Justin Verrier

We're going to talk about some bad teams now, even though they don't deserve it.

No.

No?

I would say the West deserve it more than the East because these teams, a lot of the poor results that have matriculated over the back end of the season have just been basic ineptitude, I guess, especially for a team like the Pelicans.

But I would say there's some respectable tanking going on here for most of them.

Maybe not the Kings.

Maybe not the Jazz, but you can make the case at the very least, like these teams didn't intend to be bad.

They just ended up being bad.

I guess that's a comfort.

Yes.

But let's talk about the Dallas Mavericks, a team that didn't expect to be bad going into the season.

I think they had high hopes that they would go quite far in the postseason based on some of the trades they made last season.

What's interesting about Dallas is I feel like every two or three weeks I look up and Mark Cuban's on another podcast, which who could blame him?

There's a lot of them out there.

But he has really gone on a media blitz, unlike anything I have seen in recent NBA history, to completely divorce himself from the fact that he knowingly got off of the team ownership.

He dealt that to somebody else.

And then they did whatever they wanted with the team and broke up his beautiful construction and traded Luke out.

And I get it because clearly he's affected by that and he didn't see this coming.

On the other hand, like once you sell a team to someone, you're kind of left to whatever they want.

That's kind of how this works.