Jason “White Chocolate” Williams was playing for former teammate Gary Payton’s 3-Headed Monsters team before he went down with injury in Week 1 of the Big3 (Keith Allison/Creative Commons).
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Oliver Maroney, basketball writer for Dime on Uproxx and host of The Big3 Show, calls in to discuss the Big3 tour just as it concludes its regular season and prepares for Sunday’s semifinal round in Seattle. Maroney gets into the business and marketing side of things, while also, of course, delving into the basketball issues at play. For instance, we’ll find out which team is most likely to challenge the undefeated Trilogy squad and whom he favors to take home the inaugural MVP trophy. Just a one-year novelty experiment? Oliver thinks not. He argues that this league has staying power. Listen to find out why that is.
3:24-3:41: “Obviously there’s nostalgia involved, but I think people are just overlooking the fact that this is a competitive basketball league and not just something where retired players go to play. This is something a little bit more than that. They’ve got camaraderie, all the players enjoy each other, and it’s just very different from your normal NBA atmosphere.”
12:10-13:57: “The players love it because that’s the 1990s way. [In] 1980s, 1990s NBA basketball, hand-checking wasn’t allowed and there was more physical play allowed, and now you get to this day and age where players are paid $200 million-plus over five or six years, and teams want to keep their guys healthy, so the only way to kind of eliminate injuries is by just making it a non-contact sport, which it’s almost essentially become…This league, it’s completely the opposite…They’ve tried to take it back a little bit. They’ve tried to make it more physical, and I think you can tell on the floor. When you’re standing there or at the game, you can tell. It’s just so much more physical. It’s a cross between kind of like a boxing match and an NBA game from the 1990s, just because players are really going at it, they’re yelling at each other, the arguing’s there. The competitive nature of these players is still all intact, and they don’t hold back.”