Russell Westbrook’s One-of-One Career With Kirk Goldsberry, Plus College Football and Coaches With Van Lathan and Chris Ryan

**Bill Simmons** (0:00)
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The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. We put up two rewatchables last week. We did the Italian Job, we did About Last Night, and then on Monday, we have the Respeed. We are doing Speed again. We did it. It was a really, really good episode. Me, Sean Fantasy, and Chris Ryan, the OGs.
We did Speed very early on in the rewatchables run. So now we did it again with way, way, way more categories. That is coming for you on Monday. I'm not sure if I'm going to have two more podcasts or three this week. I'm going to have at least one, possibly two. So stay tuned. Then after this week, going to go hard into football. I've been very careful this year. I've been trying not to do too much NFL before we got close to the season. Because I felt like I did too many segments last year, and I basically gave you all my takes for the season before I did the preview with Sal. So Sal and I talked about it, and Sal and those guys are breaking down on RingerWise guys, which you can watch now on YouTube and Twitch and Spotify.
They've been breaking down division by division, and Sal has been hosting it and steering it, but being very careful about giving too much away. So when we do our giant extravaganza on Thursday, the 27th, a two-parter AFC-NFC, I'll hopefully have some very fresh. I have some hot NFL takes this year. I'm really trying to save them for toward the end of August. So on this podcast, Russell Westbrook retired. I had to break out the old Book of Basketball Pyramid breakdown format that we did for a few guys, if you remember. You can find all of those, by the way, on the Book of Basketball podcast feed.
I wanted to deep dive on Russell Westbrook's career. The strangest career of any top 100 guy ever. We're going to explain all the reasons, good and bad, why. I'm probably a little more of a defender than most of Russ, but he is so much fun to talk about. So Kirk and I did a bunch of that. And then I had Van and Chris when they were here the other day, we talked about coaching and a whole bunch of college football stuff. And after we did rewatchables, we just kind of kept the cameras on and went. So I was saving that for the Sunday pod. So that is going to be the podcast. We're going to take a break. Pearl Jam. And then Kirk Goldsberry and I on the career of Russell Westbrook.
This episode is brought to you by one of my best friends in life, NFL Sunday Ticket. Man, I missed it. Kickoff's coming. Yeah, we're getting close. We're within a month. With NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV, you get every game every Sunday, all in one place, and it's magnificent, and there's no other way to follow the NFL season. I'm so mad I didn't get YouTube TV until a couple years ago because it's the best. New users that might include you can get NFL Sunday Ticket for eight payments of just $30 a month.

**Kirk Goldsberry** (3:22)
You heard me correctly.

**Bill Simmons** (3:24)
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All right, Kirk Goldsberry is here, my old Grant Land teammate. There's nothing going on, it's mid-August. There's some baseball stuff that hasn't really gotten interesting yet. There's football pre-season.
We had a basketball event that happened, and it was not the Basketball Hall of Fame. Russell Westbrook surprisingly retired. And I figured this would be a good time to dust off my old book of basketball gimmick. But before we do that, break down Westbrook's career, before we do that, is there any NBA thing that interests you right now, or is this full hibernation mode for you?

**Kirk Goldsberry** (4:41)