Change isn't coming. It's already here. Commerce is going digital and tax complexity is multiplying.

Tax rules evolve, rate shift, data floods in. Vertex connects it all.

A global tax compliance platform powered by tax-ready data and intelligence systems.

Smarter tech, continuous tax compliance, built-in confidence.

Learn more at vertexinck.com.

Welcome to a special edition of the Athletic MBA show.

I'm your host, Andrew Schlecht, with me today.

A man who covers a historically horrific basketball team.

It's my guy, James Edwards III, in Detroit.

James, are you okay? Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine.

Yeah, I think the hardest part is just coming up with, like, you just feel like you've written everything under the sun at this point, right? You wrote a great piece that went up on The Athletic a couple days ago that really just detailed, like, how did we get here?

How did this happen to the Detroit Pistons who, you know, throughout a lot of like my childhood, like, we're pretty good.

And then like awesome, you know know in like the early aughts

and now it's just like the only reason they're in the news is for losing can you can you give like a

brief summary and i think to me the the point is like a lot of people will look at detroit and say

well why can't they just be like Oklahoma City or Orlando or,

you know, whoever else in this process? I want you to like at least like defend like why it's

even like reasonable that they wouldn't be exactly on pace with them. But then we can talk about

the other stuff too.

But just give like a bird's eye view of your story.

And then we can kind of talk about like how the rebuild has kind of gone wrong.

Yeah.

...