Rob Mahoney

Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.

Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.

And then you let the AI keep massaging the melody, and this happens.

Mark, what did we just hear?

Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.

Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.

Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.

Hey, buddy!

We'll see you next time.

Are we sure anymore that that's where they're going to end up? I think it's striking looking at the rest of the bubble teams, all teams that are making moves right now. The Spurs, the Warriors.

I think they might be, just because they're a little further behind. Because they're too far behind? I mean, too far behind with two games back sounds insane, but it's more that there are too many teams in front of them.

I think it might be the Suns. I think it is. I think it might be the Suns.

Who do they have second?

Sacramento to me is the clear second. I feel like that's a little bit of Zach Levine disrespect. Is it? I think the Malik Monk, Zach Levine, Sabonis thing is going to be pretty decent. They brought in Jonas Valanciunas, which is not nothing.

I would say about the same. I want to put this out there, not because I want it to happen, but because I fear it could happen. If the Dallas Mavericks do not make the playoffs, as a son of Dallas, I would like to be able to go home again. And I fear that the city would be razed to the fucking ground.

Keeping Kuminga out of this thing, I'm still shocked. Keeping Kuminga was amazing.

Unless Kaminga is traded the next hour. Which he might be. But even preserving him to potentially include him in another deal is important. And I think the Jimmy Wiggins comp, like Andrew Wiggins has had a perfectly fine season. I don't mean to diminish it, but Jimmy is a totally different level of creator. And most importantly, he is a go-to scorer, as we've discussed, but also...

a point trigger man for a lot of the Steph Curry off-ball stuff in a way that Wiggins is just not comfortable doing. And so now you have another person who can do that in addition to Draymond, in addition to Pajemski, if you have him in that role. You have someone who can actually make some plays for the way Golden State wants to play.

He does not. But it's also not a coincidence that like every star leaves Miami kind of feeling like this. You know, like by the end, it's always ugly. There's no peaceful transitions of power.

I think it's if you're over any apron at all, first or second, you can't sign a buyout guy for the mid-level.

Basically, if your contract is just over the non-taxpayer full mid-level, which his is like by a hair, like just barely, then you can't sign with any apron team as a buyout guy.

It feels like they basically just said we don't want Dennis Schroeder. We'd rather have cap space? But it's telling when a team like the Heat who, say what you will about their personality management, they're pretty good talent evaluators. And they have just decided thanks but no thanks on Dennis Schroeder.

I'm always worried about Miami. I'm always worried about them. Never not worried about the Heat. So right now, the Heat are three games out of the fourth seed in the East. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is their new rotation. They got Tyler Hero and Terry Rozier more or less running point. Scary Terry. Duncan Robinson. They brought in Davion Mitchell from the Raptors.

I've wanted to see him on a decent team.

Andrew Wiggins, of course. Haywood Highsmith. Jaime Jaquez. Bam's been playing the four with Kalel Ware. Nikola Jovic.

Been quite good.

And Kyle Anderson. Tell me that is not the most Miami Heat-ass team you've ever heard. It's Kyle Anderson's one of the most Miami Heat guys ever.

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Do you have anybody else? I think the Bucs are still interesting enough. And I think the Magic, if they ever get their shit together, are still interesting enough. They've got a lot to figure out offensively, though.

Can we talk about that?

What does the apology sound like these days?

Fair.

I mean, it's hard to be that inefficient, that passive aggressive, and that much just straight chilling all the time. Like it's really a rare skill.

I'm a DeAndre Hunter skeptic. I like players who will, on occasion, pass. DeAndre Hunter doesn't really do that. And now, he's granted, while not passing, had the best season of his career by far. Has scored and shot in a way that he never has before. That's all well and good. But when I'm imagining the Cleveland freewheeling offense...

I don't know.

So I'll put this like this wouldn't be a problem if what the Bucs weren't giving up is a player who is very important to their team and Chris Middleton who just can't do it at that level that they need him to do anymore.

But what they needed was somebody who could do some Chris Middleton adjacent things. And Kyle Kuzma is closer to Torian Prince than he is to healthy Chris Middleton. That's a big problem for a trade like this.

No, and not in trading Chris in his current form, but that's the quandary that the Bucks found themselves in.

He's been an occasional entity.

Rob, you get the tiebreaker vote. It's not going to go well. Yeah. He's Kyle Kuzma. Wow. Here's the thing. When you approach a trade of this magnitude, and this is a huge trade for the Bucs. They've been waiting to either trade Chris Middleton or Brooke Lopez for the right move that came along. This is not the right move.

He's also their, I want to say, the elder statesman of their rotation right now.

I don't think he's an Orlando Magic player personally, but... Does Orlando know they're allowed to make trades?

I want somebody who's going to move the ball, who knows how to play and flow. And that's not really what DeAndre Hunter does to the point.

They probably should be a little bit more desperate in terms of getting some offense together.

Super important to their team.

This year it has been, right? Like he's actually been like a good soldier within that context. And I take your point, but I think he's actually done a pretty good job of that exact thing this year.

And like, those are literal facts, though.

Sure, sure.

Yeah, my hands are tied. My hands are tied. What can a guy do?

That's the thing. Ultimately, what you're describing is in some way the way the league has been for a long time. It was just they were mostly trying to dodge the tax. Now, even if you are above the tax, there are more lines to dodge and harsher penalties.

You say this like you're not talking up Julian Strother in the group chat.

I mean, love the pickup for them. It is a buy low thing. And we need to acknowledge that Bogey is having the worst season of maybe his entire professional life, including pre-NBA, just has not had it.

Almost everybody who went to the Olympics has been a little step slow this season. It's been a thing for sure. So I would love to see him recapture some parts of his game surrounding him with high, like high leverage defensive personnel with the Clippers.

That's a team that is so desperate for shot making, depending on what's going on with Harden, how he's being pressured that night, where Kawhi is in terms of his health on a day to day basis. They need what Bogdanovich can provide. And so if this is the cost, absolutely. Why not? Can I read you his stats? I'm a little worried to even hear them.

I feel okay being a bogey apologist.

Never really happened. Never really got off the ground.

Bones? What about him? He is a player in the NBA, that's for sure. He's a player that made a lot more sense 30 years ago.

He was the truth.

He thought he was better than Jamal Murray. Yeah.

They're really gutting this thing. I guess, you know, it makes sense in the way that the future of their team is more Jalen Johnson, Zachary Richerche oriented, right? Like Richerche. I think there's something there that works. Do you have to do all of this housekeeping right now? I don't exactly know why it would need to happen right now.

The spite piece. Yeah, you got to stick it to them.

Like you just never know.

I genuinely don't. They're a team that wants to play a very loose, freewheeling, democratic style.

That is not how Brandon Ingram plays basketball. If you did want a big forward to put next to Scottie Barnes, why did you trade the better one in Pascal Siakam? And the Siakam comparison is inevitable because they're giving up that Indiana pick. They're giving up Bruce Brown. They're giving up Kelly Olenek, who I want to say was involved tangentially in that deal in a follow-up with Utah.

Caught half of it.

And so now you traded Pascal Siakam for... an expiring Brandon Ingram. Oshaya Baji was in that deal. The pick that became Jacoby Walter. That's your Pascal Siakam haul. Why didn't you just keep Pascal Siakam if that's where you were going to end up?

Yeah. I think it'll probably be a shorter term deal.

But are you telling like, I'm just seeing a future where they pay him upwards of $40 million a season. And to do what? He is a dynamic duo. I'm Scotty Barnes. He doesn't fit with Barnes. He's hurt all the time.

He will occasionally talk himself into taking spot up threes.

Agbaje seems like he has a good head on his shoulders. He seems well-adjusted. He's having a good year.

They have a lot to take personally, you know?

Shout out to our colleague Danny Chow who flagged, this is now four consecutive trade deadlines where the Raptors have traded a first for a guy who's about to be a free agent.

I can't imagine. Doubtful.

And he's got an extension. Two years, $20 million, which is a nice little turnaround for him.

I think that's where you get into really tough places when you don't actually have the ideal version of the player anymore. And the Pelicans have not had the ideal version of Brandon Ingram for quite some time, mostly because of injury. But they held on to him too long in the same way that the Raptors held on to Siakam too long.

You can see this chain of events of some of these teams that are feeling pinched where they don't move their guys when they need to move.

What was it? I can't imagine a single reason why he might not want to run back that experience again. Probably a Draymond thing. I could imagine that being a potential holdup.

No. I think him coming back to the Bay, if there ever was a full circle moment for that, it would require Kevin Durant to have a dramatic reimagining of who he is as a player and a person and the way he fits into the basketball universe. And I give Kevin Durant credit for this in a way. He has a very firm and fixed understanding of who he is.

great guys get picked I also like Cleveland going for it a little bit you know pushing in in a way that there are certain non-negotiables on their roster like Darius Garland Jared Allen those guys are only going to play one position but otherwise you want a little lineup flexibility you want the ability to play you know Struis here or Dean Wade there or now DeAndre Hunter at the 3-4 like there's there's some options for Cleveland that I think are pretty appealing not just for a Celtics matchup but really just getting through the Eastern Conference alive

And it is not the guy who needs to go crawling back to the Warriors to win again. And that leads you to some places like Phoenix with this particular roster sometimes. But it didn't really fit with the KD that we know that he would want to do something like that.

It felt like this could have been the first time in Kevin Durant's life where he didn't really get to pick. And maybe he just would have gotten moved somewhere. But then when he was so vocal and made it so clear he didn't want to play for Golden State, I think it changed the math a little bit.

Ultimately, I think the only way it would have worked for KD as a warrior again is if it was also a more elaborate LeBron going to Golden State thing. They would probably have to have... Just the old guys.

Well, I think you're probably bailed out on that just because the timelines were so different. Let's talk about these old guys some more.

Conspiracy Bill is here.

In which direction? Like him towards Golden State?

Why not? They also ended up with, who did they get in the Butler deal? I want to say it was Lindy Waters and Josh Richardson, I want to say. Yeah, Josh Richardson. Maybe not players that have been important for them. Lindy Waters, I could see actually giving them some minutes and some stretch at times. I could see him giving them some decent minutes.

Do you think we should have third round picks? Should we have third round picks? Who are we drafting in the third round?

Do you think the Waz of 10 years ago would have made this take? Of course not. This is personal development.

Their part of it is the most confusing.

Another team that just like held on to Zach Levine for too long, waiting for the perfect deal to materialize. And it never did.

Better than this?

They've made the playoffs one time in 20 years. 20 years. I get it. I get it. That's the thing. It's like, in theory, sure, from an asset standpoint, maybe there's an argument for a teardown. Sabonis has been probably a little too good, at least as a regular season player for that.

This has been a big deadline for potentially dumb teams. I know we're not dipping too much into the Lakers part of this yet, but the Luka trade has made me feel young again. It is hearkening back to a time of our youth. where there just haven't been that many old-fashioned, absolute dog shit, like David Kahn-style trades.

But the big man market has also dried up pretty fast on them.

He's currently injured, I want to say. I think it's a Swiss thing.

And Michael Malone was like quite definitive. Yeah, yeah. They're not going to trade Michael Porter.

They are actually close. Like they feel like one even kind of minor role player addition could tick them up a couple percentage points in the title race.

Michael Jordan?

But what a beautiful 23 games they were.

When Jalen Johnson got hurt, they really have not been able to function without him.

He might be day-to-day. He might be a minor.

That would be the kick of the potential Kevin Durant trade would be that the Grizzlies spent all this time cultivating this very elaborate interwoven offense. And it's like, let's just get a ball to Kevin Durant.

Probably so.

I mean, he is by far their most reliable creator this year. He's the only reason their defense has ever remotely worked, which it mostly does not. But he's the only thing kind of papering over most of their mistakes and the lack of ball pressure on the perimeter. There's a reason why when he's out, they look like a totally different team. They don't know how to work without him in Phoenix.

I mean, this is a player over 25 for the Washington Wizards, which does not fit their timeline. Two adults. I guess that's true. They do have Chris Middleton now. What a weird roster. What a weird way for Marcus Smart's Grizzlies tenure to end. I can't believe that we got here.

Well, now that they have Marcus Smart, the Wizards have waived Reggie Jackson. Oh, Reggie. Shout out to Reggie Jackson's brief Wizards career.

Yeah, the one for 2025.

I'm trying to figure out what Memphis is doing because the reporting from Shams around the Marcus Smart trade is that it's creating roster flexibility and Memphis just So there's some trade coming. Dumped Jake LaRavia who can actually play. Rotation guy. To the Sacramento Kings. Nice little pickup for them.

They got LaRavia.

So what are the Grizzlies going to do here?

It won't be very exciting. Although, when the KD era in Phoenix appeared that it might be coming to a close, I was trying to reflect and say, okay, what have we done here? About two years as a Sun so far. Obviously hasn't had the playoff run this year. A 6-9 record in the playoffs with Phoenix. One playoff series win. Series win.

But that's a team that they just dug themselves out of the absolute Nadira vibes in Sacramento. It got so weird and so bad for their season, and they finally get this momentum with Doug Christie. They finally have some things with their roster sorted out. I don't know that it's realistic to expect the Kings to just sit on a couple months of De'Aaron Fox pouting, if that's what it would have been.

The meter is broken.

This is a perverse take on the Julie Delpy before sunrise fake phone call.

He's gone. He's gone. I think it is the signature hang-up. It's not just like, oh, could you trade him to Miami or whatnot. There would be a taker on the market.

Congratulations to them.

Yeah.

I just have a very bad feeling we're going to look at the total math of that breaking up the one pick into three. And it's going to be three deals that are basically like this. Like basically use a first to dump Yusuf Nurkic's contract. To dump a dumb decision you made. Yeah, to try to rebate another bad decision. Yeah. The other ones, we'll see what happens.

Maybe they pull a rabbit out of their hat this summer. Maybe there's even time left for them to figure something out here. I just, I think that was a blunder in itself.

Who is the movie theater in this metaphor?

