Game 5 Instant Reaction!! J-Dub’s Dominance, Haliburton’s Struggles, Trade Season Begins, and Much More With Kirk Goldsberry.

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Ball over everything.

All right, everyone, coming up on a jam-packed Zach Lowe show with Kurt Goldsburg, which was also a live show on YouTube.

We get into everything that happened in game five of the NBA Finals, the Oklahoma City Thunder.

One win away, a whole lot of steals, a whole lot of SGA, an absolute all-around masterpiece.

from J-Dubb that goes up in history with some of the greatest finals games ever by some of the greatest individual players of the last 20 25 years and a stinker from tyrese haliburton what does it mean how do we parse it when a naturally unselfish player nursing what appears to be a real calf injury has zero made field goals in an nba finals game obviously that is unusual and not good enough for a pacers team who was game game like got within two in the fourth quarter and then a whole bunch of stuff happened and then it was a 17-point lead We will also talk about the Desmond Bain trade.

Holy cow, was that fun on Father's Day?

The Kevin Durant trade landscape, as always, and all the off-season drama that is ahead with Kirk Goldsbury.

Hope you enjoy it.

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Welcome to the Zach Lowe Show Live.

We're live on YouTube, Kurt Goldsberry.

The Oklahoma City Thunder, one win away from completing one of the greatest, fastest, most emphatic turnarounds in the history of professional sports with a 120-109 win over the Indiana Pacers.

The Indiana Pacers who will never say die, who will never go away, who will bring TJ McConnell off the bench for a flurry of all kinds of TJ McConnell points, who will suddenly be within two thanks to a Pascal Siaka masterpiece.

It was 95-93, and then a whole lot of stuff happened, and it was 111-97, and the game was effectively over.

There are three main storylines to hit.

Are you ready for them, Kirk?

Yeah, I'm ready for all three, Zach.

Number one,

if you want to start negative, Tyrese Halliburton nursing what appears to be a bothersome calf injury, zero field goals.

four points, six assists, three turnovers.

It is what it is.

It was not a good game.

He has had one of the greatest clutch shooting runs in the history of basketball.

They are not here without him.

They needed him tonight, and he just didn't deliver.

Number two, if you want to be positive, Jalen Williams with one of the finest all-around performances you will ever see full stop in an NBA Finals game, both ends of the floor, scoring in every possible way.

You need pick and roll buckets.

Do you want them to be jumpers?

I got those.

You want to be lefty layups off the glass?

I got those.

Do you want them to be leaning bankers off of Spain pick and roll roll with Shea as the back screener?

How about we throw that in when our season's authentically on the line?

Yeah, I'll make that.

You want me to make a kick three off a Shea pick and roll or an offense rebound?

I got that.

Something in transition, I'll do that too.

You want me to play pit or pat catch with Shea, pump, drive, score?

I got that.

You want me to back cut for a dunk?

How about I do that three times?

Once in transition, once out of a baseline, out of bounce it, once out of a time, I forgot.

A masterpiece from Jalen Williams.

And connected to that for the first time in the series, it took five games.

This is storyline number three for me.

The Thunder got out of the mud on offense.

Thanks in part to the aforementioned Jalen Williams, thanks in part to 15 steals that for the first time in the series actually led to stuff.

And just thanks to some timely three-point shooting, Aaron Wiggins, four threes, Kayson Wallace, four threes, Lou Dort, three threes, two in that fourth quarter run off what I call trust passes from SGA.

I thought SGA was forcing it a little bit when the game got tight.

Kind of just, I'm just going into a crowd.

Miles Turner stripped him once when he had Chet open in the corner.

And to Shay's credit, calmed down, made the passes.

Dork made the threes.

Oklahoma City pours up 120 points on a massive offensive rating, holds Indiana to about an average offensive rating.

You pick Tyrese Halliburton.

Yeah.

I'm hesitant to say no show because the whole ethos of the team flows from him.

But Tyrese Halliburton, not much show.

jalen williams all the show thunder offense off the charts where do you want to start

you got to start with j dubb that was that was just an incredible performance the game of his life one of the reasons they've been able to do what you called the fastest or one of the fastest turnarounds or rebuilds in the league uh and he had everything going tonight he was the best player in that game best playoff game of his life.

I mean,

when he gets going vertical, Zach, and he gets going to the rim, he's got this cool signature sort of scoopy shot on both sides now.

And it's so cool to watch.

You got to start with him.

I agree with you.

Tyrese Halliburton was kind of a no-show.

He was making the right plays a lot of the time, but he has to score the ball if they're going to win on the road like that.

And then the thing I'd add is like,

And to steal a point from our boss, like the Thunder defense has this ability to go on runs by itself.

And I felt like the key moment in the fourth quarter was really defined.

And you sort of alluded to it.

15 steals, this isn't normal.

That's not a normal number

of steals in an NBA game.

But really that Thunder defense goes on runs and explodes.

And just, it seemed like every time.

Indiana was threatening to take a lead or get back into it,

that OKC defense that we've been raving about for years now just showed up and made the big play.

So aside from J-W, I talk about that OKC defense, just making play after play after play.

So many lazy passes turn it into easy buckets the other day.

Not just lazy passes, passes where they were kind of trapped.

Like Nemhart had a big one in the fourth quarter where he picked up his dribble and he was just

arms, arms all around him.

Where am I going to go with this?

And he tried to go to Shay.

He miscommunicated, or he tried to go to Halliburton.

He miscommunicated, threw the ball away.

Steele goes the other way.

And

I thought their defense just hit, not for the entire game, for portions of the game early and late, particularly when Caruso was in the game and they could switch one through four, sometimes switch one through five.

I thought that's something they leaned into.

Bill and I talked about at the end of game four.

Like, hey, worst comes to worst, just switch Chet onto Halliburton.

Let's not get ourselves in rotation.

That's not what we want to do.

Maybe it's what we have to do.

And he did, Halliburton got him once on like an up and under where it took every ounce of craft and guile Tyrese Halliburton has just to draw a foul.

Not to make a basket because he didn't make any baskets to draw a foul.

Other than that, Chet pretty well contained him.

And those were the sequences when Indiana, you seldom see Indiana resort to like, oh, Miles Turner has the ball with 10 on the shot clock and he's just got to like dribble and do stuff.

And Neesmith has a bailout shot at one point and Halliburton has to take a long two with no traction, no momentum.

They had him gummed up.

And that's what they've been doing all season.

And that's what they leaned on when it mattered.

They They got, I mean, I've got my notes over here.

They just got a hail of turnovers and steals from all over the place.

Um, Holmgren got Halliburton in a pick and roll in traffic.

Tyrese just kind of like lost the ball.

How many turnovers did Tyrese have tonight?

Half

not egregious.

Uh, Pascal six got picked a lot of times in traffic.

A couple turnovers in transition, but both of these teams, you sense that they're like, man, we're not getting much in transition.

These, the other team is awesome in transition defense.

I'm just going to go for the home run.

I'm like trying too hard to like, when I get an opportunity, one-on-two, trying to thread needles that aren't there.

Yeah, just all-around awesome performance by the Thunder.

And look,

if Halliburton can get healthy with two days of rest or healthier, and he did not look all that bouncy or healthy or comfortable sort of pivoting around at times tonight.

You can't just write the series being over now.

The Pacers have earned too much respect for that, right?

Yeah, and I thought they were going to make us look like fools again.

i mean it seemed like that the thunder were running away with this game and having their way on both ends of the court and here comes this tj mcconnell stint in the third court

and it was just this incredible moment and i'm looking at the numbers because they had 45 points at halftime that the pacers did and they they came out zach and they scored 34 points in the third had 30 again in the fourth.

No, you can't count them out because as good as that thunder defense is, there's been phases of the series where the pacers offense has outplayed that incredible thunder defense uh and this time it was it was tj mcconnell making all the right plays covering up for a lot of the gaps that tyrese uh had left for somebody and he is one of the best backup point guards and he showed it tonight but you can't count them out you know i think I had originally predicted, hand up, the Pacers were going to last five games.

I was wrong.

They're much better than that.

I expect them to put up a big fight in game six, if not win it outright.

And I would love, as I'm sure you would, Zach Lowe, for this to have a historic seventh game back in Oklahoma City in a few days.

Do you really, do you think we're going to get there?

I would think the Thunder will be slight favorites going into game six.

