The Ringer NBA Show
A Big Ol’ MVP Debate. Plus, Picks for Every Other Individual Award. | Group Chat
09 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What happened in the 2026 NCAA men's championship game?
Hello and welcome to Group Chat. I am Justin Verrier. And joining me, Rob Mahoney, J. Kyle Mann. Gentlemen, we're never talking about college basketball again. We're done. The Huskies are done.
So take the year off, brother. So this is a great relief to me, you know, trying to fake it through these segments as if I know what you guys are talking about.
Chapter 2: How has the NBA season evolved this year?
It's it's not just an inconvenience to me personally. I find it like deeply wounding. So thank goodness we can turn the page on that.
Rob, you said something like a couple of weeks ago where you dropped this suddenly in there. You were like, it's a distraction when you were talking about the NCAA tournament, which I think said everything. I was like, OK, buddy. All right. Yeah.
Was I wrong? Yeah, you're wrong. Think about how many more nice things we could have said about the dog shit teams of the NBA if we weren't distracted by the tournament.
Chapter 3: Who are the top contenders for the MVP award?
I had a good time. I thought the tournament was really good this year. Part of that was probably because UConn did so well. Sure. But I also thought a lot of the prospects that Kyle has been talking to us about over the course of the year played big roles there. Unlike last year with a lot of those guys, the Rutger guys in particular were just not available. Didn't end as well as I would like.
Do I regret wearing the hat that I did? Yeah, a little bit. But I think the fact that they were even in that game was pretty spectacular. It shows how good Dan Hurley is.
Did you feel some person permanence? Did you see some of the words that had come across your desk? permanent, you know, become permanent when you see them on the court. Like maybe they solidified themselves like names to faces kind of thing.
Yeah. There was a little bit more vibrancy. Like they came to life off the page, almost like an aha video or something like that.
We need somebody to animate that.
Do you have any final thoughts from the tournament, Kyle? Can I just say this first and foremost? Michigan, fucking huge. Yaxel looked like he was playing in a different league or age range or something like that.
He literally is.
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Chapter 4: Why might Wemby be a favorite next season?
Is he not an adult man?
That contributes to it, certainly.
Well, I was laughing about Jamal Mashburn saying that Yaxel reminded him of him. And I was like, yeah, Yaxel's age. You were already in like year three or four in the NBA. Like that was that's a funny thing.
Chapter 5: Who is leading the Rookie of the Year race?
Yaxel's good. Those thoughts aside quickly, basketball wise, like in the macro sense.
uh them changing the block charge rule in college i think caused what we're seeing here it's no longer viable for davids to go into these games and think that they can take down goliaths by like just standing up like you know bowling pins and hope the ball hits them and you know get in foul trouble that stuff's not a factor anymore you can be gigantic like like michigan um i don't know like you know launching that to
Is that something that is a big, bigger picture thing going on in the NBA, too? I don't know. The causality is the same necessarily. Like we talk about the offensive rebounding revolution in the NBA. It seems like it's happening in college for different reasons. I think that would be my my main takeaway for for basketball fans who are watching both.
Yeah, whenever I plug in, and by that I mean the past two to three years when UConn finally got really good, like the fact that post-up bigs are still pretty relevant and to the point where like at least two of the successful UConn teams of the past four years have like kind of revolved around those guys and Sunogo and now Terrace Reed is like...
Chapter 6: What makes a player Most Improved this season?
It's almost like you're jolting back a couple of years in history where it's like this just doesn't happen in the NBA now. And it seemed like to a certain extent, other teams were kind of thriving off of their bigs. And obviously, Michigan was just gigantic to the point where I mean, Morris Johnson was basically playing the like the three or the four.
I guess he and Yaxo would switch and they're both like power forwards in the NBA, which is wild.
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NBA centric by job by focus in a lot of ways, just like as a as a sports fan, do you prefer when the NCAA product feels like a distinct thing in that way? Whereas you're saying Justin, it's like there are different styles of player that are successful there. There's entire like ecosystems in terms of the way you play that just work better on that level?
Or do you prefer it to look and feel like the NBA just just slightly different?
I personally liked it because it's almost like getting a different cuisine that is familiar enough to the thing that you're used to eating all the time. I will say, could I have stomached that throughout the course of an entire season? I don't know, because it is slower. And in that title game, Yukon could not hit anything. And so there aren't a lot of threes there.
And I do like the dynamic timing. sort of shooting element to the NBA. And so I liked it in a tournament setting where it was like one and done. And I think that adds to the appeal of it all. But I do like it's a different experience. I had fun in this tournament more than I had even in the past years where UConn was more successful.
We got more older players, you know, I think in the fact that we don't have the 24 second shot clock in college leads to more just kind of like pointless actions at the beginning. So it can seem a little boring for, for people who aren't used to that product.
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Chapter 7: Who is the Defensive Player of the Year frontrunner?
So the college product is always going to suffer from that. But overall, I think. The game is as old as it could be. It's, you know, we've got more older players in the college game. So I think it's been better. The numbers have reflected it too. So, you know, it's been up across the board. So, yeah.
Chapter 8: What are the predictions for Coach of the Year?
Yeah, the Braylon Mullins experience, I think, is like indicative of that, where it's like to start with, you can't hit the broad side of a barn and you're just kind of maddening because it seems like this is the type of player he should be. Why is he not excelling at this exact thing? But then when he does hit big shots, it's more dramatic because you suffered through all the misses.
And so that is heightened. And so. There's something a little bit more just like visceral, I guess, that really tugs at the heartstrings in ways that perhaps the NBA doesn't because it's a little bit more efficiency conscious and everything is so dialed in. But it's nice to have both, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and yeah, the NBA this season, I mean, we can get into it. A bit of very weird NBA campaign overall. Very hard to get a grip on, like, yeah, we know the Thunder are good. Yeah, we know the Pistons are reeling off wins. Yeah, we see these ascendant teams. But between the injuries, what is driving the conversation on a week-to-week basis around the league, it's just been...
Such an odd year, I think, for like the soul of NBA basketball. And I don't know how to make sense of it right now. I wonder how we'll think of this time in retrospect. But in the present tense, it's hard to feel like overwhelmingly great about where the NBA is.
And I say that despite the fact that we're probably just weeks away, days away at this point from some pretty incredible playoff basketball. This is just a different thing in the regular season.
I would take it a step further. Like, I think this is the worst NBA season since I've started covering the league almost 20 years ago. Like this is the least amount of fun. And I say, this is someone who's going to watch the basketball regardless. This isn't about any sort of personal preference poking through that. I don't want to like indulge in this stuff. I do.
We talk about this twice a week for multiple hours a day. This is like what we do. I just it's just there's something missing here. You know, it's the tanking. It's the injuries. It's just everything. There's just a giant Paul over the league.
It's funny because I was reading in anticipation of this pod like about Nikola Jokic column and it started to like another electric NBA season is in the books. I was like, what the fuck have you been watching? It hasn't been relevant for months at this point. Like since the All-Star break, there have been like a couple games where
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