Alex Speers

And his basic point was like, if you go back and look at the high school tape, there's aspects of it that look like two completely different players.

In his opinion, Darren Peterson's clearly injured.

this season.

And for all the questions about, you know, his competitiveness and his toughness, he kind of reframed it for me as like, I think he wants to play and he's trying to play, but he really does have some type of injury because you can look at the tape in high school and it looks like a completely different player in terms of explosiveness.

And so I,

Maybe it's more of a question of like, okay, well then how serious are these injuries?

And that's really what the question should be about rather than any like personality concerns.

Cause by all accounts, it seems like he's a super hard worker and super competitive and he just looks different from how he looked in high school while still being pretty awesome when he does play at Kansas.

All right, well, Christian, thank you for answering all of our Mavs-related questions.

It's now time to play Andrew vs. the Beat, our weekly trivia show where Andrew goes head-to-head against an NBA beat writer this week, Christian Clark of The Athletic.

Now, Christian, what I've done is I've come up with eight questions about the Mavs.

You're going to give me a number between one and eight.

It will correspond to a question.

If you get it right, you'll get at least two points.

And if you get it wrong, Andrew will have a chance to steal for one.

And we'll go back and forth.

So all the questions have been asked and answered.

So to start us off, I just need a number between one and eight.

I'll go three.

Question number three.