Ben DuBose

Paulo's in Portugal where they're having a storm at the moment, so his audio sounds good to me, but you never know until you play it back in some cases.

And as for me, I'm in Las Vegas this week.

If you watched my show with Dave Hardesty and Adam Clinton after the Spurs game the other night,

people were busting me in the chat for my AOL 56K modem giving out.

I think the internet connection is a little bit better today, and this is audio only.

But again, you could never be sure until you actually play it back.

So rather than keep going on, I'm going to end it here in hopes that we can salvage what we've done over the past 50, 55 minutes or so.

And also, I think, you know, there's certainly some potential trade deadline implications.

That's

two weeks from today that you can certainly get into with the recent developments but I think that's a better discussion for next week because we're at a point now with the Rockets where I think we just need to get more data like I heard Kelly Eco on Brian Barefield's postgame show the other night that's big stars making the case for without Steven Adams while you might want to

hold Clint Capella and not use him as matching salary.

And the same could be said for Dorian Finney-Smith because he needs to play more since you're potentially sliding Jabari Smith to the five a little bit more.

Like those are valid perspectives, but there's also a lot to be gained from seeing how the Rockets perform over the next week.

I mentioned three of the four games are against the Pistons and Sixers on a back-to-back the next two nights.

and then the Spurs rematch next Wednesday.

And in between there, the Memphis Grizzlies, who are not a terrible team at the moment.

They're competitive, and John Morant is playing to boost his trade value, it feels like.

There's a lot to be learned about the Rockets, and if things go off the rails a little bit...

maybe that moves the needle more for Rafael Stone into thinking, this is a year in which we need to be aggressive to salvage a 37-year-old Kevin Durant that's still in peak form and you don't know how many more opportunities you're going to have with KD playing like this.

Conversely, if they have another good week, then maybe that lends credence to Kelly's theory that, hey, you've started to figure it out.