Mark Shanowski

Yeah, just unbelievable news that I got yesterday morning.

Stacey, a true broadcasting legend and a great friend, and he's going to be missed terribly by Bulls fans if

Well, I'm actually old enough that I covered Stacey as a player during the Bulls' first three-peat, and I remember him coming in as a highly touted player at Oklahoma.

Old enough to remember Stacey as a college player.

He was the national player of the year.

He led the Sooners to the national championship game, and I can't tell you...

How many times that whenever it's brought up that they lost to Danny and the Miracles in the national championship game, Stacey would get really angry all over again because they had beaten Kansas twice during the regular season and they thought that they were going to win the national championship and they didn't play their best game that night.

and Manning and Kansas beat him, and he was always bitter about that.

But I got to cover him during the Bulls' first three-peat, and then, of course, after he retired, he coached for a while in the CBA with the Rockford Lightning, and then he got into broadcasting.

I did a year of pre and post with him at Comcast Sports in the studio, and then at that point,

Red Kerr was kind of winding down his broadcasting career and the Bulls were looking for another analyst and they gave Stacey a shot and he was so good they immediately moved him to the full-time analyst role and his career really took off from there.

We started the podcast in 2020 during the height of the pandemic which is kind of

Yeah, we started in November of 2020, and it was just an eerie time in the world where people really weren't doing much face-to-face contact, and we thought it'd be a good way to continue to communicate things.

Stacey was interested in starting a podcast, and we did a couple episodes, and he liked it, and the thing just kind of took off.

We expanded to YouTube, and now the episodes had been aired on Chicago Sports Network.

So Stacey was very proud of

the growth of the podcast, it gave him another outlet to connect with his fans.

And he was always excited to do it.

You know, we did a new episode every week.

Mark, we were happy to have you on as our Bears contributor for a couple of years.