What If the T-Wolves Sweep Denver? Plus, the NBA's Media Deal and Freshman-Year College Lessons With Ethan Sherwood Strauss and Zoe Simmons.

Bill Simmons

Coming up, a bunch of NBA stuff and a surprise guest appearance from one of my favorite people. Next, this episode of the Bill Simmons podcast is presented by State Farm. If you ever been in an accident and you're okay, but you know what happened, your first reaction is going to be, man, why did that happen? If you ever buy a new house or a new car or a new anything, there's this little rush you get when you're like, I did it. I made it happen.

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Click the claim now button on the homepage to claim the PBT. Apply the profit boost token in your bet slip when placing an NBA bet. So there you go. Coming up on this podcast, I wanted to talk about Minnesota and Denver and all of my thoughts about that series, specifically under a prism, a what if prism. So we're going to do that at the top.

Then. Ethan Sherwood Strauss, I like his substack. We want to talk about the NBA. Is the NBA more or less valuable than we think it is with all this tv money getting thrown around? We'll talk about the officiating stuff, too.

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Jeff.

All right, so I'm taping this on a Tuesday. The next Minnesota Denver game isn't until Friday. Minnesota took a 20 lead over Denver. And there was a moment like around the second quarter in that game when it was just clear that this was now clubber lang in the first fight against Rocky, where you just like, oh, my God, they can't. They can't hold these guys off.

We talked about a little on the Sunday pod with Rosillo about what if they're just ready. Now, we've seen this over the course of NBA history. Sometimes teams are just ready and we never expect it, but they're ready to go. And then we all look at each other and we can't believe it. And then it happens.

In this case, it's happening. So my question, if you remember, once upon a time I did a whole chapter about what ifs on my book of basketball. I did the 33 biggest what ifs. I got to do that again because there's probably more what ifs. Now I have, Kevin Durant's involved in at least four of them.

What if Minnesota sweeps? What if they sweep Denver? Just as a thought exercise, what are all the ramifications of that? We leave the weekend. I think they play on Sunday.

And Rosilla and I are talking about a Minnesota sweep. What are the outputs of this? Well, here's the biggest one. Anthony Edwards becoming the king of the NBA is officially in play. What does that mean?

Well, he's averaging a 32 and a seven and a six and over and over again is just making these crazy supernatural plays. I was talking to a friend of mine today on the phone about it. The game sped up on Jokic, those two. Game one and game two. Minnesota was able to speed it up.

And he was playing at this weird pace that we did. A little frantic. Like he just kind of couldn't. Couldn't grab control of the horse. And the opposite happened for Edwards.

Edwards, it looks like everything's slowing down. He's starting to look like Bradley Cooper. And limitless. I was watching limitless over the weekend. And there's that moment at the end when he's talking to De Niro.

And De Niro is like, you're going to fuck with me. I'll come right at you. And. And Bradley Cooper's like, do you understand what's happening right now? There's going to be a car accident right over there.

Watch. This guy's going to be looking at his phone. Car accident happens. Everything is slowed down for Edwards. Shit's going on.

All of a sudden he has this mid nineties turnaround. Michael Jordan shot that Jordan took years and years and years to craft and perfect. I'm not comparing to Michael Jordan. I'm just saying all of a sudden he has this bankable turnaround shot where he can physically push down, get to the spot that he wants and then just easily shoot over basically anybody they put on him? Aaron Gordon.

Cool. I'm just going to go buy you everything. Slowed down for this dude. So. All right, what does that mean?

What if he goes through KD and Booker in round one? What if he goes through the defending champs and Yoko Jamuri in round two? Next round? Luca or SJ, they're going to be favored in that. And then Tatum and Brown in the last round.

I've already watched him go head to head with those guys and he couldn't be less scared of them. What if they win the title and he runs through all those dudes and wins Finals MVP? Like, this is on. Here's what else is going to happen. Team USA, late July.

Well, this now turns into a 92. Michael Jordan. Hey, I know you love all these old guys, but I'm also here. We're in the Netflix series. Netflix is doing that NBA show that's basically modeled after quarterbacks.

I think LeBron's in it. Jimmy Butler Tatum's in it. Anthony Edwards is in it from what I've heard. He is very, very, very loving of all the cameras and all the attention and all the different stuff that comes with that series. And they're predicting he might be the star of the series.

Not surprising if you watched hustle with Adam Sandler when he stole every scene he was in in hustle. So you have that endorsements, sneakers, commercials, hosting SNL, all that stuff becomes in play. And then just like the future of the league. Again, this is a thought exercise. I'm not overreacting.

I'm not prisoner of moment. I'm just saying, what if he sweeps Denver and then it keeps going? We went from Jordan, dead spot. Kobe and Shaq, they showed up great. Hey.

Hey, guys. Then it eventually became Kobe and LeBron. Little Wade mixed in there for a split second, turned into LeBron and Curry. And now we're hitting the tail end of LeBron and Curry, it feels like. And we're all looking around going, well, who's is it just going to be foreign dudes that are running the league?

It's going to be Giannis and Jokic and Luca. What, are we going to have an american guy under 30 take the reins here? And then Ant comes in and he's like, I am doing a Michael Jordan impersonation for the entire playoffs. How about that? Will that do it for you?

I'm the most charismatic, fun guy the league's had in God knows how long. Is that enough for you? So there's that he even squashed the MJ goat thing already. He was like, don't compare me to him. He's the greatest player of all time.

I don't want to. That's not fair to me. Or him. Don't compare him to me. He had that quote, which also was a weird way to get on the board with the MJ LeBron go conversation where he's like, Michael Jordan is clearly the best player of all time.

I can't wait to see l LeBron reconciles that. The point is that the biggest what if outcome of a Denver sweep, if they pull this off, is ant becoming the king of the NBA world is in play. There's more stuff I have for you. Minnesota, they become the title favorites regardless of what the odds say right now in fandom. Boston's even money plus 100 to win the title.

Minnesota's plus 290, OKC's plus 750, Denver's 15 to one. The odds are better for Boston because there's more risk against Fanduel and whoever's taking those bets on Boston. In the Minnesota, the odds drop. But to me, Minnesota becomes the favorite in that series because of the way they're playing, the way they're playing defense. The poor Zingis question.

If you're giving me poor Zingis in the Minnesota series, I'm more interested now. I think Boston with game seven at home, but right now with me not knowing what's going to happen with Porzingis, Minnesota has to be favored in that series. Here's another thing, man. This one I had to break out another stupid pyramid for you guys. I was thinking about the best defensive teams I've ever seen since the NBA merger, which was the 76 77 season, underrated Blazers year there further away.

If you're talking about the defensive teams, but the best offensive team I've ever seen and playoffs have to matter. Don't give me like, oh, the 2016 spurs, the regular season defensive rating. I'm talking like, when the fucking money's on the table, what defense do you want? And it's down to the zero four Pistons and the 89 Pistons. Those are the two best defensive teams I've ever seen since I've been watching basketball, I wasn't old enough to see Bill Russell.

And by the way, if we're doing best defensive teams of all time, it starts with pick nine Bill Russell teams. The 70 Knicks are probably in there somewhere. And then it's all the modern teams but Russell and whoever is the best offensive team of all time, I'm going to go with the zero four Pistons because a couple things were going on there. One, the rules were in their favor, and we talked with Ethan Sherwood Strauss later about how the rules changed in zero four, and that 2024 is a little similar. Ben Wallace, Rashid Wallace, those dudes together, and Rashid Wallace really giving a shit.

So you're protecting the rim. You can switch on anyone. They were probably the two best offensive bigs in the league. Duncan's probably two b to Rashid, two a. At that point, Tayshawn Prince shut down guy on the sides, and then the Billups Hamilton backcourt, plus the way they played together and they just ripped through the playoffs, and we still didn't totally believe there are five to one underdogs in the finals, which was ridiculous.

And they ended Kobe and Shaq. It was done. They finished them. So I think about the zero four pistons. It's not just how unbelievable it was to watch them.

Very similar to basically what we're watching in this Minnesota, Denver, and what we watch with some of the Minnesota Phoenix stuff where it just feels like they have eight guys, but there's only five. They can protect everything. They're just, they're. They're able to change the flow of a game and the pace and just teams are on their heels. Kobe was so bad in that final series.

It's. It was, like, shocking. We couldn't believe it. It was. This was Kobe at the basically peak of his athletic powers.

Like, even by the time he got to 2006, I don't think he was as unbelievable as an athlete as he was in that 0104 stretch. But that's the best defensive team I've ever seen. The 89 Pistons are second. When I did my book, I think I had them as the fourth best team of all time. And it was partly because they were so malleable with their lineup.

But, you know, they had Rodman, who's whatever shortlist you want to make for the best defensive players ever. He's on it. They had Joe Dumars, they had, they had the collective, you know, John, Sally, they had all these different. You want to go small ball, we can do that. If you're going to play three guards against us, we can guard that.

They just were the Swiss army knife defensive team, and they're physical as fuck and they just want to beat the shit out of you. Impossible to play against. I have them second, and I think the number three spot right now I would have for the 91 Bulls who go back and look at the stats for that. I think the points allowed that season for them in the playoffs was like eight or nine points lower than everybody else. MJ at his athletic peak, Pippen really coming together as one of the most important defensive players in the history of the league and they throw Pippen on MJ and the series changes.

Horace grants in there. That team was just loaded. I would have them in the three spot, but I think the t Wolves have a chance to take it, which is why I mentioned this. So if I'm doing a pyramid zero four Pistons top, the next spot would be the 89 Pistons and the 91 Bulls. Next spot, the third level would be the 99 spurs, which I'm always going to be partial to because it was the one time they got Robinson and Duncan together, the twin towers where they're just like, you just weren't.

You're not going to the rim on these guys. It's not happening. It's never happening. Collectively, that team was just a nightmare. Then you have the 96 Bulls, which was the older, wiser version of the 91 Bulls.

I made a rule that it had to be at least five years between teams. So like you couldn't do the 89 Pistons and the 90 Pistons. It's not fair. They're basically the same team. 96 bulls, you're adding Rodman, older, wiser, MJ Pippen.

And by that time I wrote about that, that in my book about how those guys, it was like MJ had just trained his shadow defensively in Pippen and those guys, the way they moved was unbelievable to watch. So I would put the 24 t Wolves pretty close to that third tier at this point. The last tier is zero eight Celtics, who were an awesome regular season defensive team. And then playoffs, a little more hit or miss, especially when they went smaller lineups. The 92 Knicks were incredible.

They ended up losing around two to MJ and seven, but they, man, they just like basically took the Pistons thug ball and they went to a whole other level with it and turned every game in a rugby match. Zero three pacers with Artest and Jermaine O'Neal and just the rules were really good. And then the zero five Spurs. I had to have a Spurs team from that era with Duncan and Bruce Bowen and Manu and all those guys, and I think it would probably be the zero five spurs. The point is that if the T Wolves sweep the Nuggets and they're able to beat Jokic the way they're beating them at the three spots in play, for me it really is.

