OKC’s Dominance, NBA Cup Preview, and Mega-Trades With Howard Beck! Plus, Mets Corner With Sean Fennessey.

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Coming up on the Zach Lowe Show, we got a loaded day. We're talking NBA Cup, the Thunder, won by so many points against Phoenix that I lost count.
24 and one.

Can they break the all-time wins record? Can they get to 33 straight wins? Can anybody challenge them? Can the field challenge them at all?

Are they hovering over the trade deadline and making people more aggressive to make trades or more fearful of making trades? Howard Beck from The Ringer, you might know him, is here.

He wrote a great column on the Giannis and secondarily Anthony Davis trade landscapes, how the Thunder's dominance, how the past mega trades that have all come in the past five or six years, how their outcomes are affecting the trade market.

He's here to talk Thunder, all of that. Giannis, AD, we talk Nick's magic and the other cup semifinals, lots of stuff to talk about.
And then

it's been a rough week on Mets Corner.

Polar bear is gone. Diaz is a Dodger.
a freaking LA Dodger like they needed anything else. That hurts.
My daughter's confused. Fans are angry.
Got a lot of holes to fill. I didn't want to do

another Mets corner this week, but this merited an emergency Mets corner. Sean Fentesy, always educating me on baseball.
He's here to talk Mets corner.

So we got a lot of NBA, a lot of baseball, a lot of sadness on Mets Corner. It's all coming up on the Zach Lowe Show.

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welcome to the zach low show it's thursday the thunder won again the thunder never lose and it's time to say the three most anticipated words in the world of niche podcasting.

What up, Beck?

What's happening, Zach?

Oh, well, a lot. I was up late last night doing prime, and the games were bummers.

The Lakers got blown to smithereens by the quickness of the San Antonio Spurs, who continue to roll on without Victor Wembanyama.

And the Spurs will play the Thunder in the Cup semifinals in Las Vegas, and the Knicks and Magic will play the other one.

Let's start with the Thunder

24-1,

plus 17 points per 100 possessions, which would obliterate the all-time record by such a large margin that it's absolutely laughable.

They have won 16 games in a row. I'm already checking their schedule.
Win number 33 would be at Houston. At some point, I don't even know when, January, sometime probably.
That's how good they are.

I'm looking ahead 17 more wins to see if they could tie the Lakers' record for most consecutive wins.

And by the way, if they lose the championship game of the Cup like they did last year, it doesn't count on their winning streak. That game doesn't count.

They can play any style. They can counter anything you do against them.
Big, small, zone defenses. They're the third most zoned against team.

in the league because people are just like, what else can we do against Shea in the pick and roll? I got to try zone. Well, they're getting better at that as we go.

They go 10 deep in quality players before you even get to Isaiah Joe or Ken Rich Williams. 10 deep.
This AJ Mitchell thing is freaking more than real.

And it's not just lifting them in the minutes when Shay's on the bench and they can put A.J. Mitchell, J-Dub, and Chet, who's shooting.
I think 9,000% from the field for the season. Let me check that.

No, it's actually just 58%, 40% on threes, 67% on twos. They can also go just super offense.
Shea, A.J. Mitchell, J-Dub, Chet, all together and just be like, good luck guarding us.

Now we have a million guys who can dribble. It's absolutely crazy how good they are.
They're even better than I thought they would be.

And their dominance is hovering over the entire league. Every issue that the other 29 teams are grappling with comes back to how do we go at taking on this juggernaut.

Howard Beck, you wrote a wonderful column this week or last week, I can't remember, on the Giannis trade landscape and the history of these mega trades in which teams send out three or more first-round picks.

It was a great column. Everybody should read it.
And you talked about how,

you know, we didn't see a lot of these trades in the entire like post-ABA-NBA merger.

And then we saw a couple of them, and they turned out so badly for the team that traded all the picks, including and especially the Brooklyn Nets who traded all those things to Boston in 2013, that there was this lull in mega trades.

And then we've seen more in the last like five years than we've seen in the entire history of the NBA combined.

And your column sort of posits, like, and I've written about this too at ESPN, that these trades generally don't work out as well as you would expect for the team acquiring the superstar.

And then you posit after that,

are the Bucs, if they ever decide to even take a freaking phone call on Giannis, and I'm not sure they have yet,

are they going to face a climate of conservatism from teams who have seen a lot of those trades kind of blow up in the faces of the teams who made them if and when they decide to

we don't even know like we don't know if yannis is ever going to actually ask for a trade we don't the bucks might buy the bucks might go the other way and buy but anyway hovering over all that is the oklahoma city question of like teams asking themselves, how close are we actually

to taking on this team now? Like, are we even going to get that much closer if we make a mega trade like this? And I will start by asking you this:

the group chat folks did their annual championship pie episode last week where they give teams percentages of the championship pie, and they topped out with about 40% championship equity for Oklahoma City,

which by definition means they're taking the field over Oklahoma City.

Howard Beck, now a week later, a million blowouts later, Oklahoma City or the field? What's the correct answer?

What flavor is that pie that the group chat folks give out? Seems like an important consideration.

When I thought about this during the summer,

24 Oklahoma City wins against one loss ago.

I was kind of in the camp of, I wasn't kind of in the camp.

We had to do our preseason predictions, and I think I went nuggets over Cavaliers Cavaliers or something like that because the preseason predictions are dumb anyway, and who cares?

But my feeling is, and I think a lot of folks felt this at least a couple months ago: you take the field because we're living in a time of immense parity,

seven, eight, champions in eight years, or whatever, wherever we're at in this whole thing. It's hard to repeat.
It's hard to repeat, even in an era before we had this big era of parody, right?

Like the Spurs were a dynasty that never went back to back.

The Warriors were the first to go back to back since the Lakers three-peat back in the early early 2000s. And it's just hard.
Things catch up to you.

The length of the season and playing deep into June or playing deep into the spring period every year, if you're just a deep playoff team that has gone before you got to the championship, you just, it piles up.

There's fatigue. There's attrition.
Sometimes there's boredom and there's injuries.

And so I took the field. And I said Denver because I thought the team that was best positioned, if anybody was going to do it, it would be the Nuggets.
They had had a nice offseason.

They have the greatest player on the planet, arguably. So that's where I was then, Zach.
As of December 11th,

am I comfortable taking the field over the Thunder right now?

No.

But I still think, look, a lot of season to go.

It's early, and there's still some possibility of, I would never wish the injuries on anybody, obviously, but some combination of injuries, fatigue, boredom may catch up to them.

We can get into the the schedule stuff, right? Like, you know, in theory, they've played a soft schedule. They have the hardest remaining schedule by some of the sites that track this stuff.

I'm not using that as some sort of asterisk on what they've done. What they've done is incredible.
I'm just saying, you know, it's going to get harder.

A lot of the, I looked at every team that's above 600 winning percentage. They've played the Rockets once and beat them.
They beat the Lakers without LeBron.

They beat Minnesota once, but they have not played Denver yet. They haven't played the Knicks, the Pistons, the Spurs, who they will get soon

in a game that will matter in the standings.

The Celtics, weirdly over 600, and the Magic. So,

like,

they'll have better tests to come.

Some tough back-to-backs come up in the next couple of weeks, but like...

I don't know, man. I'm not going to be shocked if that mid-January game at Houston, they're going for the record of, or the record-tying 33rd win in a row.
Would not surprise me.

Yeah, they've played the easiest schedule in the league by far.

Part of the reason that is, is because they don't have to play the 24-1 Oklahoma City Thunder, who by playing them, your opponent winning percentage skyrockets like three points just from playing the Thunder one night.

And they're blowing the shit out of everybody. I mean, there's just no,

there's no way around it.

You know,

yes, they play the Spurs three times between now and

actually four times now.

Four times between now and that Rockets game, they play the Spurs. They also have an at-Minnesota game and Minnesota has played them tough and that game's a back-to-back.
That's on December 19th.

I'm circling that one. That's an interesting one.
I don't think they get to 33. I just think it's too hard.
There's, I we went through the tough games. I think it's too hard.

I do think they're going to get past 70. And if you asked me right now, are they going to get to 73? I would say yes.

I mean, the bad teams, the mediocre to bad teams, like half the league just has absolutely no chance, like zero chance against a fully loaded Thunder team.

Like there's no universe in which, oh, wow, the,

you know, the pick a team, I don't know, the Hornets got hot tonight and beat the Thunder. Like, there's just, it's just not possible.

To answer my question,

the answer should always be the field if it's one team against the field just because of injuries, but that's a cop-out.

I'm taking Oklahoma City over the field at this point. I'm giving them over a 50% chance of the championship pie.
I just think they're so good.

And to me, the field, the field really might only be Denver. At this point, Denver is the only team I can see beating the Thunder four times in seven games, even having a chance to do it.

Houston is interesting because they are so different. And I do think you have to have a thing,

a thing that you do, a unique, unusual thing.

to have any if you just play like standard spread pick and roll we shoot some threes or a pretty good defensive team like they're just better than you at all that stuff.

Houston has the offensive rebounding physicality, toughness, also the trade assets to get Giannis. We'll talk about that.
That's their thing. Denver has Jokic.

That's their thing. A guy who can slow the game down, control every single possession, and actually outplay the Thunders' best player.

The Lakers, who are 17 and 7, theoretically have their thing of Luca plus Reeves plus LeBron, three chess masters, including maybe the best pick and roll player in in the entire league, and Luca, who's averaging a million points a game, slow it down, play off basketball, were unbeatable in close games.

I think last night we saw why this team is ranked 21st in defense and what quickness and speed can do to them. And the Thunder are overflowing with quickness and speed.
The East, forget it.

None of these teams have a shot against the Thunder. It's over.
Forget it.

Whether that should factor into their decisions on Giannis and other trades, we'll TBD that one. We'll talk about it later.
I think Denver is the only team.

And if Denver is the only team with maybe a sliver of Houston, then I'm taking the Thunder over the field and I'm not even really thinking that hard about it. And I'm not using injuries as a cop out.

The Thunder are that good.

The only other factor is the one we've already kind of like alluded to loosely, right? When I talked, you know, injury, fatigue, boredom.

The other one is somebody's going to make a big trade, potentially, maybe.

Giannis or something else, right? We didn't know when last season started that the Warriors would end up with Jimmy Butler.

You know, these, these kinds of things, like, and that obviously didn't change things in the West or in the postseason that much, did for the Warriors. But maybe there's another trade.

Maybe there's a couple of trades.

One of the things I'm curious about, and

we often analogize at a time like this, and we already have Thunder to the Warriors of 17, 18 or that KD era.

There was a moment there during that time, Zach, where, and I think you and I both talked about this, we wrote about this.

Were teams just going to bail? Like, like this era is beyond us.

Let's calibrate for getting good when we think the Warriors are going to be on the back side of this because they're not even, we can't catch them. It's impossible.

And that was different because the combination of Kevin Durant and a team that had already won 73 games and a championship before Kevin Durant felt so overwhelming, so unprecedented, and it was

that

maybe it seemed futile to chase them.

This Thunder team, like there is a relentlessness to them and an almost an unbeatability.

They're impervious to everything, but the Thunder don't feel overwhelming from a sheer talent perspective in the same way, right? This is not downgrading their talent. This is just to say that

Shay, hold on.

Shea, young Jalen, who's still on the way up, and Chet, who's still on the way up, right?

That three, when they all are at their peak at the same time, then we can talk about them next to Steph and Katie, next to each other at their peak. Okay.

Those two are top 10 players all time. I'm just saying, those are two guys who were both MVPs on their own and then joined forces.
The Thunder are younger in this cycle, Zach.

This is not downgrading their talent. I'm just saying

the Thunder compared to what the Warriors were at that time. The Warriors, we have talked about them as being maybe the best team ever.

So in talent alone,

that team felt like you just, there was nothing you were going to be able to do with them. The Thunder, based on their record this season and their championship in the rear view, do have

that sense to them a little bit. I don't think it's the same as Peak Peak Steph and Pete KD on the same team yet.
I mean,

there's some fairness to that.

