Pablo Torre

Thanks.

Thanks for having me back, guys.

There's a lot going on right now.

Yeah, I've been waiting for this.

The federal government, the Eastern District of New York, their scope has not merely been professional basketball, the NBA.

It's also been, of course, college games and in college games and in the Chinese Basketball Association saga.

I think there's a key important element here, which is that the incentive structure for what is to be gained.

if you are to participate in an alleged scheme to, you know, orchestrate the outcomes of micro events or the games themselves, micro events inside of games or the games themselves, they're just greater, right, as a cost-benefit analysis is concerned, compared to NBA players making millions of dollars.

So these are always... It's right to consider them the softer targets, the more logical targets, getting players to cooperate, allegedly, in such schemes.

And so, look...

Without saying too much, because I am processing all of this as I'm talking to you guys, just know that some of these names are familiar names from the federal indictments.

You're looking at guys like Shane Hannon, who by the way was the subject of the last episode that I did that you guys had me on to talk about.

Marvis Fairley is another name.

I'm just reading off of the list of names provided here, according to this indictment that was unsealed in Philadelphia.

And there are some characters, including the Chinese Basketball Association, including former LSU player Antonio Blakeney, where if you were to just look at what...

And again, this is it's lame of me to do this because I didn't break this story.

But if I were to show you the amount of group chatting I was doing about Antonio Blakeney last night, all of this would seem very much of a piece with the larger story that I've been talking to you guys about for months now.

Yeah.

So it's a social network.

It's a question of – I mean, look, there's not a – it is sophisticated in one sense but also very definitionally a bunch of guys group chatting to my earlier description of myself on the other hand.