Biden Drops Out, a USA Hoops Six-Pack, and ‘Heat 2’ Ideas With Bryan Curtis, Tara Palmeri, Sean Fennessey, and Chris Ryan
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We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where I hope you're listening to all of our awesome podcasts about sports and culture. I hope you're listening to the rewatchables. We've been slamming them up all through the month of July. We did True Lies last week. We have No Way Out this week. You can watch all of the new videos in the episodes that we've been recording on the Ringer Movies YouTube channel.

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Pretty big day, month, four-week stretch here at American History, and President Biden dropped out today. So at the very top, we're going to talk to Tara Palmieri from Puck News, as well as the Somebody's Gotta Win podcast that's with Puck and The Ringer. We collaborate on that one. And Brian Curtis from The Press Box, who I've been working with since the Greenland days, and he's been with us at The Ringer from the beginning. So the three of us are going to talk about what happened today with Joe Biden, where things are going, and just try to put in perspective

the last four weeks, which are about as crazy of a stretch that I can remember in American politics. After that, we'll talk USA basketball and we'll talk some heat too. So an action-packed podcast here on a Sunday. First, our friends from Pearl Jam. ♪

All right, we're taping this Sunday noon PT. I swear we were going to do some version of this, but now Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race for 2024. Brian Curtis is here from the press box. We've been working together forever. Tara Palmieri is here. She hosts the Somebody's Gotta Win podcast for us. She also writes for Puck News. She's doing a great job covering the election. I'm going to start here. Curtis.

craziest four-week stretch of politics since you've been alive? Yes. I think I'm pretty good on saying that. I mean, it's been three and a half, right, since Biden tanked the debate. Yes. Maybe the wrong word to use on the Bill Simmons podcast, but Biden had a tag debate. Right. Then we have the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. And now here we sit that Joe Biden has dropping out of the race.

in such sudden fashion that the news anchors didn't even have somebody ready to talk about it. I think Tara and I were both on the list of people they were about to call if the backup to the backup to the backup didn't pick up the phone. - I think Bakari was ready. He was just in a suit all day just in case. I saw him on CNN really fast. In that four week stretch you left out, so the debates on June 27th, complete chaos.

Biden goes on the hot seat. That's the next few days. The Democrats start turning on each other, which Tara's been covering nonstop.

Then Trump, the assassination attempt, which is eight days ago and feels like it was 17 weeks ago. We get all the conspiracy theories, all the worst of the internet immediately pops out. We get, is Biden now in or out? Was he going to be out or not? We get Trump picking a VP and all of a sudden the convention. We get the speech, we get the in or out stuff with Biden. And then today we get Biden dropping out. Were you surprised, Tara?

I just knew it was a matter of time. Like it was, I was warned by my sources. Like if this is a war between Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, she will win. She is like a true knife fighter. And this may be death by a thousand cuts, but he will end up falling. And just, I was talking with a senior health source who kept me like really up to date on the highest levels. And they were like, it just became unbearable, like too many straws on him. And he's just, he just,

As in the last straw, it was just too many and he had to. And so it was more delay tactics. And I would never say that COVID was a delay, but it gave him a few more days. And then, you know, he wanted to meet with Netanyahu, who is coming to Washington this week, because he really does believe in his heart that he is one of the strongest leaders on foreign policy. So this would give him another opportunity. His wife is going to, the first lady, Jill Biden, is going to Paris,

for the opening of the Olympics. Like, it just felt like they were choosing one event after another to keep this going. And you had Chuck Schumer go to Delaware about a week ago and tell him like, hey, it's time to get out. And I was told that if he didn't drop out soon, it was going to get increasingly uglier this week. And I'm talking about electeds

on the Hill continuing to come out against him. He had 10 in just the past weekend. Senators like Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester of Montana. It was just going to become a flood

Because Nancy Pelosi was not there anymore to stop the leaks. Neither was Schumer. They were just like, do what you must. Go for it. And Biden was under siege. And he, you know, he doesn't make decisions very quickly. He had his back up against the wall. He was in his bunker. He was furious, thinking that this was all orchestrated by Obama and Pelosi.

May not be completely off on that one. But eventually, I think he realized the damage was done. If you can clip so many ads off of the members of his own party saying he shouldn't run. Actually, I really think, though, this morning, that poll in Michigan, that public poll showed him seven points down from Trump in a head-to-head race.

I mean, I don't think that's recoverable. And you need to win Michigan. Like you need to win or Pennsylvania. You need the blue wall as a Democrat to win. If you've lost that, it's almost impossible. So I do think that that Michigan poll may have been exactly the data he was looking for. I had the same reaction. That was the first thing I woke up to today, West Coast time. And it was one of the first things I saw. And I was like, ooh, seven points. That's a lot. Brian, Tara had on her podcast a few days ago

One of the points raised was that the recourse the Democrats had if they wanted to get Biden out was just to leak everything.

And, you know, we already had somebody videotaped the Zoom, which somebody had got the actual video recording thing. And it was just it hits the point where any conversation he has with basically anybody outside his very tight inner circle is just going to get leaked because they all want him out. Can you ever remember? Because for us, you span sports, you span culture, you span politics. Can you ever remember a situation like that where somebody was in charge of

Literally everyone around him was a leaked threat. It's been pretty amazing. Look, politics is terribly the first to tell you. There's a lot of sources that are on background and necessarily on background. But what's been so interesting is the Schumer meeting that she mentioned, right? It doesn't really get the job done face to face. So then a couple of days later, we hear about the Schumer meeting.

And that is the way to get the job done, right? It's not just the leak, but it's the strategic leak because the face-to-face encounter with the very stubborn and reluctant commander-in-chief isn't working. And that just particular element, again, I know that's happened in Washington,

But to happen at this level and to happen with Joe Biden, who is famously tight-lipped, we hear over and over again, inner circle has been really, really amazing to watch. It feels like all these little mini chapters that normally would come out in the book at the end of the election have just been spooling out in real time.

And this may be the last time we have to read the phrase, the mood in the White House was grim or the mood in the Delaware Beach House was grim. Yeah. Because we feel like we've been reading that now for three weeks in a row.

And also, just to go on to what Brian was saying, his inner circle, too, is fraying. You start, like in my latest piece, a source close to the inner circle says, Anita Dunn is no longer a part of the inner circle because she's taken a lot of flack for being a part of his inner circle. You notice that there's just breaking apart. Actually, it reminds me of covering the Trump White House, because when I covered the Trump White House, there were leaks.

all the time during every moment, 'cause it was pure chaos. Everyone wondering if he was going to hang out from moment to moment to moment. And the weird thing is, is that on this campaign, there are really not that many leaks coming out of Trump's campaign.

It's a much more professional, loyal, tight operation. And it's been this weird shift to see Biden world leaking like a sieve. And everyone in Biden world, like you would see the interpersonal clashes in Trump world. There was always people fighting. He had two chiefs of staff basically at the beginning with Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. They were constantly warring the factions. And now Biden world has factions. And that's when you know it's bad. Right. Well, and you had Tim Alberta on a couple episodes

a couple of podcasts ago, but he wrote that great piece about the Trump campaign, the one he's running this time versus what it was eight years ago and four years ago, which I thought was really interesting. The Biden inner circle piece

It really seemed by the end, it was just his wife and his son. And that was what everybody was saying. Those are the two people he's listening to. And then it comes down to this, something that you see over and over again with people as they're trying to hold on their last pieces of power. And they're just turning to voices who are personally invested in them keeping that power, right? So for him...

His wife wants to stay the first lady. It's great to be the first lady, right? The son who has some legal issues coming probably wants him to be president for all the obvious reasons. But they're just saying, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. Don't let, they're trying to bring you down. And this ties into Brian, this whole kind of underdog thing that Biden's had forever, where he's always been the one counted out. He's always been rallying back. And you can see like, even if he's a little bit diminished these days, which I think we can all agree that he is, like he's still kind of

sliding into that underdog role. It's almost like a WWE wrestler. Oh, this is my gimmick. This is my shtick. I'm the underdog who nobody believes in me. I'm going to fight back. I did it in South Carolina in 2020. And it's just, he's not that guy anymore. It's totally right. Shoemaker texted me the other day and he said, Biden's trying to run a nobody believed in us campaign. Right.

The problem was it included no Democrats either. None of the kind of liberal media people that Democrats count on, at least in the Trump era, supporting the party and sort of being opinion leaders in that phrase. Yeah, I think that the Hunter Biden part of this is fascinating.

Because, you know, we read a little bit of last, you know, 24, 48 hours, like here's somebody who has, needless to say, a very complicated relationship with his father. And suddenly here he is at his father's elbow when his father is facing the ultimate political crisis, when they're trying to push him off the ticket, them being the Democrats. And he's the one going, no, dad, don't do it. Right. Let's stick tough. Let's stay here. I mean, that is an absolutely fascinating human story.

outside of all of the things that are happening in American politics right now. - Tarek, one of the things I heard was that Biden, especially with these three, four days off, as he's trying to figure out, am I gonna stay in, am I gonna leave, what should be my strategy? And people that he trusts, he probably is running out of people that he trusts at this point, but they're telling him, if you're gonna stay in,

You've got to go all out. You've got to do a media blitz. You almost have to be like somebody who's like Tom Cruise promoting the new Mission Impossible movie. You've got to be absolutely everywhere, constantly trying to prove to people that you actually are super competent, that you actually are sharp on your feet, that this is all like people just trying to, you know, they're misinterpreting stuff. Like you can actually do this. You've got to get out there and really do it.

