Transcript of Reaction: Dan Le Batard's New York Knicks Are NBA CHAMPIONS | Local Hour New

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Zazz, I have a bit of an issue here. Like, before our vehicle gets moving and starts careening without brakes and stuff, I tend to sort of, like, check all of the tires, and we've got two that are overinflated that I need to get some of the air out on because we've got way too much sports to talk about today. So, Jeremy, go ahead and give me everything you've got on the Marlins, and then shut up after that about the Marlins. So, just give me everything you've got, and then leave room for Tony so he can give me everything he's got on the UFC fight fight last night, and I can get that out of my life and then start the show where it needs to start.

Yeah, do it and then shut up.

Marlins are the hottest team in June. They're 10-2. They're the only team in baseball to hand losses to Jacob Mizerowski, Shohei Ohtani, and Paul Skeens. Otto Lopez, All-Star shortstop, leading the league in hitting, 14 for 25. That's a .560 batting average in late and close situations. Max Meyer, 7-0. He hasn't lost a game thus far this season. He becomes the third pitcher in franchise history to win the first 7 decisions of a season. It's the longest start to a season without a loss by a Marlins pitcher. He is an All-Star. So is Otto Lopez. So is Xavier Edwards. And Joe Mack emerging as one of the great young catchers in the game. He has an OPS over .900 in the month of June. He also is daring runners to steal. He keeps saying, please run, please run, please run, publicly. He's amazing. And the Marlins have the 3rd most wins against teams .500 or better, just trailing the Braves or the Brewers.

How's that breakfast?

It's good.

He didn't know I was going to him and he was eating breakfast. I was literally chewing as he said it and I went, okay, let me take a breath. He's been wanting to talk Marlins for a month and I haven't let him.

There's only 2 pitchers in baseball who have allowed 10 or fewer earned runs in 40+ innings this season. It's Shohei Ohtani and Tyler Phillips.

Max Meyer pitched. He outpitched Skeens yesterday. That's right. And as he said, they've beaten Ohtani and Skeens this season.

And Mizorowski, don't forget.

And Mizorowski, who had 15 strikeouts over the weekend. Go ahead, Tony, give us everything you've got on, on the—

And then shut up.

American excessive—

Definitely.

—freedom of UFC 250.

Yeah, Dan, it was an incredible fight night. 7 fights all ended in knockout. Just a complete success in the octagon. We saw Justin Gaethje show the warrior spirit, beating Ilia Topuria, who was undefeated, who had his victory party the night before, as he usually does. Got a tattoo crossing—

Victory party the night before?

He does that every night. Every night before the fight, he's like, we're going to have the victory party tonight because I know I'm going to win tomorrow. And it's worked 17 times. The problem is on the 18th time he ran into Justin Gaethje, who again has the warrior spirit.

Chris, did we have any mosquito problems?

No mosquitoes, no 40-mile-an-hour winds, no thunderstorms. Thunderstorms from what we saw. So everything was—

That woke Weather Channel messing everything up.

Didn't mess anything up because we got the fights in. The fights were great. Cyril Gane showed why he's one of the best heavyweights in the world right now, dismantling Alex Pereira in a way that nobody really does. I'm sure we're going to get somebody to talk about all the fights with, you know, later on, on in the show.

No, we're not going to be talking about the fights anymore, so you better get rid of it.

You got 30 seconds left.

I think we're going to talk about the fights a little bit more.

No, no, no, I'm— no, I think we are. Tony, let's not forget who's in charge here, okay? Let's not get— no, yeah. I think we are. Tony, don't make me kick you out for the rest of the show to make sure you don't say anything else.

That would be tough for you.

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Football is back, Jack. W-F-A-T. Jaylen Brunson isn't the answer. It's an awful idea. F-for-what? To go all in in hopes of signing Jalen Brunson. And by the way, he's not a 1. I'm not even sure he's a real 2.

And I worry that they're gonna, they're gonna look at Jalen Brunson and they're like, wait, we spent $27 million a year on this?

I think the Thunder are gonna destroy them.

The saddest sweepstakes ever.

The Jalen Brunson sweepstakes. Is Jalen Brunson one of the 10 best point guards in basketball? Maybe he's 10.

