that game, that's the shot that sealed the game.

Because Kobe,

if people want to go, just watch the fourth quarter.

Kobe is the best player on the floor in the whole game.

And what Wade actually has 27 points in the game coming off the bench, but Kobe's the best player in the fourth quarter.

He's everywhere on DV.

He blocked a jumper.

He deflected a lob to Powell on a switch.

He's everywhere in the game.

But

Spain then goes on a quick 5-0 run.

It's 108.104 with like two minutes left in the game.

And remember, this is the Redeemed team.

This is, we lost it Worlds in 2002, Athens in 2004, Worlds again in 2006.

All the press was Coach K, Jerry Colangelo, this is the team.

It's a four-point game with two minutes left against.

Ricky Rubio looks like a 15-year-old in this game.

And then Wade hits a three to ice it.

My only point is

only two players played the entire fourth quarter in that game, Kobe and LeBron.

But Mello was always awesome for Team USA.

The short three really helped him.

But that game was,

I mean, Mark Gasol did not play much in the fourth quarter of that game.

That was Powell's team more than Mark's team.

And it was just

Rudy Fernandez is involved.

Awesome, awesome game.

Like an all-time great game.

Almost on par, not quite with the Serbia-U.S.

game from last Olympics.

It sounds like I need to do a rewatch.

It's awesome.

Yeah.

And Carmelo, it's a funny thing, right?

One of the critiques of him during his career is, you know,

he didn't really mesh with Amari in New York.

And he didn't, like, if you look at it, in Carmelo's defense, and he only won three playoff series his entire career, which is stunning.

Again, if you contrast that with a lot of the other elite players, he's on the charts with top 10, top 20 scorers of all time, all that.

His playoff win total is frightfully low compared to everybody else's.

But like, he didn't play with a ton of Hall of Famers, right?

He had Chauncey Phillips in Denver and briefly in New York.

He had Allen Iverson in a very strange period that I often forget happened in Denver.

He had old, old Jason Kidd for that 54-win season with the Knicks.

And that's pretty much it for elite players that he was with.

He was damn at the end in Portland.

Mellow in Portland was actually kind of fun.

There are some fun mellow games in Portland.

And yeah, he made contract decisions that kept him from being able to conspire with

Wade and LeBron or whoever else it could have been, Chris Paul.

And he made decisions that kind of boxed himself in, and it's unfortunate.

And he also was not necessarily one who was going to willingly cede a lot of offense or control to other players, even if he had those guys with him, except during the Olympics, which part of why Olympic mellow became a thing was like people just loved the way he was playing off of Kobe and LeBron and Wade and all these guys, because in that context, like, what else were you going to do, right?

Like, this is not a roster where you're like, no, no, no, it's my team, my time.

Like, you're kind of forced into that role, but he did it willingly.

He embraced it.

He was awesome with it, but it was the kind of thing he was going to be willing to do once every four years in the Olympics.

But he did it to its absolute peak.

He was like the greatest role player of all time, if you want to even use that term.

And again, for people who are who want to nitpick, you know, guys' resumes as they go into the hall,

remember the Hall of Fame is not the NBA Hall of Fame.

And he'd be in an NBA Hall of Fame too, if there was one.

But it's a basketball Hall of Fame and the three Olympic golds matters a ton, as does leading Syracuse to a national championship as a freshman.

It's the totality of your career and your contributions to basketball.

And yeah, Carmelo, indisputable.

My only question, the only thing I'm still wondering, Zach, will there be a separate wing for his post-game hats?

Maybe.

But I will.

I don't even know what to do.

But I mean, he did have some good wide-brimmed post-game hats, round-brimmed and everything.

Great.

Yeah, FIBA Mello didn't have the burden of creating the offense.

It was catch, fire, and run like hell.

And those team USA teams still would run like hell.

All right, Howard Beck, real ones, theringer.com.

Always a pleasure to see you.

Look, man, we're going to be talking about NBA basketball sooner than you think.

It's early September.

Let's go.

Shortest month of the year goes by in an eyeblink.

I'll see you soon, bud.

All right, man.

Good to see you.