It's that between them and the 91 Bulls for the best defensive teams I've ever seen in my life, like the size they have. This is another outcome. The Jada McDaniels, who has not only would you call him one of the best perimeter defensive players in the league, now he's starting to be like, wow, where does this guy rank for best premier players? We've seen the last like ten to twelve years. Just an absolute shutdown.

It's like having the ultimate shutdown corner in football or something. And then the size of Gobert Towns and Nas Reed, who was so crucial against Jokic, and then Edwards, who we talked about earlier. But you know, the defense is, is one of the things that makes him so special. This was the thing Kobe always had from basically like 99, 2000, 2001, as he was trying to figure out who he was offensively, he was trying to figure out how to play with Shaq. But the defense where it was like, man, this guy's going to make some all defensive teams, and especially in the playoffs, he could just lock people down.

And Edwards has that too. The competitiveness, the ability to go both ways. They never seem tired. The difference is Edwards physically is just way stronger than Kobe was. Kobe, you go back and you look at those early Kobe years and he's just thinner.

And just look at 060809. He's just kind of filled out. He's stronger and he can take contact in different ways. The guys, the guy in those early years was just this pretty skinny, amazing athlete who was competitive as shit. Edwards is already built like he could walk on a football field and run for 1500 yards.

Uh, another outcome, the go bear trade, much ridiculed on this podcast, goes from being one of the craziest trades ever made. And I still, by the way, feel like it's one of the craziest trades ever made to an incredible look ahead moment by Tim Connelly. Because I thought, look, I went on the record. I thought what they gave away was insane. I thought they gave 200, $0.10 on a dollar.

But even if you're going to justify it, it made no sense because Ant wasn't close to being ant yet. It's like by the time NBA history says he's going to start peaking by the time he's 24 25, which will be the end of this contract. So you're trading for this guy in a win now mode, but the guy that you need to help you win now isn't ready yet. Well, obviously Tim Connelly saw something and was like, this guy's going to be ready sooner than we thought. And maybe he looked at the history of MJ and Wade and Kobe and all these dudes that age, David Thompson, all these guys aged 22 to 23 and their ability to potentially just be superstars out of nowhere when you're least expecting it.

Did he see that? Did he just want to have a competitive team away right away? I don't know. But pudding, Gobert and the rest of the size they have behind Ant and McDaniels turned out to be one of the shrewdest things of the decade. I'll never apologize for my take on the go bear trade.

I gave, I think they gave away is too much. But it worked. Uh, another outcome, towns much maligned. You know, on a scale of Ben Simmons to ten, towns was probably a three meaning negative. Like, just like I, I give up on this dude as being a winning basketball player.

I don't see it. I don't know if he's wired to win games correctly. Uh, all the dumb fouls, like the stuff even you saw it this year when he went for 60 in that meaningless game and his coach benched him. You know, it's like he was a classic. He's never going to get a guy.

And Edwards is so great now that he's sucked him into the greatness. And this version of towns is unbelievable. Like the way he's playing defense against Denver. Holy shit. So now he's, he went from a how can you win with this dude?

To, wow, you can win with this dude. That's the thing about basketball. Never, never give up on talent. Apparently a couple more outcomes. The new rules become legendary of Minnesota wins.

They changed it. Ethan and I are going to talk about this next segment. But they change the rules mid season. It ends up being absolutely perfect for, for Minnesota specifically and leads to, um, them again in this what if scenarios sweeping the Nuggets and becoming the favorite to win the title. There's a Phoenix outcome here.

If they, if the Nuggets get swept where maybe we have to go back and reevaluate Phoenix a little bit, which Phoenix just seemed like, whoa, what do they do? Blow it up? They have no picks. This is a rep to. They won 49 games and they went against one of the, of, uh, the all time hot playoff teams and a team that I'm now talking about historically as a defensive team and, you know, didn't have a point guard.

They barely had a center. Like, maybe we should give them a little more slack because they made Denver just look as bad as Phoenix. So if I'm a Phoenix fan, I feel slightly better about it, uh, Denver, if they get swept, they take a big historical hit. As you know, I'm a giant yokage fan.

This gets tough to defend because Denver, who I think we were doing the podcast segments last year and Doc and I talked about it the night of the finals, is like, is this team positioned now to go on a run here to win, like three titles in four years? Three titles in five years. Now they're. If they got swept, they move into. Yeah, they won that title, but.

And they move into that group, you know, else in that group, the 22 warriors. Sorry, you're in it. You lucked out with some teams. You played the $21. Yeah, you're in there, too.

The 2020 Lakers bubble. 2019 Raptors. Yeah. KD and Clay Thompson got hurt in the same series. Really?

Our last champ that wasn't polarizing in any way was the 2018 winners. It's very hard to leave a season 2012 heater like this, too, where we lead this season going, yeah, that was the best team. No question. I still, there's a piece of me that feels that the 2009 Lakers, you could have made a real case for Orlando in that series, but 2008 Celtics, good example. Yeah, that was the best team.

I felt that way about Denver last year. But now it's like, maybe. I wonder if that's who they played. I don't personally believe that. I'm just saying it's now in the air.

And the other thing that's in the air for them is they had this big, we're smarter than everybody. We're going length and young guys, and we're going to be so hard to play. But they bet on young guys, and they bet on young guys the same way that the warriors bet on their young guys last year. And we can throw away, toss away some stuff on the bench where it's time to bet on our young guys. You're betting on young guys.

Guess what happens? Um, sometimes young guys don't show up. Sometimes they're up and down. Sometimes they're unpredictable. And you think about Minnesota, some of the guys they're bringing off the bench, they're like pretty experienced dudes, right?

They have a nice blend of experience and youth that I think in this series, we're going to find out on Friday night. Can Denver trust Christian Brown? Can they trust Peyton Watson? Cause they're going to need younger legs to fight off this crazy Minnesota buzzsaw. Conversely, if Minnesota wins the title, and again, this is a what if exercise, they sweep Denver, they beat OKC or Dallas, which would mean they beat either Luca or they beat Shea, who's going to be second in MVP.

And then they beat, after beating the defending champs and some of the best players in the league, they go and they beat the 64 win Celtics and Jason Tatum. This becomes one of the better fuck yeah. Titles we've had in a while because like, I think like Dallas in 2011 is an awesome example of this, right? Dirk, who much maligned, he just runs through everybody. He runs through Kobe and he runs through Durant and he gets to the finals and he runs through the LeBron Wade Bosch team and he's just like just taking skeletons in every series.

This would be a taken skeleton series from Minnesota. This was not a year where it's like, oh, well, you guys lucked out cause this guy got hurt or that guy got hurt. This would be like, they're going through some fucking good teams here and uh. And it would just be really impressive. I mean, it'd be one of the more impressive titles I've seen.

Um, which leads me to one more outcome here. There's two different. I mentioned this a little on Sunday with Rosilla, but there's two different levels of surprise NBA moments when we get to the playoffs. One is the wait, we're doing this now, um, where it's like the 2012 thunder. It's like, I guess they're going to make the finals now.

The 1977 Portland Trailblazers, same thing. 2015 Golden State, 30 to one to win the title before the year cousins Allen. I bet on it. Then it was like, okay, I guess they're going to beat Memphis. I guess we're doing this now.

So Minnesota would go down that lane, but also in this Denver series. And this is what I talked about Brazil on Sunday. I was like, yeah, I think the sweep is possible because we've seen this happen over the course of NBA history. We saw it happen with the zero four Pistons split with the two games in. Lakers blew them out, 14 spurs split the two.

First two at the Heat blew them out. Last three games weren't close. 91 balls sweep the Pistons. And you could feel it in this second quarter of that game. It wasn't just that they were beating Denver.

It was like they were ending Denver, at least for this season. They were taking, they were sucking the soul out of Yokic. They were ruining murder to the point that he fucking threw something on the court. It wasn't just they beat them, they were snatching souls from them. And I don't know if Denver comes back from that, but that's another outcome of this now, this is a part of the what if sweep thing.

But if Jokic can somehow figure this out and pull them back, they're still 15 to one to win the title. And all the odds are saying that they can't come back from this. If he can somehow figure out this monster of an opponent and pull his team back, this would be one of the great things I've seen from a basketball player because he's just especially with Murray, clearly not 100% with the lack of a bench and how hungry and motivated Minnesota is compared to Denver, who won the title last year. To flip this series at this point would just be nuts. It's the worst possible opponent for him.

They have a ton of size. They have guards that can just pressure Murray and pressure him and pressure him and use length and it's just a nightmare for them. If he could pull this out, it'd be great. The flip side for him is that if they don't pull it out and they get swept, this is the last outcome of the series. From a what if standpoint, the Yoka chaters come out in full force.

The people that never believed, even when he won three mvp's in four years, even when he won the title in a finals MVP, even when he averaged over the course of four playoff seasons dating back to 2021, I think he's 3013 and eight. He's like unequivocally one of the great offensive players in the history of the playoffs, no matter how this turns out. And the haters will still come out in full force and be like, see, told you he wasn't that good and just throw some defense at him. He looked out last year with who he played. He's going to get all that stuff.

What does that do for Jokic? Does it go in the lab? Does it become like a I mentioned Rocky three or has become now rocky four things back in the log cabin? Like now he's lifting Paulie and Adrian. Here's why this is stupid.

Just about every great player has sucked in a playoff series or played below their level or just caught the wrong opponent at the wrong time. This is part of NBA history, and it's going to sound like I'm making excuses for him, but I'm not a good example. I mentioned earlier was Kobe in that piston series in zero four. Worst possible team for him to play. Team was splintered.

It was a bad Lakers season just in general. 22.1 points a game in the finals, 38% field goal, not great. LeBron against Dallas in 2011, terrible opponent for him. Sean Marion, Tyson Chandler behind him. Dallas had really kind of figured out that Miami offense and LeBron got into his own head and the pressure was too much for him.

The season was too much for him. 18 points a game in the finals. 18, seven and seven from LeBron James in the finals, when he's kind of near his, his apex. It happens. MJ, my guy, the greatest of all time against Orlando in 1995, comes back from baseball.

Guess what? Orlando kind of kicked his ass. I don't care what the stats say. Go watch some of those games on YouTube. Larry Bird, my favorite basketball player of all time against the 88 Pistons, got his ass kicked coming off the Hawks series against Dominique or the duel.

And he beats Dominique, it's, oh, my God, Larry's going to pull this off. And then you know what he wasn't expecting? It was Dennis Rodman in the next round and his body was starting to break down. Same thing for Magic Johnson. Gets the Celtics in 84, where he just sucked, where they were calling him tragic Johnson after the finals, Katie against Golden State in 2016, where they're up three one, they have a chance to finish it, and he just doesn't play well.