But I don't know.

I love those Pacers fans.

So I want it to happen so bad.

I want, you were there, right?

I might go back.

I'm contemplating a quick, a quickie return trip for game six.

Yeah, tell me what you think going into game six.

I mean, you were in that building.

Do you think they have what it takes to get one more?

You know, Bill and I and many others talked about it after game four when it felt for three quarters, like Indiana was going to go up 3-1 and the game was kind of trending their way.

And Oklahoma City just could not get rolling.

And then Shea does some Shea stuff.

Oklahoma City comes back and takes that game on the road.

And I had made a note going into that game and talking to people going into game four.

So 2-1 Indiana.

It felt like game four might be the whole championship.

Like whoever wins that game could win the series.

It felt that pivotal.

And then Oklahoma City wins it.

They win rather emphatically at home.

So they're riding momentum back to back.

Was it the first time the Pacers have lost consecutive games the entire playoffs?

Neither of these teams has lost consecutive games in the playoffs until now.

By the way, they just updated all the stats.

The score of the series.

Oh, wait, no, no, that's not.

Never mind.

I don't know what the score of the series is.

I was reading the wrong column.

We're live on YouTube.

I

feel like the Thunder can smell it, and I would probably pick them to win game six in Indiana.

And I don't think Indiana will roll over or make it easy.

They are relentless.

They are deep.

But I would pick the Thunder to win in game six.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

We got to see what's going on with Halliburton's leg.

If he's able to be full strength, there's definitely a path for them to force a game seven.

It looked like tonight, as you said, Siakam cut the game, the lead to two there.

And I felt like they had a chance.

But dude, ultimately, Oklahoma City can win the series on both sides of the court.

And I feel like Indiana can really only dominate on the one side of the court.

And I thought.

Like we said earlier, the Thunder defense was great, but J-Dub and then the three-point shooting they got from Wiggins tonight,

just was just those little things.

Indiana's got to win the three-point battle if they're going to win game six.

They didn't do that tonight.

How about the Thunder going from 10 assists in game four to 24 tonight and three threes to 14 tonight?

I mean, that is a massive one-game change.

Updated stats for the series.

Thunder plus 24 total.

So what is that?

Like five a game?

It's good math right there.

That's good.

That's some midnight math right there.

571 to 547.

The advanced stats continue to paint this as a defensive series, despite the fact that the Thunder bumped up its offense today.

Thunder offensive rating for the series 114.7.

That's like probably below average if I looked up the total rankings, the regular season rankings.

Pacers all the way down at 110, which is ghastly bad by their standards.

So it's been kind of a defensive series, which credit to the Pacers.

They've dug in and made themselves a good defensive team.

But I mean,

did Jay,

in the event that they win, did Jay, well, it's probably, it's too early.

I was going to say, did Jay Dub, did Jay Dubb play his way into the finals MVP conversation?

Because the last two games have been just heroic finals performances, but they've also been pretty goddamn good performances by SGA, including all of crunch time and game four, which may prove the pivotal game.

And just like, oh, I had 31 and 10 tonight.

And by the way, four blocks.

How about that?

Four blocks for SGA.

Yeah, dude, I think SGA's game four closing sequence is still the signature moment of the series, assuming the Thunder win one of the next two games.

So, but yeah, J-Dub made it at least a conversation on the Zach Lowe show with the last two games he's played.

But here's the dumb guy stat I was going to give you.

The Pacers need to score 111 points.

They are now 0-7

when they failed to do that.

They got 109 tonight.

And they're 14-0 in the playoffs and 2-0 in this series when they score

111 or more.

I know that's not a great stat, but

it does speak to some of their limitations on defense.

And their ability to win really hinges on their offense getting going to a certain level.

That didn't happen tonight.

You can't win with turnovers.

And I know, Kirk, oh my God.

Yeah.

They won with 25 turnovers in game one.

That's never going to happen again.

That's never, you're not going to win many NBA games with 25 turnovers.

And what were, what'd they end with tonight, Zach?

21?

22 turnovers.

22.

You're not going to win with that.

To me, that's the story of the game.

But as we alluded to earlier, you're a tennis guy, right, Zach Lowe?

I used to be, not really anymore.

I couldn't identify, what's his name?

Sinner?

Skinner?

Principal Skinner?

Yes.

Yeah, Principal Skinner and Alcatraz.

They had one of the best

French Open finals of all time the other day.

You should have watched that match.

That was an incredible match.

I caught glimpses.

I caught glimpses.

In the tennis sport, they have forced errors and unforced errors.

I'm aware of that.

I mean, you could have just gone right there.

I know what an unforced error is.

Hey, you were the one who brought up Principal Skinner or whatever you did.

Where was I going with that?

50.

522 steals are forced.

Like the stealing thing

crazy to me.

That's the signature thing.

I wrote an article early in the season calling these Thunder defenders just straight up thieves, Zach.

They force these turnovers.

They don't,

and then they turn them into points.

And a lot of J-Dub's points came in transition

in that sort of chaotic moment that's fueled by the OKC thieves.

Yeah, J-Dub was feasting in transition earlier in the game.

And I just have to, I take little notes on paper during the game.

And just the margins of a series like this.

Second quarter, Halliburton gets Hartenstein on a switch and gets one of the good three.

He got, I think all four of his threes were pretty good looks, and a couple of them were against switches.

Misses a good step back.

Long rebound, J-Dub, run out, back cut, dunk, and the crowd is starting to go crazy.

It's just like a three that like that that misses, and all of a sudden it's off to the races.

There are all kinds of other sequences like that where just one shot goes in, it changes the whole game.

How do we parse a Halliburton performance like this?

because you know what's going to be on television all day tomorrow is oh my god was this guy a fraud the whole time like you can't be a superstar like who's a superstar you can't be a superstar whatever that is and score no field goals in a finals game um

how do you parse a game like this because i am i i i'm a huge fan of tyrese halliburton's i think he's awesome i think the conversation about him during like i was at dinner in indiana with about six or seven people and i said we were were talking about Halliburton and the media firestorm around him

This is between games three and four and I said you know he made like a buzzer beater to win a finals game You'd think that'd buy you you think that'd buy you a week like a week of just not being labeled not good enough or like some sort of fraud or not a superstar you made the biggest possible shot you can kind of make you'd think that'd give you like a four days in the news cycle of not being labeled a fraud but this game was a i mean they they needed him to win this game and he wasn't wasn't there.

And I, you know, without being there, the injury was clearly bothering him.

And he's just not a guy who's going to force up shot.

If he, there are games where he's going to force up shots.

We've seen him do it.

We saw him do it in game four against the Knicks.

We saw him do it in game three of this series.

And there are games where he's just, he's, he's going to kind of just try to let the flow of the game dictate what he does.

And I guess that's what people want is

sometimes you have to be the flow of the game.

And that's just not how he plays.

And you're going to have games like this.

What else?

I mean, he's made, how many shots has he made in this playoffs to save their season and to turn series?

So I just don't know how to parse a game like this.

Is what I'm saying.

I want to be what I want to be is

generous to a player who feels as if he's earned the benefit of the doubt like 15 times over in the playoffs.

But it is the finals.

It is game five.

And he scored four points.

Yeah.

And a lot of dudes are going to want to turn on the James Harden switch on the hot take machine tomorrow.

Oh, that's.

James Harden.

I mean, James Harden.

But they,

because 0 for 6, Zach, is just, that was a no-show.

You know, it was there.

Now there's the injury stuff, but it's sort of like you have this like Hardin-ish style performance in a big game.

But we also have this Robert Ori sort of resume of this postseason where he's just made the biggest shots of the postseason over and over and over again, including some crazy ones like the Cleveland one where he gets the free throw rebound, dribbles out, makes this play.

We can go on and on, but it's hard to parse.

I think that's the thing.

He defies the characterization machine that we're going to throw at him.

He reminds me of Steve Nash at times where he can be orchestrating this offense with very little point production himself.

And the Indiana Pacers will put up an offensive efficiency that's just mind-boggling.

And that's when he's got it all going.

He's creating everything and transition and controlling the pace of the game.

But you're exactly right.

What you said there is like sometimes you need to assert yourself

if you're going to be the all-star point guard on your basketball team.

He just didn't do it tonight.

I keep going back to the injury, though.

What's going on there?

What are we going to learn in the next 48 hours?