And obviously he can't. But that was, I think, the only way he could have stayed in because all the polls, all the evidence of Democrats turning against him, there was really no other way to make up ground unless he proved that people were wrong about him. And I don't think they were. What do you think of that theory?

Yeah, I agree. I mean, the thing is that every time he did do another interview, Lester Holt last Monday, it feels like a lifetime ago, but it was literally just six days ago. Yeah, it's not a strong performance. You know, he went on, I think he went on BET the next night, another time, not a strong performance. Like,

It's not like he was coming out there and hitting it out of the gate. I know he does well on teleprompter and he had a few good rallies and he had people literally chanting like, stick it out, stick it in, like stay in there, stay with us. And I'm sure that sort of gave him some hope and morale. But like at the end of the day, no one was feeling different. And I know from my sourcing that they were,

feeling like, oh, you know, not enough people watch the George Stephanopoulos interview. It's not stemming the bleeding. What do we do? What do we do? And at one point, they even considered doing a national address because they needed to force the cameras on Biden so that he could get enough eyeballs. I think the point is, is that everyone watched that debate and you're not going to get that visual out of your mind. You're not going to get what happened. You know, you can't convince the voters at that point to think differently about him. And I don't I don't think a blitz would have changed it. But

He basically prolonged the inevitable for about a month. I don't know that it did the party much good either. And now they're in this situation where they've got to figure it all out. I mean, he endorsed Kamala Harris. What does that mean, though? Belatedly. I mean, he did a statement first and then he did the endorsement of her afterwards, almost like either it was left out and intentionally or he forgot to do it. I don't know what the other reason why wouldn't that have been in the statement?

And it doesn't have the same gravity being in a statement versus being in a tweet. It's also just very weird to see him putting out a white paper at 2 p.m. Eastern time. I know earlier for you announcing his withdrawal. I mean, I just to me, it seems a bit odd. I would think that there would be, you know, you would have got like a YouTube YouTube channel selfie like him just doing like a power walk with the phone out.

I don't know. I think maybe doing like a national address, which I guess he's going to do later. But I don't know. It just seemed and on a Sunday, I thought maybe would be on a Thursday. I agree. I thought it was weird too. Why not just leak out that he's dropping out and then do the statement after? How would you handle it, Brian?

Well, I do wonder if this whole speaks to just how many, how few people are around him right now. You know, that to me looked like the best we could do with five people around us, not wanting, you know, the larger part of the White House apparatus or the Democratic Party apparatus to know before we announced it. You know, very short. Some of those sentences in there were kind of written like Biden talks. They were not written in words.

Well, shall we say formal presidential English? Yeah. It was just like a very interesting letter. And, you know, I don't know if the sort of the twofer of I'm out, I'm endorsing Kamala, if that was him thinking that these are two separate decisions that he just wanted to just... Yeah, because she's my VP and we got all the delegates and the money together that naturally, but oh, wait, maybe I should actually just say that.

Well, I don't I don't think he forgot. I just think he probably thinks that of this is two different things. Right. These are a huge decision for me to leave the presidential race in late July. It's also a huge decision for me to do this. And maybe I'll just put them in two different statements. Why that makes sense. I don't know. But I think we would have we would have maybe advised them against that one.

Yeah, I think you just add a line in there saying, and I endorse my vice president who I believe in, you know. Yeah, the party in the election is in great hands. And one more thing. Yeah. P.S.

Isn't it weird? Brian and I are big like history buffs and it's weird, you know, growing up, especially when I was in my biggest political science history phase, like in college and after college. And you would read about some of the stuff that happened before you were alive. Right. You'd read about like the Kennedy Nixon debate and just what,

a transformative, important moment that was for everybody. Like in the moment, how something shifted and then just people write about that and talk about it. The TV candidate. Yeah. And you see the video and Nixon looks sweaty and you're like, oh man, that must have been crazy. And some of the awful stuff that happened in the 60s, like, oh Jesus, can you imagine being there for that? And then you just think of all the stuff that happened in the last four weeks and it's this big consequential stuff

that people will be teaching in history classes and they'll be writing about in books. And all of it was just happening in a row. And it was like in this content cycle that Brian and I are in with sports and culture and everything else where it's like, you know, where's DeMar DeRozan going? And then, oh yeah, and this is also happening. And I don't know, I just feel like I, Brian, I feel like I couldn't wrap my head around it.

Like just like the wittiness of some of this stuff. Oh, my God. Absolutely. I mean, it all felt. And again, this is an election, you know, that we were told was was going to be kind of boring, you know, for a couple of months. And right. At least was very baked in right here. Two very familiar candidates. And then, as you say, that whole thing starts three and a half weeks ago. But yeah, that you know, and it's also been, Bill, we should add for political reporters. This is what they have been lusting after the entire time I've been in journalism.

right like an open convention we got to do it like jack germann did back in the day you know it's like sports writers where you just feel you just miss the golden age of sports writing yeah riding on the plane with muhammad ali and drinking with mickey mantel at the bar after the game political flying coach with you know john havlicek totally they feel like heroin this is what it is i mean i've never done heroin but this is as high as i've ever felt

Thank you for that political clarification. I've never done heroin, but yeah, I mean, compared to the other elections, because it's not like 2016 was like the most normal election. But this, I mean, this went from like kind of cruising along at its own pace and everybody thought they knew who the two candidates were. But then what were the last six weeks like just to cover this, Tara?

It's just been wild. I mean, I think we spoke while I was trying to take a vacation, but I just couldn't. I mean, I was just, I had to work. My phone died because I was using it so much and it was hard to resuscitate. But I, you know, I've been on this phone with my sources every single day, waking up in the morning. Like for me, I hesitate to plan anything right now because I can't.

felt like something would happen at any moment. That was what I kept being told that things were going to happen. So I've been in sort of a sense of standby for about the past month. And, you know, sources coming out of nowhere, just people that are on the campaign being like, can we please talk, you know, people who would reluctantly keep the company line, you know, and just this feeling of like, at any moment, Biden is going to step down. And then just last week, I

On Sunday, it's like whiplash. Trump is attempted... There's an attempted assassination attempt on a Sunday. Same time as right now, by the way. Maybe a few hours earlier. And again, it's like...

wow, you really have to just be ready for anything at any moment. And who's to say what's going to happen next? I mean, yes, he has endorsed Kamala Harris, but who's to say that the full, you know, bench of the Democratic Party, you know, Wes Moore, Kamala Harris, right? Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker,

Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly, they don't all come out there right now saying, I'm running against Kamala. Like, that's a huge story too. And you've got the entire Democratic Party figuring out, I mean, I'm texting with donors. They're like, we don't really know what's next. We're trying to figure it out. I don't think that they're all settled on Kamala Harris. There's more drama to come. And

And I don't, I'm afraid to sleep. Truly. I don't know what's going to happen next. Let's take a quick break. And then I want to talk about looking forward, what's going to happen.

This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. From tip-off to hoisting the trophy, celebrate every moment of the WNBA Finals with a Michelob Ultra in hand. The WNBA is so hot, we just launched a Ringer WNBA show podcast. Yeah, that's happening. You know what goes well with it? Michelob Ultra.

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She's going to be the candidate. I would assume she is. And I think there's their own dangers of putting somebody who hasn't really been in this kind of spotlight, just throwing them in a couple months before the election. But one of the things that people have talked about, Brian, with Harris is just like,

People don't like her that much. She hasn't done that well in big elections. Like what makes people think she's going to win? And then there's that other camp like, no, no, the last four years she's learned a lot. She's been the spotlight. She's been a good vice president. What do the next six weeks look like for her in your mind?

Well, it's fascinating. I mean, we're really in an interesting situation where, you know, you're right, we don't know her as a national politician, and that's partly the doing of the Biden administration, which did not exactly want her to become a national politician after picking her as his running mate back in 2020. We do know she can be a good debater. She won her debate with Mike Pence in 2020. Obviously, the bar for having a good Democratic debate is pretty much on the floor. So she figures if she and Trump do debate, and that seems like an

an if at this point, and everything seems like an if. She would obviously have a chance to fare much better than Biden did. But you know, the next couple of days are going to be so interesting because

And Tara will be much more plugged in less than me. But you have to, I would think, have one of those big name Democrats actually step up and not just say, I want to be president, but I want to run against the person, the vice president of the United States that Joe Biden just endorsed on his way out the door, which feels like a huge step. And then state why they'd have to attack her at the same time in order to make that happen.

Well, I don't even, I don't even really, cause they talk about an open convention. I feel like I'm a relatively smart guy. I don't even a hundred percent understand what that means. Like in, in my head, it's like, you know, season seven of the West wing where it's like, oh, it's Sorkin's writing an open convention and weird shit's going to happen. But what is it? What does this mean in practical terms in real life, Tara?

