So since we're on this break over the all-star break, I figured I'd try something that I've done once before when I talked about the greatest players of all time with Kevin Paltin and Royce Webb a few years ago.

I wanted to dig back into the archives. Maybe you missed this one when it came out originally, but it should still be pretty green. It's actually from Spring of 2018.

And then we're going to do a second one that was from the fall of 2018. Apologies for my audio quality. I recorded it from a hotel room on my honeymoon in the second one.

But it's with our friend Ben Taylor. I think this first episode is, and he can correct me if I'm wrong here, but might have been the first podcast that he did.

And I'd been loving his series on Backpicks.com. He'd started getting into writing again after I had his. I'd always followed him. I loved his book, Thinking Bass Ball.

So I reached out to him through a mutual acquaintance who knew him pretty well, had him on the pod, and he was awesome. And he's been really searching one of the best voices in NBA media.

Now his YouTube channel, Thinking Bass Cup Ball is fantastic. So some of this stuff will be a little bit out of date. You know, this is Spring of 2018, this first one.

But overall should still hold up reasonably well talking about the overrated and underrated players of all time. And then the second episode is his top eight players of all time.

And so looking forward to relisting to this myself. Actually, I probably will when I'm driving to my all star destination, which is not Chicago.

And if you've heard this before, you're not interested in it. No hard feelings. If you don't want to listen, but I figured no reason not to throw out some more content for you while we're on the break here.

And I think it holds up pretty well. All right, Wednesday night edition of the pod and a new guest that I wanted to bring on a guy who whose work has intrigued me even going back to 2002 when I first started reading him.

He's a bit of a shadowy figure because his Twitter handle is kind of doesn't isn't really very self explanatory. But his name is Ben Taylor has been doing an awesome series at his site backpicks.com

with doing some historical rankings from a different perspective and with some data that I haven't seen it anywhere else. I wanted to have him on the show talk a little bit about his philosophy and then get into the historical rankings that he's done.

He still has eight to go. But I wanted to talk to him about his methodology and where he is so far through the nine through 40. And then we will have him back on to talk about his top eight.

But enough introduction here. We're just talking before the show of high. Don't do that much introduction. But here's Ben Taylor. How you doing, man? Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. And I have been described as many things. I don't know if shadowy figure is one of the

well, so you see your Twitter handle is LG 35. Where does that come from? Cause that is not in fact your initials. Yeah. Wow. No one has ever asked me that.

So LG is for the phonetic letters LNG just spelled out. Yeah. And that that actually comes from a nickname that a girlfriend gave me a very long time ago, which stands for something that I can't repeat on air.

And and the 35 was my number when I played. All right. Well, that's a great way to get started. Yeah, I never really knew what that was. So it's just one of those sort. You just have so many sunk costs now with that handle that you know.

You know, you can just change it and like you don't lose any followers. I used to be the team rebound back when I was working as a lawyer. And I wasn't sure whether I wanted people to know who I was at the law firm. I wasn't sure how they're going to take it. And then when I started with basketball,

I was like, changed it to Nate Duncan NBA. And I didn't lose any of my like, you know, 400 followers or whatever that I had at the time. You know, this is serendipitous because I was just thinking today, is that just stuck in stone forever? Or can I change it? So maybe I will now maybe you've inspired me.

So I intro to you shadowy figure intro aside, you give a little bit different of an approach to analytics to talking about basketball.

You have your book that you've written as well, which we'll talk about. But what do you think is kind of separates your philosophy and some of your ideas from some of the stuff that we see more in mainstream NBA analysis?

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