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- [00:01]
Dave Dufour
Today's episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind. 24. 7 that is definitely true for us over here.
- [00:12]
Xena Keda
Sometimes 25.
- [00:13]
Dave Dufour
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- [01:20]
Sam Amick
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- [01:47]
Mike Vorkanoff
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- [02:32]
Zena Keda
Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily for November 8, 2024. Coming up, the bucks made a lineup change and it worked Paul George, he went back to the Clippers and Sam Amick was there and he's here to.
- [02:43]
Paul George
Tell you about it.
- [02:44]
Zena Keda
And then we got Mike Borkinoff to tell us about a potential sale of the Boston Celtics and why it's so uni.
- [02:54]
Xena Keda
Foreign.
- [03:00]
Zena Keda
Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Xena. Pretty slow night Thursday night, Xena, compared to the crazy Monday and Wednesday. I mean, I feel like I just caught my breath tonight. What we've got to watch out for, unfortunately, is another name added to the injury report for the 76ers. We, we saw Tyrese Maxey left that Paul George return game against the Clippers that, that the Clippers won convincingly. He left with a hamstring injury. Looks like he's going to be out a little bit, at least two weeks. And the Sixers right now they're one and six. They've yet to have all three guys play together. They only got two games with Paul George and Maxi. Joel Embiid comes back next Tuesday for that first NBA cup game against the Knicks. They've got a bottom five offense. Their defense is not much better than that Xena. And they really could not have had a worse start to the year. And this just compounds that. I mean, where. How are they going to build chemistry?
- [03:57]
Kelly Oubre
Yeah.
- [03:58]
Xena Keda
And this has been the discussion all season long of the fact that Tyrese Maxey has had to carry such a load without the superstars beside him and Embiid and George knowing that he's already at a usage rate of about 30%. That's a lot to carry on his own. He's had several games this season where he's playing 41, 48 minutes. Even that overtime win. Right. Like, I mean, this is something that you almost were scared was going was going to happen to him. But knowing the fact that they already had two superstars out with injuries, it's awful to see. Now what's good for the Sixers is that they do have Paul George trickling back into minutes. Right. Even on his restricted night. He, he played 32 minutes in his first game out Joel Embiid coming back. So it's not as if this is going to be a long stretch of period of time with the Sixers not having any stars. It's just going to be really tough because what Maxi brings in terms of intensity, energy, general fun to what the Sixers do is so, is so important for their chemistry on the floor. So yeah, it's going to be really tough and you're going to definitely see Kelly Oubre having to step up well.
- [05:06]
Zena Keda
This is kind of. This is the theory between behind getting three stars, right? If. If one guy's out, you've got two.
- [05:13]
Xena Keda
Right?
- [05:13]
Zena Keda
Or if two guys is out, you've got one. If you're Philly, you're probably just hoping that any of them are going to be available at any point during the regular season. So, you know, good luck to Tyrese Maxey, good luck to the Sixers. Hopefully he gets health. Bucks, they played the Jazz in Milwaukee. You know, they got off to this rough start. 1 and 6. Also like the Sixers, unexpectedly. And you know what, it's the Utah Jazz. This one was probably not really in doubt. The bucks want it 123 to 100. The big news here is Andre Jackson Jr. Has now replaced Gary Trent Jr. In the Buck starting lineup. And Zena, I thought he was great in this game. He's plus 19, super active, had four steals, had this chase down block that wasn't. It wasn't actually a block, but it was just an athletic play. It was nice to see, you know, just a young athlete out there running.
- [06:04]
Xena Keda
Around for the Bucks having a good time. You saw him, like, literally physically get into comfort mode the first play of the game where he. He basically gets the ball from colic. Sexton uses his activity up in the perimeter in his grill, gets a steal, takes it the other way, dunks it down. On the way back, he literally, like, adjusted his shoulders. It's. If you're a basketball player, when you make that first shot and you're running back, you're kind of like, yeah, okay, I really did. You know what I mean? You physically saw that. And then he had that crazy chase down block. This is how you introduce yourself to a starting lineup. And I was really impressed with he. The way that he showed up. He did not cower in the moment. And yeah, it was a nice boost for how the Bucks have been playing. Y'all don't get too excited. I mean, this is the Utah Jazz at the end of the day, but this was big for him to come out and impose himself in the starting lineup.
