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unsaid. An institution for sports talk and information. This is the sports reporters.

Here's Mike Lupica, Mitch Album, and Bob Ryan. I'm Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe and ESPN.

I'm Mitch Album of the Detroit Free Press.

I'm Michael Lupig of the New York Daily News and MLB.com and welcome to the Monday edition

of the Sports Supporters podcast.

We do this now twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays and we're happy to have the band

back together.

And there's much to talk about and we'll get to baseball in the Astros.

And Commissioner Rob Manfred gave an interview to ESPN yesterday and also won over at the Braves' new spring training home in Florida.

But we start with the NBA All-Star game.

And, guys, I have to tell you, yes, yes yes the fourth quarter was fun um after three quarters of

what we've come to expect of this game which is a lob dunk a game of around the world from the

outside okay but i am looking now at the espn homepage team yannis and team lebrron go back and forth in an epic fourth quarter.

Guys, again, they actually seem to be trying.

They actually seem to be playing a little defense.

Even the refs seem to be trying in the fourth quarter.

But if that's where we're grading this now now if that's all it takes to make an epic

fourth quarter it shows you how bad this game had become game had become bad and i blame the

players for the way that they chose to play it and get away from actually playing basketball

which was actually done in years past. I'm here to tell you.

And not that every all-star game, say, in the first 30 years or so was wonderful. No, but some of them were really good basketball games. And I saw some of them in the 80s and in the 70s. And

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