I mean, I'm sure they'll downplay it publicly, which is what every team does,

both for gamesmanship and pride purposes and secrecy purposes and all of that.

And as Jeff Van Gundy always says, if you're playing, you're playing.

And like, if you're on the court, that was always his thing.

Like, I'm going to evaluate you based on the standards that you've set for yourself.

If you're on the court, and if you're injured, well, that's part of the deal.

And everyone's injured at this time of year.

And it wasn't good enough.

It wasn't good enough.

And I just don't know what else to say.

I'm not going to like make a character judgment on Tyrese Halliburton based on one finals game, even if it is the biggest game of Tyrese Halliburton's professional career.

I'm not going to like knock him down five spots in the player rankings because he had a bad finals game.

Guys have bad finals games.

Some of the greatest players in the history of the league have had bad finals games.

It's happened before.

You know, he's just a hard player

to

to really figure out based on the standards of what a superstar typically is in the NBA.

That's why people keep bringing up Steve Nash as a comp.

You know, I was, I

I was hanging out with a player today for like several hours

whose team has faced Tyrese Halliburton in the playoffs.

And we were talking about the media coverage of Tyrese Halliburton.

And this player was like,

I don't get it, man.

Like, I don't get it.

And again, this is before he made no shots in a finals game.

But the player was like...

This whole superstar stuff and the way the way you guys talk about him, he was not saying you guys to me, just you guys in general.

It's like, I played against team,

they're so hard to play against because of how he plays, because of how he gets off the ball and how he moves, and how he gets everybody else to move.

This player was like, That's why they're hard to play.

And that's why did he score 30 points, whatever it doesn't matter to me, because I played against it.

And like, he's the reason they play that way.

That's why they're hard to play.

So, it's just a difficult thing, but there's no sugarcoating it, man.

You got to make a shot, got to make a basket.

And he didn't make any baskets, and he only took six shots.

Yeah, he had one spectacular play today where I think he missed the layup in traffic and he sort of saved the ball out of bounds.

And it was, it went from a good to great moment.

And it was this kind of Halliburton sort of controlled chaos and pace that it sounds like you're describing.

As I said last time I was on the Zach Lowe show, he's the fastest player across half court in the NBA when they're starting either after a main basket or after a rebound.

He gets vertical.

He seems to understand the side-to-side stuff,

the court geometry better than any other point guard in in the NBA right now.

He is the reason this Pacers team is here.

Like, make no mistake.

And so I think he gets some grace period today.

What do you got?

No, I just, you know, I'm just looking at

the box score from tonight and just

probably, I mean, 31 and 10 for Shea.

What stuck out to you about his performance, which is going to be, you know, J-Dub is going to get all the headlines.

That's justified.

Shea would still be, I think,

not quite an easy frontrunner for finals MVP, but coming into this game, he was averaging 33 a game.

J-Dub was averaging 22 a game.

And again, you mentioned game four, the 15 points in the last seven minutes or whatever it was, five minutes.

What did you think of his game today?

I mean, it's just, this is quintessential, Shea, right?

Like, he had 31 points again, and he had 14 free throws.

He had a couple of just breathtaking breathtaking drives where he stops on the dime and gets into his footwork.

And,

you know, Nemhard, I want to say, is doing a masterful job.

And then you look up at the box score and it's another 30 piece.

It's crazy to say, but SGA was exactly what made him MVP tonight.

He was everything.

He had some great defensive plays.

Maybe that's where he was even better than expected.

But I would say, you know, that was an MVP performance and a must-win game, one of the biggest games in Thunder history.

And he was one of the best players on the court, which we expected.

And that's why the defense is why

he is the MVP, because he is not a weak link that can be picked on.

In fact, he is a playmaker who can, oh my God, Obi Toppin has a jailbreak to the rim.

I'm going to rotate from the left corner, block his shot, and we're going to go out and run what should be a dunk became, I think, a dunk for the Thunder or a three for the Thunder.

I mean, those are the margins, right?

Your best player, your offensive fulcrum, makes an emergency rotation from the corner to the rim, blocks the shot of a big man, and you get two or three points instead of them getting two points or an and one or two free throws or whatever it is.

That's why he's the MVP and why he's SGA.

Um, I thought, I thought he played an awesome game all around.

The J-W game is just, I mean, I don't want to invoke, you know, some of the some of the holier names in recent NBA history, but that's like

14 of 25 three of five on threes nine free throws six rebounds four assists one turnover and elite defense across the board i mean that's on par with some of kawaii leonard's best games ever in the playoffs that's on par with some of kevin durant and jason tatum's best games in the playoffs like that's the level of that game

Yeah, and I think Chet Holmgren is great too.

And I think this is a good time to be like, all right, this is a big three.

I mean, they're young.

They all came up together.

I know SGA obviously started as a clipper, but they seem to fully coalesce.

And I was looking at some stats earlier where if you look at the Thunders' defensive rating with Homegrown on versus off in this series, it is incredibly different, right?

I think when he's on the court, the defensive rating is near 100, which, as you know, would be first in the NBA.

When he's off the court, it's 118.

That was coming in.

I thought it was going to also be first in the NBA because it's the Thunder.

It's like on court, first in the NBA.

Off court, slightly better, first in the NBA.

I want to be clear, this is just in this series.

And just to point out, the Chet's being asked to do a lot out there.

It doesn't always look, it doesn't always look dominant.

He's got this peculiar way about him.

But dude, there was that play in the second quarter of this game where he caught Siakam at the rim.

Like only other few players in the league could get that block.

And then he goes coast to coast, misses his first attempt, gets his own rebound, and finishes the second one.

But to me, it's just like, all right, this is a big three now.

Ched Holmgren is maybe this team's defensive MVP.

I would ask you if you agree with that, because

that's a tall task in this group.

But I keep coming back there with the shot defense, the paint defense with him.

And then Jay Dubb is sort of the two-way guy.

You know, he can do everything on both both ends of the court.

He obviously put up 40 tonight, and then Shay is the quarterback.

So I think they're built for war, and tonight was a perfect example of that.

I think Dort keeps the Thunder MVP Championship belt for a while now

after shutting out Tyrese Halliburton tonight.

But Chet is, I mean, if they're going to unlock the full perimeter skill set of Chet along with the shot blocking and say, like, hey, 10, 12 times a game, you can switch and we can see what happens.

And it works, then that becomes a conversation.

And to wit, Caruso just one of eight, didn't make any shots.

And when the pacers started to get close, they missed a bunch of threes in a row.

Just another plus eight off the bench for Alex Caruso.

And that lineup with Caruso in place of Hartenstein as the fifth starter has gradually found its footing as the series has gone.

I just looked it up.

It's now, it's an even plus zero or minus zero, whatever, zero, whatever, whatever you've saved for zero.

And it had started minus, minus, minus.

And

that lineup just works with Chet at the five.

And

I just thought Oklahoma City also, like their offense just flowed a little better tonight.

I thought they paid much more attention to their spacing, their cutting, their ball movement.

Like there was a possession in the first half where J.

Dubb ran a pick and roll on one side of the floor, in the middle.

kicked to Kayen Wallace.

Kason Wallace drove a closeout, pitched the ball like an option quarterback to Lou Dort, who drove it up the wing, pitched it to J-Dub.

J-Dub ran another pick and roll where he had his choice of Holmgren on one side, Dort on the other, chose Holmgren, got somebody on his hip.

I think he kicked to somebody for a three.

It's like, God damn, that's like more passing in one possession than they had for five straight minutes of like the last, any of the first four games of the series.

They just had a little, a little more pep to their step, as Doris Spark would say.

And I think part of that is just being at home.

Shay looked fresher tonight.

Like when they tried to deny him his handoffs and stuff, he was just not going to be denied.

Like, I'm going to go get the ball, Andrew Nemhart.

You're going to be a pain in the ass and it's going to hurt and it's going to be physical.

I'm going to go get it and stay in the play.

They looked fresher.

I thought some coaching tweaks, some schematic tweaks, they paid better attention to their spacing.

Just an awesome.

That was a championship level performance tonight from a team that is now one game away.

from the championship.

What are your other takeaways from this game or stuff Indiana can point to or other than the Halliburton play better adjustment for game six.

What else should we look for?

Well, it's nice to see Tony Bradley out there.

He had another piece of this roster that we hadn't seen in the series.

That was cool.

