The Thunder Win in Seven: Their Place in History and a Look at Their Future. Plus, Haliburton’s Injury, Durant’s Trade, and More With Rob Mahoney.

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All right.

Welcome in to the Zach Lowe Show coming up.

We got a whole bunch of stuff to get to with the one and only Rob Mahoney, one of my favorite guests.

We got the Oklahoma City Thunder Champions.

What comes next for them?

It's a little scary.

for the rest of the league, to be honest with you.

Tyrese Halliburton suffers a basketball tragedy on the biggest stage, what it means for the Pacers, how to digest what happened last night.

It was just a very strange experience watching a game that you were that amped up for and that looked like it was like, we're gearing up for an epic right here with Tyrese going crazy.

And then that turn of events and just sort of how to digest it and what happens to the East from here.

Big offseason storylines Rob and I are going to talk about.

And one of those is the sort of void in the East that got even deeper.

And Kevin Durant got traded.

We're going to dive deep into that.

Is it a good move for Houston?

How sad of a move it is for Phoenix?

Did Miami miss the boat?

Did anyone anyone else miss the boat?

Did Minnesota miss the boat?

Can Houston win the championship next year?

Because that's the bar.

Would he trade for a 37-year-old superstar?

We're going to get into all of that on the Zach Lowe Show coming up now with Rob Mahoney.

Hope you enjoy it.

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Welcome to the Zach Lowe Show.

It's Monday morning.

The Oklahoma City Thunder have capped maybe the greatest rebuild in the history of professional sports with the 2025 NBA title.

They are the most well-set up, well-positioned team to win now, which they just did, and win in the future, which they will keep trying to do.

Maybe in the entire history of professional sports, at least in leagues where there's there's a cap on how much you can spend sam presti has done a masterful job transitioning from the big three era of harden russ durant to durant leaving to russ and paul george and that thing breaking up two down years rob bahoney that's all they had two down years that netted Josh Giddy after a crushing lottery disappointment where they could have had two top five picks and ended up with none.

And Josh Giddy, of course, nets the final piece of the puzzle, Alex Caruso.

And then then another down year where they get lottery luck the other way and get Chet Holmgren, who blocked 17,000 shots last night in game seven of the finals.

And, of course, J-Dubb, who is neck and neck for finals MVP, or like maybe not quite neck and neck.

And if there's any team

in the NBA

who should understand the fragility of all this,

the difficulty of winning just one NBA title, the resistance you have to have to thinking about, well, we we could win three in four years or four in five years.

It's the team that made the 2012 finals with James Harden, Kevin Durant, and Russell Westbrook at about the same age as Jay Dubb and Kasen Wallace and Chet Holmgren and this army of young guys that are coming up,

and then did not make it back again for 13 years

and saw that team piece by piece by piece broken up by self-inflicted trade, by free agency, by other trades, by atrophy, by whatever.

And they got a reminder of the fragility of everything last night in the first quarter of game seven.

A game that I assume, Rob, you like me were just,

I was the most hyped for this game of any game,

at least since 2016.

And Halliburton comes out like a house of fire.

Three threes.

Oklahoma City's defense, you know, they're going to be up to the challenge.

And that was the one unsolvable riddle of the NBA this season.

This is one of the greatest defensive teams of all time, if not the greatest defensive team of the modern era.

And you know, they're going to be up for it.

The Pacers look up for it.

You know, the Pacers aren't going to be phased by the moment, by the crowd, by the stakes.

They just play their game.

They're coming out loose, fancy-free, launching threes, running, doing all their like pass, pass, pass, pass, pass.

Can you keep up with the ball?

You can't.

And then Tyrese Halliburton goes down.

Again, a reminder of the fragility of all of this, and you can't count on anything.

And the reason why, you know,

this is a basketball tragedy that happened last night was: A,

I think everybody, like when that happened,

my first thought was, oh my God,

I can't believe I'm watching this.

And actually, Rob, people made the Durant comparison, and we're going to talk about the link between the calf and the Achilles and coming back for the finals with a calf injury or playing with a calf injury and having this happen.

In my gut, like in my basketball soul, the moment that immediately struck me like lightning was actually the Klay Thompson injury in game six of that same series.

And even that, just because it was like,

I can't believe like we have to keep, can we just end the finals?

Like, I can't believe we have to keep playing.

And even that is not a perfect comparison because, you know, Durant was out for like a month before he came back and re-injured the calf.

Tyrese has been playing the whole time.

Clay Thompson was towards the end of game six of the finals.

So not necessarily like everything's at stake for both teams.

Game, this was at the beginning of game seven.

It was absolutely surreal.

And I just, it just absolutely sucks for the Pacers, for Halliburton.

And I think, even, like, look,

again, we were gearing up for what looked like an epic, epic showdown.

And

it just, it does feel like, you know, unfair to everyone that we were robbed of that.

And I think even the Thunder would have preferred to win, obviously, against the very best of the Indiana Pacers.

And it doesn't take away from the Thunder.

There is no Asterisks.

There's never an Asterix.

The Pacers themselves have benefited from injury luck in each of the last two years.

Luck is probably the wrong word, but it's just part of it.

Just like it was Kyrie and Kevin Love getting injured in 2015.

And we can go on and on and on.

It's every year.

It's part of it.

There is no asterisk.

This is a 68-win dominant team who, even with Halliburton in the game, the unsolvable riddle of the NBA season was their defense.

And yet it's a game that 12 hours later, it's still hard to talk about what happened in terms of just putting all of it in perspective.

What is this legacy of this team, that team?

I don't know.

What are you thinking this morning, Mr.

Bohoney?

I'm thinking mostly that we remember NBA champions and we remember title runs by how they feel.

And this one is always going to feel like that.

It's always going to feel like we, as a basketball community, were robbed of something, that we were deprived of this opportunity to see both of these teams at their absolute best going back and forth, that we were deprived of the chance to see Tyrese Halliburton after the hot start he had go on to see what he could make of a game like this, what he could make of a defense like Oklahoma City's, which you're right, has been largely unsolvable throughout these playoffs.

And the season has been tremendous, is worth every accolade, every bit of

any compliment you could pay the Thunder.

They are more than deserving of on defense.

I just wish we could have seen it.

I wish we could have seen that whole process unfold because it's going to change the way people talk about this game and this run, not to put the asterisks on it that you alluded to, but just in terms of the competitive equity, in terms of the experience of watching it, in terms of what it means to go through this sort of process.

Like it doesn't take the trophy away from the Thunder, nor should it.

This is an amazing season.

They are the best team in basketball, without a doubt.

But I would have loved to see that play out in a more organic way.

And to see it happen to Tyrese Halliburton and the Pacers in particular after the run that they've had, I'm almost still in disbelief that it happened in such a devastating way.

I don't really remember anything that happened between the injury and halftime, other than the Pacers were somehow winning.

And by one point, and obviously everybody was shell-shocked.

The Thunder were shell-shocked.

It's unavoidable, and you just have to keep playing in game seven where you're also playing for your entire season, for the entire thing.

It's an absolutely bizarre situation.

And look, Tyrese Halliburton,

no one should get injured like this.

It's three now in the playoffs between Damian Lillard coming off a calf injury, different leg for Damian Lillard, Jason Tatum, no known calf injury that I can remember anyway, and this.

And it just, it sucks, it sucks.

And I think the best way I could put it is when that injury happened,

Even with the Pacers up one at halftime, my general governing thought was the Thunder don't even need to play a good offensive game to win now.

They just need to play their normal defense in Indiana without their orchestrator, without the guy who is their system.

And it was very clear, by the way, how about we just retire the Tyrese Halliburton?

Is he a superstar?

Is he overrated?

Is he any of that talk?

Forever, because you took him out of that game and everything about the Pacers' identity was gone.

It was like, okay, TJ McConnell's just going to have to dribble like a thousand times to get a shot off.

Pascal Siakam has no cracks, no alleys, no gaps to exploit because the guy who opens them all is not here.

The guy who's a threat to pull up from three, from 30 feet, who merits a certain kind of a defensive attention, who plays the most unselfish style of basketball that there is in the NBA and empowers everybody around him to make quick decisions.

He's gone, and their identity was gone.

Their pace was gone.

Everything was gone with it.

So, Tyrese Halliburton is a superstar.

He is not overrated.

He was the,

he, I don't think he was quite like the superstar of the playoffs.

I think Shea gets that honor for the 30 points and all that.

Certainly.

Tyrese Halliburton was, I think, the defining player of the playoffs.

I think the Pacers were the defining team of the playoffs.

Not the season.

The Thunder are the defining team of the season, but of the playoffs in terms of what happened to them was sports magic.

Like something happened to their team.

Even

if you just isolate like January 1, when they started playing really well till the end of the regular season, the numbers said, this is a really good team.

Really good team.

Maybe, you know, a little short of championship contender, a little short of running rough shot over the entire Eastern Conference, that's for sure.

Good team.

Very good team.

Something happened in the playoffs where

an alchemy, a chemistry, a toughness, an unselfishness all coalesced into like, oh yeah, they're just as good as the Oklahoma City Thunder, at least in this setting.

They're just as good as the Cleveland Cavaliers, the New York Knicks, the Boston Celtics.

Like, this was a real thing.

And I said last night with Bill, I was talking to a GM of another Eastern Conference team yesterday about other things.

And I just asked him, like, what do you take away, win or lose, win or lose from the Pacers?

Like, what's your takeaway as someone just watching this?

What are you guys talking about?

in the war room when you talk about the pacers and he said hope like hope that you know know, you can do this in different ways.

If you find the right players with the right attitudes and the right skill sets that all mesh together, you can create a team that is more than superstar one plus superstar two plus star three equals champion.

And I just think it was a really special thing that happened.

And, you know,

I wanted the Thunder to have to play a complete game.

to win game seven.

And the reality is they just had to play okay on offense and their usual defense, and they rolled to game seven.

And by the way, that might have been enough anyway, because their defense is this freaking good.

Totally.

I think that was always in the cards.

You know, we talked a lot about game sevens, especially at the finals, are always hyper-competitive, always pretty ugly.

I think there were hints of that to start, but honestly, both teams seemed really geared up and really locked in to begin this game.

I would have loved to see that evolution too, Zach.

We didn't get it.

And I think what I'm missing too, again, not to take anything away from the Thunder, like I want to, we need to fully celebrate everything that OKC accomplished and everything, as you, as you mentioned up top, that they are kind of positioned to continue to accomplish.

But when I think about like the enduring images of this game, there's no blocked by James moment.

I mean, that might be a high standard for any Game 7 to meet.

But the enduring images to me are.

Tyrese Halliburton on the floor in tears.

It's him being helped off the floor with a towel over his head.

It's him in the tunnel on crutches waiting for his teammates.

