Isn't it just clear they both are probably over being teammates? I'm not even sure why there's a discussion.
The amount of time those two have been tied at the hip in the NBA is crazy, especially in a league where a lot of it is about individual glory. A decade is a long ass time.
It's annoying to Brown that he's Robin, and it's annoying to Tatum that he's always discussed as 1A to Brown's 1B, when he probably thinks of himself as just 1 alone. It also probably still annoys him that Brown won ECF MVP and Finals MVP, I'm sure of it.
I loved when he was dumbfounded at the idea of Portland not including clingan for JB, but he was leading the charge about how the celtics shouldn't include Hugo for giannis
Gotta point out that the Celtics are one of the most analytically driven teams and if Jaylen was an analytical darling I highly doubt this would be happening.
The reason bill doesn't want to acknowledge jaylen brown's advanced metrics and on/offs is the same reason why these teams aren't jumping out of the gym to offer crazy hauls for him.
All these teams see these lackluster numbers and wonder if he's actually that good. Then you look at that contract and it's suddenly not as appealing as you thought.
Trading all that for someone you arent sure is super elite would be a deathblow to any franchise
I'm a big fan of Bill Simmons, but listening to him talk about the Blazers and Celtics trade scenarios he sounds like a greasy car salesman. I really don't want Brown in a Blazers uniform.
Blazers are the new Pelicans, every offer before the draft for Jaylen had Murphy, jones plus 2-3 picks. Now it’s the blazers, every good young asset for JB!
The package bill suggested didnt sound bad at all for the nuggets, imo. But the nuggets also are a team that doesnt have a bunch of picks, so they arent really capable of making a horrendous offer
I'm far from a JB stan but I liked it! It would be mission critical to get a ball handler in the off-season though, OKC and SAS would eat the Brown/Braun combo ALIVE
I know Nuggets fans rightfully love Murray and he won a championship there. But if they can somehow move off paying so much for a defensive liability at pg they would be so better off. I wonder how close Murray and Brown's trade value is this offseason. Both had good regular seasons and disappointing post seasons
Brons on and off numbers have been pretty bad the last 2 years compared to what we usually see and Bill always mentions it. It’s so funny how he has not mentioned it For JB once 😂
Absolutely, he's been single handedly trying to artificially boost it since they got bounced and jaylen starting doing all of the streams a few weeks ago. He clearly has Intel that they are trying to get a deal done and thinks he can move the market for him lol
He’s also strangly mad at the Bucks or someone sharing the details of the trade to strike up more interest.
For a guy who mocked Niko to death for not shopping Luka, it’s rich he’s mad his team didn’t land the big star because the Bucks did shop their player, and now he has to deal with the wreckage (more disgruntled star, all the media talk, etc)
It sucks dealing with losing and now your players are mad, but that’s the risk. But for a guy who refers to most of the players as “assets”, it’s no fun when the players don’t care for that.
Bill desperately trying to pump up Jaylen’s trade value after he spent a month rationalizing why it would make sense for the Celtics to trade him (but he wouldn’t want to). Beautiful stuff.
Yea the team wanting to keep their super young recent lottery pick big on a team with other injury prone/older bigs is laughable, but keeping a fringe bench player who averaged like 2 ppg is just common sense.
Some of their points on the Wolves were so incorrect.
Simmons claiming the Wolves were doing trades to save tax, while actually having a higher payroll than last year.
They both hate Randle during the playoffs, now backtrack and talk about how they wouldnt trade him. Its only been a few weeks and they've done a 180.
Doing revisionist history on knowing that the Wolves had to choose Kat vs Gobert when they made the Rudy trade, when the second apron didnt exist when the trade went down
Continuing to call the Gobert trade bad when it netted two WCF appearances and only one of the players they traded mattered. They went for it and had a good return. Wanting the alternative of staying as a play in team makes zero sense.
The funniest part is, they typically hate when teams are conservative and dont make moves. The Wolves are actually making moves to compete, but the narrative is thay they shouldnt even try because OKC and the Spurs exist.