I don't think he played particularly great or anything, but it's just another nice option.

He's large, he's very large, right?

Maybe it's just a set of three or four fouls you can use.

But here, I'll give you some random thing about Halliburton.

He has yet to make a shot on the left side of the floor in this whole series.

No way, really.

Yeah, like all of his made jumpers are on the right side of the floor.

And I was, I just, I'll put it up on social media after we're done, but okay.

It's crazy.

So it's like, there's this sort of geography, you know, how I look at the game that I was like, how is this a thing, dude?

Like, everything is on the right.

What do we need to do?

We need to take care of the freaking basketball, dude.

We need to, we need to stop giving them live ball turnovers.

I would rather them just get a five-second violation than throw some of these lazy passes

that just go to the wolves and end up going the other way and being fast breaks.

You cannot have the 22 turnovers.

So I would start there.

Those turn into those J-Dub layups and dunks.

They turn into those open threes that they finally got going in Oklahoma City.

So I would start with the turnover, Zach, is the one sort of coaching emphasis

that that group's going to have to figure out, Carlisle and company.

It just doesn't feel like enough guys have played well in the same game for them.

Like Turner's had a blah series.

He was okay offensively.

He was okay tonight overall.

They miss his room protection when he's not out there.

You feel it when they go small with Siakam and Toppin at the four and the five.

You know, Nemhart had another kind of rough shooting game.

Matherin had a rough shooting game.

Shepard disappeared in the second half.

No Isaiah Joe, by the way, for the Thunder.

They've just decided you're done.

Nice season.

Maybe we'll see you again if we need to.

It's a luxury.

I do want to shout out Siakam, who just brings it every single game.

And in

the middle of game three, or game four, rather, when it looked like it might be 3-1 pacers, you start to plot out what are the talking points going to be.

And one of them was like, is Siakam going to get finals MVP if they win?

Like, that's how good he's been.

And Halliburton is, again, the central engine of the team.

He is the defining figure of the team.

Everything flows from him.

But Siakam has just been unbelievable the entire series.

I know he had six turnovers tonight.

He also had 28 points, six rebounds, five assists, three steals, and two blocks.

And just, I've said it before, he's the electric current powering stuff in the background that even when you don't notice him, he's always doing helpful stuff on both ends of the floor, just everywhere, all the time.

Awesome game.

And just like, even the challenge that they won and then was instantaneously erased by Siakam stealing in bounce backs and dunking on the other end.

It's like, this guy just doesn't stop.

It's the quickest turnaround from like, that was a really smart challenge by Mark Dye.

Oh,

Pascal Sikam just dunked on the other end.

Very quickly.

Yeah, he was their best player by far tonight.

Wait, should we also talk about how I think I blacked out at the end and Aaron Neesmith had a putback dunk that just did not make any sense?

Like, what happened?

I need to watch that again.

He jumped over Chet Holmgren.

And I think he was talking trash before he descended all the way back down.

He was so high in the air.

No one knew what happened.

Like, even the players are like, Wait, am I taking that out of balance?

Was that

Boris Burke had to tell Mike Breen it was a converted field goal?

Because, like, Caruso's standing with the inbounds pass behind the baseline.

I don't think Breen, and like many of us, realized what it just happened.

It was a hyper-athletic play by Neesmith.

Um,

but yeah, see Occam, dude, he's leaving it all out there.

I think he ran out of gas at the end of game four,

um, and that was a big reason why the Pacers' offense just went away at that key stretch of game four.

But man, he brought it.

And,

you know, Oklahoma City, let's say he landed a big punch or two.

I love that pick six right after the challenge and he goes down.

I mean, just like a perfect way to channel his frustration there.

He was the one who scored the field goal that we talked about earlier, that cut it to two.

But yeah, he was the one bringing it in the absence of Tyrese all night for them.

And I guess TJ McConnell, too.

And in the point when they took control of the game, the Wiggins and Wallace threes in the second quarter just felt massive and keeping them separated and keeping them like we have a margin for something like a TJ McConnell run.

And by the way, at least one and maybe two of those threes were set up by Hartenstein offensive rebounds.

And he did not have a great game, minus one.

He had six offensive rebounds in 21 minutes.

And one of the things about J-Dubb and those J-Dub minutes when Shay is not on the floor, there are moments when the offense looks a little gummy.

Like, oh, Caruso's isolating all of a sudden.

That didn't go well.

Oh, Lou Dort is dribbling like a lot and in random diagonal angles around the court.

Like, I don't know if that's going to go well.

J-Dubb is going to have to take tough shots.

Sometimes he's going to miss tough shots.

Hartenstein's ability to get them second-chance points in those stretches, combined with the fact that like.

We're going to win some of these minutes.

Like, you can have, there are minutes when Halliburton and Siakama are on the floor and SGA is off the floor.

And Oklahoma City is like, we can win these minutes purely with defense and second chance points generated by just scrappiness and offensive rebound.

And I thought Hartenstein's offensive rebounds were all super timely.

And a lot of their best defensive stretches were in those minutes where it's like, hey, this might be a four-minute stretch where the score is 6-6 because of our defense.

And we're cool with that.

That's a W for us.

If you have your two best guys on the floor and we don't have the MVP, like, that's a W for us.

Yeah, and it felt like, you know, I wasn't rooting for the Pacers.

I was rooting for one lead change late in the game, just as somebody watches this stuff.

And it felt like every time they needed an offensive rebound, a big three-point shot or a turnover.

But Hartenstein was also, and one of the things that I was looking at, Zach, is like SGA was also really marvelous in the pick and roll.

The stats are going to bear that out when they come through.

But I think him and Holmgren, him and Hardenstein, him and J-Dubb.

were all very, very strong in the pick and roll.

And so like sometimes the Oklahoma City offense in a half-court setting is not that great.

And one of the things that went right, and you said it earlier, that seemed like they had that rhythm.

They were just getting the basic stuff really well tonight.

And that starts with SGA, but everybody, and in the old cliche about role players playing better at home,

that was Wiggins tonight hitting those threes.

But yeah,

it just felt like a game that OKC

won in several different categories.

For the series, the stats just updated.

Shea, 32.4 points, 47% from the floor, 30% on threes, five assists, five rebounds, 2.4 steals, 1.8 blocks.

We got to root.

What we have to root for is Shea going, getting four, getting two each of steals and blocks in a finals, averaging a two and two in steals and blood.

That's like a Lajouan kind of stuff from a point guard.

J-Dubb, 26 points a game, 44.7% shooting, five rebounds, four assists.

Shades the finals MVP if they close it out, unless Jay Dubb scores like 50 in game seven.

But J-Dubb has made it a conversation.

Just an awesome series so far for two.

And I think if you ask me to make a prediction, I don't like making predictions, but I do them because they're fun.

I think Oklahoma City closes it out in game six in Indiana.

That's what it feels like to me in my gut.

I have underestimated the Pacers at my own peril before, before, so I will not be surprised at all if they win.

But it feels like Oklahoma City is beginning to

be rolling downhill a little bit in this series.

Obviously, as a neutral fan, I would love a game seven,

but I'm going to bet against it.

Any final takeaways here?

You know, I thought Nemhard.

I say turnovers are the key here.

You cannot feed the turnover monster.

And Nemhard, I think I'd circle on the box score with some of the dumbest turnovers for Indiana, the most correctable ones.

Other than that, I'm perfectly aligned on your prediction.

I think OKC, especially in a world where Halliburton is limited, is going to win this game six.

But I've been wrong about the Pacers, gleefully wrong.

By the way, it's fun to be wrong, right, Zach?

It's fun to be wrong in our profession, especially when a team like the Pacers.

No, I insist on being right all the time, even when I'm wrong.

And that includes in my marriage.

I'm always right.

Never wrong and that goes over super well in my in my no i'm actually always wrong and usually i actually am wrong um about almost everything uh in at home

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All right, let's talk about some other stuff that happened this week.

You ready?

Yeah, dude.

I have not weighed in on the Desmond Bain trade, Father's Day trade, rude behavior by two presidents of basketball operations, both of whom are fathers of children and rude, just rude.

And wait a day.

But I think transitioning from a series in which Pascal Siakam is playing a critical role to this trade is fitting because it's going to get comped to the Mikhail Bridges trade.

It's going to get comped to the Golbert trade.

It's going to get comped to one of or both of the Kevin Durant trades.

