Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet. (Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here.)Name-dropped today: M-I-N-A K-I-M-E-S, Zohran Mamdani, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Greg Sankey, Hull City, Naomi Osaka, Christian Pulisic, Victor Wembanyama, Dr. Robby and more. Let’s go:Driving the ConversationMina Kimes spells out successFor my money, the smartest on-air talent in sports media is ESPN’s Mina Kimes. Yale alum, Emmy-winning NFL analyst, polymath podcaster, reigning “Celebrity Jeopardy” champion and — this week — first-time host of the Scripps National Spelling Bee (ION, 8 p.m. ET tonight for the tape-delayed semis and 8 p.m. ET tomorrow for the live final).In another timeline, she’s managing partner at McKinsey or a billionaire hedge fund manager or C-suite at Disney, rather than a few reporting levels down from there.Ahead of her Bee debut, Kimes talked with my colleague Jayna Bardahl in a fascinating, wide-ranging interview that covered everything from Bee prep to the NFL player who would make the best Bee participant (spoiler: M-Y-L-E-S G-A-R-R-E-T-T).Here is one of my favorite parts:Bardahl: You’ve said you want to bring a big-game feel to this year’s bee. How do you hope to do that?Kimes: When I watch it, and especially as I’ve been watching these past bees, to me, it is like the Super Bowl of academic events. I make the comparison for a few reasons. One is the level of competition. These kids are stars. They’re so prepared, and they are so composed, and they really are elite competitors in a way that, for me, feels reminiscent of the NFL athletes that I cover in my day-to-day job. So I want to highlight that.Kimes and Bardahl also engaged in an amazing video of a spelling quiz involving NFL player names. Highly recommend giving it a watch here.Their convo begs the question: Is the spelling bee sports?To Kimes’ points: It’s a cut-throat competition. It requires prep that makes traditional sports training look modest. It’s on TV, live, with a host, analysts and a championship trophy.(FWIW: I rank 2002’s “Spellbound” among my top five favorite sports documentaries of all time, so you know where I stand on the question.)Curious for your take, so let’s just get right to this week’s MoneyPoll:Get Caught UpBig talkers from the sports business industry:The Knicks as a case study in … organizational competence? I lived in NYC in 1999, the last time the Knicks made the NBA Finals. The city gets a surge of energy around the team’s success like no other sports result. There is real cognitive dissonance between the managerial doldrums of the past three decades and this. How did it happen?Related data point: $3,326. That’s the lowest get-in price I can find on StubHub this morning for Game 3 of the NBA Finals, the first Knicks home game of the series. And that’s for Section 416, way up near the rafters and behind the basket.(The last time we discussed a $3,000 ticket price just to be somewhere in the building for a game, it was Indiana football fans for the College Football Playoff national championship game — fwiw, of the hundreds of emails I got that week in response to whether that kind of cost was worth it, only a handful said “Yes.”)