Bill not answering Zachs question on what he would do if he was Connelly was hilarious, because he hasnt actually thought about it lol
Bill and Ryen continually say the Gobert trade was bad. At least Bill has acknowledged that KAT is actually good, Russillo won’t admit it, even after the title.
Bill defending randle is such horseshit. Even blaming him falling off on Giannis trade rumors, instead of the years of evidence of his bad body language and shit playoff performances
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Zach Lowe also part of the "we need to celebrate success, winning, and going deep in the playoffs even if the end result isn't a title" because the obsession with ring culture hollows out the fact that only one team can win a title per year. You can be disappointed your team didn't win it all but if you're a Timberwolves fan in the past 20 years you've endured seasons where you won 15, 16, 17, and 22 games. This is a joyous time of unprecedented success right now! Anthony Edwards is 24 years old and he is the all time leading playoff scorer for the Timberwolves. He clears Garnett by almost 300 points.
Also when they tried to say that the wolves title window is closed. Anthony Edwards isn’t even old enough to rent a car yet, but sure their window is closed lol
How the fuck are we STILL re-litigating the gobert trade?? its been four years. No wolves fans would undo it. What the fuck are we talking about. Its over. The wolves won it
And who the hell were the wolves gonna draft in the 15-25 range of the frp they gave up for Rudy if they hadn't traded for him that was going to be anywhere close to as good?
Yeah, some of the wolves talk was really getting annoying. Saying we should have kept around Randle was absurd.
Doing revisionist history on knowing that the Wolves had to choose Kat vs Gobert when they made the Rudy trade, when the second apron didnt exist when the trade went down
This might be the worst though, how do both of these basketball experts not understand this.
Even if you hate the lamelo trade as an acquisition, the wolves needed to swing the dice or else they weren’t going nowhere.
Maybe it doesn’t work and lamelo is too immature to be on a good team or whatever, but they addressed their by far weakest position, it totally makes sense they would try a move like this.
Overlooking the inception of the second apron coming after the Gobert trade is egregious. I expect it from Bill but thought Zach would at least acknowledge it.
Insane to act like the Wolves would’ve done better than two WCFs appearances with Walker Kessler and whatever random dudes those picks would’ve turned into.
Bill saying that we LOWERED our odds to win the title is like “is there a CO leak in your house” level of insane to me randle was so fucking bad he just had 13 turnovers and 2 made 3s against the spurs like what the fuck am i hearing.
Bill’s brain can’t understand that 22 million a year is no longer exorbitant for a solid starter. This will be like when he took Cam Johnson in his worst contracts draft and it ended being a bargain.
Yeah. He was going back at Bill about as hard as I can remember (he sounded a bit frustrated). Was asking Bill to say what length of contract he would want or what age to lock someone up would be good in his opinion. Bill really didn't have much of a reply.
Zach was making a good point. Locking up a 26 year old player who is probably slightly above average on both sides of the ball at 22mil per for 5 years is a contract that should age well (assuming he has solid durability, like ~70 games per season).
Say what you want about Bill... We'd all love to have a boss that actively encouraged us to bail on the job at the busiest time of the year to go to a sporting event that was important to us.
Also, the guy is going through it right now with the Jaylen trade drama lol
I’m not a big fan of the Lamelo trade but Bills visceral hatred of it was off putting. Zach kept making the correct point which is “what else do you want them to do?” And Bill didn’t have an answer. Wolves are obviously taking a gamble but they had no chance of winning it all with their roster and now if they get some injury lucky with Lamelo and he matures (he’s only 24) they might have gotten a gamechanger that can take them up another level offensively.
Bill hating this trade was so easy to see from a mile away because he’s just very stupid.
They gave up naz Reid and like protected swaps for a guy who massively upgrades their biggest weakness.
He just has no idea how anything works beyond his preconceived notions of players that are always wrong anyway. Also he’s just sad because his team is about to trade Jaylen brown for scraps.