Uh, every will chamberlain playoffs against Bill Russell, basically, except for 19, six, seven. I can keep going and going, going and going. This happens. This is the wrong time, wrong opponent, wrong season for a Yokage Minnesota matchup. And what I'm interested for is what they would do going forward under this what if scenario of what if Minnesota sweeps, if they get swept, what does the team look like next year?

What are the moves? What was wrong? What do they do? Because Tim Connolly built Minnesota to beat Denver, now Denver has to rebuild themselves to not only beat Minnesota, but you also have OKC coming, you have Boston in the east. This is an unbelievable turn of events.

I bet on Minnesota. I think I talked about this in the pod at 16 to one with like three weeks to go in the season, just because I felt like they had defense, they had a good coach, and there's a puncher's chance. Ant went up a level, and then by the time the playoffs started, I was picking Phoenix against them in round one. So I'm not taking a victory lap, um, because I watched Phoenix just make them look like they were a year away from being ready, but ant went up a level, and here we are. I think Minnesota is going to get going to sweep Denver.

I think the series, I've been through these a few times as a fan, and I think this one's done. And basketball is about to change as we know it. So there you go. We're going to take a break. Ethan Sherwood Strauss is next with Fando.

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Get 20% off any simplisafe system with fast protect monitoring@simplisafe.com. BS, that is simplisafe with two s. Simplisafe.com b's. There's no safe like simplisafe. All right, the king of substack, Ethan Sherwood Strauss, is here.

What's it like to be the king of substack? Is there like a crown? What do you get? You get a mug. So that's nice.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

They send you a mug. And I got some swag. I just stopped by the sub stack offices, and I got a onesie for the baby, a few hoodies. Yeah. I'm like, king tut over here.

It's very impressive. That's great. Well, you should check out his sub stack if you haven't read it. He has some always interesting thoughts about sports and especially basketball. Sometimes I disagree with you.

Bill Simmons

I'll text you when I disagree. I'm like, I just disagree with what you wrote there. I asked you, what is a topic that we could talk about? And we settled on. Is the NBA more or less valuable than people seem to think it is?

Because this has been, I've heard people going hard both ways, and sometimes there's an agenda when people are going hard, but they're about to do this new deal. I was on Matt Bellany's podcast last week making predictions for it. I think there's going to be three suitors, not two. I think they're probably going to at least double the total number of money they got, which doesn't necessarily mean they got double the amount of money. There's some, some thoughts on that.

No, no, it's not actually double. It's all. But ultimately, the interest is pretty good for a league that, you know, you could kind of pick apart in some ways. You could say, oh, who is their best under 30 player? What's going to, um.

Where do you land on this topic? Or do you want to talk it out? Well, I think it's a fascinating topic because it's almost a paradox. I wrote in 2022, a story about the NBA called half the audience, twice the profits. It looks like it's going to be maybe even more than twice the profits.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

It is, as a share of the television audience, a less popular property than it was before. But at the same time, because of the crazy machinations in media and the fact that it's still popular enough, it is, I guess, increasingly valuable. And then it's got this weird value, Bill, I would call it the Ben Thompson theory. Ben Thompson, who's been a fantastic guest on your program, where you would think, one would think as these cable, as these cable companies, as ESPN, as Turner, as they lose more and more subscribers, as they go from 100 million people to 70 million people, that they would pay not as much money for sports rights. But the weird thing about it is it increases this desperation, totally counterintuitive, where they pay even more because they have less of an audience.

It is a bizarre business. Well, and then on top of it, here's the part. I don't know what the right answer is, but I've heard both sides of it. Right. Ratings are going down.

Bill Simmons

Less people are interested in basketball based on the viewing audience of basketball, which mirrors a lot of the viewing audience of like network tv, things like that. But when Derek Thompson came on and we talked about some version of this and he was saying, I am a diehard basketball fan who doesn't watch basketball that much, but I love the whole circus of basketball. I love listening to podcasts about it. I like consuming the highlights of it. And I was saying, that's basically my son.

My son barely ever watches basketball with me, but knows what's going on, knows who all the players is, has an Anthony Edwards opinion and is just basically getting this through. So in some ways, the NBA fits in better than it ever has in whatever weird culture we've created, right? Way better than baseball. Mike Trout went out for maybe the year and people were like, I don't know what Mike Trout looks like. And whereas basketball, it's just constant, constant.

When you get to the Olympics, they're going to be some of the most famous people there. But yet the results aren't there from a who's watching standpoint. And yet they would go, but look at our social, look at us on YouTube, look at us on Snapchat. Like any other big picture variable from 2020s, we're doing great. I don't know what to believe.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

It's this weird thing where it's almost like there's this secondary market of yourself when it comes to a media property where I have all these opinions on some of the NBA player podcasts but similar to your kids. I've never actually sat down and listened to a full Jeff Teague podcast, but I've seen all these clips on social media and on YouTube, and I guess basketball has more of a secondary market of itself than these other sports. And then there's this other aspect of it that's hard to quantify, which is how much of the personalities involved matter. How much do these companies want to be affiliated with the brand of the NBA, which is a cooler brand as they see it, to maybe even a more popular sport like college football? The reaction when college football signed its playoff deal was a lot of people going, wow, that's not for as much money as I thought.

College football is having a moment. More and more people are watching it. But I don't know if college football is necessarily something that is as alluring as being connected to the NBA. If you're Amazon, for instance, and I don't know how you see these things, you're higher up in the business world than I am. Oh, thanks.

You know, people know, but the older I get, the more I come to the conclusion that a lot of these deals are driven more by personality than I would have thought and less, less economic imperative than I would have thought. We have two other big factors coming. The expansion teams are coming. The moment this deal gets done, the expansion prices are going to be huge. The values of the franchises have also gone up, partly because of the meteorites deal.

Bill Simmons

They could point to these different things and say, look at the money we just got from our three new tv partners. Look at the money we're going to get from these expansion teams. How could you not say we're doing well? I am in the camp of they are doing well. But I also see some of the stuff that you've written about where you're like, whoa, football said, oh, you like Christmas?

Cool, we're taking it like, that's it. Oh, Martin Luther King weekend, that Monday. Oh, you're going to make that your day. Cool. We're going to take that too.

And they're just like taking days by force. That matter of the NBA and the NBA even retreated from Thursday, which was the holy day for regular seasons. Thursday, Chuck and Kenny and Ernie and a doubleheader and football blew that out of the water. They retreated at Tuesdays until football's gone. So you see some stuff like that and you're like, well, they're not even remotely in the same vicinity as football.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Yeah, it's crazy. I think in 2016 they do those top 100 sports tv events of the year. And back then, I believe the NBA had twelve in the top 50. And I can't quite recall how many they had in the top 25, but they had a significant amount in the top 25. That was Curry versus LeBron in the finals, but also curry versus KD and Westbrook in the western final.

Bill Simmons

Yeah, that was a good season. Yeah, it was an era of the NBA. That was a very cool era. And now that list comes out every year and the NBA is just not even the top 100. It's just not even there.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

They're bounced from the top 50. So it represents how the NFL, on a relative basis, has just taken more territory relative to the other leagues, including, as you mentioned, Christmas. Where the NFL goes, it's ours now. And they've almost taken this. Yes, it's ours.

It's done. I think Goodell said something like, I don't have to ask permission when he was asked about it. But at the same time, what's so crazy, Bill, is that if we look at the past decade, I believe when this deal is signed, by the time the ink is dry, the NBA tv rights would have gone up by a greater percentage than the NFL tv rights. So as much as Adam Silver might have made this or that misstep, maybe he's just a much better negotiator with these rights deals than Roger Goodell is. And maybe Roger Goodell is looking at the situation and wondering, hey, what's up with this?

We are the NFL. We're getting 10 billion a year. You know, the NBA is going to get six or seven. And we're the NFL. What the hell happened?

Bill Simmons

Yeah, well, it's timing is what happened. Sometimes you get timing at the perfect points of whenever your contract up is up or your deal is up. I think about baseball. Baseball struck with all those RSNs at the perfect time. Right?

I forget how many years ago that was. And something that might have happened to baseball anyway, didn't happen because of the RSN money and because of how badly each RSN or whatever it was, needed baseball and needed 162 games. We'd always hear, like, baseball literally eats up innings. Well, now that model is going away and baseball is in a completely different spot, you know, especially with people under 25. And we've been talking about this for how many years since really the mid two thousands.

Yeah. But now it's finally coming home. And even, like, I forget who, who always has fun with this on Twitter, but the Sunday morning baseball package, which was on Peacock last year, and like, baseball's like, we're shopping this. And then it's like, roku's like, we'll take it. And now they have some national game that's earlier than all the other Sunday games.

It's like, cool. I don't. I'd never watch a game that's not the Red Sox. I'm not even watching the Red Sox right now. So I, you know, I.

In some cases where you feel like, man, you got super lucky with the timing of that, which I do feel like is the case with basketball. But on the other hand, I think basketball is much better suited for wherever things are going than baseball is. Right? Yeah. And I also think, you know, one of my subscribers wrote into me, because I've been talking about this whole distinction between event sports and inventory sports and how the NFL is an event sport.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

It's a big event. And my contention is, when it comes to holding popularity in this culture, there's so much noise, so many options. You want to be an event sport. You want to be like the UFC, you want to be like the NFL, you want to be like college football. But the guy wrote into me and he said, you know, you're not really giving the inventory.

It's due here. This is what's enabled the NBA to sell off different pieces of itself. So maybe the lesson is that baseball, that's too much inventory. Sport, that's too much inventory. You've gone crazy with it.

Bill Simmons

You're. You're getting lost in the shuffle. You're. You're just part of the background of life right now. The NBA has had some of that, and its regular season is waned.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

But the amount of inventory it has, combined with enough eventiness of its playoffs and its cultural appeal, and what you're talking about, where it's popular in the secondary way, it just allows the NBA to sell off pieces of itself. I thought ESPN, based on the reporting, seems like it's gotten a really good deal in this whole negotiation. But then the NBA still has yet more pieces of itself to sell off, and it almost creates this desperation bid between some companies that might be on the come, might be on the make, and a company like Warner Brothers, which is desperate, might go belly up if it seeds the property. So the right mix, the Goldilocks of event and inventory, for the NBA, perhaps. Well, somehow the NBA pulled off, basically doubling the amount of money they're getting for these packages from a place like ESPN.

Bill Simmons

But ESPN is getting less than the deal. That's been a lot of the report in this week where ESPN might just give up Fridays ESPN's always had Wednesdays, Fridays. They've had a Saturday night game. They've had some Sunday games, and they're just going to get less of that because that has to get spread around. But they're so desperate to still be involved in it.

