Our next guest front of the show. But it's been a while, it's been too long. I mean Al Hassen back on the Drive on a Thursday, I mean, happy Thursday, sir.
How you been doing well?
Doing well?
Can complain there you go, appreciate the time.
So let's get your reaction to the news of the day today, Victor woman Yama will miss the rest of the season with a blood blood clot in his shoulder. Now, my first my first thought, I mean was Chris Bosh. I hate to say it, but it just was. Now, this is in his shoulder, not his lower leg. We've seen I'm and Thompson deal with this, brandon Ingram deal with this, and a lot of Spurs fans probably be pretty nervous about the news.
What's your reaction.
Yeah, I was taking my show Oddball with Izzy Gutierrez when the news broke, and he was the one that had to kind of remind me of brandon Ingram and I'm and Thompson because originally my first thought was Chris Bosh. And then a good friend of mine, Johnmate, who passed away not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago. Actually, he was a top five pick in the draft. He his storage career at Notre Dame, but his career was first like interrupted several times in the clotting and then
eventually he had to retire because of blood clouding. And so it's a very serious issue. It's not necessarily kind of a end to his career. As we said, there have been plenty of examples of guys who got on the medication, got it sorted out, and came back and
were perfectly fine. And I haven't had to deal with it again, but it just, you know, it's one of those things where I think we all have to be cognizant day none of this stuff is guaranteed, and you know, you hope that the kid bounces back great because he's been such a breasive fresh share for the league, not only with his play, but with his personality and kind of his genuine energy when it comes to the game of basketball.
So, based off of what I was reading, this is an instant shut it down entirely for six months situation, based off of the medication that you have to take right away, because a blood cloud is not a sprained ankle. You have to take action immediately to make sure that you're taking care of just as a person less loan of basketball player.
What do you think this process is going to be like?
Because if it's a six month shutdown, he's going to be knocking on the door just to get ready for the starting next season. So what do you think the next six seven months are going to look like for Victor wemen Yama?
Well, frustrating. You've got to be frustrated for sure, because one of the things that you really enjoy doing you're not going to be able to do.
Yep.
You know. The conversation that Izzy and I had was, you know, these kind of live events kind of take one or two paths on people impacts on people. One is the this is another challenge, and I'm going to teach this challenge and I'll come back better than ever and kind of you know, just almost determining that comes
from it. The other is, oh my god, I've been racing my life, worried about things that really don't matter, and now that life and death has entered the equation, I'm going to cherish the things that do matter, like family and friendship and quality of life and all that. I tend to think that web ben Yama is more of the former simply because I think he's already someone who's with a healthy work life balance. He seems to be well rounded, he's got interests, he's not afraid of
expressing his interests that are not basketball. So I kind of feel like he's going to look at it as just another challenge to be bested, rather than a wake up call that he's been living in life the wrong way.
What do you think? And I'm chuckling because I'm just picturing. Look, San Antonio twenty three wins, and the Jazz have thirteen. The Pelicans have thirteen, So there's still a major gap between where the Spurs are now and some of the worst teams in the league Washington with nine wins.
But what do you think the Spurs do now?
Do you think they can completely just like shut it down and try to get another top lottery pick in a draft that's absolutely packed? Like, what's the rest of the year look like for the San Antonio Spurs?
Oh, Spencer, are you asking me if the Spurs are going to play capture the Flag?
Yes? Are you exactly what I'm asking you?
If the San Antonio Spurs, a team that went to the Western Conference Finals in nineteen ninety five and had the MVP of the league, and the next year one fifty five or fifty six games, and then the year after that had an unfortunate injuries in a franchise player. Just happened to be the same year that this can't miss prospect that a wake for us is coming out, and then they got them, and then and all of a sudden they were good again with the best player generationally,
probably for his entire class. Are you asking me if that's gonna happen against man? Is that what you're your kind of questioning?