And obviously their championship run last year, you know, when you could slow them down and get them in a mucky half-court game, their offense and limit your own turnovers so they can't get as many transition points as they usually get.

You could rein them in. You could rope them in a little bit.

The Nuggets did it with a depleted roster, took them to seven. The Pacers had them

in a game seven that looked like it was going to be super competitive. This is a better team, a different team.
All these guys are getting better.

And I think the counter to your point would be, Shay's the MVP.

J-Doug made all-NBA last year.

That means he's a top 15 player. Chet Holmgren is playing like an all-NBA player right now.

If they have three of the top 15 players, we can quibble about, well, they don't have the Steph KD duo at the top, but that's like pretty much as good of a top end talent as you could have.

Now, I don't want to belabor this, though. I don't, I don't, um,

uh, and you mentioned buying, teams buying to try to,

so, so this, this idea, I hated the idea that, well, it's futile. We're just going to give up for a few years.
And I will always respect Daryl Maury for being like, I neglected to mention.

Fuck the Rockets were the one team that said we're in. We're going for it because if you're built to win now, there's no sense in waiting.
Like, it's not going to get any easier against the Thunder.

And you can't predict when the Thunder will take an injury, will you know get crippled by the luxury tax if they ever do if you if you have a roster of like the knicks are built to win right now right that their roster is built to win right now the cavaliers the nuggets like there's no sense in in now there are other teams like houston and san antonio who i think have more interesting decisions to make about how aggressive to be now versus later how close are we now is it worth the upgrade uh at the cost of our future we'll get there but i just don't think i don't think that should ever be part of the equation if your roster is generally sort of built with guys in their primes.

Look, man, I'm still taking the field. Oh, buying.

I think the Lakers are like, there's been this like dichotomy of either the Lakers stand pat or they try to make some crazy Giannis trade that involves Reeves and all their picks.

I don't, I think there's a middle ground where the Lakers, there's some buzz about, you know, could they sort of make a fringy trade to try to upgrade their roster?

I think this, as this new ownership comes in, I think they're trying to maximize this team. I don't think they have enough to get Giannis, but I'm just throwing that out there.

Yeah, I don't, I mean,

they're just ridiculous. And I think they're going to get to 73.
I don't think they're going to get to 33.

And if they get into the 70s,

the MVP race is over. Like, I don't really care what the numbers are.
I mean, Shea Gildis Alexander right now is averaging

33 points a game, six and a half assists, four and a half rebounds. He's shooting 56%,

45% on threes,

60% on twos.

He is 36, 35 of 66 on step back threes this year, according to Second Spectrum. He's going to blow away.
He's honed that shot into an unguardable weapon.

And just like last year, he is neck and neck with Joker in enough of the advanced stats that Joker always wins. Like he's ahead of him and estimated plus minus right now.

You can go look at win shares and bip him and schnip him and schnorps and all this stuff. Like it's not just Jokic is the undisputed king of all of them anymore.

SGA is ahead of him in a couple neck and neck. And the wins are dispositive.
The wins at a certain level, like I picked Shea as MVP last year.

The wins are dispositive. If you win 20 more games than any other team and you're easily the best player on the team, and you're the offensive engine of the team, you win the MVP.

The race will be over at this rate.

I made this same point, I think, a little less emphatically, but I think I made this point to Michael Pino recently when we were doing the real ones together, which is just that, because we were talking about his, you know, he had the column on quarter season awards and all that.

I think we all just have these debates every year, and we certainly did like the year that Russell Westbrook won MVP and a little bit with one of Jokic's years about how, you know, how much the wins weigh in, how much the standings weigh in.

And we all have a different way to kind of calibrate that, right? But the bottom line is when it's, and like, what was it, like a 17 win difference or whatever last season? At a certain point,

the gap in wins, the success of your team is so huge that, yes, and I voted for Shea over Jokic last year.

If this keeps up this season,

you know, individual stats are nice. Advanced stats are nice.
On-off stats, all the other stuff that we can apply because we have a gazillion numbers at our disposal in this stage of the 21st century.

But at the end of the day, like MVP, it's about what you did for your team and how much it mattered for your team and how great your team was. And

the team success matters. And the Thunderer, if they cross the 70 mark, I do have one question for you about the 70 mark, which is this.

I believe the Warriors have said in various ways over the years, not that they regret going for it, but that it took a lot out of them to go for the record. And I do wonder, Sam Presti, super smart.

They are a team that I think would err on the side of being, in general, not with regard to the record, but in general, err on the side of being conservative.

They took a long time for Jalen Williams to come back into the lineup after his wrist surgery.

Is there a point where they may organizationally tap the brakes a little bit just to say, like, we have bigger goals in mind. Let's not expend ourselves.

Now, there's also super young and super deep, so it may not even matter, but I just wonder. Tap the brakes.
They haven't even gone over the speed limit yet this season, and they're 24 and one. Fair.

Like Lou Dort has missed seemingly half the games. Caruso is on this sort of play whatever plan for the second straight year.
Like that is the scary thing. They're not taxing themselves at all.

And you're right that the Warriors did have this sort of internal discussion of,

do we want this? Do we want it at the potential expense of injuries, fatigue, mental wear and tear, whatever? And they admirably, I think, decided that, yeah, we want it.

We want to go for the whole thing. We want to go for this.
It's not the reason they lost the championship either. That's just purely on Draymond, you know, punching LeBron in the nuts.

And I think, and I admired that, and I think Oklahoma City should want it.

I think when you have a chance to stamp yourself in a way that is a maybe, well, I was going to say once in a lifetime, who knows how many games they'll win next year.

But if they can, if they can try to get everything, 73 wins, a championship, the Emirates Cup.

Don't forget, no team has ever won won in the illustrious history of the Emirates Cup, the Cup and the Championship in the same year. If they can get it all, then by God, they should go for it.

Because what else are we doing this for? And I don't mean play Shea 45 minutes a game. They don't have to.
Like,

they're already doing it. A couple of things on the MVP.

Look, I think Jokic is the best player in the league. I think if you ask me and 30 GMs, you have to win one game for the fate of the universe.
Who's your first pick? I think 27 of 30 are taking Jokic.

Just size, size, size, size.

The other thing that you mentioned, though, with regard to that Warriors team with Durant and Steph and Durant and the top end talent and how unbeatable they were.

And for a year and a half, they were. And then they, you know, got a little vulnerable.
The thing this team has that that team kind of had, but not at this level is the defense.

Like, they're so much better than everybody else defensively. The Warriors were an elite defensive team.
Draymond will remind you of that every other podcast episode, as he should, as he should.

But this team is on a different level. And I think if you're going to make an MVP case for SGA, that is not just the wins are dispositive, it's that he is a part of that.

He is not the guy that is protected by the rest of the defensive infrastructure. Now, is he spared the most taxing assignments for the most part? Sure.

But you watched them play the Warriors a couple weeks ago. He's guarding Jimmy Butler.
That's his primary assignment. Then he switches over to Kaminga.

Last night against the Suns, Grayson Allen is their number one creator in a lot of lineups without Devin Booker. He was guarding Grayson Allen.
Like he's a he's at the rim challenging shots.

He's getting steals. He's not a weak link.
He's a strong link in a strong chain. And I think that matters vis-a-vis Jokic.
Okay.

Yeah, I don't know. But here's an interesting thing that's burbling up about the Thunder.

The cool thing about these cup games is that the rest of the league is off and watching them. So I'm going to read you a couple of texts I got last night.
This one is from a coach.

You have probably addressed this one before, but it's just an observation. OKC is a super efficient robotic team.
Factory-like efficiency. Not much flair or fun.
Again, this is an NBA coach.

Even Shea, their best player by far. But there are a lot of other guys in the league I would rather watch from a fun point of view.
This is so unfair to say because they are a great team.

And then I had another front office person text me.

I know I've consistently said to you that championship windows are never as long as you think, but I'm honestly not sure what could close the thunder window aside from catastrophic injury.

This is unbelievable. And I quote these two texts to you because this is what's coming into me during these games.
And there's a hint, there's a hint, and you can see it starting to come up of:

is this

potential dynasty,

quote, boring in a sort of Duncany Spurs kind of way?

Is Shay,

quote unquote, boring as a face-of-the-league superstar compared to Anthony Edwards or Donovan Mitchell or, you know, pick your guy?

And I do think the more they win, the more we're going to start to hear stuff like this. And I just wanted your reaction to it.
Yeah.

I had also had an exchange with the coach last night where when I said, can anybody beat them? His response was

serious answer, colon, capital N.O.

Um, and by the way, the championship window text from the front office is obviously referring implied is the Clippers pick that's coming to them, the Sixers pick that's coming to them, the possibility that they have multiple lottery picks in a loaded draft.

Fucking insane, just absolutely insane. Uh, somebody should just gift the Clippers some players just to get them out of that top five slot in the lottery.
Um,

it's funny because the Spurs, look, Sam Presty is a Spurs disciple.

Sam Presti runs the Thunder in a very, in a lot of ways, as the Spurs were run for many years under Pop and R.C. Buford.

And

it's too simple to just say, like, that's the analogy, and why the Thunder may remind us of the Spurs in terms of just them being robotic, which was the word you used, methodical, efficient,

dominant in a way that is less flashy than it is just lethal.

And that's what they are.

Mono Ginoblu was a really fun player to watch and had a personality to go with it. Tim Duncan, all his teammates would tell you that he was hilarious and great behind the scenes.

He just was never going to show his personality to us. But that's where the Thunder analogy kind of is on the personality level, right? Like, listen, like the NBA,

throughout its history, we talk about the most compelling figures. Sometimes it's because they're dominant, but sometimes it's because they're just compelling compelling figures.

Larry Bird was a colossal trash talker, and Magic Johnson had this wonderful smile and joy about him, and Michael Jordan was a fucking killer, and you know, Scotty Pippen's grace and Dennis Rodman's eccentricity, and Steph's joy, and whatever.

Shaq's fierce dominance, but also his playfulness. Like the personalities matter in this league, Zach.
Like it does. And so the Spurs would start to get kind of sensitive about, oh, we're not boring.

We're not whatever.

But you kind of are, and you kind of are by design. And I think the Thunder are almost, if not by design, they definitely have gone for players who

are high in character, high in professionalism, high in commitment and work ethic. And these are all admirable, wonderful things.
And it's why they are so fucking great.

And at times, you might see a little bit of fun peek out too, right? Like, you know, there's a little personality pops out here and there, but not a whole lot.

They don't do a whole lot of extra media. They do what they have to do by the rule book, and that's pretty much it.
So you're not learning about enough or much about them.

And so they just go about their business. And if you are a professional basketball franchise that simply wants to win professional basketball games, this is the platonic ideal.

I think for purposes of fans, for the league, for what's marketable, it starts to reek of the old Spurs where it was like, it's not just that they're small market.

The market size doesn't matter if you're fun. Like the Westbrook, Durant, Harden Thunder were super interesting and potentially combustible.
And Russ is a huge freaking personality.

So you can win, as Sam Pressy has done before, with a more personality-laden, but also Egan-laden team. And that one did not stay together for lots of reasons.
So I don't know.

It's a mixed bag.

But I do think that

ultimately, for purposes of how we perceive them, it'll be interesting just to see how it unfolds.

Do they start to come out of their shells more or be more giving of their personalities publicly as they win more and feel like, you know what, we don't have to be this self-contained to win.

We can win and be ourselves, or maybe theirselves are just kind of self-contained.

Maybe the most personality we're ever going to see is the three stars singing along to what a girl wants in a phone commercial.

I'm the wrong person to ask this kind of thing to, and I fully acknowledge that. I'm too deep in the weeds.
I love great basketball. They play great basketball.
I love great defense.

Their defense is beyond hellacious. I also think they have a little edge to them that they don't get enough credit for.
Like Chet,

Chet's got some edge. Chet will hit some people.
He'll throw some elbows. He'll sneer a little bit.

