Thinking Basketball podcast. My name is Ben. Welcome back to another episode. Cody's here. I'm here. It's the summer.

That means it's time for us to put our serious analysis caps on and talk about NBA history.

And what we would like to do is it's the 25th year of this century.

It's 2025.

So we are going to do the best of this century.

And we're just going to come out swinging. Usually we have all kinds of

philosophical preambles and things like that. We'll do that today. Don't worry. But to start,

we are going to do the 25 best peaks of the 21st century. It's 25 and 25, the 25 best peaks of the 21st century.

When I proposed this, I thought, man, this is going to be awesome.

We're going to get to talk about players who don't necessarily get the normal shine,

that they get the Al Horford's and Drew Holidays, all of Cody's favorites.

We're going to hit all his buzzwords. We're going to get Andre Kirolenko in here. We're going to unearth the incredible but brief run of Yao Ming. Brandon Roy is going to make an appearance. And I'm sad to say that none of those players will even be getting close to the list. I think that was the takeaway, too, once I started doing the prep and putting

together the list. I'm like, wow, there's like 20, 21, like, mega players. Like, not guys who are like third, second, like mega peaks here. I'm like, man, I was really hoping, like, the Richard Hamilton heads would come out here. Like, yes, rips out here. We're going to be talking about movement shooting. and that's just, it's not the case, Ben.

So that makes me a little bit sad.

I almost, we should almost go back and be, Hamilton heads would come out here. Like, yes, rips out here. We're going to be talking about movement shooting, and that's just, it's not the case, Ben.

So that makes me a little bit sad.

I almost, we should almost go back and be like, we're going to do the 26th through 50th best peaks of the 21st century. But alas, I think this will make due. Yeah. technically since it's 25 seasons, the first NBA season this century that covers that is

the 2000 and 2001 season. So for this series, we will be talking about 2001 spanning into last

season, which was 2024, 2025 in the NBA. Also, we thought to make it more fun, more exciting, more challenging, I don't know, more

interesting, hoping to hit some of these lesser talked about players.

We are only going to pick one single season.

We are going to say, you know, 2009 LeBron.

...