You know, I'm not, I think the rule book will be rewritten in some ways, but right now Biden has, yeah, Biden has 3,886 delegates that are his. So about 4,000 Democratic delegates are out there because there were others who, randoms that picked up some delegates. And there are 700 superdelegates too. I'm not entirely sure how,

the difference. But I think that it will come down to a vote. And in the meantime, if they are numerous candidates, they're going to have to run campaigns. They're going to have to lobby the delegates. There might be some like deals and trades done on the floor of the convention to get them to vote one way or another. But how does that how does that help if they're trying to beat Trump? How does

had us having like one giant long cat fight to try to get the nomination and just chewing up time. I don't know how that helps. I agree with you. I think there's also another thinking that if you anoint Kamala Harris doesn't seem democratic enough. Some people might argue that, that he's like passing it down to her. And so that will be the argument against her. The argument for her will be that, you know, she is his vice president. I think...

The other argument, obviously, is that she represents a core constituency of the Democratic Party. She's an African-American woman. They consistently come out for Democrats. And to pass her over as the historic first vice president, the first African-American female vice president, would be seen as a severe, you know, diss or slight against this huge problem.

core constituency. But, you know, people say she's got to earn it. And if she earns it, she'll come out an even stronger candidate. I think ultimately, and I'm an optimist on this, I do think that people will be excited, more excited than they were before about the idea of Biden and Trump running against each other. At least the Democratic base might be excited to have a candidate or just Democratic voters in general, a candidate that's under 81 years old and will come out of this convention. Yeah.

Yeah, and maybe they'll come out of this convention with a shiny new toy, someone we know of or didn't think of, and they market that person one way or another. These people haven't really been vetted, though, some of them. Probably Kamala has been vetted the most, if you think about it. But like Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, they're governors, popular governors. But I think the thinking right now is that if you really want to be strategic, like truly strategic, you should add a battleground state governor.

to the ticket, either with Kamala, that's someone like Gretchen Whitmer, who's of Michigan, or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, the two states you really have to win as a Democrat to win this election, either or, but usually if you get one, you get the other. Arizona is a possibility too, right? Yeah, Mark Kelly is very popular. He's a combat veteran, very, very popular. He's being talked about. Or have one at the top of the ticket. I think the thinking of like, I know, you know,

You know, Gavin Newsom is a star in the party and he's obviously ambitious, but having two West Coasters on the ballot doesn't really make sense. And it's and really we're down to the point where, like, it really only matters in like seven, eight states right now. And if you want to win this, you got to win the battleground state. So why not pick a popular battleground governor?

Brian, if you were the czar of this, what decision would you hand down? The GM of common sense of the Democratic Party right now? I mean, the Midwest argument to me is really the most compelling one. You need to win those states, right? If you lose Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania, you probably lose the election. And so I would say whether it's in the VP slot, whether it's Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, whether it's at the top of the ticket, that to me is the absolute must win.

the one thing I would look for in a Democratic candidate, other than somebody, as we say, who is vetted enough to run a national election now at hyperspeed. - Yeah, the thing that scares me about Kamala is that her campaign four years ago was so bad

I remember who wrote the giant feature about how bad it was after it was at Politico. Somebody wrote like the now they tell us feature about everything that went wrong with it. And it was just like one of the worst campaigns anyone's run in the last 20 years. So that, that part, I can't, you know, maybe everybody gets better. Everybody grows. Yeah. But yeah, that's always used against her. That's like, she was the main head against her. Right. The thing, the last five weeks though, the thing that,

I always like to look at things from what does the other side want to happen? And it just felt, and everybody's made this point, but it just felt like Trump really wanted Biden to stay in the race. It was goading him. He did some stuff on True Social, but that's kind of where he's like, Trump unleashed, but

In public, he was just kind of laying back. And even during the debate, you could see there were a couple of times where he could have really gone for the kill. And he's just like, I'm just going to let this guy hang himself here. So the fact that he so badly wanted Biden to stay in the race, and then Tim O'Byrne and that piece, they basically revealed that's our big strategy is we basically just want Biden to stay in. So now that he's out, what are we prepared for with Trump? Because it feels like he's

He's been intentionally calm. Now what happens? Kind of depends on who the candidate is. I mean, we read in the New York Times today that they're ready, you know, for Kamala Harris as you'd expect them to be ready. You know, that's oppo research that's right at their fingertips. You know, they've had they've had talking points on her about the border, you know, task Biden assigned her to early in her term. Another data point for what the Biden administration thought of Kamala Harris and how visible they wanted her to be.

You know, that stuff is all ready to me. But like it's, I would think, and Tara will have a better read on this, that there's just a lot of uncertainty in Trump headquarters today because Biden was a great known for them, right? He had a terrible weakness that he had no way of reversing.

that he could do nothing about. It was exactly the game plan they ran against Biden on in 2020, by the way. They were calling him old and running a basement campaign then. He was four years older. He had the terrible debate. He had that moment Americans could not erase. So, you know, to me, that's just like when you inject unknown into a political campaign in July. That you're winning. The ticket, not in the vice presidential slot like we're used to. Yeah, and you're ahead.

you've just had this convention that you feel pretty good about other than Trump's speech, which was as long as Oppenheimer. I would think that they would be at least a little rattled right now. Yeah, the fear in football, and a few people have made this point, but in football, we see this with quarterbacks sometimes where the starting quarterback's not quite good enough and there becomes the groundswell for the backup. And a lot of times the backup's either worse or it's just,

You know, you're just chewing up time, but you're going nowhere anyway. But this is like one of the great kind of football things over the years. It's like, I don't really like this guy. This guy, if we could only put in this guy, it'll be great. And now we're actually seeing this in real time happen, this in politics, which I can't. The last time somebody dropped out when they were an incumbent was LBJ in 1968.

That was before I was alive. I've just never seen this. I don't know how this plays out. We don't really have anything to compare it to because it's stupid to compare it to like Polk and Buchanan and all these people from, you know, it's a completely different atmosphere. If you had to make any predictions, Tara, for the next four weeks, give me like two, two things that you feel confident will happen.

I mean, there's going to be like real serious discussions about money and how does it get to Harris and her campaign? Because, you know, Biden, even before the debate, was coming in at a deficit. OK, $30 million cash on hand deficit to Trump. He does have the biggest war chest. How does that work?

How do they move it over to Biden? There's going to be lots of lawsuits coming from the RNC saying you can't just roll that money over to her. You can't put it in a super PAC. There are going to be tons of lawsuits going on. I think I'm going to be watching to see movements from the other camps. How quickly does the party consolidate around Harris? I mean, to be honest, like when I was speaking with, you know, senior...

you know, Hill sources, it was like, they really hadn't made up their mind on how this should go forward. They really did not know if it should just be Kamala and the whole party rallies around and anoints her, or if they allow this open primary and this open process as they called it. Um, and you know, it,

I'm going to be looking for smoke signals from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to see what they tell the party to do, because I think the voices that you're going to hear from the electeds, whether they come out and say, we want an open process versus

like we believe Kamala is our choice, it might create another sort of war between the Congressional Black Caucus, maybe frontliners, Democratic frontliners, those people that come from battleground states, swing districts. And you're going to see polling, like how is she really doing up against Trump? Because the New York Times had a poll last week that showed her really only up one point against Trump, pretty much at the same levels that Biden was at, you know, in the margin of error, give or take.

So you're going to see leaking polls come out in the next week or so about how Kamala really fares. You're going to see a lot of polls about how Gretchen does, about how Josh Shapiro does, Wes Moore. Everybody, there's going to be a lot of leaking and fighting. And I mean, I wish I could predict exactly what's going to happen, but I think the knives are still out. Yeah, like what happens if there's a poll that Whitmer and Shapiro are by far the best combo to actually defeat Trump?

Like, here's what all the data says. If we do this, this is how we win. Or you could stay down the road you're going. Brian, do you agree with that? There's already a Kamala campaign happening. Do you think the knives will stay out, Brian? Oh, it is. And look, the people that maneuvered Biden off the ticket now have to...

A, help pick a Democrat to replace him, and B, try to carry that Democrat over the finish line. Because you know, for Nancy Pelosi, for Chuck Schumer, for George Clooney, for this whole constellation of people that got together and said, we have to do this unprecedented thing. Now they're going to be looked at, okay, we did it. Now what do we do? Now how do we win? You got us to this place, now how do we win?

And that to me is going to be fascinating because these are the people who, again, pulled off this switch in midstream that we've never seen before, never in the modern age anyway. And now they have to figure out what the next move is. Well, and then the other piece of that, look, I mean, there's always distrust with politics, right?

But if you're on the Democratic side and you're just looking at how they've handled not just the last couple of weeks and months, but really the last year and a half, two years where they had the scenario that the new is coming in 2024.

