Welcome to this week's episode of the Sports Curious podcast where we are talking about the NBA Finals. That's right, June 6th is when they start. And we're here to share this with you because it's going to be a lot of conversation around the NBA Finals. But also remember, you don't have to know all the things about basketball to join in on the conversation. I don't know all the things about basketball. I'll be the first one to admit I have not watched a lot of basketball this season.
That's why we bring in Scott, our co -founder and our co -host on this. because I ask him all the questions. So you're in luck. I'm going to ask him all the questions. He's going to give me all the answers. And then we're all going to have a lot of great things to talk about when it comes to the NBA finals. So Scott, Scott, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Honored to be here and ready to share some basketball knowledge so you can talk.
NBA finals wherever you're at, at work, at school, at happy hour, on a date. We'll have you ready to roll. Well, thanks for dropping some knowledge on us for that. I appreciate it because let's be honest, this is, I like basketball, but it's not the thing I pay the most attention to. So I'm happy that you get to share that with us. Okay. Okay. So we're talking, we have the Dallas Mavericks and the Boston Celtics will be playing in the NBA finals starting on the sixes Thursday. What's if...
We know nothing else about this entire matchup. What's one thing we could drop into the conversation? I think one of the main talking points we're going to hear from now until it actually starts is we have some of the younger up -and -coming superstars that have yet to win a title. And without LeBron, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, names like that, these few players that we're going to see in this series are kind of the next evolution of superstars face the league.
So it's exciting to see them get their opportunity. And who might those be who are some names we might know? So we have two on the Celtics that have kind of, they've reached the pinnacle. They've been to three consecutive conference finals. They've been to the finals before they lost to the Warriors. So we've got Jayson Tatum and Jalen Brown, kind of the dynamic duo leading the Celtics. And then on the Dallas Mavericks side, we've got Luka Dončić, who's, I think he's 25.
He's been a professional basketball player since he's been 13. He's just this basketball prodigy and a few wins. It's going to skyrocket him to a different level of fame that he's already at. Yeah, so those guys, I mean, I feel like Jayson Tatum and Luka Dončić you've heard of before because their names have sort of been around. And these young guys, so it's kind of like, I mean, we're seeing this evolution, I think, in sports in general, right? We talked about this when we talked about tennis.
We're seeing that, you know, those big three are no longer really ever present. Some of them retired, some of them are still playing, some of them are losing and playing. But we're seeing this evolution, we're seeing this new guard come in. I think we'll start to see that in football too. We've kind of switched all that around too, but it's really interesting.
But the fun thing about this is both teams really kicked butt in the last round and the Celtics have kind of been kicking butt all season. Yes, they've had, they had very different regular seasons. Celtics were just absolute dominant all year. They won their conference by a record number of games. They were historic offensive efficiency the whole season. Everyone expected them to be here. It's kind of like their, hopefully their culmination that they've been looking for.
Dallas didn't have the same regular season, a little up and down. But since they've been in the post season, they've really kicked it into gear. Well, the interesting thing about Dallas during their regular season, they announced it, Mark Cuban announced that he was selling the team. And so that was a big thing to happen during the middle of a season. Yes, so yeah, back in December it was approved. He sold it for an astronomical amount.
So to Adelson who used to be part of the Las Vegas Sands, that's the family he sold it to for reported like $4 billion. And he's, yeah, he sold it, but he's still around. He's still running things as far as I know, like. I just looked and he's still in charge of basketball operations. He still owns 27 % of the team. And I saw some more of the numbers between 3 .5 and 5 and 4 billion, but he basically made 10 times what he bought it for the team for.
Yes, I don't know the exact amount when he bought a four back when he first became owner, but he did well and it seems like he's just still doing what he always wanted to do. Just like the basketball portion of it. there's a great, if you ever haven't listened to it yet, Smart List podcast. I know a lot of people listen to with, we've talked about before with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett and Sean Hayes.
They interviewed Mark Cuban and they're not really, some of them are not really basketball people. And they're like, how'd you make your money? How'd you go by the team? And it was just so interesting to listen to his story about how he, you know, just decided to pick up a basketball team. Like he struggled for a long time and then all of a sudden made some money and was like, I'm by a basketball team.
and made a billion dollars when he was in his mid -20s or something off internet radio and funneled that into basketball. And you'll see him on the sidelines. Hey, he's always on the sidelines, always involved with officials. So he's always front and center. Yeah, and he retired from Shark Tank too, didn't he? I think. Do you have to retire? Do you just go do a few episodes here and there? It's probably true too. Might just be a guest host if not anything. Okay, so enough about Mark Cuban.