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The Paul George thing is bordering on reanimated corpse at this point. And Jamal Murray has found some kind of life, some kind of burst. And I think most importantly, the edge and the aggressiveness in his game. That's always when Jamal is feeling whatever injuries he has at a given point or just a shaken confidence. He doesn't push in the way that the Nuggets absolutely need him to push.

And to see that version of Jamal Murray back, that's a thrilling thing to see.

I think this might be the 10, and that is somewhat confidence in the Kings, more so pessimism in the Suns on my part. Okay.

I mean, mild confidence. I think they've got some stuff to work with. Like, I think they have a reasonable play-in level roster as currently constructed. I agree.

And there's nothing wrong with that, but there's a reason we're not going to be talking about them in the vein that we're talking about Golden State, which is to say an actual threat potentially to do something with the talent that they have. And we were talking about this on group chat today, too.

I don't know if it's the Jimmy Butler element specifically that makes Golden State feel like a wildcard in the same way that his Heat teams felt like a little bit of a wildcard. It's just hard to write off. And it's hard to write off looking at this Golden State rotation and thinking, OK, you know what, like when it really matters, the Pat Spencer minutes are going to evaporate.

And the post minutes are going to evaporate if they have to. Like they're going to get what they need out of these supporting guys, but their best players are going to go the distance. And the question at that point will be how how hard did Steph and Draymond and Jimmy have to push to get them into the play in or to get them into the playoff? And will they have enough left from that point?

Nut crunch, I think is the expression you look for. Did I just invent the phrase gut crunch? The old gut crunch.

The answer is probably J-Dub and that's a reasonable answer, but he also doesn't exactly play that way all the time. Like they are such a process oriented team where they're just going to move it and go through their system and trust in the shots that they get. And I think reasonable people can disagree as to whether those shots are ultimately what you need in now TM gut crunching time.

I think gut crunch. Look, they clearly need a little bit more as evidenced by the fact that they can occasionally put up like a 14.4th quarter like they did against Minnesota today.

that's not gonna do it even in a game like this where you have a bit of a deficit you're working back from to begin with it's an area where you hope over time j-dub grows into that responsibility chet holmgren who i think played his third game since come back from injury tonight he will grow into that responsibility over time hopefully he looks quite rusty understandably right now so he's gonna get better and better over the back part of the season but that's the wild card with them and i think if they don't do as well in the playoffs as they would have liked or as many of us would have anticipated

A lot of us are going to be wondering, was there a lever to pull there in terms of getting more of a spark plug score at the deadline? Not someone who has to be a part of your permanent like a fixture in Oklahoma City, a pillar of the community. But could you not get a guy who could get a bucket on demand when you maybe really needed it?

He was balling out. He was scoring in bunches.

I told you. But you're right. It's hard to look at a roster winning 80% of its games and being like, yeah, you should have done something. They're doing a lot every night to beat basically every opponent put in front of them.

I would think. And look, the win over Golden State yesterday, massive, massive game. in terms of playing implications. But yeah, they need Davis back. And more importantly, they just need a big, a single able-bodied big who is not Omax Prosper on stilts. Like they just need somebody in that spot to do big man things. And credit to them for getting by the way they have.

Credit to them for winning tonight, not only under the circumstances, missing all these bigs, missing Anthony Davis, but Kyrie didn't play in this game either. But his spirit lived on in Dante Exum and they beat the Heat. And Dallas just kind of keeps on marching right now. It's been very impressive to see the way they've rallied.

Yeah.

Now this is going to be fun. Not fun. Wasn't very fun.

Sure.

Yeah, it's hard because there are the precursors. I don't think any of us were fully trusting Joel Embiid's health coming into the season. Certainly, Paul George has given us reason to be dubious about his long-term ability to stay on the court. But I would never have anticipated that basically every single thing that could go wrong has gone wrong.

Every bright spot that has emerged in the rotation, short of Gershon Yabusele, which I'm not trying to jinx him, wrap him in bubble wrap, protect Gershon at all costs, please. Every other bright spot in the rotation has been snuffed out by injury, by circumstance, like nothing is working.

And that's hard to predict clearly, but also hard to wrap your mind around, like how so many things could go wrong at one time.

I don't think it is. Yeah, I mean, we can kind of parse those things out because there is the step-slow thing as well, right? Like, you're not getting past Zaire Williams against the Nets. That's a problem, right? That's a problem in a game where Joel Embiid is not playing, Tyrese Maxey is not playing. This is your moment to do some of this, and you make one shot. And worse, you attempt seven.

Horrible, horrible game for Paul George. All of that said, I have found myself at many points in the season... being a bit of a Paul George apologist. And look, those days are very much behind me at this point. But the case for that apology, the defense of Paul George throughout most of the season has been a defense of the little things that he brings to the table, right?

It's orienting the offense. It's being an adult on the court when they badly needed it. It's spacing the floor. It's keeping the ball moving. Good connecting stuff. but role player stuff. And at some point, if you're doing all the role player stuff and you're failing every time you're asked to be a star, we have to call you what you are. And it's a $50 million role player.

And that's a very tough position for the Sixers to find themselves at the very outset of this deal.

A sixer should know never to say that they're bored doing something like playing the five because this life as a sixer will be very interesting very quickly in ways that you do not want.

I don't know if Chicago wants to keep winning or not because their roster would tell you that they don't. The public comments would tell you that they are attempting to. So I really have no idea what to make of any of that other than the fact that Look, the play-in crop in the East is an absolute joke.

It is teams that are either too hurt to compete, don't have the resources to actually be good teams yet, or in Philly's case, a little of both. They just are not in a competitive place by any stretch of the imagination. Quinton Grimes should not be your best player. That is not a thing that should be happening. Justin Edwards should not be playing 30 minutes in a game.

That's not where the Sixers ever anticipated this going, but it's the reality that they now have to navigate.

Portland is tough because they are winning themselves out of the tank race at the moment. Yeah, I love it. Their future is tough. And we should say Philly's future in terms of their first round pick, which they may or may not be able to actually keep, is looking dicier by the minute. They have to be very careful they don't accidentally lose that pick at this point.

We should not see him again. tethered to this conversation. They should be actively looking at shutting Paul George down, shutting Embiid down, managing these injuries over the back part of the season. It's time to regroup. This is not going to resolve itself. And even if you could limp into the play-in and even limp into the playoffs, that is not a success for this version of this team.

Being an easy out in the first round is not success for the Sixers. So at this point, sear into the skid, lean into the failure, live to fight another day, frankly.

I don't think they get New Orleans. I think they just get Milwaukee and the Knicks. All right.

Yeah, we need a visual aid. We need somebody to come up with a flow chart.

Atlanta? The Atlanta ones are bad. Because it dramatically changes how they navigate their roster, what they're doing for the foreseeable future. On the one hand, I think it can be silly sometimes when teams like the Bulls, who were so protected they were probably going to keep their own pick anyway, go out of their way to trade to get their own pick back. It can be silly. Yeah.

But there is so much more freedom and flexibility as a franchise when you do own your own picks. Because the second they're out the door, the second you lose control of when you start the clock and when you start to rebuild and when you start to reboot.

And that's how you get into these weird lost seasons where you're sort of languishing either in the middle of the standings or just outside the play-in, accomplishing basically nothing, but also losing lots of games and not getting any draft capital to result from it. The Atlanta ones feel really, really rough right now.

They'll have three. They'll have their own.

Yeah.

And if you're OKC, I think you would also have to really think about it because what the Thunder need more than anything are cost-controlled players, really good players on cost-controlled salaries. Their roster is about to get very, very expensive very, very quickly. If you could have four cost-control years of Cooper flag as you are contending with the rest of this roster...

I'm hesitant to say this because we haven't seen Cooper Flagg play in the NBA yet. If he is as good as advertised, he might be the single most attractive piece to the Thunder for exactly that reason.

Good ball skills. Incredibly competitive.

Checks out.

Here's the thing, though. If that pick does convey and OKC gets Philly's pick, six teams will have 20 picks in the first round between them. OKC, one of them. Brooklyn will have three picks. The Spurs, the Jazz, the Magic, the Wizards will all have two picks. that is an incredible consolidation of draft capital.

And I don't know who ends up keeping a lot of those picks and who ends up moving them on because they're clearly valuable for all of these cost-controlled reasons we've just talked about.

But to just help you visualize at home as you're listening to us list off all of these swaps and protections and picks that may convey, basically every single pick from 18 to 30 is going to go to a different team, except for Indiana's pick and Boston's pick. That's it. Every other pick is probably going to change hands. And that's insane.

Doing the touchscreen. We have to raise pick-swap literacy around the country at this point because this is becoming an epidemic.

I think go for it. Honestly, I think go for it. I... It's always tough in these positions, and yes, I understand the long-term arguments, but I'm with you that I am moved by the enthusiasm of the team. I am moved by the amount of backbone they've been playing with lately, and ultimately, particularly how good they've been on defense. This is...

A team that's like playing a pretty deep rotation, really high energy style, forcing a lot of turnovers. They can't score for shit even now, but they get a lot of stops and they play with a lot of effort. And ultimately, here's the thing. I say you encourage the guys to go for it and they ultimately will probably lose a lot of games anyway, but you didn't pull the rug out from under them.

I think that's where you start to lose credibility with the players on your team is when you start actively sabotaging their efforts to win just for the sake of the lottery. But if there's a way to let them run themselves out, and look, if you look at the teams that they've beaten at this recent stretch of games where they've been so successful, it's not exactly a murderous row.

They will lose games against better teams eventually, but let them find their spine. Let them find their style and ultimately what can be successful for them. And let Nick Claxton wake up a little bit because you had a bit of a slow start to the season. These are meaningful developments for a team like Brooklyn.

There's not really another option.

I don't care. I think LaMelo is better than that. I think he's better than that. Was that a defensive LaMelo ball? Look, I'm willing to go out on that particular limb.

I think LaMelo is, look, he is on another planet in terms of some of the things he chooses to do, but has a facility with the game that not many guys have, and ultimately is basically the only reason the Hornets have been anything close to solving at any point in this season. So he doesn't have a lot to work with when he's out there.

Bigger concern for me, in addition to all of his habits and kind of the judgments he makes on the court, Clearly, just like that cursed ankles, tough injury history. If he's never going to be consistently healthy, how is he going to consistently grow as a creator? And that's a problem for a player like him.

Would I want to play with anyone under the age of 25? I think the answer is probably no. Like there is a stylistic difference between us.

See, I think he and LaMelo could run beautifully together. Oh, I don't know. Anyway, they're in position to get him.

OK, can I suggest what the thing is that you might be seeing? Yeah, that's it. I would say two things, maybe. Golden State actually shooting free throws. Great. Jimmy Butler helps with that. Two, something very exotic for the Warriors, attempting to score around the basket and sometimes doing so successfully. They blow a lot of layups.

I get from that 10,000 foot perspective why Reinsdorf is the guy who comes up. I don't want to give Arturis Karnishevich too much cover here because I feel like Nico Harrison has done him an incredible favor. Patrick Dumont has done him an incredible favor, taking a lot of the airspace of the NBA right now. And I think it just kind of slid under the radar that after the deadline,

Cornish was went up there, had his press conference and explained that there are three different ways to build the championship team. You can have two stars on it. You can have three stars on it, or you can have nine or 10 very good players.

First of all, that has literally never happened before. No team has won a championship with nine or 10 very good players. Not a thing.

I don't know what threshold he's talking about, but... What's better than very good? Like, great? Well, let's talk about that. If it is... Even if that were true, even if that were what the Bulls are trying to do, how many players on their current roster are very good or even, like, pretty good?

I think he's good. He's probably the closest. Theoretical Alonzo Ball might be the closest. We hope Matas Muzelas can be that. Vooch some nights?

Yeah, there are no A minus players on this roster. I'm not even sure. This is a roster that is scraping for solid B, B minus talent right now. And to the extent that it's there, it's probably years away from developing.

So you would take Charlotte's? You would take Philly's?

What a day for the Wizards. You know, they had to win something eventually. They won your heart, at least relative to the Chicago Bulls. Congratulations to the Washington Wizards.

That is the darkest sentence that I've ever heard someone say. And it might be true. I think it's true. I think it's true.

I'll do credit to Jordan Poole who's had an exceedingly normal NBA season. And for him, for a guy that talented, that's a huge step forward.

They have a lot of guys who clam up a little bit around the basket or can get stifled out with length. They obviously play really small. But having Jimmy as any kind of presence inside, even if he's also missing some layups now and again, just as a cutter, as a driver, as a transition force, It's a nice counterbalance to everything else that the Warriors have going on offensively.

It's not as loud or as dramatic as what's going on in Philly. And so, yeah, they get the lead in terms of the dumpster fire power rankings here. It's so disappointing to see the Suns in such disarray, quietly sucking all this year and seeing none of the primary stakeholders of that team do a single thing to fix it.

And this isn't ultimately like a second apron problem or a no trade clause problem. Like those are obstructions, right? In terms of Phoenix making its roster better. They're not obstructions for anyone on this team playing into the ball on defense. They're not obstructions for anyone on this team fighting for a rebound.

They're not obstructions, most crucially, defining some semblance of offensive flow for a super talented team on paper. Like... I know there is a worse than the sum of its parts thing happening here because basically none of the parts complement each other at all. It's just a lot of guys in their individual lanes not making each other better.

And that is a really tough watch for people like us at this stage in the season. I just don't get the sense that anyone involved in it particularly is participating in that offense either or participating in this season. And so it's so disjointed. It's so unpleasant. I really dislike where the Phoenix Suns find themselves. And I don't wish this on any of them. this is just who they've been.

He would play. Who's he playing over? They need somebody like him.

Yes. I feel fine giving Bradley Beal Isaiah Joe's minutes.

Maybe sixth on the right roster.

First guy off the bench.

I mean, this is kind of the Torrey Craig corollary, because didn't he just kind of crack into Boston's rotation a little bit? Intense man. Yeah. Royce O'Neal can do a lot of Torrey Craig things. I would say he's slightly better than Torrey Craig on balance. Grayson Allen, very much an issue of how much you need his shooting. And frankly, this season, whether his shot is on or not.

