Paulo Alves

Rich Shepard can bring it to some extent, but he's a rookie, he's inconsistent.

Not a rookie, he's a second-year player.

He's inconsistent, still a young player.

And so it just seems like losing 40 mil worth of your cap space for this year, worth of players, at very key, irreplaceable positions,

kind of puts a little bit of a ceiling on what your team can be, especially so when it's not like this is, you know, the NFL of this year, where you don't have Mahomes or you don't have any super teams and everybody's kind of on an equal footing heading into the postseason.

The Thunder are still there.

The Thunder are, you know, they're not fully healthy because Jalen Williams is out, but they're going to be fully healthy once the postseason comes along.

The Spurs will see how this deadline shapes them up, but they seem to be, you know, on an upwards trajectory.

But I do think the Spurs and the Nuggets are kind of on the same level as the Rockets, even without Fred and Steven Adams.

I think we can put up a fight.

But really, how...

Really, how competitive do we expect to be over a seven-game playoff series when we're playing the Thunder without those two guys?

And that frames what we've seen thus far, and it frames kind of my thoughts going to the deadline, which is...

Well, I guess I'm okay if you want to, you know, spend a couple of second-round picks and trade a guy like Clint Capella or Donny and Vinnie Smith for a guard, like plenty of people on Twitter want to do.

So, like, you know, if the investment is two second-round picks and the potential and the loss of an asset, or the loss of what could be an asset, Donny and Vinnie Smith, and someone who I don't think is an asset, just neutral like a contract in Capella,

I'm willing to give that up to give this team a better shot.

But I don't think that's going to push us over the line and turn us into tier one contenders or a team that you could realistically think is going to beat the Thunder in the seven game series now while that things have happened.

But you don't bank real assets on a while that things have happened shot at winning a championship.

So, yeah, looking at the past few games, you know, it just seems like this team, like, they're winning now.

That's cool.