And when he and Grayson Allen had that collision last night, Jay Dubbs over there revving up the crowd. Like, I thought that was cool.

I think they're a little more, I think they're a little more fun than this conversation suggests. um

i i i mean like to to me the question is like

i i i don't like i get what people say about the efficiency of the way they play and like how how ball dominant shea is he's been compared to harden here and there and and harden became kind of hard to watch by the end of his peak peak houston i'm just doing everything i had every possession although he's still kind of doing that uh for the clippers i don't know i think they're i think they're fun to watch in in in this way for sure

Dominance is always interesting.

And you have been on the train of,

you know,

is too much parody bad for the league? Not bad, but fans gravitate toward dominance. They want to see dominance at its highest level, and they eventually want to see dominance challenged and toppled.

And

I don't, I don't, like, at some point, every juggernaut, every team this good,

if they stay this good and win multiple champions, championships, they become a little bit of a villain just because they're the team every fan base is chasing.

They're the team every fan base decides. Like it happened to the Cowboys in football in the 90s.
Like everyone, once you're on top, everyone decides.

And I don't mean a villain like LeBron goes to Miami the way he did with the decision and they become like a true black hat villain that everyone cheers against for reasons other than their dominance.

They didn't even win the first year, obviously. I mean, a traditional, like, even by the end, I like, I don't think the Jordan Bulls became villains because everybody loved Michael so much.

But for me, like, I cheered for the Jazz in 1997. I cheered for the Jazz in 1998.
I just wanted someone to beat the Bulls.

And I think the more dominant they are, the more they could pick up interest in sort of that sense of just becoming the juggernaut powerhouse everybody is aiming for.

And we haven't had a team really sustain that since the Warriors.

And this is a younger team that I don't think will have a defection like Durant leaving the Warriors after just three seasons and all of that.

I think that could be the way they pick up national interest. Villainy.
I'm saying let's lean into villainy.

Dynasties are polarizing because you're either all in on cheering for them or you're tired of them or you think they're too good. They need to be taken down, right? So, you know,

I don't remember like in the 90s, like the Bulls went six out of eight. And in between, of course, Jordan, you know, retires and plays baseball for a little bit.

But yeah, I don't remember anybody ever saying they were sick of the Bulls or wanted somebody to take them down.

I'm sure there are a lot of people like you who end up rooting for the Jazz in the last couple of seasons or, you know, for, you know, maybe the Suns one year or whatever. Like, I think.

I think they were so admired.

Michael's charisma was so just overpowering that if you weren't a hardcore fan of like the Knicks or the Pacers or someone else, you were just rooting for Michael by default. I was.

That was before my NBA reporting journalism career. I was just a fan back then.
Like, I freaking loved watching the Bulls.

The Warriors were really, really lovable on the come up.

And then they got KD and then they became villains. And they kind of leaned into it a little bit.

And Draymond is really, really good at making himself and everybody around him the villain just by, you know,

guilt by association, I guess.

But there was an inevitability about the Warriors and Warriors versus LeBron every year that made people kind of cranky. So, like, dynasties have both,

there can be a positive and a negative here. Adam Silver's platonic ideal is what we have right now, right?

He's been talking about this for over a decade, going all the way back to the 2011 lockout when he first started saying this. Don't say it.
Don't say it. Don't say well managed.

I don't want to hear it. I have an allergy to the freeze.
Well managed.

So, but he's got it. Like, this is what he always wanted, and they have it.
But there is a downside.

I think we are now far enough into this where we miss dynasties.

And I think the benefit of the Thunder winning back to back would be that, okay, finally, we've got the big bad for people to either root for or against.

They don't have to be bad, you know, big bad, but like some people will start to resent them more because there's nothing resentable about them, right?

Aside from the issue Gildis Alexander a foul merchant stuff, like what is there to dislike about the Thunder? Nothing really.

Well, I was going to say, you've already hit, and again, I don't, I say villainy tongue-in-cheek because there's no, there's no

before and after event like the decision or Durant going during a salary cap spike to the 73 Wooden Warriors that would make you suddenly flip on a team. I mean villainy polarizing personality, right?

Yeah, I mean villainy was like really Shaq Kobe. Like these are guys who people rooted for or against intensely.

I mean villainy in the best sense of earned dominance, earned superiority where everyone is taking aim at you.

That's all I mean. But

I don't even know where I was going with this. Dynasties, I forgot.

Villains, dynasties, dominance. Oh, you mentioned Shea.

They already have the thing where people behind the scenes have been grumbling for a year and a half of the Thunder discovered the hack in the system of we're just going to, I guess, rediscovered it because they're not the first team of we're just going to foul so much.

that we reached a limit where they can't call all the fouls. And because we have so many turnovers, the equation is going to tilt in our favor.
Other teams have since sort of copied that.

And it's gotten even better for them this year because their foul rate has evened out with the league-wide increase in foul rates, and they still have a million turnovers.

So, and there's already that grumbling. But anyway,

that's the OKC part of it. And we'll get to the trade landscape.
Let's talk about the other cup semifinal real quickly.

Nick's Magic.

That's a fun game.

Sure. It's a fun game.
I think we've reached the point where, yes, the Magic have to figure out how this all works with Paolo and Franz together. Defensively, we know it can work.

Offensively, they have found a zip and a formula playing these three guard lineups plus one of Paolo and Franz plus one of their centers. Well, how does that translate when they're both on the floor?

And they just keep getting snake bitten with one goes out, one goes back, one goes out again, and they're just one is only healthy at the same time.

But despite all that, I think we can say with Bain playing like this, Anthony Black playing like this, these are two teams who can make the NBA finals.

The Knicks were my pick to come out of the East at the beginning of the season. They're second in the standings, but they're playing like a team that can make the finals.

The Magic, I think, have earned their way back into the conversation. The Magic are 11th in offense, 5th in defense, 8th in net rating.

The Knicks are third in offense, 9th in defense, and 3rd in net rating tied with the Nuggets. Ninth in defense should really scare the rest of the league because offensively, this team is legit.

And the the thing I'm watching every game now is Mike Brown made the decision, we're starting Josh Hart.

We're going back to last year starting five, which was a polarizing lineup because in the regular season, it was just okay. It was plus like some nominal amount.
In the playoffs, it was very bad.

And there was some like, do we need, do we need more spacing? Should Deuce McBride start?

Then they started Mitchell Robinson and Kat together at the beginning of the season and went back to Josh Hart. Well, right now, that lineup is blowing the doors off of everybody.

They're plus 40 in 59 minutes.

And one of the reasons they're blowing the doors off of everybody is Josh Hart is playing the best basketball of his life and kind of single-handedly beating this scheme that teams are using of putting their centers on him and their and a wing on cat to chase cat off the three-point arc, something teams have been doing since this team, this Knicks team got Carl Anthony Towns.

Josh Hart's shooting almost 40% from three. He's driving closeouts.
He made Jakob Perta look like he was on skates in the quarterfinals against the Raptors.

So I'm just sort of monitoring that because that's the model of this Knicks team: the Ananobi back healthy. And holy shit, is that guy playing at a first-team all-defense level this year?

Hart, Bridges playing more aggressively on offense.

That wing combination protecting Brunson and Kat up the middle on defense to the point that the defense is just good enough that the offense carries the day.

And that's what's happening for them so far. They're playing great.
They're 17 and seven. They dominated the Raptors.
And so I just, I mean, I'm happy.

If I'm a fan of either of these teams, health issues aside for the Magic, I'm happy where I am a third into the season.

And I'm excited to watch them play because I suspect the Magic will put Wendell Carter Jr. on Josh Hart now and then.
I suspect, by the way, the Spurs will put Luke Cornette.

If Chet's playing the five, because Hartenstein's hurt, they'll put Luke Cornette on Lou Dort or whoever, as

the Suns tried last night and the Thunder have a million counters for that and it failed. But I don't know.
I just, both these teams, I think, should be pretty happy where they are. For sure.

And especially with regard to like, especially, especially both, especially the magic because of everything they've gone through injury-wise and this kind of tag team of one or the other of their two stars always in.

Bumpy initial couple weeks with Bane trying to figure out his place there. Now that he just, he looks very comfortable and was awesome the other night.

So they've weathered that.

And the Knicks had to weather, you know, basically like, all right, you know, turned over the bench a little, but we've got got a new head coach for the first time in a long time.

And Mike Brown's very different than Tom Thibodeau.

And he's shaking up the offense, and he wants the ball to move a little bit more and a little bit less, you know, ISO Brunson ball. And there have been some ups and downs there.

And they weren't that great of a defensive team before.

They're getting there now.

There's been a, you know, they, and they weathered a couple of rough weeks there, too, where I think people were starting to wonder. And a lot of cat body language watching and interpreting.

They look like they're in a really great place right now. And

yeah, the fun thing about

where things seem to be headed with the cup, especially for people like me who don't see all that much meaning in the cup otherwise, is that we may actually get a finals preview out of this.

Like Thunder versus Knicks, Thunder versus Magic, those are both absolutely plausible finals previews that hasn't happened in the Cup yet.

What if the Magic and the Knicks got to combine teams and play the Thunder in the finals? How much better would their chances be?

Anyway,

somebody run that on 2K. I don't have it.
Thunder Knicks was my preseason finals pick, and I'm sticking with it. Okay.

Congratulations to everybody who made the Cup semifinals. Before we talk trades, I have just six or seven quick bullet points.
I just want to say things, and you can react or not react, okay?

Things that are on my mind.

Zach Eady, awesome. Loving every minute of this.
The Grizzlies have played their way back up the standings. John Morant's coming back.
It's interesting. Any reaction?

We had a whole, we did a whole Ewing theory discussion on the real ones this week where we talked about Ja,

among others. Trey was in that conversation as well.
Well, yeah, it's a great year for the Ewing Theory.

Look, the Ewing theory shouldn't even apply to you if you're shooting 36% from the field and 17% from three, because by default, you are hurting your team at that point.

And that's what John Morant is shooting so far this year.

Some people are going to gag as I say this. I want to see what John Morant looks like as he moves back into a lineup that is doing well without him.

I'm always curious about this. I always give everybody benefit of the doubt that guys can evolve and find a different way to be effective.

And if you've got that kind of talent, see what's going well without you and try to pit yourself into it as opposed to trying to rest it back and do things your way. So I'll be curious to see.

Edie looks great. The Chicago Bulls stink

and are, I believe,

9 and 14 now. Yes, 9 and 14.

And they should be prohibited from making a stupid win-now trade at the trade deadline, and they should be prohibited from trading with the Sacramento Kings for at least five years.

Longer, please.

Bullet point number three. And I swear to the basketball gods, I was going to say this on Monday with Tim Legler, and I just forgot.

And then it happened in the Magic, who did the Magic, the Magic Heat game in the quarterfinals.

What the fuck is going on with the clocks in these games? Like every third game I watch, there are clock malfunctions. What, did they change the technology?

Why are we, it's, I swear to God, it seems like every third or fourth game, there's a delay, the shot clock's not working, the ref has to stop play four consecutive times because they can't figure it out.

Then they turn it off, then they have the announcer having to act like a ding bat being like 10 seconds, five, four, like at a high school game. What is going on with the clocks?

It's driving me crazy. Get the clocks right.
This is the NBA. Why are we having this issue? There absolutely has been a rash of these lately, and I don't understand it.

I'm just going to say it's AI. Let's blame AI.
Pablo Torrey, can you find out about that?

Find out why I have to sit there and be like, all right, here's a seven-minute delay because the fucking clock doesn't work, and I'm going to have to factor in an inevitable seven-minute delay because of some stupid challenge review at the end of the game.

Get the games moving. Two things that are embarrassing for the NBA, that in the year 2025, we have this happening at all, much less this often, and the cup courts that are too slippery.

Like, you just can't.

that's my next bullet point two out of the four uh games in the quarterfinals didn't even use their cup courts so let's not have the cup courts anymore if they don't work orlando didn't use theirs and the lakers didn't use theirs and maybe the players are being paranoid but maybe they're not this is their thing to judge and with the magic i don't think it was a player thing i think there's something happened with the court but if we're gonna if we're just not even gonna use them

Half the teams aren't going to use them in the biggest games of the tournament. Let's just not have, let's go a different direction with the courts.