- [06:58]
Zena Keda
Yeah. Well, we've got more Paul George talk after the break. We got Sam Amick, who was in the building, and he also tells us there were some trades that didn't happen this summer that we don't know about. Like teams that weren't. The warriors were trying to trade for Paul George. You want to stick around after the break for that? Paul George made his return to LA to face the Clippers in Intuit Dome the other night. We covered that game. We talked about the booze and the wall. Well, Sam Amick, our national senior, national NBA writer, let me get that right. Over at the Athletic.
- [07:32]
Xena Keda
Put some respect there.
- [07:34]
Zena Keda
Sam. You also wrote about the entire saga this summer over at the Athletic and Paul George and the Clippers allowing him to walk and, and that whole thing, turning down a trade with the Warriors. But I want to start with Intuit Dome and Paul George. We saw the people turn their back on him holding up the signs. What was it like in the building for Paul George coming back?
- [07:56]
Kelly Oubre
First of all, thank you guys for having me. Appreciate you. It's funny because I shoot around. The day of the game, Paul George and the Sixers were at ucla. We talked to Paul about what he anticipates as far as the crowd, and he essentially says, I think it'll be positive. You know, he's got no ill will. He, he just waxed poetic about his relationship with the front office, the coaching staff, Kawhi Leonard. It was just a mutual admiration society. Then you get to the game and it was anything but. And, and the part that cracked me up is we had a news headline that I had written where for most of the day, the first sentence of the story said, as reunion games go, Paula, Paul George expects Wednesday night to be essentially nothing if not amicable. And then it was anything but amicable. So he didn't, I don't think, see it coming. You know, I will say it's funny because the mood was certainly, you know, largely anti Paul George, some cheers. But it also wasn't. This was not LeBron going back to Cleveland. You know what I mean?
- [09:02]
Paul George
I feel hateful.
- [09:03]
Zena Keda
Yeah, it definitely didn't feel.
- [09:04]
Kelly Oubre
Well, it didn't even happen, first of all. And we're going to get into the Intuit Dome experience. They, I mean, it is what it is. They're. People are learning how to get to the arena. It's logistically a much different task to get to Inglewood than it is downtown la. You know, it's like people are trying to find the Clippers again. So you did have a lot of empty seats. You didn't have a sellout crowd. And so you didn't have the intensity. You did have the creativity, though. You mentioned it. You know, the wall with the, you know, with the pj, pga, pg. Be careful before you, you know, think before you speak. Signs. That stuff turning around, like choreographed, you know, anti PG stuff was a new twist. But, but yeah, he, he didn't have a lot of love waiting for him.
- [09:50]
Xena Keda
And it wasn't only that he didn't have a lot of love. I mean, he did fall short in this game. Didn't quite have the comeback game that you probably want when you kind of see your ex, right?
- [10:00]
Zena Keda
Definitely not.
- [10:01]
Xena Keda
And I look at the 76ers, I look at your article, looking at the way this Paul George has started, of course, with this injury, having to come back, trickle into it. If you're looking at this trade, you're like, all right, Clippers, maybe this was a win win that they were able to get him off of the books and also not have to deal with an aging star. Do you think that the Clippers are still looking at this as a win win situation? And is there a chance that they're regretting not getting assets in return?
