LeBron James Should Hope Another Team Wants Him More Than the Lakers Do! — Hahn | Get Up

Bottom of the hour, back on get up, back to the NBA. Let's do off-season wish lists for big stars around the league. Hey, Alan Hahn, what should LeBron James' off-season wish list be? His first wish should be that another team wants him more than the Lakers do so that the Lakers now have a tough decision to make rather than mess with his money, because you got the Warriors and a Cleveland Cavaliers team that might want to look into bringing him in for one last push. Charles Barkley said here last week he thinks LeBron should finish back in Cleveland where it started. Vincenzo Goodwill, what should Victor Wembanyama's wish list be? A man who was in attendance in game five of the NBA Finals, Charles Oakley. He needs an enforcer. Vic, being his own enforcer, gets him close to Draymond Green territory. And I don't mean low blows. I just mean hitting people. Yeah, he doesn't need that. He needs somebody else to hit people for him. I like that. Maurice Lucas for Bill Walton, that kind of guy. Rick Mahorn comes to mind. Jay Williams, what should Giannis Antetokounmpo's off-season wish list be? GA's wish should be to play for two of the most brilliant minds in the game of basketball. One being a guy in Brad Stevens that is a general manager for the Boston Celtics. And the next being Joe Mazzuola, who is the head coach for the Celtics as well, who need to revamp, recalibrate their scheme, having a rim protector, a guy that can drive a tack downhill with three-point shooting around him. That should be GA's wish. Well, Jay Will isn't the only person who's thinking Giannis should go to Boston. In case you missed it, this was Reggie Miller weighing in yesterday with Dan Patrick. I still like the Boston. I think if you're Joe Mazzuola, you do have to change a little bit. They took way too many threes. I'm sorry. And again, I know this is... But are you giving up Jaylen Brown? If that's what it's going to take. I'll have to see the rest of that roster. Fifty threes a game is way too much. Can I just say, I played with Reggie for USA Basketball. That's one of the greatest three-point shooters of all time saying, you took too many threes. That's a guy who doesn't take a three. It's exactly what I was thinking. I got the same thing out of it. Reggie Miller saying you're shooting too many threes. Well, it is interesting. That is ironic when you think about it that way. But the thing about the threes with the Celtics is their adherence to those analytics might have been part of the reason they had such a good season. But it was unquestionably the reason that they wound up losing. You mean live and die. A playoff series they had no business losing. So, you know, it's sort of on a razor's edge there. Very simply. Vinny, the NBA's first round of the draft is a week from today. Yes. Do people around the league expect Giannis to be traded before then? Yeah, I think so. But we've expected Giannis to be traded at so many other various points nobody would be willing to put a bet on it. I think it's reaching a crisis point, but sort of an inflection point because Giannis has two years left on his contract, but one is a player option. It depends on where does Giannis want to be beyond this year. To me, Greeny, the bigger question is how many more years of prime Giannis do we have in front of us? Because if you look at the miles on his body, the way that he plays, big muscular guy, physical, has not developed a consistent jump shot, running up and down the floor. That's a lot of atrophy. And I look at Kevin Garnett being a guy who was indestructible, and then he wasn't. He had all those great years in Minnesota, especially on the back end where they weren't making the playoffs. He had one great year in Boston at age, what, 31, 32? And then, boom, tore his knee up in Utah and was never the same Kevin Garnett again. So if that's the template, how many years does Giannis have as being this guy, the number one guy on the championship team? Sneakily, it's going to be 32 in December. So two questions on that. Let's start with the first one. Not easy, but the obvious one. If you take Jalen Brown off the Celtics and put Giannis on them next year with Jason Tatum and the general cast of characters they have right now, is that your favorite to win the East? Yes. Actually, you know what? It would still probably be the Knicks because their chemistry right now, I think, would have them in the front seat. I would still need to see what Brad Stevens does on the margins. But having Jason Tatum and Giannis on the same team makes them top tier in the Eastern Conference and in the NBA. Well, help me with, like, basketball fit. Like, Jason Tatum and Jalen Brown, I think they fit well together personally, but there's some talk of redundancy, right? The game of Giannis and the game of Jason Tatum, do those fit well together in your opinion? I think it fits well if you have some of the ancillary pieces around it that can open up the floor for Giannis to attack and dominate in the paint