Announcer: [unintelligible 00:00:04] triple double. It's a triple double for LeBron.

David Remnick: There are few better ways in this life to escape some of the terrible burdens of life than to focus and focus for many, many hours on talented young men Women running around on a hardwood floor and throwing a large ball through a slightly larger hoop. It's early April, the climax of the college basketball season and the heart of the regular season for the pros.

The New Yorker writer who walks that beat is my friend Louisa Thomas. The other day, Louisa and I sat down to speak of important things. Louisa, let's start with something close to my heart. LeBron James, who is now, God love him, 41. People talk about him as if he's 87. He's in his 23rd NBA season. I don't know how many games he's played, but he's got the record now by a lot. How good or not is he at the age of 41?

Louisa Thomas: Something extraordinary is happening, which is he has become precisely the player that the Lakers need to really become contenders in some sense. He has become the best supporting player you can possibly imagine.

David Remnick: He's a role player now.

Louisa Thomas: He is a role player, but he is not just a role player. He is the role player.

David Remnick: What does that mean?

Louisa Thomas: I've been watching him lately. He is flying around, he's cutting, he is moving in transition. He is getting the ball when he is in the perfect spot. The crazy thing is that he's still doing unbelievable athletic things. He's just managing to figure out when to pick his spots. It took him a while to get to that point, but the Lakers are rolling. Let's be clear, Luka Dončić is their best player. Austin Reaves is their second best player, but what LeBron James doing now is really unlocking their potential by making all the right basketball plays.

David Remnick: He's embraced this. It's not like he's rebelled against being a role player, because at one point people were saying every time he steps on the court, this is earlier in the season, that the Lakers are less good.

Louisa Thomas: Oh, that was true. That was absolutely true. The numbers bear it out. When. When those three guys were on the court, the Lakers stunk. When you took LeBron James off the court and left the other two on, they were fantastic. He's actually come to embrace this role. He has arthritis. He has nerve pain in his leg. He has all the things.

David Remnick: He's so relatable.

Louisa Thomas: All the things that you have. Exactly.

David Remnick: Maybe a little tinnitus.

[laughter]

Louisa Thomas: He was very open about it. He's like, "This is a sacrifice." He knows what he can do individually and the numbers bear that out too. When those two stars are off the court LeBron James is in charge, the Lakers are good again. He's not going to always have the ball in his hands, but as his coach J.J. Redick said, he knows that he's going to get the ball in his hands in those key moments and he's going to be able to do something great with it.

David Remnick: He was always a physical fitness fanatic, which is part of what got him this far.

Louisa Thomas: Sure.

David Remnick: How long is he going to go?

Louisa Thomas: I suspect that next year is his last season. Don't quote me. I came to inform you that I don't have access to his inner thoughts, and it may be that he doesn't know.

David Remnick: Despite the fact that the Lakers are doing well in this reconfigured psychology of the team, who's going all the way this year? Last year, obviously, it was the Oklahoma City Thunder, which was just an astonishing rise, this team, and so fast, so big, so versatile, so much talent on the team, and really young. They look unbeatable.

Louisa Thomas: They were not built to win last year. They were built to win this year and next year and the year after that too. We have another young team who is coming for them, and who has the winning record on the season matchup, which is the San Antonio Spurs, led by the future best player in the world, Victor Wembanyama.

David Remnick: Tell me what he does that makes him such. It's not just that he's so tall. God knows.

Louisa Thomas: He moves with such liquidity. He has this unbelievable competitive instincts [unintelligible 00:04:29].

David Remnick: He can shoot from deep, too. There's no way to guard this guy.

Louisa Thomas: He can play all five positions. You know the really amazing thing, whether or not he's the best all around player in the world, he's certainly and by far the best defensive player in the world. The other team's best players don't even drive to the basket. The amazing thing is you look at just shot selection around him, there's a void.

David Remnick: He opens the shots to a crazy degree. Now, there's another team, and this kills me. I thought basically the Celtics because of the injury for Jayson Tatum was going to be basically junior year abroad. Without Jayson Tatum, they were terrific, and now he's back. Now, I know where you're sitting. You're Sitting in Boston, I'm sitting here in New York just suffering, suffering. I haven't seen a championship since 1973. Tell me, how did the Celtics pull this off?

Louisa Thomas: The front office cleared out a ton of salary and everybody assumed it was going to be a rebuilding year. Everyone except apparently their coach and Jaylen Brown, who is having a MVP candidate season.

David Remnick: Jaylen Brown's unbelievable.

Louisa Thomas: Unbelievable.

David Remnick: My only hope is that when Tatum came back, maybe they wouldn't play together very well, but my hopes would be dashed. Totally dashed.

Louisa Thomas: Sorry to inform you. I think that Joe Mazzulla is a genius. I think that he has not only found a way to motivate the players who were still there to believe that they could win, but has figured out ways to maximize their strengths, because he has these insights that seem to make so much sense once you see them play out on the floor. He's the only one who is figuring out how to maximize these guys' potential.

David Remnick: I know you're high on the Celtics, I know you're high on the Pistons. You've written about the Pistons, the Spurs goes without saying, Oklahoma City. Throw me a bone here. Do the Knicks have any shot in the world?