- [10:29]
Kelly Oubre
I. To the latter question, Xena. No. And we can get into the details there. They obviously the warriors situation was really the only substantive chance they had to get assets in return for Paul. They did have flirtations with other teams. Denver showed some interest. There was a Michael Porter Jr. Scenario there that didn't really go very far. The draft assets that the Clippers wanted back were way more than the Nuggets were willing to give up. So the warriors situation is front and center. The way they describe it is that basically if, if the warriors would have legitimately put Jonathan Kaminga and to a lesser degree even Brandon Pajimsky on the table, then maybe they go ahead and do it. It was framed this way to me that, I mean, listen, it's been a little while since we had two teams kind of, a little bit, you know, kind of chirping at each other in the media like we do with this story, because the warriors had some stuff to say about the Clippers when our guy, Anthony Slater had a good piece a couple of weeks ago. And then there was some of that with my column. The Clippers view is this. They. They claim they were prepared and comfortable to do something with the warriors to give them Paul George for maybe a quarter on the dollar. And they felt like the warriors wanted Paul for a nickel on the dollar and you know, it was just, you know, kind of a bridge too far. So no regrets there, I don't think Xena now in terms of just the idea of having Paul George in a Clippers jersey, I think some, I think a little bit. But they, they just, they, they absolutely drew the line in the sand. And, and there's all these different scenarios and I'm talking three year deal, four year deal, no trade, you know, clauses, requests all that stuff. But when it came to the way they want their books to look going forward, the big thing that I admittedly learned that I didn't really understand before is the, you know, making the summer of 2027 a priority. Because the key distinction between Paul's situation and Kawhi Leonard's is that Paul wanting a four year deal and not being willing to just take what Kawhi got, which is three years and 150 million, that would have put Paul out an additional year past Kawhi. And I think the truth that this is just me talking, but the truth that I feel like the Clippers are not quite comfortable broadcasting just yet because they, they want to continue having a very good partnership with Kawhi and James Harden is that they're obviously already thinking past them. You know what I mean? Like those guys. And, and so the idea of Paul George making $60 million at the age of 37 in 2027 through 2028 is something they just weren't interested in doing.
- [13:08]
Zena Keda
Yeah. That 2027 window, for some reason is just apparent right now in a lot of the decision making.
- [13:16]
Paul George
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [13:16]
Zena Keda
I mean, hey, I didn't want to say it out loud. We're gonna, we're gonna. Thank you, Sam. I really appreciate you going through the PG stuff. Go and read that over at the Athletic. Coming up after the break, we're gonna continue this theme. Looking at 2027 and the effects of the second apron. We got Mike Vorkanoff to explain what's going on with the sale of the Celtics. Last season The Celtics were 64, 18, ran rough, shot through the Eastern conference in the playoffs, won the NBA championship in a very convincing fashion. And then like two weeks later, they announced the team was for sale. A couple of weeks later, they had resigned all their guys to multi year contracts, locking in their core for the next few years. But that team's for sale. Well, I needed to get to the bottom of this, Zena. So we invited Mike Vorkanoff, our business of basketball writer, NBA writer extraordinaire, who just wrote about this sale and he says what a potential Celtic sale tells us about NBA ownership right now. Mike, I need you to tell me what this sale means for NBA ownership because it's odd to see a championship team go up for sale. And in particular, I mean, I. Is this the fastest turnaround from championship to, you know, hey, the for sale signs on the window.
- [14:47]
Xena Keda
Crazy.
- [14:48]
Paul George
What it says is it's a. And this is going to be shocking. It's a Damn good time to be a person who owns an NBA team. And, you know, there's been a lot of them since 2019. In the last five years, no league has had as much ownership Turnover like the NBA has. I think this will be the ninth team that will change hands since 2019. The end. The NFL, baseball, and hockey have not have 10 combined. Right. So, like, that's the pace that this is going at the Bucks. And Mark Lazarus sold his controlling stake, I think about like a year and a half after they won the title. But this one on the market two weeks after they got that ring title. Number 18, time to cash out.
- [15:29]
Xena Keda
And it was also, like, right before they resigned their big players and came up against the second apron, they're going to start seeing some penalties because of that. Given the penalties, the potential financial constraints of resigning those players, what's the challenge for whoever they do sell to? Like, are they going to be interested in taking on that much of a financial burden on top of potentially paying $6 billion for the Celtics?
- [15:56]
Zena Keda
Yeah.
- [15:57]
Paul George
Well, it becomes like, you win the.
- [15:59]
Zena Keda
Sweepstakes to just have a ma. Massive bill every year.
- [16:01]
Paul George
Yeah.
- [16:01]
Xena Keda
And they're not. They don't even own TD Garden, so they have to also pay for a place to play. Like, this doesn't feel.
- [16:08]
Zena Keda
Is that coming up with you, Michael?
- [16:09]
Xena Keda
Enticing.
- [16:09]
Paul George
So what, you. You guys are just like, hey, trying to drive this price down? Basically.
- [16:14]
Zena Keda
Basically, yes.
