Paulo Alves

because how are you going to sell a guy on, hey, you sacrificed four years, now you've got two, he's didn't get out of the first round, and we've got to take a step back and not necessarily be as bad as we were, but don't necessarily be full throttle trying to be good, or at least admitting that we don't believe that the current path with linear development would take a step.

I think that's a very rough conversation to have, and I'm not sure they could get him to buy into that.

To be fair, if you sold him on Shang-Goon for Kingston Fleming and because he's a U of H guy and whatever picks come on top, that he might buy into.

I'm joking, kind of joking, kind of being serious, who knows.

It's definitely an easier matchup because although Jokic is great, he's not necessarily as much of a game-breaker as I think Wemby is right now.

And Jokic is probably going to be the MVP.

But it's not... As I said, it's not like the Rockets' defense right now is...

are really going to affect what either team is going to do.

In the sense of the resistance that they're going to put up, the fact that Jokic is better offensively than Wemby, the resistance that Jokic is going to put up is not going to make that much of a difference because we're basically going to allow them to run whatever game plan they want because we can't stop them.

So it's not like there's going to be much of a difference there.

But I do think offensively, we can punish Stanford a lot more easily than we can punish the Spurs because, well, Wemmy's not there.

And so what I do, I do expect this to be a close matchup or quarter, and then it's going to be about execution.

And it's going to be about who knocks down shots and who doesn't.

And as I did, and as I said in my very long time about it, I don't think the Nuggets have the ability to raise their level or decrease their level that much.

And I think the Nuggets, because of being a better, well, I just think the Squirtle is clearly a better regular season team.

We'll see how that goes in the playoffs.

But it's just a more even matchup with Denver.

And so it's going to be like many other matchups that have been throughout the entire season.

It's probably going to be into the fourth quarter.

And then we'll just see how it goes and see if we can make shots or not and see if Denver misses shots or not.