This episode is brought to you by NBA 2K26, a favorite of my sons and me.

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And now, a special treat.

It's September.

There is no NBA basketball going on.

There is Euro basket, but there's no NBA basketball.

I have long told people, and I sound now like an old man yelling at a cloud like Gabe Simpson.

that the single greatest creation of American popular culture ever, ever, is The Simpsons from like 1990 to 1997.

I've lost track of the show over the last 15 to 20 years, but nothing, nothing, not The Wire,

not the X-Files, not The Godfather, not whatever you want to posit is the best apex of American pop culture was better to me than Peak Simpsons.

So boy, was I delighted when the Ringer Zone Alan Siegel wrote this book about Peak Simpsons.

And so episode one, segment one of my Zach Read Some Books Over the Summer podcast series starts with Stupid TV, Be More Funny, How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television in America Forever.

Alan, I have one major critique of this book for you.

Shoot.

Can you write another one that's like 400 pages longer?

Because I want to dive into all of my favorite episodes.

Like, I want 50 pages of the writers who you got all of, except for Schwarzwelder, who's like a, who's like a, a, you describe him as a Paul Bunyan figure in American comedy, John Schwarzwelder, if I'm saying his name right.

I want more.

I want more, which is a good sign, I think.

I had this problem when I was writing it where I would go on these like little tangents where I'd be quoting the show in the book over and over and over, and I like couldn't help myself.

But I realized, you know, I think some of the people reading this know a lot of the quotes already, so I dialed that back a little bit.

But I wanted to, like, I have all my favorite little jokes, and your book sent me down a rabbit hole of like my favorite episodes

of all time.

But the best, the best, I mean, how old are you?

42.

So I'm 47.

I'm a little older.

48.

Oh my God, I just turned 48, like two weeks ago.

I'm a little older than you.

So I'm like in high school during peak Simpsons.

And the best way I can describe their effect on me, and you talk about how they were on Sundays, and then they were on Thursdays.

And

that's important because on both Mondays and Wednesdays, we had weight sessions, lifting weight sessions in the morning for water water polo and swimming, which I played in both in high school.

And there were like four of us who were super fans, who every Monday morning at 6:30 in the morning, or every Friday morning, depending on when the show was on, we would spend the entire weight session rehashing our favorite jokes from the previous night, Simpsons.

And the best way I can describe it is:

I didn't even know really what my sense of humor was until I watched those shows.

I learned about absurdist comedy and political references and movie references, 75% of which I didn't even get now that I've read your book.

I learned about things that tickled my funny bone that I didn't even know tickled my funny bone from this group of writers who is so much more sophisticated than me.

That's the best compliment I could give.

We would come in the next day and dissect joke for joke.

Like, oh, what about that one?

What about that one?

That it like I learned my sense of humor from The Simpsons.

People ask me all the time, like, what is the greatest influence of the show?

And I mean, you could sort of say, like, look at the adult animation going on right now.

There are dozens of shows that would not exist without The Simpsons.

But I think it's sort of like it helped us form a worldview, which I think is the most influential part of the show.

Like, you can talk about the comedy, but, you know, there's a line by one of the writers, George Meyer, that I always steal, which is basically a paraphrase.

It's like, life is crushing and miserable.

but it's worth living.

And I think like that's what The Simpsons taught us in a way.

And like that kind of gets lost now that the show is sort of an American institution and not this dangerous thing anymore.

You get into a lot in the book about the writer's room, which was both gross and inspiring, about some of the individual

mega figures, Matt Groenig and Sam Simon and James Brooks and John Schwartzweld during on and on, different showrunners.

It's all very interesting.

I want to leave that for the readers.

And the George, George H.W.

Bush versus The Simpsons, and The Cosby Show versus The Simpsons.

I had forgotten even that Dr.

Hibbert is kind of like a Bill Cosby character.

I had totally forgotten that.

I want to get into some of the nitty-gritty.

And you'd get into the nitty-gritty in the book.

You have a whole section on the monorail,

obviously, a seismic event in American comedy.

You have a whole section on the Bort license plates.

Now, I don't know if you can see it back there.

You know what?

I'm actually going to go get it.

Okay.

