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Just go to indeed.com/bluewire right now and support our show by saying that you heard about Indeed on this podcast, that's indeed.com/bluewire. I'm Trevor Lay, this is the NBA front office show, joined by Keith Smith. I was obviously this is something that has been in the works for a little bit because ESPN had a whole piece on this and everything, but myself and I know many, many other people around the NBA were completely shocked by this news. Yeah, I mean, even a lot of his ESPN colleagues with some of their responses today, a lot of them are like in the last, like, especially the NBA side, in the last weeks of vacation here before camps open up in a week or two weeks, depending on the market, you cover and a bunch of them work, you could just tell by their responses were completely caught off guard. So to make sure all the details are out there, he's retiring from basketball, reporting, not retiring from basketball, he's going to go be the general manager of St. Bonaventure, where he went to school, I saw some people like, wait, there's general managers in college, it's a relatively new position now that a lot of college teams have created with the advent of the transfer portal and NIL and some of the changes to recruiting. It's been something that more and more teams have brought on with the idea of we can't just put all of this on the coaching staff, any longer, it needs to be managed by somebody else who can do a lot more of the day to day with that. So it sounds like that's what Boj is going to do for St. Bonaventure. I am 100% certain he could have done it at a number of much larger, more prominent universities, probably even could have called any number of NBA front offices and said, sure, I'd like to come on board in the NBA world as an aside. Mike Singer, who used to cover the Denver Nuggets, is joining the Nuggets, the front office and a role. He's like the director of insight and strategy or something like that or intelligence and strategy, I think it might have been, but just as an aside. So we've seen that happen, but what Boj wrote in is kind of farewell tweet, I guess, if you will, or is his Boj bomb about himself, that he wants to do something that means more to him personally, and clearly his school is something that's always meant a lot to him. So good for him, that's a life that is tough to lead, being a lead newsbreaker like that. So congratulations to Boj on the retirement, I guess, but the changing careers really is. Sounds like more what this is and good for him if he can find that balance and that he still wants to have. Yeah, I mean, we have seen it before where reporters have moved into roles in NBA front offices. In this case, it's not an NBA front office, it's a college, but still, this has happened in the past, Lakers, you know, give me a call, but no, I look at this, Keith, and I mean, now that I don't want to sound like old man here, but as I've gotten older, the more and more this makes sense. Like if I was 20 right now, if I was 25 right now, I'd be saying, what is he doing? He is insane to be walking away from this. When you really stop and you look at what this job is, you look at what Boj does. I thought I thought what really clarified it, or at least through the reality of it, because it sounds like glamorous, everybody's waiting for your post on social media, right? Like there's this appeal, there's this power, this magic to that, right? But shoms around the, who's the other big NBA news breakers, though, you know, those you watch your list and you just don't already know that, shoms around free agency shared his screen time, of which your phone now tracks. It was in 19 hours and he was almost 20. Yeah. It was up there. I mean, crazy. He's, he's just not like hardly even sleeping, right? He's, and when anytime he's awake, he's on his phone. And you know that really it's phones multiple because they've got multiple phones, constant communication because they are the hub of all of this, this information network. And I thought what was most shocking about that, though, wasn't so much that he's on the phone 19 or 20 hours a day. It's that that was only an 11% increase over what his average is. So even when it's not free agency and things are crazy, you are glued to your phone constantly. And you look at, whoa, she's 55. Think about all the things in life that you're missing. Now, obviously it's, it has made him tremendously wealthy to do this. I mean, he had a fantastic contract and income and all that sort of stuff, but you think about all the things in life that you miss out on because you're glued to your phone, because you are this conduit for information around the NBA. I understand why he would say, you know, it's time for me to go do something else and move on. And I mean, a huge contract, congratulations to him. And hopefully this, you know, improves his quality of life and everything. I'm not saying he lived a terrible life or anything like that, but I could see where the grind of it, the weight of it would, the burnout, I think would be very, very real, at least when I try to put myself in, in his shoes and imagine what it would be like to really do that. Yeah, there's been articles written about, whoa, about Shams, there was a one written about Adam Schefter on the NFL side, excuse me, and just how much they don't do anything else. Like that's an awkward way of phrasing it, but I really think it is the best way is they are almost solely focused on this in one of the Shams articles. He talked about how he stopped playing pickup basketball. He stopped going to the movies. He stopped doing like a lot of like vacations that didn't involve like him being able to be somewhere where