Lately, it's been looking a lot better. Start of the season was not there. If he's streaky, he's not very viable. So that's a huge problem in terms of high-level competition.

Yeah, I think he can get minutes.

That's even worse than this, frankly. That's the hard thing about interrogating Kevin Durant trades is the packages feel more depressing. And I think the packages also force you to confront... what you as an organization in the Phoenix Suns have done with Devin Booker's career.

A player who had to come into his own, who took his time, who grew as a playmaker, who grew as a creator, who, to be totally fair, is not having an amazing season by his standards, but a good enough one, a good enough Devin Booker season. And if you use that whole period of time, and you have one trip to the finals in a somewhat weird Western Conference field, and that's it?

That's the primary feather in the cap of the Devin Booker era? That's really sad, honestly, for a star who's had this kind of long-lasting relationship with the team. You would hope that a player like that would be rewarded with better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They have the toughest remaining strength of schedule of any team in the league from this point. I don't... They're not going to make it.

I'm not sure they need to do that. I think they're going to be, again, perfectly fine coasting out, losing some of these games. Now, if the Fox thing catches on in such a huge way where it's unavoidable, then yeah, maybe you have that discussion. But part of trading for De'Aaron Fox is accelerating at least a little bit.

And I think ultimately their position is not so much tethered to their own pick, right? It's tethered to the other draft capital that they have. It's tethered to the guys they already have on roster. So I don't think they necessarily need to.

I think he's more 6'7", 6'8".

Yeah.

I think we covered a lot of it. We covered every mid to terrible team in the Eastern Conference, it feels like. So we really gave the people what they want today.

always walton goggins but carrie coon never upset to see carrie coon on the screen and you haven't watched the first one yet not a bit you know i'm really looking forward to it i'm really juiced from my personal trip to spiritual thailand for this season so that's the thing you get to go on an actual vacation with the cast you just live back heresy through your tv from your lips to daniel x ears let's lock it in let's get that expense report filed i'm ready to go

Lots of stuff. Love a lagoon.

Thanks, Bill.

And yet they are a high IQ team. Like Steve Kerr is about to have an aneurysm at any given moment in these games. And you get it. Like some of the passes Draymond throws for being a genius level playmaker are absolutely baffling, indefensible decision making at times. And yet they get away with it because they have these hot shooting stretches.

Their defense is obviously still pretty rock solid overall. And I think we'll only get better with Jimmy. But ultimately, I'm totally with you as far as the post-up elements of Jimmy's game. He's so intuitive in terms of the way he moves. That has fit in Golden State really seamlessly. And he also, just in staggering him and Steph a little bit, it gives the Warriors something to do.

And they were really lacking that when Steph was off the floor. It's like, what do we run? I guess Brandon Pajemski is going to dribble for 18 seconds. There was way too much of that happening. And Jimmy Butler, if nothing else, orients them to, OK, this is a this is an actual first option, even if he's not pounding the air out of the ball.

Yeah. Even in the games, Jimmy Butler is one of the best contested rebounders in the league in terms of just the overall effort he puts in and how he goes after it, even against bigs.

And if we're going to talk about how Golden State makes a run or how they hold it together, how they challenge some of these other elite Western Conference teams, a big part of that is Jimmy Butler makes the version of small ball they play make a lot more sense. Moses Moody has been a thing for a while now, but the Moses Moody minutes make even more sense when you put in with Jimmy Butler.

Kuminga is going to be a little different just because they are a little bit duplicative. They're going to be a little trickier to play together, especially if Draymond is also on the floor. It can jam up a little bit too much. And I'm curious to see what Kerr does with that, how he tries to separate those guys, if at all, in the rotation, because they're going to have to play a lot.

It's like the PER of box score stats, right? It gives you a general indication that something is up.

I suspect having Jimmy will help with some of that. And just from an overall workload perspective, Jimmy and Kuminga coming back will lift some of what is on Steph right now. Ultimately, though, I think that is who he is at this point in his career. I don't think he's going to have those singular scoring outbursts all the time.

But the good news for Golden State, I don't think the rest of the league has entirely caught up to that. I don't think they will catch up to that because history tells us they don't with legends. You put Steph Curry on the floor, someone sees him, they are going to freak out.

And that's why virtually regardless of how many points Steph actually scores, he has a massive, massive on-court impact in terms of the offensive production. He is not at a Jokic level because Jokic is really in a class unto himself there. but with Shea, right?

Like with the other really high level offensive operators in terms of the difference of having him on the court, even when he's not hitting consistently, even when he's not going for 35 or 40 points, he just scares the hell out of people. I think that part will always be true, even if Steph is 45 rolling out there.

And by volume, they've just been in a lot of close games, which that in itself, as you're saying, is taxing because it forces Steph to play more minutes to even get to that point.

I still give Memphis a little credit in that conversation. I think we'll we clearly have to wait and see what the Lakers are capable of.

But at this point, Denver's got the inside track and teams are going to have to figure out not just how to outflank them, but how to beat them specifically if that matchup comes on board, which is I would say the toughest single matchup available to anyone is what do you do with Nikola Jokic right now? Because we're seeing, Minnesota case in point tonight, OKC is a vaunted, unbelievable defense.

But Minnesota has some inroads there to score against a team like that. Nas Reid is clearly a huge part of that formula. Granted, they're not playing with their usual team. Julius Randle, Rudy Gobert, Mike Conley, Dante DiVincenzo.

Absolutely. They didn't have their normal set of players, but they found things that could work against the Thunder defense for as wonderful as it is. I don't know that there's those answers for many teams about Nikola Jokic. There's just not a lot of conceptual stuff you can throw at him that's going to work. That's not to say you can't leverage Jokic.

The occasional off night from Jamal Murray, elements of Russell Westbrook's game, parts of the back end of the rotation, Michael Porter, maybe not swinging the ball as fast as the Nuggets might like him to sometimes. Like there's buttons to press. The Nuggets are not unbeatable, but they look really tough right now.

And they look like a really tough matchup specifically for the rest of this Western Conference field.

Priscilla and I did that live show in Denver.

That was actually exactly it, Bill. Oh, great. I spelled your gimmick. that, uh, that, that, yeah, you might be buried in the NBA playoffs. And so we're going to get everybody caught up on what's happening in the NFL who hasn't been paying attention.

And, um, I got a sneaking suspicion, a couple of these, you probably, uh, you probably paid some attention to, but, um, I, I actually had trouble narrowing it down to five, but I think I have five. You can,

I have a couple honorable mentions. My honorable mention, we can do that at the start. Jim Irsay's passing, I think we should give some mention to that. And then Trey Hendrickson's contract situation, I didn't know if that was interesting enough, but that's still ongoing. We'll save those for the end.

The other thing is like over the last 48 hours, I did learn what pink cocaine is. So I got that too.

I mean, I don't know if it would, I mean, it's not like it's up there with like the love boat, you know, in Minnesota 20 years ago, that, that I think still a gold standard. I'd probably put, I'd probably still put this behind like the SS Beckham and in 2016, right, right, right before the playoffs, but maybe it might be number three in my time covering the NFL as far as boat scandals go.

The Steelers didn't sign a quarterback.

They are pretty confident that their quarterback is going to be Aaron Rodgers. And I do think that there's like... I think there's actually some decent reason here for people who want to listen to it. And I think this... This goes back to like how you manage everything in the spring and trying to get their work done.

And I think the logic for both sides here was if he signs April 1st and look, he's got personal stuff he's dealing with, he's traveling. And if he signs April 1st and says, okay, guys, like I'm going to go away for the next two months. And when I'm back, I'm back. But like, I got some personal stuff I got to attend to. I've got travel planned.

what you're inviting then is then whenever you start the off-season program, you get into OTAs, anytime the media is there, it's going to be, where's Aaron? Where's Aaron? Where's Aaron? And so I think both sides wanted to avoid that. And so that's part of it. And then I think the other end of it, and this is like, to me, almost the more interesting thing.

I think Aaron was really affected by the way his trip to Egypt was covered last year. And so going through all of that,

Well, if you remember, so he skipped the mini camp. The Jets had their mini camp at the end of June or in the middle of June last year at the end of their offseason program. And Aaron had been like pretty much a full participant in everything that they'd done up until then. And then he skipped the mini camp. And it was something that they had kind of predetermined he was going to do.

But, you know, Sala said to him, okay, like, that's fine, but I still have to fine you. And I still have to hold you responsible. I still have to say, like, this isn't an excused absence because we have to have a standard for everybody. And it became like a two- or three-week story. And when they hit bumps in the summer and early in the fall, it continued to be a story.

And the sense I get is that Aaron was frustrated by that, and he didn't want to go through that again. So I think part of the logic here for the Steelers, for Aaron, is... Just whenever you're in, you're all in, but not until then. And so I think the logic here between the Steelers and Aaron is like, okay, once you show up, we need all of you, bud. We need you all the way here.

And so Aaron's taking care of everything he needs to take care of now. And when he shows up, I do think he'll be all in. And again, I think a huge part of this is marked by what happened with the Jets last year.

Because it was a news story?

So I think that there's an element of that, but I think if you go back and you watch, you see pieces of it. Like I'm telling you, just pull up like a 10 minute highlight of their game against the Jaguars, which nobody watched. Cause it was the jets and the Jaguars at the end of the season. Um,

But if you pull up like a 10 minute YouTube highlight of that game at the end of December, you'll see it's like all still there. You'll be like, wow, like that looks like Aaron Rodgers in 2011.

Yeah, but it does look good. I'm just telling you that like, like I understand, but like there were some real, there was like some high level shit in that game and that he and Devante Adams, they, it, it, it's really, it's, it's all there, you know? So, um,

You know, I think I think what's maybe most interesting about this whole thing to me is where the Steelers are and that they are so leveraged for right now. TJ Watt wants a new contract. He's turning 31. Minka Fitzpatrick's turning 29. I mean, Cam Hayward isn't on the back nine. He's I mean, basically walking to the clubhouse now like he this is probably his last shot.

they trade for DK Metcalf, who's a third contract guy and has had some injury issues. Like it's really, I mean, this is a team, like if this group's going to win, it sort of has to be right now. And so, you know, I think a big part of, you know, the Steelers logic, and I felt like all along, like they were going to be a contender for whatever big name quarterback became available.

Is Kirk Cousins a swing for the fences? I've been waiting on that one, by the way. To me, that's the thing with Kirk. You may be more likely to hit a double with Kirk and less likely to hit a home run, if that makes sense.

With Aaron, maybe you're more likely to strike out, but at least you're swinging for the fences when you've been really average at that position since Ben Roethlisberger retired.

I mean, what else is available though? I mean, if it wasn't going to be Stafford, right? Like, and I think Stafford was the most logical answer for a lot of different teams, you know, and the Raiders and giants were really in that one. Um, the Steelers dip their toe in it. I, like there just aren't that many options, you know?

So it was a bad year to be looking at quarterback in the draft, especially, you know, if you didn't have the first overall pick and the veteran options again, like there were a lot of, I mean, the Rams, uh, When the Rams made the offer they did to Stafford back in March, it was with it in the back of their head.

This guy doesn't want to leave Los Angeles, and this guy doesn't want to play for anybody but Sean McKinney. And the Giants had the same... The Giants had the same sort of thing in the back of their head as they were pursuing them. Raiders, too. It was like, yeah, we're really going after this, but this guy's going to wind up back in L.A. So if you take Stafford off the table, then it really is.

It's Cousins. It's Rodgers. And then... I mean, now after that, you're talking about getting into Joe Flacco territory. There just wasn't a lot out there.

How much of that's just because Mason Rudolph's the quarterback right now?

They're there. So like, I would, you know, I would say like their, their offensive line should be a lot better. Like, and they've actually drafted. Okay. If Troy Fatano, you know, works out for them at tackle, you know, they've got Broderick Jones. That's two first round picks a tackle. They should be as strong. Zach Frazier might be the best young center in football.

Like they, they have a chance to have the best offensive line they've had in over a decade. Um, And then if DK Metcalf comes through, and I know I'm talking a lot of ifs here, right? Like, if DK Metcalf comes through, if TJ Watt is himself again, if Minka Fitzpatrick... If Aaron Rodgers is still alive. Right. So, like, there's all of these ifs, but if you're them, like, what's your other choice?

You know what I mean? It's either... It was either this, like, take this big swing at quarterback and try to get it right and try to... squeeze a championship run out of this core that you've had together for the last few years or blow it up. And like, that's why I look at this as like, that's it's a, it's the one team where you look at it.

I was like, that's a team that like, that's a really worthy swing because now at least like you're taking that swing with TJ Watt and Fitzpatrick and like some really great players that they've had there for a long time. Um, I don't mind this swing if I'm the Steelers.

And look, I think people there would tell you that the Russell Wilson thing undermined so many things in the last month of the season and that a lot of that building really wanted them to go back to Justin Fields. And it was something where, I mean, Tomlin was kind of, again, all on his own on that one. And I think it's part of the reason why Tomlin likes Shador so much.

Like, he likes to do it going into the draft. But I don't think Tomlin wanted to... I don't think he wanted to, like, press that button again at quarterback after what happened with Russell at the end of the year last year.

So there's some dynamics there where it's like... I mean, there's some stuff that happened at the end of the year in games where it was just like, man, like, if we were just, like, average at that position, or we were just running things as they were supposed to be run, we might have been okay. And, like, so I think their thought is...

a if we can get like 80 85 of what aaron rogers was three years ago like we might have a super bowl team which you can argue whether they would or not but i think when you when if you're them and you're looking at it with this group of players that you've had for the last few years and this might be your last shot before you really like go through like a real reset then it's worth taking that swing

Well, because you're asking me, I know it's the Patriots.

