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“The (Clippers) Curse” Book Special With Mick Minas

September 8, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Released in 2016, Mick Minas’ “The Curse” comprehensively explores the tortured history of the Los Angeles Clippers (MMinas8/Twitter).


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Mick Minas, author of “The Curse: The Colorful & Chaotic History of the LA Clippers,” is here to discuss his comprehensive book that chronicles the wild history of the Clippers. Plagued by penny-pinching ownership, questionable management, terrible luck, and a well earned abysmal reputation, the franchise experiences so many low lows, but optimism is somehow rarely too far away. Even with a new era of Clippers basketball beginning, there is reason for hope. For those interested, Mick’s book can be purchased on Amazon. For more information, visit the book’s website or follow Mick on Twitter.   

Enjoy some clips (The time stamps are approximate, given the presence of dynamic advertising; pun intended with “clips/Clips,” by the way):

7:51-8:20: “So when the players are in that type of environment, it’s easy to see how the effort level would drop off, and I don’t think it takes a lot in a super-competitive environment like the NBA. If you’ve got players operating at 85, 80 percent effort level, that’s obviously gonna lead to terrible results and then the terrible results lead to a further drop in morale, and I think it’s just that sort of downward spiral.”
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LeBron’s Lakers With Harrison Faigen, Eric Pincus

August 29, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Guests Harrison Faigen and Eric Pincus aren’t overly concerned with the Lakers’ perimeter shooting around LeBron James, but they are excited to learn more about the youngsters and their varying level of growth this season (Keith Allison/Creative Commons).


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Following a five-year playoff drought, come July, the Los Angeles Lakers and their fan base could exhale. That’s when they landed LeBron James, the most dominant and versatile player in today’s NBA. To discuss these Lakers, Aaron and Loren are joined by Harrison Faigen of SB Nation’s Silver Screen & Roll and Eric Pincus, Lakers reporter for Bleacher Report, cohost of the Hollywood Hoops Podcast and Capologist for Basketball Insiders and NBA TV.
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“Around the League in 80 Days” Book Special With the Allens

July 25, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Gabe and Bill take the reader along with them on their special, 80-day adventure to all of the NBA’s arenas (2015).


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A budding journalist and soon-to-be college graduate and his dad, a recently retired professor, set out on an 80-day journey around the NBA, stopping by all 29 arenas over a nearly three-month period. That’s the backdrop for “Around the League in 80 Days,” a 2015 memoir penned by William and Gabriel Allen. The father-son duo was gracious enough to join Aaron for a detailed, behind-the-scenes discussion on the book and their exhilarating adventure. If interested, the book can be purchased here.
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Randy Harvey: “Which Rockets Team Will We See?”

May 18, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Through two games, James Harden & Kevin Durant are isolating frequently to great individual success. But does that hurt either team’s flow? Randy Harvey weighs in (GameFace-Photos/Creative Commons).

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We’ve brought back Randy Harvey, former sports editor of the Houston Chronicle, to discuss the Houston Rockets’ Western Conference finals run. Since retiring on March 1st, Randy and his wife moved to Pasadena where he’s continued to follow the Rockets from afar. With the series tied at one, the Rockets stand three wins away from their first NBA Finals berth in 23 years. Standing in their way, the mighty Warriors who have won two of the past three titles. This season’s Rockets won a league-best 65 games after adding superstar point guard Chris Paul, who had never appeared in a conference final, along with 3-and-D wings P.J. Tucker and Luc Mbah a Moute. Of course, the team is centered around James Harden, whose MVP-caliber season has vaulted his team into this position. As the Western Conference finals has effectively turned into a best-of-five series, without further ado, let’s check in with Mr. Harvey for more on this heavyweight matchup. Continue reading

Grizz Gaming GM Lang Whitaker: “It’s Like Real Sports”

February 24, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Grizz Gaming GM Lang Whitaker reveals some of how he plans to lead his squad to success in the NBA 2K League’s opening season (Grizz Gaming/Twitter).

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Lang Whitaker is back for another exhilarating appearance, this time informing us on the brand new NBA 2K League and his role as general manager of Grizz Gaming, the Memphis Grizzlies’ representative team. Whitaker, who also serves as a contributor to Grind City Media and GQ Magazine, cannot wait for the 2K League’s inaugural season, and he’s here to tell us why. There’s no chance you’ll need to grit or grind through these interview highlights below:

6:40-8:33: “I cohosted the Hang Time Podcast for NBA.com the last few years, and one of my cohosts was Rick Fox. And I was just sitting next to Rick the last few years as he was putting together what became Echo Fox, which is now one of the big teams in eSports. So I watched him as he kind of learned about it and figured out what he wanted Echo Fox to become and so that was sort of my introduction to this thing. But look, eSports probably had around 400 million viewers in 2017. They’re projecting revenues of $1.5 billion by 2020, so this is a huge thing. I think there’s probably a little bit of an educational curve here on this depending on your age; younger people are way more into this, it seems like, than a lot of the older people are… Continue reading

Bill Bohl: “Everything Makes More Sense When [Jimmy Butler’s] on the Court”

February 13, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Under coach Tom Thibodeau again, Jimmy Butler is leading the league in minutes per game in his first season with the Timberwolves (Catherine Salaun/Creative Commons).