And they're doing stuff to, you know, they're kind of hiding Biden. Like to borrow a sports analogy, it's like the quarterback where you're only having him make the throws that he can make. And they're just, some of the stuff that even has come out in the past three, four months about how he's had less cabinet meetings than just about anybody. And it just feels like they've been very carefully shielding him.

from being out there too much. And now it seems like with reason. So that to me, just watching from afar, it feels like there's real distrust now with the whole party. How do they win that back? How do they make people feel like, well, wait, you guys just did this for the last 18 months. Why should we trust you now? What are the steps to fix that? It's a really, really good question because a lot of people argue that they've lost the moral argument, right? Against Trump because of this. Right.

because they've for so long told everyone it's okay, it's okay. But privately, they've been like, let's just get him over the finish line. Just get our 81-year-old candidate, amble him over, whatever it takes. So that's hard. And that's another argument for having a primary and not making it seem like the party poobahs picked her. Because that's exactly what the Republicans are already saying, that they cheated. This was rigged. They were always going to say it was rigged. Doesn't matter. We know that. But they're going to say if...

Kamala Harris is picked, that this is just, you know, the Democrats trying to, you know, I think they're actually using the word cheat at this point. And it's not democratic. Like, they're the ones who are supposedly, you know, the preservers of democracy. Well, look at them just picking a candidate that the delegates didn't even vote for. And so that's the narrative that they have to fight against. And that's another argument for having an open process. Now, the Republicans were always going to say that

that the election was rigged.

That's what they do, as we saw in 2020. But I don't know. I mean, like, I spoke to Trump's political director last week, and he claims, oh, we're ready for any generic D, essentially any generic Democrat. But I don't believe that. It's really hard to change a campaign, especially with only four months left. Like you said, the entire thing has been predicated around Biden. I really think that... I really think Kamala could beat him as well. I think basically a lot of... Pretty much like...

any democratic candidate not any but he's not in a position he's not that may have been their victory party at the rnc let me just say that yeah um he's in for something and they know that and i i wonder i wonder what they're thinking right now i know they've already started attacking kamala harris and they started attacking gretchen whitmer but they're yeah they're probably this is gonna get out of it yeah yeah brian what happens if if it's the reverse if

Trump names Don Jr. as his vice president and he's going down the road. He gets all this money. He gets delegates. And then last minute, it's like, I'm actually not running. I'm going to hand all this stuff over to Don Jr. People probably would have been like, you're cheating. Right? Yeah. Um, I'm not sure Don Jr. was going to win an electoral college majority. Uh, Don Jr. may have some unvetted things in his past that we haven't quite explored as a nation. Um,

No, and just a terrorist one, I would think, you know, there are a lot of anti-Trump elements in the universe that desperately want to beat Donald Trump in November and have had a hard time getting excited because they've got the wrong guy at the head of the ticket. So I think the Democrats hope will be that whoever they pick, whether it's Kamala, whether it's somebody else, that there is an immediate,

galvanizing moment that says, okay, finally, somebody, the money comes in quickly, the enthusiasm goes up. Now, again, the Biden camp's losing argument was anybody but Trump was going to get it done, right? Door number one, Trump, door number two, somebody else. It didn't work. But the Democrats will hope that just having somebody else, Donald Trump's never won the popular vote. Just having somebody else on the ballot will help them win in November.

I think it could be a unifying moment. I personally do. I think it could be good for the Democrats. You're a glass half full person. Look at you. It's definitely going to be something. Yeah, it's either going to be a unifying moment or it's going to be a disaster. I feel like those are the only options yet. Yeah, I hope that was the last three weeks for the Democrats. I mean, it could not possibly be. We don't think, anyway. You say that. Well, they'll be fighting and then they will rise up again, I think.

Or maybe not. They have to get their shit together though soon. The more this drags out, the worse it is for the party. And that's why a floor fight in Chicago is not great. One of the many parallels with sports and politics is we talk about legacy a lot. The legacy of this, the legacy of that, legacy of this guy's career.

And with Biden, that was a word that got thrown around a bunch the last three and a half weeks, right? What do you want your legacy to be? You have a chance to be a hero. Yeah, you have a chance to be. You have a chance to do the right thing. Just the reverse psychology of this whole last three weeks was hilarious because we don't want to pressure Biden. We don't say, sir, you must stand aside. We want to, and this was included a lot of people who worked for Obama and other administrations, say, sir, you have a chance to do something great here. Right. Yeah.

step aside and let somebody else try to win the race. Yeah, because if you're just talking about career moves, there's three options, right? He steps aside and Democrats win and everybody goes, awesome, Joe Biden, man, he's a true patriot till the end. The second version is he does that and they lose anyway, but they would have lost with him. And then the third version is he stays in, gets trounced by Trump, and that becomes the first thing mentioned

in any sentence about him is that he stayed too long. But it is like, I do think one of the things about this and you think about other aspects of life is the whole concept of people not wanting to give up power and people not knowing when to leave. And you see this, like I saw this happen with David Stern in the NBA where he probably stayed like two, three years too long, right? In the last couple of years,

Adam Silver was ready to take over and he just didn't want to leave. And there was some really rocky, I remember writing like a really kind of semi-scathing column about him at one point during that, because it was just clear, like it was time for him to go. It was time for him to pass the league to somebody else. And you see that with, you know, Ginsburg. You see it with Lorne Michaels right now in SNL. Is it time for him to go? Is it not time? Should he stay until he's 90? When do you leave? And I think for a lot of people, it's the part of life that we don't maybe spend enough time talking about.

is when is your exit? It's always better to be a year too early than two years too late, right? It feels like with Biden, the move in retrospect should have been a year ago to be like, well, wait a second. I can't be the president when I'm 86. I'm already not the same guy I was in 2020. I should start thinking about the party now.

Who am I passing this to? We got to set this up. We got to do this correctly. But he didn't do it. And I think win or lose, that's going to be a huge part of his legacy after this. Correct, Tara, or you disagree? Yeah, no, I agree with you. I mean, his whole argument the entire time was I was the only one who could beat Trump, right? I beat him in 2020. Which is something Trump would say. I beat him once before.

He sounded like Trump, especially towards the end in his defiance from that leaked video that my colleague Julia Yaffe had with the House Democrats. He was like, I'm the best leader on foreign policy. Name me one other leader who is as good on NATO as I am. It was like the defiance, the way he thought of himself. It was showing this level of like egomania that I think is personally distasteful and showed...

you know, his colleagues, his Democratic colleagues, they were furious about it. They thought, who is this monster? And it's like, really, I think people are going to look back on it and think he should have gotten out of this race weeks ago. And his indecision was a drag on the party because now they've got a lot to do.

Any last thoughts, Brian? Well, yeah, you go back to, you know, October 2022, which is when Donald Trump announced he was going to run for president again. Right. So then that activates the Trump stopper urges and Biden. Ah, he's running. So I got to run again. The Democrats do a little bit better than they thought during the midterms. And so all of a sudden he's in. And then he has to face this terrible choice. What if me, the guy who stopped Trump, whose entire political identity is that is the guy who's going to let Trump back into the White House?

And that's certainly what's been rattling around his mind the last three weeks. And here we are. Mm-hmm.

What a stretch. All right, Brian, you'll be covering this on the Press Box, obviously, as we head through the summer. And Tara, somebody's got to win. When did we name that podcast? Back in January or last year? Exactly a year ago. Yeah, exactly a year ago. Yeah. Well, it was an apt title. So listen to both of those podcasts as we continue to cover this on TheRinger.com. Thanks for stopping by on a Sunday. I appreciate it.

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All right, so I know it's football season. We're gonna do football. I might do a podcast on Thursday. I wanna talk USA basketball because I've been watching all the exhibition games because I'm a psycho. I love this stuff. I love the lineup stuff. I have a lot to do. I have six things I wanna cover. So it seems like the perfect time for a special part of today's episode brought to you by Michelob Ultra, the official beer sponsor of Team USA, who we're about to talk about. Win or lose, you're bound to enjoy the ride with a good beer in hand. And Michelob Ultra is good beer.

It's crisp, light, refreshing, only 95 calories. Order yourself an ultra six pack while we unpack six major things going on in the world of basketball right now. Five of them for me involve Team USA. Okay, here we go. The big thing I love with the Olympics, and we get this every four years, and you basically get to go back, you can go back to the games they played in '08 and '12 and '16 and '21 and now this year, the hierarchy of the team. You know I love this stuff. This is my jam.

There's usually three indispensables on the team that emerge and one like pivotal proven bench guy, which is basically you think of it as the mellow wade spot and it was Tatum in 21. But what happens is they can talk all they want, 10 guys, 12 guys, everybody's going to play, everybody's playing 20 minutes, but there's always a game that's

when all of a sudden, holy shit, we need to win this, and then the minutes start to resemble an actual structure of an NBA game. When you think about, like, there's 200 minutes total in an international game. You can only play five guys. The most anybody could play is 40 minutes. So if you go back, the four biggest games they've played

since '08, which was the '08 gold medal game, USA 118, Spain 107. And LeBron, Wade, Kobe, CP3, and Bosh are all in the 20s for minutes. Melo, Howard, and Darren Williams are the first three. Kidd plays 11.

