Welcome to the BasketBuds edition of the Back to Back Podcast. I'm Zach Harper, joined by Yovan

Buha. We've got Trouin Edwards. We got Wazni Lambra, our cultural anthropologist, and of course,

Jared Weiss is also on the podcast today. Before we get into a sneaker pod that was obviously pre-planned, it's around a couple of pieces, one that Yovan and Trey and everybody worked on, another roundtable that's coming out.

Obviously, we're very aware and we're not insensitive to what's going on in this country right now. We're recording this on Monday morning. We don't know when this podcast is going

to go out. So this could be Tuesday, Wednesday. It could be a week after. We don't really know.

But after what's happened over the last week, we're very aware and we don't want to make

light or ignore anything important going on in this country and in everyone's lives as everyone's

been affected by this in different ways. We hope that if you choose to listen to this podcast, that it gives you a little

bit of a reprieve from things going on. I've done this with other podcasts and other people

have. We don't want to make light of what's going on or say, hey, you should be thinking about sneakers right now, but some people may want that distraction for 30, 40 minutes, whatever this ends up being. And if you decide, like, look, there's too much serious stuff going on right now. I don't have time for this. I'll save this for later, or I'm just not going to listen. We respect that too. There's a great podcast out with David Aldridge, Waz, and Marcus Thompson. Um, also around a piece that Marcus Thompson wrote. We have, uh, we have an open letter from Monty Williams on the website. Um, we've got, uh, we've got, you know, tales of, uh, racism, racial injustice through, from a myriad of writers on the, on the website that posted, Monday morning. There's a lot of material if you want to stick with what's going on in this country.

You know, more power to you.

We support that.

We support you.

But we just wanted to make sure that you are, you know, you're not being ignored.

You're not being unheard.

And that we do take this very seriously.

But we do have a job to do on our end as well. And part of that

job is this podcast today. So, Yovon, I will uncomfortably throw to you. You were the point man for

this. I'll play point guard on this podcast, which I don't usually like to pass, but I'll do it

today. But Yovon, this was this, you kind of spearheaded this project. What was the impetus of ranking

the 25 greatest sneaker lines, not sneakers, but sneaker lines for the athletic?

Yeah. So this project came from a conversation with one of my editors, John Shear. We were talking

...