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A little more than six months after our latest Timberwolves-themed episode, things are looking pretty good for the team currently fourth in the West. Aaron checked in with Billy Bohl, writer for ESPN True Hoop’s A Wolf Among Wolves to discuss a slew of topics, including but not limited to coach Tom Thibodeau’s minutes allocation, 22-year-old phenoms Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins, and Jimmy Butler’s multifaceted impact on the organization’s success. Feel free to wolf down some highlighted sections below:

10:00-10:51: “I think it [the third seed] is preferable [to the fourth seed]. But again, you don’t want to look too far ahead…I wouldn’t want to face Russell Westbrook in a playoff series. Right now if they were the third seed, the Thunder would be the sixth seed. No disrespect to them obviously [but] I would much rather face Portland in the first round. It’s hard to decipher just which route you’d want to take. To be perfectly frank, I don’t think they’d have a chance against Houston either. I think they’d be in big trouble in the second round no matter which of those two teams [Houston or Golden State] they faced.”

15:05-15:56: “The Wolves aren’t terribly deep, especially on the wing, and they need Karl-Anthony Towns to be on court when Jimmy Butler is sitting. So they have to stagger those minutes, and that ends up driving up Karl’s minutes a bunch. I don’t worry about it too much as far as Wiggins or Towns is concerned. The part that troubles me a little: I try to be as optimistic as I can, but Jimmy Butler has already had a couple little tweaks to his knee this season. Continue reading

Salman Ali: Rockets “Not Mincing Words, Want to Go at Warriors”

January 30, 2018 / / 0 Comments

James Harden is leading the Houston Rockets with another MVP-caliber season (Keith Allison/Flickr).

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After a disappointing second-round exit in the 2017 playoffs, the Rockets were busy during the offseason, trading for star point guard Chris Paul and adding defensive specialists Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and P.J. Tucker. Those moves have been bearing fruit thus far, as last week they became only the third team since 2015 to win the season series over the Golden State Warriors. To help us assess how much of a threat these Rockets pose to the defending champions, we brought back Salman Ali, managing editor of Red Nation Hoops, for his second appearance on the show. He takes us through how Rockets GM Daryl Morey was able to engineer this roster in the offseason, the new dynamic of the Chris Paul-James Harden pairing and the rumors that Houston might be at the top of LeBron James’ free agency list in the coming off-season. Blast off with these clutch excerpts below:

4:22-4:42: “The Rockets are probably more health-dependent than any other team outside of maybe Cleveland. They’re so dependent on health. If any of their main guys gets hurt, there’s a significant drop-off. Even when Luc Mbah a Moute went down, their defense went down the toilet for a good stretch there.”

10:14-10:58: “He [Chris Paul] is so different at running an offense than James Harden…Chris Paul is like that kid who studies all week, gets the 92 on a test, and James Harden is that dude who just walks in and gets a 98 after not studying. The offense clearly runs a lot smoother with James Harden, and it feels a lot more effortless…With Chris Paul, it’s different. It’s effective; it’s damn effective. But it’s just more calculated, and I guess maniacal in the way that Chris Paul targets defenses’ weaknesses. James Harden thinks the game, obviously, but he thinks the game at a different level. He plays the game more fluidly.”

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Jordan Maly: Markkanen’s “Confidence is Oozing” for the Bulls

January 15, 2018 / / 0 Comments

After turning heads in Eurobasket this summer in his native Finland, rookie Lauri Markkanen is silencing doubters with his play for the Bulls this season (Tuomas Vitikainen/Wikimedia Commons).

