NBA Day One Reactions, Plus Blake Griffin and Peter Berg (Two Interviews!)

Peter Berg (0:00)

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Bill Simmons (1:06)

The Bill Simmons Podcast, brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where I put up a new re-watchable, it's a Monday night. We did It Follows, which I think is one of the best horror movies of the last 15 years.

That's our third horror movie of the month. You know what that means. We're going to have to do a fourth one next week, next Monday, and we're going to be doing it live on Netflix at 5 p.m. ET. I'll tell you the movie on Thursday, but we've done It Follows, we've done Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and we've done Friday the 13th. Three signature horror movies for my favorite month, October, because not only was it the month Michael Myers kept coming back again, and it's a horror movie month, and I love Halloween in general, but we also have football, we have the World Series, we have college football, and we had the NBA coming back, which I'm going to be talking about at the very top of this podcast, three NBA games, and all of them were interesting for different reasons, so I'm going to open a six-pack of thoughts on that, and then I have two interviews. Yeah, usually, it's a rarity for me to do one interview, but there were two people that we got to do in person that I really like talking to. Blake Griffin, we talked about the NBA season that's coming up, we did that today. We talked about youth sports, we talked about his new Amazon show, all kinds of things. And then, Peter Berg, my old buddy who, I think the first time he was on this podcast, I was, might even have been pre-Grantland at ESPN, he's been on a few times. He has a new movie coming out called The Mosquito Bowl, which is excellent. And we talked about that, we talked about a variety of topics. So a double interview pod for you. We're going to take a break, we're going to come back right after Pearl Jam, and I'm going to talk about basketball.

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Thank you. The third opening night game of a season that I think is the most anticipated one that we've had maybe since LeBron's first Miami season, 2010, 11, that season, where a lot of young stars, a lot of subplots, just all kinds of things in motion. I'm gonna open a six pack for all the basketball I watched today. It's brought to you by Make a Love Ultra. It's a special part of today's episode. We're gonna unpack six major things that I saw today, brought to you by Make a Love Ultra, the official beer sponsor of the NBA and a personal favorite beer of mine. Okay, first thing in the six pack. So I had OKC winning the title. I mentioned that last week or the week before. And I was debating about OKC versus Indiana or OKC versus New York in the finals. And I'm gonna take OKC over Indiana. It's gonna be my final pick, just because I like the 30 to 1 odds. And it'll be more fun to be like, the rematch, I called it. Okay, nothing that I saw tonight changed my mind about that finals pick. And if anything, I felt strengthened mentally. I feel good about my OKC pick because you can tell, they didn't have a year from hell last year, but not everything went right. And they really just didn't get much of Jalen Williams the way they thought they would get. And SGA had this weird thing with the Spurs that came out of nowhere. Wemby felt pretty confident against them last year. They lose a game seven at home. And this was a team tonight that just seemed like they had this game circled and this matchup circled all summer. You could see SGA in his gym in the bowels of Canada or wherever the hell he was over the summer, just pretending he was going against Castle and all these guys. And Wemby, he probably had some guy holding a broomstick that he had to shoot over. But SGA was great tonight. I mean, that was about as well as he's played against San Antonio. And the big thing was they lost Dort, they lost Wiggins, they lost Isaiah Joe, which were not major pieces of their 25 title run except for Dort. But you always want to know that you can replenish it. And none of they replenish it. Like, Justin Barrier tweeted about the OKC pipeline, what a triumph just watching this game was, where you have McCain, who they trade for mid-season last year, who now feels like he's more valuable to them than AJ. Mitchell, who was awesome last year. And then Mara was the big thing, that he comes in, they draft in 12th. I had my doubts, but I thought it was the right range for him to go just because of his size. And that, you know, you'd want to take him 8th, but 12th is right around like, you know, glorified role player, basically. And they take him because they need him for this. And watching him go against one of the, he only played 10 minutes, but it was 10 loud minutes. And it really felt like, you know, it felt important. It's weird. I try and never to overreact during game one of an 82 game season. We're going to talk about some other stuff later, but this marathon felt important because it reminded me of in the 80s with Andre the Giant and the WWE would try to bring these people that, you know, villains that could fight him. That would be realistic for, you know, you would think Andre the Giant was in danger. They were never the size of Andre the Giant, but they'd kill her Khan at one point. But then they brought in Big John Stud. And I remember when they brought in Big John Stud thinking, oh man, this is actually like semi-realistic. He might be able to battle the giant here. And Mara came in and you know, he's not going to shut down Wemby. I'm sure Wemby will have great games against him at various points over the next five to 10 years. Maybe Mara won't stay healthy. Who knows what's going to happen.