So my number two thing, the Cowboys, a year after Jerry Jones famously used the phrase all in, actually pulled an all in move and traded for George Pickens. And this one is really interesting to me because they're another team where like all the things you said about the Steelers, I think sort of apply to the Cowboys, right? Like, is this group that they have right now going to be good enough to

Um, and like, is there something that you can do to try to put that group over the top? And so I think the answer was like, we got to get Dak Prescott some more help. And so that when they went into the draft, they looked at it. Like we either want to come out with, come out of this with alignment or a, or a receiver. And I think of Teterola McMillan who went eighth, the Panthers made it to 12.

Yeah. Like maybe that would have been a consideration, but they were sort of looking at it as this mosaic. It's like, well, We still have... I think there were a handful of receivers they were considering in trade, veteran receivers that they had studied and they had talked to teams about. And so McMillan's gone. They like Tyler Booker. They just lost Zach Martin. They draft Tyler Booker.

And then on the back end, they go and make the deal for George Pickens, which... Here's the most interesting thing about it to me.

So this one... So one of the main reasons the Steelers got rid of George Pickens is because the issues with him a lot of times have come down to his role in the offense, the direction of the offense, and how much he's getting the ball, which is normal with a lot of receivers. He's very over the top with it, which makes him worse than most when it comes to that stuff.

And so when they traded for DK Metcalfe, The thing was, it was like he plays the same position, not that they're just receivers, the same receiver spot.

The X receiver position, right? So they're both X receivers. Okay, so now you got to figure out a way to play them together. And now George Pickens is in a contract year. So do you think if he goes through a two or a three or a four week stretch in the middle of October with, say, three catches, and is he going to be OK with that just because we got another receiver?

Right. So to say the least, so is he going to be okay? Is he going to be okay with, if he wasn't okay with it before now in a contract year with a hundred million dollars on the line, is he suddenly going to be okay with, no, that's fine. I'm okay with DK Metcalf's on the team now. Okay.

So like, that's part of the logic for the Steelers and moving off of them and saying, we're going to be better off with Calvin Austin and Roman Wilson and whoever else, uh,

That was such a weird play. So there's that, but like, and there's the lack of effort blocking sometimes, all of that, right? So like that all exists. Okay, so... If that whole thing was going to be a problem in a contract year in Pittsburgh, who's one of the highest volume receivers in football as far as targets go?

Right. So, like, is this now going to be okay with him? Again, he's in a new place. He's with new offensive coaches who are in their first year truly running the offense because Mike McCarthy's gone now. And he's not getting the ball with all that money on the line. Is he suddenly going to be okay with that?

Not right now, they're not. I mean, they're going to see how it goes. And like I said, everything's going to be in May and June. It's really easy for everybody to have their arms around each other and say, this is all going to work out May and June. It's a little different to project these things in September and October. They still have the Micah Parsons thing floating around out there too.

Like, and I, and I know like one thing that they had sort of discussed with, with George and his people was, are you comfortable going into the year without a new contract? And the answer was yes. And so like, if they go into the year, so like, but you can look at that both ways, right?

Like, is it, are you going to get a super motivated guy who's going to be out to prove to everybody he's team first? Maybe. I think the people in Pittsburgh would tell you what might be more likely is if he's not getting the ball a month or two into the season, you could have a problem.

Yeah, and that division, by the way, you've seen the schedule for that division. They're playing the NFC North and the AFC West.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's going to be really interesting. And I think a lot of it for them is counting on Brian Schottenheimer as a culture builder that he'll be able to build the right environment. Oh, yeah, that'll go great. I always go back, but I always go back to, like, I don't, like,

The idea of, like, the receiver, the Steelers, that Mike Tomlin is ready to get rid of, like, the history of that's not great, you know? True. When Mike Tomlin... I mean... Back in 2015, 2016, did anybody think of Antonio Brown and Le'Veon Bell as bad guys? It wasn't until they were gone, really. Or disruptive in some way. They got disruptive at the end. Bell got disruptive at the end.

But generally, when the Steelers are ready to walk away from a guy for those sorts of reasons, or a guy who has that sort of background, generally it doesn't work out for the next team that gets them.

Derek Carr retired, which I feel like this, maybe because it happened on a Saturday, kind of like flew under the radar. You know what I mean? But it's one of a number of quarterback situations. I kind of grouped this together. This is cheating a little bit by me, but the Saints, the Vikings, the Browns. It feels like a few teams where the quarterback situations are going to be really interesting.

Or macabre.

I mean, I throw the Vikings. I'm hesitant to throw the Vikings in there.

Who knows? And the reason I throw them in there with... the other two is because the expectations are so high there. Like if you're a player on that team, that's a 14 win team last year. Like that's not the type of team that like can throw the year overboard in the name of quarterback development. So, you know, what does that look like? And, I know J.J. fought through a lot last year.

He lost a lot of weight. And he had a lot of ups and downs coming back from that injury. And obviously, he had the second follow-up surgery. It was more of a cleanup. He's in a much better place right now.

And I don't think there's a better place in the league for a young quarterback to be, especially because of what they did with their offensive line and signing Ryan and Kelly and Will Fries and drafting Donovan Jackson. Yeah. Getting Christian Derrissaw back obviously will help a lot, but the Vikings are the one where I look at it and it's like so much is going to hinge.

I mean, that could be a Super Bowl team if J.J. McCarthy has a great year, or the quarterback position could really hold them back.

Yeah. So I got to look at those three teams. Like I, the saints to me, I mean like Tyler Shuck, Spencer Rattler, I mean, Jake Hainer's hurt now.

It was one of the more bizarre endings to a career I've seen in 20 years covering this. I mean, it started with, if you go back to the end of the season, I think Kellen Moore committed but didn't really commit to Carr as the starter in the season. in the introductory press conference. Then there were some whispers that Carr wanted to trade and some teams sniffed around that.

They sniffed around and it smelled like sewage. They were like, oh. And then there was, well, Carr wants a raise because to affirm, like, this is my team.

Then after that, then after that, they convert his contract, which basically means he's on the team without really consulting with them, which they can do. It's a contract mechanism, but it basically locked them in where it converted. It took like basically, you know, 95% of his set, 98% of his salary and turned it into a signing bonus.

Yeah. Yeah, they had, and that restructure pushes the cap money forward, but it basically locks them in with the team. Now, where they are saved by this is that they don't have to spend that money now. Now, they sunk a $10 million roster bonus into him, and part of the separation agreement is he gets to keep the $10 million roster bonus. So it's a buyout. Yeah, for the most part.

And now they move on. And we'll see. I mean, Tyler Shuck was in college for seven years. He was at four different schools. I've heard he has, I think it's four degrees, which is pretty wild. Yeah. But he was Justin Herbert's backup for two years at Oregon, which gives you an idea how old he is. And then you have him competing with Spencer Rattler, and you see where that goes.

And that looks like, is this a full reset year for them, where they're in the mix for one of the quarterbacks next year? Obviously, there's a quarterback who could be in the draft. I don't think he will be in the draft, but a quarterback who could be in the draft next year with a very famous last name that has ties to that organization.

Yeah, I mean, like they... I'd have to think about that one. I mean, I don't know how many teams there are that are just outright in that position, need a quarterback, might wind up being in that position where they're not very good. And you never know the way these things are going to play out. And Kellen Moore is a first-year coach, obviously can't afford for them.

It's hard for him to... They're the number one.

Right.

Vegas should be competitive. I think more competitive with Gino as a quarterback. So, yeah, I mean, Cleveland would be the other one if that thing crashes and burns.

Yeah.

The Colts have... The Colts are interesting because that could be... I mean, obviously with... With new people, with a new owner, a new principal owner in charge. And then like the GM has been there now for, Chris Ballard's been there for, this will be his ninth year there. And they really haven't accomplished a ton. If he's in trouble, then maybe the coach is in trouble.

It could, if things get off to a bad start there, it could get messy in a hurry.

And then, you know, yeah, it's hard. Cause like, I mean like they, it really, while luck was still a quarterback, it looked like it was really going in a great direction. And then, you know, you have the surprise retirement, um, two years, seven years ago there. And that was, that's the thing is like, it had been a crutch for a while, uh, And it can't be a crutch anymore. It's been way too long.

Not enough people are talking about how I think Houston could bounce back in a really big way. Oh, make the case. So like, I think Houston, I think Houston's got a top five defense. And I think with the level of like, like the young core players, like Will Anderson and Derek Stingley, and they bring Daniel Hunter back and they've got like a lot of nice ancillary pieces on defense too.

Really good coach. And they've got the defense. Yeah, they've got the defense where they want it. And part of the reason they traded Laramie Tunsil was because they felt like the culture in their offensive line room was broken and that they weren't able to kind of match like the culture they built on defense on offense. Interesting. And so they trade Laramie Tunsil.

They bring in a million different tackles to try and fix it. They draft the kid from Minnesota. They bring in Trent Brown and Cam Robinson. They just throw a bunch of darts to tackle. They bring in a new offensive coordinator from the Rams and Nick Cayley.

Right. Who I think have a chance to be really like, if you look at the history from that school, like a lot of guys from that school come in and produce right away. So it wouldn't shock me like as like complimentary pieces to, to Nico Collins. If those guys are playing pretty well right away and you have CJ Stroud, I, I look at it and I'm like, a lot of people have totally forgotten about them.

I think they have an elite defense. And if your problem is offense and you've got CJ Stroud to build around and you're bringing in a coordinator from the Rams, who I think is really capable and has both like the Josh McDaniels and Sean McVay background, and you play in a weak division,

And like as much as people thought they were not the same last year, they were down by one point going into the fourth quarter of the divisional rounded arrow.

Right. Right. So like, like it's, I think we look at it like it was broken because our expectations were so high after CJ's rookie year, D'Amico's first year. And I'm, I, I just don't know that teams are looking at that. Like, I don't know if people are looking at that team enough and saying, you know what? Like there's still a lot of like really good stuff in place here.

And if the young quarterback bounces backwards, CJ was doing incredibly high level shit in 2023. Yeah. That could be a dangerous team. Now, do they break into the Buffalo, Baltimore, Kansas City? Do they break into that tier? Cincinnati could get back into that tier. Maybe, maybe not.

But I think if you look at the teams in the AFC, they may have the best chance to do it of the teams that are right below that.

Houston's got to be an overwhelming favorite, right?

I was going to say, is there like a lot of belief in James Gladstone and Liam Cohen now? I don't know.

He's done jumping out of my TV. I can't wait to watch him, but I just, I think Jacksonville's problem, like under the last regime, you know, the, and this is where I think like there's some cleaning up that needs to be done. Yeah. Is like they paid a lot of good players great money.

Like there are guys there are there are guys in that roster that they paid like their franchise players when they're just pretty good. And, you know, Trevor Lawrence on that list because I mean, you you could you could I think, you know, they they pay Walker a little to play left tackle after he played for like 15 minutes for them. Right. Yeah. Tyson Campbell at corner.

I mean, Christian Kirk is gone, but I think he'd be another example of that. You know, like there was just a lot of examples of like, I mean, you could even, you could even like argue that, that, that Walker is one of those guys. You know what I mean?

Like, so like, are they just, do they just have like a collection of pretty good players and they don't have like the types of, they don't have like Houston has Will Andrews. Like I said, Will Andrews, Derek Stingley, Nico Collins, CJ Stroud. I mean, They have an identity at least. Right.

Like how many players on Houston's roster, like if you rank the two rosters, Houston and Jacksonville, how many Texans would you have to go through to get to the first Jaguar?

Yep. So number four, Caleb Williams is in the news again. And this is an excerpt from, I think, our mutual friend Seth Wickersham's book. Yeah. And it was, for those who missed it, before the 2024 draft, he and his dad had looked at the idea of... Um, he and his dad had looked at the idea of forcing their way out.

I guess what you would call it is pulling an Eli and, um, had their eyes on the Vikings and, um, the Vikings had actually researched Caleb too. That was the, that was of course the, the draft they took JJ McCarthy in. Um, so like this has become like a little bit of like a firestorm in Chicago. And I think it's sort of, I think the first signal of like what's to come for Caleb there, um,

And I think he is such a high-end talent.

Well, just, no, like, just the level of, like, the training wheels are off now. The excuses are gone. Oh, from a scrutiny standpoint. Yeah, like, now it's like you have to start playing well. Yeah. You know, we've seen the year two jump. I mean, this might get you excited about Drake, too, but we've seen the year two jump where... I can't get more excited. I mean, but you look at it.

Patrick Mahomes, MVP of the league his second year. Lamar Jackson, MVP of the league his second year. Joe Burrows in the Super Bowl in his second year. Josh Allen, 10 wins and in the playoffs in his second year.

And so you look at all of this, right? So is Caleb going to take that step? And I think... I think this is a scrutiny that Caleb's going to be under because they fixed so many things. They drafted Colston Loveland, 10th overall, Luther Burden with their second pick. They traded for Joe Tooney and Jonah Jackson to play guard. They signed Drew Dahlman from Atlanta to play center.

They hired Ben Johnson, which is a huge part of it.

And you look at it and it's like, this now looks like they should be able to get a very clean read on what Caleb can be. And it was interesting because I did a little reporting on this last week where I kind of asked around like...

you know, what they've been working on with Caleb and the stuff that they've been working on was really how you carry yourself as a franchise quarterback and how you, and how you have to like the command that you have to have to be a franchise quarterback. And, you know, a couple of the examples that were brought up to me, they watched tape of him, uh,

taking sacks and how long it took for him to come off the ground. And basically the point they were trying to make to him was last year was a tough year. We understand your offensive coordinator gets fired. Then your head coach gets fired. Your offensive line wasn't very good. We get it.

It's like, but if you're lying on the ground, you know, for an extended period of time, you're not picking yourself up off the ground. that's going to resonate with the rest of the team. That's the sort of thing that's going to... And so it's like, you need to be popping up off the ground after hits.

Probably going to be a good example. Yeah. Another thing they said, but they showed, they showed tape like early in a game of him and the motions coming from the right and he's looking to the left. And so like, there's little things as far as like command, like we want you to be the commander of the offense.

And so like so much of what they're doing right now is we're trying to make you the guy and we're going to give you every tool to make you the guy. And we're going to tell you how you have to carry yourself as the guy. And so, you know, I think you're going to take a big jump.