and drive downhill. I think guys like Derek White, there's still a lot of players on the fringes, but that roster was incomplete. And that's one of the opportunities for growth. But that's what I worry about. That's what I worry about, because a move like that is a massive, massive move. You could say one for one, but there's got to be a lot of other things that go with it. And then it becomes, like you said, the margins. That's the most important part, is how it fits around, the pieces you have around, how it impacts your depth, what you're able to do. So there's a lot you still need to see before you can say, oh, put Giannis there and they're going to be contenders. You need to know what else goes with it. Benny, I'll say on that too, is look at the margins and what they did this year. They finished number two in the East with names that people on shows on ESPN can't even tell you who played on their team. If you're the Knicks, if you're going through all this celebration and you have the parade on Thursday and everything and then you sit back and you're watching the draft on Tuesday, whatever it is. I guess what I'm saying is, and then you look on your phone and it's Shams, breaking news. Boston Celtics have traded Jalen Brown for Giannis. If you're the Knicks, are you thinking, oh no, or are you thinking, oh yes. Well, Carl Thompson, I could see it going either way. Well, Carl Thompson's probably saying, oh yes, that means I'm not going anywhere. The secondary point is, I think when you win a championship, you're not worried about what anybody else is doing in that moment. Like you, you want to see it first. And to me, the Celtics, Jason Tatum isn't a great three-point shooter. The numbers say that he's a, you know, below average three-point shooter. And he has the atrophy of an Achilles injury. He wore down in that series. So we have to answer the Jason Tatum health question. I think the Knicks will have natural concern, but if they return back their top seven players, if they get Mitchell Robinson done, they're not going to be awed or scared by anybody because of the way that they ran through the playoffs. Fair enough. Jason Tatum came back in a, like in a record-breaking setting time. Jason Tatum should have taken the whole year off. He should have. He's got a whole off season. And I think you, I think he winds up paying the bill for that at some point in his career. I hope not. Regardless of who you're rooting for, I hope that doesn't happen because it, you respect him for coming back quickly and you hope that he's okay. Just quickly, do you think, do you think that Giannis over Brown makes the Celtics more or less of a threat? I think it changes them. It changes them. I don't know how it makes them more of a threat when what they were with Tatum and Brown together was a team that every year you thought was the best team in the East and you had to just properly build around. They broke that team down for reasons of finances, not because they didn't like the pieces they had. They've got to now build it back up around them. That's the smarter play. It'll keep them contenders. We, I promised you, I would set aside a little time for this earlier today because you made a point, Jay. And I wanted to keep Dominique in for this part of it as well. What was the point you wanted to make about the way this particular championship roster was constructed? So I've been having conversations with some owners and some players over the last couple of days. Some guys are coming in free agency this summer and next summer. And the thesis of the conversations have been, Hey, Jalen Brunson left $113 million on the table. And when you think about roster construction of what you can pay talent to fill in those gaps to make a complete team, pressure that other players will start to be under over the next couple of years will be, Hey, are you willing to take a little bit less in order for us to actually build out the roster the right way in order to give role players the right value so we can actually have a championship contender? Not saying it's right or wrong. It's just some of the pressures I'm hearing people talk about. So I wanted to keep Dominique in on this. You know that he was the president of the NFL Players Association. You may not know he was the COO of the NBA Players Association at one point. So Dominique, when you hear this, when you hear the question, should stars take less money to help build out their rosters? What's your answer? That I will say whether it's right or wrong, it's absolutely wrong. So Jalen Brunson's case was unique. His former agent was the GM and his dad is a coach on the team. So there's a level of trust there that he made that other players may not have with other teams. But there's so many mechanisms designed to suppress players' salaries from their rookie pay and the contract, how long they have to stay in that contract, to max salaries to the second apron. The idea that a player should, the pressure should be put on a player to take less to me is frustrating because it's not the player's job. Like now