So what's the story behind that?

That's my Dort license plate.

Lugens Dort plays for the Oklahoma City Thunder, and I had a running bit saying the Thunder are just missing this opportunity.

All their hipster fans, if they produced Dort license plates, would buy them.

And you have a whole chapter about American drivers who have Bort license plates from the Itchy and Scratchy episode.

This is signed by Lugan's Dork, and it's a one-of-one, and I own it.

Does he know the show at all?

I haven't talked to him about it.

I have to talk to him, but this was all, this was like a pandemic thing that they gave me.

By the way, I re-watched that show, that episode with my daughter when we went to Disney World last year, and now she wants to do the thing you talk about in the book, which is re-watch The Simpsons with me.

I'm definitely game for that.

Well, it's funny.

I went to an Oasis concert, you know, as a 42-year-old white male.

I went to an Oasis concert in LA this week, and we were in this giant parking lot.

And I turned to my friend, and I said, I think we're in the itchy lot, which is a reference to Itchy and Scratchulate episode.

You know, it's like the Disney giant parking lots.

And then another friend didn't hear me and made the same damn reference.

So that's where we are.

What is

I guess the

one of the jokes that comes to mind to me is like, what do I mean by a joke that taught me about my own sense of humor?

One of my five to six favorite episodes is Cape Fear, which you write about in the book.

And the famous joke, absurdist joke from Cape Fear is Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes over and over again, which I thought was hysterical at the time for reasons that I did not understand.

Like my brain did not understand why this was funny because it's like objectively not that funny.

It's just the same thing happening nine different times and it makes no sense.

Why are the rakes there?

Why is he stepping on them over again?

Is he that stupid?

Why doesn't he just walk the other way?

The joke more so that I think of when I think of that episode is when Homer, the Simpsons are being given a new identity and they're the Thompsons and the FBI guy or whoever is like, all right, let's rehearse this.

I'm going to say hello, Mr.

Thompson.

And you say back, Homer, hello.

And it's like, hello, Mr.

Thompson.

Homer says nothing.

Hello, Mr.

Thompson.

Homer says nothing.

All right, Homer, remember, you're Mr.

Thompson.

Hello, Mr.

Thompson.

And then Homer whispers, I think to Marge, I think she's talking to you.

It's just such brilliant writing that it just makes me cackle even today.

What's your all-time favorite episode?

Give me some of your best, greatest hits.

I,

the one I've been saying, and this changes every week, is Mr.

Plow because

it sort of has all the stuff that made The Simpsons great that like you couldn't do on live-action TV.

So imagine, like, you don't have an episode of Family Ties where the characters are rival plow drivers.

And in Mr.

Plow, you know, you have Linda Ronstadt and Adam West as guest stars.

You have references to movies that like,

this is something I brought up a million times, and I just can't get enough of it.

They reference a movie called Sorcerer.

It's a William Freedkin movie from 1977 that got totally buried by Star Wars.

And in 1992, when Mr.

Plow came out, there was absolutely no reason to have a sorcerer reference in a Simpsons episode, but there is a shot-for-shot parody.

It's when Homer is on the bridge in his truck, and there's like the tangerine dream sort of fake score, like the tinkly piano.

And what's crazy is I didn't understand that reference until I was like 39 years old.

That's how sort of deep these references were.

I never did until you wrote about it in your book.

I thought it was Cliffhanger or something like that.

I didn't know.

So I went back and watched clips of Mr.

Plow and two jokes that I had forgotten about that just delight me to this day.

So Homer is driving drunk back from Moe's in a snowstorm.

Maybe a little too casual with the drunk rushing on The Simpsons, which is obviously not a laughing matter.

But he's what the windshield wipers, it's like full of snow, no snow, full of snow.

And then he crashes a car.

He crashes into a car.

He rerends a car.

And he gets out of the car, looks at the damage, and drunkly's like, well, I got him as good as he got me.

And then he realizes that he's crashed into his own car in the driveway of his house and goes, DOH!

Which is a word you,

and that one just delights me.