I don't think he's top 10. I mean, he might not be top 14. I don't think this is a move that puts them into playoff contention. It's got to be something in addition to Jalen Brunson. It is not going to be the type of player that elevates them into contender status. But I mean, do we think Brunson is a guy that is going to bring them to a second-round playoff series? He's not. I think the Thunder are going to destroy them. I mean, Kevin Durant is playing basketball in New York City and you're just like talking about, can we get Brunson? I think the Thunder are going to destroy them. The Knicks are acting like he's KD. I'm going to repeat, Jalen Brunson. Jalen Brunson. So the Knicks have just told one of the best basketball stories ever told because you do not have all-time great players sneak up on you. That's not a thing. And you don't have teams lose 3 times during the playoffs and dominate everybody that no one thought was gonna dominate anybody in that sport. And I just want to, before we get into all of the ways that people are going to crush the young Spurs for not knowing how to win close games late.

Why would they? They haven't been in any. Like, they played one or two against the Thunder, but all season they haven't had late and close situations to learn from, and they just ran into the guy better late and close than anybody is. And so I want to ask a couple of questions to the group here. First of all, if Dallas keeps its team together, do we ever find out how good Jalen Brunson is?

I think, I think the answer is closer to yes than no because We started to learn about Brunson when Dončić got hurt and he wasn't playing in that playoff series and Brunson was scoring 30 regularly. Like, he, he was carrying them. So I think we would have— I think we would have learned.

I don't think so. And I also don't think that if the Knicks don't build everything the way they built it, every time getting questions with every move they made, that he doesn't become something more like— and this is not a slight exactly— Allen Iverson, who didn't have enough to get there as a small guy. Look, Look, 45 points in a game, closeout game, when your team scores 94 is lunacy. That's Michael Jordan stuff. Like, a player that size, only Isaiah Thomas is the comp. I guess Steph Curry, but he's sort of an outlier because it's just all shots from beyond. But this is Iverson winning the championship because they put the right pieces around him when— This started with Phil Jackson falling asleep on the subway because they thought Phil Jackson was going to be the architect and that group that was brought in was questioned. You got to be happy for James Dolan today. I mean, I don't know. The architects of that team were questioned at every turn for every move. Jalen Brunson was merely the first of the questioned moves. And you rarely get the kind of story that New York now has forever, which is, yeah, everyone did doubt that team and no one thought that it would win the championship, never mind dominate everybody.

And of course, they got the Spurs at the only time that you're going to get them. Like, you— this is the time that you had to get a young team, and they got them at precisely the right time, which is why the Spurs will be favored next year in a way that the Knicks will not be favored next year.

I'm not 100% sure about that. I'm not.

Well, it's already— it's already so. The betting favorite is not the Knicks next year.

Oh no, no, no, I understand that. Like, it's the Thunder, the Spurs, the Celtics, and then the Knicks. No, I understand that part. But the whole, like, you better get the Spurs right now Look, this is 8 consecutive years of a brand new champion, of a unique champion in the NBA. And during those 8 years, only one of the teams that have even appeared in those Finals even returned to af-Finals. And that was the 2022 Celtics, which eventually made it back in 2024. So recent history would tell us the Spurs are not getting back anytime soon.

No, I disagree because all of those teams you mentioned, their core wasn't all under 23 years old. One of the things that was surprising surprising to me about that series, and I don't think you guys will have a lot of comps for this. Can you play the sound of Wemby, uh, talking about how he thought, uh, that they basically were the better team all series? Because you've got a rare thing here, Zazz, where it felt like the team that was up 10 the entire series lost in 5 games. Like, that's not something that you see very often. Let's hear Wemby still confused by it afterwards. Every team you faced so far, you guys always found a way to get over the top eventually. What, what did you learn about how hard it is to win the Finals against this Knicks team where they kept coming up with answers? Brunson just could always score no matter what in the end.

I learned— one of many things I learned is the margin of error is very, very thin. Our domination stints are absolute. We absolutely dominated for most of the series, but our errors, our mistakes are punished so hard that we can't have ups and downs like this so much, you know. The ups are okay, the downs, it's—

Yeah.

Is the reason we lost.

I don't agree.

I, I think he sounds ridiculous. I do. You know, you could say you dominated the whole series because for most of the series you were ahead, you got out to the huge leads. If you're ahead big every game and the other team winds up coming back and winning the game, the way that you dominated to get that huge lead that then in theory means the other team dominated you in order to get back and ahead in that same game. And then you look at the actual numbers, the Spurs for the series, first quarter Spurs were a +57. The Knicks were every other quarter in the entire series.

Well, I'll tell you what—

The Spurs did not dominate the series.