They're like, all right, fine. And, you know, that's, that's my question with TNT and Bell. And I talked about that a little bit last week because I think TNT, I think Warner is going to get bounced from this. I think that's how it's going to play out. I think it's going to be NBC.

Peacock combined with Amazon will basically get what we know as the Warner side and ESPN will give up a little bit to throw into that package. I don't know if Warner wanted to pay double what they were paying to get less stuff. It's like, if we're going to do that, are we still getting a conference finals every year? It's like, no, we're not sure about that anymore. I'm like, well, fuck that.

We don't want to do that. But when you have people over a barrel, that's when you can get them to do whatever. I personally think it's an absolute catastrophe for Warner if they don't keep basketball because what are they at that point? Yeah, it's like one of those Daryl Morey poison pill contracts from back in the day that. Oh, yeah, the Omar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. NBC has put them into the Omar ossic kind of situation where you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. They're not a big company relative to these other bidders. And now you're seeing the strangeness of David Zaslav, who runs WBD. They're putting him on the, on the tv during these playoff games, and he's waving and he's next to a Lloyd bank fine or flying of Goldman Sachs.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

It's almost like he's trying to say, look, I've got great credit. If we pay for these rights, we're not going to go belly up. Hey, if you want to get recklessly speculative, I wonder if NBC Comcast put them in this position because there are rumors that Comcast would like to buy Warner brothers, and maybe this is the thing that, uh, puts them towards the brink of bankruptcy. I don't know. Like they're cutting their legs out.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just getting a little bit wild, a little bit a succession esque plot when I throw that out there. But that's one of the rumors you hear bandied about. But it is a crazy situation for them at Turner where it looks like they can't afford this, but it looks like they also can't afford not to do it. And you wonder, to get back to this, how much of this is personality driven? How much of this is that?

Zaslav of Warner, he said, we don't need the NBA a few years ago. And you wonder if that actor would. Suck that one back into his mouth and not have it live in the air. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, now you see him at the games during this rights negotiations. I love the NBA. It's great. You got nicks. You know, the other thing, there's another piece of this that there's so many things going on.

Bill Simmons

This is why I want to do a segment when we have another. We're going to talk about refs in a second. But what's happening with the league sanctioned networks, which is also a piece of this because they haven't reported this yet. But my guess is NBA tv is just going to probably cease to exist at some point or it will just become a highlight thing or it'll morph into NBA.com, which is already kind of happening. But you think about it, I remember when I was at Grantland and the WWE launched their Wu channel and they're like, we're bypassing all these people.

We're going to own our shit ourselves. And it was like the final level of the RSNs. It's like, whoa, they're going to. The pay per views are going to be on there. What you're not going to have.

And then as soon as things shifted, where the rights became more valuable than owning your own stuff, they were also the first one to shift and be like, hey, Netflix, hey, Fox, hey, Peacock. And they started selling their content. I think we're watching what's happening with the NFL Network where they're just gutting it. You know, they also have the ability anytime they want to sell a game for it seems like between 75 million and 100 million anytime they want, which at some point there's a law of diminishing returns with having the NFL Network. And the fees you get from that, from the cable systems versus, hey, Amazon, do you want five more games or seven more games?

And I think that's also happening with NBA and the NBA. Like, we've had all these playoff games on NBA TV. Why? What's the point of that? Like, they could have sold those games a week ago.

If there's some NBA tv game this week, they could have sold it to Amazon just to say, fuck it, why not? I'm sure they have deals and their stuff that makes it. But don't you feel like that model is about to be past tense? Definitely. And I think it sounded good to them back in the day.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

And maybe it had a little spark of life way back in the day when Gary Payton and Chris Webber and Ahmad Rashad on the NBA tv studio set. Glorious days. Oh, it was just wonderful. That's a bygone era. But yeah, sometimes you don't want to make all of your own stuff.

I once saw somebody figure out how to make their own chicken sandwich from scratch, and I mean farming and I mean raising the chicken and what the total cost is and everything else. I feel as though these leads. Was it Tom Brady? Who was it? I think he was just a guy.

But maybe that could be a secondary career for Tom Brady after the roast. But I think for them, they realized that this is actually difficult and you need an infrastructure. And you saw that with NBA TV. They brought in Turner to do it for them because it's just not something that's easy to do yourself. And as you're talking about, if you're trying to sell these games, I mean, that's really what it's all about.

I don't know if this term is ever going to catch on, but after Peacock had that NFL playoff game and made some money off of it, I call it the peacockification of sports where, and it sucks for the consumer. I think we're just shortening the cockification. The cockification, yeah, the consumer is certainly getting cockified as they're paying a fee here and a fee there, you know, in order to see a playoff game. But that definitely seems to be in the offing, especially if NBC has rights where, yeah, there's going to be a really big playoff game that you want to watch that's going to be on Peacock, and you're going to sign up and either you'll be a committed Peacock customer or you'll forget about it and you'll just keep on paying the sub fees. And that's what they're counting on.

Bill Simmons

Also, a fascinating way to find out how intense your audience is, both for the product and for teams. Nick's Pacers game five only available on Peacock. Guys. Okay, what do we got? Who's signing up?

How many people are from, like, the tri state area? How many people are from Indiana? And then they study all that data and they're like, whoa, that really drove our audience in New York. So then the NFL looks at that and goes, it did. Oh, we'll put a Giants game on there and then you kind of go.

But I just feel, especially as everybody, all these big companies, they're trying to get sleeker and sleeker. You have like a league like the NFL, 32 owners, they just want to, they just want checks for stuff, right? Yeah. Like, like when the NBA expands and it's $9 billion for the two teams and each NBA owner splits $300 million, it's like, here's your check, $300 million. Whoa.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Same thing for these games. Peacock's like, there's 90 million for a Tuesday game after Martin Luther King day. Great.

How much is that? It's two and a half million. Oh, thank you. And that's what they care about. So I think they're going to dump these channels.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Yeah, I think that's what's going to happen. And it's an indication of why Adam Silver apparently was renewing his contract a few months ago. Ultimately, it's about the money. And while I've certainly been critical of some of the things the league has done, I don't like how they've handled the all star game. I love the new prison ballification of the NBA, but that's, you know, maybe for later on in the conversation.

Ultimately for the owners, it's about the money, it's about the embedded growth principle. And Adam Silver appears to have made it rain. It seems like he has really put the screws to David Zaslav and he has found the necessary leverage, uh, during a rather chaotic moment for the league. So what, a decade for the NBA. Yeah.

Bill Simmons

And we were going to get to this point that, I mean, I'm old enough to remember, like when Nolan Ryan signed for a million dollars a year, there was either sports illustrator, inside sports had one of those covers and it was million dollar players. And are the salaries getting too high? It was like in 1970, 919, 80, somewhere in that stretch. And we had million dollar players and it seemed like I was a little kid, it seemed like so much money. Like this guy's making a million dollars a year.

It seemed like, you know, we had no context of it. Now you think less than 50 years later, 45 years later, once the salary cap kicks in, the way it's going to kick in, we're going to have a hundred million dollar NBA player over the next decade. Right? Cause there's only twelve to 15 players on a team. So if the salary cap is going to, the amount of money that goes to the players is going up by 7% every year for 8910 years.

That's going to lead to somebody signing a $750,000,000.05 year deal, something like that. That's where we're heading, which I think is great. Kudos to them. But I'll be really interested to see how the fans respond to that. I mean, it's a good bulwark against the Jonte Porter situation.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

If all the players, if all the players are making at the baseline bottom 30 million a year, then you're not going to have any of that funny business. And I guess the details are negotiating right now. It's about whether Anthony Edwards will be a hundred million dollar player or Nas Reid will be $100 million player. So there's going to be sticker shock. There's certainly going to be sticker shock.

I think as far as the owners and everybody else within that business, they're going to be very happy with the results. Now, what it means for the NBA's future and how popular it's going to be. I mean, that's more stuff for people like ourselves who care about its cultural impact and its cultural imprint. And I think that's more up in the air. Well, here's.

Bill Simmons

I mean, I did this at the top of the pod, but if Ant becomes the guy, you can't even put a price on what that means to the league. Like, if he legitimately becomes the guy, they don't have anybody under 30 who totally fits that bill. And we were in that situation in the late nineties, early two thousands, where they were dying for anybody to take over. And then it kind of eventually became some combination of Kobe and Shaq, then Kobe and LeBron, and they figured it out as the decade went along. If Ant becomes the guy, that makes a lot of this a lot easier, having a signature guy that everybody knows and cares about, wanting to see if they make the playoffs every year.

The other piece we didn't mention how they included the WNBA in the deal and didn't split it out. And I asked some people involved in this, like, why are they doing it that way? And the NBA's theory was, if we include the WNBA, and you have to, and you basically have to have all of it. For us, that's 320 days a year of basketball. Like, you're adding the NBA and then all WNBA stuff.

I mean, way back in the day, back when I used to make fun of WNBA, we always felt like it was being force fed to us, like broccoli, and it was two different audiences. And I don't know if it's two completely different audiences anymore. Oh, it poisoned the relationship, the early relationship between the NBA and ESPN, because the executive over there at ESPN, I'm trying to remember if it was Shapiro. He was mad at David Stern. He didn't want stern to force the WNBA upon him.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

He said, look, we like women's college basketball, but people are not watching this. And Stern was furious, and he was livid. And he tried to go over. He tried to go over I think, Shapiro's head with Iger, and it was just a really toxic relationship on the basis of that aspect of the WNBA now with Caitlin Clark. I mean, there is some legitimate interest there, and it's almost one of the.

Bill Simmons

Stars they already had that. You could feel it changing the last couple of years. And then I think Caitlin's going to be the catalyst for it to blow up. I mean, I think there's a potential of that. There's certainly a lot of interest in that happening.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

I don't know. I was so fascinated by when closureman was on your podcast, and he was wondering if we're about to see the shift that happened with the NBA, where college basketball was bigger and then the NBA became bigger than college basketball, as basketball professionalized. If something is going to happen like that with women's basketball, where it will go from more popular college to finally, the WNBA will, you know, make that leap and overtake, I don't think so, but that potential is there. I almost wish they broke out the WNBA rights just so I could, you know, just see where they're at. Right.

Bill Simmons

And see who is desperate enough to overpay for it. I I. Which is always the case with all these sports rights come up. There's always somebody who really, really, really needs it. And we're going to post basketball.

UFC is going to be the next one, and UFC is just sitting there like, guys, please knock yourself out bidding on this basketball one, because whoever doesn't get this is going to need us. Like, at that point, Warner is going to need them. I think that's the one I think Netflix is waiting for, and we just saw it with the Brady roast. Netflix wants these live events that are in and out, not. They don't care about the inventory as much as what you were talking about earlier.

They want, like, splash and UFC is splash every four Saturdays. Huge things they can put on there. Blow it out, put Netflix stars around the octagon, the whole thing. I think it makes way more sense for them. WNBA, they haven't figured out the schedule.