Did you watch the

Raptors Knicks quarterfinal game? Yes.

Sideline reporter for that game on NBC, I believe, JD Dyer,

brought a British accent to the game. And I have to tell you, I'm very stupid.
I realize this is very stupid. Immediately classed up the entire NBA experience.

I thought I was like watching a Premier League, a fixture or something in the Premier League. Delightful.
I loved everything about it. I felt like I was watching a a different league.

It just an accent on a sideline reporter made me enjoy the game even more. Absolutely delightful.
I'd never heard of him before, but he was fantastic. And not just because of the accent.

He did a great job, but like, yeah, the accent. It classes the join up.
We love it. More British accents in the NBA would be wonderful.

Okay, three big man issues other than Zach Edie that I'm monitoring.

Joelle and Bede.

I'm just, I'm getting, I'm getting worried. Like, I've been worried.
You and I have argued about how worried we should be. Like, it's not, it's not going great.

And the last time we saw him, he shot four of 21 from the floor.

And then two other things. I mentioned the Knicks starting five.
There's been a few games recently where Kat and Mitchell Robinson have not shared the floor together at all.

And there have been some games recently in Miami where Bam Auto Bio and Khalel Ware have not shared the floor at all. And I think

watching Spolstra and Mike Brown figure out how viable, I mean, we know the Kat Robinson one is viable. How big a part of the rotation does he want it to be? Is it matchup-based

or is it, you know, some games yes, some games no? And in Spo's case, like he's been pretty open about the plus-minus on those numbers, on those lineups this year has not been good.

It was okay last year.

Ware has gotten so good that that's an interesting combination, the conversation to me. So I'm just monitoring that.

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You wrote a great piece on Giannis trades

and the Giannis trade landscape and how

this spate of mega trades mostly gone bad for the teams who forked over their entire futures, even if every trade one by one was perfectly justifiable, headlined by the Clippers trading everything, including SGA.

to unite PG and Kauai.

The two exceptions, as you noted, were Drew Holiday to Milwaukee, netted a championship. Now, that was on the low end of Assets Exchange, I would say.

And then on the high end of assets exchange, Anthony Davis to the Lakers also yielded a championship. And when you make those trades, that's the standard.

Like you either win the championship or you live to regret making the trade. And the Suns have been living with the regret of trading everything.

And I mean everything for Kevin Durant in a win-now move that, you know, they were very good and they lost to Denver in the second round of the playoffs. Denver went on to win the title.

But, you know, and I do think teams have now zoomed out,

looked at the sort of spate of those trades. And I do wonder if, to the point of your piece,

if the Bucks ever get to a point of even entertaining the idea of moving Giannis and or Giannis ever gets to the point of actually asking for a trade instead of having these bizarre semi-leeks about maybe discussing conversations and resolutions up to a certain date and we're going to table it and put it on a committee list of things and agenda items.

If they do meet a sort of more cautious atmosphere than you might expect for a player of Giannis' caliber, a no-brainer first-team all NBA player who is 31, not 34 like Kevin Durant when he was traded to Phoenix, 31, but

has some injury issues, including right now, that are concerning. I thought the piece was right on.
I've studied the history of these trades too. There's been a lot of them in the last 10 years, and

some are still TBD, like the Cavs going for Donovan Mitchell.

Larry Markinen, part of that trade, by the way. But I thought it hit the nail on the head because

the landscape, I mean, for AD is a separate thing. If the Mavs trade AD, it's going to be a price point thing.
Some team is just going to be like, the price is right for us. He's a really good player.

We know the health issues. We're not even considering extending him.

We just are happy to trade this amount of outgoing stuff to get him for the two years he has left left on his contract and play that out. And then we'll wash our hands of it.

The honest thing, I do, I think it's a little murky to me, like how frothy the market is going to be. Obviously, the Bucs would get a lot, but

it's a little bit murky to me. I don't know.
Are you hearing the same thing?

Yes, I am. And of the people I talked to, executives around the league while working on that piece,

when I asked about, well, you know, it's hard to get an answer to, you know, why everybody was just so all in for this period of time, right?

Because prior to like, you know, six years ago, 2019 is kind of the inflection point, right?

We had the Nets Celtics deal back in 2013, but there wasn't a lot of all-in deals with a ton of draft capital until 2019 when we get the Paul George one and then everything else that's that's come since that you've already mentioned.

And so we've, we've had this absolutely incredibly frothy market where draft picks, which at times during NBA history are treated like gold and times they're treated like freaking Halloween candy.

We just went through a six-year run here where they were Halloween candy and everybody's just giving them out and not even thinking twice about it.

And it's the most of these kinds of trades we've ever seen in any span of the NBA and maybe the more all of NBA history combined.

I actually went to the NBA at one point during the course of this researching this story saying, hey, do you guys have like a list?

Can you give me like every deal that's ever involved at least three first-round picks or more? plus swaps and whatever else. They don't even have it themselves.

I wish they tracked it. So I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty damn sure anyway.
This is the most. So what I asked people was: are we on the other end of this now?

Has there been enough buyers' remorse, enough of these blowing up in people's faces that teams will be more cautious, whether it's Giannis or whatever the next one is?

This is not specific to the Bucks and Giannis. This is just the tenor of the NBA right now.

And yeah, the answer I got was yes,

we think, we team executives in various places, think it'll be a more conservative environment now because of that. But you and I both know, like, what's the one

immutable law of the NBA? It only takes one.

It only takes one team to overspend on a free agent, only takes one team to and screw up the market, only takes one team to go all in when you don't expect it.

But even when we look at the landscape of teams that could be in on Giannis,

I think all of them have either have limits in what they can do draft capital-wise, like the Knicks, or they're teams that have a pretty good path going, even if they don't get Giannis.

And you can make the argument, as insane as it seems, to pass up on the possibility of getting a 31-year-old two-time MVP who's still a perennial MVP candidate, often injured as he may be, or at least consistently.

You can make the argument for some of these teams that, you know what,

we're doing pretty well otherwise, and mortgaging our future and the ability to build on

what we have already got might not be the logical move.

And so, yeah, I think the unfortunately for the Bucs, I think if they come to that point, they may get less than what we saw even for like Desmond Bain and Mikhail Bridges and in draft capital specifically.

Well, and this is why the thunder hover over all this, because one of the calculations you have to make as a team with the assets to go get a guy like Giannis is, are we already close to being able to make the finals and or win the title?

And that can cut both ways. It can cut towards making a trade because you're that close and you think it gets you over the top, or it could cut the other way.

And you say, Well, we're already a favorite, one of the favorites, and this is going to cost us so much of our prime age players and our picks that the 2%, 5% increase in title odds, although incredibly valuable and the hardest 5% to get, is not worth the cost to us.

And this is why, like, I always go back to, I've always been conservative to a fault, to, and I admit it, to a fault, trading up in star age.

And I remember in 2019, I argued that the Celtics should be very cautious about trading for Kawhi Leonard.

And I even wrote then that Jalen Brown, who would be the centerpiece in that trade, could one day become like 90% of Kawhi Leonard.

And I was completely mocked when the Raptors did trade for Kawhi Leonard and won the NBA championship. Lo and behold, Jalen Brown's become pretty goddamn good.

I was very like not optimistic about the Celtics in 2022 trading Jalen Brown for Kevin Durant. for the exact same reason.
I thought the Celtics were already favorites to win the East or thereabouts.

And the argument was, well, this will take us from small favorites to big favorites.

And I was like, I don't think that's worth like Jalen Brown and Derek White and three first-round picks or whatever it is. I've always been too cautious.
I admit, I'm too cautious.

I didn't like the Durant trade for Phoenix, but that is, I'm always a little too cautious.

So I may be, again, on the

extreme of that continuum, but I think it's

the thunder part of it is

I don't really know what to make of of it because every team might conclude we're actually just not close enough at all

that Giannis doesn't close the gap enough, or maybe we need to take a gigantic swing to be close at all. And this is the swing that we have to take.

I don't know which way it goes, and it's going to be different for every team. Now, the other interesting thing hovering over all of this, Howard Beck,

relative to one particular team, is that the tanking landscape has shifted a little bit in the last two weeks. Washington is 3-19.

New Orleans is 3-22.

Then there's a three-win gap up to one, two, three, four, five. Like nine teams have won between six and nine games.

So in other words, Washington and New Orleans have separated themselves a little bit from the pack. Now, that could change.

We've already seen like Indiana is playing better now that they have some of their players healthy. Brooklyn has won some games.

Noah Clowney's been playing great and their young guys have started to show some flashes.

So maybe, you know, particularly the Pelicans, if Zion ever gets healthy and Queen keeps playing like this, maybe they play themselves into that, you know,

six to 10 win group right now. Maybe a team like the Kings falls back into the Washington, New Orleans phase.

But let's just say that you're projecting where the Pelicans are going to pick in the draft. Right now,

they have the worst record in the NBA, and they're one of the two worst records in the NBA by a non-trivial margin.

If they finish with the second worst record in the NBA, that pick is guaranteed to be in the top six. Guaranteed.
No chance it falls lower than six and a 52% chance it's in the top four.

It's relevant because obviously the Atlanta Hawks hold the rights to that pick in the trade for Derrick Queen, where the Pelicans traded the rights to Ace Newell, and that pick unprotected the best of the Pelicans and Bucks picks to the Hawks for Queen.

And now, Howard Beck, Derek Queen is balling out, balling out.

And I hear from people around the league who you can't have it both ways.

You can't be excited about Derrick Queen, the player, who looks like one of these big guys who, and I don't want to say the J word, people should not say the J word about any young big guy, but one of these big guys who can get where he wants to go offensively.

And that's what makes the Jokic Shingoon archetype so hard to guard: it's not just that they're great passers and creative players.

It's that they can take their body and get you from the foul line to the rim and draw help along the way. And he looks like you do that.

Well, I've heard you, while you can't be optimistic about Queen and still think the trade was a bad trade.

And as Bill Simmons tweeted, he needs a support group because he feels both these things at once. You absolutely can be optimistic about Derrick Queen and feel like the trade was a bad trade.

And by the way, love Derrick Queen. His two-man game with Trey Murphy III.
Awesome. Like, love everything about him.

You're telling me that Atlanta wouldn't have done that pick if you slapped top two protection on it. You're telling me Atlanta wouldn't have done that

trade rather if you just traded that pick and not number 23 as well. Like there are other things you could do to make the value proposition better, but that is where we have ended up.

And I bring this up because Atlanta has that pick. And Atlanta, because they have that pick and because they own a piece of Milwaukee's 2027 pick, is kind of still my favorite Giannis team.

And

if you map out what a trade would look like,

if I'm the Hawks, I go to them and like, this is, I've pitched this trade before, Trey Young and Reese.

Yes.

I've got my answer to the Trey Young question. This is the answer to it.
And I, instead of,

like, that pick is so valuable that I wonder if they could go to the Bucs and say, hey, right now, we're not not going to give you the pick out right,

but right now we Atlanta have the choice of we get the better of New Orleans's pick and your pick. How about we just flip-flop?

You get the better of the picks, we get the second one, and because you're trading Giannis, you're probably going to be in the lottery.

So at least we feel like we're going to get a lottery pick out of it, but you get the best one that is legal. I checked around.
They can do that. That's interesting to me.

And the Hawks then would have a starting five of Alexander Walker, Daniels, Jalen Johnson, Giannis, a Kongwu, and their bench would be more or less what it is right now.

Given that Trey Young's not playing, it almost becomes a one-for-one in terms of present-day talent, Reese out, Giannis in. To me, that's the most interesting one of a team that right now

is not, I don't think, a title contender, even in the weak East, to they vault up to, ooh. That's interesting.
And yeah, we've got to figure out the Jalen Johnson, Giannis fit and all that.