- [16:15]
Paul George
Well, it's actually a twofold problem. Right. You're gonna have to pay a very large tax bill if you keep this team together. And next season, 25, 26, the tax rates, whether you're a repeater team or a team who hasn't repeated in the luxury tax, jump up a lot. If you're 20 mil over the luxury tax line and you have a choice, then are you going to pay these exorbitant tax rates, and the Celtics will be repeaters, and I think it's like, become $7.25 for every dollar that you're over.
- [16:47]
Zena Keda
Right.
- [16:47]
Paul George
So you're talking about, like, a little more than 7x for every mill that you're over there, which someone can do the math on me, but I believe generally translates to a lot of money. And then the other question is, like, all right, if you don't want to pay this money, and the Celtics right now projected for over $200 million payrolls each of the next few years, because all those signings you guys mentioned, are you going to be the person who buys the Celtics and breaks up a title team? Right? Like Derrick White, Chris Osborzingis, Jalen Brown, Jason Tatum, all under contract for the next few years. I think I'm forgetting someone else on top of that. But you're going to have to make a decision whether you want to pay those, pay those taxes or whether you want to deal with the second apron restrictions which might include a frozen or are you going to be the one who says hey, we gotta start over and dip under.
- [17:32]
Zena Keda
I think that the repeater tax that they're hoping for is the repeat champion tax that goes on the sale price. Right. Like locking in this team. You think, hey, look, valuable franchise already, they just won a title, so it's a good team. So you're, you know, you're not buying on the ground floor. This is not the Charlotte Hornets that you're purchasing. You're purchasing a team that has history already as a championship level team. Just had had a championship last year and maybe gets a second one this year. And to be honest with you, like, there's no reason why this team isn't going to be in contention for the remainder of these guys while they're under contract. So you know, I, I understand like the thinking they're locking these guys up and then making the move to, to sell. You know, they're the first team to go for sale under this new TV deal. And, and we've watched like, like we just said the number keeps going up for these franchise valuations. I mean Mark Cuban in the time that he owned the Mavericks made quite a bit of money in return on his investment. So you know, do they like internally, do people see this as this, the Celtics price is going to be, everything's going to settle around it or this is just maybe the launching off point of the next round of big NBA team growth. You know, I'm assuming it's going to affect the expansion prices too.
- [18:46]
Paul George
Yeah, this, this is going to be an interesting one. It might be, have an impact on the expansion prices. It might also be kind of like the final capstone to this last decade or so of, you know, titanic valuations across the NBA. Right. The Suns were valued at $4 million $4 billion when Matt Ishby had bought them last year. That's the most that an NBA team has been valued at when sold for a control sale. And so I think the Celtics will go above that. They'll set a record for the NBA where it lands. Exactly. I don't know, you talk to smart people, they're like, hey, Maybe it lands 4.75 billion, 5 billion. I talked to an NBA owner who thought it might land close to 6. If it gets that high, then maybe the NBA starts asking for 7 billion when it goes to expand in Vegas, which a lot of money again, right?
- [19:31]
Zena Keda
Well, fanduel has a lot of money invested in Vegas, so I'm assuming that by the time we get there, you know, we're going to have some other looming questions.
- [19:39]
Paul George
Yeah, people keep betting parlays on FanDuel. I'm sure FanDuel will do very well. Look, and the, the big thing, though, is the Celtics are also an odd case, right? They don't own their own arena. Now, real estate is a big population proposition. Part of the value prop. When you buy an NBA team, you want to own, like, essentially all of the revenue that comes with the team, from tickets to gate to, to media rights to all of it. The other part, it's a weird ownership structure. Like, the grassbecks own 30%, roughly, according to my sources. Whit Grassbeck, who's the controlling owner right now, owns about 2%. His dad, Irv Grassbeck, who's, you know, 90, and they said the part of his estate Planning owns about 28% there. And you've got a bunch of minority owners who have to kind of be dragged along in case of a sale. So this is, this is a weird one, right? It might not be the perfect test case to see where everything goes. And if you talk to people who are interested in investing in NBA teams and sports teams altogether, they think prices are going to keep going up, but maybe not like hockey stick up into the right as it's been, but just maybe like a little bit slower. And so if you see some slower growth, what does that mean? The new media rights deal should really help. But I think that's been baked into prices the last few years. People have been expecting it, although from what I understand, if I think it came in a little bit higher than maybe, you know, some people are expecting it. And the big question, really, and this goes back to what we were talking about with the tax rates and how much you want to pay for this. If you are paying for a team to be really good and you're paying a lot, right, that means you're over the first apron, you're over the second apron. That's around generally the point where it's actually maybe not even profitable to own a team anymore. Again, if you're losing a few mil and the valuation of your team goes up by like $3 billion over the course of your ownership, you know, small potatoes type of thing. But to some people, that matters. Right? And it gets into what and how you want to run your team. The Celtics and the Grassbeck family and this entire investor group bought them for $360 million 22 years ago. They're going to make, I don't know, 15, 18 times that, right. When they eventually sell, depending on where this all lands. But they also, you know, they're in that place where they, they're paying so much into the luxury tax where they might not be able to turn a profit year after year, year over year. Just like when you're taking all that into consideration.