I'll tell you what, uh, it felt like to me, do you guys watch any of those nature specials where a baby animal is born, doesn't have its legs, and then you see the predator just sort of hunting it down. By Game 5, we all knew, including the Spurs, they were going to lose that lead. Like, because they did not have someone who has been doing in the playoffs what Brunson has been doing for 3 seasons now and always losing at the end. Brunson's seasons always end in failure, even though he's giving it everything he's got. But I want to look at this from a little bit of a historical, perspective and ask you guys, where do you put Brunson now as an all-timer? Because we thought the Jokic thing would be recreatable as a champion. This guy never gets to win the championship. This player with this story is not allowed to be the number one player on a team and get past Wemby. It's just not something that happens in the history of the sport. If you're that size, you do not win at the end.

We've been talking a ton going into this series and throughout the series, Wemba He's the guy, he's the face of the NBA. Why isn't Jalen Brunson the face of the NBA?

Well, he snuck up on everybody, man. He's still sneaking up on them. This is not somebody who's regarded as an all-timer except for because of that last game.

But here we are, like, we're here now. Why isn't Jalen Brunson? He, he wins everywhere. 2 NCAA championships, NBA championship, did it in New York as a huge underdog, is a tremendous character. His father is assistant coach who trained him, and he winds up slaying the big beast in Wemba Nyama in this series. What? And New York, I mean, it's, it's the biggest market in our country. Why isn't Jalen Bronson the face of the NBA?

It's a good question you're asking that we will answer over the entirety of the show. I see that they are now on Good Morning America, the 5 Knicks starters. OG Anunoby saying nothing, of course, because that's his thing. He doesn't. He is famously someone who doesn't date very much because he says someone's going to have to be really comfortable with a lot of silence. Like, a lot of silence all of the time. And when you talk about what it is that Brunson just did, he took a discount to stay in New York. He's about to make all of that money well back with endorsements because he plays in that city. He is not going to be suffering at all from taking that discount, but because his father trained him the way he did, which was really regimented. It was brutal. It was hard, tough love. And here is how Brunson talks about gratitude afterward when he's asked about his father. And you got to share— you're getting to share this with your father. Just how special— how special to you is that? We can see it. That's it then. You can see it.

I love it. I love it so much. When I'm watching it, it struck me as so organic and so real. And then, you know, you got like Jason Tatum, "Oh my God, we did it! Oh my God!" Like, this guy was real. Jalen Brunson. That was like— I loved watching that, man. I know I'm not supposed to because I'm a Heat fan, but whatever, you know.

You're also not supposed to try and impersonate Jason Tatum in a way that makes Roy drop his head in shame.

Oh my God!

Double down.

Be careful.

Just be careful.

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Don Lebatard.

I'm just here to say one thing. The Knicks are fucking back. Stugatz. Tyrese Haliburton, 6 points. Frog. Fraud. Everybody was like, yo, he's better than Jalen Brunson. He's better than— the Knicks should have drafted him.

Fraud.

This is the Dan Levatar Show with the Stugatz. The Spurs led for 72% of the series, and the Knicks are now responsible for the first, second, and fifth biggest comeback in NBA Finals history. That's why Wemby sounds confused. That's why Zazz disagrees with him. But let's get to the question he's asking, because has an immortal ever snuck up on us this Usually in basketball we have tons and tons of warning. It's not always—

I mean, Jokic, right?

It's not always doubt. Yeah, but Jokic, we saw everything that he was doing. And then when he won the championship, it's not like we were surprised by it. He was the MVP of the league. Brunson doesn't finish MVP of the league. Brunson's not ever in the conversation. Any of them.

Should be.

Who's the face of the league? Who's the best player in the league?

He's also not high-flying, right? You give it to Anthony Edwards, who does these high-flying acrobatic dunks. He's got the swag. He's got this. He's got that. Wemby, 7-foot-5. 5. Like, it's easy to put those guys in those boxes. Brunson has hairy shoulders. He plays kind of awkward.

I've noticed that.

He's got very hairy shoulders, and it's like, that's not— that can't be the face of the league. Can't be Gillette, hey, I'm— I use it to shave my shoulders. That's crazy.

And Jokic also looks different in terms of that lumbering body, but he's a big man and he's a foreigner, and so there's all this mythical stuff we can draw around him. But when you look at some of the names and the athleticism of the last several Finals MVPs— Shea himself was an emerging young star. Brunson's a veteran. You had Jaylen Brown and the story they built over years in Boston. Jokic, Curry, Antetokounmpo, LeBron, Kawhi. The more we go back, the more you see the peak athleticism. And Brunson as a veteran now, as that player, it does sneak up on you.

I want to go back to the hair on the shoulders. I thought I was the only person who noticed that a few games ago.

