The Oklahoma native is a six-time NBA all-star with matinee looks, a cushy studio gig for Amazon‘s NBA on Prime and, at 37, likely many years to enjoy all of it.
So what would make a person like that go out and try to become…the sports world’s John Oliver?
Next week Griffin will attempt just such a feat when the first episode of his new late-night show The Stepback with Blake Griffin debuts on Amazon and YouTube. Produced with Wondery, the program eschews the increasingly calcified conventions of an ex-jock on a video podcast. There is no game analysis, no sidekicks, no boyish hijinks. There is kidding around, but only when it serves a political point, or a changeup from one.
Instead Griffin sits at his desk and, aided by a backstage team of researchers and writers, explains and opines for a full 24 minutes on a controversial sociological sports topic — gambling in one, the effect of NIL money on college athletics in a second, the NFL and head injuries in another, soaring ticket prices in yet a fourth. (“He’s asking questions insiders won’t,” a new trailer says.) The writers room is filled with top-tier veterans who’ve worked with many of the biggies, including Greg Iwinski from Oliver, Alison Agosti from Seth Meyers and Jason Ross from The Daily Show.
In an episode viewed by The Hollywood Reporter, Griffin pulls no punches as he goes after greedy owners across all of sports who hold a city hostage until they get a taxpayer-funded stadium, then move the team if their demands aren’t met. The owners of Oakland’s now-ex teams — the A’s, Raiders and Warriors — come under particular fire.
People who know Griffin as an affable if quip-happy presence (the ex-Clipper also has done standup shows at venues around the Los Angeles area, where he primarily lives) will be surprised to see him go so hard after sports’ sacred cows. And people who know sports podcasts will be pleasantly surprised; for all the gaseous words that fill that particular balloon, very few shows try to be hard-hitting about the issues challenging modern athletics, and the ones that do tend to be helmed by journalists like Pablo Torre, not former NBA rebound kings.
With fourteen episodes already shot and scheduled to drop weekly over the coming months of the NBA season — and new episodes of a second season hoped for later in 2027 — THR sat down with Griffin to ask about his transformation and his aim to change the sports-talk universe ahead of his Tuesday debut.
“Sports’ John Oliver” is a pretty ambitious goal. What made you attempt it?
I actually had this idea in 2016 and it’s just sort of been sitting around and I’d been updating the doc and updating the doc. It literally came from watching Last Week Tonight. John Oliver could talk about heavier topics but also keep my attention because it was like ‘here’s a big issue, here’s a joke,’ and that just helps my brain contextualize what’s going on. And over the years I would tell friends about my idea to do that for sports and so many people would say, ‘There’s not really anything like that.'”
It is remarkable how, for all the content out there, so much of it is just about the games and the personalities, not the business or systems.
Exactly. So much of the sports content is not explaining the underneath side of sports. They’re just reacting to the score or the performances and saying this happened or this happened. And what we’re trying to do is — no pun intended — take a step back. To collect the information and understand the big things happening and how we got here and how we can move forward if it doesn’t seem like the best path. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a tweet or a post and it had to do even with basketball or a team I was on and I find myself saying, ‘That’s not right.’ So the more informed we are as fans, the better off we’ll be.
Why do you think this isn’t tried more by others? Do they know something you don’t?
I think sports back in the day had a lot of real journalists that did this kind of reporting. And of course there’s still some of that. But there’s less and less, and we’ve gone more towards whoever says something loudest or first. And I think that’s a mistake. People do crave actual, factual information and want to be well informed. That is why Pablo is so popular. You want to learn and you want to place yourself in the hands of someone you can trust.
You are being distributed by Amazon, which has NFL games, has NBA games, has WNBA games. Are you worried about getting censored? That seems like one reason the networks won’t be critical of the system — they’re part of the money waterfall too.
That was one reason I wasn’t interested in pitching this around and having someone get back to me with notes like ‘we can’t talk about baseball because we have baseball games,’ or whatever it is. I didn’t want to jump through hoops. Fortunately, Wondery [owned by Amazon] gave me the platform to do exactly the show I want to do. We have a whole episode about TV rights. We can say what we want to say.
I know you want to do dozens of episodes. Are there enough serious topics to fill that void? Part of why it seems like sports media ends up so blatherous is that there are so many hours to fill.
Oh, no, we have so many topics. It doesn’t always have to be new either; it could follow up and get more granular. Once we opened up the writers room and the research room, I was blown away by how much more there is to learn about these topics. You can just keep digging and keep digging. Like we did an NIL episode but we didn’t have time to touch at all on the transfer portal, which I’d like to do.
Just as an aside on that, I have to say, while the labor side of me likes what’s happening there, the fan side hates it. We’ve killed so much competition. Cinderella is dead.
I am a fan of athletes getting paid but there needs to be paramaters. It has felt lawless for a while — like whatever school can round up the most money wins. Which means some schools or sports will rise and all the others will go down.
And it’s not like we don’t have parameters in pro sports. There are salary caps and max contracts; there is income distribution like the NFL has.
I think we’ll start to see more of that [in the NCAA]. The Senate just passed a bill with caps and other protections that feels like a start.
Speaking of salary caps, your old shop and its owner just faced some extremely serious penalties for allegedly going around one [for Kawhi Leonard]. Did that feel fair to you?
It feels like a pretty serious situation. I feel most bad for Clipper fans. Those fans hold a special place in my heart and for them to go after all these years to really having a team and a potential championship contender, to what’s happening now — that’s really hard.
The advent of massive amounts of money in sports would strike a lot of our readers as the through-line for many of our problems, whether it’s relocation or gambling or so many of our issues.
We have a gambling episode that touches on this. And a youth-sports episode — just the size of that now, it’s so massive. We have a ticket episode. Everything comes down to how we can squeeze the most money out of something. And it’s doing sports a disservice.
I am legit shocked at how usurious some of these prices are, both fees on primary sites and the ways bad actors or bots drive up prices on secondary sites.
And some of the primary sites are owned by the same companies that own the secondary sites, which means they make money twice, and also can really set prices. We go through all of that. I don’t think I realized how messed up it actually is until we got into it. That’s why I admire the Premier League and soccer in Europe, where fans will stage a walkout — they will riot — if the prices are too high. It shows how all of this means nothing if we don’t come to the games.
Is that your ultimate mission, one of fan empowerment?
Fans have so much more power than I think they realize. Like, everyone says “it’s all about the fans.” But that’s a factual statement. You can still play the games without them but the players or the owners wouldn’t be making anywhere near this money without fans. So I think there’s a way not only to slow down what’s happening [with ticket prices] but change the direction that sports is going.
Do you wonder if there are a lot of viewers who don’t want to understand the business because it ruins the magic — they just want to sit down and watch a game on a Saturday or Sunday with a beer; they don’t want the mask pulled off? What you’re doing is very admirable but are there some people who just don’t want this kind of rigor in sports?
I’m sure there are some people like that but honestly I think they’re a minority. If you’re going to invest so much time and money into a team and get your heart broken every week, or go on Sports Twitter or wherever it is, you want this level of understanding. You’re almost like an investor. You’re going to care to learn more because you have so much tied up in it.
Speaking of Sports Twitter, do you have an episode on that?
We don’t. I think that would take a whole season.