If you want my third eye to be open, I'll ask you if this is really a blood clot.
Bro I can go as deep as you want.
Yeah, I'm su the Spurs, though, you know five they would never they would never step something up.
Oh goodness, gracious, you know.
It's it's cruel because I feel like the Jazz should have done what they're doing now a few years ago when this kid was available, you know, But instead the Jazz decided to be fine being average for a couple of years, and they had some late lottery picks, and
these kids just really haven't popped very much. So I understand what you're saying tongue in cheek, But the Spurs did exactly what they should have done a few years ago, and the Jazz didn't, and now we're kind of paying the price for it around here.
It is. It is remarkable, right that every time there's a generational talent, these guys just happen to have, like the the on ramp to being terrible, terrible at the right time and not terrible for too long. Right, you don't have to deal with a whole lot of terrible of pan Antonio. They're just gonna be terrible for the small window. And it seems to work out for them.
It sure does, It sure does.
So whether it's intelligence, timing, or luck or accommodation of all three, you gotta give them a lot of credit. But let's have a little fun now with the Utah Jazz, and let's say, for the first time in jazz history, the Jazz actually get lottery luck. The Jazz have been in a lottery nine times and they've never moved up.
If they're able to cash in on this really difficult season for a fan base around here that choose to winning, to digest and snag Cooper flag number one, and they roll in the next season with the front court of Walker Kesher, Larry Market and Cooper Flag, a front court that would be very popular around here. I'll just leave it there. Then we're kind of onto something, aren't we. Like, if this entire process leads to that, maybe this fan base has something to latch onto.
Yeah, I just want to point out how staggered I am. These said the Jazz have been to the lottery nine times in their franchise history.
Yeah, and they've never moved up I mean, look, okay, never moved up fields.
Like, oh wow, that's that's kind of tough. But so only been there nine times. Yeah, yep, pretty remarkable. I mean it's and by the way, three of them, so thirty three percent of them we're in that right now. That's that's very, very, very remarkable. Now, you know, obviously, you know, Cooper Flag is a kind of talent where you could thirty teams and they all need a Cooper Flag.
Utah is kind of Look, Denny Ainge has a vision of how to do this, He's done it before, and what we're seeing is kind of, you know, the same sort of formula in terms of when you look at the deals and you look at him getting involved in that Lake to Maverage deal as a third party, not even knowing who the deal is, for all of that
kind of accumulation, accumulation, accumulation. He's doing this in the same way he did it in the mid two thousands when he realized that Paul Pierce alone wasn't going to get it done and you needed to make a bold move. And so the question becomes, and I think this is the part where everyone gets frustrated, is you say, what is that bold move going to be? Well, you don't know.
And I think that's the thing when you know, way back when I think of Philadelphia, when people were praising Sam hinty Oh for doing this and he's accumulating picks, and this is the way to do it if you're not first, your last with your Bobby style. And what I said at the time is on paper, yeah, that's what you do. But this thing doesn't happen on paper, and you've got ownership to answer to. And even owners who can pretend they're bought in and it come from
tech or finance and they understand these kind of processes. Ultimately, they still have kids who go to school and get teams because their dad owns the team and ruined it. So your capacity to run this playbook, in essence is directly proportionate to how confident you are in the ownership behind you speaking behind you. In the case of Sam Presty, I had full raids you could do it forever, and they were never going to give up on him because they knew, hey, we got ourselves one of the best
guys in the league. Does Danny Aide have that sort of job security with Ryan Schmick? I don't know. One would tink because his track record and obviously who he is locally, one would think that he's got that job security. But again, hell have no fury like my kids coming home from school crying because they've got made ton.
Of Well, look, I think the answer to the job security security question is Danny has tremendous job security. I mean, Ryan has been front facing about how much of a fan he always was I Danny because Ryan's a big BYU fan, and then obviously Danny goes on to do great things in pro basketball. This was born out of a fan relationship between the owner and the executive far
more than it was born out of a friendship. Now it seems that it has become that now, and I'm sure Danny appreciates this ability to not necessarily put in the same type of ground where Xanik does, yet get paid a lot more money and kind of swoop in what he needs to. And I know that he's involved, but Justin's the one that seems to be doing the.