And just in terms of how many picks the Orlando Magic forked over to acquire a player who has never made an all-star team, I do think he probably would have made one, Desmond Band, if he had been playing in the East this whole time and not in the West.

So four first-round picks, one of which is, what, number 16 in this draft, one of which is very likely to be Phoenix's pick next year, and then two future

Magic picks and a pick swap, top two protected, I believe.

The Magic picks are unprotected down in the out years.

KCP goes from Orlando to Memphis.

Cole Anthony goes from Orlando to Memphis.

And the Magic now have Desmond Bain on their team.

And I think the reaction, you know, I gauged the reaction yesterday and just sort of looked and wonder what are people thinking of this.

And you knew right away it was going to be four picks for Desmond Bain, where Kevin Durant isn't going to go for four picks.

And I look at it, well, I'll actually, what did you think of the trade?

I was shocked by it.

I mean, real trades travel in silence.

That's the J.A.

Dondi quote of a quote, but I love it.

I had no idea this was coming.

I had no idea was coming.

And at first, my reaction was, oh my God, that's way too many picks.

But then you start to think about it.

And you're like, actually, no, I can talk myself into this.

There's some out years on the Bain deal.

This is not a guy who's got one year left.

And then you're saying to yourself, what was the glaring weakness on this roster, on the stat sheet for the Orlando Magic?

It is everything that Desmond Bain is.

Reliable three-point shooting,

flexible guard play.

As soon as Suggs went out, the Orlando Magics defense went from mediocre to awful.

They just couldn't get it going.

Desmond Bain, you know, we saw in Memphis with John Morant missing so much time.

He could run the offense.

I think this is a fair price to pay.

And I'd go so far as to say I talked to somebody Orlando today, Zach, and they said it's time.

This is our chance.

You know, we're not going to get a big free.

Freaking God, it's time.

They haven't had a top 20 offense in the NBA since 2012.

That's one of my favorite stats in the NBA.

They're the Joe DiMaggio of shitty NBA offenses.

The top 20.

There are only 30 teams in the NBA.

You know how hard that is, dude?

How many years in a row is that?

That's 13 straight years of bottom 10 offenses.

It's about freaking time.

Yeah, that's a crazy stat.

And recently, that's been driven by anemic three-point shooting.

I think they were last in two of the three main categories of three-point shooting last season.

And so

you know what they're last in?

Clankish, clanking, just clanks.

There's so many of their threes.

Like, ooh, that one hurt to watch.

Like, that hurt the rim.

That hurt the backboard.

I didn't even hit anything.

Jonathan Isaac from the corner missed everything somehow.

It hurts my eyes.

That's what they lead the league in, hurting my eyes while shooting jump shots.

And KCP is a character here.

They thought this was their three-point shooter.

And for whatever reason, it didn't work.

He didn't make the exact same shots in Orlando that he'd been making in Denver.

And so getting off of him, Cole Anthony, okay.

The Phoenix pick is the prize.

And I think maybe,

you know, Orlando expects to be.

Hey, if you have any faith in Orlando, all the picks they gave up are 20 to 30, right?

And so I don't think it's that bad in terms of the picks out.

And I love Desmond Bain for this team.

So I came around in the last 24 hours being like, you know what?

This is actually a pretty good deal for the Magic.

I liked it right away.

And I don't regret liking it right away.

It's a lot of picks.

It's a lot of picks.

It's all the picks, pretty much.

How annoyed were you, though, that this disrupted your Father's Day?

I didn't care.

It's fine.

Like,

you were a little annoyed.

No, I'm jokingly annoyed.

Like, it's a lot of picks.

It's, it's, it's all the picks they can trade.

Basically, they retain their own picks in the intervening years so they can trade swap rights on those picks, which are not going to be valuable because the magic are going to be good.

And I think, you know, people throw around the term opportunity cost.

Like, what's the opportunity cost of this?

And I think the opportunity cost is much less like who's the other great player that the Orlando Magic are going to acquire via trade.

Who's it going to be?

Desmond Bain is perfect for this team.

He is an A plus, plus, plus shooter off movement, off the dribble, off movement, in transition

with very little space required to get his shot off.

He, as John Morant's been injured a lot, has taken over the offense quite a bit in Memphis, expanded his pick and roll repertoire.

He's not someone you want to be a number one option.

Guess what?

The Magic have multiple people they'd like to be number one-ish options, including Paulo Bancaro, especially Paulo Bancaro.

They don't want one of those.

They could have gone after Trey Young.

They didn't really do that.

He's not a defensive liability.

I think he's a decent to good defender.

That's what separates him from a guy like Anthony Simons, who they definitely sniffed around and concluded this player at this higher price was better for their team.

He is purely additive to everything that the Orlando Magic are.

And it is a lot of picks, but...

As you said, the reason I brought up Siakam is like three first-round picks for Siakam.

They're all crappy picks.

All of them are crappy picks.

It was Bruce Brown and three first-round picks, which is an interesting equivalent because Bruce Brown was not part of Indiana's long-term future, nor were KCP or Cole Anthony in this case.

And that's a big deal too.

They did not deal anything from there

that they really cared about, to be honest, with apologies to Cole Anthony, who I think was underutilized last year.

And

do you like, do you think the Pacers even remember the three first-round picks they traded for Pascal Siakam?

They don't care.

Now, four is one more than three, and then they throw a pick swap on there.

It's, it's a lot of picks.

Desmond Bain is turning 27, I think, quite soon.

He's very young for a trade like this.

It's one fewer pick than the Knicks gave up for Mikhail Bridges.

You know, some of these

teams just go get their guy and bet on themselves.

And I don't know who the other guy was that they were going to get that checked all these boxes.

If there is an opportunity cost, I think it's the ability to do the little trades like the Celtics trading trading one first-round pick and a swap for Derrick White, like those kind of trades that pop up on the fringes and that turn into the trades that really make your team pop in the end.

Those trades are hard to make and rare in their own ways.

Like, I don't mind this at all.

And,

you know, there are teams in the NBA who are ready before you realize they're ready.

And I don't mind the magic betting on themselves as one of those teams.

Now, I think they're going to still come into next year behind Cleveland, behind Indiana, and probably behind New York in just in terms of pure talent.

But you'd like, I saw someone throw around, well, they could be next year's Pacers.

I don't think they're going to make the finals next year, but we all know there's a void in the East now with Tatum injury.

And there's always a void in the East.

The East is just a void in and of itself.

It'll be, it might be a little better than people expect next year, but and maybe the Magic believe they can step into that void to some degree.

They are Pacer-ish in the sense that they have an identity that is very hard to play against.

It's the polar opposite identity of the pacers, which is all happy, go lucky, pass and cut and move and be fast.

The Magic's identity is just going to beat the shit out of you the entire game, and it's going to be miserable to try and score points against us.

I don't know.

I don't mind it.

This is the going rate for a player of this caliber.

And

I don't mind it.

We'll talk about the Grizzlies end of it in a second, but anything else strike you about this one?

I think from Orlando's perspective, the thing that is also analogous with the Siakam deal is you don't have access to free agency in some of these markets.

I always say that

you have to be really aggressive in the trade market if you want to get a Desmond Bain or a Pascal Siakam

to move to Indianapolis or Orlando.

And so I think sometimes you have to overpay to get these guys.

That's just the nature of the NBA marketplace right now.

I love their starting five.

I love their start.

Let's just go over it so people remember.

Jalen Suggs, Desmond Bain, Franz Wagner, Paolo Bancaro, Wendell Carter Jr.

I love them.

We should say that our love of this lineup is contingent on Jalen Suggs not missing half of every NBA season.

That seems like a minor detail, or it's being treated like a minor detail

in everyone's excitement.

You kind of have to have the guy play at some point.

Right.

Yeah, that's true.

So

in a vacuum where Jalen Suggs is playing and Paolo is doing his thing on offense and Franz is doing his thing and Wendell's getting the rebounds and Desmond Bain is now giving them some three-point shooting.

I like them winning a lot of games in the East.

I'm with you.

Cleveland and Indiana are ahead of them right now.

But anything can happen.

And Indiana is proof of that.

So

I think

they think they're ready.

They told me today it's time.

And that's what this move amounts to.

You know,

if anything, I think the bench is going to be very interesting for them

because we just said they're starting to five.

Their bench is Anthony Black, who I really like.

Yeah.