Oh no, no. If you've been watching Jaylen Brunson, you know he's got hairy shoulders.

I noticed it one day. I'm like, look at that. I've never seen that.

He'll shave them this offseason. He said it to somebody on the court. I don't remember what game it was.

He said, I have to shave my shoulders. Yeah.

I have to find that sound.

No, the problem is that he originally shaved his shoulders and now he's gonna forever have to shave his shoulders. Very interesting.

Is that real or is that a myth?

Like the chiropractor, once you start you have to keep going? It is a thing. If you start shaving, you're going to have to keep shaving 'cause it's gonna come back stronger. You're never gonna win that battle with your hair unless you're bald. His shoulders won't go bald. Put it on the poll, Juju, @LevittardShow. Does Jalen Brunson deserve to be under-regarded because he has hair on his shoulders?

I think another good example of that snuck-up all-star superstar face of the league is Kawhi Leonard, right? Like, Kawhi got traded. Kawhi was on— oh, wait a second, he's on the Spurs team, but he's kind of like a young guy. LeBron turns over and says, oh, baby.

Second year in the league, right, that he won the MVP, uh, Finals MVP?

I mean, yeah, but nobody saw that.

Kawhi is a good one in terms of a confusing team like the Raptors, but it ain't this. And all the other guys that Jeremy mentioned except Curry, they're all big, they're all 6'5", 6'6". None of them are ever the smallest guy on the court. I do think one of the things that's going to happen here, because a lot of people are really mad to see New York happy, and especially the New York celebrity elite happy, one of the things that's going to happen is that a lot of the concentration is going to be on the failures of the Spurs instead of the, uh, successes of the Knicks. And I believe actually, uh, Zazz, that that's fair because there haven't been a whole lot of examples that you've ever had, not just in basketball, anywhere in —where you're watching a team that you know is good enough, talented enough to win a championship, and you're like, "Oh, they don't actually know how to win at the end." They don't know how to do it. They don't know what's required of them in late-game situations so that a series that they legitimately could have swept, they end up losing because at the end of the games, the last 3 minutes— It started with all of us knowing that Brunson was the best player in the fourth quarter, but by the end of that series, The Spurs knew it because the most impressive thing about what Brunson just did in that closeout game, the most impressive thing is that you had all the time to prepare.

You know exactly what they're gonna do and what he's gonna do, and you could not stop it at the end when he went for your throat. There, there was no surprise in he's gonna be the one who's trying to get to 30 and 40 points, and he kills you with 45 in the last game, has 45 of your 94 points. Let me give you some numbers here.

In the fourth quarter, 4th quarter in the final 2 games of the series, Jalen Brunson had 24 points. He was 7 of 12 from the floor. He was 9 of 10 from the free throw line and a +32. Victor Wembenyama in the final 2 games in the 4th quarter, 8 points, 3 of 14 from the floor, 2 of 6 from the free throw line and a -25. Like the Spurs did not dominate just because you get out to a huge 1st quarter lead every game. And the Knicks are chipping away and chipping away, so you're still ahead by a lot. That doesn't mean you dominated the series. They didn't. The Knicks dominated the series. The Spurs had a good quarter.

Per OptaStats, there have been 48 total 5-game spans by a team in NBA history where they led by 8 or more at the end of the first quarter in all 5. That includes this NBA Finals. In 47 of the 48, the team had a winning record over those 5 games. Everyone except for the Spurs in the Finals.

And it wasn't only the players, by the way. Away, you know, and Wemba Nyama maybe was tired, maybe the moment was too big, I don't know. But it wasn't only the players. I was showing Tony, uh, earlier before we started, Mitch Johnson had a really bad series. A really young coach. And look, it's weird how we'll do this with players, right? Wemba Nyama, he's only in his third year in the league, he's gonna learn, you know, he's, he's gonna learn, he's gonna get better. We don't do that with coaches, you know, like why, why wouldn't a coach get, get better and better from when he's younger and get some experience? And that's probably going to be the case with Mitch Johnson. But Mitch Johnson was bad. Like, I'm showing Tony the clip of when Mitchell Robinson— they're up by 3, Hart misses a free throw, there's 25 seconds left in the game, and Mitchell Robinson grabs the offensive rebound on the free throw line, and it led to them fouling Anunoby, and he put the game away, and they went up by 4. But when he grabs that rebound, Mitch Johnson is signaling to his team, foul, foul, foul.