Work on the ground. But here's the question.
Based off of the dynamic, Ryan fancies himself as a basketball guy. He's in the meetings, he has input, and I can tell you that both Dennis Lindsay and Quinn Snyder had just one meeting with ownership and was like, Nope, I'm good. In your history around the league medaling owners that think they're basketball people, how does that typically work out?
Well, it's funny that you mentioned that the relationship with between Danny and Ryan was born out of a fandom, because to answer your question, I can think of another owner GM Combo that was born out of a fandom
was Robert Charver and Steve Kerran Phoenix. Robert Tarborough was the university when I was on the Glad and he was a big fan of Steve Kerr at U of A. He's obviously a big fant of Steve Kerr as an NBA player, And you know, at first it was like that, it was like, yeah, he listened to Steve, and then
at some point Robert just thought he knew better. And so anything that Steve came up with that we came up with as a staff, Robert would basically second gas and leak to other people asking them their opinions, and our business was out in the streets. So typically, what I found is the more your owner thinks he knows basketball, the more dangerous your owner becomes, right, because he's much more likely to believe. Look, I get it, I understand.
I'm not like you've got a guy I am. I'm I'm cool, right, And as we all know from high school, the guy who announces he's cool not really cool, right. The cool guy I didn't have to announce you cool, he just is. And typically these owners who think they know what they're talking about are not. They don't know what they're talking about. I'll give you another example. A current example is Matt hb in Phoenix, who I would say, legitimately, good thing. I know basketball. I played high level V
one basketball. I won a national championship. I played for Togas one of the greatest coaches of all time. I'm friends with Isaiah Namas, I'm friends with Jason Rigidster, I'm friends with all these great NBA players, Zach Randolph, etcetera, etcetera. So if they ever learn with anyone who would say, oh, I actually know this stuff, it's matt Eshbia and yet it hasn't really turned out great. I'll give you another one.
And he may have heard of this guy, Michael Jeffrey Jordan's son might say he knew basketball any of any of us, But when put in that position to be the final saying, he turns out he wasn't that great at running a basketball team, because at some point it gets in the way, point your know it all, this gets in the way, and ultimately the best owner is the owner that at the beginning of the year says, this is a number, you can't spend over it, and we come to an agreement on what the expectations are,
and then I don't do anything. I just sit back and watch the show. And at the end of the year we look at the numbers. We look at like where we were recording to an expertation, if there are things that make us alter the plan midway through. We have a conversation about that. But the more your hands on and there, sitting on meetings and all that and giving your opinion, the more you end up with kind of.
What I would like to say is mediocre results one more jazz thing because you're good at this and you can make it interesting. There's not a lot of things topically with this roster that I really care to ask you about, because we all know the deal, we all know what they're doing. But this is a fan base, as we outlined with nine lottery appearances, it indicates that
this fan base is used to winning back basketball. Now, we haven't had a championship out here, and if I'm honest, we haven't had a championship team here since nineteen ninety eight in my opinion, and that was John and Carl's best and quite frankly last chance to get it done. And of course Mike took brings off their fingers as he did to our guy, Pat Ewing and Sean Kemp and Gary Payton, Charles Barkley.
We could keep going.
It is a fan base that's used to winning, and his championship thirsty. What's a reasonable expectation during this process where it is asked to accumulation, you hope a young player two pops, then you hope you get lottery luck. I mean, that's as reductive as I can be about what they're trying to do. What's in that reasonable expectation to this fan base is to win. Winning basketball might be back in Salt Lake City.