Really like.

Needs to shoot it better.

We all know that.

He does a lot of things that are very interesting.

A good backup center, whether that's Goga or Mo Wagner coming off an ACL tier.

Everything else in between that makes me nervous.

And when I'm already kind of nervous about guys like 7 to 11 on your team, and you're talking about winning 50 games, and one of your starters business half of every NBA season, makes me a little bit nervous.

But the good news is a lot of those guys are young.

So, like, I like this, the De Silva kid, I thought, showed some potential to be a good regular season player.

They do have the 26th pick in this draft.

Maybe they'll get somebody there.

Isaac, I mean, I don't even know what to expect out of Isaac.

Is he physically capable of playing more than 15 minutes a game in 80 games?

I have no idea.

And, you know, Jet Howard is still on the team.

It doesn't really ever play.

So that makes me a little nervous.

But, you know, the interesting thing about these trades is Kevin Pelton and I did this over at ESPN a couple of years ago.

There didn't used to be any trades like this with like three or four or five first-round picks getting thrown around.

There were, there were more, we did the research, there were more between 2012 and 2022, I think, than there were in the entire history of the NBA prior to that or from the merger to that.

And it's just kept going since then.

And you think about some of the reasons why

I think the shorter contracts in the player empowerment era, people, teams are like, we just have to win when we have a chance to win.

And

there's a sense that the league has been pretty open since the Warriors broke up, since Durant left the Warriors.

There's a sense that between the play-in and the lottery odds changes, like that the incentives have just generally skewed toward winning.

And I think if everybody feels those same sort of pressures, and I've written about this before, if you fling away four picks in a deal like this, you probably think in the back of your head, we can just do like the reverse to some other team that feels this aggressive in three years if this doesn't work out for us and recoup some picks.

Maybe not our picks, but some picks.

Um, the our picks thing is a big deal, as we've seen with the Nets and now with theoretical Giannis stuff about like getting your own picks back.

But it's just interesting how often we're seeing just massive amounts of picks going around.

And for the most part, it's teams that think they're going to be good, so their picks are not going to be very valuable.

And I think Orlando is justified in thinking that of itself.

Yeah, well, one more layer to that is I think it's also the, and it's related to this marketplace idea that I have: is that the glamour markets are more than willing to rely on free agency.

And the smaller markets know they can't.

So there's like this economy of draft picks going from places like Los Angeles, the Lakers, and the Clippers to a smaller market like Oklahoma City or Indiana.

The New York Knicks sending them out, you know, teams that can reliably count on free agency to add big names, they have this disposable relationship with first-round draft picks.

And then the smaller markets know they don't have free agency.

They need all those draft picks, either build with or use in trades.

Like we just saw with Indiana, sending three to get Siakam has been very important to them.

And we just saw here with Bain.

So I think

there's a geography to this too.

And we got to revisit that.

That's a good concept, Zach.

The interesting thing about the magic is:

can they keep these four guys together together salary-wise

because Suggs' contract declines because Franz is locked in you know to 25% of a cap that was you know as of this year and his contract will not raise rise as much as the cap

and Bain's contract similarly was signed you know two caps ago now or whatever two cap years ago They can pretty safely duck the second apron, maybe this entire run together.

In some years, the first apron is going to be dicey, but not

like unduckable.

You know, I think like even this year, they could just dump Gary Harris and get out of the second apron danger.

But they're going to be a tax team a lot of the time, and we'll see what their appetite is for that.

And a big thing to watch is Paolo Bancaro, whether he makes all NBA this coming year.

That's good to say.

Because that, that really, and again, I don't want to wax about this much more.

It's nauseating to me that teams are put in positions in which they kind of have to root somewhat against their players achieving things because the Cleveland Cavaliers got hammered financially by Evan Mobley winning a fantastic honor that everyone should be proud of him for winning Defensive Player of the Year.

So that'll be interesting

if they can keep those four guys together.

The Memphis Grizzlies on the other side of this trade decided that building around three gigantic salaries was just going to box them in too many ways.

And I do think, you know, Matt Moore was tweeting about this this week.

I do think they're like when

there's like Dallas with Dallas pair Kyrie and AD with a with Kevin Durant on a $50 million contract.

You pull teams and they're like, man, it's just hard to have three contracts that big.

It just makes it so hard.

And I think that's why we saw the Grizzlies kind of bail out of this.

And

from everything I've heard, they want to keep Ja, they want to renegotiate and extend Jaron Jackson Jr.

and have two big salaries and some flexibility around it.

That sounds great.

And I think it could work.

It's a little depressing that you end up.

It reminds me a little bit in some ways of when the Thunder traded Paul George, which obviously worked out quite well for them, and the Wolves trading Kat.

And that

you just have to end if you want to get out of jail.

And for the Thunder, it was the jail of mediocrity.

For the Wolves, it was money jail.

You just end up defaulting to like, I like this guy.

I don't want to trade him.

He's the most valuable guy on our team in terms of what he could bring us in trade value, but that's why we have to trade him.

That's what this feels like with Desmond Bain.

I just don't know

where they go in the next five years, how they get back to where they seemed to be going in the Western Conference.

But I'm interested to see if they can.

Needless to say, Kirk, if Ja is not even going to sniff being a top 10 player ever again, this is not going to work.

But beyond that, like, what's interesting to you about the Grizzlies pivot here?

Well, let me ask you this, because I think your listeners want to to hear you talk about this like how do you connect the two big transactions in memphis that we've seen over the last few months right the the taylor jenkins firing bringing in this finish coach and now this

what what is what is what does the combination of those two things signal to you zach

uh

The happy answer would be, we're going all in around John Morant.

John Morant didn't like the way we were playing offense.

He wants to play a a different kind of offense.

We think this dude's European coaching track record suggests he can really optimize a shaky shooting, super fast, super athletic point guard, who also, by the way, gets hurt a lot.

The negative side would be: even if we thought we wanted to trade John Morant,

we're not getting for John Morant what we just got for Desmond Bain.

And so we're going to do this other thing instead and hope that it works.

That would be my two angel devil on the shoulder answers.

What's your answer?

It just seems like it's

they might be heading towards a rebuild.

I don't know.

Like, it just seems like those two things

you have to look at them in tandem to really make sense of why you would do this, other than the cap.

So they could say, all right, we got Jaw and we got Triple J.

And Michael Pina had an article for the ringer about this today.

It's like, you know what?

This is just flexibility around these two guys.

We got a new coach, to your point.

We got some new draft capital.

We can move that and get better pieces in here that we need.

I mean, they've tried to get better pieces for so long.

That's what they were trying to do around these three guys.

Can we get Ananobi?

Can we get Bridges?

Can we get Durant?

Can we get any of these guys?

And they haven't been able to get them.

And then the other school thought is the Bill Simmons

take from this week, which is like, this is the white flag.

This is just the beginning of them waving the white flag in the West, that they don't think that this core group can compete over the next few years in the western conference um

and so i i i think the taylor jenkins move is is is is relevant here because to me it signals more of like we might blow this whole thing up bring in the young coach and and and start from scratch but admittedly that is a leap i don't feel good about saying that i feel like there's two ways and that's why i asked you in that way what do you think about it so so i will say i will say this a Brian Winhorse reported this today.

I've heard the same.

The plan, such as there is one, is to keep Morant and Jaron Jackson Jr.

I will tell you, teams that talked to them about Bain, and there were several, including a few of the teams that have sniffed around Durant,

came away less convinced that that was the case from their conversations.

However,

GMs all do these conversations differently and try to plant little seeds of doubt over here and little whatever.

The actions will tell us what they want to do.

If we get a report in two days that John Morant is suddenly available in trade talks, we'll know.

We'll know what the tea leaves are.

It's not hard to read.

And the easiest one to look at is Jaron Jackson Jr., who's eligible for a raise and extension, a very rare kind of transaction in the NBA.

They need to clear out more cap space as of July 1st or when the next NBA fiscal year starts to raise him up to a level that's going to get him to sign that extension.

Like, this is not,

they have to earn this extension with Jaron Jackson Jr.

if they want him to sign it, because

he's a very good player who could wait a year and enter into

a rich cap space environment.

You've got to make it worth his while, both as a basketball situation and a financial situation.

And right now, they don't have enough cap room even close to really make it worth his while.

How much more do they need?

Call Jaron Jackson Jr.'s agent.

