bill simmons IS bill simmons IN the book of BASKETBALL

talents, crab rangoon, things of that nature

lol someones gotta dig into what simmons said over the years about the decision

ahaha, he literally pitched it to maverick carter or whoever?

yeap

that’s wiiiiild

the beauty of podcasts is it’s hard to find actual records of takes but I know for sure he has repeatedly said stuff about how the decision was a failure of having the wrong people around him or whatever back then. this is hilarious

lool

see if i were bill simmons i wouldve played it real cool everytime the topic came up

https://i.imgur.com/Y4QUqa5.png

Every life event is like sports. Every sports event is like a movie. Every movie is rewatchable.

-Buddha Simmons

imagining myself listening to a podcast of simmons rewatching goodfellas then becoming the unibomber

https://www.espn.com/general/page2/story?id=5366996&src=desktop

TLDR:

“So when Clemens went to Toronto, got in shape, won two straight Cy Youngs and forced a trade to the Yankees, really, a column called "Is Clemens the Antichrist?" became inevitable as soon as I found a bigger forum to write it. I hated that guy as much as you could hate a professional athlete without things getting creepy.

And you know what? What LeBron did to Cleveland last night was worse. Much worse.

It's one thing to leave. I get it. You're 25. You don't know any better. You're tired of carrying mediocre teams. You want help. You want the luxury of not having to play a remarkable game every single night for eight straight months. You want to live in South Beach. You want to play with your buddies. I get it. I get it. But turning that decision into a one-hour special, pretending that it hadn't been decided weeks ago, using a charity as your cover-up and ramming a pitchfork in Cleveland's back like you were at the end of a Friday the 13th movie and Cleveland was Jason ... there just had to be a better way.”

lool

i want netw3rk to do the whole nba desktop about this. get all the articles, pod audio, and video clips lined up and just completely roast his boss.

bill is a good sport he would like that

wait.... this news... what the fuck lmao

when i read the report it seemed like there were 8 critical things that occurred between the mailbag column and the decision itself and it wasn't really that interesting

the thing that nobody involved at any point could know is that lebron would choose miami and say "i'm taking my talents to south beach"

you can take a horse to water, but you can't make it light itself on fire and then drown

yup

lmao this is amazing

bill is a good sport he would like that

he does love content, idk.

obviously lebron is responsible for how it went down, but the fact that simmons did what he did to get the ball rolling is hilarious to me.

its very funny, and then he just carried on like he didnt do it

bill is not a good sport for the record i was just kidding

yeah he is a guy who for better or worse likes to make predictions and brag about his correct predictions and it’s something you think he’d mention when the topic comes up if he were proud of it

bill setting it up and immediately armchair fan tut-tutting the thing is just so pure

whats a cheap assist lol

Bill Simmons' in his latest podcast: "Luka's assists are like Bird's - they're not cheap assists... like the James Harden type of assists'.

— Andrew Soukup (@asoukuptx) August 10, 2020

crash toward the basket and kick it out for a three?

BS almost ruins Luka for me

he was basically talking about seeing passes that most ppl don't see vs. passing to a spot and knowing someone is there. it was pretty forced.

not sure where to put this, but netw3rk is leaving the ringer

some personal news! pic.twitter.com/flfHRoK9ax

— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) October 30, 2020

boooo

somethings afoot at spotify ringer

hi! today is my last day at the ringer. it’s been a delight working with so many thoughtful and brilliant people over the last four years. i was 22 and waiting tables in kentucky when they called me - i’ll be grateful always, to the ringer and to any of you who followed along ❤️

— haley o'shaughnessy (@HaleyOSomething) October 30, 2020

it's not spotify. people don't like working for bill because he's an asshole

is that what's going on? losing newtork seems like a big deal

idk about each individual situation but from what i've heard in aggregate yeah

also the union stuff there has been a huge battle even before spotify. i'm sure it hasn't been helped by the acquisition, but it was bill vs his employees in a way that really brought a lot of the underlying issues w/ working there to the surface (again, from what i understand). it doesn't seem like any of it has been resolved really

Too many of our members have said that they struggle to cover basic living expenses from month to month, and too many of our members say that they have received little to no salary increases even as they take on more responsibilities.

— Ringer Union (@RingerUnion) August 20, 2020

athletic gonna take on all these people leaving? makes the most sense. seems like their personalities might be capped a bit there vs ringer tho

maybe this was naive of me working for a gigantic company but i was extremely surprised at the lack of basic HR and career dev stuff at the ringer based on what the union was claiming. is it uncommon in internet media?

at start up type websites definitely not. for the ringer you could make an argument that it’s different bcuz bill has run a website before and should have also learned from the mistakes of similar type websites before him, but speaking from what i know personally, the HR/office infrastructure situations at places like pre-conde pitchfork or the fader (or gawker lol) were shoestring at best to nonexistent + actively harmful at worst. the career dev aspect is trickier and that’s a huge issue at the ringer specifically as it pertains to the divisions between writing and podcasting and video and who got the opportunities to do what, but in general when you have ppl competing for scarce opportunities and a belief that certain ppl will do better in front facing roles (i.e. being on camera) than others you run into these types of situations pretty quickly where a select few ppl seem to be elevated at the expense of their coworkers. bill is just really bad at this — his response to a reckoning this year about the lack of diversity in his podcasts was (largely) to hire a bunch of celebs like bakari sellers, raja bell, ryan shazier etc, while also giving shows/jobs to his children and relatives and then claiming that he was simply running a meritocracy.

presumably espn handled all the annoying HR stuff at bill's previous website

athletic seems to be stressing podcasting lately, but apart from that i think the era of them hiring everyone is long over

network could probaly just do his own thing

yeah he’ll get into TV or something i’m sure

the ringer trending toward celeb podcasts is a disappointing and predictable development with the spotify purchase

btw can someone explain to me, a non-podcast listener, how this has become so huge and lucrative? like i understand rogan or whomever, i guess, but there are only so many hours in a day to listen/pay attention to hour-long sound files and their ads. idgi

is it just venture capital

podcasts are very popular and usually very cheap to produce but yeah prob just vc

it was possible until recently to do pretty well with an independent podcast that had a decent listener base using ads alone. i think reduction in commuting time this year plus some consolidation of the ad market for podcasts is changing that. my favorite basketball pod recently went from ad-supported to a subscription model, which i could see happening with a lot of pods not backed by a major company.

Yah my pod listening is down to like one per week or two where I used to listen daily