Victor Wembanyama was selected as a reserve for his first All-Star appearance as the NBA announced the reserves for the game on Thursday. Dave DuFour and Es Baraheni react to the names and debate the biggest snubs. Then, Kyle Neubeck, from PHLY Sports, stops by to discuss the Sixers reluctance to tank, Embiid’s return, and the Sixers trade deadline options. Finally, Kelly Iko joins the gang postgame from the crazy scene in Memphis as the Grizzlies won a hard fought contest against the Houston Rockets.Host: Dave DuFourWith: Es Baraheni, Kyle Neubeck, & Kelly IkoExecutive Producer: Andrew SchlechtAudio Producer: Grayson MoodyRead Kelly’s story on Amen Thompson: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6097869/2025/01/30/rockets-amen-thompson-stats-news-interview-nba/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What are the biggest All-Star snubs this year?
Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily for January 31st, 2025. Coming up, we've got the All-Star Reserve announcements, which means we've got snubs. Hey, it works. Look at that.
Let's go.
We've also got Kyle Newbeck on the Sixers and Kelly Eco on the Rockets. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, S. I can't believe we pulled that off.
Good morning. Hey, chemistry right there.
There you go. That's it. Hey, guys, we got the all-star reserves. We actually have a huge show. Kyle Newbeck from PHLY Sports. We're talking Sixers, maybe trade options, talking about Joel Embiid, when he might be back. So stick around for that. And then we got Kelly Eco on the crazy finish with Rockets Grizzlies and what the Rockets might do at the deadline. But S, we got to start.
with the all-star reserves, the Eastern conference reserves. I'll just run through the list real quick. Damian Lillard, Darius Garland, Jalen Brown, Cade Cunningham, Tyler Hero, Evan Mobley, Pascal Siakam. And I think if you're just saying, you know, who got snubbed, who's missing is really what it is. It's not, I don't want to do the whole, Oh, take this guy off.
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Chapter 2: Who should have made the All-Star team instead?
You know, we're not haters here, but yeah. If I'm saying who's missing, it's got to be Trey Young, right?
Yeah, I think it is. You know, the Hawks are still in playoff position. I know they've been struggling recently, but Trey is leading the league in assists. It always seems like coaches are the ones who discredit Trey, which is an interesting thing. And I know he took to social media to talk about that earlier today, too. So he kind of feels slighted with what's going on. But I agree with you.
Trey is the guy that jumps out to me. I know people will talk about LaMelo Ball. As a potential option just because he's putting up the numbers and led the fan voting for guards in the East. Is there a conspiracy against LaMelo Ball? I don't think there's a conspiracy. No, I don't think there's a conspiracy at all. I think it's just the Hornets are 12 and 32.
They're second worst in the Eastern Conference. And so it's tough to get a guy like that.
He's got the stink on.
him and also the numbers look he's having like this experimental season it's not a good season yeah it's not a bad season but it's it's kind of an insane it's fun yeah it's great and he's putting up some some impressive numbers and doing some crazy things i love to watch him play but yeah come on i think i would rather have trey over lamello for whatever all-star stuff yeah but yeah
What about the West? Okay, yeah, the Western Conference also some snubs here, but we got Anthony Edwards on there, Anthony Davis, James Harden, Jaron Jackson Jr., Alperin Shangoon becoming his first-time All-Star, Jalen Williams becoming an All-Star as well, and then Victor Wembanyama, of course. Snub-wise, the guy I'm thinking about, DeMontis Sabonis, Sacramento Kings.
Yeah, and I feel like with Sabonis, he's a little bit a victim of the Kings' lack of success. I mean, I would point to Alper and Shingun maybe getting a boost for the Rockets' success. And the Rockets have been, you know, we're going to talk to Kelly later about them, right? It seems like they're on national TV a lot right now, and maybe that added attention.
But, you know, Sabonis leads the league in reboundings. He's second in three-point percentage, which seems crazy. I mean, this guy is a double-double machine. He's a monster. And look, they have been pretty good since Doug Christie took over as head coach. I mean, you know, they kind of turned the season around, and Sabonis has been a big reason for that.