I don't know.

If you see a John Conchard dump or an even a Cole Anthony dump or some couple of big dumps, that's going to tell you everything you need to know about what they want to do.

But I want to throw a theory at you.

You want to hear a theory?

Yeah.

What if they're waving the white flag

for like a year or two,

but in a way that is trying to disguise the color of the flag?

So by that, I mean

we have Ja, we have Jaron Jackson Jr.

We have all these picks.

We're We're staying competitive, guys.

Come to the games.

Like, we got a star.

Ja's a star.

Jaron Jackson Jr.

almost made all NBA.

Really good players.

We always punch above our weight.

Santi Aldama, free agent this summer, by the way, sneaky one.

He's a good player.

He comes up.

He comes off the bench and does stuff.

G.J.

Jackson Jr.

is kind of cool.

Like, we'll be good.

Brandon Clark's always helpful.

I don't know how many teams in the West that they're better than.

And I know this.

It's possible in the West to be competitive and also end up with like the fifth pick in the NBA draft because you can be competitive and 13th in the Western Conference real easily.

And I wonder if they're like, if that's the downside for us is like being

38 and 44 and getting into the lottery with like the ninth best odds.

And we've just seen what happens.

Maybe we can have our cake and eat it too and be like a decently competitive team.

And by the way, the upside is maybe we're 45 and 37 because we surprised some people.

I don't know.

And the upside is we can sort of hover in this nether world.

Our fans won't realize we've

raised the white flag for any period of time.

And if we have, it'll be for shorter maybe than we think, because then we can convert all these picks.

I don't know.

The downside is we could go two years.

You actually have raised the white flag and now you're trading John Moran.

I don't know what's going to happen, but I can see that little like, I mean, what was Dallas this year?

39 and 43 and

ended up getting the number one pick in the draft.

Like,

it's possible.

Yeah.

And, you know, and the other thing I like to do with this exercise is to look at where the arc has been.

It's not that long ago.

They had Stephen Adams and Dylan Brooks and were making deep runs in the playoffs and talking trash to the Warriors and stuff like that.

It just feels like there's this general direction downward of the Memphis ship.

It's a good ship, Grizz.

Yeah.

So I don't know, man.

Time will tell, but, you know, some have predicted this to be the most crazy offseason we've seen in a long time.

So maybe things are just

starting.

Here's the Memphis Grizzlies last five years.

A lot of trash talking, some confrontations with LeBron,

a lot of

some dollar bills on the floor.

A lot of that.

Lost first round, lost Western Conference semis, lost first round, missed playoffs, lost first round, one playoff series in five years.

That's right.

For all that noise, for all that noise, one.

And so

what are we doing?

Right?

Well, I don't know what we're doing.

I think they

under.

They had some health issues in the playoffs and all that.

Okay.

I think that's it on my Bain.

I don't mind it for the Magic at all.

I kind of like it, actually.

You know, it's a lot of picks.

It's like there were definitely.

executives from teams whose reaction was, that's too many picks for Desmond Bain, just like it was too many for Mikhail Bridges and and too many blah, blah, blah.

Are the Magic close enough to justify?

Like, I thought the Knicks were close enough to justify an overpay for Mikhail Bridges.

The Magic are not as close as the Knicks.

They're certainly not as veteran as the Knicks.

But I also think Desmond Bain is a more urgent and better fit for their team than Mikhail Bridges was for the Knicks.

So

interesting times.

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Rated R under 17, not admitted without parent.

Okay, any thoughts on Kevin Durant, who, you know, look,

got to be talking about it during the finals, I guess.

He's got a list.

How many lists has he had?

Is his list number three at this point?

He's making lists.

The guy's just making lists at his house.

Minnesota, you know what?

Cross Minnesota, they're not on my list.

The list is

the Suns, the place for the Suns.

The list used to be the Suns.

The list was the Suns and only the Suns.

Suns.

That's right.

It seems

anybody but the Suns.

The Rock.

Yeah, go ahead.

No, go ahead.

What are you talking about?

What are you talking about?

Well, I think I got some news.

I know our friends in San Antonio think the price is too high.

And

the original discussions, including the number two pick and/or Stephan Castle,

are not going very well on the Spurs end of the telephone.

I can tell tell you that.

So everybody loves Kevin Durant, even though he's 36, soon to be 37.

But the Phoenix Suns, my understanding is, Zach Lowe, they're asking for a little too much.

I had one Eastern Conference executive say the name is better than the game, which I thought was a little mean.

I thought that was mean.

It's Kevin Durant.

You look at Kevin Durant's numbers last year and it's like, the game's pretty damn good.

Yeah, I forget who had the stats, that it was like

yeah he obviously he's he's playing at a great level um

but he's 36 and what's interesting to me is like somebody who's like thought about strategizing in a front office it's like

the spurs and rockets are all like 23 year old dudes like what are we doing we're gonna add a 30 it's just from an aging curve doesn't make a lot of sense now you could say oh my god if the rockets had kevin they would have won maybe a playoff series they ended up losing and I'd listen to that.

But generally, when you're playing a team, you're trying to align some of these age curves.

And this guy's just at a different level in his career, different place in his career than Houston and San Antonio.

What else is on his list?

Houston, San is Miami?

Has he Miami?

He's on the list, baby.

Hashtag he culture.

Yeah.

What you're really saying is that Kevin Durand is the kind of player that if you trade for him, you must be a championship contender immediately.

And I think the Spurs justifiably look at their team and are like, even if we get the price down to the point where Devin Vessel is the most harmful thing we have to give up, or Devin Vessell and what do they have, the 14th big VLA?

Yeah, 14.

And Harrison Barnes and some filler.

And so we have Fox and Castle, the number two pick, and Kevin Durant and Victor Wembanyama.

And I'm probably forgetting somebody good.

Are we actually good enough to like win two to three playoff series in the West?

And I think they're probably like, I don't, I'm not sure enough of that to start getting aggressive in like two, good luck.

Castle,

again, the guy's going to be 37 years old on an expiring contract and maybe wants a two-year $112 million extension.

That by the way, like, I don't know if I'm psyched about that, which is why the Minnesota thing remains interesting to me because they're not on the list.

He's made it known he would not want to go there.

They are interested in him and would like to get him and are doing this dance of like,

would we dare?

Yeah.

If we're daring, is the price lower because we have no long-term security?

Or is like, do we even mind?

Like, can we get the price down to the point where we don't even mind if he just like comes and it doesn't work and he leaves?

Or

has he been so sort of emotionally unpredictable that even if he says he doesn't want to come here, maybe it'll go the opposite way because everywhere he says he wants to go, he ends up hating.

Maybe we go the other way.

He doesn't want to go here.

He ends up loving.

I don't know.

I've said before, I think think Houston is the most interesting fit because I think between Van Vliet and Brooks and Ishengun, who plays like an older player than he is,

they would be a pretty interesting, ready-made fit for them.

I just think, like, what are you trading if you're the Rockets for him?

It starts with Jalen Green.

Jalen Green has to be in the deal.

If I'm the Rockets, I'm trying to go like Jalen Green, Jock Landale, Aaron Holiday as salary filler.

Maybe Reed Shepherd.

Maybe, maybe.

No, I'm not giving you Reed Shepard.

This is too early.

Maybe the number, Maybe the number 10 pick.

And like, you're going to ask me for Jabari Smith Jr.

and my own pickback if I'm the Suns.

And I'm like, maybe you get none of those.

You definitely don't get both.

Like, it's a complex because I got to have enough in the kitty, or maybe you got to give me Royce on the Old Two just to have a good eighth man on the team.

It's a

trickier negotiation.

And, you know, the other thing that's relevant here is this is a new GM in Phoenix, Brian Gregory, you know, who's who's navigating this?

And this is very hard to do.

And you have experienced GMs around the league like Miami.

Miami and San Antonio are not easy to deal with if you're making that phone call from Phoenix.

And some of the Reportings Act that I'm sure you've seen too is that they want to recoup about as much as they gave to get him.

Well, that's not going to happen.

That's just not going to happen.

He's at a different stage of his contract.

He's a different stage of his career.

And I wouldn't doubt that they're asking Houston for Shangoon and Shepard and Jabari, some ridiculous haul.

If I trade those guys and I get Kevin Duran on my team, what is the point?

We're not good enough.

We have to be good enough now.