you'd have signal and those kinds of things because it's just can't shut it off. Right? You need to be there for the next story, whatever the next scoop is, like they want to be involved and they want to do it and even talked about how he has this like special case for his phone to shower with his phone, like while he's in the shower, like those are just bonkers things. You and I joke around the trade debt that I'm like, all right, is it safe to shower? Right. We're afraid to leave the house. Yeah. Yeah, we're afraid to leave the house. But for us, it's like those are very much jokes because it's not what we do. You know, we're not reliant upon breaking news for our careers. We react to it. We analyze it more than what we do is break it. So I don't know that the average person fully grasps like you, you commit to this life and this is what you commit to. It's missed your events, missed weddings and birthdays and even if you're at them, you're still missing some of those things because you're getting up and walking away. You're doing stuff. I had a chance to talk to an NBA person who used to break news at a pretty high level. And one of the things that he was telling me was he's like, when he realized like, I get a, I don't want to do this anymore. He, he has twins and missed the twins birthday party for the most part because he was chasing down a story, one, one free agency period. And it was like, that's, you know, then he was like, you can imagine what problems that caused at home. And then it was like, yeah, I can't be doing this. This is not, you know, how I want to live and stepped away and backed away from, from, you know, breaking news and all that stuff. So it really is a spot where if you're going to commit to it, man, you got to really commit to doing this and we'll just did it for, you know, decades, decades ish, you're so like really coming to prominence and it's changed, obviously, right? Because it used to be, you're going to break news through getting it in that night's to the, to the newspaper that night, so it'll be in the next morning's paper and those kind of things. Well, now it's a, it's an immediate and if, and they all know how it works, you don't get it. The next guy will. Yeah. They'll, they'll just go to the next person on the list and get, give it to them. And it's, it's just, it's a different kind of world, different, different kind of life than me. Oh, a lot of people want to live in. And I, I really am. I'm, I'm happy for him. I hope he, you know, now what he's doing, like he said he wants something with more personal meaning. I can't imagine a way to that it can be more personal than basketball, where he went to college. Like that's got to be huge for him. So that, that sounds amazing. Yeah. You know, I can kind of compare it to what like you and I do to a degree. So I can at least understand kind of where he's coming from with, Hey, I'm, I'm ready to step away from this. But because you and I have both had situations before plenty of times where I mean, looked at I'm not complaining because we get to talk about basketball for a living and I can't complain about that. But we've both had situations where we get pulled away from family stuff because something happens. Oh, shoot, it's 4th of July. And this trade just went down by, by barbecue, you know, that's, that's just, that's the way that it goes. But again, there's, there's a lot of pros that come with it, but you could see where Wojs deals with that times 10, right, in terms of how absorbing, yeah, right. I mean, how absorbing that this is for life. Now, Keith, what I do want to talk about too though, is in addition to congrats to Woj and that's phenomenal that he's able to step away and all of that. This now leads, leaves a power vacuum in, in the NBA. And I'm curious to see what happens here because what a lot of people think about Wojs, we think about the fans side of it. What is, what is Wojs, well, Wojs peels back the curtain, Wojs tells us what's going on. Okay. This is, this is what's happening and this is what's happening here and there and all these places and there's this rumor in that rumor and all of that. That's not just what Wojs does though. That's just what most fans see. Wojs also acts as a go-between for a lot of teams in this information marketplace. Wojs kind of, he's like his own information economy. So what happens now, because I know there's still shoms out there. I know shoms has his contract coming up, which makes me wonder what's going to happen with that. I don't, I feel like that's not a coincidence. Like there's something there, but, but the bottom line is that this sport for the last however many years has operated with two primary newsbreakers, Wojs and shoms and they, and their competition has been part of the game within the game. What happens with this power vacuum now? Do we see one person step up and become the next, Wojt, does shoms become Wojt and someone steps up to fill the shoms kind of role or, or is it multiple people? Where does this go in terms of NBA news break? I'm really curious to see how this plays out Keith. Yeah. I mean, it could be shoms like clearly shoms will step into the primary newsbreaker role. Yeah. I almost think that's a guarantee he's already there to your point about his contract. We also have the fact that NBC and Amazon are getting in the game now NBC has continued to cover the NBA as I know, because I once worked there, but it's a little bit different between covering it when it's not one of the sports you own rights war and owning rights for it. Both those groups are going to be putting together pre game, post game, studio show teams, all that stuff. They're going to have their game coverage teams and presumably a part of