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Chapter 3: What is going wrong for the Philadelphia 76ers this season?
But Kyle Lowry at 38, 39 years old is just not somebody you want to be relying on as every night and pretty big contributor. So he had to play. This is probably a snapshot of the season. He played 17 straight minutes to end their game against Sacramento. Kyle Lowry has gone many games this year where he didn't play 17 total minutes.
It's just crazy. Wow. You know, but I will say this. Look, these guys are still playing really hard, even in spite of the injuries and the lack of success. But, you know, we have been discussing it for weeks. Should they tank? They seemingly are not going to tank. Is that the right call?
Like, do you think that they should have just pulled the plug on the season, try to salvage, you know, the draft pick and, you know, get through it without, you know, suffering further injury to some of these guys who seem to be, you know, so prone to it?
I think the tough thing with making an argument for tanking, and there are a lot of merits to it, especially the protections they have on their pick this year. They run a big risk of OKC just taking their draft pick in a really good class and taking a potential high upside player off the board for them. The tricky part is that you have to sell it to Joel Embiid first.
All this starts with you would have to rule out Joel for the season. And I think there are some people on the outside who think this is a scenario where if you rule out Joel and you say, hey, you're not playing the rest of this year, you come back training camp next year, you get off to a fresh start, it'll help the knee.
But I don't think the issue he's dealing with is like, oh, he's got to get surgery or this is one where he takes – six months off and it materially improves the knee. This is for the rest of his career, a management issue. He's going to have problems like sort of similar to what we saw with Dwayne Wade, right?
Like Dwayne Wade, after a certain amount of time, the knee would swell up and he'd have to manage it. Or, you know, Chris Paul has played without a meniscus in one of his knees for a long, long time. And again,
transparently he's probably a little more serious about the day-to-day care of everything because he's also a much smaller guy too yeah let's not forget that joel is a massive human being you know you know a hundred pounds difference also yeah yeah yeah so it's it's not serving joel or at least joel's need to say we're giving you the rest of the season off this is a a It's pain management.
It's swelling management. It's all kinds of different things. And he has tried to put himself in position from a... He's lost a lot of weight. He's slimming down. He's trying to put less stress on all that. But that's the main reason that I don't think you can throw in the towel. It's like... this guy is going to have to deal with this problem the rest of his career.
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Chapter 4: Should the Sixers consider tanking for a better draft pick?
quite a bit is santi aldama in memphis right he's a guy that they didn't they didn't get the extension agreed to he'll be a restricted free agent this summer he's on a i want to say he's around like eight million dollar contract and they have a bunch of guys the sixers in that range where they could do a one for one salary type swap and then say hey we'll give you a first round pick and then yeah the grizzlies don't typically like to pay the tax for guys right so
Yeah.
Yeah. So it's a guy that he's a versatile front court guy. You can play him next to him. You can play him as a center at times. He can help out. You know, Yabu's had to play all these center minutes like that's the type of move. Like it's not a big swing. Right. But it's a guy who is good now and you think can grow into the future like that.
If they're going to make a buying move, I would keep an eye on some stuff like that. But I still don't know that it's clear that they're going to buy, right? You mentioned Yabu and Eric Gordon. Yabu Sali is probably the most interesting decision they have at the deadline because they really don't have salary flexibility to bring him back. He's having a great role player season.
I think it's going to be a test of, and I hate getting into like the math and the CBA and all that. It's like very boring to talk about, but how is that going to impact the market for middle-class players like Yabusele? I think we saw last summer, a lot of those guys are getting squeezed. There are only so many of those mid-level contracts to go around.
So maybe you can end up keeping them and stealing them, but otherwise it probably would behoove them to say, Hey, if we can get a few seconds for this guy, that's probably worth it for us as we try to retool moving forward.
