We're back we talk:

• The NBA Finals and how Giannis Antetokounmpo's Finals MVP performance ranks, as well as his Chik-fil-A endorsement attempt.
• A teaser of a talk with Dave Berri and our two cents on the NBA Draft. Namely, if you're worried about how the NBA Draft impacts your team next season, you've already lost.
• Simone Biles and how athletes playing through injuries is weird and annoyingly applauded, e.g. James Harden this year.
• The Ben Simmons' trade rumors and why they make no sense (for the 76ers to bite on)
• Why Brad Beal is a horrible target for the Warriors
• Why the New Orleans Pelicans won the first major offseason trade in acquiring Jonas Valanciunus.
• Shoutout to LassoCon 2020!

Enjoy!

Dre and Brian talk:

Mark Eaton's case for the Hall of Fame.

We talk a bunch of Celtics drama including:

Danny Ainge leaving

Kyrie Irving commenting on racism and snubbing the Boston logo.

A fake screenshot Tweet that got NBA Twitter.

Of course, we review round 1 of the playoffs. Some highlights: Hawks vs. Knicks - the mini Rockets looked good.

Lakers vs. Suns - Health sucks and Bubble Basketball and Play-In Ball have added a ton of variance.

Nuggets vs. Blazers - Hat tip to Damian Lillard and thanks to Melo! Jazz vs. Grizzlies - Jazz are the favorites, one loss meant nothing. Bucks vs. Heat - Reversion to the mean hit hard.

Clippers vs. Mavericks - Porzingis was a mistake. Doncic is good

Shout outs:

Naomi Osaka for withdrawing from the French Open.

Tedd Lasso and the amazing AI "Practice" homage.

We talk:

The Warriors making the playoffs, and how Dre was right!

The MVP race and why it's obviously Jokic

A little NBA Playoffs, we'll talk more after the play-in.

Ben Wallace and Chris Webber are in the Hall of Fame. We go over Dre's article on the subject.

Shout out to Mark Fidrych, one of the most amazing "what if healthy?" players in sports history.

Enjoy!

Reviewing the economics and rationality behind what NBA teams look for in NBA players using Drew Timme.

Fun precursor. Thanks Robert Vodicka for noticing we had a bug on the 76ers page of the boxscoregeeks.com -- we talk this at the end of the show. Ironically fixing this page was an easy fix but also required a system update which wound up taking down the Boxscore Geeks for two days ... so yeah!

Patrick is back to talk:

Why James Wiseman was hurting the Warriors and how Curry is an MVP. This happened right before Curry torched the Nuggets and had back to back 10+ three pointer games!

We talk the Wolves possibly getting sold and Patrick gives a free Business Course on how to really analyze NBA front office finances.

We talk a silly chess feud that resulted in a fight between Eric Hansen and Hikaru Nakamura - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FcokIxe50A, it is as stupid as it sounds!

Tune in!

We were lucky to have on a very special guest - @TyWillinganz! Ty's a fellow Wisconsinite who's been blogging about basketball forever. In the old days, he regularly wrote at https://courtsideanalyst.wordpress.com. He stopped after the lockout but is back at https://berribasketballratings.blogspot.com. We specifically had Ty on to discuss his brilliant March Madness strategies. However, we ended up talking more about random basketball topics, mainly due to the suboptimal performance of our respective brackets. Tune in!

Some highlights:

Ty discusses how he breaks down player productivity as a W-L number as opposed to a single aggregate.

We talk how Ty was one of the first bloggers I knew of that attacked defense and noted that it was more of a team/scheme/coach number than something easily tied to a player.

We talk about Ty's precursor to Moreyball - Sh** Shots, or how midrange shots were obviously a horrible plan. Ty also has a metaphor for ideal defense in the NBA - the Avocado Defense (hard on the outside and middle, soft in the middle).

We do talk about some basic March Madness strategy and why Michigan wasn't a bad Darkhorse. Also, Drew Timme looks great and should enter the draft if he knows what's good for him.

We discuss a few NBA trades particularly Jeff Teague to Milwaukee, Drummond to LA, and Aaron Gordon to the Nuggets.

There is also tons of NFL and Football talk scattered throughout the talk as Ty is a giant Packers fan and Brian knows a ton of football. Enjoy!

We talk: 

Steph Curry's Talents being wasted on the Warriors.

Anthony Edwards' bad shooting but "good dunk" and the Nate Duncan online fight.

Draymond Green's Great take on Andre Drummond/James Harden and the double standard for players and front offices in the media.

Kristaps Porzingis being an obvious mistake at the time for the Mavericks.

And why the Nuggets have room for optimism and pessimism.

Broadcasted live on Twitch -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/nerdnumbers 9:30pm EST Monday!

Timestamps of subjects below:

0:40 Anthony Edwards is impressively bad!

7:20 Shaq/Donovan Mitchell feud.

13:15 NBA's commentators are bad for growing the sport.

19:15 Nikola Jokic is MVP and the best passing big ever.

27:24 Dikembe Mutombo swag!

32:20 Clint Capela and the death of the Houston Rockets

39:54 The James Harden / Jarrett Allen trade.

49:36 The WFH BSG 1:04:00 The Wolves horrible #1 Pick history

Shoutouts:

Patrick - Karl Anthony Towns and the unfair year he's had.

Brian - T.D. Williams for their great take on Shaq's bad commenting.

Dre - Andrey Esipenko for defeating Magnus Carlsen in their first match!

The NBA season is upon us and we review the state of a small small portion of the NBA thanks to the great data from Hispanos NBA (https://en.hispanosnba.com/transactions)

Thanks to co-host Chris Yeh for coming on to predict his Lakers would win the 1st seed out West again. Andres counters his Nuggets will win the #1 seed. Where Brian says the Warriors are a team that plays basketball.

You can find Chris at chrisyeh.com, @chrisyeh on Twitter, and make sure to check out his two New York Times best sellers: Blitzscaling and the Alliance. Both co-written by Reid Hoffman (and Ben Casnocha for the Alliance). As we note on the show Chris and Reid are the Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman of the Business writing world!

New York Times Best Seller (among many many other accolades!) Chris Yeh returns to talk three of his birthday wishes. In the order we talk about them:

A Biden victory!

• Chris Yeh's Podcast has a great talk with John Robb on this subject!
• We also note the absurdity of treating election results as a linear "game" and not a bunch of votes being counted "out of order."

A Dodger's Championship

• That Kershaw guy is pretty good!

A Lakers Championship

• Chris Yeh's Podcast has a great episode with Gary Martin aka the "Lakers Sign Guy" on their title.
• We also talk the Lakers vs. Celtics "rings" total.
• Also, the Agony of Defeat Podcast has a must listen episode with Jeff Pearlman on the Lakers!

As always check out Chris Yeh at chrisyeh.com and thanks for listening!