Prince plays eight. Boozer and Red get DNPs. So already two guys are just out. When it really comes to nut crunch time, two or three guys are getting pushed out. 2012 gold medal, USA 107, Spain 100. KD plays 38 minutes, which was an amazing year for KD. It's 2012 finals. He feels like he's going to be an MVP at some point really soon, even though LeBron's the best guy in the league. KD plays 38 of the 40 minutes. They basically can't keep him out of this game.

CP3 29, LeBron 29, and got in a little foul trouble. And I was at this game and we were just sitting there in the fourth quarter. LeBron's at the bench. They can't stop the game. And we're sitting there having a heart attack because they can't get LeBron back in the game. And then Kobe, who was kind of like old man Kobe at that point, it was like, ah, we're going to lean on him when we need him. And he ends up playing 26, the

Kevin Love plays 18 and plays crunch time against the Gasols down the stretch. And then for the bench, it was Williams. Westbrook played nine minutes. Chandler played eight. Iguodala, Harden, Davis barely played. So they really went nine guys, but really it was six. 2016 semifinal game was the big game that year. USA 82, Spain 76. You know who played the most minutes that game?

Klay Thompson, 35 minutes out of the 40. KD played 30. And then DeAndre Jordan, I bet you didn't have him in your bingo card. He played 27. Melo, 25. Kyrie, 24. And then George, Lowry, Butler, and Cousins were the bench. Draymond Green and DeRozan basically got bumped. So that was that. And then 21 was the most recent one, three years ago. USA, 87. France, 82 in the gold medal game. KD, once again, the greatest Olympic player we've had.

35 minutes plays the most. Drew Holiday was the second best player that year. He played 29. They had kind of a hodgepodge that year because Dame, Bam, Booker, Tatum, they never knew what they were expecting from these guys. So Dame, Bam, Booker, and Tatum were all in the 20s. Green, Zach Levine, Middleton, 16, 14, and 10 minutes. And then JaVale McGee, Jeremy Grant, Keldon Johnson did not play. So the point is,

You have the indispensable. The indispensable is an 08, Kobe, LeBron, Melo, Wade off the bench. 2012, KD, LeBron, CP3, Melo off the bench. 2016, KD, Klay, DeAndre Jordan, Melo off the bench. 2021, KD and Drew are the only indispensables, Tatum off the bench, and then HodgePodge, depending on who looked good. This brings me to 2024. Who are the indispensables? LeBron, Curry, and Anthony Davis.

I think that's our three and Tatum in that mellow Wade bench spot. And then probably drew holiday as the glue guy, defensive guard, shutdown person, just kind of do everything. I think those are the five guys that get the most minutes.

So the most interesting thing about that to me is the LeBron piece because heading into the Olympics, I didn't know if it was going to be LeBron. We're so happy for you to be here. You're, you encourage the faces of the team. Maybe we'll bring it off the bench as a six man. Maybe you'll start, you'll play 20 minutes, a little like Kobe in 2012. It's not like that at all. They've given him the car keys. He's the point forward of this team. You can see it against the, in, against South Sudan. Um,

He's the point forward, Curry's playing off him. Steve Kerr basically is using LeBron in this crazy 19.0 version of Draymond Green, where he's using him a little like how he uses Draymond, but with the added bonus that LeBron can shoot and he's one of the three greatest players of all time. He's the leading scorer in points in NBA history. So you have that, but you also have all the stuff you can still do with Curry and Draymond, but you just do it through LeBron.

And Davis has been the other indispensable guy because they don't have anyone else like him on the team with his size.

his defense, his shot blocking, his rebounding, his energy, his ability to jump out on shooters. And you watch him compared to Embiid, who's not totally in shape, who's too slow to get out on shooters. And you could basically use him as your overpowering 2006 Shaq guy in spurts. But if you're actually trying to lock teams down, you need Davis, not Embiid, which brings me to the second part of the six pack. Anthony Davis versus Embiid. Embiid won an MVP. Anthony Davis has never won an MVP.

Davis won the 2020 title and was in the mix there for finals MVP, but LeBron had an awesome finals. He made the 2023 Eastern Conference Finals as well. Embiid has lost six of his last nine playoff series. Embiid has never played 12 playoff games in a postseason. Embiid has never played 70 games in a season. Embiid has played 433 games in the last 10 years. Davis has missed the playoffs six times.

Davis has either been, I'm having an awesome year or you probably forgot what happened to me this year. Davis for his career in the playoffs is averaging 25 and 10

in 50 plus playoff games, which puts him in the company of these guys since the merger. Giannis, Dirk, Jokic, Hakeem, Anthony Davis, that's it. So he's been a really good playoff guy. He's been averaging 26 and 12, 54% field goal for the last few years. But then you look like from 2013 to 24, he's 83rd in playoff games. This century, he's 169th in playoff games played.

So he's had this career that's both been really good, but at the same time, I'm not sure it shouldn't have been better. And then you have Embiid who, you know, you go through his last seven playoff years, loses to Boston in round two, had an orbital fracture and a concussion that year.

Loses to Toronto in game seven in 2019. The Kawhi shot. Had knee tendonitis that year. Swept by Boston in 2020. Nothing wrong with him other than Ben Simmons was in exit stage right. 2021, loses to Atlanta in seven. They're up 3-1. He has a torn meniscus in that series. 2022, lost to Miami in six. Was tied 2-2 and then they lost the last two. He had a torn thumb ligament, orbital fracture, and a concussion that series.

2023 was the worst one, round two, up 3-2 in the series. They end up losing to Boston at 7-8, a sprained knee that year. And then 2024, round one, loses to the Knicks in six, torn meniscus. I bring this up because he gave this New York Times interview where they talked about greatest player of all time stuff. And the interviewer said, is the implication that you think you would be in the greatest player of all time conversation about the injury problems? And Beat said,

I think so. I think I'm that talented. I obviously need to win championships and to win championships, you need other guys. You can't do it by yourself. I want to win so bad, but if you don't, you just got to understand that as long as you care about the right stuff, if it doesn't happen, maybe it wasn't meant to be. Which brings me to my third piece of the six pack. With Embiid, it's all about the injuries. So he's self-aware enough to say like, yeah, this could have gone better. I had some bad luck. It's too bad.

At the same time, Joel Embiid, there's bad luck and then there's the question, is your body totally meant to play basketball? Which is a question we wonder about a lot, especially with big guys. We wondered about it with Yao Ming. We wondered about it with Bill Walton. Like,

And Bede is talking about himself as like, without the injuries, I'd be in the greatest player of all time conversation. Bill Walton actually did have the injuries and would have been in the greatest player of all time conversation. And we saw when he was healthy, he actually ran through the league and won the title and probably would have had a dynasty. When you're talking about greatest player of all time, first of all, that's ludicrous because

If you're not durable, you can't be in the conversation. And he's never been durable even before he had all these injuries the last seven years ago. So the better question is, could he have been in the greatest center of all-time conversation? Which again...

Now you're competing against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who wasn't just one of the three best players of all time, who didn't just have one of the great start to finish high school to college to NBA careers we've ever seen, who won all kinds of MVPs, who won, I think, six titles by the time it was said and done, but was also astoundingly durable. And over and over again, if you look at the greatest of all time, durability is a big piece of it. It's a big piece of the LeBron case right now.

LeBron might not be able to beat the ceiling of Michael Jordan. He might not have as many MVPs and rings as Kareem, but his case would be the career case. It would be just for 20 plus years, the durability that he had, the reliability, he was just always there over and over again and really was a little bit indestructible.

And Embiid was the opposite. So Embiid said in this interview, you think about it, the thing that stopped me all these years is just freak injuries. Every single playoffs, regular season, people falling on my knee or breaking my face twice. It's always freak injuries at the wrong time. That's a piece of it. It doesn't explain what happened in 14 and 15 and why he only played 31 games in the first three seasons of his career. And I do have sympathy for him because it sucks when an athlete doesn't reach his potential. But

All you have to do is watch him. All you have to do is look at pictures of him when he was at Kansas for that one year before he entered the lottery, what he looked like when he was even working out for teams versus what he looks like, what he looked like last season, what he looks like at the Olympics now where he's just not in the same shape.

And if you talk about big guys, one of the ways to not get injured is to be in awesome shape. And I don't think anybody's watched Embiid the last couple of years and said, wow, that guy's in amazing shape. He's always carrying too much weight. And that's one of the ways you get hurt if you're a big guy. We have so much evidence of this. We saw this happen with Shaquille O'Neal in the second half of his career, where you can get through with athletic talent and overpowering people and all that stuff.

But once you hit your 30s and you're carrying all that weight, that weight's not going away. And now some stuff starts happening. And this goes back to the self-awareness piece. What I would have wanted to hear Embiid say is, I could have been one of the best players ever. I had some bad luck.

