May 27, 2017 10:05 pm

Catch up on Playing with Science’s Basketball episodes before next week’s NBA Finals

The 2016-2017 NBA season comes to its exciting conclusion starting next week. LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers are defending their championship title in a rematch against Kevin Durant and the Golden State Warriors. It’s the first time in NBA history that two teams will meet in the finals for the third year in a row!

Whether you’re a die-hard, never-miss-a-game NBA fanatic, or you just tend to pay attention to the playoffs and the finals, we recommend you catch up on Playing with Science’s basketball episodes before the finals start.

This week, we’re focusing on Slam Dunk Science (Part 2), the second of a two-part “off-season special” show previously recorded at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas with our friends from TuneIn. Our hosts, Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly, welcomed former NBA All-Star Caron Butler and actor Michael Rapaport, the co-host of the Two-Man-Weave podcast on TuneIn, to join guest astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for a freewheeling discussion of all things basketball.

Given that LeBron James just passed Michael Jordan to become the all-time playoffs scoring leader, the conversation the guys have at the start of the episode about whether LeBron is in the same class as MJ, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and Kobe Bryant, is particularly timely.

So is the conversation they guys have towards the end of the episode, where they discuss the morality of changing teams in search of a championship ring – something LeBron James did earlier in his career, and which Kevin Durant did before the start of this season.

You can listen to this episode right now on TuneIn.

And if you’re enjoying Playing with Science, you can help us get prepared for next season by subscribing to Playing with Science wherever you listen to podcasts. You can listen on TuneIn, of course. But you can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and GooglePlay Music.

By the way, before the finals start, you might also want to listen to another of our Playing with Science episodes, Basketball: Inside the Three Point Shot, where Chuck, Gary and their guests take a deep dive into the physics of the signature shot of another of the participants in the finals this year: Golden State’s Steph Curry, arguably the greatest shooter in NBA history.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Jeffrey Simons