I remember talking to Brady about this way back when I was covering the Patriots.

Yeah, and he said to me, the only way I can show my toughness is availability. That's the only way I can. At that position, the only way I can in this game where everyone's tough, the only way I can prove my toughness to the guys who are really out there in the trenches is to be available and to be the first one into the huddle and to be the first one up and to be available to them.

And I think that was sort of the point with like, you have to be the first one to pick yourself up off the ground too. Cause no matter how hard you got hit, someone's probably hurting worse than you are out there on that field. And like, even like the thing about the motion, right? Like, is it going to be like that guy who's coming, that receiver who's coming in motion, right. From your right.

And you're looking left. Is that guy going to follow you after that happens? You know what I mean? Like, or he's, is he going to see that and say, what, what is this kid doing? You know? So it's little stuff like that, that I think they're trying to do to empower Caleb. And, um, that's really interesting. Yeah.

And so I think like, it's, it's just, I think that stuff is really, they're trying to kind of empower him to be the leader there. And I even think like the way he handled the, the, the, the, the backlash, the Seth thing, um, I think it was yesterday, he stood up there and he stood in front of the media and said, look, he took the bullet for it.

He said, look, when I was coming out, me and my dad were looking at everything. My dad, as any parent would, we were just investigating all of our avenues. Once we came and visited the Bears and we got to know the organization, we felt differently about it. But of course, we looked at the history of it. And it was... To me, it was like he could have hid from that. You know what I mean?

Like he could have just said, I'm not talking about it's in the past. But the only way to kill that story is to stand up there and answer the question. So I thought that was a pretty good sign for maybe him maturing a little bit and growing into the leadership role for.

I mean, what's I mean, one of the most I mean, that market for football, like that's one of the more pressure packed markets in the league.

He's not getting up. Sometimes you pick up things on these things, covering them in really stupid ways. And this is one example for me. So when I was covering the Patriots, when I was in the beat, my roommate is one of my best friends from college and he was coaching. He was a limited earnings coach at Northeastern before they dropped football. And we were living in the North end.

And so like he and I would, would talk about all these things. And I remember him, like it was, it was awesome. Like, you know, when I, when I watched football with him, like he would actually come in and watch with me when I would like watch the Patriots games over again. And he said, you know what the difference with Brady is? And I'm like, no, what would you say it is?

It's like it's that he lets the plays develop. It's like if you watch other quarterbacks, they get rid of the ball. He is so willing to take the hit. And this was before the ACL. But he is legitimately like watching him. He was saying to me, he's like he is legitimately giving the receivers an extra second to get open.

He is giving everything an extra second to develop because he's willing to take a hit that the other quarterback won't. You know, and I thought that was such an interesting piece of insight. And I think it matches up with what you're trying to say on Brady. And I think the guys, the guys recognize that too. You know what I mean? Like the receivers recognize that too.

The guys who, cause that's going to help them out.

Yeah.

The concussion at the end of the year. Well, yeah.

Um, so I was, I had like tush push here, but I'm so freaking sick of talking about that. Yeah, please. I'm done with it. I did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think calling the other owners a teenager was an interesting strategy to take. I actually think the bigger thing to come out of that meeting is the discussion on the playoff format changing.

So I don't think enough people are talking about this. When they first brought it up in the meeting, In March, they had probably five or six votes. So for people who don't know, you need 24.

So you still get in the playoffs automatically if you win your division, but the Lions proposed open seating. More or less, it would mean you're seated purely by record.

So, yes, the Vikings in Week 18 were in a war with the Lions. They lose. They have 14 wins. And now they got to go on the road.

Right. And they got to go on the road in the wildcard round and play a Rams team that rested everybody in Week 18. Yeah.

I think they had 10. They were 10-7. Yeah, so they were four games worse. But I think the nuance to this is that people think this is about fairness for the league, and it's not. It's about games in Week 17 and Week 18 being compelling. And the Rams are actually the example of why... The Rams are what scare people.

What the Rams did scares the league because the Rams didn't have nothing to play for in week 18. If you remember, they could have played to avoid the Vikings. They could have been the third seed or the fourth seed. Sean McVay makes the conscious decision. It's more important that my guys get the rest than play for the third seed. So I'm going to sit everybody down. They lose to the Seahawks.

So that scares the league because it paid off. And because now you have a team... And the NFL, they're very cognizant of what's happened in the NBA. And they look at each of the 272 games as pieces of real estate that they can sell. So are we making those pieces of real estate as valuable as we possibly can...

If you have the format they have now, I think is fair in a lot of ways because of the scheduling formula and the way that works. But you have these games at the end of the season now where it's like, screw it. We'd rather get the rest.

And that's what I was going to say. So they're projecting it forward and they're saying, this is going to get worse.

Like it just worked for the Rams. And this now is going to get worse if we don't do something about it. And so if they have open seating, like there will be more to play for at the end of the year. The problem is the scheduling formula. In the NFL, you only play 14 teams over the course of a year.

Of course, you play your three teams in your division twice and you only play teams in your conference. You only play 11 teams in your conference. So the schedules are so wildly different. And I use the example of like the NFC East, right? Like, so the NFC East plays the NFC North and the AFC West this year. The NFC West plays the two South divisions, right?

So, I mean, you could argue an 11-win season by the Eagles is more impressive this year than a 13-win season by the Niners, right? Yeah, no question. The Niners have played eight games against those two South divisions.

Yeah. And so like you had the, the Ram COO, Kevin Demoff stood up in this meeting, um, you know, last week and basically said to the room, guys, we need to decide what we're trying to do here. Are we trying to be fair or are we trying to make the games at the end of the season more compelling? Um,

And that led to like more big picture talk where I think the scheduling formula is going to come under some scrutiny. Are we doing this right? And I think the scheduling, the scheduling formula, I think is mostly fine. Yeah. But like, that's the sort of big picture things that they're going to be looking at.

I mean, was it possible that it would be fair to have every, like just have open conference and no divisions, right?

And like, just, but, but, but here will be the idea. You play, you play every team in your conference. So you have 15 games in conference. And then if you're going to an 18 game schedule, you play three games out of conference every year. I like, I don't, I'm not wild.

No, no, no, no, no, no. You deconstruct the divisions altogether.

I mean, it's one solution, but the point is... I don't think they're going to do that, but the point is... I think this is the sort of big-picture thinking that's coming out of it. I saw... you know, on the way out of the meetings, a team president say to somebody else, you know, Hey, I want to be part of the scheduling discussion.

It's going to be a big picture topic for them over the next couple of years. And I think it's going to have way more of an impact than what everybody was focusing on last year with the last week with the Eagles. Right. Because it could, you know, they could lead to some structural change in the way that all this stuff works.

Yeah, that was one was like, do we have a marker where it's like, if there's a three game gap or a two game gap, then that's a stipulation in there. Do you like that? It just feels like too arbitrary for me. I don't know. I mean, there was another one where it was like, you have to be plus 500. If you win your division, you have to be plus 500.

You have to be plus 500 to get the automatic seat. Otherwise, you're in the pool with a wild card.

Right, so they discussed that, which that makes some sense to me too. I think when you're in a league that only plays 17 or 18 games and you're not playing everybody, it's just the records aren't the same. The records don't mean the same thing. And so I don't know if there's a really simple way to take care of it.

That's where it gets stupid.

Right. Yeah. Well, let's see how you remember the Seahawks and, um, the, the, the beast quite game, the Marshawn game. That's the famous one. Right. Right. So they beat the saints. And I think if I remember right, the saints were like 11 and five that year. It was like breeze in the prime of his career. And they had to go all the way to Seattle.

and coming off the wildfire thing and they're playing and the game was weird in Arizona. Like the Vikings were dealing with all these strange circumstances. Yeah. Right. Right. And it was like, and, and, and it, but I, again, like, I think that's what scares, what scares the league is like, if that really worked, that means more teams are going to consider it next year.

Even this coming year, don't you think some teams are going to look at what the Rams did and say, we need to consider that. If we're locked into a playoff spot and we're just playing for a single spot in the seating, maybe we are better off sitting all of our guys. If you watch that game, you go back and watch that game, the Rams looked like they were shot out of a cannon.

The Vikings looked like they were dead-legged. I think that's what scares the league about it. I think it's It's something that's going to be part of like the big picture discussion going forward.

Yeah, it's because of money. I don't need 40 seconds to explain that.

because it's eventually going to be shoved down their throat. And like, I think for the players, it's as much about like, how do we get as much as we can for it? And I would say like my argument, if I were the union, what I would want is you need to get me to free agency quicker. Like you need to, instead of it being four years on rookie contracts, you need to have it be three years.

Because if you think about it, like the difference between 16 and 18 games, right? That's eight more games that you've got to make it through to get to free agency over four years, right? Plus playoffs. And you're talking about the most violent game, right? So that's a real thing that, you know, if I'm looking at it, I'm a player, I'm like, you got to get me to free agency quicker.

The problem is in the NFL is that the union is controlled by the older players who, is that going to be a priority for them to get... a 22, 23-year-old to free agency faster. Generally, historically, it hasn't been the priority for him.

But I think that that's what you would... If I'm the union, I think that would be one of the first things I would ask for is you have to get more of my players to free agency faster and maybe... even like you look at franchise tags and those sorts of things, is there a way we can loosen the reins on those as well?

It's the dichotomy of the league.

Right, right, right. That's exactly it. Like that's a dichotomy of it is like the rank and file in the NFL is making less than a million dollars a year and like is probably going to be out of the league within a couple of years. So they've got to take every dime they can get while they can get it. And yet the guys who are controlling the negotiation are the 1% of the 1%.

I would say the best thing I could say is like the new staff's gotten in there. There was a lot of things broken last year. Josh's offense is pretty complex. He has worked on kind of simplifying some things. He studied the college game a bunch last year to try to make it a little more user-friendly. But the best thing I can tell you, the most encouraging thing I can tell you is that they...

they have not needed to game the offense up to make it work for Drake May. He has looked like a professional quarterback in the meeting room and on the practice field at this point.

I can't remember who it was. There was somebody who tried to top it. The tall blonde lady? There was somebody who tried to top it later in the draft too, who said that they were going to lay their life down for the franchise. I don't know if that's going to become a trend now. Like who can go more Braveheart on like the draft interview? I loved it.

I love how all he wants to do is protect Drake Bay. That's his job in life. If you Google it, there's some really good like LSU weight room content that you'd really like. Like I haven't watched it.

Okay. All right. Yeah.

All right. Thanks Bill.

Why not both? But I think the dark clouds of John Morant falling that hard in the fashion that he did and the way that the game just completely flipped on its head the moment that he left, it's hard for that not to be the top-line takeaway. It's just such a bummer.

I mean, it's certainly better context than winning by 50 plus, right? Like these are the kinds of these are the kinds of runs you want to have to make. I think the Caruso point you laid up top is really important. This idea that he is a crucial part of their closing groups.

And I think showed in this case, you got to play that dude off the floor because he will fuck you up and he will end your season. Like the number of just completely disruptive defensive plays he had down the stretch against bigs, against wings, against guards. he just, like, his defensive range is so incredible.

And the only thing you can really do is try to challenge him to hit some shots, try to, you know, I think push him on the other end to the point that OKC has to make some hard calls, and they just never reach that point because Caruso was that good. And ultimately, I think because Chet and J-Dub were that good, too.

Yeah. I mean, that was like a best case shooting half for Memphis overall. They were hitting everything. It was just, everything was clicking into place, starting with Scottie Pippen Jr. having such an amazing game. Yeah. For them to have to give it all back like this is so dispiriting, is so crushing.

And I think the Jaron Jackson piece of this is interesting to talk about because OKC is a horrible matchup for him. I think his handle is good enough to beat Biggs. It's not good enough to beat the Alex Carusos and certainly to drive into the teeth of a defense like Oklahoma City. That's where you really strain even the more developed part of his skill set from this year.

Honestly, when he took his jersey off coming off the court, he was not responding as if he was going to be coming back out there. You could see he was in a lot of pain. You could say he was in a lot of anguish over that fall. It was a tough scene all around.

The audacity to hurdle Lou Dort is what makes Ja Ja, but it's also what leads to these plays, unfortunately.

I mean, I think just a lot of optimism from the Chet piece of this game, just a monster second half overall that is heartening as far as his piece in that, right? They're always going to have the questions about this sort of secondary offense. They're also going to have those questions, as you say, about what is the best optimal defense to throw at SGA in a playoff setting.

And I think Scottie Pippen Jr. does a good job against pretty much every star he's asked to guard, like real yeoman's work, considering what he's asked to do. You could say the same of a Chris Dunn matchup. Derek Jones Jr. is one of the few defenders in the league who actually seem to have an effect on SGA in the regular season during some of their matchups.

And so the challenge of a team like the Clippers, as Denver is finding out, is the sheer variety of shit that they can throw at you and the way that they can mix up their coverages and their assignments and keep you guessing at all times.

And if something is going to throw the thunder off their game, and I'm not sure it will in a way that they're going to lose a series, but it would have to be disruptive in that way.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's good. It is going to come down to whether you can push him and push them in that way where he has to be more of an offensive presence if you can leverage it. But he's such a good playmaker in a facilitating capacity and he's such a smart cutter. I feel like he always has stuff he can do.

And of course, if you're creating enough havoc on defense to create fast breaks, you're going to win those trade-offs. The issue with Caruso has honestly not even really been his offense historically. It's been like, can he be healthy enough to play a lot over the course of entire seasons? And with the way everything is shortened up now, it really doesn't matter.

You can just put him out there for 25 to 30 minutes a night if the matchup allows it, and he's going to do you a lot of good.

They have five and a half playable guys right now?

Peyton Watson's been kind of a disaster in some of his minutes so far. Yeah. If Russ can't play, this is the thing about all of the hand-wringing about the highs and lows of Russell Westbrook. They just straight up need his minutes more than anything. They can't afford this much Julian Strother as they're going to have to throw out there if Russ can't go.