But that's really interesting. And

it makes us really interesting for the next three or four years in a way that waiting on the player we draft with that pick will not be. And maybe we can keep half the pick.
I don't know.

That's an interesting one to me.

Very interesting.

I'm going to get back to that in a second.

I just want to know: one of the reasons why teams are going to get more conservative now is because the second Apron era has made everybody's finances really tight.

And cost-controlled rookies on five-year deals are really valuable. And then that's part of this too.

I love your idea of them being able to offer the, you know, they've got the swap rights, Bucs and Pells,

where,

you know, the Bucs will get the hire of it and the Hawks will still come out of it with a nice pick, no matter how that goes. I think if you're the Bucs,

the trouble with that one is that

Like we don't know what if the Pelicans just get on a tear later this season and what if the Bucs are respectable and or what if the lottery balls just don't bounce your way?

And both those picks end up becoming like still top 10 picks, but not top four. Like there are, there are, there are variables here where, you know, the, the end, the NBA season is unpredictable.

You just don't know when someone's going to get on a hot streak or somebody else collapses and it, and it, and it benefits you. And the and the ping pong balls bounce funny ways.

So, yes, guaranteed top six pick right now, that Pell's pick that the Hawks have control of, but may not be the case later.

And so as an in-season trade, if you're doing this in season, if you're trading Giannis at all, and if you're doing it in season, that part of it is dicey.

If you're the Bucs, of course, the first thing is we want Jalen Johnson and then the Hawks hang up.

And then you get them back on the phone and you say, okay, Young and Reese, cool, but we also want Dyson Daniels and the Hawks probably hang up again, just not quite as quickly.

And same thing with Alexander Walker. Like if you're the Hawks, you are absolutely trying to hold on to those three guys and Okongwu and plug in Giannis.

And they, because of the value of that Pels Bucks swap and the value of,

look, Trey Young, he's not at Giannis' level, but the guy's an all-star caliber talent. He can put butts and seats.
He can win games. He's fun to watch.

Like, that is a good return, along with Zach Reese, a recent number one pick. But yeah, if you're the Bucs, you're probably going to want more picks, right?

And the Hawks have other ones they can throw in there.

I am absolutely with you. The Hawks have been and remain, in some configuration like we've just been discussing, the most compelling Giannis suitor, potential Giannis suitor.

I don't know how anybody, I mean, well, I do know, like there are fun Spurs possibilities and everything else.

We shall talk. I think, yeah, the Hawks are the most fun because of the control of that pick.
And yes, we can root for Derek Queen to succeed

and enjoy the hell out of watching his game because

he's an incredibly fun player.

We can do that and simultaneously say that the trade was a bad idea because it's his process over results and the process was bad uh atlanta was also linked to anthony davis and shamstrani's inside pass column the other day at ESPN I'm sure they're looking

he fits a need for them generally I guess

I would I would suspect they have eyes elsewhere too Toronto was also mentioned in that column sure like why not Toronto was on my initial list of Anthony Davis teams long I mean I had like 12 teams clippers bucks like they could the bucks could go the the other way and buy now.

Like, they could try to win and try to help Giannis as another last-ditch effort. And Shams also mentioned Detroit for Anthony Davis.
I don't see that one. And

I'm just not stating my opinion. I've already said I wouldn't do that if I were Detroit, no matter how low the price gets.

I would be surprised based on what I've heard if Detroit has actual real interest in AD, unless the price point gets like laughably low to the point that I don't know why Dallas would do it.

So again, Hawks for Giannis is interesting because of how far it vaults them up the

sort of championship contention hierarchy and

what it does for them the next two or three years. The other teams, let's do Spurs now, Spurs and Rockets.
These two teams are very good right now, particularly the Rockets.

The Spurs are rolling without Wemby. They're going to get Wemby back soon.
This three-guard thing has been completely fine. Fox, Harper, Castle has has not been a log jam at all.

And Castle's game last night against the Lakers was a showcase.

You might not want to put me in these trade conversations if you ever decide to have them about Giannis, because he would be, I think, the logical centerpiece.

And the trade would be something like Castle. And then you got to get up to the money.

So it's like Harrison Barnes, Keldon Johnson, maybe another marginal guy. And I get back Giannis and I got to throw in some of my picks that I own from other teams too.

Does it make them better right now? Absolutely. You start, your top six is incredible.
It makes you better top end. You start Fox, probably Champagne, Vesselle, Giannis, Wembanyama.

You still have Harper coming off the bench, Cornette coming off the bench. Your top six or seven, if you include Champagne, is amazing.
After that, you've really hurt your depth.

You've traded two starters and a borderline six-man of the year candidate in Keldon Johnson, and you become super susceptible to injury. You obviously have lost one of your young guards.

Now you've got three killer lottery picks from the last three drafts in Wemby, Harper, and Castle.

It would be a bold play. It would fit Fox's timetable.
If I'm the Spurs right now, I worry it makes me too thin. I worry Oklahoma City is still better than us by like maybe a lot, maybe not a lot.

And I also just kind of want to see my team. Like I just haven't seen Fox and Wembanyama and Castle and Harper.
I haven't seen what this all looks like. And I want to see it before I do anything.

But it's interesting. And they just have to ask themselves, like, what's the cost? And short term, are we actually good enough?

Because if you're going to do this, you've got to be able to win today, right now.

I know that this is a different era of the Spurs and Spurs leadership. Pop is not the coach anymore.
He's now El Jefe,

as he has dubbed himself. And with that resonance.
I love that. I love that so much.

RC Buford is more over on the business side and like building malls and things and stuff, but like, and they're still around, and it's Brian Wright's show,

but it feels very unspursian

to make an all-in trade, especially an in-season all-in trade. This is a team that like went like decades, I think, without ever making a trade in season.

It would feel very unlike them, Zach.

Also, like, when you, let's contrast the Spurs and the Hawks for a minute. And I know like, like, there's a qualitative difference here, championship or no.
But like, if you're the Hawks,

getting Giannis, and if the only thing you're giving up in terms of your rotation is

Trey and Reese and then the draft capital,

if you're the Hawks, you're like, okay, we've got a ticket to the finals. Not guaranteed, but like the East is wide open.
We think we can make a run to the finals, a place we have not been.

If you're the Spurs

and you still have to think about like, are you even getting to the finals? Because Wemby. and Giannis and everybody else who's left after the trade might not be enough to topple the

I don't know. I think it's a little bit of a different calculation.
And I also think just the sheer number of really great young players that the Spurs have who are on Wemby's timeline.

I don't want to get too caught up in timelines, but you have a long, you know, we talk about how long the Thunder's runway is.

These guys are all great and young and still improving, plus all the draft capital they've got. The Spurs, it's a different version of that.
But Wemby, Castle, Harper, Darren Fox is a

mid-prime vet. He's not old.

Vassell Johnson, like you've got, you've got the right pieces around Wemby to say, we've got a long runway and we'll just rely on internal improvement and maybe a smaller trade somewhere along the way.

It's really tempting. Like, listen, we all love playing with trade machines.
We all love speculating on blockbusters. It's really fun to imagine Giannis and Wemby together.

I'm not entirely sure it's the best move. And again, the Bucs are going to say, give us Castle and Harper, and you're going to hang up.
And then they're going to say, all right, Castle,

I played with Castle, Vessell, and Barnes, which worked salary-wise. If I lose Castle and Vessell,

I mean, Vesselle is so valuable because he's an elite shooter and he's on an OK contract. Like, they, in secondary playmaker,

again, like, it's Giannis, and you want to say, well, it's Giannis. You got to get Giannis.
If it's Vassell

and Castle.

And, you know, I've got a Maverick swap. I've got a King swap and a Friction first round pick.

And I still probably have to get up to the money a little bit. I've just lost, I'm now like a six-player team.
My shooting has dropped off a lot. It's, it's a lot of depth.
And

it's hard. And

I think the Spurs are like, there was all this fretting, not from me. I loved the De'Aaron Fox extension.
I thought, I thought it was fine. Like, I thought he was going to have a big year.

There was all this fretting about timelines and how these three guards can coexist. Now, it's easier for them with Giannis

with Giannis, with Wemby out because there are more touches to go around and all of that. But I think they're in a perfect position to have their cake and eat it too.

They have Fox, who's a veteran, who's tested, and they have a team that's good enough to make the second round of the playoffs.

And who knows if the Thunder and the Nuggets have to play each other in the second round, they could somehow get into the conference finals. That's how good they are.

When Wemby comes back, he can sort of mesh in with this, I think, more pick and roll, more lobs, less, maybe a little bit less just ISO, ISO, ISO from Wemby. He's watching these guards thrive.
And,

you know, Fox eases the learning curve for Harper and Castle now. And then

they can win at a good level now, maybe a really good level, and save all their stuff for later. I think they're in a great spot.
Houston,

I don't think Houston is trading Shengun or Ahmed Thompson in a Giannis trade.

And I might, they might not even put Reed Shepard in. And if that's the case, there's just nothing to discuss here.

Whether they should trade one of those guys is, I think, an interesting question.

It depends a little bit on who else is coming back. If I can get something other than Giannis, like Kuzma, or who else is going out.

But no matter what you do, it's just like if you end up with Giannis, Durant, Jabari Smith, and a center,

it's just a huge team.

A little bit awkward. A lot of questions to answer and just upheaval, like absolute upheaval.
If it's Shingoon, how many double center lineups can I play?

Is that not part of my formula anymore? If it's Ahmed Thompson,

you know, I lose a lot of like perimeter ball handling

and guard defense. It's just, it's a little,

and it, and by the way, if it's, if it's Ahmed Thompson, I'm going to have to include like Finney Smith if he's healthy ever, and maybe another piece in there to make the salary work. Look,

Houston will obviously have some meetings about it internally, but I don't,

it's, it's upheaval. It's, it's upheaval, and it's, it's not as simple as people think.
It's not. I was and they're very, and they're very good right now.

And they have the kind of, like I said, the kind of curveball philosophy that if you're going to take a shot at the Thunder, you got to have a thing that's your thing that could work against them.

And their brutality and offensive rebounding is the thing.

I'm going to make a strained, unfortunate two timelines reference here for a second. The Rockets have locked themselves in the short term into this KD timeline, right?

Where we don't know how many great years he has left, but they can be a contender right now. And contender, you want to put air quotes around it because of the Thunder's existence, that's fine.

But they're a contender right now with KD. And then, whenever he retires in the next probably two, three years, whatever it's going to be, you have

a now more developed Ahmed Thompson and Shangoon and Reed Shepherd and whoever else you've acquired along the way. They've got all these picks.
They've got Suns picks. They've got Nets picks.

So they have the ability to contend at some level right now. And then whenever Durant retires, they're still going to be in really good shape.
And because of that, again, I don't know,

54 million is a really, really hard number to get to. This applies to the AD thing, too.
I spent a shit ton of time trying to do trade machine stuff yesterday using fan spo.

And

I got a lot of those big red X's trying to construct trades to get you to that 54 million. And it requires a lot of bodies.
You almost have to end up going like four for one or five for one, which

creates all kinds of other problems because you have roster minimums. And then are they waving guys? Are they like, you got to get enough, a third or a fourth team involved? It's really complicated.

But the Rockets, in theory, you could offset sending out less in terms of like top end talent by sending them. They've got swap rights to Brooklyn in 2027.
They've got, I think, the Suns 2027 pick.

There's a Dallas Phoenix thing in 2029.

And they've got, I think, most of their own picks that you could justify to the Bucs, we're sending you enough draft capital, valuable draft capital, to offset that we're only sending you the Fred Van Vliet contract and some combination of bodies.

By the way, and Fred Van Vliet has a de facto no-trade clause, just

FYI. Minor thing.
Right. And by the way, he's one of their only large contracts to put in a trade like this

until you get to the guys that you aren't trading. So it's hard.
It's really hard.

I don't like, I think realistically, the Rockets just aren't in this unless there's a way to find a third or fourth team and that team gets somebody or parts of the draft capital and eventually everybody gets whole.

