Transcript of An NBA Mailbag, LeBron’s Next Move, and the Wild Paramount-WBD Merger With David Jacoby and Matt Belloni

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Und jetzt auch für ihn. Tamaris. The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by FanDuel Sportsbook. We are also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where on the Rewatchables, it is officially CR Month. That's right, Chris Ryan picked a bunch of movies. We did Sicario on Monday night. We did it live. On Netflix. You watch on Netflix, you watch on Spotify, wherever you hear podcasts. We have Fargo coming next Monday, and then, uh, the next one after that is going to be To Live and Die in LA, which we've been waiting to do forever, a classic. And then the fifth one is going to be LA Confidential, and we're going to let everybody vote for the fourth one. So if you follow the Rewatchables on Twitter, uh, we'll have some choices for the fourth one. There's some pretty good— we have 12 movies Vote every day for one of the four, and then we'll make the finals the fourth day between the three winners. So that's what we're doing. Coming up on this podcast, Dave Jacoby, my old friend from my Grantland days, my ESPN days, he is coming on to do a mailbag with me.

We have like two-thirds of a mailbag, but some really, really fun basketball questions, some good nickname stuff as well. And then Matt Bellany, who you can hear on The Town. Um, we are going to talk about the Warner Brothers Paramount, uh, crazy merger and all the ramifications and ripple effects. So, uh, action-packed podcast for you today. We're gonna take a break, bring in Pearl Jam, and then my old friend Dave Jacoby. This episode is brought to you by Expedia. You gotta love a good deal, whether that's a quarterback on a short, low-risk contract who competes like a top-tier quarterback Like a Brock Purdy once upon a time. Or Expedia's Bundle and Save feature, which allows you to combine flights, hotels, and cars into one package for impressive discounts. And not just that, but if you're a member, you can book an item now, add select items later, and still enjoy bundled savings. For instance, if you're a football fan, you want to go to the championship, conference championship, the Super Bowl, wherever it is, and you don't know your team's going to be in, all of a sudden they're in. What do you got to do?

I gotta get a hotel, I get a flight, I get a car. Expedia can do all three. You never know when your team's gonna be in a big game. Use Expedia. Now that is a winning strategy. Book now with Expedia. Dave Jacoby is here on a Tuesday afternoon. You're the first person who doesn't like the chairs.

I do not like the chairs. I don't like the way they look. I especially don't like the way they feel.

Um, I don't like the way they look. What's wrong with the way they look?

Sink into them too much, right? And, and I like a high top. That's been— my posture will be better. Yeah, less poochy pooch. And right now my knees and nipples are at the same plane. I want knees below nipples.

Dating back to Jalen and Jacoby, when we had the first chairs, and I would make fun of you that you were an invertebrate with the camera angle.

Well, there's someone who wrote a very serious email that was like, you've got serious problems. Who wrote that? It was a stranger. Yes. If you're just listening to this, Bill has Something that I had in, like, 1992. What is that thing?

This lap desk?

Yeah. You've got the beanbag underneath the—

Well, because I like to— we're about to do a mailbag. I'm very excited.

Okay.

I didn't want to have the mailbag too low on my lap because then I'm doing this and coming up. So it's out of necessity.

It's a posture move.

And plus, later my wife's going to bring me dinner and I'm just going to eat it like this.

But it's a posture move.

So I did a whole thing about nicknames when Max Kellerman was here. People pointed out some nicknames that I missed, including Downtown Freddie Brown. I'd like to apologize to him.

I'd like to also shout out Downtown Julie Brown, who stole it from Downtown Freddie Brown.

Slick Watts, the Boston Strangler, Andrew Toney. Great one. Dr. Duncanstein. Remember loving that as a kid? The Microwave, Vinnie Johnson, the Mailman, the Chief. White Chocolate was a big miss. The Glove, Big Country, AK-47, and then currently Greek Freak, Time Lord, and Slow Mo. I bring all this up because the whole point of the initial thing was we're just not good at nicknames anymore. We're lazy. We do initials, we do acronyms, and we just don't put any thought into it.

I've got a take on this.

Let's hear it.

One thing about the sports media world that that really bothers me is when athletes launch their brand or their logo.

Yeah.

It's either their number or their initials.

Yeah.

No one has done this right since Kobe Bryant, who just like stole it from a sword on like Kill Bill, who had a couple chances.

Yeah. He, he tried a couple different gimmicks.

Always just initials. It's just like, or like DA7 or something. It's just like, why, why can't we be more creative than this?

Oh, that's so Imran from San Francisco has a theory on this that we've gotten lazy. Oh, he blames Kevin Durant. Tough year for Kevin Durant. Emron, he says Kevin Durant deserves blame for rejecting a potential Pantheon-level nickname, the Slim Reaper.

Slim Reaper.

And instead asking people to call him the Servant, which no one wanted to do. Players realized they could just reject nicknames that didn't fit their brand, and now we have these vanilla corporate nicknames instead. Just a thought. Do we put this on Kevin Durant's law thing?

I don't think it's really fair, but Durantula was great. Slim Reaper was great. And then he's like, I am the Easy Money Sniper. Okay. Easy Money Sniper.

Slim Reaper was an all-time great nickname. We could have called him Slim. We could have called him Reaper.

And it also, it visualizes it. Like, if Slow Mo is a great nickname, but you can't, like, see it. You know what I mean? But you could see him. They've got the graphics of him in the hood and with the sickle and everything. So yeah, maybe it is Kevin Durant's fault.

My thing with nicknames, like Slick Watts is a good example. The nickname has to become how we say the person's name. We've had some nicknames over the years when it's like the nickname's over here. I even didn't really love the answer for Allen Iverson. It was just easier to call him AI. I know people like to push the answer. I never personally called him the answer. I always called him Iverson or AI.

It doesn't roll off the tongue.

Ultimately where you want to be is like Clyde the Glide.

Yes.

Neek. Or Pearl. Shorten your name, whatever. So anyway, Peter T had an idea. There was a lot of Con Knipple suggestions, which people know how to get into the mailbag. Just bring up Con Knipple.

You sent me some of the questions. I was like, oh, these people are just tailoring it right for me.

Yeah, listen, it's a human algorithm. Peter T said, He said, mailbag nickname submission: Con Snow, Bill's illegitimate son in Charlotte, like Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. He said, as a Duke fan in Colorado, I love that your pod is now 25% Jokic and Kniepel talk. I resent that because I feel like it's 50% Boston talk, 25%.

I'm taking the over on the 50.

Okay. Okay, here, now let's get to the good stuff. There was a lot of Stephon Castle. What are we doing here? This guy needs a nickname. I think people agree, right?

Can I push back? Khan is a unique name in itself, and Castle is a great last name. Like, why do we need to upgrade these?

Well, just wait. Jude from Westport said it had to be something Castle or medieval related. He proposes the Dungeon. He's locking someone down. He's sending them to the dungeon. Like, I'm not against it. You've been locked down in the dungeon. Jacob and a few people suggested this, wanted to call him the Moat because a moat is perimeter defense for a castle. So it's like, you can't cross the moat.

Oh, do you know one you haven't thought of?

What?

That you didn't bring up? Off Night. Oh, for, uh, David Mitchell. Yeah, that's a great nickname.

You don't like Mike Breen yelling, nobody is crossing the moat?

Nobody's crossing.

Um, a few people suggested this though, and I think it's the winner. For Stephen Castle? Checkmate.

Sure.

You don't like it?

No, I like it. I like it.

And Checkmate rises to the occasion. I don't know.

It's pretty good.

I want to hear somebody test drive it. Khan, a lot of people going DEF CON 3 or DEF CON 7, which is his number. Mm-mm. Not quite there. Khan Air doesn't really work.

No.

And then a couple people suggested 2K. 2K's good.

2K's not bad. 2K's not bad.

2K had 35 last night. That's not bad. That's as good as we've heard.

That's one thing about the answer.

It does—

the word answer doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that 2K does.

Did you see 2K hit 9 threes last night? It's pretty good.

The question—

the bigger question is do you need a nickname if your name's Khan?

No.

Which is— so if we had a nickname czar, the nickname czar would probably be like, we're good. His name's Khan. It stands out.

Yeah, it'd be so hard. I mean, if you're going to do something with Khan, Knipples name. Yeah, Nips is right there.

Nipsey.

Nipsey. It's right there.

We had a Nipsey Russell. A bunch of people for Jalen Duren suggested Bull Duren.

Sure.

Not bad. Sure. This was the best one. I can't believe how good it is. More than one suggestion, so I don't want to give anyone credit. Josh Giddey.

Don't. Just don't. Just don't. Just don't. Just don't.

Josh Giddey, the Giddler. The Giddler had a triple-double last night. He could have the old '90s poster with like he's dressed as the Riddler, but it's instead of a question mark, it's a G.

I'm not sure. Maybe like October Josh Giddey deserved this nickname.

The Giddler?

But it's too close to something else.

All right, so your favorite is 2K.

Yes.

Dan from Denman Island in Canada suggested, he was one of the Checkmate suggestions for Kessel.

Where's Danman Island?

I don't know, it's in Canada. He suggested for Kayson Wallace, Twitch. 'cause he has such fast twitch reflexes that we just start calling him Twist. I don't think he needs a nickname.

There's a ex, a motocross Mental Militia guy named Twitch.

Okay.

He was great.

This is the best one. I don't think he has the right person for this, but it's one of the best names I've ever heard. He said for Jaylen Brown to call him Jalapeño because this is what my group of friends who have a basketball draft call him because of a typo, but it also fits for when he is on a heater. That's a better name for somebody you play pickup basketball with. It's like our friend Juan. We call him Jalapeño because he just gets hot in these games.

Maybe.

You don't like Jalapeño? A typo.

Any nickname you have to sort of explain with more than one sentence, I'm out.

Do you like Jalapeño as a heat check nickname, though?

Only for one of my friends.

Okay.

Yeah.

So our best one is 2K.

2K.

All right. So Alex Lyons wrote in, there's this guy, Robbie Avila from St. Louis, the guy with the goggles, the 6'10" center. You've seen him, college basketball. He has 3 nicknames: Cream Abdul-Jabbar, I'm in, Steph Blurry, and Milk Chamberlain. All of them. So maybe he'll save the nickname.

Cream Abdul-Jabbar, is it?

Cream Abdul-Jabbar. Steph Blurry is pretty good too. Okay. Next question is from D Bob in New York. Who do you think will be the top 5 players in the league 5 years from now? So that would be the 2030-31 season. He said it's a fun exercise. You never would've predicted Shay or Wemby top 5, 5 years ago. The top 5 players in 2021 were Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, Curry, Luka, LeBron in some order. To me, in 2031, there's 2 locks, Ant and Luka. But anyway, he's basically like, who do you have?

This is, this was harder than I thought it would be.

I thought, I agree.

This was harder than I thought it would be. And one thing that I'm not going to allow is Hugo Gonzalez being part of the conversation.

Did you see him last night? It's 16 rebounds. I did.

I did.

Yeah.

But this was harder than I thought because my question for you is like, there's a couple, there's a bunch of 29-year-olds who will still be in their prime. But when I'm looking at some players, I'm like, Luka will be 32.

Well, can we do the chalk picks? So if we're just going chalk, it's Wemby, Ant, Luka, SGA.

Whoa, Luka and SGA are 32 years old.

I'm just saying chalk. Oh, this is for 5 years from now. Safest bets.

Okay.

And I would have Cooper Flagg as my 5th chalk guy. He'll be 24 at that point. Everything we've seen, how much better he's gotten just in the last 2 years.

Luka and Shay at 32, I started to think that there are others out there. And I, Jokic is gonna be 36 and he probably wouldn't be playing.

He's out.

Yeah.

I, I wrote down, I had different categories. Cade and Maxie.

There's a lot of 29-year-olds. Cade and Maxie, you're on my list as well. And Edwards, but he's in.

Edwards. Edwards. So can we put Wemby and Ant in bold?

Yes. Okay, absolutely.

Can we put Cooper Flagg in bold or no?

He'll be 24. Yes, you can.

I, I just think—

I think there's no way he's not awesome in 5 years.

There would have to be some sort of knock-on with terrible injury.

But we're not even having that conversation. Wemby's in, you know, Wemby, Ant, Flagg. Yes.

I could offer you AJ D'Abansa, Darren Peterson, DP, DNP, Chet, Amen Thompson, Jalen Johnson, Palo with a big resurgence. Anybody else?

Jalen Johnson is on my list. I'm glad you didn't bring up Tatum.

He's going to be too old. He'll be like 33.

There's a little bit—

I didn't write him down just for—

Yeah, but there's a little bit of me that's looking at Maxie like, I don't know. Could be top 5 because you have to play defense too.

He'd have to be in the low 30s point-wise for like 4 straight years in a row, basically where Mitchell is now. You wouldn't even put Mitchell in the top 5 right now.

No.

So probably not.

Is there a world in which Jalen Johnson becomes like an all-around jack of all trades, 9 assists and like 25 points a night guy?

The problem is you have to really win to be in this conversation.

Yes.

His Duke season didn't go well and he's never won anything with Atlanta. So you're really projecting with this.

Yeah, I think we're there. I don't think there's anybody else on the list that we're missing.

Okay, so Wemby and—

But you would— it's interesting that you would put Cooper in bold, guaranteed, and not even mention Nipsey.

I didn't want to put that on 2K.

It's, it's a lot. It's a lot to ask of 2K.

I think Cade should be in there though. Cade will be high 20s at that point.

Yes.

Like 20, 28, 29. So I think he would be my 4th pick. And I'm sorry, I think Luka's still gonna be there. It'll be year 13 Luka, 32 years old. He's already moves like a 39-year-old. Yeah.

