All right, I want to welcome on a first time guest, but someone who's been in my brain for a very long time, because he wrote a great book about the 76ers.

And now he has written another one.

It's a Hollywood ending, the dreams and drama of the LeBron Lakers.

And this is a group that has long fascinated me and we'll get into it. Your own Weitzman is here. How are you doing, man? I'm good. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So I guess where I can start is just why did you pick this topic? Um, so there's a few reasons. One, I'll start with a boring answer, right? Which I'm not, I don't always give, but I'll give it here, right?

Writing a book is a commercial endeavor. And so you need to find. So you need to find something that you'll sell. Now, that being said, like you can't, it has to be something you're going to be, and this will get to a deeper answer. It has to be something that you'd be, I spent three years on this.

So it has to be something that you're willing to spend three years on, right?

And really like just hone in on and just obsess over. So obviously, LeBron and Lakers are big brands, right? I don't think, you know, you can do a book on a smaller team or whatever. But I just felt like going into this that, uh, the story here would sort of fit into the themes I like to cover, which is sort of power and backroom stuff in the NBA. And the phrase I use is sort of like, how the stuff that happens behind the scenes that we don't see impacts, what happens on the court that we do see. That's, I think, sort of a niche I've developed for myself, not necessarily purposely,

but just something I like writing about. That was my last book, really. The Sixers book was basically that. Some other stories I've done too. And just, it seemed very clear to me a few things.

One, that the merger, and I'm going to call it a merger on purpose, the merger between LeBron,

the Lakers, like that there was just a lot to unpack there. Two, if I told you when LeBron first time with the Lakers in 2018, that he would play eight seasons, at least with him, be mostly healthy. You would have said, forget more, probably more than one title. If not that, definitely more than one finals run. So like to me, you can't say it's, I say it's success because they won a title, but it was a success, but more expected.

So why did it more happen?

And I wanted to explore that.

And I felt like sort of out of them, I'm a New Yorker.

I don't cover the Lakers a lot.

I don't cover LeBron a lot.

Sort of as an outsider, I thought there was like something I could lend to that. Just you come from a different perspective and you're able to write things and cover things in a way that maybe people who are around the team every day are not able to. Yeah, those dynamics are fascinating as well. And I want to get into every bit of it, you know, going back to the gym boss era and Jeannie boss and as you put it in this marriage.

Because those teams always have fascinated me throughout this period.

And we haven't done our own original reporting, but we do plenty of tea leave reading and

going to know what truly was the impetus for some of these decisions, some of the internal

dynamics and stuff like that.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm not sure

if I personally, I got on the basketball floor would have said it was a disappointment for him

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