But I just, I think it's really tough. Look, I did all the Giannis fake trades last week.
People can listen to that. Warriors, Raptors, Cavaliers who are not playing all that great.

The two teams left that I want to focus on today are

first the Knicks because Giannis, as everyone knows, is eligible for an extension after this season.

One, he cannot sign with a new team until October, which is a long time to wait with something hovering over your head if you trade the farm for Giannis.

And so he could try to put his thumb on the scale. And again, I don't think the Bucs are taking call.
I don't even think the Bucs are engaging in any of this right now.

And the Knicks were reportedly by Seams over the summer, the place he wanted to go. Unfortunately, the Knicks traded all their picks for Mikhail Bridges, which I think is fine.

The Knicks are a very good team. And the Knicks are the most fascinating one to me because they fit this bill of: wait, are we already good enough to make the finals right now?

And what does that actually mean for us? Does that mean we should stand pat? Or does that mean

if we get to the finals, we'd actually like to win and the honest would help us win? Or is our current formula like

we have a top 10 offensive player in Jalen Brunson and the best shooting center in the league in Cat?

Is this the formula that sort of works well for us even against higher end talent like Oklahoma City?

And

the only trade, like, there's just not even a lot of deals for the Knicks that I'm entertaining if I'm Milwaukee because

like Kat is not doing much for me. And his extension looks that is looming in a couple of years, looks like a potential Anvil.
And these veteran wings are fine, and maybe I can retrade them.

But this idea that I'm going to stay relevant without Giannis is sort of cockamame-y to me because they can't win a goddamn game without Giannis right now.

The only trade that makes sense, and I've done this one before,

is Ananobi and Cat for Giannis and Kuzma. And I'm even going to be friendlier to the Knicks because I think Ananobi is probably a little better than Mikhail Bridges.

And I'm going to say the Knicks negotiated down to Bridges and Cat

for Giannis and Kuzma. And that leaves me with this potential starting five: Brunson,

Hart,

Ananobi,

Giannis,

and Mitchell Robinson. And let's say my bench is mostly the the same.
I keep McBride, I keep Shamut. You know, I get Kuzma coming off the bench.

Is that team

meaningfully better than the current Knicks team?

It might be, but the Giannis, Mitchell Robinson, Josh Hart thing, there's some shooting issues there.

I probably need to get Jericho Sims back because I don't have a backup center unless Huck Horty is really ready for those minutes.

I'm also super now petrified of a Mitchell Robinson injury, like completely undoing my team.

You know,

it's an interesting team because it does up their high-end talent and their ability to pressure the rim.

I'm not convinced that that team is better than the current Knicks team, which is already my pick to make the finals. And

I'm just not sure I'm doing that if I'm the Knicks. I landed in the same place.
And it does nothing for me as John Horst

to leave, not even leave, to get into that. Yeah.

I mean, that's, I mean, every time I've thought about, kicked around Giannis' ideas, and I know like the Knicks, they're involved for all the obvious reasons, including the fact that Giannis apparently is really enamored of New York.

I just, if you're the Bucs, one of the problems with all this, and I addressed this in the story on theringer.com about, you know, all-in trades, we don't even really know what John Horst wants.

And that's something another conversation I was having with executives while researching that story. Like, what do we think he wants? What do we think the Bucs are going to want?

And no one is entirely certain, but given that

they're not completely out of draft capital, but they've got a lot of like encumbered draft capital and they have sent out a lot over the years.

If you don't have Giannis, presumably you're going young. So yes, go get your pick back if you can get it from Atlanta.

Get other people's picks. The Knicks have no picks to trade them.
So I don't know that the Knicks are the most attractive trade partner in the first place.

And if you're getting the Carl Anthony Towns, Bridges, and Filler or whatever for Giannis and Kuzma, which is exactly where I landed yesterday in playing with the trading machine too,

are you keeping Cat and Bridges because you're just going to stay competitive?

Or are you then trying to turn around and flip them somewhere else because you really are going more of a rebuild and going young and trying to get young players and draft picks?

So I don't even know if this is, if they're the right trade partner for the Bucs.

And before anybody says, but if Giannis wants to go there, lest we forget Dame wanted to go to Miami and ended up in Milwaukee. Like teams ultimately are going to do what's best for them.

And if it dovetails what's best for the star, great. If it doesn't,

the team's obligation is to do what sets them up best for a post-superstar future. So I don't know that the Knicks are the best trade partner in this on the Bucs side of it.
To your point,

it's hard.

It's hard to say that it would be a mistake for the Knicks with Jalen Brunson and all the great players they've got around him, that it would somehow be a wrong idea to flip Cat for Giannis.

Giannis is the better player, the more accomplished player. Kat and Bridges, Cat and

the real guy. Right, not right.
It's not some minor.

like, if only the Knicks had some of the draft capital that the Hawks had, you know, then you could say,

but even then, you still have to make up the salary. Like, that, again, this is the problem.
You have to build yourself to the point where all the cap rules are satisfied.

And getting to that 54 million without putting in one of your key players is tough.

If Mitchell Robinson had been averaging 70 games or even 65 games a season for the last five years, you could feel a little bit better about it.

But you have no other bigs

and

you'd lose a ton of shooting with Catton and Bridges going out.

And Giannis is currently injured and has been injured in the playoffs several times.

That's the reality that you just can't

scoot by.

Scoot Henderson, also injured, by the way, still somehow Scoot Henderson still injured. Scoot.

I just don't think that this works for either team, frankly, a Knicks Bucks deal. It doesn't mean it won't happen.
I just, I'm skeptical. I know the one other team you wanted to talk about.

We'll just do it super quick: is Miami. And Miami, to me, falls into the Atlanta bucket of

given that

I'm not good enough now and I'm not sure what my roadmap to being good enough in the next four years is, it's probably worth a swing for me.

Now, I'm going to have to give up where that's just non-negotiable. And so I'll probably have to find a backup big somewhere else.
Maybe it's Jericho Sims.

And so farewell, where, bam, bam, experiment.

I'm going to probably have to give up Hero.

And to get up to the money, I'm going to have to give up something else. And I may actually have to make it a four for two trade where we take Kuzma back because of the money realities.

Does Wiggins have to be involved in that? Well, now I've given up two starters. Can I flip Rozier in the Wiggins spot? We don't even know if we're allowed to trade Rozier.

What the hell is going on with Rozier? It gets complicated, but to me, and I've got, they only have two picks to trade as of now. Could they get the one back they traded for Rosier? I don't know.

Nobody knows. Bobby Marks and Tim Bontems wrote about this yesterday.
But they have some interesting young players.

The guy they just drafted, Jakachunis,

who hasn't played yet,

Jovich, who's out of the rotation, whatever.

You got to love Khalel Ware, and I'm pretty high on Khalel Ware. That's the one where it's like.

I might be in a position where I'm already choosing between Powell and Hero long term, medium term. So trading one is not hurting me that

That's worth it to me, but

I don't think it's worth it to the Bucs. I think they can get a better deal than that.
Probably not.

And the reason I tagged them in the text with you yesterday was just that, again, in doing the Giannis story and talking to people around the league, after New York, Miami was suggested to me as a place that Giannis would really love to land if it's not New York.

And so, again, like where Giannis wants to go is only one piece of this, and it's not going to be determinative necessarily.

It will still come down to what the Bucs can can get from their trade partner. But yeah, it's like, you know,

Hero Wiggins, where, or can you keep wear out of it possibly, but then give them all of your picks. They don't have a lot.
Like, I think they don't have a pick they can trade until 2029.

They can trade two firsts as of now and some swaps.

Yeah, so two firsts and some swaps. And by the way, like, while that doesn't sound spectacular as a draft capital haul,

going back to my story and going back to our discussion of earlier, well, maybe it doesn't take as big of a draft capital hull as it once did.

Again, the Hawks have the ultimate Trump card because they have control of that Bucks Pelican swap. But, you know, maybe two picks and some swaps plus good players, Hero, Wiggins, whatever.

You know, again, I know they're going to demand where. Maybe that's enough, but

it's hard. I also just don't ever underestimate the Heats' aggression, their ambition, and their star chasing.
Like, it would not surprise me if they just found a way

and would do, I i don't want to say whatever it took but would well they are they are the hardest playing best conditioned meanest nastiest did you did you memorize that i don't know i'm just making i maybe i think that's accurate uh the thing about the picks is obviously this is why the the the hawks to me are in the catbird seat is that yeah picks from the team that giannis is going to are not going to be projected to be uh great picks honestly like this may all just be enough this may all just be like he's not going to to get traded.

Like, I don't know what, we don't know what's going to happen. But, Howard Beck, awesome stuff.
Real ones, columns on the ringer.com, occasional appearance, slumming it over on the Zach Lowe Show.

We love you, Howard. I will see you soon at a New York City-based arena, probably, I would say.

Always a pleasure, my friend. Thanks.
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Woke up today.

My wife took our daughter to school. She comes back in.
I think the real field temperature was 15 degrees or something here on the East Coast.

And she said she hates the cold.

And she was like, oh, this weather is just not for humans it's just not fit for humans and i said well who is it fit for and i'm not making this up she said polar bears and i said not today

not today pete alonzo is a baltimore oreole edwin diaz and is an la dodger brandon nimmo is a texas ranger the mets have um not really done anything of note

Now, look, this is a strange thing for me because I am not nearly as emotionally invested in these guys as you have been for the last seven years in Pete's case or whatever years in DS.

I jumped in this well-documented.

Pete Alonso's home run against the Brewers was the moment that crystallized for me that I need to jump back in, that this is still so fun, that somewhere in my blood runs blue and orange, and I need to get back into it.

So I'm sad that they're gone, but I'm not as emotionally attached as you. It's also very strange being a serious analyst from another sport.

I cognitively am aware that these are smart people who surely have a backup plan. And yet my sentimental nature is getting the best of me.
I guess we got to figure out what's happening next.

But this is, I mean, Keith Hernandez is out there being like, I can't remember a time of turmoil like this.

I guess they just decided the team wasn't good enough and needed a complete makeover around Soto and hopefully Lindor. I just don't know what that makeover is going to be.

I'm not going to like, you've seen all the the videos on Instagram and I've heard like Mets people just like, this is worsted Wilpon. This wasn't supposed to happen under Steve Cohen.

These guys are incompetent. Stearns is a freaking nerd who doesn't understand fans at baseball.
I can't get that angry about it until I see what happens.

But it's, it is just whether it's good or bad, it's shocking. And you're probably more shocked than I am.
I'm well, the problem is, is that I'm not

because

if you follow the team closely,

especially since the Cohen era began, and particularly since David Stearns was hired,

you could see this coming.

You could see in the last offseason that Pete Alonzo was not a player that fit the David Stearns profile, that Brandon Nimmo's contract isn't really the kind of thing that David Stearns likes to do, that this core

has been disappointing at best with fits and starts of thrills. And I personally have been going on podcasts for the last last five years and saying, break up this core.

So I can't pretend like this is some shocking or rage-making experience. I think I'm just really disoriented because,

as we've talked about a lot in the last, since we've been doing this,

Pete Alonso is just the player that makes us happy. Edwin Diaz is just the player that makes us happy.
I have built a real relationship to those players.

And sports is about fun, you know, and winning is the most fun. and this team didn't win enough.

But the second most fun thing is having a player or a figure who you really care about and are invested in.

And then the third most important thing to have fun is to get excited about what's coming next.

And it's just hard to feel positive. It's hard to anticipate.
It's hard to be excited.

I think there's a case to be made that this is just a matter of extraordinarily poor timing, that because of the way that this news unfolded in succession with Edwin Diaz, where it seemed as though the Mets got a little bit caught with their pants down against the Dodgers and got a little bit outmaneuvered on Edwin Diaz, followed very quickly within 16 hours of Pete Alonso getting the deal that many people thought he could not get and leaving the team.

And with no, really no moves of note other than Devin Williams made thus far this offseason, which is obviously a downgrade from Edwin Diaz, that we feel as low as we can possibly feel.