That's not where I wanted to come out of this game.

I'm sure it's not how the Thunder wanted to come out of this game.

And

for that kind of team of destiny to end in this way is clearly unfortunate.

Like, it's almost impossible to talk about the Pacers without sounding like a coach in Hoosiers, without sounding like

a hokey in a certain respect.

Like, there is a degree of collectivism in what they've accomplished that, yes, is inspirational for other teams and other front offices that you can look to as there is proof that this can work.

There's also proof here, I think, that Tyrese Hallibrun is just one of the NBA's great winners.

And this proof has been building for a while now.

And I wonder

one of the things to come out of this run, I was hoping that by the end of these finals, we could be talking about the Pacers as another team of the future, as a team that's going to be positioned very well for the East next year.

That's going to change a lot with him probably out for the majority, if not all, of next season, depending on what the specifics of that injury turn out to be.

It certainly looks like an Achilles.

But I hope, if not that, at least people people can start to look at last year's Pacers run, in which, let's not forget, they just went straight to the conference finals.

There are a bunch of other really good teams with a little less disbelief, with a little less discredit.

Like, this is a guy who has been to the playoffs twice and now gone to the conference finals and then game seven of the finals.

I don't know how you prove more in your first two playoff runs than that.

Well, I mean, yes, it validates their last their last year's run to the conference finals.

Like,

they've benefited from a little bit of injury help along the way, both.

As they all do, Dame Giannis, the whole Knicks team falling apart last year, the Cavs this year.

Guess what?

They freaking waxed the Cavs this year, waxed them.

Wasn't even close.

Left the Cavs wondering about their DNA as a potential championship.

Like, do we just not have it?

You know who has it?

The Pacers have it.

I thought Oklahoma City was going to win last night in a close game.

My official prediction was 110, 106, Oklahoma City.

You know what that means?

I think the Pacers could have won the championship last night.

I think it was absolutely on the table for them.

I think it was like a 60-40 OKC game in my mind.

I know the line ended up at minus seven or six and a half or something.

I, you know, whatever.

And Tyrese Halliburton is,

there's something, again, I'll say this again.

I was hanging out with an Eastern Conference player at an event last week for like several hours we were together, who is whose team played the Pacers in the playoffs.

And he was like aghast at how

the

television media had largely talked about Tyrese Halliburton.

And is he a superstar?

Is he not?

His first thought was like, why does it even matter?

Um, because the team is winning.

And his second thought was like, I played against these guys in the most intense moments.

They suck to play against.

It's so hard to play against them because of him and how the ball moves and how bodies move and how people move because they know he's going to get them the ball and get the machine moving in a speed that is unmatched around the NBA.

And it's hard to conceptualize because the best players, the A-plus superstars, look like Shay Gilles Alexander.

They're bucketed.

Give me the ball.

I will carry us to the finish line.

He can play like that.

He does now and then.

You know, he had the one huge game against the Knicks.

He had a huge game in this series where he, you know, and the Pacers like when he shoots more.

There's like a his high scoring and highest assist games tend to go together it's just he's a different kind of player they're a different kind of team and they didn't win um the championship and yeah the east is in in disarray um

defense wins championships i guess robs that's good news for the dallas mavericks um

i'm glad they have some good news you know it's it's going to be a tough week for them uh in cooper flagland but i think one thing is as far as that defense goes and as far as the pacers go the unifying theme of these finals to me, how these teams got here, there's a bunch of things they have in common.

There's a bunch of ways in which these were the two most connected teams in basketball this year.

I think that played a huge part of it.

I think what you're mentioning in terms of the effect of what it feels like to play against the Pacers is not so dissimilar to what it feels like to play against the Thunder in the sense that these are teams that strip you down to your identity.

and your core beliefs and your understanding of what it is you think you're running and what it is you think you're doing.

Like the Pacers offense will have you going to your assistant coach being like, are you sure this is our coverage for this?

Like, are you sure this is how we're supposed to be doing this?

And the Thunder, very similarly, will strip down everything you think about the primary creators on your team, about the sets that you usually run, about all the actions that kind of got you to whatever point you're playing the Thunder.

Like these are two teams that force existential crises.

And it was so fitting that they ended up here in the end.

I just hate that now the Pacers have a sort of different crisis to consider as a result of their injury, because I love the effect that they have on other teams.

I love watching people try to figure out the Pacers and are, you know, we talk about the magic of it.

We've talked about their crunch time performance.

There's something of that that's inexplicable.

And there's something of it that's very flesh and blood tangible, that's very psychological in terms of the effect that they have on their opponents.

You know,

before we transition to the Thunder and their place and did what they did this season, which was 68 wins and then 16 more.

Tremendous.

As you're talking about their,

before the series, I picked the Thunder in five.

So add me to the club who underestimated the Pacers and what the hell was going on with them.

Same.

And the way I framed it was the Pacers win with frenzy and depth, speed and depth and just pace, pace, pace.

And they're coming up against the only team in the league who can match them in youth, speed, depth, and frenzy.

And I think what I underestimated in that analogy was these are two very different kinds of frenzies.

The Thunder is just this defensive menace that takes the ball from you.

It's like, we're in your face.

We're going to take the, thank you for playing against us.

We're taking the ball and going the other way.

There's no defense like this that forces turnovers at this rate.

And they forced even more in the playoffs than they did in the regular season.

The Pacers frenzy is a little more subtle than that.

It's a frenzy of movement and cuts and passes.

And it's just sort of, it's like like basketball art that is harder to keep up with.

And at the center of that, and I think it cannot be talked about enough, and it's part of what makes Halliburton both unusual and hard to talk about is one of the things that he's very best at is not doing something.

And the not doing something is turning the ball over.

And it's hard to sort of conceptualize

the value of the absence of something versus the presence of something.

And not only that, the rarity of a team that that passes it this much, plays this fast, moves this much, and plays so unselfishly being an ultra-low turnover team is almost unicornish.

Most of the lowest turnover teams in the NBA are like isolation, boring, slow offenses because they don't pass as much, they don't risk as much, they don't turn the ball over.

Even the seven seconds or less Suns were a pretty high turnover team.

And it was baked in to, in their view, like, this is the sort of consequence for how we play, and we'll take the benefit of it over this and this consequence all in one.

The Pacers have the best of both worlds, and that's because of Halliburton.

It's, it's hard, part of what makes them talk about, hard to talk about.

And it's part of what they lost without him in game seven is all of a sudden the Thunder just were like, take the ball, take the ball.

And, and, and also, the Thunder were already turning Halliburton over much more than usual in this series because their defense is that good.

Man, I'm so bummed about last night.

I was so pumped, and it just, it just took the whole air out of the game.

I know Thunder fans don't want to hear that, and they should celebrate.

And, you know, the buses can run with the paint on them that, you know, was the big storyline before the game.

And they deserve it.

They're champions.

And we can both appreciate them and say that there is no esters and also just be gutted by, like, any human would be gutted for what we did not get last night.

Especially, I think the point you made up, Top, is very important about the Thunder players themselves and members of the organization and coaches would not have wanted to win on these terms as opposed to Tyrese Halliburton being healthy.

Like that's what any great competitor would want is the chance to have that moment and have that sort of duel.

It didn't go down that way.

That's okay.

Oklahoma City Thunder, the champagne will taste just as sweet.

Everything about the celebration will still be terrific.

I think

it is telling though that as you said, like it's very difficult to measure in a case like the Pacers and for a player like Halliburton, measuring the absence of things and the absence of turnovers is always complicated, but it felt telling to me in the series that every time we were talking about what's going wrong with the Thunder, like why, why did they have a lull in this quarter?

Why did they lag during this stretch?

Why is their offense underwhelming at this moment in time?

It was basically always because they didn't turn the ball over as much or they sorry, they didn't force as many turnovers during that period of time.

When their defense is that, it lifts everything that's happening in Oklahoma City.

It carries that

entire roster, that entire organization.

It is a team that is guided by their ability to create that kind of havoc.

As I look back on this series, I'm going to think about that and the kind of slow stranglehold that the Thunder defense was able to put around at least some elements of the Pacers offense to tamp it down to the point that this became a defense first series.

I'm also, not to twist the knife, going to think a lot about game four and a game that the Pacers,

they were right there.

And we were talking about in the moment how that felt like an opportunity loss.

We just didn't understand then the full extent of what that moment may have cost them.

But it could have been a very different series if a couple of different possessions go differently for the Pacers there.

You know, so much has happened since that game, and the schedule allows for so many breaks.

And then the Halliburton thing happens that, you know, what did they

end up winning that game by seven, the Thunders.

So they pull away a little bit at the end.

I'd like to go back and re-watch the end of the game because obviously that was the game when Shay had 15 points in the last five minutes of the game.

An incredible incredible finals close, we should say.

He won finals MVP in that, in that fourth quarter.

That was his moment.

So that's what, two weeks ago now?

And finals time is just like, it's like being at a time warp.

Yeah.

And one catastrophic injury ago.

And I almost forgot until you brought it up that I went into that game thinking there's like a 75% chance this is the entire championship going on the line in this game.

That if Oklahoma City wins this game and it's 2-2,

I could see, I remember I was talking to people like, I bet the home teams just win out from then and it's OKC in seven, maybe OKC in six, whatever.

And the home teams won out and it just happened in a completely unexpected, unexpected way.

I just, again, I want to repeat about the Pacers and why the hope thing resonates with teams around the league.

Tyrese Halburn's an all-star and an all-NBA player.

Pascal Siakam is a three-time all-star, I think.

He's a sometime all-NBA player, right?

Like, he's not a no-brainer lock.

Like, they got a big two in a traditional kind of sense.

And I love Spicy P.

I had him on my podcast six years ago.

Like, the guy's awesome.

And I thought defensively last night, every ounce of sweat and energy he had, he and everybody else, but he was spectacular defensively for the Pacers last night.

And then after that, it's a second-round pick, barely in Andrew Nemhart, first pick of the second round, but a second-round pick nonetheless.

It's Aaron Neesmith, a first-round pick who busted out in Boston and a center who has been in trade rumors since he got into the league, basically.

And then the bench is like, you know, here comes TJ McConnell, basically not in the end, barely in the NBA.

I had to scratch and claw for his place in the NBA.

Ben Shepard, late first-round pick.

Obi Toppins, scrap heap lottery pick, busted out in New York.

It's just...

But they all fit, other than Matherin, who showed up and played his ass off last night.

They all fit a certain ethos and style, and it just added up to something more.

But anyway, any parting thoughts on that?

And then I'm going to talk about the Thunder a little bit.

I think, just in terms of that construction,

I want to talk about the Thunder as far as what we can take away from the team building there.

But I think you're right that there is something to identify with the Pacers.

