Hoops Tonight - Jason Timpf reacts to Netflix's "Redeem Team" documentary and shares why he thinks Kobe Bryant is "grossly" underrated, what went wrong for the 2004 USA Olympic team, and then compares the 2012 team starring LeBron James and Kobe Bryant with Michael Jordan's Dream Team from the 1992 Olympic Games.

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hundred gambler dot net in West Virginia. All right, welcome to Hoops Tonight, presented by Fandel here at the volume Happy Friday. Everybody, congrats on making it to the weekend. Our season is right around the corner. After this weekend. On Monday, we're going to be doing our like season preview kind of on a macro scale, just giving my

final picks of the year. I feel like that's just something everybody's got to do before the ball gets thrown up for the first time, at least tell us you think's gonna win the title, you think's gonna win m v P, and all those sorts of things. So we'll be doing that kind of thing on Monday and then

starting Tuesday night. The way the schedule is gonna work throughout this beginning portion of season during football, when we get towards the end of the season, it's gonna be literally live shows every single night after the biggest game, after the five biggest games of the week during the regular season, and then once we go into the playoffs. You guys know me, I'm gonna be working basically every

single night through the middle of June. So that's that's all We're gonna be night stuff during that latter portion of the season. During this beginning of the season, when we're working with football, it will be a little bit more of a mix. Will pick like two or three nights a week where there's huge games, will go live after the games, and then for the rest of the week will go during the day when I have more time to kind of pour over the film, which will

be a nice little mix up. Today we're gonna be covering the Redeemed Team documentary. There are four things from that specific documentary that I want to talk about. A little bit about Kobe and how he's revered among his peers and how we should factor that more in when we're talking about him. A little bit about Larry Brown and the O four team that lost in the Olympics,

which I think is interesting. And then why why I think the two thousand twelve team was better than the two thousand eight team and comparing the two thousand twelve team to original Dream Team. You guys know the drill before we get started. Subscribe to the Volumes YouTube channel so you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at Underscore Jason lt so you guys don't miss any show announcements. That's also where I put film breakdown since I can't do it on YouTube, so

you're gonna want to follow me there. And then, last but not least, for whatever reason, you can't finish one of these videos and you can't get back over to YouTube to finish them, you can find them wherever you get your podcasts under Hoops Tonight. On that note, let's talk some basketball. So my favorite part about watching that particular documentary, which I very much enjoyed a lot of cool stuff, like vintage Olympic footage. Um, and it's just kind of a cool. Uh. What's kind of cool about

having that old fashioned film? Is it just when it's taking care of man, it just shows up so good all these years later, Like some of the camera angles on the sideline of Team USA when they only had college players. That was really the cool footage. Um. And then it was just good to see a lot of Kobe and you know, like so so many NBA media now um, And I think a lot of this is

analytics driven, but there's there's several reasons behind it. But a lot of NBA media before Kobe's death and even now after, hold him in relatively low esteem compared to

some of his peers around the league. Most people seem to have in between ten and thirteen all time based on based on some of the more prominent people in the media that I hear talk, I have Kobe Bryant as the third best basketball player of all time, at least in my perimeter players list, because remember I keep perimeter players separate from bigs, and you know, I think it's pretty straightforward. I think he's firmly ahead of Magic Johnson and and Larry Bird. But a lot of people

disagree with me. I think I think analytics plays a huge part in it. I mean, first of all, analytics in general, like we talked about, anytime you try to simplify a complex game like basketball down into catch all metro x or even lower level metrics, but used without context, it does it does a terrible job of quantifying the

game of basketball. Now, it certainly doesn't translate across eras that's just not the same watching James Harden go to work and spread pick and roller spread is so spread by a ton of shooting in many cases without even

having a center on the floor. That's just not the same as Kobe Bryant playing alongside Pau Gasol and Andrew buying him are alongside Shack working in a triangle offense when the half court set is incredibly congested and there's just not a lot of space to operate, and he's manufacturing shots through incredibly difficult shot making because that's what he needed and that's what the team needed from him in order to manufacture points in a very congested mid

two thousand's basketball game. And so I just don't think it's fair to be like, oh, James Harden's true shooting percentage is fifty eight percent and Kobe's was fifty three there or James Harden is a better basketball player. If that's just stupid to me, that's like, just pull my hair out. I can't believe what I'm hearing. Stupid, but that that type of analytic stuff works against Kobe. He was a gunner and just general, a lot of basketball

a lot of basketball purists don't like gunners. And then obviously he has some darker parts of parts of his story that we don't have to get into. But all of those things kind of amount to Kobe being, in my opinion, grossly underrated all time. And the reason why I have him at number three is simple. I I simplify. I explain the analytics stuff by pointing out the obvious differences in the eras if you actually broke it down to skill set at the two guard position, there wasn't

