Thinking Basketball Podcast. My name is Ben. Welcome back to the series finale. Our final episode of the

top peaks of the 21st century. That's the best player seasons of the 21st century where we've gone through for the last,

who knows how many months digging into all kinds of stuff. And Cody, as excited as I am to

wrap this up and get our housekeeping in order and finish this project, where I wanted to

start today is the reality that I pretty much at this point hate

ranking players.

What,

okay,

so let me ask you something about that.

Do you hate ranking players because,

because of the reaction you get?

Or do you hate it because,

like internally you just don't feel like that's an actual way to think about basketball players? It do you hate it because, like, internally, you just don't feel like

that's an actual way to think about basketball players?

It's a little bit of the internal thing in the sense that for me, I can no longer just

think about a player either just in an order, like, one, number one, number two, number

three, two is clearly above three, and then if something bad happened to two, two has to go below three. I can't think like that anymore. And the other thing is that intuitively for me, just thinking about those like top end and bottom end ranges has become so organic because of the tension, because of my internal tension of like, I don't know,

there's some good things about this player. There's some things that I'm nervous about this player

that I can't resolve. But yeah, man, I mean, I think it's mostly the ranking culture in basketball

and people's reactions is just, yeah, it's not enjoyable. I'm thinking about what the actual list would look like.

Like if you were to release the true thing, that's honestly a representation of what we've been doing here.

I feel like you would actually be like a hundred lists with like a percentage next to each name as to like how confident you'd be that they'd be in that list.

...