And overall, the construction of the team... to your point bill does not feel like one that would give you a lot of confidence if you're Nikola Jokic, if you're Jamal Murray, if you're Aaron Gordon with one functional calf.

I don't know how you watch the team around you not close out to shooter after shooter after shooter and think, oh, we're just a couple of effort plays away or we're a couple of strategic tweaks away. This feels like a chasm in the series that's developing. I think in part because the Nuggets, they just look shook by the end of this game.

It's just not a good recipe for him.

We're trying to figure out who did this.

And me, to be fair.

I feel fine. I feel like it's a regular season award and I will sleep soundly at night with that knowledge.

Or to get two functional rotation players for Michael Porter Jr., right? Denver does need depth in such a bad way. They do need shooting. They need the stuff that, at his best, MPJ is able to provide. Right now, he's clearly not at his best. Maybe he's not at his best consistently enough for the salary slot he takes and the role you're asking him to fill on the team.

But I don't know, their problems cut so much deeper. Like, they're just not going to go on any long runs if this is how they're going to defend. And functionally, the core of the team is not going to get dramatically better in that regard unless you start making some pretty dramatic moves.

It was incredible to Billy. You're saying Jokic is passing in the first quarter really was awesome, like high level Jokic stuff. What you would expect from a player of his pedigree. You watch them go on a run. You're seeing him set up these guys with all these no look passes. You're like, OK, Denver's really got something. You look at the scoreboard. They're up four points.

I just think the Clippers have done such an amazing job of just chipping away at all of these Nuggets runs. A lot of that is James Harden in particular, who played amazing basketball today. Kawhi Leonard wasn't even that good, and it just did not matter as far as the Clippers' consistency of scoring went.

So they've just been able to mitigate every little bit of something that the Nuggets have put together. And when you're in that position for Denver, it just takes all of the wind out of you.

It's how deep the league is. It's also some of these teams, especially in more of the mid and small markets, running scared of what the apron is going to mean for them and preemptively trying to get ahead of some of these problems in the way that Chris was talking about. It wouldn't have fully saved the Nuggets.

And there's some parallel versions of that for the Bucks where, if anything, maybe they've been a little too aggressive in steering into the skid of their finances. Maybe they've been too aggressive in steering into the skid, certainly of the age curve, right? Of leaning on someone like Dame Lillard to be Giannis' primary running mate.

You couldn't have anticipated the blood clot, but you could have anticipated some of the gradual decline year over year that a small guard is going to have naturally. And so then you end up with Giannis Antetokounmpo. You end up with Nikola Jokic surrounded by teams that are like fine, you know, pretty good. And because they are so amazing, well,

at some points trick you into thinking that they're probably a little bit better than they are. And that's a really dangerous place to be at a team. It's hard to take an honest assessment of who your 6th and 7th and 8th guys are when every time they're shooting an open 3 from Giannis or they're getting a backdoor cut from Jokic. It's hard to take stock of your team in those circumstances.

Yeah, I mean, you joke about the Simmons part. The Clippers winning his minutes so decisively is a damning a piece of evidence. Like, that is really where you are if you're the Denver Nuggets is you're straight up getting embarrassed by the Ben Simmons zone defense minutes. And Jokic is on the floor for a lot of those, right? And you're still trying to figure it out.

You could see them trying to cut behind it, trying to, like, work some angles. None of it felt sustainable. None of it felt like they ever got into an actual rhythm. Breaking down, I repeat, a Ben Simmons zone defense. That's the series right there.

You are coming to this with trauma, I will say, given last year's playoffs.

I'm becoming a little radicalized, I gotta say. I have a quite high tolerance for James Harden-esque theatrics. I'm mostly fine with it.

This is the thing, and I think the juxtaposition of him specifically against Asard Thompson in the series, who's just playing good, wholesome defense, but with a hyper-athletic frame. And you're just seeing him get baited into sometimes dumb young player shit and sometimes inexplicable non-calls that Jalen Brunson gets the benefit of.

I will say, I thought the first half in this game, Jalen Brunson was participating in every version of that possible and trying to steal every one of these calls. I thought he cleaned it up a lot in the second half. And I thought that some of what we were talking about in terms of the shot distribution paid off too.

Like he just looked really fresh and was such a huge part of them rebuffing all of these Pistons runs in part because he wasn't trying to sell these dumb fouls every single possession and hitting the floor every single time. At some point you can, you are allowed to just play basketball. And I like when Jalen Brunson just plays basketball.

I like when he draws some fouls too, but we need a little bit of shame, just a modicum of shame.

They are close, but I came away from this game, which is a two-point game, feeling pretty confident about the Knicks margin for error because everything you laid out is true. Like those are all elements of the game. Some went well for Detroit, some didn't. It kind of all came out in the wash for them.

For the Knicks part of it, I thought the Knicks just straight up botched their pick-and-roll defense for a huge portion of this game. Just were not on the same page at all. They got nothing from their bench through the entirety of this game. They got outshot from three. They got out-offensive rebounded. And they still win, squeaking it out.

But down the stretch, it really did feel like I trust Jalen Brunson to make these plays. I trust even Carl Anthony Towns to make these plays, who he had a tremendous game overall. And to the idea of whether the shot distribution was intentional or not, Cat coming out super aggro. You can usually tell really quickly kind of what's in his head. He kind of has it all out on his sleeve.

And his intention to make his presence felt on this game, I think, changed a lot of it early. And that then opened up for Jalen Brunson to do a lot of the closing late. Clutch player of the year, Jalen Brunson. Oh, yeah, I forgot. A real award that exists.

I did see it. We discussed previously, Bill, you had Jason Tatum third on your ballot for clutch player of the year.

He's only 19. He's only 19. I'm not disputing it. I'm just saying I saw the full voting and there was exactly one third place vote for Jason Tatum for Clutch Player of the Year. So congratulations for working your way into voting history.

Yeah. Even what we were talking about as far as Jalen Brunson overextending in the previous games, some of that is a Tibbs style of offense as well. Some of it is Jalen Brunson. Some of it is a guy like Cat who can sort of ebb and flow in these games and doesn't always claim his spot as far as his role in the offense goes if he's not really focusing and thinking about it.

I think Tibbs is such a weird coach because he cleans up so many things for you, but he also so clearly leaves all of this other low-hanging fruit that some other coach could come in and do and make your team a little bit better in these particular ways. For example, I remain stunned by how little 1-5 pick and roll the Knicks run. Jalen Brunson and Carl Anthony Towns are your best players

it almost doesn't matter who is guarding them. You can do that anytime you want. And certainly every second that Jalen Duren is guarding Carl Towns, which was a lot of the second half after the Pistons kind of switched that matchup. Why are you not running pick and roll at Jalen Duren every second he's on the court?

Lots of options.

I respect Tibbs a lot. I think he brings a lot to this team. But there is something to the idea of the formula maxing out at a certain point.

I thought B-Ball Paul was trying to get ejected. Like, what was that?

KCP versus Al Horford.

Pretty amazing stuff. What about Draymond with each and every rocket?

Completely separate arguments and frustrations with all of them somehow. And I appreciate his ability to compartmentalize personally.

I would challenge any human being to try to move fast enough while rotating their body to beat Ja Morant to a quick twitch spot in order to even try to undercut it. It's just not a realistic human thing to do, even for Lou Dort.

It's like, oh my God, it's busted wide open. Well, they tagged in Gogo Batase. That's what happens after he comes into the game.

He's aged out of Swayze. Yeah.

Yeah, I would like to think that Pacers-Bucks is going to be fun and competitive and maybe have a spin on that series. I just don't really see what levers the Bucks can pull to really change things there. They kind of are what they are, and Giannis is going to be amazing, but how do they really make anything happen?

Versus we clearly know how the Wolves make things happen, and it's hit a fuck ton of threes, make really sharp decisions with the ball, and counteract at least some of what the Lakers have going on on the other end.

They're not that bad in crunch time, for the record.

They're probably about average.

Yeah.

I mean, their defense was pretty incredible with that group. But yeah, the more times you have to do that repetitively and the more times you're doing it and giving and a chance to look at it and see how to break it down and they're going to film sessions in between is going to get harder and harder. And there's no alternative, right? There's not the option to just play Jackson Hayes 35 minutes.

You can't do it. So all they have to do is stretch out Dorian and Rui and LeBron as much as you possibly can. And I thought LeBron was

awesome on defense in particular in that game he was great ultimately the Lakers I mean they didn't light the world on fire with their own scoring they won that game because they locked the Wolves up and they forced a team that's a little shaky in its decision making to make some characteristically Wolves mistakes

Even if you had him, would you play him over Davion Mitchell? Who's I think is just a better player at this point.

I mean, I think he's in a... I think he's in a... Like, he's still pretty injured, I believe.

Honestly, pretty sick.

I'm trying to think of which of these series can get... I feel a little disoriented because the series that we were loving are now also stilted.

If Jimmy Butler doesn't play, if the Clippers keep really accelerating into this series, is there anything else in this first round that we're really psyched about other than... We've already talked about it a little bit, but I do want to see the Wolves counterpunch. I do want to see what they've got. I think that's probably the most interesting next step for me.

Clippers, and I would say Thunder were impressive today. The thing is, they were already so impressive. You know, the Clippers, we wanted to see how they stacked up against a team like Denver so much. And they've had all the answers, right? The fact that they're dictating all the terms of this series so far is really demonstrative at this stage in the playoffs.

I don't know that I've seen a minute go by in the series where someone's arm isn't around Steph's hip, just like locked in, holding him in place as he tries to cut around the court. It's just, he's always had some of that where defenders are allowed to get away with things with Steph that they wouldn't be in any other context.

Or if he had the ball in his hands, as you're saying, it would be officiated completely differently. Somehow he still busts loose as long as they have enough bodies to make their lineups work. And without Jimmy Butler, if that's going to be more than game three, I just don't think they have the bodies to make the lineups work.

We're in a very healthy place. I'll say, too, the Pistons-Knicks game today, it was refreshing to see the game end and both teams are just furious with the officiating. The backcourt violation for Brunson, as you said, Chris, was cited chapter and verse.

Just something for everybody to be pissed about.

We got The Last of Us going on. We got your friends and neighbors going on. There's some pretty solid TV happening right now.

You're a Birkin guy?

almost perpetually. But I think some of that is the struggling out of the gate earlier in the season, the skepticism that Chris is talking about in terms of, you know, like their playoff run last year, I think felt so fluky to a lot of people based on the injuries in the field, based on some of the opportunities in front of them. It felt blazery. It felt a little blazery. I think that's fair.

But I also think they seized every opportunity in front of them. And I think they've continued to do that and really righted the ship, not just offensively, but defensively. So I am happy to be neck deep in Andrew Nembhard tape and to be an advocate for the Pacers here on a national platform. I think they've been really, really good. I think they're better than most people realize.

And I think ultimately more balanced than most people realize between the depth and the defense that they've played over the back part of the season. There's a really good team top to bottom.

That's where I think the Dame return is such a huge deal. It completely changes the matchup. It also changes it from, I am a battered man who had to carry this team over the finish line for the back part of the season. I'm dragging Ryan Rollins on offense to make this thing work. And now you have potentially a really potent shot maker returning to the field.

I thought before the Pacers were going to win in a fairly short series. I picked Pacers in five thinking Dame was not going to play. him coming back at some point buys them time. I just don't think they have enough secondary and tertiary answers. Dame, in whatever state he's in, is going to be out of shape, out of rhythm, coming back into it.

Already has had kind of a weird season in terms of the actual impact he's making on the game. And beyond him, you're like, I'm really living and dying with Kyle Kuzma here. And that's not something that I like to do personally, but live your life.

The heroic language that reminds me of in Shams' report about Dame coming back, amazing, colon. It was like the language of the blood thinner thing, which is amazing, is very impressive. I have no idea how he's medically cleared to play. The framing of it from Shams, with all due respect, was a little bit like Trump's annual physical to me.

That was the kind of vibe I was getting about like, everything's great.

I mean, that's kind of why I don't want to over-index on that Clippers-Warriors game too much, because the Clippers just became one of the toughest matchups for basically every team in the Western Conference field over a matter of like five weeks. They're a really tough Jokic matchup.

Like, Zoo plays him pretty well, I think gives them a chance to play it honestly if they want to try to do that, and I suspect they will. This feels like a temperature check series to me on how you feel about Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr.

Long term, long term in particular, but even in within this series, like we know Denver's depth is an issue. We know that they're not once they go beyond their seventh guy, even sometimes their sixth guy, to be honest with you, things can get dicey. But if Jamal Murray isn't fully healthy and he's kind of inching his way back and more or less play off Jamal Murray, they're going to have problems.

And if Michael Porter Jr. has those games where he's a little spotty and the shot isn't hitting and all of a sudden he has 11 points in a mostly ineffectual game, that's a huge problem for Denver against this Clippers team that all of a sudden just has all of the pieces to put it together.

I'm trying to talk around it. I'm trying to be nice.

Aaron Gordon erasure, but largely I agree with you.

We have.

With Harden, too, honestly. Harden did not have great games against the Nuggets this year, but Kawhi didn't play in any of them, if I believe so. Having Kawhi on the floor dramatically changes every matchup, changes the defensive priorities. And in particular, I like to tie this into what you were saying, Bill, about Jokic and foul trouble. It's not just like battling Zoo on the block.

It's not just fighting him, fending him off for rebounds. It's you're going to be in a ton of pick and roll all night because James Harden is going to have the ball that is going to be his primary use. Like you're going to have to hang in that and not get too handsy along the way. And every foul for Jokic could mean a lot in the same way that every foul for Zoo could too.

They can get away with playing Batum at the five sometimes, especially the non-Jokic minutes are such a wild card in terms of what kinds of fake centers you can throw out there. I don't see a reason why that has to work that way.

I think Murray could be on the table, too.

