Hour 2: Jose Caballero

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And opening week is on a new level.

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Welcome to another season of the NBA on ESPN.

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New chapters begin in South Beach.

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Two of the elite players are on display.

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The king protects his new court.

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NBA opening week, Wednesday and Thursday on ESPN.

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This is the Michael Kay Show podcast.

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I gotta get more Kay.

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Listen live weekdays at 1 on the ESPN New York app and your smart speaker.

Michael Kay (0:41)

Hey, what's up everybody? Our two of our two hour radio program. You are listening on ESPN New York, 880, ESPN New York, and also on the ESPN New York YouTube channel, brought to you by our very good friends at the Parisman Firm. Thank you for ending your work week with us. Hope you have a great weekend, everybody. The Dodgers get swept by Milwaukee. Kind of stunning. I'm not saying it's stunning that Milwaukee won, that they got swept. They looked so, this is something I always say that people say, they look so slow, the Dodgers. When you don't score and you don't get hits, you look slow, but they are an aging team. And let's see how genius Andrew Friedman is. Can he turn this around quickly? And especially what happens if there is a legitimate drag on salaries in the new collective bargaining agreement and the Dodgers can't flash the one thing that separates them. Now, they draft well, they develop very well. All of that is true. But the finishing piece is they get through free agency. Freeman, free agent, Betz, free agent, Otani, free agent, Suzuki, free agent, Yamamoto, free agent. So yeah, you can build a team with young partners, but you're not going to dominate every single year. They're going to have their growth, and then they're going to have their setbacks. So if you can't spend $438 million, are they going to be the behemoth that they have been for the last five, six years? And I think that that's one of the reasons that baseball could sell and say, you know what, we don't need one team just because they spend so much more money than everybody else to dominate. And then we'll get a real good look at how smart these GMs are. Because Matt Arnold of the Brewers, obviously he's very bright. And you know what, we can't forget, and I'm surprised that nobody on that podium said it, maybe because the partying wasn't so pleasant. David Stearns deserves a lot of credit as well for building that team. And Matt Arnold has continued to build it, but the basis of it was started by David Stearns, the Mets president of baseball operations. He deserves some kudos. You know those guys are smart. You know the guys in Cleveland, they're smart. They have to be. You know Eric Neander down in Tampa Bay. He's got to be smart. You got to be really smart to build a team to get to a league championship series without a big payroll. And if there is a salary cap, everybody is going to be on equal footing. Then we will really know who's smart, who's not, whose intelligence is bolstered or enhanced by the fact that they could spend a lot of money. If everybody is on equal footing, then you know who the best GMs are. Now you can only guess. In football, you know the best front offices because the teams are on equal footing. Same thing with the NBA. Who has the best front offices?

You could judge them because if you're the only team in basketball like the Denver Nuggets that goes through the second apron, everybody else is pretty much on equal footing. And the team that's gone through the second apron is an incomplete team and they can't make deals because they're in the second apron. So will the world change with this lockout that starts on December 1st? I'm not sure if they'll get a cap. I mean, these players for the longest time have been dead set against the cap, dead set against it. Will they finally capitulate if baseball is shut down? And I was thinking this last night as we're watching the game because I love watching baseball. I really do. And I said to myself, I didn't speak out loud, I never speak out loud to myself. I think it's off-putting.

But I was thinking to myself, if they shut down this game and we miss 60, 70, 80 games or we have a season of 90 games instead of 162, because they have this long lockout and they don't get a cap? Shame on them!