Nick Friedel

And guys, we're five minutes into the conversation here.

We haven't even touched on the T word.

Permeated through everything.

These are big fundamental issues that the league has.

And when you have All-Star weekend and you get to a point in the schedule where everybody's going to go, oh man, this should be a celebration.

It's not a celebration anymore.

It's a reminder of the way things used to be.

and it's a reminder of the current state of the game.

So I'm sitting there watching this every night, and I can't tell you all how many times, even in the last couple months, being back in it day to day, and I'm around the Warriors a lot, I look at my colleagues on press row, and we're looking at each other and we're like,

are you watching this?

Are you looking at this?

People are just not going as hard as we're used to seeing.

And it's not just a one or two team thing.

It's an everybody thing because there are too many games.

The regular season is way too long.

And you've got all the back-to-backs that guys either don't play in or when they do play,

they aren't fully invested in the same way because they know, like we all know, that there are much bigger games down the stretch of the season.

So there are a lot of problems right now for the league in the All-Star weekend and the dunk contest.

Those are just reminders of much bigger issues.

Marshall, at least they're trying something.