I just would, I would put a word of caution out there to any fans of other teams, to even people working for other teams,

easier said than done to become the next Indiana Pacers, Easier said than done to identify not just one of

Nemhard and Neesmith and I mean, even Matherin relative to his lottery standing, McConnell, Toppin, like all of those guys, finding the treasure in everyone else's scrap heap is very, very challenging.

And the work that Kevin Pritchard and Chad Buchanan have done to kind of put this team together in a way that makes coherent sense.

First of all, the reason it makes coherent sense is because of Tyrese Halliburton.

And the reason it makes sense because of Tyrese Halliburton is because the Pacers identified in trading for him in the first place and targeting him in the first place that this is the kind of player who can create that sort of unity in a roster.

Not every star can do that.

There are great, one of them just got traded in Kevin Durant.

And it's always kind of an open question as far as like, is Kevin Durant the sort of player whose skill set makes other players make sense?

I think there's degrees to which that's true and degrees to which he's just a different kind of scorer and he kind of can exist in a silo in a way that Tyrese Halliburton never ever would.

And I want to give a ton of credit for that.

I think the Pacers deserve a lot of credit for understanding that this combo guard with a funky shot in Sacramento, who, yeah, had great like advanced numbers and that a lot of scouts seemed to like for like loose intangible reasons was something more than that and was something that could be an anchor point for an entire roster and an entire organization, like in the exact way that Shay has been for the Thunder, to be fair, like a guy who can be the ethos of your team.

Very, very hard thing to find.

And then you have to find every single subsequent piece to make the roster work.

Very, very difficult work, it turns out.

But I do think both of these teams,

obviously, you can't win without elite talent across the board.

Like, duh.

I do think both of these teams, though,

speak at least somewhat to the power of like,

if you have something unusual about your team,

lean into that.

Yes.

If you have, make that your identity.

Identity is the great amorphous word of the NBA.

These teams each have an identity stemming from their core players.

Unselfishness is a shared trait across the board, both teams.

The Thunder drafted just defense, defense, defense, and feel across the board and just tenacity on defense.

The Thunder, the Pacers, we talked about their identity and unselfishness and how it springs from Halliburton.

Sometimes it's a happy accident.

You just get the guy you get, and or something happens on the court that changes your team.

But if I'm

if I'm a team that feels like a young up-and-coming team that feels like there's something a little unusual about me, like I'm thinking just randomly of the pistons, like this toughness, physicality, just lean into whatever makes you different.

Um, because both of these teams are different, adaptable, but different in a way that makes them hard to play against.

Okay, the thunder.

This, what, one thing about that, Zach?

Like, this is, so I went to indiana at the beginning of last season to do a story on tyrese halliburton and the pacers what you just described to be honest is a lot of like if when i'm thinking about writing a story about any team any player specifically teams though it's what does your superstar allow your team to do that other teams can't and That is the sort of guiding principle that led the Pacers to Obi Top in.

That is the sort of guiding principle that brought in Bruce Brown in the first place, who then became Pascal Siakam.

It's the guiding principle that made Pascal Siakam a prime target for the Pacers, right?

This idea of if we are playing a 94-foot game where other teams are not, if we are playing a movement style where other teams are not, there are certain players that are more valuable to us and there are certain players that are less valuable to us.

And I think you really have to think about your stars in those terms about like what is not just like what is unique to this player that can be a little funky in the way that you mentioned, but like how does that reshape the market for the players that are actually good for us?

And who does that suddenly make available that wouldn't be to other teams?

I think it's also part of what drew them to Siakam, who was an obvious trade target.

Toronto was dangling him.

Sacramento looked at him.

Atlanta looked at him.

I think one of the, but both those teams got down the line at some point with him.

And his speed and versatility was an obvious fit for the Pacers and for Tyrese Halliburn.

And yet, you know, you talk to people who are around Pascal and around the team.

When he got there,

he was,

I think, a little bit surprised by how demanding the pace actually was and how conditioned he had to be both mentally and physically to play at the pace they wanted.

And that there's in year two, he looks more comfortable, and we go on and on.

And Toppin, same thing.

Like, as soon as they got him, it was like, oh, so he's just going to sprint up and down the court and dunk the ball all the time.

Like, that's awesome.

And he's made himself into at least a passable defensive player in some circumstances.

And by the way, one thing about the Thunder and defensive identity and all this,

you know,

their best player in their MVP just averaged 1.9 steals and 1.6 blocks in the freaking NBA finals.

Like, what is he?

Akeem Alajuan over here?

Like, that stuff really, really matters.

When you see your best guy, and even when he doesn't block shots, Shay's at the rim a lot, hands up, mucking things up.

When you're Kason Wallace and you see that, when you're Aaron Wiggins and you see that, it's like, I have no, like, that guy's doing that i'm amping it up even more even more um

one point like 1.9 steals of 1.6 blocks from that's crazy what's happening like that's dwayne wade akema lajuwan okay

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The Thunder.

Boy, oh, boy.

You know,

here's the,

we all know that the Thunder are scarily set up for the rest of the league.

And we also all know that this is very fragile and like one injury, one bad thing can undo everything.

And if there's any franchise who knows this, it's a franchise that traded James Harden after making the NBA Finals, I don't think they will make any mistake like that ever again with their core players.

They do have interesting decisions to make down the line to kind of trim the roster, trim the spending, whatever around the big three.

But to me, when I think about this team going forward,

they're obviously very young, and it's been a talking point for a year plus now that, like, well, J-Dubb is still getting better.

Like, does he have another level offensively to get to?

And by the way, everyone kind of poo-pooed the Pippen talk, like, okay, easy, easy, premature on the Pippen.

Like, Pippin's a six-time champion, one of my favorite players of all time.

I've told this story before.

I had, like, didn't talk to one of my best friends from college for two weeks because we got into an argument about Scotty Pippen.

He thought Scotty Pippen was overrated.

And I was like, I can't, I don't even know if I can be friends with you if you think Scotty Pippen's overrated.

What's up, Kevin?

Um,

uh,

I like, I think Jalen, I think

should become like a better offensive player than Scotty Pippen.

As great of a playmaker as Pippen was,

he should be a better scorer and a better shooter than Scotty Pippen was.

I don't think that's outrageous.

And everyone's like, you know, Chet's just scratching the surface of what he can do offensively.

The three-point shot comes and goes and is tended to go, frankly, in the playoffs.

Both of those guys will get better.

To me, the more interesting question is, and it goes back to they didn't even have to play a good offensive game last night to win game seven, is as both of those guys get better as kayson wallace gets better as topich becomes whatever he becomes yeah what if

what if he's good what if nicola topic topic just looks like a good meaningful rotation player next season i think they think he's going to be and there you talk to people in the draft he would have been picked higher had he been healthier and of course he falls to the freaking thunder but the more interesting evolution to me is as those guys all get better

What does that mean for the broader ecosystem of their offense?

Because I think we saw in this series an Indiana team who's a good defensive team, but not a great one, kind of strangle their offense a little bit and bring it.

Like they, they ended with 110.5

points per 100 possessions in the finals, the Thunder.

That would have ranked like almost last or like 25th or something in the regular season.

It was a little predictable, a little dribbly, not a lot of passing, not a lot of threes, not a lot of variety other than some out-of-time out plays.

And that's what reminds you of like, this is still a young team that is all growing together and learning the subtleties of all that.

And to me, that's the off-season project that I'm already digging into.

If I'm their coaching staff, if I'm their front offices, we don't want to become the beautiful game Warriors.

Like no one's asking you to be that.

We don't want to become the Pacers or whatever they do.

But there is a broader sort of systemic evolution that can happen here that can make them even scarier to deal with without sacrificing any of the things that just won them the championship.

Yeah.

If anything, it would tap into into those things, right?

As you're mentioning, like the depth and the versatility of talent is what made this championship possible.

And further exploring it is what's going to make like sustaining that sort of effort possible.

I thought it was fascinating to watch them over the course of the series.

You're right, that in some ways the Pacers had them sort of under wraps or at least contained in terms of the most explosive elements of their offense.

They also brought some things out of the thunder in terms of Shay and J-Dub screening for each other, for example.

That's what I'm talking about.

And I thought, you know, we talked about this on group chat a little bit coming out of last night's game, but the number of pacers-esque, like, ghost screens that J-Dub was running at Shea, not something you saw a ton of in the regular season from the Thunder, not something that's been like a staple of their offense.

And now all of a sudden, it's like, oh my God, this is a real weapon for them.

And why can't that happen 15 times a game if the matchups dictate it?

And frankly, like, why can't J-Dub and Shea become better back-to-the-basket players when that action results in a little guy on them?

Why can't,

you know, I've talked before about how a lot of the out-of-time out plays they would run would leverage Shay as a screener off the ball to get him favorable matchups, to see if the defense would switch, or if they didn't switch, if someone would come open on a cut to get Shay the ball at the nail.

Like,

why can't that become more a part of like your offense in the run of play and not just out of timeouts?

I think all of that is on the table for them and it lifts their ceiling even higher than it is right now.

And I think Chet is a huge part of that too.

Like he's going to have to get better at a couple of different things offensively.

I think most importantly, his ability, as he has this in common with many bigs in the NBA today, to leverage smalls.

When he does get the mismatches inside, when he does have those advantages, like he needs to find whatever his version of that shot or that go-to move is, he has it sometimes.

He's long enough that he can just finish like over and around some people, but we'd love to see that sort of evolve into a more consistent weapon within their offense to turn, you know, even taking what Miles Turner did successfully over the course of this playoff run, less so in the finals, but over the course of this playoff run in terms of the duck-ins and things like that.

Like, I would love to see Chet have that kind of overall development, but his ability to put the ball on the floor could change their offense.

His ability to attack mismatches could change their offense.

Like there's so many different opportunity points for the Thunder that it's almost dizzying to think about two years out from now.

what this team is going to look like.

Like this was not a super team construction in the way that like Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosch and LeBron coming together was, in which all those guys have to figure, now figure out how to play together.

But in a way, J-Dub is like just becoming a star and learning what it means and what that entails and how that kind of opens things up for him and everyone else.

Shay has kind of established himself and leveled up in so many ways that these guys are like still kind of getting used to what it means and what it can be.

I'm so curious to see how different their offense could look two years from now.

If it's just going to be a night and day comparison or if it's going going to be kind of an organic tick forward, a couple of things.

Number one,

it can't be emphasized enough.

Like they are, as much as it feels like they're on schedule and the journey has gone step by step to this point, they are like wildly ahead of schedule.

They won 40 games two seasons ago.

They were under 500 and lost in the play.

And now, Chet missed that whole season.

That was his rookie year.

But to go from 40 to 57 in the second round of the playoffs, that's almost a bigger leap than the one they made this year from 57 to 68.

They are ahead of schedule.

Like, they should just not be this good this fast.