anybody nearly as skilled as Kobe. He was a better defensive player. Than everybody at his position. He was just the best at what he did. So you have to look at the way that these percentages and things worked back then and kind of keep it in the context of that era, not in the context of pairing him to all of the eras. In general. When we're comparing eras or comparing players, I think it should focus on

skill sets. It should focus on how they performed relative to their peers, not in the grand scheme of just here's how many rebounds he had versus here's how many rebounds Michael Jordan had, or here Lebron has more assists than you know, so and so like that. To me, that, to me is just not a good way to have that conversation. We should be talking about how they performed against their peers and how they performed in their era and the way that they impacted winning on their particular

basketball teams. And then that pure score thing, the gunner thing. I've never looked at that as a negative. It's just one of the archetypes. You guys probably remember this summer we did a whole thing on all of the different uh superstar archetypes, like that super small, super athletic guard, like the John Morant, Russell Westbrook, Derrick Rose type of thing. Right, then we had the big playmaking forwards like Lebron James and your Luca don chich and and guys like that.

And then we had our you know, big men, guys like Nicola Yokitch, Joel Embiid shack all those guys over the years. But then we also have the scoring wing. This. This is Kevin Durant, this is Kobe Bryant, this is Michael Jordan's. That has always been a very important part of the game of basketball. Does it sometimes get esthetically annoying? Yeah, of course it's annoying sometimes when when he rises up

and shoots over three defenders and misses a shot. I can get why that would have fanned basketball purists on a certain level. But the reality is is you need guys who are capable of taking and making crazy shots. You need guys who are insane enough to think that instead of making the extra pass or making the right play, that they should rise up and shoot. You need guys that are wired like that within a team, because not everything goes by the book, and sometimes the right play

doesn't always result in a good result. For instance, at the end of the game against Spain. This was the grand finale of the documentary. You know, Spain goes zone. Uh USA gets tight. They're scoring on the other end. The game is close. You need someone who's crazy enough to be on the court with Lebron James and Dwyane Wade and Dwight Howard and Chris Paul and be like, no, I'm shooting this, you know, like him against the zone

taking a jab step three. That's a bad shot in theory. Right, You've got this super talented team, You've got players that should be able to succeed against the zone. You have a zone offense in theory. Yeah, you know, a jab step three basically a contest at three where he literally got fouled. That's not a good shot in theory. But he's crazy enough to take it. He's talented enough to

make it. And in a game like that where everyone's got sweaty palms and it's just tight, you need somebody that's going to rise up and knock that shot down. And that's what Kobe did. That's what he was for that group. He was the guy that was crazy enough to take the reins when everybody was a little concerned about who should take the reins that that to me is a huge side effect of that pure score archetype. It's incredible, valuable in the NBA, and it should never

be used against Kobe. And the last reason why I have him up at number three, I think it matters that his peers revered him the way that he did. Should it be the end all be all, No, Like, I don't. I don't think it should just be like, Oh, people are Kobe fans, therefore he's the best. But it's

part of that story, you know. I think. I think the people that are on the court with him, the people that that understand the way his work ethics stacks up to theirs, when they are paying him that level of respect, we should take notice, you know, like with the fact that he was able to throw a few morning workouts prepping for the two thousand seven FIBA America's UH Games, that he was able to convince the whole team to start working out in the mornings. That's an

aura thing with him. That's a power mentally that he had over his opponents, and by the way, that extends onto the court. We talked about this all the time. We I talked about this a lot in the last

playoff run with Steph. I believe a huge part of why Luca don Che didn't play well in the conference finals and Jayson Tatum didn't play well in the NBA Finals is they're looking across the way at Steph Curry and he's so confident and he's so comfortable and he's playing great basketball, and they're nervous, and that battle of personalities can really weigh on you on a basketball court. There's kind of like a a seesaw effect in every basketball game between the two best players on either team.

When one clearly feels more confident is playing better than the other, it can really start to tip that scale. And and I just think I think Kobe's persona around the league and the respect that he got from his peers is woefully underplayed when we're talking about him in his career accomplishments. UM I wanted to talk for a second about the about Larry Brown and the O four team, which, again, regardless of how you look at that they had no

business losing, regardless of who was on the roster. When you have Tim Duncan, when you have Alan Iverson, when you have you know, the young talent that they did on that team. They should have one, but they didn't. And you know, I think, I think in general it was an interesting case study. You have poor roster construction and the idea of um like the idea of redundancies. So for instance, like I, you know, I play a

lot of pickup basketball these days. You know, typical thirty one year old former player, just trying to scratch the competitive itch. And you know, I find that when I play with guys that know how to play together and understand the different roles that have to be filled out of asked what court, it's easy to win games, especially when there's a clear hierarchy and I know I can trust my guys to do what they need to do.