And then, as the police or whatever, are investigating this crash, crash they interrogate homer and they're like so what were where were you coming from like when you had this accident the insurance adjuster where are you coming from when you had this accident what is this place mows and then we go into homer's brain which is always the most always the most delightful place to go and he goes he comes up with an answer he thinks is brilliant he says it's a pornography store I was buying pornography.

And then his brain says, I wasn't going to think of that.

There's just such great jokes.

Give me another, give me another highlight.

So this joke is, and it's pandering, but I don't care because I love it so much.

It's when Krusty opens the Clown College, and it's because he's lost money betting on the Washington Generals.

And you see him watching the Generals play the Globetrotters.

I reference it one every like 10 episodes.

Yeah.

He's spinning the ball on his finger.

Just take it.

It's like,

I don't know what it is.

But then it keeps going, and he says,

someone someone says to him, why did you bet on the generals?

He's like, I thought the generals were due.

They were due.

Give me another episode that's in your

pan Dion.

So Lisa's substitute is, it's tough because this isn't one that like people quote all the time, but it's when Dustin Hoffman comes in and he's Lisa's substitute teacher.

And he, again, this just shows like at the time how sort of backwater animation was that like Dustin Hoffman wouldn't even have his real name on, you know, in the credits.

So, he just went by Sam Eddick, which, you know, you get it.

So,

it that episode like had

actual emotion and sort of gravitas to it that other episodes didn't.

And it kind of spooked the writers because they were like, shit, like, we're going to have to be this emotional forever.

But it sort of gave a good example that the show was not just Bart saying hell and damn all the time.

And that, like, really helped it launch it into a whole other stratosphere.

Can I give you a couple of mine that are in my other?

than we'll trade we'll trade other than cape fear let me see where do i want to start

uh let's just do the monorail right away um

because it's an all it's obviously an all-timer uh the song Conan O'Brien wrote it, has performed it at the Hollywood Bowl, which is just outrageous that this happened.

And it's an episode, people who are listening to this know the monorail episode.

Can I give you my favorite moment of the monorail episode?

More than the song, more than donuts, donuts, is there anything they can't do?

More than anything else, my favorite joke in the monorail episode is, I believe it's at the end after Homer has saved the town from devastation in a monorail crash.

Or it's at some point.

Leonard Nimoy, why is Leonard Nimoy in this episode again?

He plays himself, but why is he in it?

So they initially wanted George DeKay to come in, and he had already played

another character in a different episode, but DeKay was like, no, no, no, I can't do a monorail episode.

I have a deal with the San Francisco Transportation Department.

So he didn't want to trash public transit in any way.

So they got Nimoy, and Conan was excited because Spock outranked Sulu in Star Trek.

So that's why Nimoy ended up in the episode.

All right, so Leonard Nimoy, now I remember.

Leonard Nimoy is on the monorail and there's a solar eclipse.

And it's Leonard Nimoy.

He's playing Leonard Nimoy.

And he says to his seat neighbor, a solar eclipse.

The cosmic ballet goes on.

And you think for the seat, the random person sitting next to him, it's the greatest moment my entire life.

Leonard Nimoy is talking about astronomy.

And the guy just goes, anyone want to switch seats?

It just slays me every time.

That episode has one of my favorite moments, which is like the Marge exasperation with Homer like peak when,

you know, Marge is like talking about who's going to save everybody and Homer's like, is it Batman?

She's like, no, it's not Batman.

Just like, and that kind of goes back to the Cape Fear episode too, where they've they've been kidnapped and Homer is passed out.

And you just hear Lisa go, dad's been drugged.

And Marge goes, no, he hasn't.

She's like.

All right, I'm going to give you another one that I don't think was in your book even once.

And I kept waiting for it and waiting for it because it might be my favorite episode of all time, although it's a cliche answer to this question.

The Stone Cutters, which is called Homer the Great, I think.

Is there stuff on the cutting room floor of the book about that episode?

Or is that episode not as sort of pantheon popular as I think it is?

It's incredible.

i think my problem was that there are so many damn good episodes like there was a writer that once told me i once you know for the ringer i ranked all the best i think the top 100 episodes and he sort of was like if you did like a random number generator for the first 250 episodes you probably could not go wrong like it probably would seem reasonable i mean Patrick Stewart in that episode is so funny.