And I also feel like there's some things I would do over again. I would be in better shape. I would try to condition my body better so I could absorb some of this stuff. And it just doesn't seem like he gets it. Even he had some quote later about continuity. On the one hand, I love that we have candid athletes. On the other hand, his career made more sense after I read the interview. Then he says later,

And this became a big story this week where he says, he's talking about Team USA and he says, you got to understand most of those guys are older. The LeBron now is not the LeBron that was a couple of years ago. So it's a big difference. Everyone would also tell you, and you can see for yourself, the athletic LeBron, dominant that he was a couple of years ago is not the same that he is now. I think people get fooled by the names on paper, but those names have been built throughout their career and now they're older. They're not what they used to be. That's a crazy thing to say about somebody you're about to play in the Olympics with. And conversely,

If they were reporters, went to LeBron and said, Hey, what'd you think about what Embiid said to you about how you're not the same guy? And LeBron said, you know, he's probably right to some degree. I'm 40 years old. I've been in the NBA forever, but you know, I feel like I can get 95% there. But if I was Joe, I would be worried about trying to stay in. I wouldn't be worrying about other players. I'd be worried about me. We wish Joe was in shape. He's only playing 14 to 16 minutes a game for us at team USA.

I wish he was in better shape. I'm sure if you talk to anybody in the Sixers and gave them true serum, like in true lies, I'm sure all of them would say, we wish Embiid was in better shape. So I guess I'm pushing back on that could have been the greatest thing

player everything because we've just never seen the off the court work discipline from him that all the other great guys had, that Jordan had, that Kareem had, that LeBron had, that Bill, even Bill Russell in the 60s, 50s and 60s when, you know, nobody had any of this stuff and he was still out there all the time. The only time he got hurt was the 1958 finals. So just wish Joel Embiid was a little more self-aware. The fourth thing on the six pack,

The 12th Olympic spot and the concept of this, which is going to dive into Jaylen Brown in one second. But when you're picking a team, as we talked about earlier at the minutes, you know, you're going to have that one game where only nine guys, maybe 10 are going to play. So they're picking this team. They know they're building around AD and Bam and KD and Tatum and LeBron and Curry and Edwards and Drew is the glue guy. So they know they have eight guys. Then Embiid decides he's going to play.

And there's some benefits to that because there's going to be moments like against France, you're going to need him in the Gobert or Wemba Nyama matchup. You're going to need the size. There's going to be moments, especially if you put him out there against the right teams, like a team like Canada that doesn't have a lot of size, you can bring him out against second units and Embiid just becomes unguardable for four or five minutes. So there's a case that he should be on the team like...

Would you be better off just putting Chad Holmgren on here and he doesn't care if he plays or not, but when he plays, he can at least stretch four? Maybe, but I'm not going to argue with having Embiid. There's Halliburton versus Brunson was a big argument. And I think the reason they didn't have Brunson ultimately, even though he's a better player than Halliburton, is because they wanted somebody who would have been fine not playing. And if you read the tea leaves, the South Sudan game, Halliburton didn't really play. And I think he's going to be one of the odd men out.

Jalen Brunson, would he be good with that? I have Jalen Brunson as the sixth best guy in the league. Is he good with just getting shoved to the side? Probably not. Derek White is in that kind of shutdown defender, backup guard defense spot that you have to have because all these teams have these fast guards. Teams can go small. You just need guards and you need defense. So White gets that spot over Jalen Suggs, Alex Crusoe, whoever you want to talk about there. And then that last spot, Jalen Brown,

You're basically talking about him versus Devin Booker versus Donovan Mitchell, in my opinion. And Mitchell was never really in the mix for this. So it was always Booker. And Booker was on the 21 team, played a lot of minutes. They picked Booker. Booker was in there early. And Booker's a very good international player. But once you do that, now you have KD, you have Tatum, you have LeBron, you have Curry, you have Edwards, you have Drew, and you have Booker. You don't really have minutes for Jalen Brown, who just won the finals MVP, who's just on a title team. And now...

You're gonna add him to this team last minute 'cause Kawhi gets shut down and he's not gonna play and that's gonna go good from a chemistry standpoint? It's not. The white pick was a chemistry pick.

That's it. White's not going to care if he doesn't play or not. Jalen Brown now playing is a little bit of a different. It's a little bit embarrassing. He probably thinks he's on the same level as KD and Tatum and LeBron at this point, and he might not be wrong. But to me, it made sense not to have him because it brings up all the chemistry stuff that you want to avoid. Which brings me to the fifth thing I want to talk about. Everyone knew Derek White was going to get the Kawhi spot for a couple months. I knew in May.

Um, if Kawhi somehow wasn't ready to go, by the way, tough blow for the Clippers, it wasn't going to be Jalen. It was going to be Derek White. And I think Jalen knew this too, but yet he, he said something anyway. And it was what the Celtics have had a couple of moments during this summer, right? Everything goes right in the playoffs. They win the title. What happens right after all of a sudden the, the owner is selling the team WIC with Grosbeck.

That makes me nervous. Now we have a little instability at the top. The Porzingis injury, which he played on in game five, and then it comes out. He's out for six months. Oof. Well, he's not back until December. Well, to me, that means February. I'm just assuming we're not seeing Porzingis until February. That would be the safe bet to me. So you have that. So now the Celtics, it's already hard enough to repeat. Now you have two major things going against you. And then you have this Jalen thing, which...

You know, I don't want to throw a tantrum about it, but I didn't love it. A lot of people are asking me over the last couple weeks, what do you think of Jalen saying what he said about how he, you know, basically insinuating he should have made it over White, who's his teammate. And my answer was I didn't like it because it wasn't the kind of thing that would have happened before they won the title. Before they won the title, there was a selflessness to that team. That was one of the things that made it special.

And even though Jalen's right, and he should be one of the 12 guys in this team, if we were just picking a team of the 12 best guys, he should be on the team if we're doing that. But that's not what the team was. They're trying to do all these different things with the team, and White made more sense for it. So if he's going to express displeasure, if he's going to blame Nike or whatever, you have to do it through the prism of Derek White's an awesome player, and he was a great choice.

It's upsetting to me that I wasn't given a chance to compete for one of the forward spots. Some way to frame it that doesn't make it seem like you're kind of shitting on your teammate because he got picked over you. That's not the kind of stuff that was happening before they won the title. So as you know, I love The Secret, which Isaiah Thomas revealed in 1989. I based it as a big premise around my basketball book when we did the book of basketball stuff. I brought it back.

And this was something he talked about during the '89 finals when he was in a press conference. And Isaiah said, "I looked at Seattle who won one year and Houston who got to the finals one year. They both self-destructed the next year. How come? I read Pat Riley's book Showtime. He talks about the disease of more. A team wins it one year and the next year every player wants more minutes, more money, more shots, and it kills them. Our team has been up at the championship level four years now.

We could have easily self-destructed. So I read what Riley was saying and I learned. I didn't want what happened to Seattle and he was snapping us, but it's hard not to be selfish. The art of winning is complicated by statistics, which for us becomes money, but you've got to fight that, find a way around it. And I think we have, right? So you've heard me read that. And then the other thing he said was lots of times on our team,

You can't tell who the best player in the game was because everybody did something good. That's what makes us so good. The other team has to worry about stopping eight or nine people instead of two or three. It's the only way to win. The only way to win. It's the way the game was invented. There's more to that. You've got to create an environment that won't accept losing. I would argue that described what the Celtics were last year. There was selflessness to them. They didn't care who scored. They just wanted to win. They didn't care who got the attention. They just wanted to win. They wanted to show up.

play for each other. And it was one of my favorite Celtics teams ever. And then a month and a half later, we have stuff like this. And it just makes me nervous because I think it's really hard to repeat. Once you win, you got what you wanted. Now people start veering toward what's best for them. And that's what the Jalen thing felt to me. I hope I'm wrong. And I hope this team's able to snap out of it. But if you're talking about disease and more champs,

67 Sixers, 71 Bucks, 75 Warriors, 77 Blazers, 79 Sonics, 80 Lakers, 92 Bulls, they ended up winning. 00 Lakers, they ended up winning. 04 Pistons, 06 Heat, 2010 Lakers, 16 Cavs, 18 Warriors, and really the 22 Warriors, I have to count because the Jordan Poole-Draymond thing happened right after, which was another one of those moments where you're like, eh, that's a bad sign.

I'm just pointing this out. I'm not panicking yet about the Celtics. I think they're fine. They have everybody coming back. Hopefully Porzingis will come back before the All-Star break. But I do wonder if like next June, if they don't win and we're looking back, we're like, man, remember June and July when like that happened and that happened, that happened. And it does feel a little piece of that. I wish Jalen didn't say that.

And I love Jalen Brown. And he's one of my favorite Celtics of the last 20 years. And I just think it was a bad moment. I don't think he should have done it. Last thing on the six pack. I'm going to make this my superior take. And it plays off what we just talked about with Boston. Just some little red flags. The Milwaukee Bucks are 15 to one on FanDuel and Giannis is six to one on it for MVP. And they had the year from hell last year, right? Name it, it went wrong.

Nobody has beaten a healthy Giannis since the 2022 Celtics beat them in seven, thanks to an insane game six performance by Jason Tatum. And if you go look at that box score, there's no Chris Middleton in that series. Giannis had 46 and 20 in that game. It's not like he wasn't doing anything. And Tatum ends up just leaving his body, wins, go to game seven. Grant Williams hits a bunch of threes. All of a sudden the bucks are out. And the next two years,

A bunch of dumb shit happens and Giannis isn't healthy in either playoffs. And now he's 30 years old. Dame's 33, Middleton's 33. And yet I kind of like where the Bucs are because they're under the radar now. Nobody's talking about them, right? Even think about the Olympics. The Bucs are irrelevant in the Olympics basketball discussion. The two teams that in the summer got the most attention for moves in the East were Philly and the New York Knicks.