Yeah, I think that's the killer for them. Is that basically the part that would really resonate when basketball's gone, that, like, eight weeks, by the time football comes back, now, all of a sudden you're going against football, and it just feels like the playoffs get lost in a way that. And I don't know how they fix it. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, right? There might not be a way to fix it.

Yeah. I think the issue structurally with the WNBA is that it is a subsidiary of the NBA, and therefore, it's hard to figure out what's unique about yourselves because you're so much patterned off of the parent company. I would have liked to have seen the WNBA try to be dramatically different, try to have a way different schedule, frankly, try to do some of the wackier Adam Silver big ideas, but it just didn't seem to happen that way. It just. I mean, except for the one thing.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

The one thing they should have done, and maybe there's still time to do that they didn't do from the outset, is just use the same team names. Like, why force people to learn about the fever? You know, why not just have the w pacers? I think that makes it so much easier to just resonate and cut across. Like, how they're in college, where it'd be like the Lady Gamecocks.

Bill Simmons

I think they're close to figuring this out, but I wonder if the season should start before college basketball or during college basketball. And then they have the hockey model, where, like, college basketball ends and the players just come right into a season. Or do you stagger it where it's like two halves? There's got to be some way where the season peaks when there's no NBA and no NFL, and that's how they win. They would argue that we're growing anyway, and people want multiple options.

But I think it's interesting. Women's college basketball took off basically by targeting those days when there was no men's college basketball. Right. That Friday, final four became this event, and they had it forever. But I think once they really honed in on that and then Sundays, and they.

And it was always. They were never competing against too much, and that was, I think, what tipped it. And now that, to me, it's like, all one thing. Like, you get to that final four weekend, it's just four straight days of basketball, and it's awesome. Well, they've got an opportunity to make it all one thing.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Like you're saying, where you can just build momentum from the college to the pro the NBA has this weird problem where they have, in theory, a free farm system in college basketball, but they've also got a competing business, and it's somehow both things, and it goes against them, and they don't have that advantage that football has. Football is the beautiful model where on Saturdays, we've got the college product, and on Sundays, we've got the pro product, and one will help the other and flow into the other. The NBA is in an awkward place with this, where they don't care. They're bathing in money currently, but they tried to make G League ignite work, and they tried to replace the college basketball pipeline, and they were not able to do that. So, yeah, I think there's actually an easier pathway to making women's college basketball work for the WNBA than right now there is for college basketball to work for the NBA.

Bill Simmons

You're right. I just. I wonder. So this ties into another passion point of mine that I know you and I have both talked to Steve Kerr about the shorter NBA season, and I wonder if, like, if you're going to basically align the WNBA and the NBA from a selling rights standpoint, it would make sense to me to make the WNBA kind of lead into the NBA season. So you have the playoffs and the finals.

Basically, that's like, late September to October, and then the basketball start. The NBA starts, like, late October, early November, something like that, with a 72 game schedule instead of an 82 game schedule. The thing I don't get about the 82 game schedule is that literally nobody wants it, not one person. And when you talk to people about it, they're just like, yeah, it's too much money. That's it.

But you're just getting so much fucking money from this new deal. This is the time to go to 72 games. Yes, it should be seized upon as an opportunity. I don't know if they care enough to do it, but it should. And it is crazy, Bill.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

This whole thing where Espn and tnt are both. I mean, ESPN, it almost seems like, look, we will pay you more money, but we want less product. There is something so paradoxical to that. It's almost like we just want the good stuff from you. We care about the conference finals.

We want that. We care about the NBA Finals. We want that one game a week, but we don't want all of it. We don't want all of the inventory. We want enough to be able to tell people that you've got to pay a sub fee because we've got the NBA.

That's what we want. And then we want the tent pole, the big event that people are going to see because it's a huge game, but we don't want all of it. So there is this question of how do you make the regular season really work? I don't think they're going to do it, but, you know, are you aware of the Kevin Arnovitz model? And if you are, then how do you feel about it?

Bill Simmons

What? Tell me what it is. It is a proposal that some within the league, like it was proposed by Kevin Arnovitz, who is@espn.com. Back in the day, that you've got Kevin. Jesus.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

I know. I know. You know, I'm explaining to the. I'm explaining to the listener who you should know who Kevin is because he's a fantastic writer. You might or might not agree with his whole big idea, but it would be a 44 game NBA season, twice a week, regular schedule, something like Tuesday and Thursday, and maybe you've got some sort of big one game showcase on the weekend.

And the whole idea would be to eventize the NBA where if you're an NBA fan, you know exactly when your team is playing. You know they're playing in the way you do with the NFL. Personally, I feel like the model, though, it sounds radical. I think it would make the NBA just huge. It would just make it more popular.

I also know why it won't happen. Because they're getting a bunch of money anyway, so why take a big risk? Yeah, but you could have a modified version of that. If you cut to 72, like, they're going to go to two more teams. So it'll be 32 teams.

Bill Simmons

You do four a team divisions, right. So you play everyone in the other conference twice. That's 32 games. Then you play everyone in your conference three times. So that's 1515 games total.

That's 45. So that gets you to 77, right? 77 is at least better than 82. But now if we wanted to do. No, we could actually go a little lower than that.

Now it's like you play everybody in the other division in your conference two times. That's 16. Now I'm at 48. Then I play everybody in my division three times. That's another 21.

Now I'm at 69 in the 69 game schedule, which would be hilarious. People get a lot of jokes out of that, but somewhere between 69 and 77 feels like the right number. And I just think about, like, the play in how we kind of engage with the NBA around, I don't know, like three weeks left. Like, oh, shit, Golden State might not make the playoffs to, to be able to speed that up a little sooner with more stakes and, like, if you have one injury that could really matter, you know, I just think it would make the league more interesting. But they're not going to listen to us.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

They, they might, but they, they probably won't, but they might in that case, because that's not a huge sacrifice to get there. And there is some proof of concept. The most watched NBA season post Jordan, and I don't think anybody would have anticipated it. It was the lockout season of 2010 2011, I think. No.

Bill Simmons

1112. That season was 11 12, 66 games, and it was like, it was actually just hoops every night. It was great. Yeah. And there was no rollout.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

You couldn't promote it. They hastily put together their greatest ad, which the I want to be with you forever or whatever it was, with the bad CGI that still had an emotional impact, merging the players from yesteryear with the players today. But the crazy thing about it is when baseball had its strike, it took a huge dip in popularity. But the NBA had something equivalent. And because I believe they had fewer games, it just whet the appetite more.

So I think at some level, people kind of know how many games you have and calibrate their interest according to it. And so I think if you did cut it by what you're talking about, I do think that you would be more rewarded by more interest in the league. I don't know if any owner wants to take that risk when they've got the money in hand, but I do think that's how it would work out. Well, one other thing about that lockout season, which is relevant to the time right now, LeBron, year two. Miami.

Bill Simmons

Yeah. Durant, OKC taking off. Kobe still circling around with the Lakers. Derrick rose taking off in Chicago. Carmelo in New York.

The old Celtics team. There was just a lot of fun teams that year and a lot of fun storylines. And then Dirk and Dallas trying to defend the title. And I think where we're heading toward the mid 2020s, especially now that we are established in Minnesota as a real new contender, we're establishing OKC. Luca and Kyrie might be able to play together.

You know, you get the Celtics, you have whatever the fuck's going on in Phoenix, and you'll always have the Lakers. And now there's a lot of players at the table. Wait, before we go, we got to talk referees really fast. Oh, yeah. This was the biggest rule change we've seen affect the competitiveness of a season that I can remember in the NBA since 2004.

Five. When they headed into that zero four five season and got rid of the hand check and all that stuff. You've been fascinated by it. You've written about it a couple of times. Most fascinating thing to you about this.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

It'S that we don't even know perhaps, who's good or who is optimized for this. I think Karalabob tweeted that he has to recalibrate everything with the San Quentin rules, as he put it. Where I'm looking at what happens to Denver right now, and I'm looking at this team, and I can tell something is weird about them. Something is off. Jamal Murray's throwing things at refs.

So maybe if we played the season out without the rule change, maybe they would come apart and they wouldn't have a good title defense at the same time. I don't know. Maybe they were just well situated for the old rules, and the Timberwolves are well situated for these new rules. And this, uh, prison ball of vacation, or whatever you want to call it, this whistle swallowing where I just looked it up, the, I think, defensive efficiency. There was no team, uh, well, it's just, I think the lowest team was at 104.6 for last postseason, and there are four teams right now in the post season with a better defensive efficiency.

I don't even need to give people stats because everybody sees it. Everybody sees Jamal murray. Jamal murray getting his leg humped all the way down the court. You know, everybody can see that it's a different kind of situation right now. And so that's part of what's interesting to me is just, I don't know who is best situated for this.

I've heard from people that, you know, Luca is kind of good with these rule changes. He's just big. You're not going to throw him off. So maybe they're better than we thought they were, and it's something that has completely changed, changed the game. And maybe this is another thing we could credit Adam silver for.

This is bad process, good result. I mean, generally, it's not good to have a secret rule change in the aftermath of your tv meetings at all Star during a rights negotiation. But I can't disagree with the result. I love the result. I didn't.

I didn't. I didn't like the cheapening of the sport. I didn't like 145 to 135. I think they're just like, there's sort of an ideal length to the season. There's an ideal score, there's a platonic ideal, and there's nothing more beautiful to me than 100 to 101 playoff game.

And, yeah, they've got to refine it. Maybe you can't have guys clawing each other's eyes out, and they've got to figure out something in the middle and a happy medium. But I generally think this has been a great reform for the league and a direction I really approve of, even if it was arrived at in a particularly shady way. I remember Racil and I, because we were doing pods about it pretty early, because we. I mean, within the first 910 days was like, this is different, okay?

Bill Simmons

Who's going to win from this? And I think Minnesota was one of the first two teams we talked about. Cause we were like, man, if these are gonna be the rules, this is great for Minnesota. I think we said the Knicks. I think maybe we talked about the Lakers just cause they know how to, you know, with LeBron and Davis and the fact that LeBron gets the one guy who still gets calls.

But, yeah, it turned out to be this fortuitous event for Minnesota. But I have to ask you, what's your hottest take for why they did this?

My hottest? Give me the rational Ethan take. But, you know, you're known to whip some hot takes around from time to time. What's your hottest take for why they did this in February? My hottest take would just be the conspiracy take.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

It would be that one of the tv broadcasters said, look, you got to stop this craziness. We'll give you the $2.6 billion or whatever, but you've got to stop this now and show, you know, show that you're loyal to us and you'll be responsive to us. We want to know that when we say jump, you know, you ask, how high? And that's. That's my take.