That's what I think about Luka and Jokic. I'm like, is this good or bad? Because he doesn't, like, like Maxi relies on athleticism that diminishes over time. Luka doesn't do anything athletic.

So you wouldn't have SGA if he was still this good in 5 years. You're now talking about the best guard career anyone's had other than Michael Jordan. It would be better than Jerry West. It would be better than every guard we've ever had.

I also think they're going to win a lot too.

That's why you might put him in.

He's borderline there.

So 2 spots for Cade, Luka, SGA.

I think, God, it's hard. This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

Well, here's the other thing. There might be somebody we have no idea. Like, we wouldn't have said Anthony Edwards in 2021.

He's the number one pick.

But we wouldn't have said Anthony Edwards will be one of the 5 best guys.

And both Edwards and Cade didn't have the kind of, like, Cooper rookie year.

I'm going to say Cade. Ah, shit. It's hard to leave out SGA. Especially now that they're the villains that we need in the NBA. I started that on Sunday.

Explain to me why Cade won't be better at 29 in 5 years than SGA.

The case would be really physical style, putting miles on him the next 4 or 5 years physically might break down.

Okay.

Those big physical guards, it's almost like a big physical receiver or something would be the case. I don't believe that. His team's going to be good. He's going to have, he's going to have Bull Durham the whole time.

They're going to bring in a second creator.

Yeah, they'll have somebody. Giannis. Bull Durham and Beef Stew. That's a great nickname. Beef Stew's a great name.

It's a great nickname.

I'm going to say Cade. You know what? I'm going to say SGA over Luka.

I don't, I don't know about Luka at 32.

That video the other day, which I actually thought was kind of a big deal. And normally I'm like, don't overreact to when guys get mad at each other on the bench.

I could talk about that for hours.

Here, here was the key piece that I didn't think enough play. There was, I think, I think it was Vanderbilt sitting next to him. It was Vando, and he was watching the whole thing. If you watch the video, he's watching them go, and he's like, the most important thing that Vando did all year. He's watching and he's watching, he's watching. JJ walks away, and it looks like Luka went out to put his arm out, but JJ walked away, and JJ didn't seem to put the arm out as Luka was putting out. And Luka got mad and stood up and I think it was Vando.

It was Vando.

He's watching out of the corner of his eye and stands up with Luka to block him from chasing JJ down the sideline. If you watch everything he's doing, it's the stuff like we're at a bar at 2:30 in the morning and our buddy is like, uh-oh, don't let him go over there. And we're just kind of watching him the whole time. It's like, oh, there he goes. We got to get him out. That was the vibe. I didn't think it was good.

I don't think it was good at all. And the first person that it made me think of was Nico Harris. And I've said this on the Mismatch, but I've always felt like there's just more to the story of what happened in Dallas. And I think that they hated each other. And he was like, guess what? You can be gone. I have that kind of power. Yeah. I think it was personal, and I think it was vindictive. And I think that he hated seeing Luka every single day. And I think that Luka was disrespectful towards him and probably vice versa. This is all—

clearly thought he was a dick.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? These things aren't reported. I'm not reporting anything, but I think that that happened. I think there's a lot of— incidents like this behind the scenes that we didn't see?

There's two types of people, and I'm in the wrong camp with this. Like, my wife instantly, if something's happening, she knows, right? Like, when you have little kids and the kid is going down the pool, walking towards, crawling toward the pool or something, and there's the type that goes, oh, no, that's bad. And then you act. Or there's the person who sees that and they're moving immediately. That was Jared Vanderbilt. He saw it immediately. I don't think I would have stood up in time.

What's the second type of person? What are you?

I'm the one who would have— I would have sat there for the extra second, been like, this is bad. And Luka would have walked by me before I realized that I should be stopping it.

Because you— I don't like to compliment you, but you're an excellent room reader and floor seer.

Not in the instinctive, this is bad. What are you, which side are you?

You know, I rush to conflict. I enjoy the conflict. I enjoy tension. I enjoy the, just the weirdness of it all and like saying things that I probably can't take back and probably shouldn't say.

The best version of this I've ever seen was our friend Jalen Rose. There was one time, one of the NBA shows we were doing and there was, people were arguing. I was one of the people arguing. And we're walking off after the thing and Jalen goes, turn your mic off, Bill. Like, he just insisted we turn the mic off.

He's great at that.

Immediately, like, read the tea leaves.

I know you don't have to say it. I know you're going to say something that you can't regret.

Turn your mic off, Bill.

And that microphone is going to broadcast to the truck.

Shout out to him.

Yeah.

All right, next question. Gus from Texas. I saved this for if we're ever going to do a mailbag together. He said, longtime BS Pod fan. Thanks, Gus. Longtime fan of The Challenge. Always love when those two worlds collide, but it's been a minute. If the NBA did a Rivals-style season like The Challenge, who would your favorite pairings be? Who would be the CT West team that would dominate? Who would be the messiest, funniest? So I sent this to you.

I just want to tell Gus that I love him very much.

It's a great question.

It's a great question.

Two-man teams. This is the Rivals thing that we love. So would they have to be rivals?

I spent more time answering this question this afternoon to myself than I did, than I've put into anything I've done professionally in 10 years.

You were the right part. This is it. This is your vortex of all the things you care about.

I have found the perfect pairing from the NBA to go to the Challenge. But one thing I was thinking—

rivals or just the Challenge?

He said rivals, right? So I did think of sort of pairings that would be mismatched, we'll say, right? Like, they're not real rivals because, oh, Diabate and, like, Beef Stew. That's not going to work. You know what I mean? Or like Dylan Brooks and LeBron. That's not going to work. But I was thinking, I was like, they did something like this. Do you remember the season that had like Shawn Merriman and CM Punk and like Lolo Jones?

Yeah, that was weird.

I remember thinking, I was like, this is so—

Lolo quit.

Yeah.

And then she came back another time. But I remember sitting there being like, this can't work. But the athletes weren't as good at the challenges that you would think.

Yeah.

And of course, this first person that came to my mind was Johnny Bananas. The GOAT of the challenges and like what makes him good at this and what makes him good at doing this is he's in great shape so you can run the final, right? But he's really good at room reading like we were talking about earlier and playing the social game and finding out who's aligned with who, getting the right people out at the right times. So I was thinking of a strategist. So my first answer's going to be a team that I think would be successful.

So not Kevin Durant.

Not Kevin Durant.

Okay.

But the fun answer is a team that I really want to see, and I'll give you that next. I think that I landed on teammates. They're not rivals, but it would be Cade and Ron Holland, because Cade is very mature, very measured. He's very intelligent and articulate.

Cade and Ron Holland. I was not expecting this.

This is where I ended up. And I've got a fun one, though.

Okay.

The fun one is obviously—

So why Ron Holland, though, over other people on the team?

I think that Ron Holland—

just because he's such a good athlete.

Yes. I think that his type of athleticism, he can climb up stuff.

So he'd be like, Holland will be like the puzzle guy.

Yes, exactly. Because obviously your mind goes to Beef Stew or whatever, but I think he might be just a little too big for this. And I think that Ron Holland's got a nice little level of crazy. And I think Cade will be sort of like the brains of the operation. Holland will be like a little intimidating and like a little wild card.

So they'll be in the bunk beds and Cade will be like, Let's bring over Draymond Green. We got to align with him.

Yes. And my favorite pairing for this, and I used to coach, is LaMelo Ball and Joe Mazzulla. Just imagine, like, Joe Mazzulla. Joe Mazzulla. He's got, like, a blindfold on, and LaMelo Ball's outside of the fence being like, it's to your right.

It's to your right.

And Joe Mazzulla's just like, what the fuck, LaMelo? He just rips the blindfold off and just chases after LaMelo, who's just laughing and running around in circles. Like, that pairing to me would be the one I would want to see the most.

That's great.

It would be perfect. Joe Mazzulla should be on The Challenge.

I think this is— this would be an unbelievable vehicle for Draymond Green too.

I think Draymond would be great.

I think he'd be the most compelling character. He'd definitely get kicked out of at least— if he did 10 seasons, he'd get kicked out of 3 of them. He'd complain about all kinds of stuff. He'd probably get into it with TJ. At least once or twice.

I don't—

I wouldn't mind Durant either. Like, you see with him, with Tyler Herro and the Miami bench, and like, yeah, I watched that Starting Five show.

Yeah, but Durant, they would just team up and get out in the first episode.

What would you do?

Like Cara Maria. See, now nobody, nobody who lives— nobody watching this knows what we're talking about. We're not talking to alternate language. Who would, who would be the Laurel of this? The big bully?

Oh, I love Laurel so much.

Um, but Draymond, yeah, but Draymond's more of like the—

Laurel's nice.

I guess he is more than Laurel.

Laurel's nasty. She will, she will dress you down for no reason.

Who would be the good guy? Would it be Curry?

Everybody likes—

like how everybody loves Mark Long.

Everybody loves Mark Long. Remember he came here?

That was fun. Um, thanks, guys. Sean from North Carolina, I wanted this question for you because you have kids. I only sent you a couple questions, you don't know a lot of this.

I know.

He said, we used to live in a proper country. I would catch all sorts of classics on TV, including the slightly sanitized version of Die Hard on TBS. Streaming services are great, but I wish they had a cable edit option. That way I could show my 10-year-old kid Terminator, Terminator 2 without it being inappropriate. Do you think Netflix should add this? A parent cut of different movies? Well, and would you show that? Would you watch this with your kids?

You have older kids than me, and I was around when they were younger, and I learned one thing that I've taken from the Simmons household is just like, you want to see Halloween and you're 6 years old?

Cool.

Here's a kitchen knife. You know what I mean? It was just like— or like cursing in front of your kids. You were very like, we throw them into the fire. You know what I mean? And I do that at my house as well when it comes to content. Like, me and my son, he's 12. We watched Psycho Killer over the weekend. Oh, you know what I mean? Like, horror movies, uh, sex scenes. I'll be like, close your eyes, you know what I mean? But he doesn't really do it.

So that's the thing, you have to know where the bad parts are and you cover. So I don't think we need the edit option.

Not necessary to do this.

I agree.

And I also, I took, I took a page from your book. It's just like, let the kids watch whatever.

They're going to do it anyway.

Yeah, it's fine.

You can either like put your head in the sand and pretend like you're controlling it or Yeah, do it with them and just kind of put hands over their face.

One of my daughters gets super scared, so she won't watch. Fine.

Like, you're watching Terminator with your kid, and all of a sudden that guy's like, I came across time for you, Sarah. And you know they're about to get it on. Like, you know what, we're gonna fast forward this part. Yeah, we'll just tell you that it's gonna get romantic here. We're not gonna watch it together, and you just move on.

My kids will— won't watch things from the 20th century.

I came across time for you, Sarah. One of the great pickup lines in the history movies. Like, what woman's not at least making out with you after that? You came across time.

I came across time for you, Sarah.

Thank you. This is from Alex in Delray Beach. And I've gotten this email a bunch of times from people about the '03-'04 Kings. Are you familiar with them? Chris Webber's out for— he's torn ACL in the postseason previous year. Peja has his random MVP season, one of the most random top 4 MVPs ever.

The aforementioned White Chocolate, right?

They're 40— no, he's gone by then. They have Mike Bibby. They're 43-15 through 58 games. Webber comes back, and as Alex points out, the return was disastrous. Stojaković's efficiency plummeted. The Kings lost 10 of their final 16, fell to the 4th seed, bounced in round 1. Now Tatum's coming back. Is history destined to repeat itself? So there is a doppelgänger for this comeback that I forgot about.

Bill, I thought we were going to talk about the Kings.

Okay.

And then at the very end, you're just like, oh, the Celtics.

Do you remember this Kings thing?

No, not really.

Yeah, I didn't really remember it either. Yeah, I vaguely remember the Peja piece, but was it—

I remember like Lakers series and like Divac and like that kind of pre—

Give us your quick Will Tatum screw up the Celtics take. I know you've done it on the mismatch already.

No, adding good players to your team, it helps.

Is he better than Bailey Sharman?

He might play like 14 minutes too. It's like, Adding good players to basketball teams doesn't screw them up. Sorry.

Did say one thing in the weird documentary they've made about his comeback.

Wait, you're watching that?

No, this was a thing on Celtics Reddit. He said he didn't come back to be a role player. It's like, oh, it's fine. Okay.

One of my basketball philosophies is like, there's only one ball. I hate there's only one ball.

Yeah.

Share the ball. Guess what? If you score, I score. Jason Tatum makes teams better.

We'll be fine.

Yeah.

Steve B writes, what if Steve Kerr does not have a contract for next year because Steph is winding down and Wemby is winding up and he's replacing George Popovich to make a second run at a dynasty? I just like that he called him George Popovich.

George Popovich. I think Steve B too.

Steve B. So I was wondering, like, so Kerr, let's say he leaves this year and the Warriors are going to be out of the playoffs. Like they're, they're, I think they're going to shut it down. Steph down. I just, my spidey senses are like, he said, yeah, it's gonna be like 10 more days. There's only 39 days left in the season. What are they gonna, even when he comes back, they already lost Jimmy Butler. They're not good to begin with. What are they gonna play? 2 playing games with Steph with a not 100% knee like that? That team should go for a lottery pick.

KP's already got illnesses.

Yeah. KP's not coming back like that. That season's washed.

Is Horford gonna carry you to the second round?

Kurt leaves. Thanks for everything. I'm going to take a year off. I'll do media. Hopefully comes to the ringer. Then San Antonio, who knows? And if anything ever happens on that team, then they might be— you wait for that, or you wait for the Knicks or some awesome job. You just do media for a year. When you do media for a year, your stock just rises. You see that every time. Yeah, right. So you don't think he's going to replace George Popovich?