On Chet,

I think you nailed it on a number of levels.

Number one,

if there's something it feels like they're just scratching the surface on, it's the spread, pick, and roll with Chet at the five and how best to leverage his skill set with the three ball kind of not being there yet, but still being enough of a threat that defenses think about it.

Two, should should he roll hard to the rim more often in space?

And what does that do for their offense?

Two, how do we start to learn how to respond when the defense kind of stunts a third guy toward him behind the arc and

trigger our passing sequences?

And baked into that is, and you know, I don't want to overdo the sort of long-term outlook for the Thunder and the finances.

I think they're going to be largely willing to spend and largely fine on, you know, they're going to have apron issues.

Someone actually made a good point to me today because once Shay's big number hits in 27, 28, along with Jadub and Chet at what I'm going to presume is the max.

And if one of them makes all NBA or wins Defensive Player of the Year, in Chet's case, like it's a super duper max.

And then, you know, Kayson Wallace will be here making $25 million before we know, whatever it is.

Someone made the point to me, like, if there's a team that just doesn't care about having their draft pick frozen in seven years, it'll be this team, like, because they have a million draft picks already.

I thought that was an interesting point.

But the one pivot point that I do think is interesting is Hartenstein, because he makes $28.5 million next year, and they have a team option for the same number in 26, 27.

And I think to be sustainable financially, luxury tax, apron, third apron, fourth apron, iron ape, lead apron.

I think their plan, and I only concluding this based on the length and structure of his contract, is

by then or by 27, 28, when Shay's big deal deal kicks in we don't need to spend 30 million dollars on a starting center like we have a starting center in chet or he's gotten so good that if we do need to spend more on centers we can find a 10 million dollar guy to play 18 minutes off the bench i think that's the long-term vision but i think you nailed that i think he he is the most interesting sort of pivot point in their offensive growth And I think there's ways in which you kind of need Chet to find his inner Hardenstein.

Like it would be great if he could have the sort of short roll passing effect that Isaiah does does within that offense.

That's not really been Chet's game for the most part.

It's not like how he reads the floor intuitively, but he has the ball skills and the general awareness where I think he might be able to get to some version of that place.

As far as how you deal with the center rotation long term, I think one thing is like kind of

like it's a little tenuous to go through Western conference life without the guy who can at least put a body in front of Nicole Jokic.

That's always going to be in the back of your mind on some level, so long as the Nuggets are at all competitive.

And we saw how far Denver pushed OKC in that series, even with Hartenstein, I think, guarding Jokic pretty well and fighting and doing everything he could, as did Alex Caruso, to sort of slow down that matchup.

Overall with this team, you mentioned the finances of it.

Obviously, they have all the draft capital that they do.

I'm coming out of this series wondering,

clearly they're ahead of schedule.

Are the Thunder a historical aberration in that way?

One of the youngest champions we've seen, at least in the last 50 years, basically, or are they a case study in how to do this now?

Is this something that other teams need to be watching for and learning from in the sense that we've been talking for months and really the whole season about the importance of depth in this current NBA landscape?

We just saw two teams go to the finals, basically playing nine or 10 deep the entire way.

I was waiting for the moment where somebody would get excised from the rotation by either the Thunder or the Pacers.

It just never came.

Like they really just never kicked anybody fully out of the rotation.

Isaiah Joe is sad that you forgot about him.

He kind of was hanging around, though.

He's kind of hanging around.

He was still getting some scrap minutes here and there, maybe not in second halves, but he was at least in the mix.

One of the core reasons the Thunder were able to build that depth is because, as you said, they're not expensive yet.

Chad and JDeb in particular are not expensive yet.

OKC was bottom five in terms of total salary.

The reason they aren't expensive yet is because they're young.

And is there a path here where this is a thing that teams need to be more mindful of?

We live in an NBA now where, to be honest, rookies come in and not all of them are total defensive liabilities anymore.

You'll see a couple first and second year players almost every year now who it's like, okay,

they're either a difference maker defensively or at least passive enough defensively.

That was always one of the knocks that would favor veteran teams.

I'm just looking at the state of the game and the state of all these injuries.

And it feels like the days of certainly the Lakers 2020 team being as old as it was are out the window.

Even maybe the days of the Bucs plug and playing playing PJ Tucker might be out the window.

The days of like you have your veteran team and you want to make your one or two veteran minimum signings to hold the rotation together.

I don't know that that's like a meaningful thing anymore.

Maybe this is it.

Like, again, not every team can do what the Thunder did, but I wonder if we're going to see more teams in the 25, 26 average age range versus the 28, 29, 30 average age range.

Well, that definitely dovetails with the Durant trade discussions, which we're going to get to shortly, and how teams like the Miami Heat looked at a 37-year-old Kevin Durant

risk-reward benefit, particularly having watched these playoffs.

We will get there.

Durant trade talk is coming.

You mentioned injuries, and that jogged my memory.

You know, look, I'm very cognizant that I don't know what I don't know, right?

And I had flashbacks to the Durant thing from 2019 last night, and I texted

a bunch and bunch a bunch of medical personnel from around the league.

Like, can you draw a line like from the calf injury to the Achilles injury?

Is that a line that exists?

And I got even, I got forwarded a couple of studies, like academic studies.

Did not read them during game seven of the files.

Read the abstracts at halftime.

And,

you know,

the consensus is kind of like, it doesn't help.

Like, it doesn't help.

Surely.

You know, every injury is different.

Every calf injury is different.

Where is it?

How severe is it?

What are the connected tissue injuries?

Whatever.

There is, I think, some evidence that a prior injury of some kind on that leg, and there were studies that looked at ankle injuries and knee injuries.

is pretty objectively like not helpful and probably increases the odds a little bit.

But I was cautioned by a couple of guys in particular, like A, every injury is different.

B, universal praise from all these people for the Pacers medical team.

Universal, which did not happen in other cases where I've talked to some of these same people.

And C,

it's just hard to tell a guy not to play in game seven of the NBA Finals.

And,

but

these Achilles injuries are happening more.

They're happening to younger players, players in their primes, and they are happening after other injuries around that area.

And, you know, look, how could you fault Tyrese Halliburton for playing game seven?

How could you fault the Pacers and everyone putting all their brains together and deciding whatever the risk is, we think it's minimal, we think he can play.

And now it vaporizes the whole year next year.

Like, is it worth it?

We're assuming his career, like Durant's career, like hopefully Tatum's career, peak Tyrese Halliburton ain't gone.

Like 100% Tyrese Halliburton is coming back.

The same guy, maybe better in some ways, who knows, is coming back.

But a year is gone.

A year is gone for the Pacers.

A year is gone for him.

A year is gone for Tatum.

A year is gone for the Celtics.

And I don't know how to make these decisions, but

it's impossible to ignore the pre-existing injury and what that might have meant.

And I don't know what to do with it, though.

I don't know how to talk about it.

I don't know how to talk about it.

I don't know how to fix it.

I do know that we just had a conversation about how taxing it is physically on an elite athlete like Pascal Siakam to come in and play Indiana Pacers offense.

And I think there's versions of that all around the NBA.

There's versions of that with OKC's defense.

This is just like the reality of modern basketball.

The dynamic movement that's being asked of these players for 82 games, plus some cup games potentially, plus a long playoff run, plus or minus whatever your offseason responsibilities may be to various national teams or training or whatever.

It's just...

too much.

Like there's just too much that's being put.

I would say specifically on players' lower bodies clearly in terms of the torque and the explosion and the reaction time.

And it's changed the game for the better.

Like the NBA as a sport, as a visual product, is incredibly fun to watch and is an open floor game in a way that it really never has been before.

And defense's ability to adapt to that, to close out with even more force, to take away so many of those threes.

Like that give and take has been so fun to watch over the last couple seasons.

It is also testing the limits of the human form of the greatest athletes on the planet.

I don't think there's a way around that at this point.

Whether the NBA

cares may be too strong, but cares to fix it, I think is up to them.

There's some pretty simple solutions on the table in terms of how you reduce that sort of wear and tear.

You reduce the games.

That's a good start.

You space out the games differently.

That would help for sure.

Right now, that is not the number one concern for the league, or else it would be changed.

The number one concern is how do we keep the financial bottom line more or less intact as it is now?

And I don't see that changing anytime soon in terms of the priority structure.

You say the league.

I think you also have to say the players union because, yeah,

when it's a money problem, it's everything.

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Ball over everything.

Okay, a couple other things about the finals.

Number one, topic.

I think last year's Celtics, as a standalone team, not where they're going for the next five years, as a standalone single season team is a very interesting and apt comp for this Thunder team because both teams,

you look at their statistical profiles going into their chance to win the title, and you're like, oh my God, is this like the fifth greatest team in the history of basketball?

Then they suffer a blowout loss that sort of ticks them down a notch in the sort of final margin of their finals win or whatever, and still puts them into quite lofty territory.

And yet both teams, it feels like, yeah, I'm not sure this is like the 86 Celtics here or the 85 Lakers or the 91 Bulls or the 92 Bulls.

But you know how you could really stamp it and stamp yourself is breaking the no repeat streak.

The Celtics talked about it openly.

Joe Missoula came on my podcast and said, it's all I've been thinking about since we won the title.

And they learned how difficult it is in terms of

physically taxing, mentally taxing, taxing, luck that you have to have.

The Thunder are best positioned to do it, even better positioned than the Celtics.

They will come in as gigantic favorites to win the title next year.

But I do think when you look at their statistical profiles,

it is sort of eerie how, I mean, the Celtics lost fewer playoff games.

The Thunder lost seven playoff games.

They got taken the distance twice.

But you want me to take you through some little basketball reference dives that I did?

I would love it.

Okay, so

the Thunder just became the 10th team since I cut it off at 70, 71 because the 71 bucks come up in all of these searches.

And I wanted to cut it off at the merger, but you know what?

Let's give the 71 bucks a little love.

They become the 10th team in that span, so whatever many years that is, to win 60 games in the regular season, win the championship, and have a regular season, regular season scoring margin of 10 or more per game, 10 teams.

The Thunder, 68 wins, is in the middle of the pack of those teams.

It includes the

69-win Lakers team, a 69-win Bulls team, a 72-win Bulls team.

It's a lot of Bulls teams.

But they have the number one scoring margin in the regular season of all of those teams at plus 12.4 per game or something like that.

Number one, Thunder, 68 wins, number one scoring margin of all these teams.

Then I looked at another club.

Okay.

So that's 10 teams in the regular season club.

Let's look at the playoff club.

I looked at this club.

Win the championship

and outscore your opponents by at least eight and a half points a game.

There were 11 teams in that group.

The Thunder fell just short of that after losing game six.

They finished plus 8.3 points a game.

There are three teams in both groups.

That's it.