There's an 11-second differential shot clock and game clock. You don't foul there. And Mitch Johnson is signaling foul, foul, foul, and then you go back of course to the game before that, not guarding the inbounds pass, like he had a really bad series, the coach.

And also in the last game, you draw up a couple of shots for De'Aaron Fox when you know he's ice cold, he's 3-for-15.

And you, and you, and you, and you double down on Fox, he's our guy, he's gonna have the ball at the end of the next game just like he did this game. Alright, and he went 3-for-14.

Guys though, what happened here is that team doesn't know how to win at the end because of the way basketball's distorted everything. When are the close games that they have played. Like, the game they won in overtime against OKC, they won because Wemby took a bad shot and made it with 27 seconds from a million miles away. And so they delude themselves into thinking that they have something at the end of games when what did they have at the end of games? 18-foot jumpers. Who can get us an 18-foot jumper? We're not going to get fouls, we're not going to get anything. We're choking here. Everybody in the world— everybody in the world watching who's watching this knows that we're flailing here. And they've got someone with a knife in their hands. Like, they've got the best fourth-quarter player in the league for the last 3 years running, playoffs and regular season. They've got a killer. They've got someone that when Mitch Johnson looks and says, "Bail me out," he's got to look at De'Aaron Fox. That's where he's got to look, 'cause he doesn't have anything else that has any experience in late and tight games.

I don't know. Dylan Harper looked pretty experienced. Because every time that guy got the ball—

He was the only guy who gave him anything last game.

It was like, ooh, this guy looks like a 10-year vet the way he's commanding the offense.

And that's why, on top of how horrible De'Aaron Fox was, Game 4 and Game 5, game on the line, he's your veteran, he's supposed to be the guy you can count on. It's why a $200+ million contract is kicking in next season. But because of De'Aaron Fox's massive failures this series, series and Dylan Harper's very clear emergence, like, they have to trade De'Aaron Fox this offseason.

That's another thing that was obvious over the last 3 games, I would say, that they had to be moving the ball through Harper a lot more than they were. Like, that was a player who felt like he belonged in that moment and was just about the only one. It wasn't Wemby because he was still confused afterwards saying, this is a huge learning lesson, but I don't know what the hell I Is that sound that you're making with your hand, uh, with your hand puppet telling me that video doesn't have the— We're gonna do a puppet. We're rolling. —asked for that you said that we had and was ready to be thrown to? Is that what that is saying with your hand? Yes, the video is in my preview screen and it looked like it was ready to go and it's not playing.

I have a stat to help us here.

Compared to anything before, this is the biggest The biggest lesson of my life, the biggest learning moment. I can't tell exactly what the lesson is, but we're learning from that for sure. I'm learning more than any other time in my life before.

Can you currently be learning if you don't know the lesson?

Dan, can I ask you a question? Can you do all the talking that Wembenyama did throughout the series? All the flagrant fouls? Boy, was he dirty, and he got away with a flagrant foul that should have had him suspended if there were going to be a Game 6. Can you, can you do all the Wembenyama stuff, not shake hands after the game, and shoot 34% from the floor in the fourth quarter of the NBA Finals? Woof.

Can you guys think off of the top of your head of another example, not just the hot takey, hey, they choked, they choked, they choked, where you were obviously watching a team that didn't know how to win at the end? Like, those, those numbers we just gave you, we can blame any number of people and for everything that happened there, but the numbers that we just gave you, where the Spurs are better the entirety of the game, but clearly the last 3 minutes the other team is better, and the Spurs know that they're going to get hunted down from behind. They just know it, because we know it, they know it, and everyone knows it, that that game is late. You've still got the double-digit lead, and you see that it's just going down, down, ever so slightly down, and the more that it goes down, the more the noose tightens around all of those young players who are saying, Wait a minute, Wait a minute, are we going to end up again in the situation where Anunoby's going to fly in from out of nowhere and beat us when we're going to sit there stunned because we can't believe that we don't know how to do this at the end?

It's just a super rare thing, right? I think— I want to say it's youth. Like, I don't want to say it's mental frailty. I don't think it's that the moment got too big for them. I think that the games get harder in the playoffs and the games get harder at the end of the playoffs. And the only way you learn You know how you learn that? Is by losing during it. That's how everybody in basketball learns it. It's how Brunson had to learn it. And throughout the history of basketball, the way it is that Wemby goes into the offseason and develops more of a post-up game is this hurts so much and he's so embarrassed that he realizes he has to get better. When you're making the shot from 30 feet against OKC, you don't realize that you have to get better at late-game situations there. Yeah. Up and 29 seconds out take a terrible 3?