I don't think he's going to replace George Popovich because Mitch Johnson's doing a good job. That's the problem. It's like, I don't think that's going to be available to him. And Mitch Johnson wasn't supposed to be the head coach at Spurs.

No, he wasn't.

Could you see a front office thing? Maybe where it's like he's not on the bench, but he's just sort of like part of the—

I could see— I honestly, my honest answer for this is I don't think he coaches again after this. I think he did it since '14, '15, did 11 years. He set up his son to potentially be a coach down the road. Won 4, he won 4 titles.

Mm-hmm.

He won, how many did he win with the, he won 1, 2, 3, 5 with the Bulls and Spurs.

Yeah.

He's won 9 titles. It's done. It's a wrap. Just do media.

There's a media, it's gonna be on the rewatchables.

It'd be great. I would love to have Steve Kerr on the rewatchables.

It's K-month.

Martin in New York writes, where does Al Horford rank on the I left my marriage for the stripper twice and to no one's surprise it didn't work out list?

You saved that one for me. You saved that one for me.

He left the Celtics twice 'cause he thought the title window was closed, only to be instantly proven wrong 20 games into the season. And he did it twice. It is a tough beat for Al. I never understood the, I'm gonna go chase the title with Golden State part. What title did he think he was chasing? You're in a conference with OKC. Well, what do you think's gonna happen over there?

Also, like, they need you.

Yeah.

Because it's like, Post is sort of their other big at the time before they got KP. I've never— I'm back to the Warriors. I never really saw it this season for the Warriors.

I thought they'd go over the 46 or whatever, but I didn't think they—

but what did everybody say last year after they added Jimmy Butler? If you look at the numbers, they were the best team in the history of the NBA. And I was kind of like, yeah, they were like in a playoff game for like 2 months in a row to kind of like get into the plan.

The thing about NBA history, the older you get, the harder your chances to win the NBA title. That's one of the things I've learned. And the only chance you have is if it's like a weird down year for the league where there's not a lot of stars and there's a couple bad drafts, some of the younger players didn't pan out, then you can kind of sneak in. League's not like that right now. The league's fucking loaded. No, you're not winning it. Like, I even look at Durant on Houston and Houston, you know, we'll see what happens with them. They've hung around. They're gonna be a 3 seed, but they're still gonna have to rely on Durant for 10 straight weeks in the playoffs to win a title. And he's 37. I just think it's unrealistic. We saw in '22, remember Tatum took it to him in that Nets series? He was 33 in that series. He's 4 years older than that. Let's take a break and then I have some more mailbag questions for you. The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by FanDuel. FanDuel's putting you in control right from tip-off. That's right.

You get to choose your reward. Play it safe, go for it, whatever your style. You're in control. I'm going to figure out some sort of bet for the Celtics-Charlotte game. But I think, I think it's gonna be a close game. I think it's gonna have a lot of points. And I predict my guy 2K Concanipple, some threes from him. But just in general, I think it's gonna be a fast-paced, a lot of points game. I'll figure out what my final play is. Check it out on my Twitter account. No matter how you play, FanDuel's giving you the power to choose your award, own your game this NBA season. Head to fanduel.com/bs to make your pick. Get in the game and play it your way. 21+ select states or 18+ DC, Kentucky, or Wyoming. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Game problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER, call 888-789-7777, or visit ccpg.org/chat in Connecticut. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. What makes basketball so exciting? All the superior skill on the court. This has been the case my whole life. The craziest thing, I, I mean, Wemby stuff he's doing every game. There's 2, 3 Wemby moments a game where you're like, I don't know if I've ever seen that.

The number one thing for me is when he does the screen and roll, he's going to the basket, somebody throws him an alley-oop and he just catches it and dunks it without jumping. It's an alley-oop, but it's not an oop. It's just kind of an alley. And every time he does it, I'm like, I've definitely 100% never seen that anymore. It's a superior play. Superior plays aren't just for the NBA though. Try Michelob Ultra, the official beer partner of the NBA, and a crisp, refreshing, superior light beer. It's the beer of Max Kellerman. He just told me that. Plus, they're giving you a chance to win courtside seats, custom merch, and more. Michelob Ultra Superior is worth playing for. Enter now at michelobultra.com/courtside. Michelob Ultra Courtside 25-26, no purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2025, ends on June 30th, 2026. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at mcglobeultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, and prizes and details. All right, more mailbag with Jacoby. Mercury P. I don't know if that's a nickname or a real name. I'm so glad you're here for this question. He's proposing two new end-of-the-season awards.

The Marcus Morris Award for Worst Best Brother. Oh, so you're the best brother, but you're the worst player of all the best brothers.

Wait, the worst best brother out of all the best brothers of the combos?

You're the worst one of all the best.

But the Lonzo Ball would win this year.

No, that— no, we'll go into it. And but he also has the Seth Curry Award for best worst brother. So you're the second—

Mercury P has got me thrown for a loop.

There's 3. So there's really 3 categories. There's worst worst brother, which would be Yannis's brothers. Thanasis. They would win these, sadly. They're nice guys, but they would win the award for worst, worst brothers for players. They're nice guys, but they're the worst players.

How do you go out for coffee with the—

if we had all the brothers and we did a draft, they would get picked last.

Yes.

Best worst brother. So of all the second best brothers, brothers, Who is the best second best brother? That's got to be Asar Thompson, right?

Yeah, I'm trying to think.

I'll give you the other candidates. Mo Wagner, Champagny, Aaron Holiday. No, not a lot there.

Yeah, Champagny. It's not fucking Thompson.

Rod Harper and the Celtics. Cam Christie. One of the Spencers. Pick one. So yeah, but here's where it gets interesting. Worst best brother. So the brother combo— better brother, the better brother. Who's the worst better brother? Oh God. Okay, so I'll give you 5 candidates. Okay. Keegan Murray and his brother Chris. Max Christie and his brother Cam. Caleb Martin, brother Cody. Tyus Jones, brother Trey, or Justin Champagny and his brother Julian. I think the answer is Tyus Jones.

It's a little unfair because Jones and the Martin twins are kind of on the other side of their peak. You know what I mean?

The answer's the answer. We're doing the awards at the end of the year.

Yes.

Probably Tyus Jones. It wouldn't have been Tyus Jones last year. 'Cause the Martin twins. He was just playing better. Yeah.

Interesting.

Best, worst, worst, best brother. Here are the nominees. But do you know how many brothers there are in the league right now?

More than there's ever been in the past.

It's 19 brother combos. Combos?

Yeah.

Or 19 sets.

Two brothers.

Yeah. Wow.

That's—

wait, 19 combos. That's 38 people.

38.

Plus we have some— we have 3 holidays and 3 innated kuppos. We have 40 brothers.

So if there's 50 and there's 500, it's like 10% of the league.

Turns out DNA is important. Yeah. Matt T says, me and Nick Wright missed the most obvious coaches for the Black versus White All-Star Game gimmick that Nick suggested.

I'm not at liberty to speak on this idea.

No, hold on.

Microphone. He said Larry Bird should coach the Black team and Magic Johnson should coach the White team, and it would bridge generational divides. And then you flip it with the coaches. All right.

I might have—

I really like that idea.

No, see, I'm going to push back on this. One of the scenarios, because I've thought about this a lot too. It's not going to work. I've played this. I've played this hypothetically. I've played this hypothetically in my head over and over and over again. I was like, this is not going to work. But one of my favorite hypothetical scenarios in this hypothetical game is the white team jumps out to, like, a 10-point lead in the first 3 minutes. Black team calls a timeout, and in that huddle, the discussion that Black team has is just to be a fly on the wall, listen to that. I think if you have a Caucasian head coach, you don't get that same conversation. That's my concern there. And also the race war that would come along.

This is from William McGlynn in Sydney, Australia. Oh, he said he just watched Kade go for 27 and 17 and thought about how he got waived for no reason by the Sacramento Kings. Um, he mentions how it's interesting that this has happened more than you think. The Cavs waived Isaiah Hartenstein. Mm. The Grizzlies waved Steven Jackson. Danny Green got waived by the Cavs, picked up by the Spurs. Alex Caruso got waived by OKC, picked up by the Lakers. Um, and he asked what my favorite one of all of those were. And I think it's interesting. I think it's Steven Jackson. Because they actually win the '03 title because of how Steven Jackson played in the playoffs.

Yes.

If you go back and look at— he's got a bad— Danny Green as well, 2013, but they don't win in the finals that he gets hot.

Remember Game 1, Game 2, he had like 35. He was the MVP heading into Game 6. That's just completely forgotten in history that Danny Green was the best player on the Finals MVP.

Yeah, he was.

But I think it's Steven Jackson because he actually swung the title. Yes. If you go back and watch those games, it's, uh, he's like the number 2 guy on the Spurs.

And he brings us all the smoke.

And he brought, he brought us a bunch of joy. He was very pivotal in the melee.

He's also really fun to have around the office when I was at ESPN in LA.

We gave him his first media chance on the Grantland Basketball Hour.

He would, he had a real presence. He had a real presence around the office. Like, you knew when, you knew when the elevator doors opened and, and Stack came out.

Yeah.

It was a good time. Uh, Glenn Shefford says, I'm listening to the podcast with Kellerman. Crazy that you went from discussing nicknames into discussing Darren Peterson's tattoo of Michael Myers. And the Boogeyman is sitting right there is an incredible nickname. Do you like Darren Peterson more if his nickname was the Boogeyman? And we also haven't had a Boogeyman. Boogeyman's pretty good because we had Boogie. Yes.

Boogeyman's pretty good.

The Boogeyman had 45 last night.

And there's been a resurgence of Boogeyman lore because of John Wick and Baba Yaga. So, like, it is time to come back.

Maybe that's the nickname, Baba Yaga.

Too hard to say. Baba Yaga goes down.

Baba.

Yeah, but Boogeyman would be a really good nickname. But I think that person has to be scary.

Multiple readers were disappointed in me that I didn't stick up for Darren Peterson more when he has a Michael Myers tattoo. —and I'd like to apologize to everybody.

I had no idea he had a Michael Myers tattoo.

It's a pretty strong statement. All right, Ryan in Chicago wants to know, what 5 events would you include if there was a Winter Olympics pentathlon? Distance speed skating, cross-country skiing, and downhill skiing are the most obvious 3. Would you round it out with ski jumping and luge? Ski jumping, definitely. I don't know about luge.

Ski jumping and luge.

But so you have distance speed skating. I think you have to do the fast speed skating too, right? Short track.

Short track.

Cross-country skiing would be the last event. Downhill skiing. I think ski jumping's the fifth, and I think we're good. Ski jumping would be amazing.

So what are we creating exactly? The best five? Some pentathlon. Just a random pentathlon. We're not going to do any figure skating.

I think 10. I think 10.

No hockey, no figure skating. Okay. This is just like— so it's sort of like one athlete can do all of these things. Yeah.

Because when you think about decathlon, it's like jumping, running, endurance, shot putty here and there. Strength. It's all these things. So for Winter Olympics, it would have to be skiing, skating, endurance would have to be the 5.

I like a little jump.

The jump would be— so the jump's not fun anymore because everybody— there's no danger and everybody's good at it. But if you had these guys where it's like, The jump is his weakest event.

He told us he hasn't trained much for the jump. Yeah. Okay.

This is from Joshua Tabor, College Station, Texas. If you had to bet your entire net worth on one current NBA player to win at least 3 championships over the next 10 years, who are you taking?

Okay, well, it's a different proposal for each of us because of the net worth part, but I had trouble with this. I think the only answer is Victor Wembanyama.

I had SGA and then Wemby.

I thought about SGA too.

I think SGA because of the OKC situation. Exactly.

They're going to cycle in more young players so they'll stay under the cap.

This would be an interesting FanDuel future that they couldn't do because you'd have to realize it over 10 years. But I think SGA would be like a -150 favorite.

I think so too. And I wrote down in my notes, just institutional knowledge. Just like they've won a championship before, same front office, same coaching staff. Uh, you know, they'll, they're going to have to, you know, cycle through some roster spots, but they've got tons of picks. Sorber and Popic are the last two first round picks, don't even play.

You know what's funny about Sorber? So the Clippers and OKC, they, they had the pick swap as part of the Kawhi trade last year. Mm-hmm. OKC gets Clippers pick, they take Sorber. I think this is what happened. And then the Quips got number 30 and they took Niederhauser. I bought stock last week, had a whole argument with Mike Tolan in my seats about it because we went to the Minnesota game and I'm like, I really like this guy. And he's like, no way. And I'm like, I'm buying the stock right now. So Tolan's my witness. He's good. He's young and runs and jumps and I fucking like him.

I feel like they were like Zubac, you had a great year for us last year.

It's not exactly working this year, but we've got Cold Cannon, neither.

Heiser, John Jacob, Jiggleheimer Schmidt coming off the bench. He's good, he's good.

Clippers are kind of interesting. If Garland can come back and actually look like the Garland from the first 50 games of last year, which we haven't seen in over a year. Yeah, I know, like them though.

I understand why they did what they did. They're kind of interesting.

That trade was great for everybody if you get somewhere 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th pick. I've started to work on this draft. So they get the Pacers pick if it's 5 through 9. Otherwise it gets pushed like 6 years. There's like fucking awesome scores in that range. Every guy from 5 to 9 is a guy who could average like 25 points a game in the NBA at some point. Maybe.

Seems like there's a 40-point game in college basketball like every, every week.

These guys are like real— every week. Acuff's my favorite out of all of them. Like Acuff's gonna come in the league and immediately be a guy. So anyway, I thought that was a good trade. So we have SGA and Wemby. Who would you put third? Ant or Hugo Gonzalez?

I can't make a case for Flag, really. I think it's SGA and Wemby.

It's too hard to say with Dallas.