And the Thunder were about to be the fourth team in both groups.

The three teams in both of my categories are the 71 Bucs

pre-merger,

the 96 Bulls,

who won 72 games and then went 15 and 3 in the playoffs, plus 10 and a half points per game.

And the 2017 Warriors, which I think is the greatest team I've ever seen, Durant year one, they win 67 games and go 16 and one in the playoffs, only losing when they're up 3-0

in the finals.

And there are other teams who like barely miss

one of the criteria, like the 86 Celtics, 15 and 3 in the playoffs, plus 10.5, 67 regular season wins, plus 9.4.

So they're just below my 10 points a game.

85 Lakers, 15 and 4 in the playoffs, plus 10 regular season, 62 wins, plus 7 per game.

So they barely miss.

Let's see.

91 Bulls barely miss.

They were 15 and 2 in the playoffs plus 12, 61 wins in the regular season, plus 9.

87 Lakers, 15 and 3 in the playoffs, plus 9.3 in the regular season, 65 wins.

So I think all those teams are just

better than this Thunder team.

The Thunder team doesn't belong quite in that echelon.

That's fair.

But statistically,

this is a great, great team, and they belong somewhere in that next tier down with last year's Celtics, who kind of, you know, people, because of the injury luck they got in the playoffs, there was a lot of, are they really this good?

Or they can't be that good.

And I think the Thunder are probably not quite as good historically as that statistical profile.

I wonder why we're getting these incredible statistical profiles at a time when there's so much parity in the league.

But

their dominance is just objectively awesome.

Their playoff run was not quite as sort of emphatic as you would want it to be to cap them into this into this group, particularly.

I mean, like, they fattened up on the Grizzlies in the first round that they fattened up their scoring margin.

But, I mean, that's the territory they were looking at.

And the numbers are the numbers.

Like, we can, we can downplay them and put them in historical context and drop them down to tier or whatever.

But like the numbers are like, holy shit.

Like this was an incredible team.

And the numbers are representative of, as you're kind of highlighting, like two almost very different things.

Like there's a reason those lists have so few commonalities in terms of regular season dominance and playoff dominance.

And I think we're seeing that, like the canyon between those things drift further and further apart in terms of what it means to be a dominant regular season team in 2025 and what it means to be a dominant playoff team.

The Thunder have one of the great unifiers.

And I think maybe some of the skeptics of Thunder basketball in the regular season who thought, oh, you know, they play super hard.

They play like their defense is great for the regular season, but is it going to hold up under the scrutiny of the playoffs?

Like, maybe are they too undersized?

Do we believe in J-Dub this and that?

Like all of that, sure.

The level of disruption that this team creates plays in all time zones.

plays in all arenas, plays against every opponent, even as we've seen some of the lowest turnover teams in the league, the highest functioning offenses out there.

So long as that is the case, I think they are uniquely positioned to make a run at that kind of list.

They're going to be uniquely positioned to dominate regular seasons, maybe not always to a 68-win mark.

That's an unreasonable standard for every team to be held to every season.

But I would be very surprised if this is not a 60-win team again.

Like, why not?

Other than, you know, now we've won one.

Do we do the thing where we like take our foot off the gas a little bit like the Celtics did this?

Sure.

And like, did that end up costing the Celtics Celtics a little bit of rhythm?

A little bit, I don't know, but like, you play defense like this and you have the talent they have.

I mean,

are they going to be favored in all 82 games next year?

Like, who's going to be?

What is the scenario in which they're not favored?

Like,

who are they not like at Houston?

Are they going to be a one and a half point underdog at the Rockets?

Like, at who?

At who?

Now, obviously, some team will get off to like a 35 and 5 start and be a surprise team, but like at what team?

Because they're going to be a home favorite in every game.

So what away game are they actually going to be underdogs in next year?

It'd have to be on the road.

At Cleveland?

Yeah.

Cleveland has won eight straight and has a three-day rest advantage, you know, versus Oklahoma City coming in on a back-to-back or something like that.

But

I'm very curious to see how Mark Dagnall.

manages the rotation over the course of next season and who, you know, again, how much he wants to push certain guys.

It seemed pretty deliberate in terms of like slow playing Alex Caruso in particular over the course of this year in a way that really, really paid off for them.

And so how I would assume more or less the same from Caruso, but Chet Holmgren played like 30 games.

So there's room for them to slow play next season.

Hardenstein missed like 30 games.

He missed like 30.

He missed like 30 games.

They could be so much more conservative all throughout next regular season.

and somehow be as as much or even more dominant just by result of having a better like having better health outcomes.

Also, they have the 15th pick in the draft and another first round pick after that, uh, somewhere late in the first-round

couple other finals-related/slash future topics.

I don't know if you got this homework assignment in time that I gave you, but Bill on his pod last night was saying something to the effect of this is going to be the rare postseason where I remember the runner-up more than I remember the championship team.

I, I think that's maybe true.

I can remember both.

My brain is still functioning at that level, but it did make me think I want to go back and look at like the last 30, 40 years since I've been an aware NBA fan, who are my most who's my most memorable slash favorite closest to my heart finals loser of the last x amount of years did you get the time to do this or you want to just hear my nominees i did i i also have some nominees uh i think i would start with the 2009 orlando magic not even on my list not even on my list come on zach the you're just stabbing richard lewis in the back uh we we will not allow it but to me one of the signifiers for this like the pacers is who has such a distinct style of play?

Who feels like they have shifted something within the sport and captured something that other teams hadn't yet?

And that was kind of year two of that particular magic experiment, but them sort of breaking through the barrier in that way.

And I, in particular, at the time, was, I mean, just like writing for Dwight Howard as a dominant player.

Why are we all talking about it?

Like the level of force he was like.

exercising on both ends at that time was really phenomenal.

And I'm always going to remember that team.

Pre-ballot, me voted him mvp in 2011 the year derrick rose one um give me another nominee

uh the 2007 cavs which were a shitty finals team they're pretty low they're pretty low on my list but they're on my list to me it is it's it's about one thing in particular lebron scoring 25 against the pistons straight is a you remember where you were kind of snapshot nba moment on my parents' couch like a true blogger like

just out of the basement but still on the couch um Yeah, not basement, living room couch.

Okay.

That combined with proof of concept for one of the best to ever do it, plus just an absurd assemblage of guys to name.

Sasha Pavlovich, Larry Hughes, Damon Jones, Booby Gibson.

Like that should not have been a finals team.

And the sheer probability of the fact that they were captured by just how summarily the Spurs waxed them in that finals.

To me, captured something.

And as a team, I will remember forever.

I like this.

Give me another nominee because our lists don't overlap very much.

I have a clear winner, by the way, for me, for me personally.

I'm a little older than you, so I have a clear winner, but you go.

Give me another nominee.

There's one that kind of dovetails.

We've talked about the 2012 Thunder as, again, what felt like a very formative moment that proved to be quite fragile in terms of the way teams are assembled.

It is.

Crazy to think that those things are four months apart in terms of going to the finals and trading James Harden.

So it has turned into like a wistful photo of a team of the three of them together or the four, if you want to include Serge Abak in there, which you should.

Yeah.

By extension, I wonder if we will have the same relationship with the 2024 Dallas Mavericks and Luka Donchich in a Mavericks jersey in the sense of this is a team that was like kind of just breaking through that particular barrier that looked like it was going to be positioned to be competitive for an incredibly long time as it was assembled.

In the grand scheme of things, Luka Doncich barely played with PJ Washington and Daniel Gafford, the guys who kind of came in at the deadline to elevate that group.

I feel like they could like that with that moment, their run to the finals, which again, they were not super competitive in, and the Celtics dealt with them pretty easily, but them getting there in the first place will prove representative of something we hold on to with that team in terms of like, this was an era of Luka Doncic's career, of Mavericks basketball, of a thing that should have been allowed to grow to fruition, but was not.

Yeah, but they only made the finals in defense wins championships.

So, like, who cares?

The 2012 Thunder were

my top choice for post-2000 NBA teams.

And even they are more of like a what-if

than they are about like that particular iteration of that Thunder team, although they were glorious to watch and they won four straight against an incredible Spurs team to make the finals.

I thought often these teams have the great conference finals moment.

And then what makes them a runner-up is like they're just not quite there yet.

And then we end up wondering what could have been.

So I'm going to just go quickly through my nominees from worst to first.

2021 Suns.

Yeah.

Just like how the rise from the bubble to the finals to now looking was a very memorable team.

A lot of youth, Chris Paul, Point God.

And then

what happened?

Like, how did we arrive here in 2025?

Okay.

I was thinking in watching the Pacers players leave the floor last night.

Not to wish this on Indiana by any means.

I hope Tyrese Halliburton comes back.

I hope the Pacers are back in the finals at some point.

Devin Booker at the end of that that series, looking around the floor as the Bucs celebrate, untucking his jersey and just having like a, goddamn it, like

tasting how close it was.

When we talk about the Durant trade in a few minutes, I'm going to talk about Devin Booker's Lament that he had after the season, where he talked about how close they were just not that long ago.

And then I thought, should I submit a poem called Devin Booker's Lament to like the New Yorker and see if I can sneak in a little poetry into The New Yorker?

If Jesse Eisenberg can get an op-ed in The New Yorker, I feel like there's there's a door there i want a poem maybe i'll use a pseudonym devin booker's lament and it'll just i i have to work i have to i'm not a poet like i can't write or read poetry i'm too like i can't i literally can't read anything above shell silverstein poetry i don't understand what the poem is about shout out to shell uh

okay um devin bookler's lament by zach low um

2012 thunder he mentioned 2011 heat only because of like lebron had a legitimate meltdown at the biggest stage of of basketball

20 lives were the same the next day.

He gets to go on living, and we got to go on living.

Got to pay the rent.

2010 Celtics, only because I love a good last-gasp team.

And it wasn't quite the last gasp.

2012 ended up being the last gasp when they went up 3-2 against the Heat in the conference finals and lost.

And LeBron had the greatest, maybe most consequential game, if not the greatest, of his career.

But that 2010 team,

to your point about the 2000, the 2009 Magic, that should have been the Orlando's year in the East.

and Boston was just out-guiled them in the playoffs.

2004 Lakers, just for a whole host of reasons.

98 Jazz, the second straight loss to the Bulls.

And that's the full court pass, I think, from Stockton to Malone.

93 Suns, just a delightful team with Barkley.

And then my personal winner.

for my favorite finals runner-up of all time that shan't be forgotten.

Ironic that I'm bringing it up today.

I hate to do it.

The 1996 Seattle Supersonics of Sean Kemp and Gary Payton and George Carl just trying to throw their different style and freneticism against the greatest player of all time, coming back from 3-0 to make it a series.

And just a team that anyone my age loved, the Sonics, loved the green and yellow, loved Kemp, loved Payton, loved everything about that team.