Well, you have your answer, Dan. You answered your own question. It's, it's identical mirror image to LeBron, uh, against JJ Barea. Like, you thought you had all this stuff in your bag, and then you realize the most important thing, the most fundamental thing they teach you as a big guy playing when you're growing up, is back-to-the-basket moves. How do you get a go-to move when somebody smaller is guarding you? Barbecue chicken in the post, go get a bucket. And he wasn't able to do that, and he's taller than everybody on the court.

And De'Aaron Fox, their vet guard, couldn't set him up, right? So you have this big man, this freak of nature, where he's not really doing a good job of creating his own shot late, but that's what they're relying on with Wemby instead of putting him in position to succeed. And when LeBron had the ball in his hands at the end of those games, he clearly didn't know how to play back to the basket and, and not only set up others but get his own shot. And Dan, to your point on blowing teams out and not knowing how to win late, 8 of the 10 losses for the Spurs vs Spurs were by 10 points or fewer. But 9 of their 13 wins in this postseason were by double digits.

The last—

Several of those 20 or more.

The last time I could remember a team that didn't know what to do late in huge games that was not comfortable in that spot, because they hadn't played in very many of those spots, it was in the movie Miracle in 1980 in the US-Soviet hockey situation. Late in the game, the US was ahead ahead, the Soviets, they were never trailing late, and the Soviet coach, he didn't know what to do. He didn't pull Mishkin for the extra skater. The US was up by a goal, the clock's ticking down, it's ticking down, and he, he didn't, he didn't know to pull Mishkin, he didn't know what to do.

Don Lebatard.

Jon, can you rate my Al Pacino from that billiard scene in Carlito's Way if I do it for you? I think it's pretty good. Yeah, okay.

Stugatz.

You think you're big time? Or you're gonna die! Big time! That is, on my infamous scale of 1 to 10, that's a 7.6. Solid.

Good job, Dad.

Good job, Dad. Good job.

That's a Sui nominee right there.

This is the Dan Levatar Show with his two dads.

The reason that I believe that the Knicks fan has an unusual story to celebrate today is because if you look at, let's just say, the Miami Heat's championships, plural, all 3 of them, you can celebrate that Dwyane Wade was homegrown. Homegrown, but those championships were won because you went out and got somebody regarded as an immortal in LeBron James and Shaquille O'Neal. The Knicks got Karl-Anthony Towns. They're not homegrown either. It's a bunch of trades. It's, it's free agency and trades. It's Brunson, it's Anunoby traded for, it's Karl-Anthony Towns traded for, it's Bridges traded for.

Is there a single player on the team, literally, is there a single player on the team Anybody drafted? Um—

There might not be.

Deuce McBride got drafted. It's not homegrown, but it is a bunch of people that were doubted as soon as you acquired them. Shaq and LeBron were not doubted when the Miami Heat acquired them. They have had since the beginning a bunch of doubt about the moves that they're making. The first championship that the Heat won in 2006 was a bunch of weird stray parts where Antoine Walker never really fit. And you saw what happened the year after where it all just came apart because they weren't actually a team. A bunch of mercenaries playing together, and Dwyane Wade got a million foul calls in that series.

Oh, what a series.

But the Knicks fan has in, in their possession a team that's just really easy to love because there hasn't quite been a basketball story like this where no one thought you were going to win the championship this year, and every single one of the moves you've made has had its doubt. You heard us play all the sound on Brunson. Karl-Anthony Towns was viewed as a soft It's amazing to think that Wiggins and Towns have now won a title and Jimmy Butler hasn't. That those guys— talk about—

Never will.

I bet you Wiggins and Towns were older than all those Spurs when Butler dusted them in that practice. I bet you Wiggins and Towns were older and viewed as soft, even though they weren't as young as those Spurs were, coach and all. Because Amin's been saying all week and he's been texting me that Monday, that today should be capitulation day. That he was right. That Amin was right. That the Spurs weren't experienced enough to win the title. The problem with that is he told us the Spurs were going to lose to OKC, and once you say that, I don't think you get to be right forever. I think the Thunder are going to destroy them.

He was talking about next year, that's what it was, Dan.

But should we be capitulating?

Because he says that we should.

To me.

We should— he says we should be capitulating to him.

Keep saying that, using big words. I don't know what they mean.

Why should we be capitulating? You know exactly why. Why? Because— exactly. Well, why? Because you hate— you hate Wemby?

No, not because I hate Wemby. Because I told you he's inherently evil. And series after series after series after series, Tony's closer to right than wrong. He's shown he is evil. He does things that are non-basketball plays. The play against Brunson was despicable.