Like the line that I always remember is like, let's get drunk and play ping pong in the like, you know, in the, in the, in the

very deep voice.

And

again, there are so many good episodes that it was hard to know sort of what to whittle down, like what was the most important.

Homer becomes a big wig in the Stone Cutters, which is like sort of a Mason's secret group

in Springfield with all the Springfield luminaries.

And he's living it up and he's going out to the club every night.

And Marge warns him at one point, like, hey, Homer, you know, like, nothing lasts forever.

And he just goes, everything lasts forever.

It's a classic Homer line.

And then at the end, when he's kicked out of the Stone Cutters or they dissolve, I can't remember exactly what happens.

Another just great throwaway joke.

Marge is like, you know what, Homer?

Don't worry about that club.

You're a member of an even more exclusive club than that.

And she's referring to her family.

And he just goes, oh, the Black Panthers?

Like, as if that would be a reasonable answer.

Those are the jokes that just make everything.

Give me another one of yours.

Yeah, well, I was going to say, like, what the writers loved to do was...

this sort of like weird dichotomy of making Homer incredibly stupid, but also give him like a brain that he didn't really have.

It's like, on one hand, he would forget how to breathe, and on the other, he would make jokes about Vassar or, you know, Vassar.

He knew what Vassar College was, but he could forget how to breathe.

And I think, like, so, so there's a joke that I repeat all the time.

It's like not an episode people love.

It's, it's when Bleeding Gums Murphy dies.

And so there's a runner throughout the entire episode where like a hot dog vendor is there, you know, selling Homer a hot dog.

And they're at

Bleeding Gums Murphy's funeral and you just hear the hot dog guy go hot dog get your hot dog and homer goes like woohoo and marge is like do you follow my husband around and he just goes lady he's putting my kids through college and it's like

it is a throwaway joke in some ways but the deli like things like the delivery like you don't realize like it's not just the writing it's hysterical Another one like that that I reference all the time just randomly is here come the pretzels when they had the baseball game, which I'd forgotten about.

I went through a whole montage of on YouTube.

There's a montage of every time Homer says, It's my lifelong dream to do something.

And then Marge says, No, Homer, it was your lifelong dream to do X and you already did it.

And one of them is, it was your lifelong dream to run on the field during a baseball game and you did it.

And it cuts to a photo from the newspaper of Homer running on the field to the baseball game.

He's put it up in his house, despite the fact that the headline is, idiot cost Springfield the pennant.

And it's just like such a great joke.

Go ahead.

I was going to say, like, Homer's sort of weird, weird.

He has no short-term memory, and his long-term memory is screwed up.

And it's like he,

his memories are like just sometimes just like old TV episodes that he thinks he lived, which is like, again, a

weird projection of the writers, just how much they watch television.

You do get into that at one point where he talks about how he's excited to go to his high school reunion to see the old gang, Ralph, Malfa, and Potsy.

And Marge is like, that's happy days, Homer.

Okay, I'm going to give you a couple more

of just my all-time favorites, and you can take off wherever you want to take off.

Colonel Homer, where he manages Lurleen the country singer.

Homer loves Mindy when he almost has an affair.

Homer goes to college when he lives with the nerds in college.

Homer goes to space when he's the NASA guy.

And I'll stop there.

Those are those are.

And oh, Homer Badman when he's accused of sexual harassment.

those are like in my pantheon personally.

So Colonel Homer has one of my favorite jokes, which is like a peak George Meyer joke.

So George Meyer was this writer.

I assume people know who he is who've listened to this podcast, but he just had this way of like

making these very simple punchlines that like weren't necessarily like without context, they don't like really pop.

But like a great example is like Homer's in this honky-tonk bar and these two sort of like rednecks are at each other's throats.

And you hear one and he just goes hey you let's fight and the other one goes them's fighting words and it's like this joke that some one of the other writers was just saying it's like

it's like a joke that should have already been written but somehow it wasn't and that's like a george my joke and the the the mindy episode is great the line that i repeat is just homer when he's sort of obsessing over here over her and he just goes mindy has a motorcycle and like it doesn't really make any sense like on its own but it's hysterical um

there's a joke and i don't even remember what episode it's in, that stands out to me.