And they just, no one actually thought they were going to beat the Bulls.

The Bulls were unbeatable, unbeatable, but

that's my winner.

One of those teams that if you just judged history by watching the last dance, I'm not sure you would register that the Seattle Supersonics were participants in that series.

I'm not sure you'd register that Tony Ku Koch ever played for the Chicago Bulls.

Probably not.

You know,

we're writing and rewriting history all the time, but I'm here to insist the Seattle Supersonics did, in fact, exist at one point, and I hope we'll exist again.

According to the last dance, the Bulls won game seven against the Pacers because one of Michael Jordan's friends was in the the stands and it motivated him to play well.

It had nothing to do with Tony Kukoch scoring like 23 points and whatever else happened in the game.

Zach, where are you on the ⁇ is this the first championship in Oklahoma City Thunder history?

Yes.

Yes, it is.

Yeah, it is.

There's no other.

Does anyone disagree about this?

I don't know.

I guess technically that is not true, but spiritually, it obviously is.

Seattle is like throwing an anti-parade.

What's the opposite of a parade?

Everyone stays home and nobody does anything.

That's just a Wednesday.

Okay, quickie before Durant.

I mean, I don't know kind of how else to address this, but the East is just a complete mess now for next season.

And

we don't need to go through it all.

But my big question is, and this is one of my big offseason questions.

I did my big non-Giannis KD

offseason topics last week.

And one of them was,

Again, this is last week.

Are we going to see another moonshot kind of deal?

Not that the Desmond Bay trade was a moonshot because I like that trade for Orlando.

Are we going to see another team

look at what's happening in the East, particularly an East team, and be like, you know what?

Let's just go get whoever.

And I don't know who whoever is.

I have my list of the whoever's it could possibly be.

Because, I mean, it just.

All of these teams are just gone for a year.

And Cleveland's back, New York's back.

And,

you know, Orlando's going to make a run at it.

And maybe another team will rise up from the ashes down there.

I'm probably forgetting someone off the top of my head.

But are we going to see another team?

Toronto

sniffed around Durant Silverstrong.

If you're not including Jakob Pertle in the Durant trade talks, I'm not sure if you're not even, if you're, what's less than sniffing around, you're doing that.

And I like Jakob Pertle, big fan, great, very good NBA player.

Um,

is there going to be another team and who would the target even be?

Because obviously there's a void here where if, like, suddenly the Detroit Pistons went all in and got Lowry Market in, you'd be like, oh, wow.

Okay.

That's interesting.

I don't, I mean, who you could name a whole bunch of teams.

I think that is the team in terms of Eastern Conference candidates who are positioned to throw a bunch of stuff and young players into a deal to try to swing up.

They're the natural candidate.

The regular season success is already there.

We've seen that they can at least be competitive and like rise to the intensity of a playoff series, even if they don't have the experience quite yet.

And I think the Cavs might be like too close to where it probably makes sense for them to be a little bit more conservative.

The Knicks probably need like more moves around the margins to flesh out the rotation more than they do like a complete overhaul.

No, I'm talking about the out of nowhere like

this awesome player

got traded to this team.

Well, I just mean like if we just want to go down the standings, it's those two teams.

The other three of the top five all ended their seasons with Achilles injuries to star players.

And then there's the Detroit Pistons.

And then there's the Orlando Magic.

I don't think the Heat are really close enough, although they're obviously always in these conversations.

I don't know if they quite have enough.

And speaking of, like, there's some reporting that maybe they were hesitant to include Jaime Hawkes.

No, no, no.

We'll get there.

We'll get there.

Okay.

I don't think the Heat are close enough.

I would love to see the Hawks do something fun, but we'll see on that.

And I have absolutely zero faith in the Chicago Bulls to do basically anything ever.

So I think the Pistons are the team on the board to watch as far as this sort of like long shotting is concerned.

How about the Sixers?

Are you ready yet to bring them back into your life, into your heart?

No.

I already was holding on to them for an unreasonably long amount of time last season.

Like, you know what?

As a Paul George apologist, I'm just out here in these streets trying to believe in some version of that team.

Are you carrying around

a cardboard box top with just like Paul George's good written in Sharpie just going around your sandwich sign?

Yes, literally.

I mean, look, the people need to know about it, or at least the fact that he used to be good.

I believe in versatility.

I believe in the balance of the player he used to be.

Was he that player last season?

Not often enough, unfortunately, but I just can't get there with the Sixers anymore.

I'm going to need to see it.

Cool.

It's worth a shot.

Like, you have nothing better to do if you're the Sixers than try to make it work with Joel MB.

His contract is prohibitive.

He's awesome when he plays.

yep maybe you know you what else are you going to try to do give up like make it try to make it work do something um you know try to load manage him through the season but if that's something is like trading jared mccain and a bunch of other like

i don't know what it would be yeah but it's it's like i i've already said there nothing should be done on joellen bead's timeline anymore no franchise decision making should be based on his timeline but i'm kind of probably just he's going to be on my team i might as well do some small things to try to win and hope like if that's load manage him through the season.

But again, you watch these playoffs.

It's a goddamn grind.

It's 20 something games.

Every other day for the middle two rounds of the playoffs, people are dropping like flies left and right.

Why would I have any faith that Joel Embiid, even if I load manage him perfectly and he doesn't suffer any injuries in the regular season, can get through that playing 35 minutes a game?

Let's limit it to just 32 minutes a game, whatever it is.

I have zero faith that that's even possible.

So that's my six or stake.

If I were, if I were the jazz, I would be just waiting for someone to call me and just bowl me over.

I even thought, you know, I talked about this with Bill last night.

I created the Jeremy Grant line.

Like the player in question has to be better than Jeremy Grant to fit this conversation of like moonshot, you know, I think that's very kind to who Jeremy Grant has been for the last two years.

I only brought him up because there, there are just not many teams who are going to be willing to take a step back next season if you bowl them over with a good offer for a a good player.

And he's, he sort of fits that description, sort of like what Memphis just did with Bain of like, all right, we're bowing out a little bit of next season.

Marketing's the obvious one.

The Kings guys are the obvious ones.

I brought up Zion.

The other implication is like

the Bucs,

with Giannis apparently just being on the Bucs next year,

they must be looking at this like,

if I were them, I would be like, can we flip Lillard somewhere where maybe we get someone else's problematic long-term salary, but the guy is good and fits with Giannis?

I don't know who that would be, but is there any way to accelerate next year for the Bucs?

And how about the Pacers quietly trading to reacquire their 2026 first-round pick next year?

How fortunate are they that they did that?

Oh, my God.

Because if next season goes super wrong for them, they now control that pick and all they did was sacrifice this year's pick to do it.

I think they did that largely for financial reasons.

There were even agents around the league who were racing for the Pacers to draft their guy in the first round and try to get them for 80% of the rookie scale instead of 100% or 120%.

And now they're like, well,

thank God we got that pick.

Any other thoughts on the East?

I mean, look, obviously, we know the teams that are just,

they're going to go for it.

Orlando's just now in the conversation to

be in the conference finals for sure next year.

I think that fit is going to be pretty slick with Desmond Bain.

I'm very excited to see, I mean, Jalen Suggs back and healthy and how all those guys fit together.

He is so much of exactly what they need and is exactly the sort of elevating piece.

Like their regular season defense is not quite at thunder levels, but it's maybe the closest thing outside of Oklahoma City in terms of the consistency of it.

And if they're playing that kind of basketball with the offensive juice that Desmond Bain can bring them, I don't see a reason why they couldn't be the second or third seed in the East.

I also take your point about Giannis and the Bucs, whose outlook seems to have changed overnight just by virtue of of the fact that they don't have to compete maybe with the Indiana Pacers in the standings quite as much.

A team with Giannis on it, even if the second best player is like Kyle Kuzma or Gary Trent, might be good enough to do something.

I don't know what that something is or what it's worth, but it certainly looks better in Milwaukee than it did a week or two ago.

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Speaking of Gary Trent Jr., and I'm not even kidding.

He's represented by Clutch Sports.

Okay.

Fred Van Vliet is represented by Clutch Sports and has a team option hovering over him that is going to be a very very interesting negotiating pivot point for the Houston Rockets, who just acquired on the day of game seven of the NBA Finals, Kevin Durant in exchange for Jalen Green,

the number 10 pick in the draft, Dylan Brooks, five second-round picks, and the emotional devastation of the greater Phoenix community

having traded an entire team of picks and players for Kevin Durant and received what I just outlined in return.

I will join the

consensus that I love this trade for the Rockets.

For them to be able to do this while keeping Eason out of the deal, while keeping Reed Shepard out of the deal, while keeping Jabari Smith Jr.

out of the deal, while keeping the Suns' own draft picks beyond this season out of the deal is an absolute masterwork of leverage, of playing your leveraging.

No, we're just not giving you those things.

By the way, I think the Suns could could have gotten one of those things at the trade deadline last year.

Probably Smith, maybe somebody else.

I don't know.

How is Reed Shepard not in this deal?

Like,

I just am so headed to how this was the settling point.

Yeah, I get the leverage, but Jesus Christ.

I love it for the Thunder.

For the Rockets.

I can't believe I just said Thunder.

I love everything for the Thunder.

I love this trade for the Thunder.

It's great for the Thunder.

It probably is great for the Thunder.

So they'll probably have a draft pick somewhere in 2031 that got better somehow because of this trade.

I love it for the Rockets as a fit.

I love it as a short-term talent play because it just puts them in a position to like, we can win now while sacrificing only one good young player from our team.

And

when Durant's 40, his contract, assuming they sign him to some sort of extension, expires and we still have all the young guys here.

And like, what are we, what is it really costing us?

Financially, it's a good sort of reset after that for them.

I love it as a basketball fit, and I love it for this reason.

And this is why the mockery of Toronto for not putting Purdle in the deal and the heat for not putting Khalil Ware in the deal and whatever else they were not willing to put in the deal is somewhat

fun to be snarky.

It's somewhat unjustified because here's the reality of trading for Kevin Durant.

When you trade for a 37-year-old on an expiring $50 million contract who wants maybe 50-something something million next year and the year after that as part of the deal, wink wink.

You have to walk into the next season immediately capable of winning the championship.

There is no grace period.

There is no like, okay, we traded our starting center who's like a 15 and 9 guy who plays good defense.

We'll just figure out who the center on our team is next year somewhere down the line.

There's no grace period for any of that.

You have to be able to win the title now.

Miami looked itself in the mirror and said, you know what?

No matter what's going on in this deal, if we have Hero, Bam, and KD and a bunch of guys who are like backups to spot starters, we're not winning the title.

It's just, we're just not going to do it.

It's not worth it for us.

I think both of those teams concluded that correctly.