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The Chicago Bulls ended the year last season by surprisingly stealing two games in Boston in their first-round playoff series against the Celtics and then subsequently losing the next four games. Since then, they let go of veterans Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, traded away franchise superstar Jimmy Butler, and brought back a new young core of Zach LaVine, Kris Dunn and rookie Lauri Markkanen. In our first episode of 2018, we’ve brought on Jordan Maly, host of the Locked on Bulls podcast, to help decipher this enigmatic Chicago team. He takes us through a mid-season assessment of that Jimmy Butler trade, the slew of developing young talent the Bulls have fostered and the awkwardness of covering the team after the fight between Nikola Mirotic and Bobby Portis. Charge forward into the show with these excerpts:

4:30 – 7:44: “When Butler was dealt, the immediate overwhelming reaction was that the Bulls got screwed, that the Bulls didn’t get enough back for him, that the Timberwolves basically snaked Jimmy Butler and that No. 16 pick in the draft… For a lot of Bulls fans, we didn’t have trust in the front office, didn’t have trust in what they were saying or what they were trying to build. But now, slowly, over this season, Lauri Markkanen has turned into a viable piece and somebody that looks like one of the best rookies out of this class… Kris Dunn, I think, has been the most phenomenal part of this three-piece trade. He’s gotten his confidence back from when he played at Providence… and is turning into something that could be a budding superstar. And then you add the most important piece that everybody thought would be the No. 1 piece of this deal in Zach LaVine… I think he can be a definite impact player, and he can be a definite impact person for a Chicago Bulls team that’s looking for their sort of superstar.”

11:35 – 12:58: “When [Lauri Markkanen’s] asked about his player comps, about players that he watched to develop his game, he always says he ‘doesn’t want to be the next Dirk. There will never be the next Dirk, because Dirk is far and above anybody else out there.’ He said he wants to create his own path. He wants to be his own player. He wants to make his mark as Lauri Markkanen… Everybody said that Lauri Markannen’s not going to be able to play defense, especially down low, and he’s proven people wrong so far this season. The way he moves his feet, which are so quick for a big man of his size and his length, and his ability to not give up against guys… His confidence is oozing right now.”
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Ian Levy: Oladipo Spearheads Pacers’ Newfound “Kinetic Explosiveness”

December 23, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Victor Oladipo’s first season with the Pacers has been a smashing success. If he can sustain his superb shooting, guest Ian Levy believes he should be an All-Star (Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Wikimedia Commons).

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The Indiana Pacers have bounced back from a subpar start to stand 18-14. In an Eastern Conference crowded with many solid, second-tier teams looking to separate themselves from the pack, Indiana is more than holding its own thanks to an elite offense led by Victor Oladipo. Ian Levy, NBA editor and columnist for FanSided and Editor-in-Chief of The Step Back, helps us break down the team he knows best. We’ll cover Indiana’s captivating comeback ability, the sudden emergence of Oladipo and so much more…Who’s your (Hoosier?) favorite podcast for interview excerpts?

6:42-7:28: “If he [Victor Oladipo] can sustain what he’s doing shooting the basketball, especially on those pull-ups, that sort of locks him into this tier where he’s, I’d say, a clear-cut All-Star [and] one of the best shooting guards in the league. So I think that’s probably the hope for the Pacers rather than him somehow getting better than he is now. He’s given them everything they could ask for. And that aggression and passion is such a different aesthetic than the Pacers have had the past couple years. Even when they were good, back in the Hibbert-David West-George Hill-Paul George-Lance Stephenson [days], back in those days, they didn’t have the same sort of kinetic explosiveness.” Continue reading

Max Rappaport: “Now 76ers Care About Wins & Losses Too”

December 9, 2017 / / 0 Comments

76ers head coach Brett Brown is displaying much more trust in his players this season, argues Max Rappaport (TastyPoutine/Creative Commons).

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With redshirt rookie Ben Simmons garnering heavy praise around the league and Joel Embiid looking healthy and better than ever, the long-tanking 76ers are finally winning games, beginning to reap the benefits of their ambitious Process, which Sam Hinkie launched nearly four and a half years ago. As Simmons comfortably leads the Rookie of the Year chase, filling virtually every corner of the stat sheet, he’s surrounded by improved shooter Robert Covington, veteran free-agent acquisition J.J. Redick and, more broadly, a considerably bolstered roster compared to a season ago. Philadelphia’s Defensive Efficiency has cracked the league’s top 10, and Brett Brown’s squad is playing with confidence and even some semblance of consistency. Max Rappaport, co-host of the 76ers-themed Stepover Podcast and contributor to Complex Sports and Bleacher Report, helps us delve deeply into this up-and-coming Eastern Conference team. To close the show, Joe Borelli of the SuperFlight Podcast makes a special appearance to rave about Simmons, whom he affectionately refers to as an “anomaly” and a “physical freak.” The (numerical) time stamps below are only approximate, but the quotes contained inside are the real deal:

6:42-7:25 (MR): “I think the hardcore Process fans, maybe their enthusiasm level hasn’t really changed or it’s been shifted in a different way. They’re no longer cult followers of lovable losers. Now they care about wins and losses too, and that makes it, in some ways, more fun, because the team’s better and Embiid’s playing and Simmons has been awesome. But at the same time, it was kind of a win-win before…Now, it’s like half the time you’re kind of pissed after a game.” Continue reading

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