Jake Fischer’s “Built to Lose” chronicles the league’s “Tanking Era” with a focus on the 76ers, Suns, Magic, Kings and Lakers.
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Enjoy Aaron’s one-on-one conversation with Bleacher Report writer Jake Fischer on his debut book, “Built to Lose: How the NBA’s Tanking Era Changed the League Forever.”
4:47-5:23: “There was a long Google doc of probably 600 names of people that were this player and his agent and the player’s college coach and every single guy who was ever rostered by that team, guys who were in training camp. And then as you get on the phone with other people, you start to ask also, like, ‘Hey, now that we’ve talked for 20, 30, 40 minutes, and you kind of know who I am a little bit, know the work I’m trying to do, and just the honest conversation I’m trying to have, anybody you think you could put me in touch with that would help me further understand, add another perspective?’ Sometimes I’ll even ask for specific people.”
14:38-15:47: “For me, before I got into this more newsy space at Bleacher Report, at Sports Illustrated, I was working on “Built to Lose” for a long portion of my time there. I kinda developed a niche at SI of being someone who covered left-of-center stories, like I got coffee with Mike D’Antoni ‘cuz he’s obsessed with Starbucks. And my last thing I ever wrote for SI was a profile on Red Panda, so stuff like that. I realized from [those], I don’t really cover basketball that much. I kinda cover the people who work in basketball and things about the business of basketball and the ecosystem of the NBA. So it’s always been difficult, I think at times, to throw like a random question to somebody, but there’s a way to do it in a way that is interesting to them versus, ‘Here’s this total left-field subject.’ If you go at it kind of with humility and laughing at yourself…”
18:24-19:00: “I really do believe that every page has some type of new information that didn’t come out before, whether it was furthering a story that had come out previously or just bringing out a new story altogether. That’s a big goal of mine any time I write. I had a really great journalism adviser in high school named Greg Gagliardi, who I shout out all the time, who’s one of the people the book’s dedicated to. And he taught me back in my junior year of high school, maybe even my freshman year, if you don’t have something new, then you don’t have a story.”
30:11-30:50: “I really wanted to include the Lakers being that they’re the independent variable in all this, where they were the worst team in the league during the five-year stretch in which we cover in the book. And it didn’t matter. LeBron still signed there in free agency in 2018, Anthony Davis came soon after, they won a title. So I think that’s exactly why tanking does exist in these smaller markets. If you’re Utah with Donovan Mitchell, if you’re Orlando when they had Dwight Howard, Milwaukee with Giannis, Portland with Dame [Lillard], you’ve gotta get these guys through the draft and do everything you can to build a contender around them or else you’ve got no shot.”
35:01-35:11: “The worst team in the NBA was creating some of the biggest storylines and the most interest in its product, so I don’t see how it could’ve been viewed as a bad thing.”
*Stories referenced in the discussion:
Jake’s Mike D’Antoni-Starbucks story
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Music: “Who Likes to Party” by Kevin MacLeod.
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