I think I'm getting a little nervous that the plan is something much more dramatic. Like, there are a lot of fans who are like, when's Kyle Tucker getting signed?

You know, when are we trading for Scoobel? When is, you know, where's the Cody Bellinger contract?

I'm getting a little depressed because I don't know if I see that coming because I don't think that that's what David Stearns wants.

And so we have to reconcile the loss of the relationship with Diaz and Alonso as players we love.

And then we also have to be nervous about the next one, three, five years of our fandom. And both things are really depressing.
I'm depressed. I think that's where I'm at.
I'm depressed.

It's not sadness, it's depression. So

when you say that's not what David Stearns wants, I read up a little bit on him the last couple of days, how long he's been with the Mets, how he built the brewers, all this kind of stuff.

And obviously, he's talked about run prevention and being disciplined on long-term contracts.

And, you know, he's talked a lot about opening opportunities for guys in the farm system, you know, opening roles for guys in the farm system.

Is what he wants like

Soto and young guys going forward? Like, like all of all of that other stuff, I mean, Soto is only 27, so he's got tons of time left.

But the young guys and bring all the guys up from the minors and open up roles and run prevention sort of flies in the face of, flies against, we just paid Juan Soto $750 million

to be here.

That's the part that I don't really, I guess if he's that good and they hit on all these young guys, maybe this is a feel-good team next year or the year after. But

I want Kyle Tucker and Belgium and Schoolball. That's what I want.
I know. I know.
Well,

that's a part of our fan brain that in the offseason,

when we lose something, we have to replace it. And we have to replace it with a known quantity, right? We have to say, okay, so we just lost 38 home runs and 126 RPIs and 160 games at first base.

What are we going to do? Who's the body? Who's the human who's going to fill that hole? Vientos? I got to watch that dude play first base.

I think it's a little scary if that's your answer, hitting behind Juan Soto and his $780 million contract.

I think that in terms of what David Stearns wants, I don't know.

My best guess around it is that he favors athleticism, versatility, a defensive-minded skill set.

and also wants to have the same mentality around managing the salary and that he wants a lot of versatility. If you have a lot of young guys, you have a lot of controllable contracts.

You have a long stretch of time before you're reaching arbitration and free agency. And this payroll needs to be reset because it's just got a bunch of very old players who make a lot of money.

You know, Marcus Simeon is older and makes more money than Brandon Nimmo, but only for a shorter period of time. So that's a move towards that.

Pete Alonso at 35, 36 years old, making $33 million a year is very scary for David Stearns.

Edwin Diaz at 34 years old, making the highest average annual salary for a closer in the history of the sport is very much anathema to his philosophy.

But I've been saying it the last couple of days: like, you got to get uncomfortable

if you want to win. And you also got to sell tickets.
And Steve Cohen chastised the fans before last season about not showing up during the 2024 run.

And fans showed up this year and they put an embarrassment on the field. I mean, really, truly one of the most nightmare collapses in the history of the sport.

And so we're in this six-month successive pain cave with the franchise. They've just lost credibility with fans.

I didn't talk to a single, and I talked to hundreds of Mets fans, some online, but honestly, many in my life. I have one particular Mets chain that has 38 people on it.
Oh my God.

Can I get on the chain? I'm an Android user, though. I will.

I've ruined the chain. That could be challenging for you, but this is this chain is massive.

No one is happy. Not a single person is defending where we're at right now.
You can see the rough sketch. To me, the rough sketch is: okay, Carson Benj is playing left.
Jet Williams is playing center.

We're developing, Mauricio is DHing. Vientos is playing first base.
And Sproat, Christian Scott, and Nolan McClain develop into one, two, and three starters.

And then you've got those guys under your control, and you've got Lindor and Soto kind of backing them up as the superstars in the lineup.

And you wake up and it's 2027 and you've won 103 games and David Stearns is a genius.

And what you then have is the financial flexibility to go sign, say, a Shohei Otani type when he comes to the world, a Yoshinabu Yamamoto when he comes to the world, a Tark Schubal when he becomes a free agent, because that was the Dodgers model.

The Dodgers model was we got Clayton Kershaw.

What are we going to do now? We're going to develop Max Muncie. We're going to develop Will Smith.
And then when Mookie Betts comes available, we're going to pounce.

When Freddie Freeman comes available, we're going to sign him and take him away from the Braves. That was their strategy.
I assume that's what David Stearns wants to do.

But his track record is just spotty right now. I mean, this is the guy who just gave two years and $36 million to Frankie Montas and jumped the market.
We don't trust him. We just don't trust him.

So

it's very hard to feel like, okay, I'll roll with you on this one, Stearns.

Because we can't trust him yet. Well, you said 2027.

That happy scenario plays out, right? It's going to be 2026 in 20 days. Like 2027 is real soon.
And that team you described with Lindor and Soto and all these young guys coming up,

what do they win? 77 games next year? I don't know. Like, is that a good team? Is that an actual good team? Like, young guys generally, I don't know how they are in baseball.

They come up and they're probably not really super ready to win at a high level. And then you're going to go from that to 103 wins just like that.

I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm too impatient for that. And I think, like, so we lost, we lost our second best hitter

and lost our closer. And I want to come back to that one.

And so hitting worse, relief worse.

And the thing that was actually the weakest link on the team starting pitching completely unchanged other than hoping that the young guys are ready to improve and Kodai Senga, I guess, solves whatever the hell was going on in his head.

The strengths of the team have been weakened and the weakness has not been addressed yet.

Obviously, there's stuff that's going to happen, but like stuff's got to happen, or else the team's just not going to be good next year.

You're absolutely right. I don't really, I almost don't know what to say.
Like, the team is meaningfully worse, and they were a disaster last year. So,

you know, Merry Christmas.

It's a good thing. Look,

I haven't bought my Rode Gray jersey yet. I kept waiting for what the Dominoes are going to be in the offseason.
It's a good thing I haven't bought the freaking thing yet.

I don't even know if I want to now. No, I will, but it is, it does feel to me in sort of some cosmic sense that the Mets and the baseball gods are testing me personally.

Like I jump in during this wonderful playoff run, real happy, get off to 45 and 24, best record in baseball. And now it's just like a greatest hits of Mets disaster.
Just the season goes to shit.

Players who are beloved go away, go to other teams. Off-season upheaval.

Steve Cohen, I want just to seed the floor to you because you were, I had the same reaction to Steve Cohen's text, I guess it was to John Heyman yesterday as you did. So I will seed the floor to you.

Well, you know, we've been, we, David Stones has been going before the media the last few days during the winter meetings and has been extraordinarily vague.

And something is happening now with the fan base where they're like, enough of this bullshit.

The smugness, the vague generalities, you know, the general managing, that's that job, that president of baseball operations who can't really say anything about anything, who's trying to not make waves, but we're getting to a point of real discomfort and frustration.

And in some cases, among fans and some prominent fans, real rage at Stearns. Cohen's nowhere to be found.
He's not on social media anymore, deleted all of his stuff.

And when he got rid of all of his stuff. Well, I didn't realize that.

When he got rid of all of his stuff, we should have known Pete was gone because that was obviously a move where it's like, you just don't want to hear it.

You know, you've made a choice organizationally that you don't want to hear. When did that happen? I guess a month or two ago.

So he's not on social media, but he did give a quote yesterday, as as you said to John Heyman, and this is the quote in total. I totally understand the fans' reactions.

There is lots of off-season left to put a playoff team on the field.

Okay, a couple things about it. One,

that's not sincere enough. Two, speak directly to the fans.
Don't call a reporter and try to get him off your back by giving him a two-sentence quote. Three, this is not about making the playoffs.

You came here and you said we would win a World Series within three to five years. Why'd you open your mouth? We're entering the sixth season of your ownership.
Prokeroff. He did the broker off.

At least he didn't promise to get married. This is not acceptable.

If you don't want to talk, if now is not the right time to talk to the fans, because there's a lot of moves coming, I'm okay with that. The half-assed, like, hey, I get it.
Whoops. That's bullshit.

That's not okay. Like, act like you've been here before.
Act like you know what you're doing because the five-year track record of the ownership stretch is ultimately not good.

You've got 2024, which is lightning in a bottle, and you've otherwise got two absolute disaster seasons, an underwhelming 2021, and a first-round elimination in the playoffs.

You also probably have the two most embarrassing teams in the history of American sports with $250 million plus payrolls. It's just a fact.
It's a fact.

So

I'm not saying I'm out. I'm not saying that this can't get fixed, but this wishy-washy bullshit.
leaked to John Heyman.

And frankly, if they have been leaking information about everything going on with Diaz and Alonso, about, oh, well, he never came back to us, or, you know, Diaz was miffed because this happened and, you know, we never made an offer to Alonso.

You were a watertight operation, and there were no leaks last year.

And all of a sudden, all this information is coming out because you're really feeling the heat because of this philosophy that you have. Fuck that, man.
No,

be one thing or the other. Be the smartest team in the league and move in silence.

and you know stick to your plan or be the messy Mets and leak all over the place and make bad signings and give Justin Berlander a contract he shouldn't get.

Pick one. You can't have them both at the same time.
If we're going to be a joke and we're going to win 87 games every year and never really be Dodgers East, fine, I can deal with it.

I've been dealing with it for 43 years.

But if you're going to be the really great franchise, fucking be it.

And the Diaz thing broke my heart. I don't know if you want to talk about it because it just seemed like they didn't know what they were doing.

It just seemed like they didn't know, they got outmaneuvered by the team that actually knows what they're doing.

And I find that hard to accept right now based on everything that we've had to endure as fans for the last few decades. So

I don't know. What does your daughter think?

So

I do want to talk about Diaz.

My daughter, surprisingly, I thought Diaz was going to hurt her because of the trumpets. The first game we went to, four rows behind home plate.

The night game, the lights go out, the trumpets come on. And this is the greatest spectacle that she's ever seen in sports And is just like, What is going on? The lights are flashing.

This is every time this dude comes in. This is amazing.
She was like, Oh, okay. She was mad to her credit that he went to the Dodgers.
That made her mad. Pete,

she got home last night from whatever the hell she was doing on Wednesdays. I don't know.
And I told her,

I said, You're really, Mata, you're really getting a trial by fire and what it's like to be a Mets fan.

She said, Daddy, what happened? And I told her, and the look that came over her face,

there was this flash of sorrow that was

quickly pivoted to like,

okay, I'm tough. I can take this.
I'm not going to betray how sad I am about this. But Polar Bear meant more to her than Diaz did, I think.
He's an everyday player.

She knows he's a Mets Lifer. And I saw a wave.
She's like her daddy. She's just going to, she's just going to try to move on, try to move forward.

But I saw a wave of sorrow across her face that made me very frightened for what could happen if there's a Lindor departure at any time, because as everyone knows, that's her guy.

Diaz,

look, you can sit here and make the reasonable case for moving on from Alonzo, right? You've made it. We've all made it.
We get it.

That said,

can you make him a fucking offer?

Like, even if you don't think he's going to take it, you don't want to go to the greatest home run hitter in the history of the franchise and say, hey, how about we don't want to go long?

How about three years, 130, three years, 115? Just something so it doesn't come out in such embarrassing fashion that they didn't even make him an offer.

Now, I know that that's sort of like, it's not like they didn't want him and they would never have made him an offer. They just knew what the market was.
Just make the guy an offer.

Is that so unreasonable? They reportedly made one to Kyle Schwarber. So that makes it even worse.
They made Kyle Schwarber the three years, $120 million offer. Why that's not that?

Why make that two hundred Just put it on paper and say, hey, we love you.

I think it is what you said. I think they didn't want him.
I do not think that he makes sense. He's not coherent to Stearns' philosophy.
Then say that.

Don't say that. Don't say we love Pete.
We love him. It's just, you know, it's sad for us.

Diaz,

it doesn't seem like that big of a contract, although I guess it's the highest ever annual whatever for a reliever.