You have Orlando got better and Milwaukee is just kind of like, yeah, yeah, they won in 21, but now they're old. And so you have Dame coming back from a year from hell. No question. Um, this is probably the biggest season of his career. Cause if it doesn't happen this year, I don't know if it happens for him as a top two guy. They got a couple of breaks. Porzingis being out for half the year and beads out of shape. The Knicks never got a center. The Knicks, by the way, I agree with that. They could probably get a center in January, February. Um,

The big thing that I think slipped under the radar, they signed a bunch of guys who can play in a game seven for minimum contracts over the summer. They signed Delon Wright, who I've always liked, who can absolutely play in a big game. Gary Trent, who was just sitting there for somebody to steal, a 3&D guy,

who hasn't really played with a point guard for the last couple of years. Right. And it's just been on these weird Toronto teams that keep changing their identities. But I don't, that guy's unafraid. I don't mind Gary Trent. And then Prince on the Lakers who I didn't think had a great year, but guys have a tendency to not have awesome years sometimes in that LeBron AD infrastructure as a ninth guy, he's going to be better than Jay Crowder and whoever they're going to have Conant and coming back. They still have Portis and, uh,

And I kind of like their nine. And the big thing for me, Giannis, who in the last six years for MVP finished first, first, fourth, third, third, and fourth. For the last six years, he's 30, 12, and six, just every season. And from a perception standpoint, Jokic passed him, Luka passed him, Wemby's coming, the Celtics have the best team. And he's just kind of over here.

He hasn't really played since March, and I just am expecting some insane Giannis, I'm taking back my turf territory. Sometimes when I talk about the Celtics, people think I'm doing reverse jinxes. People in my life, they're like, oh, you're just saying this because you're trying to jinx whoever. I'm the most worried about the Bucks in the East. That's where I've landed. I've had a little bit of a vacation the last few weeks.

The Bucs are the scariest team to me. I'm not that worried about Philly. I think that's going to be, they have two of their top three are injury potential guys. They're throwing a whole bunch of dudes together. I still have some questions about Paul George and Philly, how that's going to play out over an eight month span. The Knicks, there's going to be some weird minute stuff with them with bringing Randall back with who's going to finish games. They don't have enough size. I think they're really going to miss Hartenstein. Are they going to get the same healthy season for Brunson?

And then you have Milwaukee, which is going to be stable. You would dock out in the coaching staff like, like Missoula did over last summer and 15 to one on FanDuel. Normally you don't get good odds on teams, but that to me, that should be 10 to one. And that was the one that jumped out to me. And then the Celtics over under for wins on FanDuel is 58 and a half, which just seems too high to me. If they're not going to have Porzingis for at least half the season, that feels like to me, that should be maybe in the 54 range. Anyway, watch out for the Bucs.

I said last year, don't watch out for the bucks. I'm not buying it. This year, I'm a little more intrigued. Anyway, that was today's six major things. And remember, get yourself a six-pack of Michelob Ultra Superior Light Beer, an official beer sponsor of Team USA. It's refreshing, crisp, only 95 calories. And here's another reason to like it. Michelob Ultra is giving you the chance to take home the gold.

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What's up, everybody? Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, Bill Simmons. We had to get it on. We are here at BJ's on Alvarado at 2 a.m.,

to talk about the distinct possibility that we might be getting heat to uh it's july 18th when we're recording this on july 16th michael mann talked to the la times he premiered this whole crazy website his archives which is like his own film school his own like it's it's an incredible database when am i gonna be at this point in my career where i'm just unleashing

Giant massive archives Uncut page two columns Yeah That sounds good Let's do that right now And anyway He said to the LA Times That he hopes to be Shooting Heat 2 By the end of this year Or the beginning of next year So He basically said I had to get it on Yeah

There's been strong rumors that this is like Austin Butler is in this movie. So this is becoming like increasingly a reality. Catching Austin Butler at this moment Austin Butler's having. Yes. And that he would be playing Christian Haralas. He would be playing the Val Kilmer part.

So the lead would be Chris. That is half of the Heat 2 novel. So this is going to be based on the novelization of this idea. It was Meg Gardner and Michael Mann co-wrote this novel, Heat 2. Part of it is a prequel to Heat, and it's Neil and Vince in Chicago and in the West kind of taking down scores and stopping guys who take down scores. And then half of it is Chris in South America after Heat.

So after he, yeah. Is it going to be young Neil and Chris and, and Vince in Chicago and around there. And then it's going to be split in half. So it's one or the other, or it could be both. Yeah. Godfather two parallel universe. Yes. See, I intentionally was trying not to read about any of this. Cause you want to go in fresh. I'm worried. I was wondering about like, you guys are, you guys are the counterweights to my enthusiasm for this.

How dare you? Well, you're worried. I think that you've expressed some cynicism about late period Michael Mann. I'm worried the same way I'd be worried if Larry Bird was like, I'm thinking about playing again. I shot in the backyard yesterday and it felt great. And I think I could be a stretch four. That would make me worried. You are not a fan of Ferrari.

I don't know how strongly I could say that I wasn't a fan of Ferrari. Wow. It was exceptionally, exquisitely well done. And I almost went into a coma. Okay. I don't think you would have that problem with heat, too. I would have said I wouldn't have that problem with Ferrari. Yeah. How are you feeling about this? Very torn. Michael Mann, does he share a birthday with Joe Biden? They're roughly the same age. That's not ideal. It's tough. It's hard to make movies.

When you get in your 80s. So Michael Mann's not allowed to make movies, but Ridley Scott and Francis Coppola are? It's not I'm not allowed. It's like this is sacred IP. This is like if Coppola's like Godfather 4 is happening. It's very similar to Gladiator 2. And the jury's out on Gladiator 2. I'm very excited for Gladiator 2. If he too is happening, I would be there opening day. I like Austin Butler. Yeah, let's all say we're all going to be there. I'm in. I'm in.

But what does it do? Thanks, guys. Thanks for going to Heat 2. What else am I doing? What does it do to not just Heat's legacy? It's dangerous. But the 5 Heat, the 6 Heat, the 7 Heat, like all the plans that you guys have. And also, why aren't we involved? That's the bigger question for me. If you're going to do Heat 2, like...

I'm right fucking here. And CR is right fucking there. Yeah. Like we should be involved some way. Like, is there a whole backstory of Dennis Haysbert, the chef character? Yeah.

Pre prison or maybe in prison and he's just like there's a whole prison basketball. Is that what you came out of heat wondering? No, I'm going backwards. I'm like, let's let's fucking go back. Let's go back for one second So because you have podcasted about heat three times you think you should be creatively involved four times In the execution of heat - yes, you know what it brings up a good idea though. I yeah Frankly, yes, would you be more or less excited about?

If this was executive produced, maybe even written by Michael Mann, but directed by someone else? No. No, because I think the directing is the one thing he's still really good at. The race sequences in Ferrari are sick. He still has that. There's no question about it. He still has that. I've read the book. It's okay. Yeah. It's not... It's okay. Is it good enough to sustain? Are you saying that because of the story or because of the writing?

Because I think the story is actually pretty cool. Like, you could just look, we have to accept the fact that no matter what, something else about Heat will get made while we're alive. Like, this will become IP. They will be like, someone out there is going to make a Heat adjacent story or Heat sequel or Heat prequel. Like, there's just no chance this is not being sold off at some point. So I would just as soon have Michael Mann do it.

Even if it's black hat level. Let me pose a hypothetical to you. So do you think Bird could play 10 minutes for the Pacers? Let's say you open up the Holiday Reporter tomorrow morning. There's a story in development, Cruising 2, starring Al Pacino. Cruising 2? Current Pacino or de-aged Pacino? Looking back on his career. Cruising 2. And then we're recasting...

someone into Pacino in the 80s, but we're making a new story. He's now really experimenting with both murder and his sexuality. Right. Are you like, hell yeah, we need more cruising? No, I'm not. And to me, the better analogy is Godfather 4.

Where Coppola's like, let's go back one more time. He's just at dinner with somebody and they say... Like, I'll make you whole from Megalopolis. I'm going to pay you all back. The right party guest is just going, you ever think about what would happen to Corleone's now? He's like, you know what happened? And then all of a sudden he's sketching out and now we have Godfather 4. Like, sometimes it's okay for IP to just end.

I agree with you, but it's, since it's never going to, or it won't at least in this era, I'd rather Michael Mann do it, I think. Listen, we support the Michael Mann franchise. I think we've done all of his movies on the rewatchables, except for like four. And if he's going to do it, we're going to support it. It just makes me nervous. There's like five directors out there that I'd be like, I'm kind of curious what you would do with this. Like,

Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, people who have been obviously very influenced by it. If it's like Michael Mann is working with Nolan and they're figuring out he too, now my nipples are hard. Interesting. Rock hard.