Well, I think again, we have to define what winning is winning a championship. I don't know, maybe never I got something that everyone has to come to groups with every fan in the league except for the Lakers, so ha do they keep doing it? But everyone else you have to come the grips with. If your thing is my destination championship, you gotta be ready that you may never see that destination. So what do you want to
see in the meantime. You want to see growth, you want to see improvement, and you want to see standards right, And the thing I always go back to Sam Presty Oklahoma City Thunder and comparing contrasting what he did versus what Sam Hinky did in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, sam Hinky said, I need to be terrible so I can get all these lottery picks and just be a clearing house for other people's craft so I could get keep getting lottery picks. And he did that by stocking his roster with players
who were not NBA talents. No disrespectful guys, they just weren't NBA caliber players. They were guys who in a regular situation would never make an NBA team, but in this situation, because they're trying to be as bad as possible, welcome aboard. And he did that over years, and then even as he hit on some of his guys, he refused to stock his roster with vets. He refused to have any sort of semblance of we're going to play competitive,
tough basketball. We're just gonna get blown out every night. And the contrast is the Oklahoma City Thunderwear. Yes they were doing the same thing. Yes they're trying to be bad, Yes they were getting a lot of evictuses to their cleaninghouse, But beyond hitting on their picks, they maintain the entire time. This is the standard. The people talk about heat culture, they got thunder culture over there, and it's that we have standards and we're going to do things the right way.
Win or lose, it doesn't matter. These are the expectations, and so what happens is the players that you have there are growing up in a system and in a culture that is positive and a winning culture, despite those standings not being that. To me, if I'm a bad team and if I'm a fan of a bad fanchise, that's what I want to see. I want to see players that execute. I want to see players that defend and play both types of the ball. I want to see players that are developing and be able to do both.
You know, multiple things are supposed to being specialists, right, and I want to see my team be competitive even if we win twelve games all year long. I want us to be I want us to win twelve games, lose seventy games by five points, seven points, nine points like I wanted to be. I want us to be leading and then we blew the lead down on the stretch. Like those are the type of losses where you can walk away and say we had a legitimate chance and either we got out talented or we made mistakes of
youth that we will not make in the future. And if you're Utah, that's if you're a jass On, I think we look at this team, you want to see players that play hard. You want to see players that are competing, and if they're losing due to bad decisions, like when the Collier kid waves off Colin Sexton to still get an eight second count, you want that to be feared in his brain. So I think he becomes a number one time a time in sport situation type of play.
So well, I want to move over here.
We have we've we had Tom Haberstrawan, and Zach Harper on this week, and so we've talked to friends of yours, coworkers of yours about All Star Weekend, and I think I'm just now resigned.
Look for thirty years or forty years, it was.
The best pickup basketball game in the world, and it was awesome, and it wasn't every year, and they didn't play hard one through forty eight.
I understand that.
And the reason why I still bemoan what it's become is I miss that what it once was. Is there any going back or at this point is it just going to be an undigestible weekend regardless of everybody yelling about how bad it is, There.
Isn't going back. Unfortunately, the guy who is going to do that for us is out for the rest of the year with a blood clot. You know, hopefully he's fine next year. But it starts in the locker room.
All of these fixes that they've tried, elamending, draft your Own Team, tournament, like all of these things, they all come down to one simple premise, which is the twenty four guys in that locker room, for whatever reason, aren't taking it seriously, and so we're going to do whatever we can to manufactor something that causes them to ticket seriously. I thought the tournament, the basketball part of it, the basketball part of it, wasn't improvement over the last three
or four years. We got competitive basketball for the first time. I thought the rising stars in their game, they actually that was the best game of the three that we saw on Sunday. I thought that the championship game was okay, it was decent. I thought the first game was kind of lackadaisical. But the point is they created this gimmick because they wanted guys to burn calories. Like you said, we're not asking for one through forty eight. We're not
asking for Game seven intensity. We're not asked for the finals intensity. We're not asking for playoff intensity. We're not even asking for regular season intensity. Can I get preseason intensity? Preseason? A preseason intensity looks like basketball people want to watch because here's the deal. These are the greatest players in the world. They dribble better than anybody else, they shoot better than anybody else, They dunk on people, all that stuff.