I loved, I'm surprised how much I cared about Edwin Diaz, given that he's a closer, so he appears in whatever amount of games.

And this is my first year watching him pitch, because I grew up with John Franco and Armano Benitez, and it was so lovely.

Although I was at one of the only saves he blew this year, I was at that game.

It was so lovely to have a guy who would come into games and be like, I don't feel nervous. Like, I feel like I fucking trust this guy.
And now he's gone.

And I got to learn to trust someone else who probably won't be as trustworthy. And you're going to tell me he had some bad years with the Mets.

And I heard you with JJ on his, on New York, New York, talking about there's a world in which he goes to the Dodgers and sucks just like all the relievers they got last year.

All I know is after covering my eyes every time John Franco came into the game, other than when he struck out Barry Bonds looking at the playoffs, and covering my eyes whenever Benitez came into the game and knowing in my soul he was going to blow game one of the Subway Series.

This is a guy that would come into games. They'd be like, I can't wait for him to fucking strike out these three dudes.

And he frequently did. I mean, if you watched Mets games like we did last season, you know how special he can be.

And you know how a little crazy making he can be in the way that some closers can, where he hits the leadoff man, and then the leadoff man

steals second base because he can't hold runners. And then you're like, okay, so it's 3-2 in the bottom of the ninth, nobody out.

There's a runner on second base, and we're so screwed and we're going to lose. And we almost never lost those games.

So they had that bases loaded one late in the season. Who was that against? Was it against Cincinnati, I think? Yes.
That was an epic one. Yeah, and he's obviously done that magic act.

And he's also had seasons where he's not been successful with the Mets. His first season in 2019 is one of the more epic meltdown seasons you'll ever see from a closer.

Edwin Diaz wasn't a perfect player. Pete Alonso wasn't a perfect player.

The optics and experience of watching the Mets sign Devin Williams to what would make him one of the, I think, five highest paid closers in the game coming off a down year with the crosstown Yankees before addressing Edwin Diaz and then hearing a report that Diaz, although he was a free agent and has no right to this, was offended that he did not get a heads up about the Devin Williams signing.

This is crazy-making stuff. It just feels like amateur hour, or it seems like that was an intentional move to drive Diaz away.
I don't know what we can read from that.

I was on board with the idea of the Super Bullpen. Obviously, the bullpen was a disaster last year, and

David Stearns has no one to blame but himself for that. So now

I loved watching Edmund Diaz as a fan. I think he was great box office and he was actually great baseball at the same time.
That's something that you can legitimately claim.

If he's not the best closer in the game, he's one or he's two or three.

He's only 31.

He's not 37.

So

good. No, I mean, I'm reminding myself what they signed Williams for.
three years 45 with a total guarantee up to 51.

So he's worth that, but a better guy who we know is not worth three years, 69.

If you look at the underlying metrics, you can say Devin Williams is just this valuable, but fandom is not about underlying metrics. We're about results.

The other thing that is very clear, pitching in New York under high pressure situations is just different. It just is.
It's just different. It's different.

It may not be dramatically different from doing it in Boston or doing it in Chicago and huge markets where there's a lot of media, but pitching as the closer for the New York Mets, especially coming in the aftermath of Edwin Diaz's departure, is different than closing in Milwaukee.

It just is. And

this is a hard sell to us, a really hard sell. Maybe Devin Williams recaptures his 2023 form and he is unhittable and the airbender is the new Diaz slider.

And we commit to him fully as our Lord and Savior. But it's a really hard sell and it's really hard to knock it out of your head.

This idea that Stearns is identifying former brewers and that those are his favored figures, you know, the trading for Tyrone Taylor and Adrian Hauser, signing Montas, signing Devin Williams, the idea of possibly trading for Freddie Peralta and Trevor McGill.

That would be a real dramatic trend that we have a lot of former brewers and Yankees on our team. Now, those are successful franchises, but it's hard to say goodbye to the players that you like.

And last season, Alonzo and Diaz were not the problem. They just weren't.
Alonzo, I mean, the first Mets corner we ever did, I asked you,

because there was this free agency drama last year where he hung out in the market and didn't get a deal and came kind of limping back to the Mets on this one plus one. I asked you, like, I mean,

I'm a newbie to this team. What was plan B? Because this dude is awesome and he's carrying the entire offense while Soto gets off to,

by his standards, a shaky start. Like,

this idea that he's some old bum because he can't field or he throws wildly, like, the guy was a monster at the plate last year, and they were DOA. There's no 45 and 24 24 without him.

These are facts, man. And, you know, we're going to find out what the plan B was.
The leak yesterday was, well, maybe we'll sign Paul Goldschmidt and we'll platoon him with Jeff McNeil.

Drown me in the river, if that's the answer. That's a nightmare.
I'm tired of that.

Or maybe it's a little trade for Wilson Contreras and Lars Newtbar, and Lars Newtbar will play 114 games in left field. And Wilson Contreras.

who's a 35-year-old converted catcher, who's a very talented defensive first baseman based on the metrics of last season, but who's still a 35-year-old first baseman? Like,

I don't know. I don't know, man.
I don't know. I don't like Jeff McNeil's face.

Neither does Francisco Lindor. Something about him, I just don't, I just don't like his face.
I do, I do.

Look, obviously, they're going to, like, again, we're not doing the thing where it's the Will Pons. This is worse than ever.
This wasn't supposed to happen under Steve Cohen.

There's going to be signings coming. Maybe they blow us away with some stuff.
And I'm interested to see what they do.

I do, I would be very curious to hear from Lindor and Soto today about what they think is happening, what they're being told the plan is, because these guys are not in this for like a gap year or whatever until the next generation of Mets is ready.

Like that's not what they're here for. And that's not what we're here for.
And that's not what you have the highest payroll in baseball for.

Or it's even if they drop to the fourth highest payroll in baseball, if you have a payroll that high, you are by definition supposed to be trying to win as many baseball games as possible right now.

I completely agree with you.

In dark moments, I thought maybe this is a soft rebuild with Soto and Lindor over the last 48 hours, but that just cannot be true because you don't sign Devin Williams to a

$16 million annual salary as a closer if you're soft punting the season with the expectation of a lockout in 2023.

That's what I'm going to ask you as my baseball expert.

Is the CBA work stoppage hovering over this?

How big of a deal is this in the Mets not wanting to sign these long-term contracts? It's possible that it's a factor. That's not been communicated to anybody.

I think most people who follow baseball closely believes there will be a work stoppage, but there's not going to be a salary cap. There may be more onerous penalties on spending over the tax line.

And we just saw one of the massive penalties this week. This is a smaller bit of news, but the baseball draft lottery happened earlier this week.
The Mets

were, because of the amount of money that they spent on their payroll,

unless they won the lottery and they had two shots at winning the lottery,

had to drop down 10 spots. So they needed to get either the number 10 or the number 13 in the lottery poll.
And that would have vaulted them up to the sixth overall pick.

If they didn't get 10 or 13, they plummeted. And they didn't get 10 or 13, they got 12.
Can't believe it. So Twist of Fate went against the Mets.
Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

And now they're picking 27 in the draft. So they've had the most epic and embarrassing collapse, arguably, in franchise history.

They've just allowed their two of their four signature players to walk in free agency, which we never would have expected would happen with Steve Cohen's ownership.

And they're picking 27th in the draft to show for it. It's just cruel.
It's a cruel week. They also lost their assistant GM, Tommy Tannis, who's been a long time.

I guess he wasn't officially their assistant GM.

He ran scouting for them and is responsible for drafting a great many players, including some of the players who David Stearns presumably believes will contribute meaningfully next season.

So it's been a bad week, bro. Hey, look,

I've gotten a lot of texts. You know that people

are liking Mets Corner because the amount of texts I got about the Mets in the last 48 hours is a little shocking to me.

And a lot of them are. We are a strong, sad community.

A lot of them are like, so do you regret this? Like, do you like, you just, do you, do you? Do you want to reclaim this segment of your time and your life? And I do not.

I'm enjoying the hell out of it. And as

unhappy as this Mets corner sounds, I'm so happy to be back. I'm going to be super curious about what they do with the team.
I will cheer for Pete Alonzo to have an amazing year in Baltimore.

I will too. Diaz with the Dodgers, I don't know, but I hold nothing against him.
But no, I'm all in. I can't wait for spring training.

I can't wait to sit on the couch and watch the games with my daughter and see who's on the team. And maybe they'll be a feel-good story.

And if they're not, there's always feel-good stories buried within the team somewhere. And it's like, I'm in it for the long haul.
I'm back and I'm not thrilled, but nothing

for the Mets people who are listening to this podcast, still love the team, still all in, still can't wait to see what they do next year. I'm in the same place.
I'm obviously not quitting.

It would be insane to quit now and then watch them win four years from now. And then I was out.
That would be a ridiculous move.

Is there one thing that could happen that would really lift your spirits with the team? Is there one move or one acquisition or one announcement that would make you really, really fired up?

So I, again, I don't know. I've looked at our minor league guys and their stats and I don't know

sort of like what the norms are.

Like in the NBA, I can tell you exactly like how many first-round picks should go for this kind of player and what a fair trade is for Anthony Davis or Yannis Atentecumpo.

I don't know what a fair trade is for Scoobel, but an ace starting pitcher who one out of every five games, I can be like, this guy's going to give us.

a 75% chance to win the game would make me very happy. I don't know what the cost is.
It's probably pretty heavy. It's probably pretty unrealistic.

And the names of the pitchers that are being sort of rumored for the Mets are like B-level starters, which fine. Like they would have been helpful last year when the starting rotation fell apart.

But I would love a true blue.

Man, would this guy be fun to start in game one of a playoff series ace?

I agree with you. That would be the ideal.
That would be the ideal salve on this wound. I've got my doubts that we're going to get any good news for the next six weeks.

They seem to be really moving at a glacial pace.

So, the NBA offseason is like 95% over in two days. Is this not like, is baseball not like that?

Well, baseball, I mean, as you recall from Pete waiting to sign until well into the winter, it's not like that. But covering the NBA the way that you do, do you think that that is like a lot better?

Like, I know a lot of baseball pundits are annoyed with the two and a half-month free agency period. What do you think works best?

I think something closer to the NBA from the fans perspective is more like a frenzy.

I think if the NBA could extend, it's the best combination, the best NBA free agency is the combination of the frenzy, but like one guy who takes 10 days, like Kawhi.

And so you have a bunch of frenzy, then you have this one guy when his domino falls, there's other dominoes that are waiting. Because two days, it's like, wow, we're done.
That's it.

And then, but if we get that and the longer thing, that two and a half months is long, man. Like, everyone needs a break.
Everyone needs a break from the news cycle. I agree with you.

No breaks from Ets Corner, though. No, no, we're back, baby.
Sean Fenty. You are on New York, New York.
What are we doing on big picture this week? Hamnet, you're familiar with that film? I'm not.

It's based on a best-selling novel about the personal life and tragedies of William Shakespeare. Will you be seeing it? No.

Should I be seeing it? I don't think so. Is Kenneth Branaugh involved? No.
Good question. It's Chloe Zhao, Oscar-winning director of Nomad Land, starring Paul Mescal and Jesse Buckley.

I've heard of one of those people. I still have not seen Nomad Land.

It seems heavy. It's extremely heavy, as is Hamnet.
Here's the movie I'm going to recommend to you right now, Marty Supreme. Oh, it's Timmy.
Marty Supreme. Timmy.
Timmy Chalamet. Nick's Supreme.

That's the one. That's Nick's legend, Timmy Chalamet.
That's the one for you, Zach. Okay, I appreciate it.
Sean Fenny, thanks, bud. Let's go, Method.
Thanks, brother.

That's it for today. Thank you to Howard Beck.
Thank you to Sean Fennessy. Thank you to Pete Alonzo and Edwin Diaz.
We wish you well over on Met's Corner.

Thank you to Mike, Billy, Jonathan, and Jesse on production. Thank you all for listening to and or watching the Zach Low Show.
We'll be back next week with more new episodes as the NBA rolls on.

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