what they will have is some form of news person there that does that, that's, you know, been a big part of what Wojt has done. Shoms does that now kind of more on a independent basis, I guess is the best way to phrase that. He's not attached to a big network in terms of on camera news breaking. That's done through like fan duel, I think he works with and then stadium he used to be with and AT&T and things like that. So you definitely think you're going to see him be more prominent somewhere. So yeah, I'm sure he's sitting there right now along with his agent or like, well, this is good for us can kind of name my price, right? Like I'm the number one guy. But then who's next? Who knows, right? Like, like there are a lot of people doing really good work, just not on the scale of Wojt and Shoms. Now is that because they didn't need to be because they like teams had Wojt and Shoms to do that with like there's that maybe there is the idea of maybe they don't want to, maybe they don't want to live that life. So we're going to see where this goes from here, but I think what's going to be really kind of interesting is there was a time when it was Wojt and then there was a whole lot of people that would get like all the other stories, right? Wojt was doing the big stuff. Then everybody else was getting all the other stories and a lot of that was local beat writers that they were the ones handling it and all that. And this was in a world pre Twitter, because it was kind of hard to track some of this down. You had to look for multiple sources. That's where some of them better places that became like aggregation outlets became really valuable because they were they were going to not necessarily Twitter, but to like the newspaper sites, seven, eight, nine, 10 times a day in seeing is there anything new? You know, what is out there with that? So so I don't we're certainly not going to go back, right? Because now we have social media. It can all be immediate, but do do do people start using their local beat guys more part of the reason that got phased out is they're focused on that team right there. They're focused on the Boston Celtics, the Los Angeles Lakers, like that. They don't necessarily always have the contacts league wide to know, you know, hey, what's happening between Orlando and Sharp, right? So that becomes the other piece there where the national guys do ESPN as a ton of talented people in house that I'm sure if they they want it, they could maybe go to one of them. There's a whole lot of other people. I don't want to just start naming people off because part of it is we'll forget someone and then like it feels that it'll be. But what about? Yeah. And it's and it's not out of any sense of malice or dislike for their work. I think you guys all know you see who we reference reports from. You see who we reach me. You see who we've talked to on the show at times. But yes, my guess is somebody steps in to be kind of the, the, the challenger because if nothing else, you need that to keep the top dog on their toes, right? To know, okay, you got to stay locked in because if you don't, we'll start going to this guy. So I'm, I'm really curious to see how that all develops, you know, it's, it's going to be a little bit of a different world. My fear is we're now going to have a, I, I think we're going to see two things happen. One, we're going to see the 50 million fake, which accounts turn into, well, now just make up and aim, grab a stock photo and turn into a newsbreaker, right? And that'll be fake garbage. Yeah. But I think we're also going to see, because we see this every year during free agency, the trade deadline and things legitimate people who fancy themselves as I can do that job, are going to try to push their way in, and that rarely is ever goes well, we, we could spend hours telling cautionary tales on some of the people like that. And that is, you know, that's, that's a, you know, thing I'm a little worried about because for people like you and I, that turns into a whole lot of people tagging us, forwarding us, sending us things on our live shows, asking, Hey, just saw a tweet from, you know, Joe Johnson saying, you know, this is going on out there, you know, what's the deal with, you know, with this and it's like, what news is that person ever broken? And that's not gatekeeping. People always accuse it of that and somebody, everybody starts somewhere. But it's like, it takes a while. You're not going to walk into, Hey, I'm breaking the news that, you know, the Lakers are trading LeBron James, right, like no one's walking into that story as their first thing out of the gate, that's going to be broken by somebody, you know, probably very likely with, you know, a track record in a history, at least trustworthyness with that. So that that's, those are the things I'm a little worried about is, I think we're going to go through a period here where there's just going to be a lot of filtering through. All I will say is, thankfully this happened now when there is any ton of news, ton of transactional news and like with that last thing I'll finish with, because I saw some of this going around social media in the wake of vlogis announcement was, do we really need these guys, like, can we just find out from the teams? You, you can 100%. You can. Teams won't give you everything. And the teams are only going to tell you, we signed Player X, and they're going to tell you they signed Player X. Sephora stores are everywhere you are, so just pop in when you need a brown lip to match your 90s playlist, a confidence boost before your interview, or a last minute gift for Mom's birthday. There's always a Sephora near you, just pop in. Use our store locator to find your local Sephora or Sephora at Coles. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Turn your ideas into reality with an Azure free account. Get everything you need to develop apps across cloud and hybrid environments, scale workloads, create cloud-connected mobile experiences, and so much more. Discover what you can create with popular services free for 12 months. Learn more at azure.com, that's azure.com, and sign up for a free account to start building in the cloud today. Days, weeks, months after they agreed to it. There are a ton of Exhibit 10 training camp contracts being signed right now, some of which were shared at the draft, on the evening of the second night of the draft, that are just going finalized now, that the teams are only just now acknowledging. Teams are not going to tell you length of deal and contracts. Yeah, we'll get them, I know where I live, I'll get them, right? That's part of what I do is hunting that information down for a spot track. But here's the other thing, the teams need this too, because the teams want to know on June 30th at 6pm, who is, you know, who are the Philadelphia 76ers spending a large chunk of that 60 plus million in cap space on? What's going on there? They're not spending on this guy, great, that means maybe he's in play, or they are spending on this guy, that means we're not getting him, so let's pivot to this guy. And they don't get it through calling up the team, nobody else called up Philly and said, hey, you're getting Paul George, and probably got a very straight answer, right? It's probably, yeah, we're trying, you know, we're having a conversation, but it's that's where they need those newsbreakers too, to be part of this. Personally, as long as I could do without the all the whole, Trevor Lane signing with the Los Angeles Lakers, sources, you know, his agent, Keith Smith, tells ESPN or tells the athletic or tell whoever, like that part, like, and I get why they do it, I get why it's done that way, I could do without all that. But I want to know, oh, that signing's happening. Awesome. Great. How much? How much was it for? It allows to do the rest of the work that we need to do to do it. So if you just want to wait for team press releases, I have any issue with that. That's how you want to do it. I don't care if you want to turn on opening night and be like, holy crap, here's what the roster is. Wow. Like can be fine. Consume it the way you want to consume it. Just know we're not going back to, you know, the old days and someone else will emerge. Absolutely. So to give kind of everybody a sense of at least the way I view kind of what we do, what WOGE does kind of the hierarchy and all of this. And you're absolutely right. Well, a lot of teams get their information from WOGE from Shams. That kind of stuff certainly matters. It's part of the information network and everything. But essentially the way I look at things is you take a team will say, we've signed player X terms of the contract are not disclosed, right? They're not going to disclose anything. They're not going to end. They may tell you a week after the fact they're not going to tell you anything more that they absolutely have to if that, right? Like that's the way teams are going to approach their moves, free agency trades, all that sort of stuff. You're not going to find out to well after the fact. What WOGE will do and Shams will do is he'll put out, like you said, so and so agent has signed this player to this contract or whatever. And there is a little bit of that that gets a bit unseemly where you can tell there's different things that WOGE has written where you can tell, okay, he's doing a favor for this person. He's putting this information out there to help this person's cause or whatever. And that's part of the game. Hey, I'm going to do this. So next time you have a big story, it's coming to me, right? We do see a bit of that. But WOGE will put out such and such players signing. This is the contract. This is how much this player is making. What we do is we then take that information that gives a little bit more and then we blow that up and provide all of the content. WOGE is just going to say team X is signing this player for this much money, right? And that's his job, put out just the news. We're going to take that and we're going to project, right? We're going to make our own inferences from that information. Okay, this contract came in. Now this team can do this, this and this. The impact on the league is this. Clearly the team's thinking is they're going to be doing this on the floor. We take that and we provide context to all of that. And that's kind of our role in the media ecosystem as it as it were. So you still need that piece between us and what we do, and what so many other analysts around the league do, and what the team is going to give you because you need that extra information. And again, it's not just us who needs it, but it's also teams around the NBA, as Keith was saying, who needs that. So that's kind of the way all of this works and the way the system operates. And so somebody is going to, and maybe it's multiple people, but somebody is going to fill that role because it's a necessary piece. And again, I think there are going to be changes because whoever comes in is not going to be exactly like, whoa, which I'm sure there's going to be different and it can maybe multiple people. So I'm sure there'll be things that operate a little bit differently. It'll be interesting to see how things adapt moving forward. But this is an important position within the NBA. I mean, look, NBA communications, the league's communications put out a post congratulating Wozh. Wozh does not work for the NBA, but they put out a post congratulating him on his career. I mean, that