Dan, how was that not called flagrant foul. They didn't even call it. How is that not a flagrant foul? He would have been suspended for the next game. Do you think— would they retroactively given it to him? Because you remember, when LaMelo Ball did the thing to Bam, there was no call in game, and they retroactively gave LaMelo the flagrant foul. Would they have retroactively given Wemba Nyama the very obvious flagrant foul and suspension in Game 6?

Integrity of the league. They would have had to.

There's no way. There's no way they would have.

There's no way that they can sit there and be like, no, you know what, it was a clean in play. It wasn't. It absolutely wasn't.

They would not have done it. How could you possibly do it?

Grow a pair, Adam Silver.

What happens to Wembley's reputation over those last 5 games when you get that kind of shrinking to the size of a postage stamp? Does anyone use postage stamps anymore?

How else do you send mail?

Well, I just think people are emailing now and they don't send mail anymore. I don't think that people send mail anymore. I think, uh, I think, uh, I think the postman are out there doing—

There's still always a line at that damn post office.

Nobody's ever mailed anything in entire lives.

Everybody's confused. What do I do? Where's the boxes? The box over here, buddy. Let's go.

There will be no mails if the Democrats have their way.

And then I get in line and somebody who's filling something out like 20 feet behind me says they were in line but walked— it's like, no, no, no, if you're filling something out over there, you're not in line, buddy. Or maybe only males.

Get to the back.

A little confused.

I actually have to send a letter today, so I'll find out for you. Put it on the poll at Le Batard Show. Do you have stamps in your house? Yes or no?

I got a roll of stamps at the house. Don't do anything with them, but they're there. Maybe in 40 years they'll be worth something. The hell would I have those for?

I wanna know, the Postal Service is famously a flawed business model, okay? Because they keep raising the price of stamps because fewer and fewer people are using stamps. And so eventually stamps are gonna cost $1 million because it's just gonna be Elon Musk wants to mail stuff and that's how he's going to do it. But I don't believe people under 30, put it on the poll @LevittardShow, do people under 30 have stamps in their house? Yes or no?

I mean, look, you say that, I mean, we can make fun of the young people here, but how many of us in this room know how much money needs to be on, you know, an envelope to send out postage?

I was gonna ask, sometimes you have to put a couple stamps on it, right?

But like, how much do the stamps need to be worth?

I literally did not know that was a thing.

Okay, so let me do this, because the last time—

You just put a stamp.

The last time I used a stamp—

No, it's a certain amount of money.

I think it was 38 cents the last time I used a stamp.

I have no idea.

What is it now, Roy? It might have been 36 cents, I might have that wrong.

Jeremy, like, you don't notice on envelopes sometimes there are multiple stamps? Not for decoration.

I mean, clearly, but I don't get enough envelopes to think about this.

You weren't— but you weren't aware that stamps had a— that it costs—

I mean, I get you have to buy stamps.

It's a postage value on a stamp.

And if something's a little heavier, you have to put— if it's heavier, you have to put more stamps on it. If it's— It ain't heavy, it's my mail. A first-class forever stamp is 78 cents right now.

What?!

Stamp for immediate letters right now is 74 cents. What?! That's high. Feels high. So a regular— wait a minute, you're telling me double what you said, Dan? I know, because I haven't used a stamp. It's probably been 10 years since I've used the stamp. You tell me, are you telling me that the price of stamps— what, what about just a regular stamp that's not first class, that's not anything? Because that's, that sounds very expensive. I don't believe that the stamp has gone up. Everything has doubled. Yeah, no, yes, that's true, but I don't think the stamp has doubled in the last, uh, in the last 10 years. I, I believe— yes, no, there's a Big Mac has doubled. There has, there has indeed been inflation on stamps. I just I just don't believe it's been doubling the last—

I think Roy might be right.

You're telling me one letter of any kind that I need to mail is gonna cost me 78 cents to mail anything? That's—

Send an email for free at the price of my soul getting sucked up by Google.

This is a rare combination in our chat where half the people are judging us for not knowing this and half the people are learning how expensive it's like everyone is very polarized on this topic.

Postcards though, 61 cents. 1 cents. Those are cheap. Jeremy's so confused, he has no idea.

I gotta be honest, I'm stunned that it's doubled in 10 years because I didn't think it had been 10 years since I mailed a stamp. And I was legitimately scared when I said 38 cents, I thought they still might be 36, so it might— so I went immediately down to 36 because I got scared. I'm like, no, I don't want to get—

That'd be 2 cents cheaper.

