Sam Amick

is I think the root issue of what led to, you know, what happened there.

And that, you know, you got a guy in Kauai who is, you know, obviously legendarily quiet and soft-spoken and certainly a like, I'm going to show you and not tell you type of leader, right?

That's not the end of the world, but you put him next to James Harden, who has been lauded for a lot of things, has had a historic career, but has never been known as a leading the troops type of guy.

The thing that strikes me about the Clippers and confuses me

It's just how they they just stubbornly stick to their plan, no matter the results.

And, you know, you mentioned the reporting from our Joe Varden at the Athletic that that there's a lot of people around the league indicating that the Clippers front office is on track to get extensions.

You know that again, just from a common sense standpoint, that runs a little counter to the like, even even if that ultimately happened.

You know, to do that in the middle of a league investigation when you have pretty serious salary caps or convention accusations coming your way, the optics of that are strange, you know, that that investigation hasn't even ended yet and you're extending the relationship with the group that is front and center.

I mean, there's a lot of layers to it, but it's bad.

And then just the cherry on top is, oh, by the way, the all-star game is in your arena this year.

So all of your, you know, like even life in general, you know, all of your issues coming to the fore when the spotlight is brightest for the world to see is not ideal.

Yeah, we'll see, Dave.

I mean, it's funny because this December 15th date certainly inspires, with good reason, a real uptick in not only conversations around the league, you know, because as you know, so many contracts that were signed in the summer are now eligible to be moved and the pie of, you know, what is available is suddenly larger.

But so it fires up the rumor mill to a pretty serious degree.

But the movement still doesn't come for a minute.

Like so, you know, it's going to take a while for the market, I think, to evolve.

But we have plenty of different situations to monitor.

Obviously, the commingling one you mentioned, we've been tracking since I mean, really past couple of years, but it.

came to a head last summer when he's in the staring contest with the Warriors and restricted free agency, ends up signing a two-year, $48.5 million deal that was structured in a way that everybody involved knew that they would likely trade him around this time, heading into February.

The part that you probably didn't necessarily see coming is that he's had this rollercoaster season with the Warriors.