I understand the concept of having the mid-season tournament to understand how serious it is in European basketball and how players are able to get up for it.

Mainly because of the bonuses and incentives that come with it, but for me the biggest thing is how does the schedule pan out if you put us a mid-season tournament in?

The NBA is just not happy with the term load management in general, they don't like it, they don't like the description of it, they think a healthy player that misses a game, shouldn't be able to under the new resting policy and they think that they should term it with something else, basically saying that you need to be injured.

Load management isn't a valid excuse.

I think they should figure out logistics on what it would look like to receipt 1-16 for the playoffs.

Could you imagine a first round matchup of Eastern and Western Conference team? Because it's never happened before, we've never been able to see that besides in the finals, I think a lot of fans could appreciate that.

Welcome to the Antonio Gates episode of Polo Bess, episode number 85. I can't believe I've made it this far and still have quite a ways to go.

First and foremost, I want to shout out Jordan Schultz, Jordan will not be on the pod today, he's currently traveling, he's actually flying as we speak, we want to wish him a happy Thanksgiving and don't worry listeners, we will have him back on next week, as we always do.

Today we have a special guest, Chris B. Haynes, a good friend of mine who's worked his way up throughout the NBA, he's considered a rising star, but he's already a star now.

He's a Yahoo Sports senior NBA insider, he's had stands covering the Warriors to Cleveland Cavaliers and most notably the Portland Trailblazers, you can follow the Fresno State Alumni on Twitter at Chris B. Haynes and Instagram at Chris Haynes NBA.

He also is the host of Post It Up with Chris Haynes Podcasts, he's worked his way up from the bottom and before we get into the podcast, I want to kind of talk about his story.

Chris is a guy I can relate to in terms of starting from the bottom, having to literally work his way to the top, from having multiple gigs to riding for free, to being a janitor Chris, for our listeners out there, I'm familiar with your story, kind of give us a brief recap of how you got to the point you are today and basically briefly touch on the work it took to get to this point because a lot of times people see the final success, they see you in the NBA, they see NBA players final form, but they don't understand the stress, the anxiety.

The thoughts, the doubts, you wanting to quit, wanting to kind of go on a different career path, so just kind of briefly touch on that before we get started.

All right, CJ, first of all, thanks for having me, big honor. But I'll say this, look, it was just to just condition the storyline.

I wouldn't be able to have, you know, I wouldn't be able to get to my path if it wasn't for me being in a social media area, the blog area, you know, obviously 15 years ago, everybody had to write for a newspaper and that was usually the mountain they had to climb to get a higher beat, to get a more higher profile beat.

So, you know, with blogs being out, which allow people to showcase their talent, they allow more people to do so. So, you know, I utilize that, but long story short, I wanted to cover the NBA graduate from Fresno State, major in the Kinesiology, wanted to be a PE teacher of basketball coach, coach basketball for a couple years, then I realized, you know, especially on the high school level, money is not, you know, it's not a lot of it.

At that, that that phase, you know, these, I realized, you know, I started, you know, during the hours, I started adding up the hours, the practice time, the games, and you know, it was one season, what I said is, I'm like, I realized by all the hours you put in, I'm making about $75 an hour.

So, just say stuff, all the practices and all that. So, I had to quickly reverse courses, you know, I wanted, you know, I had a passion for writing and, you know, I reached out to a couple of blogs and they told me, you know, look, you know, you got some potential, you got some talent, it will work with you, but you have to move to an NBA market.

And that's the only way we can bring you on, we can't pay you anything, but we can get you potential. So, I chose Portland, you know, that was 10 hours drive, 10s, 12 hours drive.

So, in just in case I failed, it wouldn't be such a long drive to go back home. And, you know, man, I just hit it off, man, relationships that I accumulated, man, and you know, the timing was perfect.

You guys, you damn, you guys came along, just at the right time, you know, it was at Brenner Roy's tail end of his career. I caught the final year of his tenure with Portland.

And, man, it just, it just, you know, my, it just went up from there. And, you know, I got better, you know, breaking stories and getting relationships, getting exclusive stories, important to tell stories that, you know, other journalists probably can't get or probably can't tell.

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