Is that like a new scale we can create? Like a hardness scale of Bill's nipples? No, but it's, you know, that part's really interesting to me of Mann working with a younger, like really peaking great filmmaker and collaborating with them. But also like, doesn't sound like Michael Mann's that much fun to collaborate with. I don't know. He's kind of a, kind of a...

That's not the barometer. That's not the test we use for whether or not directors are great, though. I just think some people are solo acts that do their own shit. I can't see him taking a younger person. Oh, I see what you mean. Like working with a partner. Yeah, he kind of does his own thing. Your best quality, and you have many great qualities, but your best quality is your loyalty. And this is a true show of your loyalty. His worst quality is real estate. His best quality...

Just all things real estate? No, he's just been trying to get me to buy a house for years. He just doesn't get it. But he doesn't understand. In 30 seconds, I may need to drop everything if I feel the heat around the corner. And in this case, it would be a barstool con. When you're barstool Chris. Where's Chris? He's in Chicago. Oh, no. Why is he there? Here's another thing. Okay. How popular do we actually think heat is?

It's certainly the foundation of this podcast and we love it. And in our universe, it's one of the great movies ever made. But does everyone feel that way? Like if Heat 2 comes out, is it as big as Barbie? No, I'm just, but I do think Sean, what, what is your, you're a little more rational with Heat. What is Heat 2 in the theaters? When is it released? What month does it come out? What's the best marketing plan for it?

I think it's an October movie that might get some awards consideration, but is mostly just like a crowd-pleasing play. It's a movie for adults. It's probably going to cost north of $200 million to get all of the talent on board and the scope of the story. Is there another bank robbery?

I mean, he... There are robberies in Heat 2, yes. He has to. I think just to live up to the billing of the movie. I think it's like simultaneously a big hit and a cult movie at the same time. The cult aspect of it makes it feel bigger than it is because the people who love it live by it. Talk about it a lot. The stakes are frightening to me. One of the most disappointing experiences of my life, not movies, but just life. Well, that's probably a little overboard. But...

Another 48 hours. I was so upset after. I understand. And I was just like, oh, we're doing this. We're bringing back Reggie and Jack Case. It's my favorite movie ever. And then it just was like, fuck, man. If they Irishman De Niro and Pacino, I would not want it. I would point to the underperformance of Furiosa and say, careful what you wish for. A lot of people love Furiosa.

I was not as high on it as some people were, but the appetite for that movie was not as big as some people thought there was. Which is the fear with heat.

I'm surprised as a content lord that you're turning down the opportunity to dreamcast this movie for the next three months on your podcast. No, I mean the suggested cast of Driver. Adam Driver, Austin Butler, and Ana de Armas is a home run. That's a home run. That's three people I love seeing in movies that I think are great. And Oscar Isaac. Adam Driver, he's red hot. And Oscar Isaac. He's what? He's red hot. Gotta grab him before somebody else snaps him up. It's not a hot streak.

People love coming out for him. Did you see white noise? Listen.

Austin Butler's exciting. I don't know. Maybe the Adam Driver partnership maybe should end after Ferrari. You can't possibly be more excited about Austin Butler and Heat than you are Adam Driver and Heat. No, I like Adam Driver. He's fine. He's well-suited to Heat. Yes. He's a little too big to be either of those guys. Certainly. They'll have to put him in a hole in the ground half the time. Yeah. He's just too tall. Do we want this set in the future or the past? I would prefer it, actually. If you're asking me right now what's my...

This would be like my number one suggestion is just do the Chris Schroerles thing. And just in the future, with all due respect to Val Kilmer, just be like, it's Austin Butler is Val Kilmer the day he leaves Los Angeles.

Yeah, see, I'm fine with that because I think TV shows and movies are always afraid to do that and to pick up something with a different actor. And I don't think they should be. That show is way closer to Black Hat than it is Heat. Because that story in the novel is closer to international crime syndicates. And we think that's a good idea for Heat, too. Bill and I love Black Hat. I tried again.

It took me like seven years to like Black Cat. Did you watch it thinking of my cut while you were watching it? No. When I watched the director's cut. What happened when we did the Black Cat pod? Top five least successful pod we've ever released? It didn't do well. On the feed? It didn't do well. It didn't succeed. People don't like that movie. Yeah. Because it doesn't work. But the dudes who like it, like, swear by it. Would you rather Heat was like this awesome, super well done version of a Michael Mann movie or closer to

The Den of Thieves type of cuisine. I need it to stay in the man-spiritual. I like that question, though. Which is like, is the better outcome being the B movie? Yeah. That's an interesting idea. That's where I've landed. Heat 2 with Gerard Butler? Because this would be a movie that would be prestigious and would have a big, fancy premiere. I don't want that from Heat 2.

I want like, I want like Chris being unable to give up the lifestyle and we're robbing banks again. Yeah. And that's it. The other thing, you know, when Michael calls me, I'm happy to talk to him about him. We'll see. Maybe we'll go to Dan Tannis and talk about some ideas. Not after this conversation. You won't. Fair. Um, I, I,

Really like setting this in the future and I like this model that Beverly Hills cop tapped into we're just like we're now here in 2020 contemporary there's an IP that I like and we're just going forward and would seem like the move to me is Like think of the original crew like what if a couple of them stayed together the sons and daughters Mm-hmm. Oh like like Chris's size on his kid. Yes, Chris's son is now 34 and

Sizemore's kid is in there. Maybe they're just buddies or they're at some 35th, 30th. They're TikToking from a Hollywood Hills home. Yeah, they're just like my dad or they're being part. I'll give Michael this idea, but I'll give this guy's to you now. Somebody's doing a documentary about the Heat Crew.

Right? Like a nine-parter on Netflix. Jason Aaron. And the two, inside Morris Kidd and Chris's Kidd are both scheduled for interviews at like the four seasons of Beverly Hills. And they're like one's at 1, one's at 2.30. Alex Gibney. Kind of run into each other.

And then they decide to go get coffee. And it's like, fuck it. Let's keep the legacy going. Do you think that'll have the same weight as Al Pacino and Robert De Niro sharing a scene for the first time in their careers? Austin Butler and Adam Driver, the sons of the original crew. Fantasy's in.

Sounds good. I'm in. I'm in. Heat 2, but we also get to parody the documentary world. I mean, the thing is... That's definitely a high on my priority list. Let's lampoon documentaries in Heat 2. If Heat 2 was a complete fucking fiasco D-movie that lost $180 million, I still would be like, I'm pretty pumped to see Heat 2. So the conversation is kind of moot. Can we give you percentages, Seesaw? I'm offering you...

20% chance he too is really good. 80% chance it's a fucking disaster. I'll take it. I'll take it if it's going to happen either way. I would too. What about 1090? I would say yes. And I am Will and I don't want him to be done. I have nothing to lose. I don't want him to be done and I think it's just like it's obviously something he's still very passionate about. Are you talking about Joe Biden or Michael Mann? I'm just trying to keep track. The industry part of my brain

is very dubious that a studio is going to give him $250 million. I agree with that. I think after Ferrari, that's no way that's happening. I don't think he is going to be able to get that. I hope it happens. No, I know. I agree with you. Regardless of this conversation, but I don't think that's going to happen. He's not going to be able to make this cheaply. That's not even a prediction. There's no way after Ferrari, he's getting $100 plus million to do another giant movie like that. Yeah. I just don't see it happening. Oh, this made me feel better. Well...

But I'll say what I think part of the reasoning behind all this stuff this week is he's doing the... Absolutely. He's fishing. Yeah. Absolutely. And his archives is a cool idea and a good thing. And people should check it out. I looked at it. I looked at all the Ferrari stuff. And it's fascinating. So that stuff is great. We should celebrate that. I think it's going to be heat too set in Abu Dhabi.

funded by whatever and that's how he gets the money that's inspiring stuff um bill simmons sean fantasy god see i just got bummed out well because it's like if you're gonna take my favorite movie ever made and just be like let's just carve it up among petro states yeah i'm gonna be a little bit bummed out about that do you want to hear what you want to hear or do you want to have your friends be realistic with you what do you want

Maybe it shouldn't get made then if that's the alternative. I'm sorry, Chris. I'm sorry. I would vote tread carefully with Sacred IP. I know, but they're fucking making Gladiator 2 and there's five Alien movies and six Terminator movies. I have a news flash for you guys. Gladiator 2 is probably going to be bad. My hopes are not high. Ridley Scott's 87. Well, you know what? Until we see it, we can have hope.

You know what I am excited for? Devil Wears Prada 2. All right. I think that's going to be good. Thank you for watching us. Please subscribe to Ringer Movies. What happened to Miranda?

All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Tara Palmieri. Thanks to Brian Curtis. Thanks to Jesse Lopez for producing. Thanks to Steve Cerruti as well. And thanks to Sean Fantasy and Chris Ryan. Don't forget, new Rewatchables coming tomorrow. We're doing No Way Out. That will be on Monday night. And you can watch it on the Ringer Movies YouTube channel as well. You can watch some of the clips from this podcast on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel.

I might see you later this week. I might be doing another podcast on Thursday. So stay tuned for that and enjoy the next few days.