Think about it. 3 championships in 10 years.

Last guy to win 3 titles.

What do you mean?

Last guy to win 3 titles.

Is there a question mark at the end of that? Yeah. Oh, Steph Curry. Yeah.

Yeah. It doesn't happen a lot. No.

If you're talking generationally, I had no idea you were asking me a question. You're like, last guy to win 3 titles. It's like, what?

Steph won 4. Duncan won 5. Kobe won 5. If you're just going this century, 3 is like a lot. Like, Bird only won 3. LeBron. LeBron won 4.

Yeah, yeah, it's hard.

But LeBron was in the '03 draft. We're talking about the next 10 years. Yeah, Curry's the last modern guy who won 3 titles. Even Durant, only 2. Um, Klay Thompson heads— you're like, what about Klay? There's a second part to this question from Joshua Tabor in College Station, Texas. Oh, if you had to pick one current NBA star whose legacy is most at risk of looking completely different in 10 years, either way better or way worse. Who is it and why? I had a specific guy for this. Okay, please. No, you go. I wait. You're the guest.

My problem with this question is all of my answers were negative.

And I was like, that's where my head went.

You know what I mean?

I was like, all my answers were just like bad answers.

Mine were Zion and Ja. Oh, interesting.

I've, I've already given up on those guys. To me, that, that would be a positive if it changed.

Well, I think Zion, it could be like 10 years from now, it could be like, do you remember that guy Zion Williamson that played in the NBA?

I think Luka is the answer to this. Oh, Zach and I did a thing on the Sunday pod, something I noticed with Luka's MVPs, how he only had a top 3 and a top 4.

I heard that.

And I wasn't doing that because I'm intrigued, but I wasn't doing it because I was like, he should have more. It's like, because we do that with LeBron, it's stupid. The only person who you could definitively say should have more MVPs than they won is Michael Jordan. He should have 3 more MVPs. He should have won 9. I think he won 6, whatever it was. But the 3 that he didn't get, it's fucking stupid when you go back. It's like, I can't believe we— he didn't win that year. Michael Jordan.

Yeah. Also, like, would you rather have Karl Malone?

The '97 one is one of the worst ones, but the '93 was ridiculous when Barkley won. There was another one in like '89 or '90. Um, but with Luka, this is— next year's gonna be year 9.

I'm intrigued by this, Bill.

But what if he just turns out to be like Dominique Wilkins, who made the finals once. And it's like statistically the most awesome, and he's in, in there with all these greats. And then it's like, yeah, one top 3 MVP, one top 4 MVP, only made the finals once. And that's just his kind of his career. All right.

Counterpoint.

Counterpoint is the ceiling's still high.

Well, it's not only that, is, uh, his style of play. We, we were just like 10 minutes ago talking about him in 5 years being one of the best players in the league. And I also think that what happened to him in this trade, however it happened or whatever really happened behind the scenes, I have no idea what actually happened, but he ended up, he like teleported to the Lakers, you know what I mean? And this team is not built for him. So we saw what happened when Nico did a very good job building a team for Luka Dončić. Pro-Nico stance.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He did a really good job. We were all celebrating this guy, you know, with the PJ Washington and Gafford or whatever. If you, the Lakers are not built for Luka to be successful. And I think that when LeBron is gone, they will build a team for Luka to be successful, and then he'll have some good years.

I see your glass half full on that. I am. I think there's a Tatum— Tatum coming off the Achilles in a possibly negative way. Just like he made first team All-NBA a few times. He has two top four MVPs. But can he get back to where he was, or was that the peak?

Or like Jalen Brown sort of like stays in this number one spot and he sort of perpetually Just sort of goes into like a role.

The other guy I had was Lamelo. What if Lamelo— what if Zach had some good stuff about him on my pod Sunday night? What if we are now at this awesome Lamelo moment where he's just going to be really good for like 9 years and he's remembered as this really fun guy who's in a lot of playoffs? Talk dirty to me. Oh man, remember we were worried about Lamelo? He's awesome.

You know, you know I love Lamelo so much. He brings me so much joy to watch. I'm so glad that you're now on this team. We argued about LaMelo before he was drafted. Do you remember that?

It took me 6 years to warm up.

I was in on LaMelo early, and I said this on the mismatch. Every time he has the ball, he's just looking around. He's like, what's the coolest thing I can do with this basketball right now? That's all he wants to do is cool stuff.

As they've gotten better, he's pulled it back a little bit. He's like, he's become more of a winning player, I think, than just I'm out here to have fun and make highlights. Yes.

And one Lamelo—

with that said, he did drive the Hummer across the guardrail into, or across the yellow lines into that car. That was very concerning. Like, that was, that was crazy bad driving.

I am looking at my phone because, because I saw it and I was just like, that makes no sense. It's not an intersection. He's not making a turn. Wasn't great. I would say that I watch a lot—

still scares me, but I like where it's heading.

I know you're watching a lot of Hornets games. I do. And I do want to get your take on this, this weird substitution patterns in the end of the fourth quarter with Lamelo Ball.

Well, I think they're trying to, it's 27 minutes a game. I think sometimes they'll put a more defense lineup.

But it's not offense defense though.

So it was last year. That was one of the things where they just started benching him at the end of the games. They seem very concerned about putting too many minutes on him and kind of like, it's like when you have, when you have kids and you have a win with the kids and you're like, we're having a really fun time with the ball. Let's go. Yeah. Before something bad happens. Yeah.

Of course. I just feel sometimes like he'll be not in there with 3 minutes left and I'm like, oh, I guess they're going to finish without Lamelo. And then with like 2 minutes left, they'll put him in. Yeah, it's weird.

Corey Wallace writes, just listen to the Alien rewatchables. Bravo for pointing out how much cats suck in general. I like to tell people that the bigger cats get, the more likely they are to hunt you for sport. The bigger dogs get, they still lick your face and want pets like all good boys do. Also, I could go on and on. Cat shit indoors, they cover said shit with their paws. They walk on tables and counters. What are we doing here? There needs to be more negative coverage of cats in media.

This is wild. First of all, I just want to say Mallory Rubin is very important to me, and I can't go anti-cat and be as pro-Mallory Rubin as I am. So that puts me in a bad spot.

I was in the same spot, even worried about doing this email in general. It is a good point though, when you, when you, especially if, is your Instagram algorithm ever send you cats? Like cats, like hitting dogs in the face and stuff.

I did get that same clips, those AI clips that you got where it was like, oh, is it real? Cats fighting bears or whatever. And like the first 20 seconds you're like, oh my God, cats can beat up bears. And then you're like, oh, this is, this is just fake.

It is an interesting point that the bigger cats get, the more they become predators. Okay. And the cats that we have as pets are just the mini version of those predators.

But the first thing that came to mind was, I think it was that Liam Neeson movie when the wolves were— The Gray, I think it's called. Yeah. Do you remember the wolves in that movie?

So that could be dogs.

Those are dogs. And they are pack hunters. And Liam Neeson was at the edge of his life for 2 hours in the cold.

I remember this was in the '90s. I was dating this girl and her family had a cat. And we were staying at her house, and I went down to get a water, and I heard this weird noise. And in the foyer of her house, the cat had a mouse trapped, and it was like doing the Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs. Like, it's like, I'm not gonna kill you yet, like, really enjoying it. The cat didn't know I was there, and I was watching. It was like just torturing this mouse before it finally took it down. I was like, this cat's a fucking psycho.

I love how much you were enjoying it. Like a voyeur.

You just sit there.

The cat didn't even know I was watching.

It was like, I got you stuck in the corner. Yeah. Cats. I don't know. I've never had them.

I had a tough go with cats. There was 2 cats. They were Siamese cats, but they were twins. So they were Siamese twins, but they were not conjoined. That makes sense. And they just sat in this closet in my parents' room, and they hissed at you if you walked by. And I'm like, what is the point of this?

Yeah, that's not like, what are we doing? Stephen in Ohio wants to know, he was reminiscing about the Ricky Davis year before LeBron came, which would've been a great 30 for 30. And by the way, with the way they're picking 30 for 30 topics these days, might actually be a 30 for 30. I'm here alone. He averaged 20.6 points per game. It was the year he had the fake triple double. And he said, yeah, I know you've talked about how easy it is for a lot of people to get to 20 points on a bad team. But he did want to know who is the worst player to ever average 20 points per game in a season. So I did— I didn't tell you this one. Yeah, I prepped for it. I went on Basketball Reference. Okay. First of all, I was very surprised how hard it is to average 20 games. It was like less people than I thought, and I had to do a lot of different stuff with the basketball reference.

I'm trying to think.

So I went— I tried to figure out like between 20 and 22 points a game seemed like a good because there were so many people I had to like narrow down the sample size and then they'd buy windshields and PR.

Let me ask you a follow-up question that I know you're going to know. Yeah. We're in the middle of like a scoring boom right now. But is what, where, what is this the scoring peak or was this a previous boom in a previous era where it was like 150, 160?

There was another one, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So we're taking those people out of the pool.

So all I did was go back to 19, the merger season. Copy that. I'll give you 6 players who averaged 20 points a game. Mike James, 20.3. Ricky Davis, 20.6. Dana Barrows, 20.6, made the All-Star team that year. Never nervous Pervis Ellison, 20.0 one year. Huh. Tony Campbell, 2 years in a row in the expansion Minnesota Timberwolves. But I think our answer at 20.3 points a game Jordan Poole. Jordan Poole averaged 20 points a game.

Counterpoint, on a certain night Jordan Poole looks really good.

And the other counter would be he actually really helped them in the NBA Finals, helped them win a title. Yeah, so. So maybe it's Mike James?

I'm kind of looking at Never Nervous Purpose.

So the other thing that was interesting about that, it was the only time he ever averaged anything close to that. He had like one big year, but for the most part he was like between 7 and 13. So maybe that's the answer. Never nervous.

Yeah, that's my answer. It's just he's not— he doesn't exactly jump off the screen when you watch him play basketball. He doesn't exactly jump when you watch him play basketball either.

Ricky ended up on the Celtics, which I know you remember. Of course. He had nights where you're like, wow, this guy might be an All-NBA player. Yes.

And that's my Poole— that's my Poole retort too. Yeah. Is like Jordan Poole had nights on a certain night. Yeah. They're putting up 40.

All right, so there's 2 more great questions.

Okay, let's do it.

I'm going to give you the second best one first, and then I'm really excited about the last one. This is from Jay in Charlotte. He heard the Hornets deep dive that Zach Lowe and I did, and about— Zach was joking about raising a divisional banner. Wanted to know who had the saddest rafters in the American sports scene. So I just concentrated on basketball. As a Hornets season ticket holder, he has to nominate— he calls it the Spectrum Center. Currently, the Hornets have 3 things hanging in the rafters: number 6 for Bill Russell, which everybody has, number 13 for Bobby Phills, who tragically died in a drag racing accident, and the Charlotte Sting jersey number 32 for Andrea Stinson, who averaged 12 points a game in the WNBA. They've never won their division, made an Eastern Conference Finals, or won a playoff series since the arena opened. The most famous basketball moment in the arena is a drunk guy in a purple shirt taunting Dwyane Wade and hitting 2 threes in a Game 6 to close out the game when he had 7 threes in the year. Is there sadder rafters in American sports? So I did the research on this, but okay, I just wanted to present that Charlotte case for you.

So Bill Russell, who didn't play for them, Bobby Phills, who tragically passed away, and a WNBA player, and no division or conference title, anything.

I don't think you can get sadder than that.

I'll present to you the Memphis Grizzlies. No, no, any rafters either. Bill Russell, Zach Randolph, Tony Allen. I'd still go with Charlotte. Minnesota, Bill Russell and Malik Saly, who tragically passed away. And that's really it. I don't think they have anything else.

They're going to do Garnett.

They'd have a Dunne. Yeah, but didn't they just, didn't they just sort of like Orlando only has Bill Russell and Shaq, but they must have the '95 Eastern Conference title, whatever. And they made it in '09, so they'd have two. The answer is actually the LA Clippers. Oh.

Zero anything.

They have no retired numbers. What? And they've never won anything. They've never won a conference finals. They have nothing.

What about like a brand or something?

They have nothing. They put high school uniforms of California players in their thing. I'm not kidding. They don't have a single retired number.

I'm trying to think.

They didn't retire Bob McAdoo's number, who won an MVP on the Buffalo Braves. They didn't retire basically name anybody. Chris Paul? Chris Paul maybe will be the first one, but he had this terrible experience with them. Blake Griffin, maybe you get to a point where you retire Chris Paul, Blake Griffin.

I think you do that. That's pretty sad though.

Couldn't you at least retire Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson together? Just have—

that was a great year.

It was a really fun year. We enjoyed it. But yeah, the Clippers have nothing. That's sad. So they are the most impressive.

I feel like just if we're just going with just rafters, you might be right. But it really touched me when he was like, nothing's even happened in this arena notable. Yeah. With, in Charlotte. Cause I was thinking about the one thing would be LeBron staring at Michael Jordan before he dunks at a playoff game. That would be like the most notable thing that's happened in that arena in my memory.

Well, now 2K is going to be raining threes. 2K.

They should put him in the rafters already.

This is a little sorbet appetizer for you before the last email. John from Jersey City had an email for Conspiracy Bill. Oh, I love it. I thought I could turn you on to the latest NBA conspiracy. The Nets rigging the 2026 lottery.

The 2026 lottery.

