Wednesday night edition of the pod. I really wish I thought of this topic a day earlier because I think it's quite apropos given that it's April Fool's Day. You're probably listening to the Sunday full second, but day we were recording this on April 1st still counts, right?

Yep, counts enough for me. Do the days even matter anymore?

Yes, because we still recorded Sunday through Thursday nights and my weekend is Friday and Saturday, so kind of.

So the reason, of course, that we decided to do this is because it's April Fool's and wanted to talk about the biggest flappers in the NBA.

The players who focus the most on fooling the referees and also give a little bit of love to the players who flopped the least, which I think is only fair.

And many of these players are great players. However, I find their call seeking behavior to be a relative blight on the game. It's not their fault. They are not bad people. They are responding to the incentives that they are given. In many cases, I think the referees, but really more so even the league in terms of the way it calls a number of falls.

We talked many times about the fix the charge hashtag even did a presentation on it at Sloan last year. So they are responding to the incentives that they are given.

I think the league has done a decent job making incremental improvements, though, such as the three shot fall for the field contact and then decide to throw it up after you feel the contact that they're now making that an unshooting fall.

So they've done some things to take away some of these roughbating behaviors, but there are still many, many players who just can teach you a master class in deception.

So we're just going to go through some of our candidates here. We'll just switch off nominating someone talk about the genius of their flopping.

And then we'll pick our top three biggest floppers and then also give some credit to the players who deserve it for actually playing basketball and using the foul rules as they are intended, which is as a constraint when they're trying to prevent you from playing basketball, not a reward that you should be seeking out from the referees.

Yeah, at times on the NBA cast in particular, I talk about the difference between how I see flopping and embellishment.

And for me is that a flop is accentuated contact that basically does it exist. So the, you know, or or so severely exaggerating the contact so as to like basically nullify that.

So like you could see, there was a great Josh Jackson one a few years ago where he flew a mile and a half, even though we got bumped or something like that. But but flopping, but embellishment is interesting.

And I've tied the two together here partially because some floppers are also good embellishers. And I think of it from a soccer context like basically if you get bumped and then you make it seem like a bigger bump, that's embellishment.

And if you make it something out of nothing, that's more flopping. But in this since they're so correlated and interrelated, there aren't really guys that are particularly adept at one and not at the other or practitioners of one and not the other that I kind of felt like it all fit together.

And I think I would also throw in there as well. A little more extensive, which is just the call seeking behavior where you are doing stuff where the point of it is to make the referee blows whistle in your favor, not to actually either score or stop your opponent in a legitimate way other than the rest of referee flowing as whistle.

And generally that involves what you're talking about the embellishment of, all right, I'm going to jump in front of this person. And yeah, you know what?

Maybe I'm utilizing the contact to fall down. But if I wanted to, I could easily say on my feet, I might just get knocked back a step or two.

You're basically jumping in front of someone making yourself a limp noodle and then falling down when they hit you in the, in the, in the lot of defensive floppers. They're playing offensive floppers too.

I think actually there may be more offensive floppers than defensive floppers these days. But I want to start off with the player who I would give the best young flopper award to.

The Tour de France has the best young writer award the white jersey. So we've got the best young floppers. So give a white jersey to Trey Young of the Atlanta Hawks award.

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