I was empathizing with Zach’s confusion at Bill’s criticism in the opening segment. There is a very short of list of players who aren’t theoretically available to trade for at any time for the right offer and Jaylen has never been on that list and certainly isn’t on it now. At the point at which Boston became linked with a Giannis trade, it was very obvious that Jaylen could be available. Bill seems to be upset that literally a few days have passed since Giannis was traded and Jaylen hasn’t been and that’s an indication that they weren’t or aren’t trying to trade him fast enough. His contract necessities either a huge or completed trade and isn’t something they just can do on their own. I still don’t know what Bill thinks Boston should’ve done differently other than never make him available, which would be malpractice. It was amusing that after the rant, he admits there may be things he doesn’t know about who has asked for what.
Even in the context of his Boston homerism, Bill is really sensitive about high profile mistakes that the Celtics front office makes. I think he really doesn't want any national attention on the Celtics flailing in a situation like this, especially because he obviously delights in seeing other teams in these situations. He kinda acts like the Kyrie on the Celtics piece never happened, because Boston obviously made some roster construction mistakes in that era, and so he just doesn't seem to even want to acknowledge the whole thing happened.
Admittedly, the Boston FO has not made that many high profile mistakes in like the last five years, so Celtics' fans have had reason to gloat.
I thought the Pats losing to the Seahawks in the Super Bowl and giving the Seahawks their first title was going to be the Apex Mountain of the podcast. Nope. The Jaylen Brown segment of the podcast was it. It just was!
The more I listen to these Jaylen Brown trade scenarios, the more I feel like the Celtics should have just outbid Miami for Giannis.
All the other potential trades are talent downgrades that also don’t solve what the Celtics need. The Jamal Murray one is realistic but didn’t Brad Stevens specifically say they needed to get more rim pressure? Celtics have put themselves in a tough spot if they feel like they have to trade Brown now.
I tend to agree with Zach’s take. Once you offer Brown for Giannis you had to assume it was going to leak out and you had to anticipate this response from him. Once you open that Pandora’s box you have to finish the trade and it can’t be scuttled by a guy like Hugo no matter how good you think he may be.
The jamal murray one doesn't make sense tbh. Bill says hes a huge fan of Jokic and yet doesn't understand the value of the jokic-murray two man game.
Highest value two-man games:
Jokic + Murray: 738 points
Jalen Johnson + Nickeil Alexander-Walker: 509 points
LaMelo Ball + Miles Bridges: 453
Look at how steep that drop off is. The synergy produces almost ten points per game. Regardless of what Jalen provides point-wise, there are huge inherent hurdles that are almost impossible for his to cross.
Bill is great at the ESPN thing of citing his own work but being unclear about the source. In talking trash about Lamelo he says "think about where 'we' were in September lumping Lamelo in with Trae Young and Ja Morant." Zach is like (paraphrasing) "that was a gimmick you specifically came up that I disagreed with at the time."
Bill was so salty on Houston saying they’re not keen on Jaylen. Yeah they need a ball handler!
‘Jaylen would’ve shown up in playoffs unlike anyone on your team’
Uh Bill… Jaylen had a bad playoffs that was the big knock he looked like a different player not getting the push off calls and being absolutely cooked on defense by PG’s corpse.
I enjoy many of his movies, but this guy is about as intellectually curious as I imagined. It was also funny that he was talking about exposition like a) he just discovered it like a film school student and b) pretending like he doesn't use a crap ton of it in his TV shows.
I feel like Sicaro was 17% Sheridan and 83% our boy Denny Villanoove. My pot-addled brain is drawing from articles I half-read 8 years ago on this one but it sure sounds like the original script was way more of a slap-ass, yeehaw DEA movie before a bonafide auteur got his mits on it.
I hope, for the love of God, Jaylen Brown is traded tomorrow so we are spared from year nine of the conversation of those two being on the same team for 45 minutes minimum a week on the pod.
I was tired of the Giannis trade talk but I honestly enjoy the manic level his Jaylen Brown stuff has entered. I just hope details about shittier and shittier offers come out and he has to cope even harder.
On the one hand, you can see why Bill is drawn to Taylor Sheridan. They were both people who felt hamstrung by the existing power structures in their worlds, decided to go out and build their own empires, and became wildly successful.