Then you run into you know, sometimes you go to the gym and your some of your buddies are there, and the next thing you know, you've got four or five high level players on the team, but they're all kind of scores right, or they're all dudes who like

to have the ball in their hands. And then what ends up happening is like instead of everybody playing well, it kind of hurts everybody, like no one gets in a rhythm because it turns into your turn, my turn, and you know one of the guys in your team feels like he should be shooting more so, like you'll force things when he should in or there's a lot of just dribbling the basketball at the floor and shooting.

That kind of concept. That's a basic basketball concept. Just you experience it in a pickup game, but you can also experience it at any level of basketball. There is a redundancy there when you have a bunch of guys who like to do the same thing. We talked about this all the time. With a basketball line up, there are a list of responsibilities that have to be fulfilled.

And when you have stars that specialize in fulfilling specific responsibilities like creating advantages or isolation scoring, you know, mismatch attacking things along those lines, driving the ball to the basket. But you don't have guys who specialize in spot up rolls. You don't have guys who specialize as cutters or as

off ball screeners or things along those lines. Guys who dedicate their life on the within the NBA to defensive roles or being in the mix, boxing out and securing defensive rebounds, are going after offensive rebounds when you don't have guys on the team that target those sorts of things, then you just have a bunch of guys who are good at this stuff, and you've got those bases covered, but you're leaving all these bases uncovered, and you end up losing to a team like in Argentina or a

Greece who has maybe one or two guys that fulfill the star responsibilities and the rest of their roster is full of guys that specialize in those little things, in the dirty work. And ironically, when they were building that roster they kind of talked about in the documentary how they went after the younger players because they couldn't get some of the bigger stars like a Shack or a

Kobe or things along those lines. Right, Well, instead of going after younger stars that Larry Brown wasn't gonna play anyways, because Larry Brown famously didn't like playing young players, they should have just got old veteran role players. They should have just targeted five or six random dudes around the league who were vitally important role players for high level

playoff teams and put them on that roster. And then Tim Duncan and Alan hiverson can focus on being who they are, knowing that they've got a traditional basketball group of dirty work role players behind them that can get stuff done. And I think that was just a fundamental example of fundamentally poor roster construction. And then the second part of it is, Um, you know, the the Carmelo Anthony and all those guys really went after Larry Brown for just being like wanting them to play the right

way and things along those lines. I've talked about this concept before on the show, Um, but it really bothers me when coaches in general try to inflict their philosophy on a roster rather than catering their philosophy to what the roster is good at. You know, the truth of the matter is is there is no right way to play basketball. The only right way to play basketball is to win. It's to score more points than the other team, find some way to get stops, find some way to

score baskets. And you have an assembly of players and they all have a skill set, and there's got to be a certain way that they can feel comfortable scoring the basketball or playing defense for instance. We talked about this all the time on the show. Some teams are more geared towards drop. Some teams are more geared towards switching. Some teams are like Dallas, are more geared to single creators and guys in spot up roles. In some teams like Boston and the Clippers are more geared towards like

equal opportunity, drive and kick. Everyone has lots of time with the basketball in their hands. There's just different philosophies that fit different types of rosters. And anytime I hear something like that where coaches trying to inflict his philosophy on a team, I'm always just ready for it to go immediately south from there. So kind of looking at the uh um uh. Comparing the two thousand eight team

to the two thousand twelve teams. So this has been a take that I've had for years, but I think the two thousand twelve team was considerably better than the two thousand eight team. And I really, I really boil it down to three things. Okay, First of all, Lebron in two thousand twelve was twice as good as he was in two thousand eight, much more consistent as a shooter, a much better defensive player, a much better understanding of

of how to win basketball games. And the details, controlling the pace of the game, understanding how to close games. He in the half court, he was so much better as a surgical playmaker and as a surgical score than he was in two thousand eight. He was just many, many times better, and he was still every bit as athletic as he was in two thousand eight. So I've got a better version of Lebron. That's that's where we're starting there. The guy, the two thousand and twelve Lebron.

Many people think that's his best version. I think it's two thousand eighteen. But two thousand twelve, two thirteen Lebron is no worse than the second best version of Lebron, who is the second best basketball player of all time. So let's go ahead and put that up there. Now I've got Kobe. I think Kobe was better than two

thousand twelve than he was in two thousand eight. Now, um, I get it, he's a little bit older, but if you remember, this was during the stretch where his uh where he had gotten some treatment on his knee, so he was more explosive. If you've ever looked at Kobe Bryant's athleticism in that two thousand twelve two thousand and thirteen season, he was jumping out of the gym and dunking over literally everybody because his knees were feeling better.