Yeah, especially because, you know, you run into a situation where some of these guys, maybe in the offseason, you want to move them. Having those extra seconds to attach gets them off the books pretty easily. Kyle, you guys can find Kyle wherever you listen to podcasts, over on YouTube, PHLY Sports. You guys do live streams after every game, right?
Yes, we do pre-game and post-game for every game. We have five shows a week. So if there's four games, we'll have one off-day show. But we are round-the-clock Sixers coverage. We got our written stuff as well, where we'll have a lot of stuff with the trade deadline coming up and all the balls in the air for this group.
Yeah, guys do a great job over there. Rich Hoffman, Derek Bodnar, Kyle Newbeck. Thank you very much, man. Guys, stick around after the break. S and I are going to catch up with Kelly Eco after Rockets Grizzlies. Man, that was crazy. The Houston Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies played a basketball game last night. The Rockets only play crazy games. They only have crazy finishes.
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Chapter 5: What are the Sixers' options at the trade deadline?
Yeah, Memphis is on the other side, right?
Yeah, Memphis is a top two, top three pace team. You have a difference in ideologies in terms of Fred who wants to, he's more methodical. He wants to dribble the ball. He wants to get guys in the right spots. You got guys like a man in jail who want to go 150 miles an hour. Alperin is probably more of the Fred mold in terms of patience. And then it's just like,
Sometimes you see these young teams, they get into these sets, and like you said, Dave, they want to run, but by the fourth quarter, there's no time to catch your breath, and then you're playing against another team that also has athletes. Jalen Wells, underrated athlete. Desmond Bain, underrated athlete. Jaren Jackson Jr., underrated athlete. This is probably the best matchup
that you could have for Houston in the Western Conference because the Grizzlies are physical. They're aggressive. They might not be as good. They're still a poor half-court offensive overall, but they have enough speed to get them through four quarters. And even though Ja wasn't playing, they're still pushing the ball. Yeah.
And you have Lawrence Bases, you have Santi, you have Leonardo, who was great tonight. I think he had, what, 22 points? 22 points tonight. You have enough shooting to at least sustain you against a team like the Rockets who can't combat you with that three-point arsenal. So it's really a possession for possession game. And even though tonight they scored like 72 points in the paint,
It's just rim run after rim run after rim run after rim run, and you can't – there is no play and beat. So your only hope is to see if there's any individual brilliance that you can get from a Fred or a Dylan or an Ahmed. And you saw what happened in the fourth quarter. Or Dylan hit 10 threes. Yeah. And you saw what happened in the fourth quarter, the last two positions of the game where –
They're trying to draw up a play for a man. Memphis can already see it coming a mile away. They just pack the paint. You have to kick it out to Fred, who is forced to take a step back three or step back. It's just not great. It's not good execution.
And that's going to cause you issues in April, in May, if you don't have enough firepower, if you don't have enough release valves to find you good to great shots in the fourth quarter.
I think one of the interesting things for me when you mentioned the release valve, to credit the Rockets, the last couple of weeks, they've won some really, really impressive games.
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Chapter 6: How can the Sixers recover from their injuries?
Demar is right there. Fred and Demar back on the same team would be funny.
And it might not cost you a lot. It might not cost you a lot. It might not cost you a lot. All right. I'm pretty sure there are better options out there, like maybe go get a – make a call about Herb Jones or Trey Murphy or, you know, one of those 3 and D guys.
I would definitely call about Herb Jones. I mean, just personally, I would make a call about Herb Jones.
But if you watch them, it's like their issue – sometimes it actually is their ball penetration at times.
Yeah.
Like if teams want to wallop them in and he doesn't have the ball handling yet to break that down for a secondary move. Right. Jalen still has to bulk up. And we saw today whenever he tried to go left, Jalen Wells is on his hip. Yep. It's difficult. So you need a guy that's savvy that can get in between the lines and who's kind of an orthodox player. DeMar has been that for years. Yeah.
And I think, Thank you. No, on paper, it's not the sexiest fit because Herb Jones is probably a cleaner analytical fit. But, you know, it's worth a shot.
You need the guy, Kelly.
Yeah, you need the guy.
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