I'm a Nets season ticket holder. This is the upcoming lottery. When I got my ticket renewal price for next season, I was shocked. They raised prices 24% for the same seats next season. Last year they raised it 3%. The only rationale I can think of is to upcharge their season ticket holders who have sat through the mess of the last 2 years because they must know something. The rest of us don't. I'll tell you this, Conspiracy Bill did darken the room and smoke the pipe a little bit and thought about this one. Why would they raise ticket prices 24% coming off a terrible season? They don't have a single signature player other than like Michael Porter Jr. and Egor Demond. What made them raise prices? But it's a large, it's a sizable league. Yeah. Conspiracy Bill was intrigued. Huh. Tyler Dickey, by the way, wanted to know, um, I'm not buying that one though.

The rigged lottery.

Listen, Conspiracy Bill got his people together.

At least they talked about it.

Yeah, they had a meeting about it.

Tyler Dickey, this is another sorbet. Um, he said, when you talk about craziest stories of the season, everyone's like, KD's burners, that was the craziest. Won't get crazy that. He points out the Trail Blazers head coach got arrested by the FBI one game into the season. I'm not the historian of the game that you are, but I've never seen or heard anything quite like this. No one cares about Portland, so this is easily swept under the rug. Did Chauncey actually mess with our players' playing times and development and control outcomes? Did he cut minutes so player props would hit unders? Why is this not a huge deal to anyone else? I don't know. Why isn't this a huge deal?

I don't know.

Ramona just wrote a huge piece about him today about how he had to sell his house and he had $5 million bail. This is like a major gambling investigation. And he was in the poker and alleged—

I can't say I know Chauncey that well, but he was around ESPN when I was there, and he is just like the most responsible, measured person I've been around in a special setting.

I worked with him too. I thought he was the nicest guy. Yeah.

Some of the stuff you hear about Malik Beasley, you're like, oh, that's a little weird. But Chauncey was just like a sweetheart.

It's a good point. This one kind of just went away. Not sure why.

I think it was because it's so long ago. And also the Katie Berner thing, he made a Twitter account and it was in a group chat. You know what I mean? So it's not even like public-facing tweets. Yeah. Someone in his group chat just violated his privacy.

Somebody betrayed the chat. Yeah. That seems to be what happened. Yeah. Okay, last question from Dan in Manhattan Beach. I can't wait for your reaction. I didn't send this to you. What if instead of signing with any one team for next season, LeBron makes his retirement tour an actual retirement tour by signing a one-week contract with all 30 teams? Every team gets one LeBron home game where he starts and plays, and they sell thousands of limited jerseys. New York finally gets Knicks-LeBron. Minnesota gets an Ant-LeBron team-up. Miami gets Heat-Reunion-LeBron. We just keep going. He's not going to win the title no matter where he goes. Why not generate news in every local market? Never happened.

Great idea.

I couldn't pin holes in it.

There's also this thing hanging on where it's like, I have no idea where LeBron's going to play next year. So just like, there's no sort of natural—

I did this on the pod two weeks ago with Zach.

You did a Golden State thing.

Well, because I don't think Cleveland— I think Cleveland has a chance to win the title every year, and it's Donovan Mitchell's team, and he's not going to be like, cool, let's add LeBron. Like, it's his team. Jalen Brunson, it's his team. These guys don't want the LeBron retirement circus coming into their thing. They'd rather just win the title. Does be my guess.

Does if he goes to the Warriors per conspiracy bill, does that team a championship team?

No, but it's, it's like a Curry and LeBron last ride.

Porzingis and like Jimmy Butler off an injury and like that team is not that good.

One last ride. Curry goes to Charlotte to end his career. So I tried to think about, could this 10-day thing work? And I actually think it could.

Okay, hold on. Kerr going to Charlotte, that's gonna take shots away from Nips.

It's, it's an older—

Oh, it's like a mentor, pass the torch. I'll be the best shooter.

2K and him will work it out. Yeah.

Kind of like a Chris Paul-Wemby thing. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

He's there to shepherd him into superstardom. Um, so if it was 30, he'd have to play for 30 teams. It's 60 games total, right? So you play one home game, one road game, or two home games.

Why the road games?

Maybe just the home games. Maybe it's a two-game homestand. Limited edition jerseys. You'd have two jerseys for everything. It's like a fucking cash cow. It would actually be kind of amazing. And the Celtics would be like, whoa, our LeBron game is coming up on March 4th.

Oh, the tickets would go out of control. That's why they raised ticket prices in Brooklyn. 'Cause of the LeBron game next year.

Or is LeBron just going there next year? No.

For a potential piece of the team.

Just said, that's it. That's his thing. So if he played on every team, this would, first of all, it would be an amazing— nobody's done it before.

The league just brought in two new partners and took billions of their dollars. Yeah. And this is a little gift they can give back.

How about this? LeBron's into golf now, plays in these different cities, 2 home games, and you can sample the best courses in each city over the course of 2 days.

This will never happen, but it should happen.

I thought it was an almost unassailable idea. I loved it because— and then he ends up on the last team, and it's— and that's the team that has a chance to win the title, and you just kind of slide in. It's like, oh, I had a really good time when I was on Minnesota in December.

Guarantees a ring for LeBron. Yeah, I only played one game. They won the title.

I didn't even think guarantees a ring. Yeah. Everyone who played for the team gets a ring.

I mean, this is on the level of Ewing House talking about a guy with a metal baseball bat playing for the Wizards. This will never happen, but it is intriguing. It's one of those things where it's like, okay, this, this won't happen, but if it did, what's the problem?

It would be cool if he started out with the shitty teams and then gradually got to— and then OKC was like, we'll do it, but it's got to be in December. We don't want to screw with our team too much.

Because I was thinking about like him on the Jazz and I was like, uh, you know what I mean? I was just like, well, I don't know if I'm gonna even tune in for that one. Or like the Wizards.

I did think, could there be a scenario where he only picks 12 teams but then I think the other 18— there'd be some fan base that'd be like, what the fuck? And I do like the idea of him having the one game in, like, Memphis. Just fucking weird. He's wearing a Grizzlies jersey.

But the thing is, is that city's on absolute fire. It's like basically Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, but basketball and LeBron is basically what it is.

Every game would be an event. I think Bronny also has to come. So it's two 10-day contracts. You have to get both guys.

Every text thread that I am on would be, which LeBron game are we going to? Right. It would like the second the schedule is released, it would, every text thread that I'm on would be like, so which one are we going?

He does Knicks, Nets back to back. So he has Knicks week and then Nets week. He's in New York for 2 weeks. He's doing all the shows. Huge.

Oh yeah.

It's like, this is amazing. It's so cool.

We're in Knicks territory. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a great idea.

This is a brilliant idea. Dave Jacoby.

You can hear him on the Miss— hear and watch him on the Mismatch with Verno, Chris Vernon. How's Verno handling another tanking season?

You know what? He's not handling it well. Yeah. But I think that we're doing everything that we can to support him.

It's tough when you're whole, when you put your stake in the ground, we aren't going to tank. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got Triple J and Joe and they play together. Yep, exactly. And, uh, yeah, it's going—

it's not going great. He's watching a lot of college basketball.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you too. Now it's time for a special segment of the show. It's called Value Mount Rushmore, and it's brought to you by Domino's. I love Domino's. I'm gonna talk about real value, no hype, no buzz, just decisions in the game that actually get you more than you pay for. Like how Domino's Best Deal Ever gets you any pizza with any toppings for $9.99. What a steal. Now strap in while I break down my top 4 value plays. Uh, the Clippers just did this. My first one would be when the Clippers traded Zubats who's making $20 million a year so they could start playing the rookie center more, Niederhauser, who makes like $2 million a year. What a deal. If Niederhauser can put up most of the stats that Zubats puts up, great. I just saved $18 million. That was a good one. Uh, late round fantasy sleepers, always awesome. I always like to do running backs, uh, at the end of drafts because you just draft the backups or rookies and just hope you strike oil. With, uh, with one of them. Um, futures, I like what the— like looking for futures ahead for like the NBA, NFL season.

NFL, you always look for the bad team that has a good schedule the next year, um, and a new coach is a good one. For the NBA, the team that starts to stack the lottery picks and then all of a sudden, even though people don't have high expectations, like Charlotte this year, maybe they'll make a jump up. So that's a good one. Um, And then a fourth one, glue guys. Always good when you're— if you're building a sports team, invest in those glue guys. The Celtics have a couple good ones. Jordan Walsh, Hugo Gonzalez— Hugo Gonzalez, sorry. Just people that, you know, they're not going to be max contract guys, but you can throw them out and rely on them over and over again for 20 minutes a game. Anyway, the highest tier move you can make for your wallet is Domino's best deal ever. Order any pizza with any toppings for only $9.99. Um, I always do thin. I like the, uh, I like the gluten-free crust. I like it well done. Um, and I like the, uh, I like the double pepperoni with extra cheese is my favorite. Get Domino's best deal ever today.

Prices higher in some locations. Select this online-only offer from February 23rd until April 6th. Size availability varies by crust type. Max 7 toppings, 6 for New York style and pan crust. Stuff crust extra, excludes XL and specialty pizzas. Minimum purchase required for delivery prices. Participation delivery area and charges may vary. All right, my friend Matt Bellini is here. You can hear him 3 times a week on The Town, which you can also watch with his fancy video setup. It's a great podcast. You can also read his, uh, his newsletter, part of the Puck newsletter world. Uh, very essential, especially lately. There's always stuff going on. And just recently, Warner Brothers, which has been passed around like a Yankees Christmas gift since 2001, seems to have finally found a home. Somebody finally wanted the snow globe. They wanted to keep it. Finally?

I don't know if it's finally. We may be doing this all again in 5 years. Uh-oh.

Well, today, Paramount stock got downgraded to junk status, so everything they just paid—

Their debt was downgraded, yes.

All right, so I have so many ways to go here. I have— I don't think there's been enough talk about the, the merger name. You got— you've been joking about this on your pod because they could do the acronym, they could do PWB, they could do Warner Mount, which you've said a couple times.

Yeah, that's my preference. Uh, do you—

does the Paul Brothers interest you at all? Paul Brothers or Paul? Just calling it Paul with like a paw print.

I thought you were going to go Peacock. That's their current, their current monitor was Paramount Skydance. They do Peacock, which, uh, Craig Horlbeck loves.

So do you think Paramount just absorbs it and it just stays Paramount? And that's like kind of their ultimate trump card.

I think ultimately perhaps that will be the route. The funny thing is though, the Warner Brothers is much larger than Paramount. So if you're really looking at the, you know, what the brand is and what to do moving forward, you call the whole company Warner's. Or Warner Brothers or Warner's Paramount, and then you keep the streaming service as HBO or HBO Max, right? And just kind of fold Paramount into it.

Well, none of us were ever happy with WBD, Warner Brothers Discovery. It was just a complete mess. And everything Zaslav did was just bizarre and crazy, and including his victory lap last week, which you excoriated him for. And yet he's going to walk away with like $800 million.

It's, it is unbelievable. The company lost two-thirds of its value under his leadership. The only thing that raised the stock was the prospect of it being sold. And he lucked out. He has these, the, the world's fourth richest man who's got a son who happens to love Hollywood. It's the, it's the greatest thing in the world. And all of a sudden there's a bidding war because Netflix is like, oh, Well, we'll take that. We'll take HBO and Warner Brothers if it's for sale. And all of a sudden you've got a bidding war. All you need is two bidders. And then next thing you know, the stock goes from $7 a share to $31 a share at the sale. Unbelievable.

And some people were buying it when it was like $18, $19, hoping that we did get to the mid-$20s. Um, this— so I was really trying to think about this and I was thinking about real life and culture. Is this the most faith anyone has ever shown in their son?

Well, I don't think anyone in the history of the world has had the wherewithal that Larry Ellison does in terms of just sheer wealth. I mean, I guess Elon has what, like 10, 12 kids that will someday be old enough to, uh, to have to deal with his money.

But this is like in Game of Thrones, Queen Cersei's like, Joffrey, we're riding with you, baby. We know you're 17 and we know you're a sociopath, but I think you can handle the Seven Kingdoms. Yeah, we'll wait till culture, but not in real life.

Wait till Don Jr. runs for president. Then we'll really see what, uh, what's going on there.

Well, I was going to say the Bushes would be the other analogy, right? Like, like Senior Bush, like kind of grooming Junior Bush, but not in a situation where you basically incur $79 million— $79 billion in debt plus the junk, which is now 3% on top of the $79 million. Um, I've never seen anything like this. And I, I gotta be honest. I'm not smart enough really from a math standpoint to understand it.

Well, isn't there a correlation in sports? Aren't there legendary sports owners? I mean, Dr. Buss, perfect example, Dr. Buss, you know, and his kids running roughshod over his empire. I mean, there's gotta be a million examples of very savvy sports owners who turn their entire kingdom over to their kids and all hell breaks loose.

Here's the difference. So I did think about that and we see this in sports all the time and almost always it goes horribly and the kids, You know, they're basically, their, their qualifications for the job is I'm related to my dad and he's the rich guy who made all these things. They're not self-made, all this stuff. In this case, David Ellison has tried to put in the time for the last 10 to 12 years to try to figure out, like, I want to be a content mogul. So it's, it's a little different than in sports sometimes when somebody is like, okay, I am, I'm going to fold shop. Here's my son. He's now the CEO and he'll be in charge of all of our basketball moves. You're like, oh no. Yeah. David Ellison really does seem like he, he's, he's ready for the moment. I don't know if anybody else thinks he is, but it seems like he has a point of view and, and a style and a take on this. Right. Certainly.

And he definitely put in the time. We can argue about how successful Skydance was because their biggest successes have been essentially putting up money and glomming onto original franchises at Paramount. He had, you know, he had Top Gun, he's done Mission: Impossible, he had the Terminator franchise, and he did those movies to varying degrees of success. So he hasn't made a huge impact via Skydance, but he's put a lot of money into movies and he's made a lot of TV shows. So in that sense, he has been kind of auditioning for this, but now he is in the absolute big league. I mean, he's gone in a year and change from being a guy with a semi-successful production company to arguably the second or third most powerful person in Hollywood.