it's time for the GM to do their job, not to ask the player to again make another sacrifice to make things work for you. Obviously in the Jalen Brunson case, it worked out phenomenally well for him. Of course, he's got to make hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of bringing this one title to the Knicks. But I just hate the idea that, and we see it in football all the time, I hate the idea that the players are gonna be underpaid for a stretch. And now when it's time for them to realize their true value, we're gonna put more pressure on them to make the job of the GM even easier. Give him the max deal, give him all his money and go figure out, go draft well, go sign, go trade, go do your job. Don't ask the player again to do your job for you. Vinny, I think, look, there's something about taking less, a little bit less, and then $113 million less. That's not a haircut. You're going bald after that. Like, no. And here's the other thing. Let's be perfectly honest here. Four years, $254 million. That's what Jalen Brunson is going to be eligible to sign next summer. You think he's taking a haircut then? Absolutely not. No, he won't. No way. Okay, fair enough. Because he delivered. Yeah, but he shouldn't have to, the money is necessarily delayed, not deferred. You know what I mean? He's going to get all of his money anyway. Yeah, bet on himself. But I love what Anik said because he's right. This is a unique situation because you have a trust, you have a relationship with those who are making those decisions with your contracts. So you're working with them. And what did it do? All right, I'm going to give you this money, but here's what I want you to do with it. Go get me Mikael Bridges. Go get me Carl Anthony Towns. Get pieces that I know will work around me. So that was a collaborative that was totally different than most situations anywhere in any sport. It's tough in the NBA to do this with this now the second apron. Very difficult to do it. And if you make one mistake, you're screwed for a long time. So that does put the onus on the front office, but it always should be that way. But here's the thing. Let's say the Knicks buck the trend and repeat. OG Anenobe will be up. Carl Anthony Towns will be up. The pressure will be on them to take less because Jalen Brunson took less. Right. And James Dolan's got the sphere going on. He's got all these other things that bring him money. Why do the players who have a very limited shelf life of being able to maximize their earnings potential have to take less? Just one thing off that. Let's say, hypothetically, Jalen Brunson didn't have this run and he got hurt. Like he had a really bad injury that hindered him from playing at the same level he played at. That's $113 million that's not in his pocket. That's the risk he could have had. That's the risk you take. Obviously, there were risks involved in going in that direction. And I think Dominique, you make a great point about the uniqueness of this situation. The example people will continue to go back to is Tom Brady in the sport of football, who consistently took less money than he could have. And that might be why they were able to add the pieces around him that enabled him to become what he is now, which is universally believed to be the greatest player of all time. Yeah, and I can't argue with that. And these are two aberrations in particular situations. You could also take those cuts and it not work out, particularly in football. I can't argue with it. I just hate setting the precedent and creating a media atmosphere where we're putting pressure on players to take less and say like, oh, it means you don't want to win a championship. It means you don't care enough. No, the pressure remains where it belongs, on the general managers and the teams to manage their caps properly, to manage their acquisitions properly. Or you could abolish the salary cap for the second apron altogether and spend all the money you want. Don't put the pressure on the star players who have sacrificed and earned and gotten to this like incredibly unique pop, this incredibly unique situation to then go, oh, you got to then take a sacrifice. That means you don't care enough. To me, that just feels unfair and it pisses me off, got me stuttering. Well, this is what happens because we have a team like, we have a team like San Antonio Spurs, right? Everyone's like, oh man, like that's a baby OKC team, right? If you want to say Dylan Harper and Castle and Wimby reminds you of KD and James Harden and Russell Westbrook. But can you keep that team together long term? Because Castle and Harper, they're going to demand maxes. Your wages are suppressed in the NBA for your first seven years. So the first times you get to get a max contract, you're then asked to take another haircut that's below market value. That's I think that's a bit unfair to ask players. It's good conversation. I'm glad that we had Nick in on this. Thank you for jumping on this, Dominique. And I'm glad that you brought it up because it clearly is something people will be talking about.