It's just like, how did they land on this joke?

I don't know the context.

It's just coming to me in my head right now.

Grandpa Simpson has an American flag, and the flag has only 49 stars on it.

And Homer or someone is like, hey, I think there's a star missing on your flag, Grandpa.

And he just says, like, out of nowhere, like, no, there isn't.

I'll be dead in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missouri.

And I'm like, how?

Who wrote this?

And I remember watching it and dying of laughter, not even understanding why that's funny.

Like, why is I, but just this sheer ridiculousness of, like, why does he hate Missouri?

It's completely unexplained.

It's this like weird old-timey, like, kind of like weird Civil War era attitude.

It's like there's the grandpa line where he's like telling stories about his military time and he's like, he, he.

replaces the word 20 with dickety and he's like, the Kaiser stole our word for 20.

It just doesn't, like, where does that come from?

And like, that I think is,

you know, what made the show great.

It's like, you sort of expect a certain level of joke, and then it like goes up an entirely different level.

Another thing that you get into, what you get into in the book,

a storyline that has been talked about, but you broaden it and explain it more, which is always like, even I could sense this as a teenager, that the show found its stride.

when it evolved from being a show about Bart to being a show about Homer.

And George Myers, in the book, he says, to me, Homer is the greatest comedic character in the history of the world.

And I completely agree with him.

Homer Simpson is my favorite character in any show of any kind ever of all time.

At least comedy-wise.

And

you get into that sort of transition.

And I completely agree.

And now I forgot what I was going to say.

I'm looking at my Homer.

The trajectory, maybe, like how it happened?

No, I mean, but you get into that, but it's just like, that's when it really sort of hit its absurdest high.

And all my favorite episodes are from that era.

But I don't know what I was going to say, just Homer and the writer.

But you talk to the writers about this in depth.

Yeah, and I think like it's sort of like a double-edged sword.

So they realize that they have this character that they can go nuts with.

Like, you know, just a good example to me is like, you know, you can't send Bart to space as an astronaut because he's 10 years old.

But you can send Homer.

And,

you know, that episode, Deep Space Homer, is an absolute classic.

And at the time, the writers were like, i don't know like it's it's not grounded it it's it's not real and i think like by then that they had the room to really sort of send the show in a different direction like to make it less realistic but i think it wouldn't that wouldn't have been possible without the first three four years being very grounded i remember what i was going to say about homer

every single time

he imagines an alternate reality and they show the alternate reality is an absolute home run.

Like there's one where the Germans come take over the nuclear power plant and he imagines the land of chocolate and it's just everything's made of chocolate and it's Homer dancing like an excited little girl eating everything that exists, including like animals.

And a common theme is he's eating all the time.

So in Deep Space Homer, they have this beautiful sequence

set to the same music as 2001 A Space Odyssey where Homer is floating in space eating potato chips that have exploded out of a bag.

And in Homer Badman, when he's accused of

sexually harassing a babysitter, he imagines living under the sea.

And they cut to him singing a version of Under the Sea from the Little Mermaid, but he's eating all the fish that he comes with.

He's ripping snails out of their shells and eating them.

He's eating, and he's just eating all the time.

And then cuts back to reality.

And Marge says, Homer, that's your solution for everything going under the sea.

It's not going to happen.

My favorite sort of Homer-like cutaway gag is the cartridge family where Homer gets a gun and he just goes, what if I rob the Quickie Mart and you see him and he's in a chair and he's twirling a gun in his finger and marges in a bikini and

like just dancing and then like it cuts back and you realize he realizes he's left the quickie mart already and he's just like don't and it yeah it's it's great speaking of the quickie mart um

apu is not on the show anymore right correct yep So that is that

controversy coming to the center of the show and then Apu not being on the show and Hank's area sort of saying, like, I didn't realize that some could construe my voice as offensive and all of that.

That's long after I was really watching the show.

Going back, like, it was interesting to me because just as like a formative viewer, I always thought they kind of did right by Apu as an immigrant and told his immigration story with love and a heart.