And Houston and to a lesser extent, Minnesota were the two teams who could have looked at this and said, you know what?

We can walk into next season capable of winning the title.

And I think the Rockets, assuming Van Vliet comes back on

probably a lower salary and a longer deal, having kept all the guys they kept,

having the mid-level exception possibly at their disposal, which is why I brought up a guy like Gary Trent Jr.

I think they can look at it and say, hey, look, the Thunder are the bar.

Sure.

We can get to the conference finals for sure.

And we have a superstar score that we didn't have last year and a style of play.

Talk about identity.

The idea of Van Vliet, Durant, Shangoon as the triangle of creativity on offense, I think is a beautiful fit.

We can talk a little bit more about how you envision those three working together and just surrounded by athleticism and frenzy at every turn is a really good identity and a really good team.

I think they walk into next season, depending on what Denver does, which is another big offseason question to me, as the second best team in the West, depending on, obviously we have a lot to uncertainty, but a team that absolutely could make the finals, absolutely could push the thunder in the conference finals.

And by the way, sounds ridiculous.

We just saw two teams push the thunder into seven games.

They'll be better next year, but this is a worthy,

worthy shot for the Rockets.

The Rockets fuck up a lot of teams in terms of their style of play, in terms of their approach.

Like they make things really, really hard.

And that's before they had one of the best individual shot creators that the sport has ever seen.

I think they definitely could win the championship next season.

Again, it is within that like,

you know, less than 5% chance, championship odds, maybe maybe a little higher than that sort of range.

But like, that's what you do this for.

You give yourself a shot.

As you said, it's not at a very high cost.

The Jalen Green trade market was not robust.

It's been kicked around for months and months, if not years at this point, in terms of them trying to find something that fits their roster a little bit better.

We saw in the playoffs what Jalen Green's limitations are as a creator, as a one-on-one defender, many, many different areas of his game that could use a little bit of work.

Kevin Duran is not that.

He is someone who you can go to reliably at the end of these half-court possessions that are going nowhere and get a lot lot of bailout offense.

And so you can run all of the action you want, as you said, through Shangoon, at the elbows, in the post, with Fred Van Vliet running pick and roll, with Kevin Durant flying off of however many screens you want to set for him.

Makes all the sense in the world.

Short term, this makes the Houston Rockets an incredibly competitive team.

Medium term to long term.

If you're like forecasting what is actually important here for Houston in terms of the pieces of their roster that will continue to be the pieces of their roster, I don't know that there's like many better fits for Ahmed Thompson than Kevin Durant.

In terms of the spacing and the shooting that Durant's game opens up and how it accommodates all of the weirdness, the like delightful productive weirdness of Ahmed Thompson's game, this is kind of a dream pairing as far as like who I would want on the floor with Ahmed to facilitate his development.

And I also think, like, Jabari is another guy I'm watching very keenly with this because if you think about who Kevin Durant has been,

the Kevin Durant who was on those 2017, 2018 Warriors teams in particular, was one of the best rim-protecting fours we've seen in modern NBA history.

There is an outline there in which he has a lot to teach someone like Jabari Smith, a lot to help with, a lot to show him.

And Kevin Durant isn't thought of as like the cuddliest mentor in the world, but he is someone who believes in helping the next generation of basketball players, who wants to invest in the young guys around him, who often will speak up in advocacy of the young players who are on his team and vouching for them and wanting them to get more opportunities.

I think he has a lot that he could help in terms of the young talent that's already on Houston's roster, not just in terms of who they are on the floor next season and kind of everything he opens up for them, but the players they're eventually going to be.

I just, there's something about the Van Vliet Durant Shangoon triumvirate that I really like on offense.

I feel like it's just the right mix for Durant of guys who can do enough of the creative heavy lifting, but also not so much that he feels relegated to watching another star on his level just dribble all the time.

Van Vliet, yeah, I'll bend the defense.

He also gets off of it willingly and fast.

Shangoon is a super creative big man hub.

Durant hasn't really played with quite a player like that.

I mean, Draymond is obviously his own kind of big man hub archetype, but in terms of post-ups and drawing attention, they're both unselfish

in a way that I think he benefits them, particularly Shangun will benefit from the spacing Durant provides and Durant is a kickout option.

I just feel like it's the perfect role for him in terms of he gets to do a lot, but not too much and a lot on terms that make sense for him.

And defensively,

look, he's 37.

He's not the same defender he was.

I do think for the first two months of this season, he was defending at a pretty goddamn top level for his age and his ability.

And you just wonder how much of the slippage there was just fatigue, malaise, the whole Phoenix thing just not working.

And now,

you know, in Phoenix, he was like, am I the best defensive player on this team?

Like, how is that even possible that I have to do so much?

Now

he can offload all of those assignments or many of them to Tari Eason and Jabari Smith Jr.

and Ahmed Thompson and whoever else.

He can have Stephen Adams' back to beat the crap out of anyone who dares mess with him.

And they can switch a lot, which can ease the burden of movement that he'll, I just think it's an absolute perfect fit.

And they're starting five.

I just penciled in Jabari smith jr as the fifth starter so van vliet thompson smith durant shangoon off the bench i've got eason

uh stephen adams reed shepherd cam whitmore is still around maybe i use the mid-level on somebody do i bring this do i bring back aaron holiday as a decent backup point guard like there's enough there the the the brooks loss is a big one yeah but you also have tari ison and ahmed thompson on your team to make a guy like dylan brooks tradable i think there's enough in the cupboard for this to be a deep enough team particularly since they discovered the Adam Shangoon thing is a real thing.

It's not this gimmick to throw out for four minutes a game every other game.

They can play that 10, 12 minutes a game in the regular season if they want to.

I think that's more of a reason to start Jabari, too.

Like you want to steal some of those minutes in terms of just like rounding out your rotation to make room for the dual bigs later.

I also think in terms of replacing Dylan Brooks, which I'm glad you brought up, is a real concern just because of like the innings eating quality of Dylan Brooks, especially regular season defense, but even playoff defense against high-level opponents is very important.

Tari Eason has to stay healthy, which has been a huge difficulty for him over the course of his career so far.

If he can stay healthy, the whole rotation is rounded out and makes sense in exactly the way you're describing.

You can see the shooting, you can see the playmaking, you can see the defense.

You can also see the way that Eason and Ahmed Thompson in particular reduce the wear and tear on Durant, because if you're turning opponents over nine extra times a day, a game by virtue of having those two guys on the floor, just like mucking things up, then all of a sudden there's less half-core defense to play.

There's more and more opportunities for guys to kind of like space out their intense defensive efforts over the course of the game in a way that I think Kevin Durant probably needs in order to sustain that sort of early season effort you described from him last season.

So there's just so many ways in which all of this talent makes a lot of inherent sense in ways that it did not for Kevin Durant in Phoenix.

The Suns, in terms of the way they were eventually designed in particular, was just like a pale imitation of a super team.

It was the outlines of what kind of worked for him in Brooklyn, taken down many different pegs creatively in terms of their ability to play together, in terms of just like pure shot creation, like was not on the level of that Nets experiment.

And so nothing even worked up to the level of that.

This is a completely different idea of a team.

It's a team that had everything else to begin with in a lot of ways in terms of that playmaking and defense and needed the one thing that Kevin Durant is uniquely qualified to provide.

Like, how can you not be excited about that combination?

For Kevin Durant,

this is the last dance for Kevin Durant.

This is a guy who

had a difficult slash impossible decision to make in free agency after 2016, didn't like any of the other options before him and chose the Warriors because they were a glorious basketball Nirvana.

Won two titles, two finals MVPs.

Was surprised, I think, and so were his people,

the degree to which he did not get the quote-unquote credit he felt he deserved for being a finals MVP.

In my opinion, he shouldn't have been surprised.

He joined a 73-win team

and

they romped everybody for a couple years.

I've reverse-engineered that choice a bunch of times.

I don't, it doesn't matter to me what he did.

I don't know that there was a better option for him.

Then, obviously, everything since then has been wayward.

And

this is a great chance for him to have a last chapter fitting of a player of his stature.

Yeah.

The Heat.

So this was the sentence from Sean Trana's report, Sean Strane's report on ESPN that got all the attention.

The Heat made multiple offers for Durant, but ultimately turned down the opportunity to place Jaime Hakez Jr., Nicole Jovich, Haywood Highsmith, the number 20 pick, and other draft assets in a deal, sources said.

So that was mocked.

The Heat were mocked for like none of those things.

You're not willing to trade any of those things.

The word and there is the important operational word.

The heat from what I've heard, and look, people spin and spin and re-spin from what I've heard making calls yesterday, we're willing to include a couple of those things in a trade for Kevin Grant.

If not, what are we even talking about?

Right.

I mean, like, it was just the totality of them.

Where was out?

Like, where was out, period.

The totality of all of that to them was, well, we're not, I'm just, let's just make this up.

We're not doing Jovich, Highsmith, number 20, and two future first-round picks.

That's too much.

Maybe even one future first-round pick in addition to all that was too much.

Would we do Jovich, 20, Wiggins, Filler, whatever?

I think a deal like that, not that specific one, because I don't want to throw Jovich's name around like that, but a deal like that was probably available to the Phoenix Suns.

And they chose the number 10 pick as the best draft asset they were getting, and they're excited about that draft asset, and Jalen Green as the highest upside player that they could get a former number two pick in the draft with just one percent athleticism top one percent athleticism no doubt and look i know that all the word coming out of phoenix is well we don't want to trade jalen green like we like jalen green we got him to play with devin booker I think that door's open.

I don't think they're going to reroute Jalen Green right now.

Yeah.

But I think they very much are going to listen to trade offers at any point for any of their players, basically.

And honestly, like, it wouldn't surprise me if they held talks about trading down from 10, not very far, because I think it's going to depend who's on the board.

But if they can get, you know, move down four spots, get a guy they like and get another asset in return, I think they'll discuss that.

But they're excited about that pick.

But I think the Heat doing that

is a very look-in-the-mirror moment for Pat Riley.

That was probably difficult because you know Pat Riley wants to go for it.

And you know that the Heat could beat the offer that eventually got Kevin Durant.

And I think

calmer winds prevailed, or whatever the saying that I can't conjure right now.

And just like, yeah, that team, Hero, Durant, Bam, and some like good backup spot starter guys and young guys too, whoever's young guys left over,

is not going to be good enough.

And part of the reason it's not going to be good enough is they, like all of us, watch these playoffs, the depth, the ferocity, the toll it takes on your body, and just ask themselves, like,

can we depend on 38-year-old Kevin Durant surviving those playoffs healthy?

And not just surviving them healthy, but doing so while playing 38 minutes a game of high-level basketball that this team, stripped of its death, is going to need him to play.

And they just said no.

And I don't blame them for that decision at all.

