Bill Simmons

What's your number one?

I saw, I was looking at, uh, some of the assist numbers.

There was multiple teams just averaging 29, 30 assists a game, which I thought was, was kind of exciting.

But so you mentioned the early sixties and I remember debunking the Oscar Robertson triple double stuff for my book because just the way they played back then, they would just kind of run up and down and take shots and nobody could make a shot back then the way they could now.

Um,

There's a bunch of reasons why scoring's up.

I'm going to throw a couple at you.

I didn't know you were going to bring this up, but I'm ready.

The fact that bigs can all shoot for the most part.

Right.

We have your occasional Nimi Keita or DeAndre Ayton kind of outlier, old school center who's just kind of around the rim.

But for the most part, we have these bigs, these stretch fives and just more talented bigs.

That's one.

The pace is up.

I think that's to the pressure.

Phoenix, you wrote about in your piece today how Phoenix, that's one of the reasons they've been able to unlock their season.

These teams that are just using 10, 11, 12 guys and trying to pressure the ball 94 feet, which Indiana started last year.

And now I feel like it's a trend.

But I also think a big part of that is how much talent we have.

That teams can go 10, 11, 12 deep now and have the luxury of doing that.