A Shocking Lakers Sale. Plus, the 20 Best and Worst Youth Sports for Parents With Cousin Sal.

**Bill Simmons** (0:06)
The Bill Simmons Podcast brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network. I had a re-watchables for you on Monday. We did The Italian Job, Me and Van Lathan, and Chris Ryan. Super fun pod. And in fact, we're doing two re-watchables this week. So we have another one coming on Thursday. It's a one for us, but I also think it's in the running for best rom-com of all time. It is About Last Night with Rob Lowe and Timmy Moore. It came out 40 years ago. It's a really important movie and a fun one to talk about. It's on Netflix right now. So if you want to watch it before we do it, go check it out. But we're going to do it About Last Night, me and Chris Ryan and Mallory Rubin. And that's going to be up Thursday night. So two this week. And then on Monday, the re-speed.
Yeah. The re-speed is happening. We did speed. It was one of the first ones we ever did. And now we are doing speed again. So that is what the schedule is for re-watchables. On this podcast, at the top, I want to talk about this crazy Lakers sale. I'm just going to solo that part. Everything I'm hearing and all my thoughts is going to just dump them on you. And then Cousin Sal is coming on because this is something I've wanted to do this whole summer and it's finally time.
The Youth Sport Parent Rankings from 20 to 1
These are my rankings only. What I think the worst to best youth sports all the way through high school are for parents. And it's probably not going to be liked by everyone who listens to this podcast. But that's the thing. It's an honest conversation and these are all my thoughts. And I can't wait to go through them as well. So that's what we have in the docket today. We're going to take a break, bring in Pearl Jam. And then my thoughts on the Lakers.
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All right.

**Bill Simmons** (3:44)
We're recording this part of the podcast on lunchtime, Pacific time. I am in California, where the Lakers just got sold again for the second time in less than two years in the single most shocking franchise sale in the history of the National Basketball Association, which is almost eight decades old at this point. Nobody saw this coming. There was no inclination, no inkling. There were no whispers. I never heard one thing about this. The Lakers and the Dodgers, who were both owned by Walter, were being for the last year. They morphed together into basically one super franchise. There was a lot of talk about redundancy and people who had the same jobs and it was going to be a zero-sum game that the two organizations were going to mesh in all of these different ways. There was real fear in the NBA that with the Buss family, who had owned the Lakers forever, that were basically a mom and pop operation presiding over one of the three biggest franchises in the league, that we went from the mom and pop side to now these cutthroat analytics, tons of money searching for every edge, and the Lakers becoming the same kind of franchise that the Dodgers became who just won the last two World Series and spend crazy amounts of money and have found every single possible edge you can find in Major League Baseball, to the point that we're about to have a long lockout next year because of basically what's happened with the Dodgers and a couple other things. So the thought was that this guy was going to preside over, but there was a couple of whispers just about what was going on with this guy became a topic this summer in Los Angeles and I think in the rich guy circles too because there was a report that he had had either a mild or a legitimate stroke in 2024 He was being investigated by the Department of Justice and there was some possible insurance fraud. There were always whispers about how did he come up with as much money as he came up with to buy what I think is 78% of the Lakers. He'd already owned a piece and he had to shell out I think close to $5 billion to buy the rest of it. There was always talk that he got Middle Eastern money for that. Did the league know that ahead of time? Where did he get it? This is a bigger question about what's happening in professional sports leagues now, how people are paying for these giant, giant, giant franchises.