Do I know that that happened? I know that Adam was humiliated by the All Star game, and I know that there was some sort of event with Larry Bird and Bob Costas where they started cracking on the modern NBA and the lack of defense, and they were getting belly laughs in the room, and there was a bit of an embarrassment factor. And everybody knows that the All Star game isn't a real game, but it sort of highlighted how the game had kind of become like an all star game. And so, yeah, the two hot takes are that it was demanded by a broadcaster, or the other hot take is that it was all Adam going back to his hotel room, steaming and going, fine, fuck it. Fuck you guys.

We're changing the rules. Sick of Trey young whipping his head back and getting a call. Either one I like, either conspiracy theory, I like. And I don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive. I love the Adam goes back to his hotel room after the all Star game, just pissed off, sending emails to the director of officiate, and it's like, all right, execute operation prison ball.

Bill Simmons

And that just that night the thing was sent, he just had it just being pissed. Cause he was pissed when he was handing out the trophy, you know, and I don't think it's a coincidence that everything shifted right after that, but it's one of those, I would say one of the top two or three things he's done since he's been commissioner. You know, the way he pulled off the quippers, Sterling thing is probably still number one for me because that was a real crisis, and he did it. But this is, this is up there, like, really realizing something is wrong with the league. We can't wait till after this season to fix it, and we're just fucking fixing it.

Letting the players figure out how to play with the new rules. Oh, rule changes are huge. It's a huge aspect of what a commissioner can do. What was one of the biggest things David Stern did? It was what led to the 7 seconds or less revolution where they had to go the other way, where the platonic ideal, it was way too much the other way.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

And instead of 145 to 135, it was 75 to 72. And they had to figure it out. A lot of the six to 61 in the playoffs that year, that was a final Pacers pistons, I think. Oh, was that the Reggie Miller getting a shot blocked by Prince game? Or maybe that was.

It was in that. It was in that era. It was in that time. So it's almost like when you're running the fed, where sometimes you got to cut interest rates, sometimes you got to raise interest rates. And, you know, as a commissioner, I think that's a valuable, that that's a valuable thing that you can do, because these sports, man, they're just their rules.

And we talk about it like there's just basketball, you know, with the 96 Bulls beat the Nuggets of today. Yeah, but the game is their rules. The game is the. The rules of the game. And if you change the rules, you change the game.

And the NBA changed the rules, and the game has been changed. And I think to a better end, I think these playoff games are just great theater, even as the Knicks, as they did back in the 1990s, try to make them as ugly as possible. Yeah, it's like even in the mid two thousands. It wasn't just the hand check rule, and it wasn't just they switched his own defenses. I thought two of the subtle things they did that were super smart were that 16 seconds to cross the ball over half court instead of 14, which doesn't sound like anything, right?

Bill Simmons

It's 2 seconds, but there's just a pace sometimes. And when I watch it, sometimes I feel like the guys aren't going to get over. Brunson's the master of that. You always feel like Brunson's going to get an eight second violation. He barely gets it over in time.

And then resetting the shot clock on an offensive rebound I think was huge. Cause these teams have got offensive rebounds, and especially if you want to play with a slower pace, you just pull it back out and you rip off another 18, 20 seconds and it sucked. Now you get that rebound, you pull it out. There's 11 seconds left already. You got to like, come up with another shot.

Just those two things alone, plus the hand check. I thought, you know, it's one of those things where you think, why didn't they always do this? Which is how I feel now about reviewing block charge calls. That would be my number one draft pick for get this the fuck out of basketball. Just take it out.

Like we're going to be 50 50, probably long term with the 2000 block charge calls we review every season. Just let's, let's say coin flip. Okay, get him the fuck out. I don't want to watch another review of him. Yeah, I would feel similarly.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

I feel that way about replay review in general. But this goes back to the tv incentives and the money. Why? Sometimes what's good for fans isn't good for everybody. There's a perverse incentive with the replay review at the end of these games because people get so frustrated.

There was that crazy end to Warriors Lakers in the regular season that dragged on and on and on. But the perverse, the perverse aspect of it is that the end of the game is when the most people are watching. So even if you're drawing it out and boring people, um, you're going to get a bigger number often when that happens. So that's going to be a hard thing to argue against. Oh, this is a good one.

Bill Simmons

So your conspiracy is this, this drags on the higher rating for longer? Yes. It draws out the portion of the game when people are watching. Look at that. People are watching the most.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Which is unfortunate because I think, I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze I think it would be better to have european style games that are just boom, boom, boom at the end. I would want replay review gone. In general, I liked it when it was imperfect back in the day, but given that perverse incentive, I'm not sure we're going to really get there. That's another adam hot take about the rule change, by the way, that he was realizing we were going to get our asses kicked in the Olympics and they had to fix this now because we're going to get to FIBA and these guys are just going to be like, wait, what? I just got knocked on my drive and you didn't call it.

Bill Simmons

So he was trying to, uh, trying to condition them to do it. All right, before we go, give me your number one hottest media take right now. Oh my God, do I have a hot. Give me something that you just pulled out of the microwave and you burnt your fingers on it. Anything ESPN related?

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Well, I said that I thought the ESPN got the best deal. I don't know if that's really a hot take. I'm trying to wonder. Hot take? I think it's a good take.

They finagled it. Now I just don't know what a hot take is necessarily, other than that maybe all the ratings are fake. I'll say that much as a ratings watcher, as a ratings watcher, it is totally unpredictable in both directions. There are some games where I used to be able to predict it, and I would talk about it with Ryan Glasfiege of the New York Post, and we would predict it. We can't predict it anymore.

It's all over the map. And so my theory is, as they've changed the rating system, where they've added out of home viewership, where they used to not count you if you watched in an airport or a hospital, they now have all these new counting systems, which gave everybody like a double digit percentage boost for all of sports, almost. Uh, I feel like combined with that and how all the different streaming services are now incorporated, it goes both ways, where sometimes I go, wow, that's way fewer people than I would have thought, or, wow, that's way more people than I would have thought. I've called it the great vaganing. This is just one of my many terms that is not going to catch on, that I'll try out in the podcast as I try to make fetch happen.

But I think that we are entering, in general, an era where we just don't know how popular anything is. And I'll miss Phil. I will miss the days of just knowing. Because when we combine sort of how Nielsen is, is noodling around with new metrics and new scoring systems, with how the streaming companies don't even want to tell us how many people watched. I would love to know all the numbers on the Tom Brady roast.

I don't know if we'll ever know it. We're just entering a period of time where we just won't know how popular things are. You still see with. It happens with YouTube and podcasts too, because people can buy YouTube views and people can game the podcast system and the rankings and the charts, and there's all these different tricks for that. But yeah, it's the age of disinformation and confusing information.

Bill Simmons

I have no idea. Like when we get to the finals, the only thing I know for sure is they're going to release stuff. That countdown had the highest ratings it's ever had. That game four of the NBA Finals had the highest rating for a game four. In ten years, everything will be the highest.

And I just don't know if I believe any piece of it. No, it doesn't make a total. It doesn't make a lot of sense because it seems like there's so much competing media out there and there are only so many young people who can sit still and watch a game in its entirety. And more and more people are cord cutting. So it would be hard for these things to get more popular.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

But ultimately, I'm just not sure how much we'll really know going forward. So welcome to the great vegan team. We'll get some statistics and we'll just have to kind of see for ourselves a bit and see how much people pay for things. The great vegan, Inc. Sounds like a new Apple tv drama with like, I don't know, it's like Jason Siegel, it's his comeback to Apple TV.

Bill Simmons

I don't know. Peter Gallagher's in it. It's great veganing. They're set in the midwest. I think the whole Apatow crew winds.

Up in that one in the great vagining. I like it. Yeah, it's a. Yeah, it's a writer's workshop in the midwest. And all of these people want to get popular again now that books aren't being published as much.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

We'll figure it out. We'll figure out what the great veganing actually is, other than not very catchy. But, you know, I try. All right. You can read Ethan's sub stack, which is very good always.

Bill Simmons

I mean, you have to subscribe to it, but that's. That's the world we live in in 2024. Sometimes, if it's good, you got to subscribe to it. But I always, I always respect how you went on your own and built an audience. I thought it was pretty cool.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Well, thank you. And I apologize for cockifying the audience by charging a sub fee. Thanks, Ben. Good to see you. Thanks.

Bill Simmons

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All right, I'm here with my daughter, Zoe Simmons. She just came back from college. It's great to have you back, Zoe. Oh, thanks. Miss you too.

Yeah, I miss you. I miss you stealing my clothes. I miss you actually getting me a coffee, which you did. Thanks for coming. I know you didn't even respond.

Zoe Simmons

I still got you a Starbucks and your favorite order too with taping brand. I was taping another part of the pod and of course you knew that but started facetiming me anyway and scrap. It was good to have you back. Just wait for half your sock collection to be gone because that will happen within this first week. I know.

Bill Simmons

I'm going to actually have to put. A lock on that thing. Yeah. I now feel like my favorite t shirts, sweatshirts and socks are under attack. Yeah.

Like in a way, like you were gone. I felt super safe. Now I'm making my bathroom your primary spot. Well, you also. That's what you get.

You also had, I don't think the. Stench has left that room. You also had the air conditioning was 60 degrees last night, which was absurd. That wasn't me. I'm not taking the blame for that one.

All right, well, it's great to have you back. All right. You had some topics you want to cover, things you learned from college. The biggest thing you learned was that you could actually be self sufficient and do stuff. Like, instead of us waking you up because you had this or that, I.

Zoe Simmons

Just wouldn't wake up at all. You figured out how to sleep through things that you. Now you figure you. No, I did. You had like some early PT appointments and things that I was like, wow, she's never making that.

Bill Simmons

07:00 in Cambridge. And you actually did. Yeah, there's a lot of things I had to figure out this year that you don't really think about, like niche, little things when you're living at home that you actually have to do yourself when you move out of your home. Like waking up in the mornings, existing, eating, getting my food every day, like clean my rooms clean. Yeah.

You're in a big city, so you had Starbucks and Panera and CB's and all these things around. I have my access, but. All right, biggest things you learned. Well, first of all, you learned that you lied to us because you went to college and you're like, I'm not gonna date anybody. I just wanna be single.

I wanna say that completely I don't wanna be attached. I just want to have a full college experience and find a bunch of friends and not get attached. And then, of course, you had a boyfriend within five weeks. That wasn't necessarily my fault. I didn't go into college.

Whose fault was it? There's two people above their attention. Yeah. My boyfriend, Tommy, he asked me to be his girlfriend for two weeks straight, every single day. And I kept trying to say no to him, but he wouldn't let me, so I got worn down.

Zoe Simmons

I wouldn't put that as a my fault type of situation. Are you going to be one of those people who just always has a boyfriend? I hope not. I've never tried to be that type of person and just kind of have. Well, you're not like a big drama person.