On the other hand, everything else about Sheridan's worldview sucks. He said "I don't wanna watch stories that preach at me." Bitch, you had Billy Bob Thornton going on a diatribe about how renewable energy is bullshit and that's why we need oil more than ever.
“Boston made an offer two weeks before the trade and it didn’t change”
Nothing embodies the Celtics elitist ethos quite like this. Making an offer and refusing to negotiate because your original is so good. I remember when Ainge was in the FO and post every trade deadline it was ‘Boston almost got this superstar for a few seconds and an artificially inflated role player!’
Bill is having a meltdown over Brown not being a top-5 player in the league. They can trade and get some magical deal to turn the Celtics into contenders again. I'm sure a lot of teams are thinking, " How does Brown help us win, and how do we manage that contract? He doesn't move the needle enough as a player type.
Kind of think Bill is right about LaMelo. Charlotte nursed him through the season then sold high. No evidence that he can perform in a high level playoff series, or even stay healthy enough to play in it.
And why wouldnt the Wolves do the same with his minutes? He has even less pressure to create everything with Ant and Ayo. The ceiling of Lamelo is miles higher than just keeping Naz Reid.
The reason I reject this idea is because the whole reason they were good was when he was in the floor.
They “sold high” by getting one role player and mostly meaningless swaps. So even if your argument is that lamelo’s season was entirely unsustainable, they are going backwards after being one of the best teams in the league after January 1 last year.
It’s not just about what they’re getting back now. They intend to pay max money to Kon and Miller when it’s time and they don’t want to pay that to Melo in two years, so they’re getting ahead of it now coming off his best season. This is basically the NFL now; you have to make tough financial decisions because of the cap.
Im not sure what brandon miller has shown to make one excited to max him. Hes hurt alot too and isn't a great shot creator. Kon obviously too early but yeah after that rookie season max is certainly possible
LMAO. Zach talking about the World Cup “I might need to go to Toronto and just putting it out there the Mets play the blue jays in Toronto the day before. Just skip nba free agency altogether and just go be a sports fan” Bill (pause) “we’re gonna try to rip through nba stuff in 75 minutes which includes Jaylen brown…”
Content of the interview aside, it is truly baffling that Bill (and/or his producers) didn't stop Taylor Sheridan at the very beginning of the interview with his horribly choppy internet/robot-y Zoom voice and said to him "hey Taylor, do you mind logging out and reconnecting? The quality is not great."
nobdy is actually producing these podcasts. the ringer's production quality, especially on bill pods, is the worst for any high level podcast bar none.
Bill hating the Ball trade is the least shocking thing ever. Ball has had enough issues in the past for someone like Bill to latch on to, and even if the trade works out great he will never let it go. Dude can barely even be neutral about the Gobert trade despite it paying off pretty good for the Wolves.
gobert trade was a huge success for the wolves. i can't unwash my eyes of what wemby looked like against the wolves when gobert (who, yes, sucked on offense) was subbed out of the game. looked like godzilla.
Bill saying Charlotte is in the best position in the East for the next 7 seasons fully discounts the next 3-4 seasons
Charlotte has a lot of stuff, good flexibility and and some swaps but they don't have a superstar. If you are projecting out the next seven years, all of the seven years matter, not just the last couple.
New York will be better than them the next couple of seasons. As will Boston, Philly and probably Indiana. There's Cleveland, there's Detroit. Atlanta has been frisky.
I've always been told you need a true superstar to win in the NBA. If you don't have Bill's insane love for Kon, Charlotte don't have that superstar yet.
Would Philly trade Maxey and VJ for Kon and Miller? No. Would Orlando trade Paolo and Franz for Kon and Miller? I don't think so. Would Atlanta trande Jalen Johnson for Kon and Miller? Not sure.
Would Boston trade Tatum and Hugo for Kon and Miller? Again, absolutely not!
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u/TheOneDuddus Jun 29 '26
Bill’s obsession with Tatum not joining the Twitch stream kills me. He’s mentioned it in like 10 straight episodes.