Hello and welcome to the Game Theory podcast.

I'm your host Sam Vassini.

We're presented by The Athletic.

Today on the show, Matt Penny is here.

And oh boy, we have the perfect college basketball culture war bullshit thing to talk about.

Because Jalen Johnson has decided to opt out of Duke's

final six games plus a potential at ACC tournament depending on if conference tournaments

are going to happen.

By the way, isn't it crazy, Matt, that we are February 16th and we don't totally know

what the deal is with conference tournaments.

No, it's kind of like fly-by-night.

Like, yeah, it's up to the conferences.

The conferences are like, yeah, I don't know.

I think we'll do them, but we'll see what happens.

Yeah, it just feels like at some point we need to figure these things out.

At least we know that there's going to be an NCAA tournament in Indiana, but we digress.

We're going to talk about Jalen Johnson here for a little bit, and then we're going to talk about Shereef Cooper and just an update on the G League Night guys.

So the reason that I feel like this Jalen Johnson story has taken over the consciousness is because it's like such an American story right now, right?

Like we have all of these older like frankly white dudes that have this entitlement that essentially are saying he's a quitter and all this bullshit, right?

And essentially you're just trashing a kid publicly for deciding that he doesn't want to play

basketball anymore.

And there's like, and there's a foot injury perspective here as well that I, look, I don't

...