Ben DuBose

And if you are, then something went wrong and the record would speak for itself in that situation.

Hold your own against whatever big boy team you do eventually draw.

and make sure none of your young players are so exposed that you have significant doubt about their playoff viability moving forward.

I guess those are my three keys for the remainder of the regular season and the playoffs.

Psychologically, I would like to see them go, you know, at least 19 and 10 over the final 20 games, 29 games that is, so that they have at least the same amount of wins that they had a year ago.

That could also give them a decent chance, given Denver's schedule of moving up to three and perhaps avoiding the Thunder in the second round.

But that's my general outlook as far as what would make a successful season.

It's no longer championship or bust.

We talked about that in some of our recent pods, especially with the Steven Adams injury added to the Fred Dent Fleet injury.

Paolo, what do you think as far as what makes this season a success or failure over the remaining 29 games and any postseason play from there?

And to be clear, like...

There's more gray area than how I presented it.

I was trying to sum it up in broad strokes.

I mean, if there's one thing we know about the Rafael Stone era of the rockets, they're not going to force a deal.

So if they, you know, narrowly miss out on one of these checkpoints,

I mean, yeah, it's possible that we look in the offseason, especially relative to the opportunities that are or aren't available, you know, talk ourselves back into, you know, with the addition of Fred and Steven and, you know, a DFS plus Capella for a solid role player type trade to feeling that, you know, next year could be different.

It's not...

wide as cut and dried as I made it, just talking in, you know, broad strokes to sort of set the table for the offseason.

Because I do think that, you know, the way last season ended did make the ultimate trade involving Jalen Green and Kevin Durant a bit more likely.

You know, it didn't lock it in by any means, but it did move the needle in that direction.