And then that was the year where he really figured out kind of modern basketball and more of the spaced out environment where he could operate instead of having to operate in the congested area around the free throw line. He was working a lot more from the three point line. He was working a lot more with a live dribble, a lot more spread. I saw a lot more spread pick and roll, and his percentages went through the roof. If you remember two thousand and twelve, two thousand and

thirteen was actually one of Kobe's most efficient seasons. Kobe, in the year or so before his Achilles injury, I think was the best version of Kobe. So I've got better Lebron, I've got better Kobe. And then there's the Cade versus Dwyane Wade thing. Now, Dwyane Wade is incredible,

and Circle two thousand eight, Dwyane Wade was incredible. I don't dispute that at all, but he kind of primarily acted as a bench scorer for that team, although he did play in crunch time for a lot of a lot of the games, but uh, he he had some of that redundancy. He his impact on the game was somewhat limited because he was in a spot up roll often, and Dwyane Wade has never been a fantastic about up player.

Kevin Durant in that two thousand twelve Olympic run was just a knockdown, stand still shooter what I call aggressive spot up shooting, meaning like you're hunting three point looks off the ball to the extent where even if someone rotates to you and contests, you're still rising up into

a shot. You're just not scared of anything. In that regard, that type of aggressive spot up shooting from Kevin Durant just made him a much more natural fit with the two thousand twelve team than Dwyane Wade was with the two thousand eight teams. So even though Wade in OH eight I think was probably a better player than Katie in two thousand twelve, the reality is a Katie was a better fit, which is kind of one of the

themes of this particular show. So I've got better Lebron, better Kobe, and I've got k d who's a better fit over Dwayne Wade. So I would take the two thousand twelve team over two thousand eight by a pretty decent margin. Now when we compare them to the ninety two Dream Team, this particular debate is incredibly difficult to have of so I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it's pretty simple to me. Comparing

across eras is impossible. I hate it when people start talking about like who can guard who, Like, oh, well, who's gonna guard Larry Bird on the two? Who's gonna guard Michael Jordan? When you're talking about these guys who are top ten players of all time at the peak of their powers, none of them can guard anybody. I'm sorry, but Lebron in two thousand twelve, if you leave him on an island with Michael Jordan's he's gonna kill him. If you have both ways, m J can't guard Lebron.

Lebron can't guard MJ. Kobe and MJ specialize in making incredibly difficult shots. Neither of them would be able to guard each other. Like I'm sorry, but like as we go down the rosters, position by position, everyone is the best at what they do. None of them can guard anybody, so it's hard to talk about specific matchups or how things would work. The two styles that they played based on the era were incredibly different, so it's impossible for

me to compare anything. They're the types of the way that the two thousand twelve team played offense. Doesn't even resemble the way team played offense. So I don't really I can't really get into the weeds of that conversation. I would simplify it down to this. I said that two of the top I said that my top three perimeter players of all time are MG one, Lebron to Kobe three. So I'm getting two of the top three players of all time at the peak of their powers.

That's gonna matter to me. Um and then and yes, I know my four and five are you know my I think I actually just bumped Larry Bird to six and put Steph past him. But my four and six is Magic and Birds, So yeah, I get that. But they weren't even close to the top of their They weren't even close to the top of their games. When they were right, Magic was still pretty good, but Larry was injured and wasn't the same player. So when I

look at the top. I like what I'm getting out of the two thousand twelve team, and then just in general as a philosophy, I've always been of the belief that modern basketball players are just getting better and better, not worse and worse. I know old heads really struggle with that conversation, and they truly believe that there was like this golden age of basketball when everyone was better and then now every ones just worse than they don't play the game the right way. I think that's insane.

I think the two thousand twelve basketball players are just better than basketball players. I think the two thousand two basketball players are better than the two thousand twelve basketball players, and I will think the two thousand thirty two basketball players are better than the two thousand twenty two basketball players. That's just gonna be a consistent philosophy that I keep over the years. I think that's just human nature in the way that we advance. We get better and better

in every industry as time goes on. But I very very much enjoyed that documentary. I hope you guys do as well. Check it out on Netflix. Um that's all I have for today. Like I said, get ready on Monday for our season preview, and then Tuesday we're doing our first live show of the year in the evening. As always, I sincerely appreciate your support. Thanks for rocking with me over this summer. I can't even believe how

how successful we were over this summer. I expected things to slow down quite a bit, so I appreciate you guys support, and let's get into that real basketball next week. Making mad, mad Mad, Mad Mad Mad The volume