Sports journalism has changed a lot, and Blake Griffin takes a step back to look at what we've lost along the way. As local newspapers disappeared, so did the beat writers who traveled with teams and worked the locker room. Blake breaks down what filled the gap, from insiders like Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania, whose scoops can double as leverage for players, teams and agents, to the embrace debate era that turned First Take into two hours of Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith arguing about anything. Blake shares what it's like to get Woj bombed on a trampoline with his kids, revisits Stephen A. Smith’s feud with Tyrese Haliburton during the 2025 playoffs, and shows Mark Cuban out-arguing Skip on LeBron. He also explains why real sports journalism still matters, pointing to the reporting that forced Donald Sterling to sell the Clippers.
Blake Griffin spent years building a respectable mid-range jumper, right around the time analytics decided it was the worst shot in basketball. In this episode of The Stepback, he takes a step back to look at how analytics went from finding overlooked talent in the Moneyball era to an optimization culture where everyone copies the same math. Blake traces it from Billy Beane's Oakland A's and Bill James to Daryl Morey's three-point Houston Rockets and fourth-down math in the NFL. He revisits the Rockets missing 27 straight threes in Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference Finals, John Smoltz on pitching careers getting shorter, Steve Kerr wondering what would happen without the three-point line, and Dave Roberts trusting his gut in Game 7 of the 2025 World Series. Blake isn't against analytics, but he makes the case that the best moments in sports are the ones that shouldn't happen.