Pick Three: Spring Sports News

0:03This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

0:16It's a triple-double for LeBron! There are few better ways in this life to escape some of the terrible burdens of life than to focus and focus for many, many hours on talented young men and women running around on a hardwood floor and throwing a large ball through a slightly larger hoop. It's early April, the climax of the college basketball season and the heart of the regular season for the pros. The New Yorker writer who walks that beat is my friend Louisa Thomas. And the other day, Louisa and I sat down to speak of important things. Louisa, let's start with something close to my heart. LeBron James, who is now, God love him, 41.

1:06And people talk about him as if he's, you know, 87. He's in his 23rd NBA season. I don't know how many games he's played, but he's got the record now by a lot. How good or not is he at the age of 41? Something extraordinary is happening, which is he has become precisely the player that the Lakers need to really become contenders in some sense. He has become the best supporting player you can possibly imagine. He's a role player now? He is a role player, but he is not just a role player. He is the role player. What does that mean? I've been watching him lately. He is flying around. He's cutting.

1:49He is moving in transition. He is getting the ball when he is in the perfect spot. The crazy thing is that he's still doing unbelievable athletic things. He's just managing to figure out when to pick his spots. And it took him a while to get to that point. But the Lakers are rolling. And, you know, let's be clear. Luka Doncic is their best player. Austin Reeves is their second best player. But what LeBron James is doing now is really unlocking their potential. by making all the right basketball plays. So he's embraced this. It's not like he's rebelled against being a role player. Because at one point, people were saying every time he steps on the court, this is earlier in the season, that the Lakers are less good.

2:34Oh, that was true. That was absolutely true. I mean, the numbers bear it out. When those three guys were on the court, the Lakers stunk. And when you took LeBron James off the court and left the other two on, they were fantastic. He's actually come to embrace this role. You know, he has arthritis. He has nerve pain in his leg. He has all the things. He's so relatable. All the things that you have. Maybe a little tinnitus.

3:01And he was very open about it. He's like, this is a sacrifice. You know, he knows what he can do individually. And the numbers bear that out, too. When those two stars are off the court and LeBron James is in charge, the Lakers are going to get. He's not going to always have the ball in his hands. But as his coach, J.J. Reddick, said, he knows that he's going to get the ball in his hands in those key moments, and he's going to be able to do something great with it. He was always a physical fitness fanatic, which is part of what got him this far. Sure. How long is he going to go? I suspect that next year is his last season.

3:33But, you know, don't quote me. I came to inform you that I don't have, like, access to his inner thoughts. And it may be that he doesn't know. So despite the fact that the Lakers are doing well in this kind of reconfigured psychology of the team, who's going all the way this year? Last year, obviously, it was the Oklahoma City Thunder, which was just an astonishing rise, this team. And so fast, so big, so versatile, so much talent on the team, and really young. They look kind of unbeatable. They were not built to win last year. They were able to win this year and next year and the year after that, too.

4:13But we have another young team who is coming for them and who has the winning record on the season matchup, which is the San Antonio Spurs, led by the future best player in the world, Victor Wimbanyama. So tell me what he does that makes him such. It's not just that he's so tall. God knows. He moves with such liquidity, and he has this unbelievable competitive instincts. And he can shoot from deep, too. I mean, he can shoot from deep. There's no way to guard this guy. He can play all five positions. But, you know, the really amazing thing, whether or not he's the best all-around player in the world, he's certainly and by far the best defensive player in the world.

4:56The other team's best players, like, don't even drive to the basket. Like, you know, the amazing thing is you look at, like, just shot selection around him. It's just like a void. He alters the shots to a crazy degree. Now, there's another team. Now, this kills me. I thought basically the Celtics, because of the injury for Jason Tatum, was going to be basically junior year abroad. Without Jason Tatum, they were terrific. And now he's back. Now, I know where you're sitting. You're sitting in Boston. I'm sitting here in New York. Just suffering, suffering. I haven't seen a championship since 1973.

5:32Tell me, how did the Celtics pull this off? You know, the front office cleared out a ton of salary, and everybody assumed it was going to be a rebuilding year. Everyone except, apparently, their coach and Jalen Brown, who is having a MVP candidate season. Jalen Brown's unbelievable. My only hope is that when Tatum came back, maybe they wouldn't play together very well. But my hope is to be dashed. Sorry to us. Totally dashed. Sorry to inform you. I think that Joe Mazul is a genius. I think that he has not only found a way to motivate the players who were still there to believe that they could win, but has figured out ways to maximize their strengths.

6:15Because he has these insights that seem to make so much sense once you see them kind of play out on the floor, but he's the only one who is figuring out how to maximize these guys' potential. All right, so I know you're high on the Celtics. I know you're high on the Pistons. You've written about the Pistons. The Spurs, goes without saying, Oklahoma City. Throw me a bone here. Do the Knicks have any shot in the world? Look, the Knicks are top five in offense, top five in defense, except that they, like, lose really badly sometimes, including to the aforementioned Detroit Pistons, let's say. All right, I get your message.