And there's an episode where there is like a right-wing mob that wants to change the immigration law to kick him out.

And

the town and homer kind of rallies on his behalf.

It's a very,

it's one of those issues that I know is more complex than I'm able to articulate because of my own life experience, but

he's an interesting character in that regard.

Yeah, they make him very, like...

Again, maybe this is flattening it or a cliche, but like he's hard, he's incredibly hardworking.

He's smart.

He's funny, and he does everything right.

And I do think that that was on purpose.

Like, so the portrayal of it and the voice, like, yeah, like you can absolutely take issue with that.

And Hank Azaria is very smart and, like, talked about it.

He, again, like you said, he evolved on it and realized that he probably wasn't the right guy to voice, to voice him.

But, I mean,

there's a line in that episode where, again, Apu is trying to become a citizen.

And Homer's like, Apu, you must love this country more than I love a cold beer on a hot Christmas morning.

And it's like...

They give Apu a lot, and I really did like that at the time.

They also, that line also that also has one of my favorite Apu lines where he's trying to act American in an American accent and he says, the Nye Mets are my favorite squadron.

And as a Mets fan, that particularly tickled me.

All right, give me, before we go, give me one last episode that

you want to hit as like an Alan Siegel, just I can't live without this episode highlight.

So I love the Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie show, which is a season eight episode where they, Itchy and

adds another character, you know, a dog from hell, which one of the writers sort of said, like, if your show is, is, or rather, that Poochie is a great example of, like,

when you need to end your show.

And I think if you watch that episode now, it's sort of, it's a great commentary on like fans and fans thinking that they have ownership of pop culture, sports, whatever.

And

it's just a question of like, when you make something great, great, like who owns it?

Like, so there's an exchange where,

you know, Bart is talking to comic book guy and comic book guy is complaining about Itchy and Scratchy.

And Bart's like, you know,

we don't owe, the show doesn't owe you.

You owe the show.

And comic book guy's response is, worst episode ever.

Like people cannot handle when something that they're obsessed with, like have a parasocial relationship with, like, isn't in their control anymore.

And like at the end of that episode, like they turn turn the TV off and it just goes to fuzz.

And, like, to me, that is like

that would be a great ending of the series.

Well, look, I mean, you get into the one of the great parts of the book is, and again, here's the book right here.

Here's the book, Stupid TV, Be More Funny.

Buy this book if you like The Simpsons, or even if you don't.

You get into sort of like the formative internet and like the first message groups about like popular shows like The Simpsons and how some of the writers actually dove into those groups and chatted with those people and like that was really interesting to go back to like early to mid 90s internet like wild wild west and like these guys some of them are reading what the super duper smart fans are saying about the show

there's something so funny about the fact that in 1992 simpsons fans were like show's going in the toilet it's crap it's bad it's it's like

like unimpeachably the greatest season of tv in the history of tv and even then people were whining about it So it's like, I don't know if it's like a rule of the internet or a rule of people congregating.

Like, they will get really negative.

And the writers at the time, like the Simpsons writers, at some point, they had to like rip the modem out of the wall.

Again, I'm dating myself talking about modems, but it

like they couldn't handle.

They thought that they liked the feedback, but at some point, you just need to let it go.

Okay, this is just tip of the iceberg stuff.

I mean, this book, the stories about the writer's room are incredible.

The stories about Schwartzwelder, who's like this mysterious figure who's a genius, are incredible.

The first 50 to 75 pages are just about like how unlikely it was that this show would ever hit the air and succeed.

The George Bush stuff is really fun.

There's just so many fun subplots in this book.

I just wanted to have fun talking about the show.

I will end by saying this.

Do you have any of these books in your library?

The episode compendiums?

My friend, I went to summer camp, and when that book came out, when the first official Simpsons episode guide came out, we would pass it around and just quote it because again, in like 1997, 1998.

Couldn't watch the show.

You couldn't just get shows on demand.

You couldn't get clips on YouTube.

So we were remembering stuff that we didn't know, like unless you taped it off TV, which very few people did.

I mean, that book is like...

It's like falling apart on my bookshelf.