just goes to show like how tethered Wozh and the NBA are and how integral of the piece he is. And that's how you know something will come along to replace him. Yeah, spot on. I mean, it's, it's, yeah, there'll be shoms for now. We'll be the big one. We'll see. We, we, I'll reference him because he's good enough to have come on the show. But Jake Fisher is another one who's a great source of information. You know, he certainly, I think, will be one of the people who help fill that void and go from there. But there's a lot of people, Mark Stein, Chris Haines, you know, again, I don't want to start naming everybody because we're going to forget people, but you know, a lot of people people out there, you know, doing what they can and, you know, and then you have some other people there, you know, kind of getting the breadcrumbs, like, like what, whatever is left over, right, whatever the last bits are left over. But yeah, it's a major change to, you know, for everybody and how we're going to consume basketball content in the transaction game bits, you know, and it's not just transactions, obviously, there are other stories he did to, you know, about, about players and teams and the like, but it's a, this is a major change, you know, and it'll be, be interesting to watch it all develop from, from here and, you know, we'll, you know, clearly be, be all over it as, you know, the new, new news breakers emerge, I guess is the best way to put it. All right. Well, we spent nearly the first 25 minutes of our show talking about what that just goes to show how much we care about all this stuff and everything, which obviously we should. But Keith, do you want to complain about fashion with me for a little bit? Let's do one more news story. Okay. And then we could close with, with, with, with fashion, I can tell you tell everybody right now, no big question today, we're not going to get to that. We will finish that series out over the course of the rest of the week here. But let's do this one real quick, if we can, yeah, a little bit of a bummer story here. Kenner to Williams had to have knee surgery. Let's say a, you know, big-ish part of the Thunder rotation, we had to have an arthroscopic debridement procedure on his right knee per the Thunder will be reevaluated after the preseason. So that tells me, we'll not be ready for opening night because that's reevaluated after the preseason. So hopefully that means some point maybe in the season's first month-ish of time. But yeah, Williams is still a, you know, a, you're pretty big part of the Thunder rotation, but we're going to see you'll kind of wear things shake out here with Alex Caruso and Isaiah Hartenstein in, in the mix here, but one of their better backup forwards, maybe this opens the door a little bit for former lottery pick, Usman Jang or Dylan Jones, who was a first round pick, maybe they can kind of put, put themselves in the mix here to play a bit more for the Thunder while Williams is out, but just, you know, we want to make sure we touched on that because it is an NBA rotation player who's not going to be ready for the start of the year. Yeah, which is certainly not, not a good thing, but hopefully he's able to come back near mid-season. We'll see how that all goes. All right. Let's play fashion critic here. Let's come play it about fashion. The NBA City Edition jerseys have leaked and keep the jet is the way because I can only turn left. That's the way you should be. Yes. I love it. I love it. I do lander reference. Let's go. What is it there? The files are in the computer. Oh, man. Dude, here's my first thought. I'm going to jump out of water here. Yeah. One in the bottom left corner, burn it with fire, and then bury the ashes, set them on fire again, salt the earth. I don't care. Like, just, I never want to, that's Celtic's uniform is atrocious. That's not even the right green. Now sometimes in these, the color is a little off, but I don't care. These look terrible. It's just awful. I never want to see these. Yeah. Hopefully these will be worn twice and I'll skip watching or something. I don't know. That would be, that would be ideal because, Keith, I think you and I, I think this is a rare occasion where Lakers fans and Celtics fans are completely aligned because we all hate our city edition jerseys. I will say those are at an absolute abomination. The Celtics ones, those are awful and we'll get a chance to talk about the Lakers ones in a moment. But you take a historic franchise and you give them that, that looks like a practice jersey. Yeah. Best. Yeah. I mean, what are we doing like that? Are we just out of ideas or what is happening here because who, how did this get approved? Who did this, who, who saw this and said, yes, this is a good idea to put out. Yeah. There's been a lot of stuff on how much say the teams even actually have because of the contract with Nike on. Yeah. I'm sure if they did something really outrageous, the teams can be, you know, but yeah, I, here's my thing. One, it's just stop already. There's too many of these. We don't need a new one every single year. Now I get it, the Nike people are sitting there, you know, looking at their, their, you know, finance reports and saying, yes, we do, you know, yes, we do, but I don't know, man. This is just some of these are we've gone way too far, like I'm, I just in this one, in particular, people know my fondness for, for the Celtics and for people who don't know I'm going to give my, my little rant here, the green and white, the white and green in occasionally the black and green, which took years to grow on me that I now actually really like. And if they want to on like St. Patrick's Day mixing the, the ones that they very rarely ever wear, which are