Dan Le Batard Doesn't Especially Care About Bill Simmons' Basketball Rankings Pyramid

Bill Simmons spent an hour* on Dan Le Batard’s radio show on Wednesday. Among the running subplots was a disagreement on tipping. Dan says he is normally a strong tipper, but will not go above the 18% if an establishment charges automatic gratuity. Bill, from his years working in the service industry, will almost never punish a worker financially, but says he might write a note on receipts when he feels service was particularly poor. He also kept trying to gloat about the Heat not making the playoffs, but Le Batard would then cut the segments off and send them to commercial break.

In the snippet above, they were good-naturedly chiding each other, which led to Simmons griping that Le Batard will spend 900 hours on a tournament about various archetypes that people look like**, but doesn’t care about the MVP. Stugotz argued that they’re important for historical ranking purposes. Le Batard countered that you’re splitting hairs between Harden, Curry, LeBron, Westbrook, and Davis, and that it’s a dumb benchmark if Steve Nash has two while Shaq and Kobe only have one apiece.

“What I don’t care about, and this is probably not the best conversation to be having with you, who ranked all of the players in order in an 800-page best-selling book, but I don’t care who’s 8 and who’s 11,” Le Batard said. “I don’t care. They’re both really good.”

This has been the weekly segment of Bill Simmons and/or Dan Le Batard saying something.

*34:17 after commercials
**They actually did this, and got Bob Ley to narrate: For example: “Kevin McHale looks like the high school biology teacher with feral and unrelenting halitosis, whose wife just left him for the tennis coach.”