Different financial commitment for sure. But I think if the Nuggets lose, and granted, this is a series they well could lose. Like a 4-5 in which both are quality Western Conference teams. It's not like a disgrace to lose to the Clippers. But clearly this is a team operating with incredible urgency that sees some pretty dramatic changes in its future. Why not?

trade Murray or Porter as a part of that if you think the outcome is disappointing. If you think those guys can't take you anywhere, then you gotta start somewhere with the actual roster.

He's one of the best playoff performers in modern NBA, if not overall NBA history.

We led with Steph instead.

Absolutely. I think there's a real possibility, and I'm not willing to stake all of these claims at once, but there's a real possibility that all three of these are upsets. That every non-OKC series in the West is an upset. I'm not just zooming past the Wolves at all. I think the Lakers, understandably, given just the collective brainpower between Luka and LeBron and the way that they...

really rip you apart over the course of seven games, deserves a ton of respect and a ton of deference as we're kind of parsing out what's going to happen in this series. Ant is still pretty unguardable, and you can pressure him, and you can trap him, and you can try to make him do difficult things, but this is a pretty capable, pretty deep team.

They also require you to bet heavily on Julius Randle being good in the playoffs. They require you to really believe in Rudy Gobert's ability to hang in this matchup. I'm probably a little more bullish on that than most. Hold on, wait a second.

I don't think he's a train wreck. I think most of the time that Rudy Gobert gets dragged across the coals, it's mostly misplaced frustration at like perimeter people who can't guard anybody or matchups that happen for like three minutes of a game. But overall, he may not be always playing up to defensive player of the year standards.

It's Rockets Warriors. I just think it has all the juice you could ask for, all the animosity you could ask for. A lot of people who are just kind of assholes to play against, and I mean that in a very complimentary way. So between the jet fuel athleticism against the old savvy champions angle, plus all of that going on, I find it hard to pick anything else.

And frankly, he hasn't been that guy this year or last year really at all. He's kind of come down a level, but he's a good NBA player and he's a good player who has some leverage in a series like this. Like I think he will make an impact on it.

Yeah, I think you hope that that's the case. And from a coaching perspective, you're right. You're doing kind of everything you can to prime your players for that possibility. Bottom line, your team has Anthony Edwards, Jane McDaniels, Rudy Gobert, Julius Randle. These are highly emotional players, if we're all being honest about the way that they operate and conduct themselves.

They've had fights in huddles. They've punched things and gotten injured. This is the core of your team, and you're going to ride and die with some of that emotion, and there's inevitably going to be a fallout during the really, really tough moments. But maybe you can get away with that for a series. Maybe you can get away with that for a couple games at a time.

I think you just have to kind of ride the right wave with it.

I would pick the Lakers, but I think it's going to be long. I'm very tempted to pick a Lakers in seven.

Hell yeah.

This is the thing. I don't know that there's an age at which you are safe from an Isaiah Stewart elbow. If it comes down to that, it really doesn't matter if you're a child. It doesn't matter if you're elderly. These guys are going to spill over. And I respect the hell out of it.

It's a real climb. I think there's places where the Pistons are going to have definite advantages. That's a matchup that really suits Cade. I think he's going to play great. I think overall the orchestration is going to be there. But keeping up with the Knicks and kind of the sheer firepower of what they're capable of, with all of their guys out there is brutal.

And I think even more brutal now, they've had a weird season, they've been up and down, they haven't all been together. They've played a lot together, but in terms of the chemistry of that core five, hasn't been as scintillating as I might have hoped coming into this season. But then you get stretches where Brunson's out and OG Ananobi transforms into this totally different guy.

Maybe there's a huge payoff for that, right? Maybe there's a payoff for those minutes where Towns is in foul trouble, Brunson has to leave the game for a bit or is just kind of being locked up in a certain matchup. Maybe Ron Holland or Asar Thompson's all up in his jersey for long stretches. And now it's the OG Ananobi show.

And I think that's something that the Pistons just don't have counters for, is that sort of layered offensive threat.

Yeah.

You know, I thought it was a real slog mid-season. It just, it kind of lost me.

She's a lawyer who's just trying to make it work. But Nicole Kidman's three episode arc, I thought that was pretty good.

I prefer my Sheridan modern, if I'm being honest with you. I prefer it with, you know, guns a-blazing, but in a more modern setting. Maybe a drug runner is involved, maybe not.

You know what makes all that stuff better is when Dylan Brooks karate chops it. You know, just take some body blows from a Steven Adams screen. You know, Ahmed Thompson blocking your shit. I'm sure it's going to go great for everybody.

What does an impactful person back then look like?

I mean, there's a case in that other than what you may have been led to believe by the way that he just shellacked the Bulls, this team can't really score in most games. And so I don't put it past them on any night to have like a 15-point quarter followed by a 13-point quarter.

I don't think they care. I think they probably... I mean, look, yeah. If given the choice, one of them is maybe a little less physically taxing than the other, but I don't think the Cavs are having a problem with either of those teams.

No, no, no. Like, they would be in. Oh, they would be in.

I think year to year, it's just impossible to know. And so they keep the option open for the most possible good games and some junk is going to filter in. Like we're just going to have to sit through it, I think.

I don't know. Nico Harrison said they were a championship level team for two and a half quarters. What more compelling evidence do you need? Yeah.

I think they'd rather play Dallas.

I think they'd rather play the team that basically doesn't have functional point guards, that's starting Najee Marshall out of necessity, that's running Brandon Williams out there, who's played relatively well, but there's a reason why when you play against anyone who's not the Kings and you're the Mavs, you struggle to get the ball anywhere it needs to go in the half court.

They just don't have enough, not just spacing, but the floor balance is kind of busted. They don't have enough playmaking in general right now. I think that would have been the case even if Kyrie was healthy, to be honest with you, but it's especially true now.

Dagnall's been great.

I did Atkinson one, Emi Odoka two, Bickerstaff three. But Dagnall's been great. Ty Lue has been great. I think Dagnall in particular, balancing all the injuries that OKC had this season, maintaining an elite high effort, high intensity defense over the entire course of the run, and helping their young players get better. That's just not something that a lot of coaches can do all at once.

So he deserves a ton of credit.

Sure.

It's reliant on how you parse 12 shots. That's what the clutch player of the year is.

I had Pritchard. I think Pritchard does a lot of what Beasley does at a more or less similar level. Not quite the three-point volume. What Beasley's doing is pretty exceptional in that way. But a great three-point shooter himself, plus holds his own defensively, plus drives offense off the dribble. I just think he's more versatile than Beasley at the end of the day.

Please tell me that's not a thing.

I mean, he's been great. But he's kind of always been great at those things, though.

I had Zoo actually, number one.

He was good, but I wouldn't have put him anywhere close to all defense last year, for example. I thought he was really solid, but now he's all defense. Now he's putting up massive numbers. Now he's still one of the most impactful rebounders in the league, but has taken an even bigger jump in terms of what that means to a team. I think he's been incredible.

Okay, I'm feeling better. I'm worried. I'm worried where you're going, but I have hope.

I had Mobley, yeah. Bill, where did you have Amin? That was the second team, right? All-defense second team?

Yeah, why not? Yeah.

They're extremely fake.

So JJJ not in either then?

Damn, none. I think he's in the group that could have like a first team argument. I think, you know, it's on that borderline where you're either going to go Amen, Jaron Jackson, Zoo, someone in that category. But I think he's got to be there. I think he's got to be their second team. Sorry, go ahead.

Now we're talking. The Kia reps are just popping off right now.

It's really jarring.

I think you have to flag it and kind of kick the tires on it. But ultimately, you circle back to the fact that this is LeBron James. And you can see so much of the impact he has on the game. He's not a subtle player. He has the ball a lot. He makes incredible plays that no one else can make. I think it's worth looking at. But the Lakers rotation has been so funky all year.

I think there's just a lot of noise in it, to be honest with you.

I think they've kind of always been that team, and they've shown some of those limitations as far as, you know, how much do you trust Golden State in the half court? The good news is, probably you trust the Rockets less in terms of executing their half court offenses. So this matchup works for them, but I agree with you, they're very small. The Kuminga element is such a

Incredible.

Definitely.

It's a lot of Clippers, even for a great Clippers season. Especially at Halliburton's expense. It will surprise no one, given my Pacers advocacy, that I have Halliburton. I actually have him on my second team. Wow. He is the style of play for a 50-win team. Yeah. Like, that's a pretty compelling case. He doesn't have a straightforward one-on-one game and that makes him kind of a funky player.

But he has a comprehensive winning effect on everything that's happening around him. And Harden has some of that, too. I want to be fair. Like, Harden... Harden handling and shouldering as much as he did is what lets you play Chris Dunn as much as you do. It's what lets you play Derek Jones Jr. as much as you do. It's what lets you get away with all these other guys slotting into their roles.

And so the usage kind of efficiency trade-offs of that are not always going to look great for Harden. But the impact is there and it's substantial. But him and Zu over Halliburton... I think the only way to do it is to do what you did, which is construct an entirely new set of rules by which you need to put a center on the team to make it look like an actual basketball team.

What could go wrong?

Such a perfect encapsulation of the Warriors, who I think at every turn have prioritized rowing in the same direction, philosophical alignment, as opposed to, oh, what's like the other counter element that we can bring in to give us a different speed, a different punch? Other coaches, other teams, other structures might welcome a Jonathan Kuminga type under those circumstances.

For Curry more than Edwards. I think Ant for me is like maybe a slight cut below these guys.

But also, is he really the answer? You know, if you're struggling with a LeBron or you're struggling with a Luka or one of these teams that have big wings at any point in the playoffs, if you're struggling with Tari Eason, for that matter, is Jonathan Kuminga really the solution? I'm still a little skeptical of that, even though I respect the talent.

I also voted Jokic. I think Shea did, as you said, every single thing you need to do to win MVP. But sometimes you play at the same time as Nikola Jokic. And I mean, this is where every voter is so different. For me, if you are definitively the best player in the world, and Jokic is, having a season representative of being the best player in the world...

I kind of start there, and you have to have the burden of proof to overcome it. And I think Shea got as close as I can imagine a player possibly getting with the season that Jokic had. Like, that is an incredibly compelling case.

what the Thunder were overall, a 68-win team, how dominant their defense was, and his role in that, especially juxtaposed with Jokic, who has not been good defensively all season. But the way that Jokic carries that team is totally unique. And overall, his production, I think, is just something that is really, really hard to talk your way around or out of.

And so I don't feel great about it, but I also don't think I'm ever going to be at the point where I'm losing sleep over voting for Jokic for MVP. As long as he's playing like this, I'm going to be at peace with that. Even if it means someone who also very well could have and I think will be MVP was not number one on my ballot.

Well, the one quirk in that, though, was that LeBron was the best player in the league and did have that acclaim, and Derrick Rose won. And this, look, Shea is not Derrick Rose. This is not that. Shea is absolutely worthy and not just a narratively driven winner. He has literally everything you would want on the resume.

Bill, you said you had seven Thunder players on your top 100 ballot. Is Aaron Wiggins one of those players?

Oh, I love Kaysan Wallace. Okay, now we're talking.

It's like a luxury for them. Maybe their third or fourth best defender, which I think is a real state in terms of what the Thunder are right now.

One other thing about the Jokic case, too, that I've seen going around. I get that the Thunder ran away with the West, and they deserve credit for that, and Shea deserves credit for that. When was a 50-win season not good enough to win MVP?

I think they're just going to win. I think this is their year.

It doesn't surprise me. I think... I take everything you're saying about the physicality, the athleticism. I want to reinforce both of these things can be true. The Rockets have had an amazing season that has been super fun to watch in terms of a young team that's just well ahead of the curve.

But if you are a young team that's ahead of the curve, I don't want to see a Steph Curry in a series, a Jimmy Butler in a series, a Draymond Green in a series. There's a level of collective savvy there, especially between those three, that has been so comfortable and so natural. We've seen them run these... just seamless three-man actions as if they've been playing together for years.

And that's where I think you get some of those random points, right? If those three guys are in concert, Quentin Post is going to spring open for some threes. Gary Payton's going to, you know, go baseline for some dunks and get some cuts. Like, you're going to get random points out of that stuff because the Rockets eventually are going to freak out.

And so it doesn't surprise me that the Warriors are favored, despite being, you know, the undercard in the series. I just think there's so much respect for them. And there's so much even sentimental value, as you were saying, Chris, like... a lot of us kind of want to see it. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of betters kind of want to see it.

Oh, my God.

You don't know Guy Santos' background. He could have played high-level competitive basketball anywhere.

Yeah. Jalen Green also will think it's him. This is kind of part of the Rockets conundrum is they don't have a natural level set. Like they don't have a place where when everything goes to shit, the ball finds a certain guy. It's a little bit clawing it out. And sometimes it is like Alper and Shangoon making ugly stuff sort of work and fighting through pressure, fighting through good defense.

I don't really trust their half-court offense at all in terms of the first shot. The question with them, as we kind of saw in that Memphis game for Golden State as well, is how many second chances are you giving up? Especially if they stick as big as the Rockets usually want to play. Like,

It may not matter if Fred VanVleet shoots 36% from the field if you're just constantly getting second opportunities.

Is that want for that moment of the Warriors are back, it's another Steph run, is that a healthy thing for us? I struggle with that of are we clinging to guys like Steph or LeBron? Are we clinging to them in the way that I'm clinging to Tom Cruise jumping out of a jet? Is it coming at the cost of something?

You know what I mean?

Part of my criteria in voting for Jokic was, I think he's the best player in the world, and I start from that place, and anyone else who I'm going to vote for instead kind of has to prove overwhelmingly that they are the best player instead, or that they had a superior season instead. I thought Shea got really close, and I couldn't quite get there. Me too. But ultimately, this does confirm that.

I think Jokic has been the best player in the playoffs overall. I think he's been the best player in the series overall. Him or Julius Randle. It's now possible. One of the two. You know, Shea had a tremendous game. And if anything, I thought him running into the wall in this particular game had much more to do with the fact that his teammates couldn't hit shots.