Yeah, because I'm trying— there's been so much glass half empty. I'm trying to think like, okay, what is the glass half full side? What are his wins so far?

He gets credit for the Tom Cruise relationship. And Top Gun: Maverick, which he actually produced and made happen. And he gets credit for, I mean, Mission Impossible. These last couple of Mission Impossibles lost money. So, but they were kind of plagued by COVID charges and ended up being some of the most expensive movies of all time. He has built the TV business is not bad. He actually, he's done Reacher. He's done Gracie and Grace and Frankie, which lasted 7 seasons on Netflix, which is kind of unheard of. So he has had wins in TV. He's a producer. Some producers, you know, some shows are hits, some movies are hits, some aren't. That's very different from what he is now. He is an owner-operator of 2 of the 5 legacy studios. And it's just, it's unbelievable how much power he's amassed. He has news now. He's never had news right before. He's got Sports. I mean, he's now the proprietor of arguably the most lucrative NFL package, the AFC package on Sundays. He's got UFC, he's got golf, he's got March Madness. Now he owns all of March Madness. I mean, it's pretty unbelievable. Yeah.

So I wrote down all the stuff that they have now, the content empire, right? 200+ million subs. Now, I don't know how many of those are repetitive. I guess you find that out in the US, they merge in the US.

Antenna just did a study where it's 7.5 million subs overlap in the US. I don't know about overseas, but it's less overlap than with HBO and Netflix. There's a much bigger overlap there.

HBO, Paramount Plus, CBS, uh, an entity that I think got just discounted during this whole process. Pluto. Yeah, they got Pluto, one of my favorites. TNT, TBS, Comedy Central, Discovery, MTV, all those, which I guess can just run as ghost ships on cable for as long as we have cable.

Yeah, they're zombie networks and they will just milk them for the ridiculousness money and that's it.

CNN and CBS News. Which, who knows if they're even going to decide they want to be in news. And if you're going to talk about ways to cut debt, if they don't care about news to begin with, that could be just a place that sadly they would just chop.

They're going to chop. I don't think they're going to kill it. CBS, CNN still throws off a lot of money from affiliate fees because it's a, you can't not carry CNN for like the 5 times a year that people tune in to watch some kind of breaking news moment. Yeah, like this weekend. Exactly. But there are about 3,000 people that work at CNN. Yeah. And there's a big overlap in terms of the product with CBS News. So that is a, the perfect place to start cutting. Yeah. Sadly.

Uh, Bleach Report, they have, they have all this IP including DC Comics, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Looney Tunes, Game of Thrones, Top Gun, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, et cetera. And that's the biggest thing that shifted, I would say, this century with, with the studios. Valuing that old IP more than ever. And now we're moving into the AI era and it's even probably twice as valuable as it was.

If we look at what's going on with AI and there's soon going to be— anybody can create anything at any time, right? Yeah. And YouTube is about to be flooded with AI-generated content. So in a sea where everything is possible, what isn't possible to recreate? And it's known intellectual property. You cannot recreate Batman with AI unless it's licensed, which they may do, but they will own Batman and you can do whatever you want with Batman. And I think that's honestly why Netflix was so interested in buying Warner Brothers because Netflix is increasingly taking on YouTube. Yeah. They're doing podcasts, they're doing all these other things that eat up innings and eat up time on the service. And if they see AI coming in, they wanted all of that IP in addition to the 100 years of movies in the library to put on the service. Right?

So like, for instance, say on The Godfather, there's a world where you could just do your own Godfather sequel between Godfather 2 and Godfather 3 and create all of the AI. And it sounds insane and awful, but like this weekend I saw a commercial where somebody used— was Airbnb. They used Golden Slumbers from The Beatles. For a commercial and I'm like, that song's kind of sacred. This is now a commercial song, but we're just used to this now. All the songs we grew up with in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s are just commercial jingles now.

Yeah, but they're getting paid, right? That's the difference. You have to pay for that.

But people will get paid for this Godfather kind of stuff too. Exactly.

It just feels weird, but I guess, I mean, Disney just did a deal with OpenAI to hand over all their characters for do-it-yourself content. Right. And interestingly, in that deal, they did not give the voices and they did not give the actual physical human likenesses of the characters that are human. So if you have Luke Skywalker, it's the animated Luke Skywalker. It's not Mark Hamill. And that's because of the guild, the union regulations. They don't let you do that. You have to pay money for that. And Disney just said, okay, you can have Lightning McQueen and Yoda, but you're not, they're not going to sound like Lightning McQueen and Yoda, because they— that's still intellectual property that's controlled. So the—

and this is the wild, wild west coming up where we don't know, you know, what if Fox just says, hey, The Simpsons, go to town, just make sure you pay us. And all of a sudden there's just Simpsons stuff everywhere.

Yeah, Homer Simpson is involved in this OpenAI deal. Yeah, not Homer's voice, because you have to get the voice separate from that, that, uh, that image. But you're going to be able to do Homer Simpson videos on OpenAI and Disney+ very soon.

You also get the Paramount library, the WB library, and two giant studio lots. Um, here's the thing. So $79 billion in debt, plus the 3% junk piece. So that's even higher. Paramount only controls two things right now when they merge these companies, which will take a year, assuming they merge. Headcount and subscription prices, right? Other than that, they have no idea how this is going to go, but they— those are the two things that they can finagle the price however they want. Like, they could chop 60% of both companies and merge it into some smaller company. They could also raise the subscription price to some crazy number and do a little like what Disney and Hulu and Fox have tried to do, which has been really confusing. Like you can't— it's really hard to get one of them. You kind of have to get all three and they're pushing people to the bundle, which is what— where we're headed with this, right? And it'd be like $35 a month and you get HBO and Paramount and you get to watch football on CBS. And that's where we're headed, right?

What, what they are saying is that there will only be one app. It will not be a bundle. It won't be like the Disney, Hulu, ESPN situation. They are saying that these are going to be combined into one. They're calling it a super app. And that it will be something like, let's call it HBO Max, and then you go open it and then there's Paramount+ tile and there's an HBO tile and there's a CBS Sports tile, that kind of thing.

So we've never really seen a deal like this with somebody that is a really proud tech person that cares about this stuff and is like, we are going to innovate and do all that. We have all of these different ideas. Like Netflix has a great main page. You go to Netflix, it, it, it knows what you like. It knows how to push things in front of you and they're the best at it. And you go to other pages like Peacock is just a quagmire.

You go to Peacock, Peacock still doesn't know that I go there every Sunday morning to watch SNL.

It's like, I do not know that. How do I, how do I do it? Can you guys tell me? It's unbelievable. And like the worst app of all time.

And then you finally get to SNL and it shows you the last 10 minutes. Of the episode that you previously watched. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I never watched the last 10 minutes of SNL because I turn it off after Weekend Update. I want— just show me the latest episode. What's the new one?

What's the new traders like? They just can't figure it out. Um, so subscription price will be one way to make the money back. I still don't know, like, I've heard you, you've talked on different pods about how do you get this, this debt down, all this stuff. $79 billion is like a brain breaker. It's a lot. That's, that's basically the entire Western Conference of NBA teams. Yeah.

Honestly, they're going to have to cut a shit ton of costs. They're saying $6 billion that they're going to take out. It's going to be more than that. And they're saying that there's a lot of synergies and that they, you know, they will probably move everybody to one of the two physical lots and sell the other one. That's a couple billion dollars there. There's a lot of things they can do. Merging CBS News and CNN. There's things that are going to result in headcount reductions, but also just like physical, you know, presence reduction and costs of, you know, office space and things like that. So you'll start to see those that come down. But the real risk here is that they can't come down enough and that this company just essentially becomes all about paying off debt. And they're just cutting costs and reducing output and servicing the debt. And it's— they're not actually investing in making this a good, you know, productive company like you should be. Which is—

I can't remember the first time I came on your pod and we talked about this. This goes to the heart of how stupid these media mergers are. Yeah, I just don't understand them. They never work. I don't— I— even when you look at Disney and Fox, like, I don't know, would Disney run that back if they— if they could do that one over again? Would they? I'd love to know. Serum?

Certain quarters of Disney would run that back. Really? Bob Iger insists it's great. And I don't think the final— I listen, I go back and forth on this. I don't know if Disney is where it is today as one of the companies that you assume will survive the streaming wars if it didn't acquire all the content engines from FX and from Hulu and from, you know, the Fox properties, putting The Simpsons on Disney Plus. I don't know about that. That is, that is above my pay grade. There's probably some McKinsey study locked in the vault with Walt Disney's head somewhere, just like this is what we got out of Fox. Yeah. But they spent a lot of money and it, it caused a lot of debt issues for Disney and they're still kind of digging out of that. They got Avatar though. They got, they got a lot out of it, but it was a lot. Now we have a better example in Warner Brothers Discovery because that was a transaction that Produced about $55 billion in debt, and Zaslav and his team essentially spent the next 3 years trying to pay that down. And then that's where we had, you know, cutting the Batgirl movie and firing thousands of people and all these things that kind of— they took a hit to the brand.

And luckily for them, they found someone to come along and buy this company. But if they hadn't, it would've been a downward spiral, I think.

So would you say the best analogy for what Zaslav did here is he bought this house he couldn't afford in a neighborhood that he liked, real— knew right away basically that he couldn't afford to keep the house and that this was going to go really badly unless somebody else was driving down the street and said, whoa, I really love that house. And that was his only out. That's basically what happened, right?

The rich kid, the rich kid in school, he happened to befriend, and he just decided that he'd really like that. And then another guy said, I'd also like it. I don't want the rich kid to have it. And then all of a sudden it's a bidding war. I mean, if you look at the initial projections for Warner Brothers Discovery, they said that they were going to have $14 billion a year in EBITDA, which is a metric for profits. And it never even delivered in that first year. That first year came in under their estimates. And it's because the linear TV business, which is where these companies make most of their money, still the linear TV business is collapsing faster than people anticipated or that they let on. So they're like, oh wait, we thought we were going to have $14 billion. Now we only have $12 billion this year. And next year we have $10 billion. And finally, when they're selling this company this past year, it's down to $8.5 billion. And it just keeps melting, melting, melting. And that's, it just throws the entire business trajectory off. They had to find a buyer.

Who didn't know that the linear TV was going to die dramatically? Like, we knew this 10 years ago.

What do we do?

It's a, it's a matter of how fast it moves.

As soon as high-speed internet was here, like, it was, it was a matter of time. I, I think one other thing with these mergers that never gets enough credit, and I say this as somebody who's worked in a couple big companies, they're so destabilizing. And I don't think people— you wouldn't know unless you were working in a company, they either got acquired or acquired somebody else. But from the moment it happens, it's, it's Hunger Games. And you have competitive departments all over the place and you have people looking over their shoulder and people looking for other jobs because they don't know if their job's going to exist. And, um, it's just this, this amount of tension. Like if Spotify merged with somebody tomorrow, I'd be terrified. I know what I'm dealing with now. I don't know what's, what I'm dealing with another company. Right.

And if you look at these Warner Brothers and HBO people, they just, they have different bosses all the time. Right. And with different bosses come different objectives, different strategies. And in a creative business, it's really hard to operate from a position of uncertainty and change. You look at some of the most stable places like Universal, which has had the same ownership for the past 15, 16 years. The film studio at Universal was able to build up these franchises and build up the Illumination business to have Minions and Super Mario. And they had the relationship with Christopher Nolan. Yeah. You take a bet on Oppenheimer and then he's going to give you The Odyssey. And all of a sudden you've got the biggest filmmaker. They have the Spielberg relationship, all these things. It takes a lot and it takes a stable team to do. And when you are changing the rudder, Every couple years, it's just a lot more difficult.

Well, look at Amazon right now. Amazon's been trying to get into all kinds of different things, and every 3 months they have another reorg. It's amazing.

I know. And they still haven't gotten what they want out of that entire purchase of MGM, which is a freaking James Bond movie, right?

They had to buy out—

they had to buy out the Broccoli family because they essentially refused to make any movies for them because they hated them, right?

Um, I want to do some winners and losers. Winner, the first winner, we talked about him before, but David Ellison, who I gotta say, I, I've only heard like at least decent things. I don't, it's, he's not like a King Joffrey character where people are like, what a prick. Oh my God.

Very nice guy.

Everybody seems to like him. I don't know if he should be running one of the biggest content, uh, whatever monoliths we've ever seen. But he at least seems like not like a Zaslav thing where he's in it to get some sort of payoff at the end. I don't think that's his intention.

No, he seems to be in it because he genuinely likes this business and wants to make good things. Now, we can argue about his taste. He's made a lot of movies that are not great, right? And he has much more commercial taste than, say, like his sister Megan Ellison, who is a great auteur producer and financier of movies. Yeah. Until she ran outta money and her father basically said enough's enough. But David—

that would make her not a good financier, by the way. Who? I would say Megan Ellison maybe wasn't a good financier because some movies— no, no. Great taste though. Great taste. Yes.

Yeah. Made some very good movies. Yeah. But I'd put her rewatchable number up against David Ellison's and I bet she has more.

That would be an interesting battle. Yes. All right. Winners and losers. First of all, $79 billion in debt. I just staggering. I'm giving that a winner just 'cause I didn't even know that was possible. That sounds like fucking outta Star Wars.

You made the debt a winner.

I think it's gonna be a record. I think that's it. I think we've peaked.

I don't think anyone's beaten this. I guess these lenders like Apollo and these, these big lenders. Yeah, whatever.

I think 79 is gonna be, this is like, like Barry Bonds hitting 73 homers. We're never topping. Yes. I'm making it a winner.