You know what makes that crazy crossover, that crazy three pointer, that crazy dunk look cool. It's resistance. Resistance makes Oh he tried to stop him and he couldn't. He tried to block it and he couldn't. Right the moment you remove resistance, it's just guys getting shot up before the pickup game starts. Been it again, Spencer or maybe at the playground and like we're still like we try to figure out what teams are. Guys just getting shot up.
That's what the ALSAR game has become over the last few years. And so until those twenty four guys understand, hey, I got apply a little bit, I can't completely treat it like a joke. It's gonna stay the way it is, no matter what the format is.
Yeah, yeah, well said all right, buddy, before I say you lose. I have not been able to catch up with you since Luka Tancic was traded to the Lakers and look man, I Like everybody else, the alert popped on my phone and I said, Nope, not real, no chance. Like everybody else, I texted everybody that I know in the league to try to make sense of this, and we can. I guess we can be as reductive as that. Nico just didn't like Luca and like z D. I
guess that that's the deal. I've talked to more than a handful of executives that still don't buy it and believe there's something that none of us know. One of them said, we'll find out in summer league when we're all together. It didn't make sense then. It still doesn't make sense to me now. So your reaction when you saw the news and now a few weeks later, where are you at with that trade?
Yeah? I saw a dm an All Star weekend. The first thing he asked me was what do you think happened? Because he couldn't figure it out. We're all kind of in the dark search and trying to make sense. How nonsense if we're going to be perfectly almost here, I don't know. I think I think the stuff that has come out recently clarify some of it is that some of it is Nico. If you know, Nico basically grew up in the NBA with Kobe Bryant on Kobe Bryant's side.
So if that's your vision of what a franchise player is, I can imagine how Luca Dantis could be a jarring departure, right, Like, that's got to be the crazy like from this guy who's a workaholic, waits up at four in the morning and you know it doesn't put any poisons so that you can embody to the beer drinking, hookah smoking, lovable, affable guy like who's never in shape, Like has to
be a complete departure from everything you believed in. Right, you got ownership that also has like, uh, you know, shaky kind of aspirations. I think you want to talk about another situation where ownership is kind of meddling. Hearing him talk the Patrick Dumont talked to the Dallas Morning News and explain kind of his visions and stuff like, you're like, oh my god, this guy doesn't sound bright at all when it comes to basketball. So I think
there's a little bit today. It's always is always an ownership element in any one of these types of deals. I think there's a little bit of Nico Harrison's worldview based on his basketball upbringing, and and maybe there's something more to it than that. If so, like I still go back to this all those things I named, you could tell me. Okay, that's why we got to shape book of docs. Okay, I see it. I don't agree
with it, but I see it. But the part where your return for him is that that's the part where you lose everybody. That's the part where you lose everybody. And so I'll say it, like like we talked about on Basketball Illuminati a couple of weeks ago or whatever it was. Once you've made up your mind I have to trade this guy, which it sounds like they did, then why do you care if it's a secret or not. Why do you care if he's uncomfortable oren notough, why do you care if the fans are upset or not?
At that point, then you play it to its natural conclusion and try to get as much as a sand.
Form wild man. I still I still whatever.
I actually kind of marinate on it, and like, I still can't believe you do this with a twenty five year old global superstar, not just transcending talent, global superstar. But we'll see how it plays out. Hey, it's been too long. It's great to hear your voice. I'll set you loose. Have a great weekend. Okay, thanks alast thing Amino Hassen spent a number of years in NBA front office with the Knicks and the Suns, and he's been on the media side of things for about fifteen years now.
Busy guy one of those guys that has like seven different podcasts at darth Emine is where you find him on social.
He is a Star Wars fan.