Louisa Thomas: Look, the Knicks are top five in offense, top five in defense, except that they lose really badly sometimes, including to the aforementioned Detroit Pistons, let's say.

David Remnick: I know. I get your message, I get it, I get it. We're good, but not that good. Let's switch to another sport, baseball, the American sport. There was a time when the top beats as a sports rider were to be covering horse racing, boxing and baseball. Now obviously the NFL reigns supreme, but baseball's making some sort of comeback. Maybe one of the components of that comeback is that it's become an international phenomenon even more than it ever was.

Louisa Thomas: Yes, absolutely. We saw that during the World Baseball Classic. You not only have a American team that has legitimate superstars, you also have a Japanese team that has a claim to being the best team in the world. You have a Venezuelan team that just won the championship in this thrilling win over the United States, and beat Japan. You have Italy.

David Remnick: I know, Italy. What?

Louisa Thomas: Italy. Let's be real, it was like New Jersey playing under Italian flag. A lot of the players were on the Italian team on the basis of heritage, not growing up in Rome.

David Remnick: When I was in my first phase as a baseball fan, the Yankees were terrible. I mean, when I was a kid, they were just, but then under Steinbrenner, they had some extraordinary teams, but I had to hear all the time about how they bought their team. Now you have the Dodgers, who are outspending people by an astonishing amount. I don't see how they lose with the team they've assembled.

Louisa Thomas: They very nearly lost in the last World Series, in one of the greatest World Series I have ever seen, certainly in my lifetime. I don't--

David Remnick: Believe me, I was rooting against them with all my heart and all my soul.

[laughter]

Louisa Thomas: A lot of people were. I think here's one thing I will say about the Dodgers, and this is one of the ways in which I will differentiate them from your Yankees. They are not only a very wealthy team, they are a spectacularly well-run team. They do a very good job of identifying talent. They do a very, very good job of developing. They have good coaches, they do have the departments, they have a good culture.

They do all of the things right. I saw some statistic about what percentage of revenues they spent on their baseball team and it was much higher than any other team. They're spending money that they have, but other teams have money that they could spend and are not spending it. I'm less sympathetic to certain owners arguments that they just can't possibly keep up.

David Remnick: I lost interest in college basketball at a certain point because as soon as I learned somebody's name, they'd gone to another school or they'd gone to the pros after a year. It's hard to form any, I don't know, loyalty or interest when it's that fluid.

Louisa Thomas: I think that that actually does help explain part of the rising interest in the women's game where those players do stick around for longer. People do form attachments to not only teams, but to players and have a sense of the arc of their career and a sense of investment. You're still seeing the best players leave after one year.

David Remnick: Are you watching anybody in the tournament that you think in a couple of years will be breakout stars in the NBA?

Louisa Thomas: Oh, this tournament is unusually stocked with eventual stars. Duke has got one of the Boozers.

David Remnick: The sons of Carlos Boozer, the NBA all Star from a while back.

Louisa Thomas: Kansas has a guard, Darryn Peterson that a lot of people are really high on. There are actually a number of prospects. One of the reasons the NBA season has been a little bit weird is that so many teams are tanking because they're intentionally losing so they get high Draft picks.

David Remnick: No.

Louisa Thomas: Imagine.

David Remnick: Name names. Who's intentionally--

Louisa Thomas: Name as in teams?

David Remnick: Yes.

Louisa Thomas: Who?

David Remnick: Yes.

Louisa Thomas: Honestly, where do I begin? The Washington Wizards, the Brooklyn Nets, the Utah Jazz? Give me a team that are either already--

David Remnick: These are harsh words, Louisa Thomas. This is cheating. That's illegal, isn't it, to tank?

Louisa Thomas: This is increasingly embarrassing for the league. The league, in fact, recently fined the Utah Jazz $500,000 for sitting Laurie Markkanen and Jaron Jackson Jr. in the fourth quarter of close games recently.

David Remnick: Louisa, I hate to tell you, $500,000, while it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, is not exactly decisive money for an NBA franchise.

Louisa Thomas: That's true. That is actually why they're looking at reconfiguring the Draft lottery to try to discourage teams. I've heard proposals that range from abolishing the Draft, but I don't think they're going to do that to trying to weight wins and in the beginning of the season separately from wins at the end of the season to discourage teams that are no longer in the playoff chase from just starting to lose all their games and land in one of those better spots. It's a big problem for the league.

David Remnick: All right, we're going to close with some bold predictions on your part. Who's going to win the NBA and WNBA championships?

Louisa Thomas: The NBA, I'm going to go with the San Antonio Spurs just to really embarrass myself.

David Remnick: God, you're really sweet on the San Antonio Spurs-

Louisa Thomas: I love the Spurs.

David Remnick: -and have been for a long time. The WNBA?

Louisa Thomas: The WNBA, I'm going to go with your defending champion Las Vegas Aces.

David Remnick: Not a single New York team in the whole bunch.

Louisa Thomas: I know. You could make a case for Liberty.

David Remnick: I'm savoring their win, though, still. Louisa, thanks so much.

Louisa Thomas: Thank you.

David Remnick: Louisa Thomas writes the Sporting Scene for The New Yorker, and you can find her on basketball with recent pieces on LeBron James, Luke Kornet, the Pistons, and much more at newyorker.com.

[music]

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