6:54I get it, I get it. We're good, but not that good. I'm talking with Louisa Thomas. More in a moment.

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9:46Let's switch to another sport, baseball, the American sport. There was a time when the top beats as a sports writer were to be covering horse racing, boxing, and baseball. Now, obviously, the NFL reigns supreme. But baseball's making some sort of comeback. And maybe one of the components of that comeback is that it's become an international phenomenon even more than it ever was. Yeah, absolutely. And we saw that during the World Baseball Classic. So you not only have a American team that has legitimate superstars, you also have a Japanese team that has a claim to being the best team in the world.

10:26You have a Venezuelan team that just won the championship in this thrilling win over the United States and, you know, beat Japan. You have, I mean, Italy. I know. Italy. Italy. I mean, let's be real. It was like New Jersey playing under Italian flag. But these guys were, a lot of the players were, you know, on the Italian team on the basis of heritage, not growing up in Rome. When I was, you know, in my first phase as a baseball fan, the Yankees were terrible. I mean, when I was a kid, they were just bad. But then under Steinbrenner, they had some extraordinary teams. But I had to hear all the time about how they bought their team.

11:09But now you have the Dodgers, who are outspending people by an astonishing amount. And I don't see how they lose with the team they've assembled. Well, they very nearly lost in the last World Series and one of the greatest World Series I have ever seen, certainly in my lifetime. So I don't— Believe me, I was rooting against them with all my heart and all my soul. A lot of people were. But I think here's one thing I will say about the Dodgers, and this is one of the ways in which I will differentiate them from your Yankees. They are not only a very wealthy team, they are a spectacularly well-run team.

11:46And they do a very good job of identifying talent. They do a very, very good job of developing. They have good coaches. They do have good departments. They have a good culture. They do all of the things right. I mean, I saw some statistic about what percentage of revenues they spent on their baseball team, and it was much higher than any other team. They're spending money that they have, but other teams have money that they could spend and are not spending it. So I'm less sympathetic to certain owners' arguments that they just can't possibly keep up. I kind of lost interest in college basketball at a certain point because as soon as I learned somebody's name, they'd gone to another school or they'd gone to the pros after a year.

12:29It's hard to form any, I don't know, loyalty or interest when it's that fluid. I think that that actually does help explain part of the rising interest in the women's game, where those players do stick around for longer. So people do form attachments to not only teams, but to players and have a sense of the arc of their career and a sense of investment. You're still, you know, seeing the best players leave after one year. So are you watching anybody in the tournament that you think in a couple of years will be breakout stars in the NBA? Oh, this tournament is unusually stocked with eventual stars.

13:08Duke has got, you know, one of the Boozers. The sons of Carlos Boozer, the NBA all-star from a while back. You know, Kansas has a guard, Darren Peterson, that a lot of people are really high on. There are actually a number of prospects. One of the reasons the NBA season has been a little bit weird is that so many teams are tanking because they're intentionally losing so they get high draft picks. No. Imagine. Name names. Who's intentionally? Teams? Yeah. Who? I mean, honestly, like, where do I begin? The Washington Wizards, the Brooklyn Nets, the Utah Jazz, the give me a team. These are harsh words, Louisa Thomas.

13:50This is cheating. That's illegal, isn't it? To tank? Yeah, I mean, this is increasingly embarrassing for the league. The league, in fact, recently fined the Utah Jazz$500 ,000 for sitting Laurie Markkinen and Jaron Jackson Jr. in the fourth quarter of closed games recently. Louisa, I hate to tell you,$500 ,000, well, is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, is not exactly decisive money for an NBA franchise. That's true. And that is actually why, you know, they're looking at reconfiguring the draft lottery to try to discourage teams. I've heard proposals that range from, you know, abolishing the draft, but I don't think they're going to do that, to trying to weight wins and in the beginning of the season, separately from wins at the end of the season, to discourage teams that are no longer in the playoff chase from just starting to lose all their games and, you know, land in one of those better spots.

14:48but you know it's a big problem for the league alright we're going to close with some bold predictions on your part who's going to win the NBA and WNBA championships the NBA I'm going to go with the San Antonio Spurs just to really embarrass myself god you're really sweet on the San Antonio Spurs I love the Spurs and have been for a long time and the WNBA the WNBA I'm going to go with your defending champion, Las Vegas Aces. Not a single New York team in the whole bunch. I know. You could make a case for Liberty. I'm savoring their win, though, still. Louisa, thanks so much. Thank you.

15:35Louisa Thomas writes the sporting scene for The New Yorker, and you can find her on basketball with recent pieces on LeBron James, Luke Cornett, The Pistons, and much more at NewYorker.com. Now, it may surprise you to hear that you can also subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, NewYorker.com. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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