Transcript
Colin Cowherd (0:00)
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Jason McIntyre (1:24)
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Colin Cowherd (1:36)
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Colin Cowherd (1:40)
Feels like everyone is talking about how the American Dream of home ownership has become out of reach. Well, Rocket is trying to give more people a chance to own their homes. They're making home ownership simpler and more accessible to more people, turning renters into owners. Rocket believes that everybody deserves a shot at the American Dream. So are you ready? Own the dream. Visit Rocket.com or call 800-4Rocket. Thanks for listening to the Heard podcast. Be sure to catch us live every weekday on Fox Sports Radio and noon to 3 Eastern, 9am to noon Pacific. Find your local station for the herd@foxsportsradio.com or stream us live every day on the iHeartRadio app by searching Fox Sports Radio or FSR. Thanks for listening to the Herd podcast. All right, we got to a Friday. What a week it has been not just for LeBron James, but primarily live in Los Angeles. It is the Herd, wherever you may be and however you may be listening. Thanks for making us part of your day. J. Mac, we got a loaded show today. NFL season ends. We take a vacation, come back. There's going to be NBA March Madness free agency. But the NBA did us a solid this year. Jimmy Butler to the warriors has been 7:1. It's a new staff and a new team. And LeBron and Luca now converging in Los Angeles. They beat another good western team. The west is much deeper than the East. So you start beating these, Dallas, Kyrie, you start beating Denver, you start beating Minnesota. These are impressive wins. A little bit. A little bit. Lakers are decent. Yeah, they're pretty good. So I'm going to start with this. Luke is not playing that well. Let's just say it out loud. He's not in great shape. Never been a good defender. Looks a little soft. One for nine last night on shooting threes and everybody sort of hedges their bet. We've all been doing this, myself included, for the last two years. We've all been doing this in the media. We just don't want to say, you know, is LeBron like the second best player in the league? Nobody wants to say that. Right? It's hey, Jokic, Giannis. I have watched LeBron in the last week outplay Ant Edwards, Luca Jokic and Kyrie Irving. He has been the best player in the NBA in the last week on every single night. Is LeBron the best player in the league? No. On any given night, is LeBron the best player in the league? Yeah. His defense right now, it looks like he's 27. It's insane. His energy better than Luka. His shooting right now, better than Luka. His on ball defense, his scoring. LeBron at 40 years old has better consistent energy than any other Laker. Now Austin Reaves is close. Austin plays hard all the time. But LeBron's fourth quarter energy, it doesn't even make sense. His on ball defense right now, this is the best defense he's played in eight years. He's a better defender at 40 than Luka is at 26. His energy, I'm telling you right now, is LeBron showing off. And I'll get to Steph in a second. It feels like Steph is kind of showing off. The Jimmy Butler, like, listen, old man, you know, and I feel when Tom Brady beat Mahomes at Arrowhead Stadium in the AFC Championship and then he beat him in the super bowl, everybody by then was falling in love and sort of was saying it, you know, like Brady's old Brady, you know, not a lot left in the tank for old Tommy. Mahomes is the new king and Brady beat him twice in Arrowhead and overtime and in the Super Bowl. Tom Brady reminding you. Yeah, it goes through me. And LeBron is reminding everybody right now. Yeah, the west, for 10 years, the east went through me 10, 12 years. However long he was over there, now the west is going to go through me. So at minimum, and I understand that Luka got hurt, hadn't played for a long time, he's playing himself back into shape. Like, I get it. And he'll be a better shooter. His jumper right now is short consistently. That's like cardio. That's legs. His jumper short. But at 40 years old, LeBron James last year had. Last year, at 39 years old, LeBron had 84 dunks. When Michael Jordan was 39, MJ had 21. Four times the dunks of a guy known for dunks. Michael Jordan at the same age. And I think LeBron this year is better than LeBron last year. And the other thing is, because AD was traded to Dallas, LeBron is hyper aware that he has to play better defense because Luca is a lousy defensive player and Austin Reaves is Limited. So LeBron is like, oh, oh, you need me to do that too? All right. His defense is insane. So he's averaging 25, 8 and 9. That's not what, that's not the part that's blowing me away. It's the energy and the defense. And you know, this. It's. I feel like, and I've said this for years, I think the NBA playoffs should be a three game first round and then five games, even through the finals. I think create urgency. I mean, March Madness. College basketball doesn't have much talent and it gets tremendous ratings. Why there's urgency? I mean, you know, Cooper flag, take him off Duke. They got a couple of decent players. But a Duke game with Cooper flag against Xavier will get a better rating maybe than like the Western Conference or Eastern Conference finals. Because it's like you have to watch. You got two and a half hours, somebody's out. Could be Duke and Cooper flag. And so I think there needs to be no more urgency. And I also think in the NBA regular season, I'd cut it down to 68 games, start it six weeks later, get away from college and pro football, you know, start playing Christmas, start playing Christmas, not your first TV game. Start playing then. So I understand that if you're LeBron, you're Steph Curry and you're not with a championship team, you're on a treadmill to nowhere. It is so clear between Stefan LeBron that these moves have absolutely energized these guys and just watched LeBron's defense, it is elite and he has outplayed Ant, Luka, Kyrie and Jokic in the last week. He has been the best player on the floor. And Here is, here's LeBron after.