- [21:52]
Xena Keda
I love the fact that in the article you kind of talked about these teams as they do become many Disneylands. Like in the way that there's so many different revenue sources from fans, from merch, from food, from everything. But I think that's the part of the conversation gets forgotten, the fans and how they interact with this team and these teams. And I'm particularly thinking about the media landscape you're talking about that big deal that's coming. Everyone knows it's. It's going to shift over next year. How does this impact the way that fans interact with their favorite teams?
- [22:24]
Zena Keda
Because Hard to watch.
- [22:26]
Xena Keda
It's hard to watch. Like, you're seeing people subscribe to one service to be able to see the rest of the league, NBA, league Pass, and then they have to have a separate subscription to be able to watch their team locally. That doesn't make sense. Like, how is this all going to come together where folks are being able to keep the value of their teams, but also keep the value of the fans that help drive that value up?
- [22:49]
Paul George
I think you're going to have people begging to pay 150 bucks a month for their old cable service. Like, it's going to be super annoying. You're going to have to have, you know, Amazon, you're going to have NBC, Peacock, espn, abc, depending on the night of the week.
- [23:03]
Zena Keda
Right.
- [23:03]
Paul George
Like league pass, as you mentioned, you know, there will be more games on national tv, which will, you know, I guess help things in this in one sense. But also it just means you're going to have to subscribe to more different services to be able to watch those games. Right. And not to mention whatever happens with local tv, which at this point really is just super hard to predict. I don't know where that's going to end up. You know, the Celtics are on NBC, regional NBC network. Diamond Sports has, I think, 15 or 14 teams that has contracts with and they're still in bankruptcy. Court and they've been there for, I think, two years now or something like that. So, like, where this all ends up is really hard to predict. But I think as of night right now, you're basically saying like, hey, I'm going to have to subscribe to all these things if I'm a big NBA fan who wants to watch my team every night, and that's going to be annoying. And I think people have subscription fatigue.
- [23:53]
Zena Keda
Yeah. I mean, and speaking of, go and subscribe to the Athletic so you can read Mike Vorkanoff and all of his hard work. That's going to do it for today's show, folks. Thank you, Mike. Thank you Sam Amick, for joining us. For Xena Keda, I'm Dave Dufour and this has been the NBA Daily. Thanks for waking up with us. Foreign.
- [24:36]
Sam Amick
As we head into the playoffs, it's safe to assume there will be a few calls made by the refs that will be hard to accept. But you know what isn't hard to accept? Discover. Believe it or not, Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. You heard that right, 99%. So make a good call for your wallet and get discovered. Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report. Learn more at discover.com creditcard this podcast.
- [25:02]
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- [25:56]
Zena Keda
Acast powers the world's best podcasts.
- [25:59]
Kelly Oubre
Here's a show that we recommend.
- [26:03]
I
Hey guys. Welcome to Giggly Squad, a place where we make fun of everything but most importantly ourselves. I'm Paige Desorbo. I'm Hannah Berner. Welcome to the squad. Giggly Squad started on Summer House when we were giggling during an inappropriate time. But of course we can't be managed, so we decided to start this podcast to continue giggling. We will make fun of pop culture news. We're watching Fashion Trends pep talks where we give advice, mental health moments and games and guests listen to Giggly Squad on Acast or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [26:35]
Sam Amick
ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.
- [26:41]
Paul George
Acast.com.