the green with the gold tint from like the eighties, fine. Anything else, we don't need them. The, the versions that looked like knockoffs of a Irish pub that somebody bought in a strip mall named O'Brien's and then it failed two years later, like get those out of here. The Bill Russell ones were fine. The ones he was involved with designing, I did like those, but those were really a version of the green ones, but just, you know, their uniforms are so classic, so standard, just stick with that. But all right, we can move on. I'll jump off the Celtics so box because I think it should be very clear by now. I don't like this jersey. No. And nor should you nor should you self-expansion not be happy with this. This is Jersey. But let me ask you this, aside from the Celtics one, just looking at the East right now, is there a jersey that you say, I like that of these, of these city editions? I like the magic ones. I think those are kind of sharp with the pitch stripes. I like the Raptors one because I like the dinosaur that's, that's the one for me. And it's Carter to like, I don't know if people even noticed that that was like Vince Carter and that dinosaur going through his legs, which is a lot of fun. The wizards ones are okay to me. The sixers ones are kind of like 80s throwback stylish. So I kind of like those ones. The heat culture one enough, like, and bored with this. The next one just hurts my eyes like I don't like it. Yeah, it makes me feel like I need glasses or something when I get the next one. And when they've did that last year on TV, I literally two or three different times. I was like, oh, man, my TV is going. It's time for new TV. The box ones are okay here. Go back to the first page. I don't mind Atlanta. Charlotte's are cool. Like those are good. Here's what I don't like about Charlotte's whole uniform vibe. Why do the pin stripes not run through the shorts to like, you know, what's funny is I complained about that a couple of years ago, somebody pointed out they never did. Even the original Hornets, they weren't on the shorts and indies is that's to carry over from the agencies and tournament. The tournament. I don't know what we're doing there. I don't mind the side stripe on it, but I the Indian logo. I'm not a huge fan of. Yeah. You know what's better is if you go indie and then you put it indie, but in Indiana Jones lettering. Maybe on that tip of the why there's like a little hat, a little hat or something like that. I don't know. I don't know. Very fun. The bulls ones are okay. I know that like they've golden like their history. They're Brooklyn's are fine for what they are, but yeah, I mean, I don't know. Just most of them kind of like, I don't really care, but yeah, I hate the Celtics ones. Those ones are terrible. The indie ones. I'm not a fan of go back to the other page again one more time. The next ones, the heat ones, those are dumb. But yeah, probably the only two I actually really actually I'm going to say three. I really like it. I like the magic ones. I like the sixers ones and I really like the rafters one just because I like the dinosaur. We are completely aligned. Those are the three that I picked out as well. Like the three that I liked. I don't know why like the sixers one isn't anything special, but I just think it's just simple and clean and it just kind of works. I think I think putting heat culture on a jersey is not good. And yeah, I mean, that's just like if you have to put it on the, like it's what they talk about. Oh, heat culture and all that. But actually put it on a jersey and make it like you're slogan and this is what we're putting out there and everybody like, come on, that's, that's going overboard. It's propaganda at this point. Right. What are you doing? Right. Paragraphs. And whatever, let's jump over to the West. Okay, we're just, we're out of ideas. All right. Let's, since we focused on your, your Celtics, the, the Lakers one, why are we trying to make black and purple a thing? Why do we, why do we continue to try this? We're a joke earlier when I was talking about this on the wire. We're still trying to make fetch happen. And then to put like show on the front and not Lakers. It makes it seem like it's a knockoff that doesn't have the rights to use the word Lakers. Yeah. I didn't even think about that now you're a hundred percent right that that is absolutely right. Yeah. It's just, yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with that. I was, you know, something that got brought up because I was talking about this earlier over on the basketball bulletin though, how much better do any of these jerseys look with the numbers on them because that's one thing like there's a lot of empty space on all these because there's no, we don't see the numbers on them right now. That will, that will change the vibe of these jerseys. I'm not saying that they suddenly makes them great, but that does change the overall look of the jersey and the numbers and the names on the back. What is the fine? How big are they? Here's the other thing too. Hand up. Somebody called it out in the comments on our last show that, you know, my, my hair lines getting pretty thin. Yeah. No kidding. I fully recognize it. But it's the other thing that's going is my eyes, they're not getting better and by no means like, Oh my gosh, I'm not going to be able to see. But like some of these teams feels like the lettering is like this big, you know, on their uniforms, it's like, who is that? And then they do the numbers that look scrunched and it's like, wait, I can't tell what that number is like it's weird. There was a set of Mavs jerseys a couple years ago where the 10 11 and 12 all looked very similar to each other and it was like, I can't tell all