That's the ownership of Dallas. The Mavs were really, obviously you kind of mentioned that they didn't have a great start to the season. They were basically, the odds were 25 to one that they would win, which aren't awful, but they were somewhere in the middle of the pack that they would even make it this far. And so what do we... What do we need to like, what are we, what are we watching for? What's the excitement? Let's, you know, let's talk a little bit about Kyrie.
I think that's kind of the, there's some really interesting, if you want some conversation starters, Kyrie Irving plays for the Mavericks, has been known to have some, maybe eccentric thought processes. He is one of the, I don't think the earth is flat people. What do they call those? They have a name for them, but. Jesus, it's not It's flat earthers, right? I don't think that's it. Thank you.
So talk to me a little bit about Kyrie and how somehow he's gone through all these teams, including the Celtics and how he's found a home with, with Dallas. Yeah, Kyrie, he did play for the Celtics. It didn't end very well. It's going to be a lot of media chatter about that. I know the Celtics fans are not going to be very nice to him. As I've shown in the past when it comes to play there. I think he will, he'll try to downplay it.
I think he's grown up a lot since he left the Celtics and things have really kind of changed around for him playing under Jason Kidd, who's a Hall of Fame. basketball player, a coach, and a lot of people are contributing Kyrie to kind of just relaxing and just playing basketball and not getting involved in these ridiculous narratives to kind of to his respect for Jason Kidd. So when Kyrie's from New Jersey, when he was younger, Jason Kidd got traded to the New Jersey Nets.
So Kyrie got to see him play kind of throughout his childhood and developed. this huge respect for him and you know modeled his game after him. And so they're kind of contributing Jason Kidd's mentorship as a coach to you know guiding Kyrie to this new mindset of just kind of play basketball and not focus on other things as much. Well, and I don't know if it was you or someone told me that there's also sort of embracing some of his quirkiness.
Like, hey, like show up, we need you to do this and like figure it out. Kind of one of those, like if you show up in your team uniform, great. If you show up in a mumu, great, whatever. And I think Jason obviously as being a former player understands kind of what it takes to get through an 82 game season with all kinds of different personalities, no matter what their beliefs are. And all really you have to really do is make sure they get on the court and play.
And I think once Kyrie's on the court and he's playing, he's one of the best players in the world. So I think they've really focused on just, you know, letting other things go that he might be doing and just focus on basketball. Yeah, I mean, it's really what's really fascinating about him is he's he created his own controversy, right? I mean, he's definitely he's been known for smudging going out and smudging the court, which is burning sage around the court.
Like he's created his own sort of controversies. And what's in Boston his first game back, maybe when he was smuggling the court. But it seems like Boston kind of has had his number, right? Like from what I saw this morning on SportsCenter that he really, he's not done so well since leaving them.
He hasn't, I mean, he went to the Nets after Boston, which also kind of rubbed fans the wrong way after he told them he would, like a season ticket holder event, he told them he'd like to spend his whole career there. And then the next season he got up and left and went to Brooklyn. And I think that's where things got weird. You know, maybe not the best teammate and things like that. They didn't have much success there with Kevin Durant and James Harden. So, and then he went to the Mavericks.
I think it's... Kind of got his head back to where it should be. Now something before we go off of Kyrie, he's been wearing these, and I don't know if it's ANTA, moccasin sneakers on the court. So something different that if you tune in, if you pay attention, you can check these out. They're kind of cool. Yeah, they definitely stand out. I think it's a tribute to, I believe his mother has, or his mother had, she passed away when he was younger, but she had Indian descent in her, Native American.
And he's - she's a, yeah, I was just reading right here. She's a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux, and she was adopted as a young child. I guess she passed when he was four. Yes. So I think he's paying tribute to that. And I know he's done a lot with that community in the recent years, going back and contributing to the tribe. So I think that's his way to kind of give back. That's really cool. I'm actually just pulled this up while we were talking about it.
In 2018, he participated in a naming ceremony where he received the name Little Mountain, has become active in the Sioux community, supporting protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and giving big donations to that effort. And so kind of cool to see. I respect that. I think that's really kind of cool to see on the court. Absolutely and as long as he's playing well and those moccasins will get plenty of TV coverage. That's right, I think it's awesome.
Let's, hmm, I don't know where I wanna go with this yet. Talk to me a little bit about any other players that we should be watching for. We've got Kyrie, we have Jayson Tatum and his adorable son who's probably no longer cute and two years old anymore. He's what, seven? I think he's roughly the age of your child, maybe a year older. So that's this. Deuce is Jayson Tatum's tiny human. But then there's another guy. We were talking about Dereck Lively. Talk to me about him and his mom.