Right, right. But no, it's, it's doubled in cost. And, and yes, Chris, I do believe, uh, that there are still people people that are actively using the Postal Service. It seems to be not a thriving industry, but one that employs a great many people who still walk around the neighborhood.

Regular envelopes, 78 cents worth of stamps have to be on it. But how about those, like, the bigger, like, like, like, like a wedding invitation, the bigger envelopes? $1.27 of postage stamps.

If it's heavier, it costs a little more. That is correct. And we are learning this as a show. We are showing our ignorance, I do believe, In Learning This is a Show, and I believe that what you just saw from the Spurs was ignorance in late-game situations.

You think Wemba Nyama knows about those stamps?

I don't know what the rules are with the French economy and stamps and the French Postal Service.

But they send mail all willy-nilly, those French.

Do they even have mail over there? Do they? I don't know. The French Postal Service?

Like, please.

Yes. What do you mean?

Please.

What kind of commentary is that? The French Postal Service.

Oh, the French Postal Service. You think they got a guy with a mailbag walking around putting mail in people's mailbox? They probably don't even have mailboxes.

Just grumpy.

Just grumpy. That's just the French. He doesn't have to be— he or she doesn't have to be holding a mail, a piece, an envelope in order to be grumpy.

I love mail workers here, but I will I will say some of them are grumpy, some are not.

I'll tell you, the table's really turned on Wembenyama. He was the darling and now it's, it's like we're fighting with the French.

He did take a hit in this series. When you go from dethroning the defending champions, and if you had placed me in the parade of gasbags, you would have heard me say that the championship was being decided in the West when the Spurs and OKC were playing, because I think that's what everybody thought. Everybody except New York. And so, uh, nobody believed in us. We did it against all odds. Ends up becoming a real thing for New York and a team for all time and a player for all time. Because I do think now we have to elevate Brunson. We are obligated to elevate Brunson. I don't believe he's ever in any of the conversations, nor will he ever be in any of the conversations of he's the best player in the league. League. Like, that's not something that people will do.

How— I mean, I think he should be in that conversation.

I don't think he will be, even after this. I think that the things that you guys were mentioning, which is we needed to be a high flyer, we needed to be somebody that's not too big, because too big, we're not going to love Goliath. Mortal enough to seem like a human being, but also someone who flies through the air in a way that Brunson does not, somehow getting all of his shots because I actually wonder now, I'm dead serious about this without looking at any of the numbers. Allen Iverson was a cultural icon. He wasn't a champion. And I can't say that he's better than Brunson. Can you?

He's not better than Brunson.

He's not.

But I mean, I think, I think before this series, anybody listening to this would have regarded Allen Iverson as better than Brunson because he's the guy who got the 35 shots and shot inefficiently. Inefficiently. Like, Brunson does not shoot inefficiently. The, the miracle of this series is that the Knicks won the first 2 games with Brunson playing pretty poorly for him. Like, that last game is more on brand. He does that a lot. That the last game he had, when everybody in the world needs— knows you need to make sure he can't and doesn't do that. When the Knicks are floundering around in that first quarter, a dreadful first quarter of that game, when they're floundering around, did it look to you like Brunson was going to have 45 in that game?

They had 15 like midway through the second quarter.

Yeah, it almost— they won the championship. It was crazy because at halftime we were like, okay, like a regular game from Brunson. They really got to step up here. And then all of a sudden you turn around, he's got 40, and you're like, how did that happen?

There is actually something that doesn't get talked about at all in basketball. There is an art to protecting a 25-point lead. It's a skill. It is a skill. I know that the holding— The most important part. 25-point leads, that there, there is a skill involved with that. And there's also a skill involved in Brunson preserving himself so that he has something in the tank when everyone's I'm flabbergasted because that— those fourth-quarter numbers are just insane. Like, that doesn't— it doesn't compute that a player that size would be going down right now, just numerically, empirically. If I said to you, hey, is Brunson the second-best clutch player ever after Jordan? It's not an asinine thing to say, just statistically, given that he scores the way that he does late in games always. It's not some of the time, it's always. You know you gotta stop him. You know everyone's tired. You know he's gonna put up 20 in the fourth quarter.

It's like when you said like, how do you know that Jalen Brunson doesn't have it? And it's like when he proves to me in the fourth quarter that he's not who he thinks he is. And every single game he continues to be who he is, which is Captain Fourth Quarter.

And he continues to sport those hairy shoulders. Oh my God, we did it! Oh my God!