these guys apart very easily from when you're like on the, like lifted sideline view. So yeah, let's see the letters and the numbers with them too. Of the ones we're shown here, there's only two that I even kind of like big Memphis is this kind of cool. I've got one. Yep. It's Memphis. I don't mind the Mavs, it's just, I think it looks a little washed out the 52 80 and then we're going to put a number beneath it. Well, that's just going to look like a mess like don't what just in like, what is the coloring there? Like, what are we doing? Like, yeah, I'm out on that when the Clippers one looks stupid, like, I don't like, like we just rebranded. Now we're going in a completely different direction flat home in a Jersey. I thought this was, I thought the Clippers thing and I know they're going to use it elsewhere, but this was a great opportunity to use your logo again, and make it and make it and get people more and more associated with it. So people will stop reading Royal Caribbean every time they see the new Clippers logo. Like, like just putting that set. And I know it's going to be on other jerseys and everything, but rather than put clips on it, use your logo, get your logo out there more, the new one and make it more associated with your brand. I thought this was a missed opportunity for the Clippers. Or just let's lean into and put, put a Clippy, the paperclip from, you know, Microsoft Office programs. I see you're writing a resume. Can I help you? Yeah. Clippy on there. And put him on there. I want to like, I bet half the people watching are listening to the show right now. Don't know Clippy. No, they're like, what do you get because he's for a dog to remember you could change him to a dog. Oh, yeah. What was that? That had, he has to have been gone for what, like a couple of decades now or something, right? Probably. Yeah. I mean, yeah, this was like start of my like professional career and that was a mile ago. So yeah. And I guess Minnesota's are kind of okay, I don't, I don't understand what that is. They went with like an ice, the, yeah, Minnesota frozen over lake, like I'm not entirely sure. And I don't like white letters on white background either. Yeah. Um, and then here we look at the, the second half of the, the West, much better, better overall. I think the King's one is a little plain for me. I thought they could have done more there. Utah, I think this is going to go back or there's going to be something similar to this Jersey becoming part of their regular rotation. I want to say, yeah, we talked about it. Yeah. Not this season. It's next season. Right. And once again, the Phoenix Suns stay winning the, uh, the city edition jerseys, in my opinion, because I love the, the valley lettering that it has that kind of old West aesthetic because that's very much Phoenix. That's the, that's out in the desert out in the Southwest. It's got that feel to it. And so I like that they leaned into that. It's not as good as the other valley jerseys, the black ones that they've had. Yeah. Those are really good. They're really, really great, but compared to some of the other options, I think, I think Phoenix did a solid job here. Yeah. The thunder ones, I don't love me. My whole thing with the thunder is it's time to like, let's really rebrand here because we're in a spa with their way too good of a team to have such a boring, like uniform set color palette. Like, let's do something. We don't need to rebrand the team name thunder is fine. Let's use something cool with that. Like, there's a way you can make that cool. Am I the one to do it? No, absolutely not. But yeah, you could. All right. San Antonio's are fine. Those are versions of ones they've worn in the past. I like the Portland ones. Like I did. Yeah. Kind of cool. I even kind of liked the New Orleans ones. I did the patterns a little funky on that one, but like, okay, like, I'm not against that. And then I do. I actually kind of like the King's one because I like the simplicity with it and I get its throwback colors from former versions of the King's. So okay, sure, you know, I also saw just as a related aside, they're going to wear from their not, not their previous meeting a couple of years ago playoff team, but like the Chris Weber playoff teams, they're going to wear those uniforms again for a handful of games, which that will also be fun. So yeah, these ones, this group of, what is this seven of them, better than any of the other three pages of stuff, like these might be some of the best ones in the whole thing. What is it? Is it just me? Is it my own bias coming into play or is it fair to say the Lakers and the Celtics are the two worst? God. No, I think you might be right there. Yeah. And it's also because you and I both prefer the traditional uniforms. And I think you maybe I'm wrong on this, but I think you and a lot of other Lakers fans have come around to the white Sunday whites. Oh, yeah. Right. We're no decades into that. Yeah. So I think people are now like, yeah, those are like, because I remember when those first came out, people were like, what is this? Yeah. It was out of here. Like we were, I would say yellow, but like we wear gold at all. That's what we wear and then it took a long time for the black and green Celtics jerseys to get there for some people. But yeah, I think it's they have two of the best uniform sets in the entire sports world, not just the NBA, the entire sports world. And then they keep doing stupid stuff with them. Like, I don't know, man, I, I feel old often, I don't know, they've ever felt older than this episode of front office show. I feel like I'm going to get up, my back's going to crack and shuffle off to the couch. No, but kid, we are not, we are far from the only ones