By far the strangest new addition to the NBA media ecosystem this season has been Klutch Sports super agent Rich Paul, who co-hosts the Game Over podcast with Max Kellerman.
Bill Simmons and The Ringer, who produce the show, have put a ton of backing behind it. The studio and lighting are set apart from the network’s usual look, and the show got swallowed into the company’s video licensing deal with Netflix almost immediately. Kellerman has made multiple promotional appearances on Simmons’ flagship podcast.
Game Over has seemingly done its job of programming the NBA headlines of the day. Paul, as one of the more powerful people in the league, knows that anything he says counts as news. And he has dutifully dropped hints at transactions and contrarian takes to get the news cycle spinning.
Given the significant resources that The Ringer is putting into a show designed to manipulate its audience like this, outlets including Awful Announcing have been sharply critical of the Game Over experiment.
Toward the end of Kellerman’s latest appearance on The Bill Simmons Podcast, the two rejected this criticism, arguing Game Over is merely the latest evolution of talk shows and insider content. We also learned just how much Paul has been driving the car on this project, a sign that it will continue no matter how deep of a bait-and-switch the podcast becomes.
“The discourse about the podcast has been fascinating. Other pods weighing in on whether this should be a podcast,” Simmons said.
“But it feels like we do this every time there’s some sort of new genre that moves into podcasting. Because when Draymond (Green) had a podcast, it’s like, ‘Wait a second, instead of a press conference, this guy is just going to talk directly to [whoever]?’
“In this case, I think because (Paul) reps all of these different players and has all this extra intelligence obviously, part of the game seems (to be) for people listening, what’s he trying to say? Is he carrying the agenda for someone else? And it’s been fascinating to watch from afar.”
When Green launched his podcast several years ago, he popularized the term “New Media” to signify the purpose behind content hosted by active athletes. To Green and many others, these shows were about taking back the narrative around them as athletes and people from traditional media figures. The “New Media” was, in many ways, driven by an anti-establishment ethos.
Comparing Green to Paul would mean that Paul is also at the bottom of the sports pecking order. This could not be further from the truth. Today, agents have more influence over team-building, news breaking, media access and business deals than ever before.
Still, Kellerman later explained, Paul was the driving force behind Game Over.
“When Rich called me a year, almost two years ago like, ‘What do you think of this?’ And I was already working on something at that point. I thought he was kidding at first, right?” he explained. “Then I realized he was serious. And I stopped and thought about it for a second, and I was like, as a consumer, I would consume that. I would need to know. I’d have to watch that, I’d have to listen to it.”
Audience numbers on YouTube were solid for Game Over before it jumped to Netflix. But the show has just 12,000 followers on Spotify, which owns The Ringer and promotes its shows heavily on the company’s app.
Some seem to share Kellerman’s instinctive desire to hear a super agent deliver sports takes, but not exactly in droves.
While Paul’s takes have reportedly led to incidents with other agents and frustrations among many NBA fan bases, Kellerman insisted that Paul believes what he says. That the opinions Paul shares on-air are not Klutch talking points but genuinely held beliefs. And often, they are spurred along by Kellerman’s point of view as well.
“I think he stands by what he says,” Kellerman explained. “A lot of times, he’s being tarred by what I say. Like, people are attributing the stuff I say to him because he’s sitting next to me. Like, the Austin Reaves thing, I suggested that they should think about trading Austin Reaves.”
So far, Game Over appears to be achieving exactly what Paul, Kellerman and Simmons hoped it would.