And so all of a sudden, you see the crowd coming in around him. He can't get to the basket anymore. But I thought this was Shea's most successful game

breaking down the defense getting all the way to the rim he was pretty relentless in that regard and I wonder how much of that had to do with he was kind of holding his right hand for a lot of this game it seemed like he injured it or jammed it somehow we'll have to see kind of what happens with that and so maybe he was looking to drive more than shoot but I thought it suited him I thought he did a really good job with that part of his game which has not been a given against this Denver defense for a lot of these contests

I think it was nobody with all due respect to the Grizzlies.

I mean, he doesn't really guard Jokic all that much. They want Isaiah Hardenstein on him as much as possible. So for me, it's more, can Chet do the right balance of... Finishing, like, contested finishes inside against other bigs like Jokic, which we saw he kind of struggled with some of that in this game. Will he have opportunities to beat smalls inside who are kind of cross-matched against him?

And Denver's gotten away with that for parts of this series overall, like putting smaller guys on him for stretches, whether it's man or zone. And then the threes are going to be what they are. Like, that's going to come and go a little bit, and you're going to have to live with that balance. With Chet, it's always like, where are you finding the other offense?

I thought he found enough in this one overall, but... But a new game is a new day. You're going to have to do that all over again. You have to run the court in transition and finish as well as you did all over again. Those two guys are such huge variables in a game like this. Just because we haven't seen them do it in the way that we've seen Jamal Murray do it before.

Probably Michael Porter Jr. ?

He is better than he's playing. I think the trade-off is Christian Brown, regardless of whether he's hitting threes or not, will get you cutting baskets, will get you transition baskets, will play great defense, whether it's at the top of that zone or guarding someone like Shea for the majority of these games. He's going to provide value. When Michael Porter Jr.

isn't hitting shots, he doesn't provide a lot of value. And you saw some plays where he was just getting not only beat on ball, but beat backdoor, beat in rotation. They need that. And Christian Brown, I think, to me, is there. His offensive contributions are going to vary a little bit. You have the rock-solid top three. Then you have whatever you get offensively from Christian Brown.

And then it's, how do we string together enough minutes? to make this rotation work. And not only did you get good Julian Strother minutes in this game, I thought you had really good Peyton Watson minutes for stretches. Offensively, not exactly what you want, but his block on J-Dub in transition in the fourth quarter was one of the biggest plays of the game.

Their collective ability, that group, to survive the non-Jokic minutes at the beginning of the fourth quarter, again, a crucial Julian Strother time, as crazy as that sounds. unbelievably important in a game like this. And so the cascading effect to all the other Nuggets, those are guys I expect a little less of. Michael Porter Jr. kind of needs to give them 20 to 30 playable minutes.

And we're going to see if that's possible for him in Game 7 or not.

Interesting.

I just think you should keep up with the most recent research on these subjects. You should have to go to a conference or something.

The tricky thing with him is you want to give him credit and be forgiving of the energy he plays with. He is attacking these possessions in ways that is undeniable and is valuable in series like the Clippers won at points in this series as well.

But you're seeing a weird tension point with him, specifically with the Thunder, where the Thunder want to get out and run so badly and Russell Westbrook wants to both drive and hit the offensive glass so badly. Available. And he's going and he'll miss a lot of those opportunities. And great, those are opportunities he's creating out of thin air with effort.

But then he ends up on the ground and two other nuggets are trying to hit the offensive glass. And now all of a sudden you have three on one for the Thunder going the other way. And so you have this like push and pull of, yeah, you want those energy and effort plays. but maybe not all the time and maybe not consecutively.

That was big. First quarter he comes in and there are like five straight Russ possessions. Turnovers, misses. I think he got to the free throw line one of those times.

you just have to hope that it offsets at some point, right? That the other plays swing the other way and you get enough good rust to counteract the bad rust, but they're going to have to ride him regardless. Like he's going to have to play significant minutes in game seven. He's going to play a role in game seven. Hopefully he does a little bit better on balance than he did in this one.

Cause I thought, I thought this was a rough rust performance.

No, no. I think we can give Julian Strother credit for this one as the Julian Strother game.

Five guys makes sense. I could easily see this being a Denver game where only six players for the Nuggets play considerable minutes. One of them, as you said, being Russ in addition to that starting five. On OKC's side, I am fascinated by the J-Dub element. I think Crusoe is someone I just don't bet against in games like this. Lou Dort, I really respect the way Lou Dort will fire. Like,

He's being challenged to hit shots. That's going to go whichever way it goes, whichever way the wind is blowing. His confidence, though, does not get shaken. And I think Oklahoma City needs some of that in this game seven. I feel like part of the issue with J-Dub and Chet both, you've seen both of those guys over these last two games air ball threes, like bad, bad misses.

And you've seen a lot of Thunder players up and down the rotation, like missed dunks, missed layups, like very makeable stuff for them. Of course, if enough of those plays swing, they're going to win a game like this one. But moreover, they just need guys who are going to have nerves of steel. I trust Shea in those moments. I trust Lou Dort and Caruso in those moments.

I trust Isaiah Hartenstein in those moments. I think even though Jokic is... Having a Nikola Jokic series, Oklahoma City just isn't in this at all, I don't think, without Hardenstein playing him defensively the way he is. Wearing him down to the degree that one can has been so important. But I think they just need that kind of nerve that you're going to get from Jamal Murray.

And on the Murray side, he almost was a scratch in this game because of an illness. Is Jamal Murray feeling better in 48 hours or is he at the start of something that's going to get worse in 48 hours?

Yeah, maybe not quite that extreme. But the desperation for Denver... And we saw this in Game 5. They just needed somebody who could hit a couple of shots. And they would have probably pulled out that game or at least made it even more competitive. Him coming up with basically a solo run in the most competitive, tensest part of this game just cannot be overstated, the importance of that.

Yes. Yeah, for sure.

That part was true.

That's definitely the model. The mental game has to be a huge portion of it for Denver. In the case of a Nuggets win, it is wearing them down. It is putting enough pressure on the Thunder where they have that second or third quarter swoon where they just go completely off the rails.

I just think with OKC, that's pretty tough to do generally unless you see kind of... Even in this game, they weren't hitting shots, but I thought they stuck to their process. I thought they kept executing on defense. It's a good point.

They are who they are for a reason in terms of their dominant regular season and the Nuggets who they are for a reason in terms of their ability to pull out series like this. And so I think the Thunder are a tough team to take off the tracks. I think that there are going to be times where, yeah, they show their youth more than others.

I would be shocked if OKC gets like really shaken up to the point that they just fold. That just doesn't really seem to be in the DNA of this group.

And as you're saying, Russell Westbrook did have the kind of performance where... He almost lost this game. He played poorly enough for extended stretches that it legitimately swung the momentum of it. And if Denver had to stretch his minutes or his importance even more because Julian Strother wasn't playing well enough, because Michael Porter Jr.

I think that's what it is. Like, I'm not sure if Denver is definitively the second best team or not. You know, assuming the Oklahoma city is the best, like if these are the top two teams or not, but if Oklahoma city can survive this, that they are unquestionably good enough to win it all. I mean, I thought that regardless, I picked them as the, my, my choice to win the title coming in.

I maintain that. I think they will pull out game seven, but this is what you got to do to do it. Like, I mean, this is nut-crunching time of the highest order, a game seven against the Nuggets, and they're going to have to prove it every possible way.

Yeah. How are you feeling?

That was awesome.

Yeah. But he kind of needed to bottom out like this. He needed to be so bad that they had to take him out. And they did. And they benefited immediately from the Luke Cornett menace.

didn't hit a couple shots, we could be having a very different mood right now for this pod.

Okay. That makes sense. Kata is not going to save you. I want to put that off to the side right now. Over the corpse of Porzingis? I think the answer is neither. I think, to me, the takeaway from this last game was they just need to be comfortable with some of those smaller looks. Like the three guards plus Jalen Brown plus one of the bigs. That was a pretty successful formula.

And so as much as you can stretch those guys out, and that's going to be a lot of...

I think it works sometimes, but not others. Not in this series. Yeah, this is not the time for it, unfortunately. So yeah, I think whoever between Horford and Cornette is kind of better in that moment for the lineups on the floor, that's all great. And then otherwise, you're just trying to stretch out the guard minutes as much as you possibly can.

You're also hoping for another Derek White explosion, which he's certainly capable of and is just one of the best shooters in the league, so I'm never going to put that past him. But the combination of incendiary Derek White game One of the best two-way games we've seen from Jalen Brown in quite some time. A good Peyton Pritchard game. A great Luke Cornett game.

Like, that's a lot of ifs that have already been stacked on top of each other.

Yeah.

I think Keita's got to be out of there.

Yes.

It's incredibly hard to do. He played with a level of calm and precision that is not a staple of his game.

We've obviously never seen that level of playmaking from him before. This is a career high, so the high watermark is there. But just in terms of the way you approached it, as you described, where there's an urgency to the way he's playing, there's a force to the way he's playing, but he really never felt out of control.

And the Tatum contrast that you highlight, I think, is really interesting because you're right that he can be a little deliberate. And when you're winning, when you're going to titles, when you're having an incredible regular season, that deliberate pace feels like confidence. And when you're frittering away leads or you're blowing these games against the Knicks, it feels a little too delicate.

It feels a little too indulgent in terms of getting the offense set up. Sometimes you just have to get out there and play and flow. And you have to understand that... with where the Celtics are, they can't leave anything out there. Like they can't leave anything on the floor as far as like options, easy baskets, quick transition, like quick striking plays. They need all of that shit.

And so like they have to go fast and they have to play some more offensive oriented lineups relative to the two big stuff that we were talking about. Like they have to have that sort of Jalen Brown. And clearly he's capable of it, but asking him to do all of that again is a lot. I just want to say that.

I thought those were really good Deuce minutes, honestly. And they desperately needed that. He's had some real cold stretches in these playoffs. And so getting some positive momentum for Deuce, another team that just needs rotation players in the worst way. And one of them is Mitchell Robinson, who is in some cases getting fouled off the floor, in some cases going six of six from the line.

We salute you, Mitch. They're desperate for bodies.

Yeah.

I agree with that. And you can see that, look, from a Celtics perspective, this game five, you're coming off of this catastrophic franchise altering injury. There is a little bit of like a pride that kicks in, an adrenaline that kicks in, a collectivism of like, you got to go out and like make your group proud and your fans and your city, however far you want to extend that. Not in our house.

Not in our house. It's a moment, right? Like the response game after the Tatum injury is a moment. Now all that energy has dissipated. You let down a little bit. You did the thing where you proved everybody wrong. You had this impressive game. Do it again at MSG. I think it's going to be just incredibly challenging. I think that place is going to be rocking. I fully expect...

I fully expect the Knicks to win it, to be honest with you. I just think that they're good enough. I think they will get enough from the OG McHale combo. Or if you want to extend it again, OG McHale, Josh Hart, like kind of two of those three guys have to have some kind of offensive game for them to win usually. And I think they're going to get it in this one.

You didn't think their first, like the first half of game five, I thought they were pretty good.

I mean, sometimes you lose because Josh Hart made three.

It does seem more far-fetched. I think anybody would love to see it, just in terms of any great player reaching those kinds of heights again and again and again as the games increase in stakes, as it becomes harder and harder to do it. That would be a Jalen Brown coronation moment for a guy who just came off a Finals MVP. That would be incredible. I just don't see it.

I don't think he has that much in the cards.

I would agree with that. And I think as far as bigger statements go, too, Jason Tatum has a long road ahead of him in terms of his rehab. And the Celtics have a lot of decisions to make as far as what this team is going to look like during his absence, if they need to make radical changes sooner than later.

For sure.

understandably like it forces you to ask some really difficult questions about the construction of the team if those questions start from a place of holy shit Jalen Brown just did something we didn't even know he could do he occupied a role for our team we didn't even know he was doing at that level that consistently okay then we're getting rid of some of the darkness you know we're staving off a little bit of it I think a lot of those questions still remain but they become a little bit simpler

That's the thing. And I would even set it up differently where it's like if J-Dub isn't performing, then you now need three wildcard players to do well. And so, yeah, you get a good Case and Wallace stretch in the second quarter. You're getting some good Alex Caruso minutes. But like when it comes down to it, Not enough guys can hit shots. You know, you don't get the same like Lou Dort streak.

Wait, in the morning it shaves time off your recovery? Yeah.

I'm just telling you, how does it affect if mercury is in retrograde?

I will believe that when I see it. That's ambitious.

Yeah.

I don't think he's going to be 90% of what he was in April.

It's true. We got you off the ledge. I can't also like knock the drink out of your hand. You know, like we're just trying to cope here ultimately. And I support you in that effort.

I think mostly the same, oddly enough. Look, anytime you're getting to the conference finals, especially in consecutive seasons, that's an incredible accomplishment that has nothing to scoff at. They did it by being the Wolves in every possible respect. Completely overwhelming in some moments. like completely baffling in other ones.

You don't have the same like Chet cashing in on his three. Like enough of those plays have to swing in your favor to win a game like this. And J-Dub just straight up for a player of his caliber, an all NBA caliber guy in the regular season, wasn't good enough to win this game. And that happens sometimes.

And I say that, you know, Julius Randall included as part of that, even though he may well be the best player in the world or the second best behind Ant in some moments, those guys are capable of incredible mistakes and miscues and passes that don't make any sense.

They're also capable of just bullying you and overwhelming you with scoring and collectively as a group, like their defensive acuity and the precision and the effort that they play with. I'm so impressed by, um, So I would say I was kind of feeling this way about them down the stretch of the regular season. They were really pulling together.

Julius Randle, this has been a building momentum now for a couple of months consecutively. And so they've been that kind of team. The question is, are they going to play the kind of opponent where all of those mistakes are going to catch up to them? This is something we were talking about on group chat, too, where it's like they kind of know how to play the Nuggets.

I'm not so convinced they know how to play the Thunder. And so the fact that this thing is going to a game seven and will be a quick turnaround into a series for them, they could have to figure out how to address OKC very quickly.

Yeah. We just saw what Draymond did to like Alper and Shangoon and locked him up. Right.

It was alarming, honestly.