Ryen Russillo on The Bill Simmons Podcast
Credit: Bill Simmons on YouTube
Like Inside the NBA moving to Thursday nights or early rumors about an unhappy superstar, for the past decade hoops fans have known to lock into the NBA season when Ryen Russillo began to pop up Sunday nights on The Bill Simmons Podcast.
Each February for the past seven seasons, the snide Russillo joined forces with the antic Simmons for some of the best basketball content anywhere. Until now. With this week’s announcement that Russillo is leaving The Ringer to launch an independent venture under the Barstool umbrella, it is almost certain that the Russillo-Simmons Sunday NBA podcasts are no more.
The writing was on the wall this summer during the NBA postseason, but these shows will be missed. Whether in Simmons’ guest house pre-COVID or virtually the past few years, the chemistry between these two was unmatched. There’s not anyone in sports media who comes through Boston that Simmons doesn’t vet, but it’s a credit to the Podfather that he got ahead of Russillo’s ESPN exit and made him one of the biggest pre-Spotify hires at The Ringer. Since that time, Russillo has become an NBA awards voter, occasional newsbreaker, and respected analyst in a way he wasn’t always in Bristol. Russillo’s exhaustive tape grinding and disdain for the gimmicks of NBA commentary became running jokes on Sunday nights, but they are what made him shine alongside Simmons.
Particularly as Simmons got further from his days writing and covering the NBA for ESPN on a daily basis, his takes got broader and his perspective less forgiving. The Sunday podcasts ran from the end of the Golden State Warriors dynasty through to the Luka Doncic trade; a lifetime in the sport. You could feel a giddy energy between Simmons and Russillo when they stumbled upon a great concept. They coined the term “unhappy generation” in 2019, chiseling the broad idea of player empowerment into a broader thesis combining Millennial anxiety and a laissez-faire league office to effectively define the culture of the league.
When the league and its players quietly agreed to an infuriating new collective bargaining agreement in early 2023, Russillo and Simmons were ahead of the curve predicting a lose-lose model in which players took the knife the deepest but everyone — fans included — got shafted. Russillo often zoomed in too far and Simmons could get lost in the sky, but the balance worked. In a media landscape where there are surprisingly few passionate NBA chroniclers at the national level, they formed a fun, creative tandem that helped define a period of basketball commentary.
Week to week, the quality could fluctuate (and no, I’m not talking about “A Truly Sad Week In America Plus the 2005 Redraftables“). That is the nature of the format, and of any sport that is not football in 2025. Without the routines of the fall, fans are not locked into other sports in the same way. If there were any cracks in the Russillo-Simmons marriage, it was their perspectives during the downtime.
Russillo, as his own podcast showed, would be happy to crack through the tape to shine a light on key games and trends. That has never really been Simmons’ game. When they did a mock expansion draft last year, Russillo’s selection of Minnesota benchwarmer Josh Minott was a hilarious meme. It also showed how different these hosts’ NBA consumption truly was. On NFL Sundays, Simmons and “Cousin” Sal Iacono offer a much more circular Venn diagram of interests: betting, bits and their favorite teams. The Russillo pods, in contrast, sometimes got lost in the woods.
This may be why Simmons pounced on hiring Zach Lowe this spring. The Grantland reunion was celebrated by NBA fans who had missed Lowe since he was laid off by ESPN nearly a year prior, but it also spelled a shift for Russillo. Sunday night two-handers added a third seat, and it was Lowe traveling to the NBA Finals for late-night hotel-room reactions with the Ringer boss. The company’s staff clearly proves Simmons will make room in the budget for as many high-quality NBA voices as he can find, but Lowe very visibly moved to the top of the chain when he arrived. Even if by accident, he is an easy fill-in to the Sunday slot.
Besides The Ringer’s hiring spree following Simmons’ renewal as top boss earlier this year, the company also has leaned more heavily into video. On most of its sports shows, the network is broadcasting live on YouTube. When Lowe joined on, he did so only as a podcaster, likely waiting for the musical chairs in NBA media to stop when the new broadcast rights begin this fall. If Lowe finds more work on television or in print before the season, all the better for basketball fans. If not, that is likely all the better for The Ringer.
Because Russillo’s move is not official yet and NBA season is months away, Simmons hasn’t commented publicly on his partner’s departure. But it’s not hard to see the writing on the wall for Lowe to slide into Russillo’s spot on Sunday nights. As an NBA face that fans grew used to seeing on ESPN, who also brings more insider insight and strong takes than Russillo, Lowe is more likely to draw live viewers and go viral than the longtime radio host.
As we’ve covered at Awful Announcing, with both Russillo and Lowe opposite Simmons this spring, The Ringer’s NBA coverage blossomed into a true competitor to the studio programming at ESPN or TNT. Those networks broadcast from the hardwood, but it was Simmons and Co. who did a better job bringing NBA junkies into the grapevine and onto the court. The addition of Lowe, whose sourced takes run the gamut of player development to international expansion, took the network’s coverage to a new level.
For me in Phoenix, it was always shocking the degree to which the Russillo-Simmons pods programmed the NBA conversation every week on radio. This might be the key to understanding what it will mean for Russillo to head to Barstool and be replaced by Lowe across from Simmons each week. As podcasting grows to a point where it becomes replacement shoulder programming for big-time sports, podcasts will be sorted by audiences and corporate bosses into new categories. Where there used to be just “podcasts” of the ilk that Simmons and Russillo perfected, now the paths diverge. A radio star at heart, Russillo can turn his popular show into a looser, longer-form chat in the Barstool mold. Back in Los Angeles, Simmons may seek to turn his Lowe team-ups into something that more closely approximates television, with bold opinions and news nuggets.
Lowe may slide into the Sunday NBA slot as a more ideal partner for that new format with Simmons, but Russillo proved to be an ace foil for Simmons in his own right. Both forms of NBA podcasts thrive today (think Gilbert Arenas vs. Nate Duncan). For Simmons and The Ringer, who represent the cream of the crop of digital NBA content, however, the scale that Lowe could help reach likely would not be possible if not for Russillo’s tenure.