Sure. You have a good sense of humor. Yep. You're fun to hang out with. And sometimes those people just always end up with people.

Well, I never. I don't feel like I've ever, like I've been alone a few different times and I'm all right with it. I think it's just I'm not a multiple people type of person. And then I'll just be hanging out with one person, then that will end up in a. You're a single person.

Bill Simmons

You're a single person. I'm monogamous. Is that the real word? Yeah. But with you, like, smaller groups of friends, not like big.

Zoe Simmons

This is one thing I've learned for sure, is that I don't feel like I need a huge friend, group or support system of people. If not every single person in that group is someone that I would trust with my life. I feel like I try to keep my circle small because I want to be able to give my friends or my boyfriend and my family, like, my everything, and I don't want to have to spread that amongst a bunch of different people that might not be. You're missing out on those, like, twelve person girl groups where there's 19 different factions and people hate each other. Sure.

But I have, like, my exterior friends or my going out friends and the people that I'll do those types of things with, but not the type of person that I necessarily, like, go out into the park with and have a deep conversation about life with. All right, things you learned when you got to college? I'm just reading the list you sent me and you can expound. Sure. Do you feel like these are going to be life lessons for the younger audience as they go to college?

Yeah, I think these are crucial. Okay. Well, stuff I didn't see on here is make sure you're on your dad's Starbucks on the app. You know how embarrassing it is for them to call out Bill every time I order, like, a pink drink and to go pick it up? I'm Bill your bill in Boston, ordering Starbucks.

Bill Simmons

And that's always. Do you think they think it's short for Billy, like, with the ie, like Billie Eilish? And, I don't know, they might not question it, considering it's a 2024. Should I change my name on the Starbucks app to just be, like, more, like, androgynous? Just something that they won't look at me?

All right, first rule. Girls and guys can never all caps be friends parentheses with small exceptions. That's definitely something I've learned this year, which you guys ragged on me, on for high school because I was a dumbass and I'd just become very close friends with. With certain guys, and it would end up poorly every single time, where either they'd have a crush on me, mostly that, or I would end up liking them, and it would just. That never happened.

They always had the crush on you. It end up in complete disaster. I thought that was something that would get left behind in high school or that people figured that out in, like, the trial and error years before you go to college. But I came to college, and that's. It's totally still happening, where there's.

Zoe Simmons

There's just so many offenders of the guy and girl friendship, super close, hanging out all the time, snapchatting each other, calling each other when they're not together. Everyone thinks they're dating, but they're not. And then all of a sudden, the guy likes the girl or the girl likes the guy, and then it's complete disaster. And it happens every single time. No matter what sort of particular situation you're in, it's always gonna end up in disaster.

Bill Simmons

See, this warms my heart, because this brings me back to 35, 40 years ago, when I was in high school and college, and this also happened. I think this is the. This is the eternal dilemma of life. Well, this is what when Harry met Sally is about. It came out in 1989.

Zoe Simmons

But people. I mean, my boyfriend was such a sweet, sweet guy and a loving heart, but I had to explain this phenomenon to him because I have guy friends, I'd say, but some have hit on me in the past, and I'm not friends with them right now because I have a boyfriend, right? If I didn't have a boyfriend, I'd probably still be friends with them. But there's just this weird thing where people try to convince themselves that it's totally normal for guys and girls to have these close connections, where it's almost. Almost like their boyfriend and girlfriend.

Guys and girls can never be too close unless there's some sort of barrier in there where they don't like the opposite sex or they're just completely in a friendship that's just not romantic at all. Or the guys at eunuch, like in Game of Thrones. What does that mean? You don't know who eunuch is? No, I haven't watched the Game of Thrones.

Bill Simmons

The Game of Thrones. The guys who have their testicles removed? Sure. Then that's a good situation. Eunuchs would be great.

Zoe Simmons

It's. It's never gonna work out. That's all I'm gonna tell you. Don't get yourself in a position where you're ruining your friendships or your friend groups because you get too close with one of the guys in it. It won't work out.

I've seen it time and time again. It's a disaster. Don't do it. We used to have. We used to know girls in college.

Bill Simmons

We used to talk about how they had, like, I wish I could name names, but they would have a bunch of guy friends, and we would used to call it, like, their bench. Like we. Soccer, you have, like, the eight players in the bench who can come in at any time and be like, oh, we need, like, a backup striker to come in and that person. And they would just have the bench lined up just in case for flirting or, like, a one night something. Never serious.

Zoe Simmons

They're there to be there for you when your boyfriend isn't. Yeah, that's just what's gonna happen. My friend group in college, it's me and my friend and then three other guys. And I've remained neutral where it's never been a weird sort of situation between all of us. I have a boyfriend, and I show up every now and then, but it's just always been a strictly friend sort of thing.

And it's the first. Well, one of friendships that I've had with guys where it's completely platonic. But why are you surprised by this? I'm not. People don't know this.

I don't think or try to convince themselves otherwise that it's acceptable or people. Do know this because this is what 85% of rom coms are about. Yeah, but I've watched all those 85%, and I still didn't fully realize, like, the extent to the danger of this situation until I went to college. Well, what did me, in my opinion. I've witnessed it firsthand.

What did you tell me? I asked you, like, how many, like, close female friends do I have? My life where I'm like, oh, I'm going out, my friend Kelly tonight, and. Mom rip your eyebrow off, huh? I think she'd rip your eyebrows off.

Bill Simmons

Yeah, that would suck. But same thing for mom. But it's just kind of what happens. You have a bunch of opposite sex friends before you get married, and then when you actually get married, you make new sets of friends and usually pairs couples, whatever. And it's kind of weird.

Like, the ultimate example, my best friend's wedding. Yeah. When she comes back and it's like, my best friend, whatever. And it's like, guess what? She makes a move, tries to ruin the wedding.

Zoe Simmons

That's so brutal. If your boyfriend or girlfriend has a best friend of the opposite sex or the same sex, just be afraid. Well, this is what all great rom.com art has been about. Your next lesson, don't go into college with a high school relationship. It never works.

Bill Simmons

Another thing, it's funny how all your lessons are things I told you about over and over again, and you. I still questioned you until I got to school. I have an array of friends, and some of them went into college trying to salvage their high school relationship with their high school sweetheart that they graduated with and they were going to get married to, and blah, blah, blah. And then a few weeks in, someone gets cheated on, or it just completely wreaks havoc and the entire place burns down, and it's a total disaster. See, this is another thing that warms my heart.

I'm glad this still exists, too. Like the go home for the Columbus day weekend and the first fight, but let's get back together at the end and then go back for thanksgiving. I mean, thanksgiving is usually the death sentence. Yeah, it is. You're going out and you see them out somewhere, and it all happens over again.

Zoe Simmons

I saw it happen with some of my friends, but it is a total disaster. It's a death sentence, and it's probably the worst thing that you can do. Well, you had a boyfriend, senior in high school. Yeah. With full intention of trying to do the zip code dating, but you don't do that either.

Bill Simmons

But you were aware because we kept telling you, like, there's no way that's gonna last. Yeah, but you're actually really aware of that. Unlike some people are like, no, no, we're gonna make it try to figure it out. I was aware of it, but I was in such denial of it, and I was a total disaster. I don't think I've ever.

You ruined my summer. Been such a disaster before in my life. It really hurt my feeling. Wreck. One could say it was awful.

The only time you were more of an emotional wreck was during COVID when you watched 17 seasons of Grey's Anatomy and went into the. You're not going to be happy to find out that I rewatched practically all of it in this past year. Well, now you're. Now you're bingeing Sex in the city, so I hope, like, if you. If you morph into the shows you're watching, I really hope that doesn't happen with Sex and the City.

Zoe Simmons

Maybe one of the characters. I hope it's not Samantha. You better hope not. Hey, the construction workers here. I think you looked at me.

She's the best. She's the best. It warms my heart. I'm gonna say that for the third time that you finally fall in love with Sex and the City. It's great.

It's truly. I just. I adore Carrie so much. What's her name in real life? Sarah Jessica Parker.

Sarah Jessica Parker. I absolutely love her. She's. And even though right now she's kind of unlikable because of what's going on in the show, I'm midway through season three. She is such a lovable lead character.

Probably one of the greatest show narrators out of any show that I've watched thus far. She's fantastic. And I just love the way that they behave and interact with one another and just the way that they talk and how poised they are. It's fun to watch. It makes me want to not be more like them, but to be more sophisticated in the way that I speak like they do.

Bill Simmons

Look at you. That show's great. We had been trying to get you to watch it forever, really, since high school, and you were like, no, it's an old person show. Those girls are gross. I never would say that.

Zoe Simmons

I just wasn't ready. I knew I was gonna love it. I wasn't ready for a serious show like that yet. It's a classic. So you saw the Hamptons episode then in season two?

Bill Simmons

That was my favorite one. Why was that your favorite one? I just thought that was a great episode. Yeah, it was pretty funny. She's holding the.

Holding the hair up when they throw up, which is really well written, that show. The first two seasons, some of those episodes were like, really well written. They're fantastic. I think it's also. How about the farting.

Farting in bed one? Oh, with big. Mister big. That was a good one. This show does a great.

Zoe Simmons

It does a great, great job at, like, showing the terrors of the first love sort of situation. Yeah. I think that was definitely probably shocking and touching to a lot of people that she ruined her life for someone who she didn't need to ruin her life for at all. What was cool about it was watching the show when it was happening. Like, Carrie was the kind of person I always would have wanted to be friends with.

Bill Simmons

Like, back to our earlier discussion. I mean, would have wanted to be friends with but probably would have had a crush on secretly too. Totally. But not. Also not.

Would have wanted to seriously date. Wanted it to be a sort of friendship flirtation. Yeah. Which is like, basically. Which is everything.

Zoe Simmons

Yeah. Yeah. That's who she always ends up with. The only character I never really totally loved was the what's her face, the Kristin Davis character. The brunette.

Bill Simmons

Yeah. I'm not a big fan of her either. That was the only one. That was the only character. For some reason right now, I can't remember her name because they're all so girl power betting on themselves, like, individual people.

Zoe Simmons

And she's the only character that's, like, really reliant on finding a man and getting married. She's the only character that also like. But that's why she's looking at the bright side. She's great because she adds that, that element to the group. Just that they never just fan of Miranda.

I like her, but I just can't handle her sometimes. Samantha and Carrie are really the only two that I absolutely adore who hate. Each other in real life. Really? Yeah.

Bill Simmons

When they did the Sex and the City remake show, Samantha's not in it. Because Carrie Jessica Parker hates her so much. They're feuding. That's brutal. I think Samantha hates her more than.

Oh, because she always. Sarah Jessica Parker made more money. But, yeah, Carrie Bradshaw, one of the great characters. It's great. Also, like, it's hard to explain this now because you've seen.

