Andrew Schlecht

If OKC and Denver don't get fully healthy, who makes it out of the West?

I understand that if we had a healthy, dominant team like the Warriors or the Shaq and Kobe Lakers or a team like that, there should be no interest in the rest of this NBA season.

But the Thunder having all the injuries that they have, the Nuggets not only not being healthy, but their defense has just fallen off a cliff.

I think they're 24th in defense.

The Knicks are all over the place.

The Cavs have James Harden on their team now.

I don't know.

All that might sound a little bit bad, but I will say this stretch run is kind of setting up to be really fun where I think we're going to learn a lot about these teams down the stretch as teams get healthy, as we see teams like the Cavaliers learn their new team.

We get to learn about the Celtics down the stretch.

Do we get Jason Tatum back or not?

I just think there are so many good storylines to discuss down the stretch rather than focusing on tanking and all of that

Because one, this is generational draft.

Teams should tank.

But on the other side of all of that, there's just a lot of really good stuff to dig into.

And I'm just excited to watch the rest of this season and the good teams that are actually trying to win because I genuinely don't know what's going to happen the rest of the way.

I feel like a lot of times you can look at an NBA season and

at the end of February and say, you know what?

I think we have a pretty good idea of who's going to make it out of both conferences.

I really don't know who's making it out of either conference.

And if you are confidently talking about that, I'd like to talk to you because I really don't understand who is going to come out of either conference, which I think is a very good thing for the NBA.