Jake Kleinberg

speaker

147 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Apr 2025

Jake Kleinberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Athletic NBA Daily · Pistons beat Celtics + "Court of Gold" behind the scenes · 27 Feb 2025 podcast

Victor Wambinyama being one of the biggest stars in the game. That's kind of an obvious choice. Those last two spots, though, Canada was more obvious than people would think, I think, because they had I think it was the second most NBA players behind the United States and their team. Yep. You have Shea. They have a basketball history that's pretty interesting that people don't really know about.

And so I think Canada became like a pretty obvious third choice. And then the fourth choice we debated for a long time. And I was part of that discussion. And it was which countries have the most interesting stories that you want to let the world know. and who actually have a chance.

And Serbia came to mind, one, because of the rich basketball history and the war and just how compelling that story is, but also because they won the silver medal at the FIBA World Cup in 23 without Jokic. So you add the best player in the world to a team that's already successful, you think like, okay, that could go well.

As far as who we're rooting for, immediately the groups were made, and it was USA and Serbia in one group, so we knew they'd be playing each other. And then as the tournament unfolded, you have Canada and France in the first game of the knockout round. So there's conflicting feelings all over the place because you develop relationships with people on every team.

So it's like you're happy that Wemby won because you love him, but you're sad that Shea lost because you love him. And it's like there's no rooting for anybody. The hope is like, I hope one of our teams goes far. That was always like, what if none of our teams go far? And with the U.S., you're making some good bets. But there's a world in which that happens. And then what do you do? So...

Yeah, I think that naturally you have people you're rooting for, but I don't think there was one team that we were all hoping would prevail.

Yeah.

I want to hear your thought first and I can tell you whether it's true or not. What's your bet?

So Max Gershberg, who was the lead producer on the show, his job in Paris was to get the Serbians to warm up to him and that crew. And it was the hardest assignment of the whole project because the Serbians were the most serious. Coach Pesic ran a very, very tight ship. And I think that Max had to do a lot of work to convince those guys that this was worth their time.

So the Serbians were actually one of the harder ones to crack because the tone that Coach Pesic said was nothing matters besides basketball. And I don't care if you're in Paris and your family's here. You need to go run on the track more instead of go have dinner with them. So they were fun once they won a medal. They were very fun. But that was the last day.

We were one of the last days we were shooting. I think that the Canadians were the loosest team. Like they had cool music playing in practice. They were very like, they had a swagger about them that just like kind of jumped out.

They were cool, man. I think Shay set the tone of just like Jordy is a really cool dude. He's like very human. The French were also really fun to be around. Boris Diaw we got really close with. He was awesome. But they had a lot of pressure on them. And any time they left where they were, the media was insane around them. So I think it was harder for them to kind of let loose.

And then the USA basketball team was, it was so fun to be around, but it was, they had so much attention that it was hard to gain the access there because just everyone was trying and you were one of a hundred people trying to get in with them. So yeah, each team had a different personality.

That's awesome to hear because I guess hanging out each day, you didn't know what you were going to get, right? There was there's this unexpected mystery to like, OK, what does today have for us when you're trying to it's sort of a moving target storytelling wise. And I think one of the cool things about it is, at least from watching it from the outside perspective, you're wondering what was left.

Like, what did you guys not put in the dock? Because there's so many moments that were captured. Steph, KD and LeBron celebrating, obviously, the incredible USA-Serbia game. But what was the moment that you or maybe the moment that you wish was in that dock that wasn't?

Yeah, there's two that come to mind. One is we shot Greece qualifying for the Olympics, and that was cool because you saw Giannis in the locker room, and they're all spraying champagne. It was awesome, but we needed to get to the Olympic, to the tournament early on because we had so much to cover. We couldn't really fit it in.

And then the moment between Ant and President Obama, that night we shot a dinner afterwards with the president and Team USA, which was amazing, but we just didn't have room for it in that moment because, again, we had to just get to the Olympics. Right. Those two moments really come to mind.

But I really think we like our team did an awesome job of getting the best stuff in because a lot of these docs we shoot, we shoot over the course of like two or three years and you have a ton of footage to work with. And while we did shoot a lot, it was only from like June 24 to December 24. So it's actually not as much as you would think.

And so we really just pick the best moments and try to build the series around those moments and sort of like tentpole them throughout the series.

And trash talking Obama is amazing, was just no, it was not.

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