Jokic, Giannis, Bill Russell discussed on The Right Time with Bomani Jones
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
You know, even though he's doing all this great stuff, like you can, you know, when you look at bird and him winning, you can say, well man, it's hard to argue that he was not the best guy at least one of those years. You know, when jokic is like, man, I still can't put him above embiid or Giannis. You know, as the best player, I know we can do the semantics of most valuable and but at some point you also talked about who's the best player and I don't really feel confident that he's the best player and what is I think that's what you kind of is important if you're going to have this like once in a lifetime stat of three straight MVPs. Right, but here's the counterpoint. Does it matter if you're the best player if you play better than everybody else? Well, there's that too. Because I think part of what gets us here is when I think about that defense in. That's not about the 82 game sample. Right. It's about the 7 game samples. That you have to get through, right? And it's fair to raise a question about how good you are at doing this other thing. Like I talk about with football, part of the problem with the advanced metrics is September and January a completely different things. They're different outside. They're different versus who you go to play. It's all these different things. How much do those things really matter? Like once you get down to the nitty Gritty, and I think it's fair for people to ask that question about yogic. However, I raise this point. I'm curious what you think. The basketball world, historically, his kind of settled on the idea that Bill Russell was a better player than wheelchair. I am not certain that is the case, but that has been settled upon. Right. Bill Russell was kind of a two way player, right? They'll tell you is that he ran the offense from the high post to ignore those really low shooting percentages in all of that stuff. But they wouldn't go out there and be like, hey, Russ, we need a bucket. 54s. Right. But there's something I think not just aesthetically, but also almost like morally for us. In our minds, that if we don't think of you as this great defensive player, we just can't do it. Right. Just because it is defense. Again, Steph Curry wound up in that same place. And then we get to the weird race thing and I'm curious your observations on this because, you know, we both had our various exposures to white people when it comes to talking about various things, including basketball. I find that nobody is harder or white basketball players than white people. There's a low white self esteem. It seems when it comes to basketball. And rappers, they're the same way with rappers too. Yep. They cut them off at the knees. Unless for whatever reason, that white rapper or that white basketball player demonstrates that he belongs in which case they go. All right? It gets all the way to a whole nother place once they cross over a certain threshold and I don't really keep up like I haven't checked the public Twitter timeline in over a year. So there's a lot of the discourse around yogic that I don't see, but I do fully understand after I've gotten a little more familiar with what's going on in the discourse.