And much like that, we will come to question the, uh, how it all happened.

Uh, loser, everyone's scared of AI and what it might do to content. This is like your D-Day because this is now the first time somebody that has, and Brian Phillips wrote about this for The Ringer this week, somebody with real insight and awareness and ability to use data, surveillance, name anything evil that, that we're all afraid of. TikTok.

And don't forget, yeah, David Ellison's father Larry is one of the investors in the US version of TikTok, right? And they still are talking about this like magical digital fairy dust that they're gonna sprinkle over the whole company and turn it into a big tech media powerhouse. And not sure quite how that's gonna happen, but I'm sure it'll be bad for the culture and our data and all these other things.

Well, it's gonna be, AI is gonna probably come in a bunch of different ways for content. I think. For when you're talking about editing movies and producing movies and some of the, some of the stuff that has just jobs that have existed for 120 years. I'm sure that's part of their plan, right? We could cut the cost here, here, here. We could just have, instead of having 200 people on this movie, we could have 70.

And that's throughout Hollywood though. Yes. I mean, there is a push right now that the thinking is these movies cannot continue to cost $200 million to make, especially in animation., but even in other, you know, sci-fi effects-driven movies, they've gotta bring the cost down and AI's gonna be a big part of that. All right.

I have a controversial winner. People who make content because, yeah. All right. I'm gonna land this plane. You're gonna be confused for most of the time. I think if Netflix got Warner Brothers, I think we would've moved into a dangerous place with content that I would compare to this. And I'm in an AL keeper fantasy league where we have, we can keep guy, we can keep 10 keepers, we have minor leaguers and all that. And sometimes somebody will get a big lead in like July and you have to decide like, do I want to chase this guy or would it be stupid to chase this guy and make trades? You know what, I'm going to let him win the title and I have a better chance next year. I think Netflix's lead would have been, especially like with the know-how and the intelligence they have, I actually think it that it could have turned into a situation where everybody else is like, yeah, we're just going to pick our spots. We can't compete with those guys. And I don't know if it would have been great for people who do movies, television shows, and documentaries specifically, because who's bidding against them if everybody is just going to be careful because they can't beat Netflix?

Not a bad take. I agree. And, and obviously if this merged company can get its act together and become that third or fourth big player alongside Netflix and Amazon and Disney, that that creates a, ultimately creates a more robust market if there are four real players that can buy your project at any given time. And then God knows what Apple is doing.

They're going to be plus Apple. If you're a relatively famous person who looks good in a giant thumbnail. Exactly.

And, and they're going to overspend on whatever you want to do.

Jennifer Lawrence, come on up. We got an Apple show for you. Pose. Yeah. Take a picture. Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, I know, but you're a divorced mom and your husband's been murdered. Go.

That is essentially what Ellison has been arguing and what they're going to argue to regulators to approve this deal is that this was a necessary evil to get Hollywood modernized for the tech era and that these are globally scaled companies and Hollywood has never faced globally scaled media companies before. Yeah. It's always been an oligopoly of only these 5 or 6 studios can distribute movies worldwide. Right. And that's why, frankly, that's why they stayed in existence for 100 years. Now that's all gone with the internet and you have scaled television companies and they need to combine to chase that. And it's going to be painful in the short term. It's not, no question taking these buyers out, like When Warner's and HBO were competing against Paramount and all the rest, it was just better for buyers. But if this goes through, it will be painful. And then maybe this company can build up and become a real scaled player. 'Cause I, you're certainly not taking your best projects to Paramount right now. Right.

And if you think about 2017, '18, '19, pre-COVID, um, there were just a lot of people that had money and wanted to do stuff and were competing against each other. And then that slowly died after COVID.

Well, and there was television. Right. There was cable television still making original shows. Now that's all gone. Cable television not making original shows, certainly not in scripted. So it's just the streaming players and a little bit of broadcast TV in there. You know, it's just, it's just a lot less felonies.

I, I decided to watch the Survivor season for the first time in a while because it's 5:50. It was a 3-hour season premiere. CBS is basically like Guys, we got to go 3 hours. We have 2 police shows, 2 doctor shows, 2 fire shows. We have football. We don't really have a lot going on, so we're just going to have this from 8 to 11 tonight. Sorry. And guess what? I watched it fast-forwarded through all the commercials.

And you know what? They're doing a shorter shoot. Jeff Probst came on The Town and was talking about how they do a shorter shoot on location now than they used to. And then the episodes are now often Longer than they used to. Right.

And he is now AI. I don't know if he announced that on the pod. He's AI.

Would not surprise me. He does not age.

Um, anyway, that's my glass half full is that maybe this will lead to two heavyweights competing for projects constantly, which I'm not against. I might be wrong. Another one.

You've got one loser.

I think one winner. Oh, I have a lot of losers coming. Continue, continue.

Well, I have another winner, the NFL. 'Cause Goodell, who's just a genius with this stuff, puts that little thing in like, hey, if there's a merger, we get to redo our deal. Yeah. So now, now Skydance and the NFL, you don't need to, you know, it's not hard to figure out that they're going to be, have the hometown advantage. Yeah. But nobody really has an advantage with Goodell and whatever he wants to do to get more money, he's going to do it. So if he decides like, I've decided we have Friday Night Football. And we're going to use AFC teams. And sorry, CBS, you're just gonna have to eat shit because we're gonna have good games on Friday night. CBS would be like, okay, fine.

Yeah, all right, not much you can do. I mean, they've been slowly taking games away from those big packages. The one thing I would say is that I do think the NFL still needs broadcast. I don't think you're going to see them completely abandon CBS.

I don't think you will either.

Go to Netflix or something like that. It would— they know their customer, and the customer viewer still wants that broadcast experience.

So I have 7, 7 suitors for the NFL when this all opens up. You tell me: absolutely have to have it, I'd love to have it, or this is a luxury. Those are the 3 answers. CBS Paramount, I feel like that's a we absolutely have to have it. Right. 100% agree.

NBC.

Yes.

Agreed. All right.

We're 2%.

That is, they have the number one program in all of television. It's an anchor of their entire sales strategy. And the Olympics are only every 4 years. NBA so far has not performed as much as they want it to.

Oh, what are you talking about? Every game ever is the most watched game we've ever had. Yeah.

These Nielsen numbers. Yeah. Let's see next year when the big data is compared against the big data. But I, it's a little less than CBS, but I still think NFL is must-have for NBC.

Well, we agree. So that's two. Fox, I think, is must. Oh, they're—

it's, it's mission critical. If— what is Fox without NFL? What, what are they?

They have to have it. And they've, they've seen, they've seen both realities when they've had it and when they haven't had it, and they don't want to go back.

No, that's what the Bank of America analysts, they just downgraded Fox because of this whole prospect of the rights going up because there's, what are they going to do? They have to just eat it. ESPN.

Yeah, I think they're a have to. We have 4 have to haves. We're 4 for 4.

I think they're a have to with all the plans that ESPN is making and how much time they have put NFL on ABC as well. Yeah, like that was not supposed to be the case. And they've renegotiated those deals to put Monday Night Football on ABC a lot. So I think it's a must-have.

More on them in a second. Amazon is our fifth suitor. I would put them in the need to have it, but it's not a game breaker.

Yeah, I'm putting them in the middle category. I think it's a like to have. Now they love it. And it's, it's one of the only things that consistently works on Amazon. And they feel that they've made great strides in getting better games and the productions are better. And they've finally, they've convinced that last cohort of people to watch, you know, when, when they first started and took the games from Fox, the ratings went down just because some people in this country didn't know where to find the game. Right. So they forgot about it or whatever. Now they're bringing in more of those people and they've, it's sort of a cornerstone. Other offerings, but like with anything with Amazon, it's a, it's, it's a luxury. They are a sales platform. They want you to buy more toilet paper. And all of this content is just in service of buying more toilet paper.

And they need 3 or 4 things like the NFL to accomplish that goal. I agree. I wouldn't say they're on the level of the first 4, but they're one level below. And then the last 2 are Netflix and YouTube. Which I would say are luxury, need it, but you're not crying yourself to sleep if you don't get it. Exactly. You'll be fine. I agree.

And especially Netflix, because they, they see the numbers and they have a big initiative to increase their advertising sales and the NFL can do that, but they're just not going to fall over themselves to steal away a full package of games unless it makes sense unless it's like bespoke, you know, the international games. I, I, I've always thought that they're gonna, they're gonna eventually evolve into one international game per week or for, you know, 12 of the 17 weeks or something like that. And they will carve out those games for a 9:00 AM or, or 8:00 AM game every week. And it will be on Netflix because it will be global.

So Netflix can show 12 international games. Netflix owns all 12. And by the way, some of those are already on NFL Network, so they could just easily sell them to Netflix. Yep. Take the Germany game.

If they have to take 'em away from CBS or Fox, so be it. Yeah.

And by the way, the NFL would tell CBS, hey, we're gonna take these games.

You wanna fight?

CBS would be like, okay, take 'em. Yeah. All right, so that's 5. There are no other suitors, right? That's 7.

Well, where's Apple?

Yeah, where is Apple? Where's Apple? You tell me.

Are they even in this? That is the eternal question. Are they interested? They have not wanted to dabble. They, they have said that, you know, they like their, their F1 deal that they just did. They want— they like their MLS deal. Oh, the MLS might have a word about that. But, um, they have not— they have not wanted to just get a game or two here or there. Uh, and we'll see, you know, the MLB did a whole Friday Night Baseball thing with them. I mean, I, who knows if that works. There's just so many MLB games. But I've always thought— the bigger problem is how many people have Apple TV, I think is the scarier question.

'Cause I don't think it's a lot.

It's not a lot. And they're now doing things about that. They're putting, they're selling through other things. They just did a deal with Roku to sell through Roku. They capitulated and they sell through Amazon now.

I'm glad you brought that up. I thought that Roku thing was fascinating. It's because that was, that's their main competitor. Yeah, it was, it was a waving the white flag basically. Absolutely.

And they did it earlier with Amazon. Yeah. They basically came out guns blazing saying, we are Apple Incorporated. We are the platform that everybody has to have. And everyone's like, eh, not really when it comes to premium video. And they basically raised the right white flag and said, okay, we'll sell via Amazon and we'll sell via Roku and hopefully we'll raise our numbers.

I like Roku. Um, one more winner here. Well, I have a couple more actually. Uh, Netflix, who, look, I love the spin and you've been on it too about like, wow, this is all along they were, they were trying to push this deal and if they didn't get it, it still was great for them because they sat on it. I don't think that's true. They spent a lot of time on this. Nobody likes to spend a lot of time to not get something, but they did.

And have your stock go down 30%. Yeah.

But they did, they did get $2.8 billion as a breakup fee, which they can just now put toward, toward those international NFL games you mentioned and other stuff.

And a big competitor has taken on almost $80 billion in debt to go after this deal. So they got them that. They also, you know, the Ellisons wanted to buy this company for $19 a share in the fall. Right. And it went up by, what is that, 40% just because Netflix was involved in 30, you know, $19 to $31. So that's a lot.

It would be funny if the Mavericks had been able to use this strategy with the Luka trade where the trade went through and, and then the other teams were like, you didn't get enough. And then the Mavericks like, we didn't get enough. The deal is now we're accepting bids still. And it was like, the Lakers were like, wait, we had a deal. What happened?

Can you imagine if that were true in sports? If you could accept a trade and then everybody could react and up the offer, right? Because they, all it would do is create a, a lane there for, fan bases to go completely nuts when a trade was made, and then the ownership would have to respond, right?

Well, that was why they never wanted to leak it out. Uh, loser? Everyone at HBO, probably, because I— they could spin this all they want. We've been in this scenario before, ironically with HBO, with AT&T, um, where everybody said, no, no, it's gonna be great, everybody's gonna work together. I'm gonna go glass half empty on this. Uh, we'll see. But you mentioned on your podcast how Casey Bloys, who's I think probably the most respected TV executive or one of them, um, his contract's up next year. Yeah. Um, I think he saw what happened to Richard Plepler in the 2010s when Stankey and AT&T took over. And, uh, this is, uh, I wanna see how this plays out for me.

Listen, Casey has it in his contract that he reports to the CEO of the company. So if Paramount wants to honor that and have him report to David Ellison and not have to report to all the streaming executives that Ellison has hired, including a woman, Cindy Holland, who was at Netflix, who I don't think he and she and Casey would, would mix well together, maybe that will work out. Ellison said straight up HBO should stay HBO, do what they do best. Easier said than done.

What happens if they're bidding on the same project? Exactly.

What, what happens then? I mean, it's— there have been examples of that. Netflix famously has a culture where you can get a no from one division of the company and then you can get a yes from another. So they do have competing arms there within the same company. I don't know what would happen there if they had— if that, that situation existed. I don't know if they'll have the resources to continue to do what they do. The HBO process is really rigorous. They don't just put stuff on. They are not afraid to scrap a pilot and start over. We just, we had Rachel Sennett on The Town with I Love L.A. They completely reshot that pilot. Yeah. And most places would just say, just cut bait and be like, okay, busted pilot, we're done. But with HBO, you know, famously with Game of Thrones and like, they just, they work it a lot longer and you can see in the product. And I don't know if that's going to be allowed anymore.

Glass Half Full Bill would say HBO is so different than Paramount from the audiences they're going for that maybe this can work.

It's definitely complementary. You know, they have that CBS-style audience on Paramount Plus. They have NFL viewers. They have, you know, the, the sports people. Yeah. And HBO is not that. They have a different cohort of people. And maybe 1 1 will be 3 here. Maybe.