I don't blame them for that decision.

I think, again, Miami was too far out.

That is a team that is in need of a deeper philosophical conversation about what sort of roster and construction they want to have.

We've seen pretty empirically the limits of what Tyler Hero as your primary offensive option will be.

Really good player, just came off an all-star season, did things that I didn't know that Tyler Hero would ever be capable of.

Like, very impressive in terms of a developmental story.

He is not a first-option scorer or creator.

Bam has not turned into the sort of first option scorer or creator that I'm sure the Heat hoped he might at some point.

And so, what do you do with all that?

I don't think the answer is bring in Kevin Durant and hope that it ties the whole room together.

I don't think that's a realistic option given not just the lack of depth that you're describing, but even who the stars are.

Like, I think those three guys work together okay.

But if you're going to invest in making a huge trade for Kevin Durant, you want better than okay.

You want something more closely approximating what we're saying about Fred Van Vliet and Opera in Shangoon and the way that there's like a more of a natural balance in terms of what those guys do well versus Tyler Hero, who maybe has more in common with the way Devin Booker plays than with the way other, you know, supporting Rockets play.

You do wonder

in a magical world in which they know that Tyrese Halliburton is about to miss the entire season, do they put another asset or two into the trade with the East even more open?

I probably still think they wouldn't, but the timing is like unbelievable of all of this.

And Minnesota, I just think, was spooked by like, I just don't think we want to deal with him if he doesn't want to be here and whatever.

Like, I just think that, and that.

And they were not even from a not wanting to be there standpoint, when the Suns were talking around Durant at the deadline, there were multiple teams they were talking to that were basically turning them away because they didn't really want to deal with the trouble of Kevin Durant.

Like, I think there is a lot of hesitation within the league to bring in the Kevin Durant size persona as much as it is the age concerns and the injury concerns, which we should say, like are now kind of a recurring thing for him.

Most seasons, he ends up missing like 20-something games.

You have to be confident in who you are as a locker room and who you are as a franchise in order to like maintain that sense of identity while adding Kevin Durant.

I think the Rockets are pretty well positioned for it.

I think Eme Udoka is a great coach who's up to that sort of challenge, but not every team is.

Not every team wants that.

Before we go, last week I did my without context or elaboration: top three non-Yanis KD storylines of the offseason.

Number one to review is the Denver Nuggets, who have a bunch of extensions hanging over their head, including Nicola Jokic's,

and

facing second apron stuff for the next couple of years, and an absolutely urgent need to remake something about their team.

Even maybe it's just the young guys getting better.

Number two was who's going to make the home run move, if anybody.

I had to cover that already.

And number three was where does the Celtic shrapnel end up,

whether it's Holiday or Prasingus?

I asked you to pick a couple without just state the Mahoney storylines if there are any left over that I left for you.

One we kind of just talked about with Kevin Durant, which is how does Minnesota get better?

This is a team that Tim Connolly is a pretty inventive executive as far as the things he's willing to entertain, getting Rudy Gobert, then trading Cat for Julius Randall.

There's a lot of stuff on the board for them that could be interesting.

What does Nas Reed want?

Does he, is it important to him to start?

Is it important to him to stay in Minnesota?

Is there any means?

I don't think they can bring back Nikhil Alexander Walker, but is there a plan to replace his minutes beyond just like elevating Terrence Shannon?

I'm very eager to see what a team that just made back-to-back trips to the conference finals does to maintain the momentum of the Anthony Edwards era.

Okay.

Any others?

I like it.

I mean, two, two straight conference finals for the Wolves.

Don't sneeze at that.

Not at all.

And all the more reason why it's like you have to be pushing forward.

Like, I don't think that's a team that would want to or could necessarily afford to just sort of like, okay, we're going to sit back and have a recalibration year.

Like, they have every reason to think that they can be competitive with the Rockets and the Thunder.

Are any of the foregone conclusion guys in this year's free agent class not such foregone conclusions and by that i mean lebron james player option kyrie irving player option smiling somewhere right now i'm just like i want to throw miles turner in this group too who the pacers do not have a convenient means to replace if miles turner who now is going to be without his star point guard next season looks around and says is there another opportunity for me out there like i just don't want to take anything for granted and i think the stakes for the pacers are quite high.

I think the stakes for the Mavericks are quite high.

If Kyrie Irving, who we should say is injured for the like near foreseeable future, but if he just leaves, what are the Mavericks?

Like, what is their timeline?

What are they pushing forward?

He could also opt in and extend.

I think there's lots of options on the table for him, but I don't take any of this as just like, oh, this is definitely going to happen.

Crazy things can change the course of NBA teams, can change the decision-making of one player.

And now all of a sudden the Lakers are picking up the pieces, you know?

The last,

I think, taking nothing for granted is a very good way to approach general NBA fandom and analysis.

You know, as we were talking and I was just thinking about this, you know,

two teams that we haven't talked much about in their offseasons, but a little bit I've talked about are the Warriors and the Clippers, sort of the old lions of the West.

The Warriors have the Kaminga thing, and I think they'll very much be in win-now mode around Steph.

Like that will never change.

As I was thinking before about the jeremy grant line and and like big big name players that

could that guy actually be available

i don't think this will ever happen i'm conjuring out of thin air but what if a team like detroit or somebody called the clippers and offered them the mother load for kawai leonard just like screw it we're going to take a shot at kawai leonard for two years however many years left on his deal the clippers would have to consider that right like you're you're giving us a parachute to the next era of our team i just no one will ever trade for him because he's just this inscrutable injury risk who disappears for months at a time.

I don't know, man.

He's still really goddamn good.

Like if we're listing the Jeremy Grant line above those players, I feel like he should come up, you know?

I think he definitely should come up.

And if the Rockets hadn't swung for Kevin Durant, I think he probably should have come up for them too.

You know, it's those sorts of teams.

Like, again, these younger teams that are bumping up against the wall of playoff shot creation.

If you are the Pistons and you're looking at this Eastern Eastern Conference landscape, Kawhi Leonard does check a lot of the boxes of what they need.

Will he be that guy every night?

Obviously not.

But as long as you can keep enough of a regular season winning foundation together, I think he still makes sense for some teams.

It's just hard to believe in him as like a holistic, dominant, every night superstar.

You know, if you just look at the decision Memphis made of like, you know what, we're not good enough.

And obviously the Clippers had a much better season than Memphis, 50 games, 50 wins rather.

And that seven-game series against the Nuggets is, I think, more a feather in their cap than not, other than the game seven, you know, meltdown.

Um, but I do think, like, Baltimore will never do it because he's not wired this way.

But I do think there is a version of this exact same Clippers team run by different people who would look in the mirror and say, you know what?

Chances are we're actually not good enough.

And this team's offering us an incredible haul for Kawhi Leonard.

And yeah, he's supposed to be a Clipper for life, streetlights over spotlights, the whole thing.

Should we do it?

And I don't think they ever would, nor would I think any team is going to throw the motherland.

I just think he's an interesting name to think about as a trade target.

You mentioned Memphis in that as well, as far as like them looking themselves in the mirror and the way they did with Bain.

Sub question off of the foregone conclusions.

How certain are we that the Jaron Jackson renegotiate and extend thing is going to happen?

Because if it does not, all of a sudden he has an expiring year and then he's an unrestricted free agent.

And is that something that Memphis is willing to just sit out?

Or does he all of a sudden join the trade market?

So I said it last week.

Like they have to earn that contract.

It's not, they have to go to Jaron Jackson Jr.

and say, here's our vision for our team and here's as much money as we can give you.

And right now, the money isn't there.

They're going to have to move players to get up more cap room.

And even then, I think the idea would not be to get him to his max next season, but would be to get him high enough that 140% off that number gets him to his max going forward.

But they've got to do work to get there and they've got to earn his signature on that contract.

I also really do believe that they plan to keep both Morant and Jackson.

Like I think that's their plan.

Retool, get more salary flexibility.

We have all these picks to make trades.

We're building around these guys.

Yeah, we might sit out a year of like true high-level play, but we're setting ourselves up for the next year and the year after that or whenever we think we can get back to this 68 win

bar that everyone's trying to reach.

uh in the thunder

that said like

if you just bowled them over, like it would be irresponsible of them.

If you just bowled, if the Pistons were just like, we'll give you everything for Jaron Jackson Jr.

or whatever, like they'd have to listen.

I don't think those guys are like 1000% untouchable.

Nobody is in the NBA, but I do, I do think their plan is to keep them and they're not like making calls or taking calls right now.

Right.

So we'll see how that plays out.

Like, I, I think we just kind of, again, write in some certainty with this stuff where it's like, yeah, like the Wolves will just get Nas Reed back.

And yeah, like Jaron Jackson's going to sign that extension because like there's some logical reasons why continuity makes some sense.

But again, I will believe it when it's, when the name is on the dotted line, you know, when the team makes that sort of commitment, when they bowl over or win over Jaron Jackson in that way, I don't, I just don't think if I, if I were Jaron Jackson and I'm looking around saying

the other selling point is one of the most unreliable superstars in the entire league right now in terms of health, in terms of judgment, in terms of lack of playoff success, like John Morant is an inspiring player to watch from my couch.

I don't know that he's the most like heartening teammate to play against in terms of like, I'm going to invest the next stage of my career running with this guy.

Like that, that in itself is a big ask.

Rob Mahoney, group chat, ringer.com, all over the place.

Prestige TV.

I got to get a cameo on that on that Prestige TV podcast.

What are you eyeing?

Are you looking forward to any off-season TV watching?

I haven't.

I'm still reeling from the Met 7 game losing streak in terms of my off-season TV watching.

Thoughts and prayers.

Any

parting thoughts?

Would you like to fart out any parting thoughts on the NBA Finals or anything we didn't talk about today before we move on to the offseason?

Just a resounding call from the mountaintop.

It was a pretty cool season.

Really fun playoff run overall.

Like, I think, you know, we hit it with the somber notes up top in terms of where the Tyrese Halliburton injury has left things, but

the moments of that Pacers playoff run, the anxieties and comebacks overall throughout this postseason, an incredibly unpredictable regular season, even if it was in retrospect underlined by the Thunders like consistent dominance.

I've had a great time.

Let's do it all again in a couple of months.

Well, the draft is very soon.

It's in two days.

That's it for today's Zach Lowe Show.

We'll be back on Thursday morning after the first round of the draft, the two-day draft.

So we'll probably have a lot to talk about, some more trades.

Where did Ace Bailey get picked?

Is Daryl Morey still waiting for him to show up at the restaurant for dinner?

A lot of stuff will happen.

We'll be here Thursday morning.

Thanks to Rob Mahoney.

He's the best.

Thanks to Jesse, Jonathan, and Mike on production.

We'll see you on Thursday on the Zach Lowe Show.

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