and we are, we're apart from the oldest ones to play the young, the youngsters, the young folks, they're complaining about these things too. So it is, it is not just us, you know, yelling at clouds or anything like that. Do you know what is funny though? I did have somebody was like, yeah, I hate it, but I'm going to buy it. And that's like, why you don't have to. Like, I know there's trust me, I'm a completionist. I get it. Like I was the, I was like, man, that new GI Joe figure, he's kind of stupid. And I think that whole new characters dumb, but I need the whole set, like I need to finish this year's line. Right. So like, I'm going to get him like, but yeah, man, I, I don't know. I'm just like, yeah, like, just pass right here. You don't. And this is just me, but I don't, I will wear jerseys occasionally. I like, I'm a tank top guy during the summer. I wear tank tops, but I don't wear a whole lot of Jersey. I will every now and then. So I don't actually buy a lot of jerseys. But what I do do is every single year, uh, do do, um, yes, we're all that's our level of humor. Yes. Um, what I do though is every year, because I love when the weather gets colder winter time sweatshirts, sweatshirts, sweatpants, all that kind of stuff. So I will, I usually seek out the city edition version in a sweatshirt for my, they'll do that type of, of theme. And some of them have looked, looked great. Um, it had been fantastic. One of my favorite Lakers sweatshirts that I've got is the city edition from like three years ago. And so that's what I usually look for rather than a Jersey itself. And so when you get something where I, when I see stuff like this and I'm like, man, not at all that good, especially the Lakers one looks bad, I'm just praying that it, whatever they convert it to being a sweatshirt or a t-shirt or whatever, there's a way to kind of that they tweak it, that they alter it just enough or something like that. Cause I'm, I'm probably not going to buy the Jersey, you know, again, I'm not a big like Jersey wearer, um, but sweatshirts, I will. And so that's where the city edition stuff really comes into play for me. And I just hope that, you know, in sweatshirt form or something or at least in t-shirt form, you just wind up looking a little bit better. Yeah. Yeah. And it's tough too. Cause often if, you know, you're having a great season, you want something from that season, right? That's going to, every time you see it or you wear it, you're going to be reminded of that season. Yeah. You hope it, it's better than whatever this is. So yeah, I don't know, not, not a big fan. So there it is. Nope. But, but you know what Keith, we are also of the mindset. I'm pretty sure you're alignment with me with this anyway. So back to a home Jersey on a way Jersey and give me one alternate. And that's it. I don't know why we were doing this thing where you're wearing the wrong color on the road or whatever, like just why did we have to mess with, with that? It didn't make sense to me. And now you get these weird combinations that just don't look right. You know, you're wearing a different colored jersey. Sometimes you're wearing the opponent's color on the opponent's court because the, your opponent went with a different color or whatever. It's just, it's weird. I wish we could just go back to go back to the good old days back in my day. You know, that type of thing. Back in the good old days when it was, it was much simpler. You want to do an alternate Jersey every year. You want to increase Jersey sales. That's fine. But at least give us some stability in terms of home, away, all of that. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, 100% I'm with you. I, I, it just gets to be too much and maybe it is, maybe I'm losing my mind too because there's times I turn on a game and I'm like, who's playing here? And then I'm like, okay, you know, I'm like flipping around league pass or whatever. Then I'm like, oh, yeah, that's their, their, their, you know, city Jersey or what, I don't even can't even remember them all anymore because there's like, you know, all these different names. But anyway, yeah. All right. Well, that'll be that until we actually see them. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's the other thing. I suppose we should finish with this. Like for sometimes they do look better when the players are actually wearing them. I thought that was the case with the Lakers Jersey's last year. I wasn't a big fan of the Lakers city editions last year. And then once I saw them actually on the court on the players, I'm like, okay, these, these look a bit better than they do when you're just seeing them kind of on their own like this. So maybe, maybe we could hold out hope that they won't look quite so bad once they're actually on the floor, although in the case specifically of the Lakers and the Celtics, I'm not that optimistic that that's going to be the case, but nonetheless, it is what it is. Yeah. Everybody, let us know your thoughts in the comments down below. You can gripe about the jerseys, talk to us about whoa, whatever you think. Give us your thoughts in the comments section. Don't forget to subscribe to the NBA front office show on YouTube as well as over an Apple podcast Spotify. Wherever you listen to podcasts, hopefully no one's reading or you googly anytime soon. Oh, another Zoolander reference. I love it. I love it. I wish I had a quick one to do. All I keep thinking of is the gasoline fight. So bad. I haven't seen that moving a long time. It's been a long time for a rewatch. It's been a long time. All right. Everybody. Thank you. Um, I'm Trevor Laid. He's Keith Smith. He's so hot right now. Till next time. You just talk. Yeah. And I like it. See ya. Stay safe.