Strong emphasis on the M in maybe. The winner, the sports piece of Paramount, which now has the NFL, the AFC side, MLB, NHL, Champions League, March Madness, the Masters, UFC, Zuffa Boxing, which they just launched. Like, I mean, I'll throw this in with loser ESPN, who has Monday Night Football, college football and college football playoffs, college hoops, Wimbledon, US Open, NBA, NBA Finals, hockey, wrestling pay-per-views. Like, it's kind of even when you add all the Paramount stuff against ESPN, and, and suddenly ESPN doesn't look worldwide leader-ish in the same way. Right.

And here's the interesting thing. It's in these deals where Paramount can start to deploy these sports across all of these new cable networks that they own. So you're going to see UFC on TNT or maybe even HBO, and you're going to see them try to get the most out of these sports deals and keep the price of those cable networks as high as possible. For as long as possible because that's where they make their money. Yeah.

Uh, winner NBCUniversal, just because they can position themselves as we're over here. You don't like some of the politics of Paramount, all that stuff. We're, we're just trying to do good stuff and, and, and be here and we, we have stability and come this way.

I don't know if I agree on that one. Okay. I would put them in a loser. They listen, you remember they were in, they made a bid. Bid on Warner's. It wasn't a very good bid, and I think it was just to get a look at their books. But NBCUniversal doesn't have a global streaming product. They have Peacock, which is only domestic. And in fact, their leadership just said today that they're not even trying to be global. They're good with domestic. That is not a long-term strategy. They need something. They need some kind of transformative deal, I think, if they want to be considered one of the global players here. Otherwise, they're just going to get left behind. Well, they have a great movie studio though.

Great app though. Peacock app.

Oh my God.

Takes 20 minutes to find anything. I don't know. I feel like they can still position themselves as like the underdog that could against this and try to, try to align with some other people and be like, all these, everyone's spending so much money in this arms race and we're over here and we're disciplined and we have this business. Might work. Who knows?

Maybe, maybe they'll do a joint venture with Amazon to get global or something. I, I don't know. But, uh, or get bought. They have a great movie studio. Yeah. They have, you know, they have NBC, they've got a lot of sports still. So it's not like they're bad. They've been bulking up on sports. They got NBA and MLB. So it's not like they're not players. It's just the global streaming strategy piece is, is really tough.

But is it okay to just have a good business and not try to conquer the, conquer the universe.

Look at Sony. Sony doesn't have any global streamer at all. Yeah. They don't have a general, they have Crunchyroll, but Sony didn't even try to enter the streaming wars and they preferred the arms dealer strategy where they just sell their stuff to everybody else. And it seems to be working out well for them. They had K-pop Demon Hunters on Netflix, biggest movie of all time. They have their movies now. They got $7 billion. To license their movies to Netflix. Wow. Now it's a multi-year deal and it's global, but that's a pretty big vote of confidence in your studio to get Netflix to pay you $7 billion to get the first run on the new movies and to be, to be able to air some of the old movies as well. Like that's why these companies are worth what they are worth because they have a 100-year library of movies.

I would rather be them than Paramount with $89 billion in debt. Just, just, just for the record.

Well, and then what's going to happen if Netflix goes after them? They're not officially for sale, Sony. Yeah. But you know, if you want a company that's at least semi-comparable to Warner Brothers as a studio, not the streaming component, Sony is sitting right there. They're not for sale. They're owned by a Japanese company, but who knows?

Sony and NBCUniversal and that kind of level. I think it's okay. I think it's like in sports. You don't have to be the Dodgers spending $700 million on salary every year.

How dare you?

You might be okay being in the NL Central and just banging out wins and playoff appearances.

If that's good enough for you, then that's fine. I prefer the Dodgers.

Loser, uh, everyone that works at Warner Brothers. This is just brutal. It's awful. This is like an all-time—

And the gut punch. They were kind of coming around to Netflix. Yeah, they were. Netflix was saying the right things. We believe in theatrical now, and we're gonna— this is gonna be a vertical merger. We're not gonna fire everybody. We love what you do. We're gonna sell to other platforms. Then boom, within 48 hours, it's like yanked away from Netflix. And all of a sudden it's not only the Ellisons who have turned CBS into more like Fox News, which is what people at the Warner lot do not like. And then they say all of a sudden they're going to smash together two studios and fire thousands of people.

Loser movie theaters. Because Ellison basically said, we're going to do 30 movies. Over there. I don't believe that number at all.

That seems, seems aspirational. Let's just say that. Yeah.

I don't believe that.

I mean, Netflix tried to make 30 movies a year and literally you watch some of those movies, they're not even finished. Right. Like they're, they were just pumping them out to get them out because they needed that engagement machine and that, and to put 30 movies a year in theaters, you got to have a higher bar than just kind of some of the Netflix slop.

It's 2 studios though, so it's really 15 movies from each studio.

It is, which is more than each of those studios produces currently. Fair.

Winner, Zaslav. I hate making him a winner. Oh my God, he's gonna make a crazy amount of money.

It's unbelievable this worked out for him. Um, you're gonna say crazy, I'm gonna say grotesque. A guy should not make $800 million off of a financial transaction that causes thousands of jobs to be lost. Like, what are we doing? I know it's all about the shareholders and he delivered for the shareholders and that's where his compensation was set. If the shareholders do well, he does well. But, but it, it feels, it feels like insane that this guy who managed the company down, down, down, and then got lucky when someone wanted to buy it can make that kind of money.

It's almost like a plot out of Succession. Absolutely. Like, like, it's like a season 3, season 4 plot where they're like, we'll buy it, we'll ruin the company, and then blah, blah, blah. I know. My last loser is the city of Los Angeles because we're gonna have a ton of people that, that are, you know, that are gonna lose their jobs out of all this, which is terrible. You have these two lots. I'm still suspicious they're gonna keep both lots in the same kind of— who knows what's gonna happen with that.

I think they'll sell one. The question is, will they sell it?

Are they selling it to—

well, maybe Netflix has wanted the Paramount lot, so maybe Ellison will sell. This was Craig's idea on The Town, by the way. It's brilliant. They should sell the Paramount lot to Netflix, have them move in, and then everybody at Paramount Warner Brothers goes to Warner Brothers. Interesting.

You— we found out on your pod the other day Craig loves the Saudis. We found that out on Friday.

He's a big, big Saudi fan. Yeah. Uh, they gotta be winners here. They're the Saudis. If this deal goes through, we don't know what the money configuration is, but it was announced a few months ago that the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Abu Dhabi, they have funds that are in this deal. So all of a sudden they're going to own a piece of CNN and CBS News and all of these outlets that are pretty powerful in terms of potential propaganda.

Well, they already own the Lakers, so nobody, nobody seemed to care about that. Uh, no, but where Los Angeles is now, this whole decade with COVID um, the Hollywood just all hell breaking loose over and over again, all the strikes, the fires, which, um, the lack of accountability basically from everybody that runs the city and the state, which has just been disgusting to watch over and over again, the cover-ups afterwards that people are reporting about, not even Noticing, um, I've never felt more uncertain about the future of this city. The city that you have Netflix moving an entire building, entire campus in New Jersey so they can get better tax credits and build a bunch of stuff there. And all these people bolting, these studios empty, no matter. You could go to Sunset Gower, you could go to all these places that used to be packed and they're just not anymore. Nobody has a plan for any of it. The governor of the state is now running for 2028 election instead of worrying about the state is in now. And it's, it's just the worst shape we've ever been in with all this stuff. Now on top of it, all these people are going to lose their jobs.

I agree with you to a point. Okay. I am, I'm from Southern California and I'm old enough to remember like the late '80s, early '90s with the riots and the gang wars and like where you literally, I was from Orange County, you literally would not go to LA. Like it was, it was bad. And, and this is not that, like LA is a pretty nice place to live. We both live here. It's a great city to live in, but this is an existential moment for this particular industry that I think is a key driver of the economy. It's not the only driver. There's many, many different things about LA that make it what it is, but I think it's an underrated aspect of what makes LA LA is this creative class of people that come here to work in the entertainment business., and that has, that needs a boost. It needs some kind of incentive or, you know, maybe the, the city should declare both of these lots to be landmarks that cannot be developed. So we don't get the Paramount lot turned into condos so that when this industry does come back, whether it's a new version that is AI powered or creator driven, or these studios get their acts together and there is a growth mode.

That they can come back and all these places can get filled with, with activity again. I do think it will happen. It's just cyclical and we are in a very big down cycle right now. It's awful.

I mean, they built this bridge in downtown LA that they lit up every night. They spent years and years building it, and within a year everybody stole the copper from it and now it doesn't light up at night. And it was like, what was all the traffic for, for 5 years? Like, I, I don't see a lot of planning and strategy with— I remember when I moved here in 2002, um, you know, you'd meet people and you'd meet people in like your kids' pre-K and stuff. What do you do? Oh, I'm a writer. Oh, I'm an entertainment lawyer. Oh, I do props for movies. And everybody seemed to work in the industry somehow. And the more that these jobs and these companies push that stuff, either they're pushing to leave LA and go somewhere else, or their jobs are disappearing, I just think LA is going to lose a lot of what made it LA. It's just not the same city if that happens.

I agree, but I do think things are changing. Yeah. How many people do you know that work in the podcast business? True.

A lot now. A lot.

A lot of those are here. How many people do you know that work in the creator business? Right. There are full-on agencies and production studios And, you know, YouTube has a huge presence here. These are things that were not in LA 10 years ago. So it, the entire notion of the business is changing there. No, there's no pilot season anymore, although they're doing some pilots, but pilot season used to be a thing. People would move here because there were 100 pilots of TV shows that were made between January and March every year. And it was like a boomtown.

That doesn't happen every year too, by the way. It was like the NFL playoffs. You knew it was happening. You could rely— now they— now we don't even have upfronts. Wasn't it—

wasn't that your idea to have a Pluto channel just for busted pilots? Oh yeah. Yeah.

I think we could still do it. Yeah, we could still do it.

There's a million of them. And you'd see big actors who were on bad pilots before they became famous.

I just did— we just did Fargo for rewatchables for next week. And one of the tidbits was that Edie Falco was in the Fargo TV series developed the year after the movie. And if it had become a TV series, she's not Carmela Soprano. Amazing, right? And it's like there's a million stories like that, and now we barely make any TV pilots. But I think when you have, like, the New Jersey thing, I thought was alarming when Netflix feels like this is just better for us to do this than to stay here. That's when you know it's okay.

But the days of Netflix building a production studio in LA, there's just not the land for that. They got a swath of land there to essentially run roughshod on whatever they wanted to do. They did the same thing in Albuquerque.

We could have given them City of Industry. I still don't know what happens there. Just give them the whole place. You could.

Yes, you could.

But there's not the strip joints.

There's not the infrastructure here. There should be. I agree that there should be incentives in place here. And, and I feel like this state is kind of getting its act together a little bit with some of these production incentives. It's better than it used to be, but it's not competitive with these other places. They want it more. Yeah. And they're just, they're going to get it because there's been this acceptance that people in LA will just like, they will be filled anyways. And they're not filled. These studios are not filled.

It's crazy to watch what's happening. These places were packed all the time and they're just not.

Well, one guy who really wanted it, David Ellison, he has a chance now. He can build a huge production studio in LA if he wants.

Where's he going to get the money? He's already got $79 million plus 3% of debt. Yeah.

Let's see if you can do it. Billion.

Billion.

Yeah.

Well, that, the other thing is they're involved peripherally with a bunch of this sports stuff too, right? These European teams, the NBA Europe League, there's all kinds of IP that can come from that. So it's a, it's, it's a, it's a daunting job. I, I don't know if he's ready for it. He certainly doesn't have the life experience, uh, or the work experience to run anything like that. But I also don't know if anyone does. I don't know who could have done this. You're talking about like, it's out of another era. Yeah.

We, we take it for granted these days that these CEOs and people who run Hollywood are in their sixties and seventies, but like in the eighties and nineties, the people running the studios were like 32 years old. Right. You know, Jeffrey Katzenberg was reinventing the Disney Animation Group in his twenties when he was in his thirties. He would, no, he, he was then in his thirties, but at Paramount he was in his twenties and like. It used to be normal that you ran companies in your early 40s.

Now it's less so. Well, we did a good job of not talking about Trump. I'm, I'm glad for both of us. Uh, Matt Belloni, you have, uh, Monday, Wednesday, Friday every week, and producer Craig, who you keep throwing under the bus and saying he loves the Saudis, but it's fine. We share him. We share custody of Craig.

The heart wants what the heart wants, and I am happy for Craig, and he'll live very— he'll live in, in comfort for his entire life.

If we were being held off a cliff like the kids in The Good Son at the end and Craig was holding onto us, who does he let go? We, we are gonna have to give him true sound and find out. Me, of course. Oh, I don't know. I don't know.

He loves you.

Are you kidding? You take him everywhere. You take him to these parties. I do.

I do take him to parties.

You put in more time 'cause you live on the same side of LA with him.

That's, that's true. But you made him a star. You gave him a fantasy football show. So you made, he made Craig a star. All right. He is.

Tony, good to see you. Thanks for, thanks for all the time. Yes.

Thank you.

All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Jacoby. Thanks to Bellini. Thanks to Gahal and Eduardo as well. I'm gonna be back on this feed on Thursday. Don't forget about Rewatchables, uh, Sicario. That's already up. Fargo coming next week. It's CR month. Buckle up. Hold onto your seats. Good times. I'll see you on Thursday. 21+ in President Select states for Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino, or 18+ in President DC, Kentucky, or Wyoming. Opt-in required. Rewards are non-withdrawable. Restrictions apply, including bonus and token expiration, leg requirements, and max wager amount. See terms at sportsbook.com. Fandl.com. Game problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET. Call 888-797-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat in Connecticut or mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope is here. Visit gamblinghelplineMA.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24/7 support in Massachusetts, or call 877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York.

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