Welcome to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet.Name-dropped today: Mike Breen, Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, Ben Stiller, Serena Williams, Tom Dundon, Shrey Parikh, Bunny Shaw, Tim Payne, Gabriel, Soccer Moms and more.I’m your host, Dan Shanoff, The Athletic’s managing editor for sports business. We’ve published more than 140 sports business stories , all just since last Wednesday morning. Let’s go:Driving the ConversationGo NBA, go NBA, go!It feels like eons ago (if only more like 10 weeks) there was widespread griping about the state of the NBA: Crisis! Tanking! Boring! Streaming! Flopping!Now tonight, the league starts its most highly anticipated NBA Finals series since the launch of LeBron James versus Steph Curry more than a decade ago — Knicks versus Wemby, its loudest market versus its most intriguing talent, arguably the ideal pairing.The Western Conference finals topped ratings records, comparable to last year’s NBA Finals. As discussed here two weeks ago, that’s the impact of Wembynomics.Now layer in a New York fanbase whose narcissism is only matched by the novelty of its first finals since ‘99. (I lived in NYC that year; the cultural takeover is unmatched.)• You’ve got Zohran Mamdani issuing mayoral proclamations that kids can stay up past their bedtimes to watch games.• You’ve got President Donald Trump floating that he wants to get to a game at Madison Square Garden.• You’ve got Ben Stiller, part of the best celebrity row in sports, out there tweeting Andrew Marchand columns about ESPN’s Mike Breen.• You’ve got endless numbers of Knicks-centric creators vying for clout, virality or fame-adjacency.• You’ve got viral NYC subway art. (Orange and blue is the new …)• You’ve got some of the worst-located Game 3 seats available in MSG going for a minimum of $4,663 EACH, per a search on StubHub I did this morning.If curiosity around Victor Wembanyama was enough to get more than 10 million fans tuning in for games in San Antonio and Oklahoma City, what will it look like when The Alien invades Manhattan? When the nation tunes in for, at best, the intrigue of watching this seemingly unprecedented player, to, at worst, hate-watching the Knicks en route to either insufferable triumph or schadenfreude-laden failure?A few finals TV audience benchmarks to watch for:• 1999 (Knicks-Spurs I) — 16.1M average• 2016/17 (peak Warriors-Cavs) — 20.3M (21st century high)• 2025 (Thunder-Pacers) — 10.2M (16.4M for Game 7)The 2026 prediction: Less than peak LeBron/Curry, more than Celtics-Lakers in ‘08 (14.9M). In fact, let’s go with a tick above that original Knicks-Spurs battle in 1999, which truly feels like it happened far, far longer than a quarter-century ago.That said: How quickly things change. Just this spring, from hand-wringing about the state of the league to, today, a finals that has everyone excited to tune in.Get Caught UpBig talkers from the sports business industry:World Cup countdown: ONE WEEK.