He's a young player. Tell me a little bit about him. So he's going to be, there's going to be a lot of storylines about him as well. He's not as well known. He's just a rookie first year out of Duke, but his mother passed away back in April during the season. And it's really significant for him. She was with him the entire step of his career. Pretty much was, he credits her as being his coach. They were always together at every event, like extremely close.
So for him to... to lose her midway through the season has been tough, but it looks like it's been really just an inspiration for him to keep going. He suffered some pretty brutal head injuries during the Western Conference final, but came back and kept playing. And he actually shot 100 % from the field, which means he didn't miss a shot in the Western Conference final. And he set a record with for the amount of shots he made without missing. So he's really...
He's really come into his own as a rookie and I know it credits his mom with basically everything that he ever learned. So that's gonna be a great storyline. That's really cool. Remind me the player who has the shoes called Mama's Boy. So that would be Jayson Tatum. That's Jayson Tatum. so, so next player, Jayson Tatum has a, I was just, I wasn't, we were just talking about moms, so, has a, talk to me about the Momma's Boy shoes.
We can watch for, if we're talking shoes, we might as well also put. we're talking shoes. So jump back to Jayson Tatum where his mom was also an inspiration. I think she had, you know, multiple athletic scholarships to go to college and then ended up having Jayson and didn't end up going to pursue that at the time. But since then, I think she's gone back and got four or five degrees. I think she's got a law degree. So she's really set the bar high for him.
And you can kind of see that he embraces it as a father with Deuce and Deuce is everywhere. Obviously Deuce is a big inspiration to him as well. And Jayson's kind of this, he's reached this point that they've had so much success that the only thing left he has to do is win a championship. That's pretty cool. And he's not that old, if I remember correctly. Yeah. been to five conference finals, I think, already and won champions. So. and still hasn't won anything. Okay, so there's that.
Have the, obviously the Celtics have won, have the Mavs won a title before? Celtics are tied with the Lakers for the most titles in history with 17. And their last one was in 2008, so it's kind of been a while. And the Mavericks have won title back in 2011, which if we can come full circle with that, Jayson Kidd was the point card on that team when they won the title and now he's the coach. So that would be kind of a full circle moment for him as well.
If he's able to bring a title to Dallas as both a player and a coach. I don't know these, I think there's only a few players who have ever done that. Yeah, it would seem like that's probably a very few, very few people who have done that. That's really cool. I just love these storylines. I think it makes the series so much more approachable. You know, we talk a lot, last night's game about how sports is, should be conversational, how it shouldn't be about stats and this and that.
And those storylines make it conversational, right? You could walk into a conversation and say, I don't remember which coach it is, but. He played for the team and he won a championship and now he's coaching and then hopefully he'll win a title there. Like you don't have to know all the things. And so what I really appreciate is that you can join in on this conversation and not remember any of these names, but still be able to have a conversation around it. I mean, I do it all the time.
Yeah, I do it all the time. So there you go. I can't say I knew everything. What else do you want to leave us with as we wrap up for the NBA finals? If we just go over, Luka is going to be obviously a strong conversation starter. Can we just go over his legacy as a basketball player, even though I think he's only 25? So I think I mentioned earlier that he was this prodigy from Slovenia. He signed a pro contract when he was 13 years old with Real Madrid in Spain. Made his name for basketball.
They have all the other, all the soccer teams have variations of basketball as well. So he signed at 13 years old, which is crazy. He made his debut on the professional roster at 16. Became the youngest player to ever play for a club. Which, so he's been a legend in Europe forever. I mean, he came into the league in 19. And he's pretty much been this unstoppable force. He doesn't necessarily look like the best athlete in the world, but he's pretty much unstoppable.
Just purely based on size and skill. He's playing a different game than most of these guys. game five when they were playing the Timberwolves in the series right before this to get into the finals. I mean, I turned the game on and he already had like 20 points in the first seven minutes or something like that. It was insane. Yeah, he outscored the Timberwolves by himself in the first quarter of that clinching game five, so...
Yeah, his skill set's very much different than most NBA players who just use athleticism and brute. He's more of a... Looks like a guy who'd be playing in like a rec league. this is a true statement or or curling. Yes, something. But yeah, it's... Okay. So when in doubt, talk about Luka talk about Slovenia. Okay. I love it. When in doubt. Well, as you listen to this, we will obviously keep you posted as the NBA finals roll on.
We will be sharing all the things basketball that we can on social media. So if you have questions, you want to know what's going on, you always can find us in our DMS and we will definitely answer those. So thanks Scott for sharing your wisdom with us and thank you all for listening. Thank you.