Seen so many crazy shows but back at the time, it was kind of a nutty show. Like, women acting. Yeah. Very raunchy too. Yeah, they didn't.

That did not exist. That's what's good about it. And it's definitely a little dated. Some of the episodes, they say things that would not fly these days but it does a good job at kind of representing that, like, strong female empowerment thing. Yeah.

Well, back to the don't date your boyfriend from high school. Yeah. Did anyone stay together? I know of one couple. Yeah.

That's really rare. I'm just. I'm just saying it's. Long distance is a hard thing. I'm doing it right now because my boyfriend does not live in the same state as I do.

You're dating somebody from fucking Miami. What? Jesus. Can you say that on here? Yeah.

Zoe Simmons

Are you gonna get him murdered? What do you mean? His name and where he lives is already on this podcast. Please don't kill my boyfriend. He's Miami, and he gave me a Miami Heat hat for Christmas, which I didn't appreciate.

I know. Well, that's right. But long distance is hard, and especially if you're in college and you're a freshman in college, you don't want your life to be restricted by someone who's in a completely different state, feeling that their life is being restricted to. It's just not a good thing. If you're going to get back together at some point, you'll come back to each other at some point.

But don't go into college with that person because you'll ruin that shot. I feel like tommy's going to show up in about a week with a suitcase. I'm here, guys. I know. Miami is first round playoff losers.

Bill Simmons

Miami, Florida. Yeah, I know. He's still trying to bank off the fact that Jimmy Butler wasn't playing and everyone got injured and blah, blah, blah, and they won last year. That doesn't fly. All right, next thing you learned in college, drop bullshit, friends.

Once you get to college, it's aggressive. What is it? What is this about? I feel like in high school, when you're still living in the city that you grew up in, you kind of have to keep people around situationally just because you feel like you can't cut that tie yet because you still live in the same state, you might see each other out. It might be an awkward thing.

Zoe Simmons

You just don't have the strength to cut people off when you think you might have to. But since getting to college and meeting some true friends and having a great boyfriend and just feeling like my life is finally stable, as in my adult life outside of this city, I've been more keen on getting rid of people who I didn't necessarily felt like added to my life and getting rid of anti bullshit. Getting rid of is a strong word, but I think it's important once you're an adult and once you're in college and you're on your path to, like, actually living a real person life. If you feel like someone is in your life that's taking your time away and not giving back that same sort of friendship that you're giving to them, there's no point. It's just not worth it anymore.

There's no, like, situational anything. Just gotta cut that person off, you know? Lena Dunham called that. What I mean, she used it in a slightly different context, but. Sunshine stealers.

Yeah, there you go. She said when she was on the rise, like doing girls and stuff, and there would be these older people that saw her as like this up and comer and they would try to glom on and do projects with her and they try to steal her sunshine. I always thought that was a good way to put it. LA's tough because there's a lot of great people here, but there's also a lot of not so grateful or great people here. I've definitely discovered that since going to city on going to school on the east coast and weeding those people out that aren't going to add to your life, and if anything are going to take, that's super important.

Bill Simmons

Well, that part of that is social media, right? Yeah. I just think that there's. Because of social media, there's a lot of, like, fake friendship types of things that you have to abide by. You mean like when you put the post up and they're like gorgeous five hearts?

Zoe Simmons

Yeah. People think that that's. I hate that so much. And I'm not one to talk. I love you.

I do that with my friends, but that's like, the social standard. As, like, a teenage girl, it's like, your friends will think you don't like them if you don't do that. If your friends are crazy, well, then you also have. If you put a picture of them and you don't clear it with the friend and they take it personally. Yeah.

Bill Simmons

All the social media rules are amazing. It's ridiculous. And, like, I don't fully abide by all of those because I really don't care. Like, whatever anyone puts out on social media, it's not my problem, but I know a lot of people take it personally. My best friend Paige, she's just like, posted the most ridiculous video for my birthday and I thought it was awesome.

Zoe Simmons

I just think there's no point in taking that crap seriously. And friendship does not mean social media. Why'd you have to mention Paige? Now she's gonna get big head. Good, because I love her.

Bill Simmons

Next one. What is this really a tip? Doing laundry, living on your own, and eating in college is hard. You read over the list beforehand if you wanted to. I told you it was broad.

You know what I used to do? I used to leave when I was going to holy cross. I used to drive 35, 40 minutes. To Molly to go do your laundry. No, I'd do my laundry there.

And I knew I got a free dinner for my dad. Yeah. Great. So I try to time it. It's.

Zoe Simmons

It. I know that's not a big tip. It's just hard. It's hard becoming an adult and doing laundry. Well, the eating is the hardest thing.

Bill Simmons

Right? Cause you're pretty. You're, like, one of the more disciplined eaters I've ever seen. I'm a pretty. I have a tough gut sometimes.

Zoe Simmons

I'm an athlete. I need to. I'm careful in the way that I eat. And my school's primary food source. Although our dining halls is pretty.

All right. And they'll have, like, versatile. Yeah, but then you have the late night of the mexican place. There's mexican place, but, like, everyone's getting cheeseburgers and quesadillas and, like, grilled cheese. And I don't.

I don't personally, that doesn't agree with my body. Every day at 01:00 in the morning. Yeah, exactly. So that's nephew Kyle. That's.

That's a hard thing, not being able to. Cousin Kyle, in your case. Yeah, cousin Kyle. But one at the 01:00 pizza. I mean, I've.

Bill Simmons

Yeah, the eating piece is a really hard one. There's. You have more intelligence about that stuff in 2024 than we had in 1990. Cause done so much research on, like. Our thing was like, I am hungry.

I need to eat. And we had, like, the frozen yogurt bar and our college thing, and we would watch the girls eating frozen yogurt. We're like, look at them losers. Oh, and then you're the one ordering the frozen yogurt. Yeah, and then we're eating like crap.

Zoe Simmons

Yeah. I think colleges have gotten better about, like, the types of foods that they're. They're serving to the students there. But let me just tell you, Emerson never doesn't have the entire dessert table full. Like, there's.

If anything's available in the dining hall, it's always dessert. So your last tip was going home in the summer or on breaks will never not be weird. What does that mean? Um, like we were saying earlier, I just. I feel like time doesn't.

Doesn't pass here when I'm not home. Like, my prom was a year ago, which felt like four months ago. I graduated high school, like, nearly a year ago. That felt like it was just yesterday. Like, in your hometown, time doesn't really pass because you don't live here.

But in college, everything's moving, and it's weird to, like, deal with having two dually different lives on two completely different sides of the world and having different friends, and it's just. It's all very strange, and it's a great thing to come back. It's gonna be weird to see ex boyfriends, ex friends, etcetera. It's a weird thing, but it's all part of growing up, but it's just. Are you excited to be judged by me again?

Bill Simmons

As the summer goes, I can't wait for it. Doing judgments. What judgments are you gonna do to me? I'll give you judgments right back. That's fine.

Can you tell? So those are your tips. We went through college. Sounds like everything went fine. Everything went great.

Now it's about getting ready for sophomore year. Yeah. Now you have a better idea what classes to pick, better expectations for? Soccer, all that stuff. Before we go, can you tell us your three favorite pieces of podcast slash YouTube content that you're consuming right now?

Zoe Simmons

Sure. Canceled podcast, hosted by Brooke Schofield and Tana Mongeau, is probably my favorite podcast right now on Spotify. What is it? I wouldn't totally know how to explain it if you know who Tana Mongeau is. She's been a youtuber and an Internet sensation since YouTube begun.

She's kind of a crazy la party girl with many, many stories, with all the celebrities that have been up and rising in these past, like, two decades, but they just kind of talk about pop culture, like their lives in LA. And I know that doesn't sound so appealing, but they're fantastic storytellers. They're hilarious. Just two great girls kind of talking about their raunchy lives in LA. Kind of like a podcasty version of Sex and the City.

Similar vibes. That's what I'd say about it. So that's your number one. What's number two? Another one I'm loving is Remy Cruz and Alicia Marie's podcast on Spotify called Pretty Basic.

They've also been on YouTube since the beginning of time, but they were more like lifestyle creators, where they were kind of at first, appealing to younger audiences, like middle school girls. So I'd been watching them since then, and they've evolved their content, but it's kind of like family style home life, like more put together version of influencers. They're great. They're also great storytellers. Just fantastic.

I don't know what my third one would be. Oh, I love. Call her daddy. Yeah, let's talk about that, Cooper. She's great.

Also. Sex. The city kind of played as a gateway for her to be able to do the podcast that she does. I feel like it was a super pivotal tv show that came out that kind of open the floodgates for content like that. Yeah, but it's not, I mean, when she was doing it, especially when she had her old co host.

Yeah. It was way more about like, the sexual stuff and the exploits. But now it's. It's more of an interview. It's shifted over.

She's talked about it a lot because she'll. She'll have guests on, but the things that she'll get into with her guests are, like, very deep. Like the gateway where it started, was like, all this sexual content and talking about her relations with people and et cetera. Now it's kind of switched over to, like, telling lifestyle stories. Like, she's an advocate for really everything that she can be an advocate for.

She's just kind of shifted her consciousness. She's an advocate for everything she could be an advocate for. I don't even know what that means. Like, when the entire Roe v. Wade thing happened, she did a whole podcast segment on going to Virginia to, like, an abortion clinic.

Like, she's. She's done her fair share of kind of shifting her content over to things that she cares about more. And there's still all the episodes with the fun, raunchy material. But you can really get whatever you want on her podcast, which I appreciate. Cause every episode's super different, as opposed to mine.

Bill Simmons

That's mostly basketball and football. I think she's a good interviewer. She's a really good interviewer. All of the interviews I've listened to of hers have been great. I just listened to an Emily Emma Rattikowski.

Yeah. Yeah, she did her interview. It was fantastic. Madison Beer did an interview on there. Also a great episode.

Zoe Simmons

Like, it's. It's really interesting to hear things about these, these people that you've never really heard about. What's been your rom.com of the year? I mean, you have watched the Glenn Powell. I was about to seven times.

I do. I do love that one. That was kind of an easy, great movie for me. But I think I've watched the notebook in La La Lands, like, a collective twelve times this year. The notebook.

Yeah, I love that one. That movie's great. I'm gonna make Ben watch it tonight with me. It's gonna be a tear fest. Do we cover everything?

I think so. Great to see you, Zoe Simmons. I'm glad to have you back. Thank you, too. Thanks for the check in.

Bye. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Ethan, thanks to my daughter. Thanks to Kyle Creighton and Steve Ceruti as well. Don't forget, subscribe to ringer movies on YouTube.

Bill Simmons

Get ready for the live rewatchables on Monday and I will see you on this feed on Thursday.

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What If the T-Wolves Sweep Denver? Plus, the NBA's Media Deal and Freshman-Year College Lessons With Ethan Sherwood Strauss and Zoe Simmons.

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