So this is The Simpsons, a complete guide to our

favorite favorite family.

And it takes you seasons one to eight.

And like, here's a page.

It's just like stacked with quotes and images and plot devices.

And two things.

Number one, I took it to college, and the same thing happened with my college buddies.

We would just be like leafing through this book, like, oh my God, I forgot about that joke.

There was no YouTube to like, let's look up this joke.

Oh, my God, I forgot about that episode.

That was so funny when that guy said that.

All the best jokes are like highlighted in small paragraphs here.

Second of all, when I worked at espn and if i ever do tv again it was in my tv backdrop at home and my wife would and my tv backdrop is like serious books and basketball books and a picture of tim duncan and a picture of my family and a tv itself that would show the logo of like nba today and then this book in a prominent spot like above the tv and my wife would be like why is that silly thing like up there it doesn't fit in your basketball backdrop like fans people are gonna think you're being silly and i'm like that if you if you fucking touch that book,

that book stays there in a place of primacy forever.

The show is like a secret handshake.

If someone sees that book in your background, their eyes will light up.

Like, maybe one out of every 10 people, but it connects people in a way that, like, even some of the best shows ever don't.

And it's not a knock on madmen or sopranos, but I just don't think it quite has that connectivity that like The Simpsons has.

Okay, I have to ask you one more question before I let you go because now I'm looking at the photos.

Favorite random non-core character?

Just it could be anybody from like Flanders level to someone who appears in five episodes.

Like, favorite, just like this, this thing is always a pleasure.

I mean, Sideshow Bob to me is

always hysterical because it's like he's such a funny caricature of like a right-wing guy, right-wing politician, but also he's like very erudite and well-read and like a musical theater sort of genius who can sing like the, you know, all the HMS pinafore or whatever.

And he like,

it's just such a nuanced portrayal of a character like that.

And like a lesser show would, you know, wouldn't do it that well.

And like you contrast him with like the most prominent like Democrat on the show and it's Mayor Quimby and he's a complete

like corrupt corrupt asshole, which is funny because the show definitely leans to the left, but you know, there's no sacred cows.

I'm going to just give you two off the top of my head.

One is a deep cut and one is obvious.

Troy McClure, every time.

And you have a wonderful section in the book about Phil Hartman, who was glue on SNL and glue on The Simpsons, too.

Anytime they couldn't figure out a character, you go into Lionel Hutz and everything.

And then deeper, this is partly because it's a recency of memory.

I was watching a clip that had him.

Rainier Wolfcastle, who's the Arnold Schwarzenegger actor in the show, just every time he's on, including in one of my favorite episodes, the Springfield Film Festival,

where Mr.

Burns gets

Senor Spilbergo to direct his hagiography,

he has a great Rainier is in that one too.

Those are two off the topic.

There's a great, this is for everybody, there's a great clip on YouTube of all the McBain clips spliced together so that it's one movie.

Oh my God, it was McBain.

And at the end, it's like, you know, see McBain next.

I think the name of the movie is You Have the Right to Remain Dead is the name of the sequel, which I will always talk about.

Alan Siegel,

thank you so much for your time.

We might have to do a sequel to this when nothing's going on in the NBA, but everyone should buy the book.

You also, if I recall, wrote the oral history of Nirvana's Unplugged.

Was that you too?

Yes, that's very, very important.

We have to have some beers together because Nirvana is my favorite band of all time.

And that album was...

That was a formative moment for me.

But anyway, everyone, buy the book.

And thank you for your time.

I'll see you soon, buddy.

Thanks for having me, man.

See ya.

All right, that's it for a loaded, eclectic, random Zach Lowe show.

It's Monday.

The board of governors meets this week.

I think Kawhi Leonard will probably come up.

We will be back on Thursday, most likely, with another episode talking about whatever comes out of that, whatever new happens in the NBA.

Maybe a restricted free agent actually signs a contract like Cam Thomas did last week.

We will see.

Thank you to Victoria, Jesse, and Cerudi on production.

Thank you for a lot watching, listening, however, you get your podcast.

We'll see you later this week on the Zach Glow Show.

This episode is brought to you by Warner Brothers Pictures.

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