And,

you know, again, like it's some, their best assets are the, not the best, their best, like realistically gettable assets for the Suns.

So take Amen and Shangoon and all those, all that stuff off the map.

Are the Suns 2027 pick, Jabari Smith Jr., the 10th pick in the draft, and Jalen Green, who just has to be in the trade.

I'm not trading you.

Eason, I'm putting over here, too.

Maybe that's unrealistic.

So that's four assets I just named.

The bullshit you're getting from me is two, two of those.

And I'm not even sure I got to give you two.

And if that breaks up the deal, that breaks up the deal.

The heat,

I don't even know what the trade is, man.

Like the trade, Rogier and Wiggins are the salary.

That's a fart noise for Phoenix.

Jake is and like three first-round picks.

Yeah.

I'm not sure that gets me excited.

And I'm going to, they're obviously going to ask for Khalil Ware, and the heat are going to say no on Khalil Ware.

And even if I swing them into that trade, Kurt Goldsenberry, even if I con them into not con them, even if they take that trade, because it's the picks, like the picks are valuable.

My starting lineup is Hero, Durant, Bam.

And who, who else is filling out the lineup?

Is it like Davion Mitchell and Haywood Highsmith?

And then coming off the bench, I got another, like, you know, I got Slomo and Ware and Jovich and maybe Duncan Robinson, Pella Larson, the 20th pick.

It's like not,

I don't know, man.

You got to think that hero KD Bam thing is like a legit big three to really go all in on a trade like that.

And I'm not sure that it is.

Zach.

How does this end?

I don't.

I legitimately don't know.

I would say,

what's a great question?

So, you're asking me who gets him?

Who gets Kevin Durant?

Or just generally, how?

Is it going to be they're asking way too much right now?

You got a player who wants to leave in part because he wants to compete for championships.

I'll make a prediction.

I'll make my prediction.

Only if you agree to make a prediction.

Yeah, I'll make a prediction.

Look, let's be clear.

This is just a stab, not quite in the dark, but in the dusk.

Okay, this is not a real, like hard and fast prediction.

So don't hold me to this, but you're asking me to name one team that gets Kevin Durant.

That's the prediction.

I think I'm just going to

go Houston.

And they find a middle ground that is palatable to the Houston front office, who I think is less excited about the prospect of it than the Houston coaching staff.

Because the Spurs, I just, I'm not, I just

not sure I'm ready to do it if I'm the Spurs.

Minnesota, it's it's complicated on a number of fronts.

Miami, I just went through.

Maybe my Miami always goes head over heels for these guys.

Maybe it's them.

Then there are the mystery teams.

Your Toronto's your Detroits.

I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody.

I guess I'd go Houston.

But none of these teams would like surprise me.

Yeah, New York, Boston.

There's some super dark horses.

I think New York's out.

They're out.

They should be i mean

i think houston is the right answer and

they're gonna start asking for five things and they're gonna get whittled down to three or two or whatever it is um

i think that's the right answer and this is why i think you've already i mean Someone reported for, I can't remember who, and I'm sure this is true because it makes all the sense in the world, is that Phoenix has already started back channeling what could we get for Jalen Green because I don't think like Jalen Green plus Booker

plus Beal, like I just don't understand what to make of any of that.

And by the way, like Phoenix,

Phoenix has to think about

what helps us remain competitive in the near-term future.

And like,

I mean, that's why the Gobert thing was somewhat appealing because Gobert is one of the great floor raisers of the NBA.

I just don't know what Minnesota's roadmap to a defense would be without him, a good enough defense.

You know, they can talk themselves into, oh, we'll get Clint Capella at the minimum or Brooke Lopez with whatever biannual if they even have that because of their apron situation.

I don't know.

It's, you know, it's tough sledding when you start going down that road, replacing a four-time defensive player of the year with those kind of guys and all five out lineup otherwise.

Yeah, it's probably not good to dismantle a conference finalist, whether you're in New York or Minnesota, for an aging superstar.

I was thinking tonight, I was like watching this game.

I was like, who's the oldest guy in this game?

Who's the oldest guy out here making a difference?

Was it Caruso?

Miles Steiner is much younger than I think

his experience level.

Yeah, this is a good idea.

Even in

the last round, it's like, okay, there's not a lot of guys in Minnesota or New York that

are older.

um

and so it's just like the reality of it I love Kevin Durant um but it is just we don't even have to do that you know we don't even have to do that dance where you're like just reminder Kevin Durant's awesome and is one of the 15 greatest players that we all know like it's it's he's you don't know when the wheels are going to fall off but it's interesting I was looking up some of like his athleticism stats um or or what passes for like

testing the idea that his athleticism has declined.

So I went on the on second spectrum or genius IQ or whatever we're supposed to call that now and looked up Kevin Durant drives per 100 possessions

per season.

This year was the most drives per 100 possessions of his entire tracking data era career, which is like the last 10 to 12 years.

And then on the flip side, you look at cleaning the glass.

It was like his lowest share of shots at the rim pretty much ever in a healthy season.

So he's driving a lot, but I don't know what the technical definition of the drive is there.

I need to refresh my memory, but he's not getting all the way to the basket.

Defensively, I thought after like a roaring first 20 games, he backslid a little bit.

And you don't know how much of that is just the malaise of this ain't going to work here.

Um,

it just you just got to, and that's why Minnesota can't be counted out, even with, even with his disgruntlement, even without an extension, because they are a team I could look at and say, like, they could look at him and be like, maybe we can get over the hump with this guy immediately.

And that's what you have to be.

You have to be that kind of team.

I can go there if you're telling me Randall is the piece out

and that's the main part.

I'm not going there with you for Rudy Gobert, who is

Randall's got a player option.

Like he controls part of this process and that's a very difficult variable to deal with.

But yeah, sure, if I had my druthers, whatever a druther is, I would love to replace Julius Randall with Kevin Durant next to Anthony Edwards and Rudy Gobert and whatever else I got going on there.

Well, and that's why the other part of this equation is so tricky because, yeah,

Phoenix expects to get better out of this somehow.

And dude, Julius Randall, with all due respect, had a good year, a couple of good playoff series.

He's not making you better than the West, like with Booker.

Like that's, that's not scaring anybody in this conference.

So

yeah,

nobody's scared of them now.

So their net scare factor is beginning at zero.

But, you know, look, like these, these trades that are getting thrown around for them, whether it's this Jalen Green trade I made up or your Spurs,

not the Spurs fantasy that Phoenix has, the actual trades the Spurs might consider.

That's a lottery team, like

no-brainer to me, lottery team in Phoenix left over there.

In that conference, like,

you know, I don't want to go through, like

the West was a little fat in the middle this year, but it's still going to be a really good conference.

And I don't like Booker plus what?

Like, what is left here that makes me think this is all of a sudden going to be a playoff team again?

They weren't even on play-in team this year.

No, they're not in good shape.

But that's sort of my main point here: is when you look at all the agendas from the Phoenix Huns as an organization to Kevin Durant wanting to compete for a championship, play at a high level.

You look at the new CBA as a character in this mess, and then you look at his preferred destinations and their agendas.

These are younger teams with different aging situations.

How are you going to get the Venn diagram of all these

circles to overlap at all?

I just don't see it.

And again, you and I agree that Houston seems to be the most realistic one, but

does that check the box that, okay, Phoenix will get better because they're living in this world the way they think they're getting better out of this deal?

The bar, the bar

is the team that's up 3-2 in the finals and won 68 games this season.

That's the bar.

If you're trading a lot of stuff for Kevin Durant, that's the bar.

The bar is not like, hey, maybe we could get into the second round.

Clippers have tried to sniff around.

The Zubats piece there is just they're not moving Zubats.

So that's why I've said before,

could you triangulate the Nets into it?

Because they have all the cap space this summer and they can throw Claxton in somehow, but then paying off the Nets and paying off the Suns, and it just becomes a difficult equation to solve.

But the Nets are a wildcard in all of these scenarios, and Claxton himself is a wildcard in all of these scenarios when centers are involved.

But yeah, man, I don't know.

It's going to be a fun offseason, though.

I think

the Bane thing was indicative of a league where there's a high level of

itchy trigger fingers and combined with a high level of angst.

Like it's not working.

Either it's really working and we need to move or it's not working and we need to move.

And,

you know, I think we're going to have a fun time in the next couple of weeks.

You ready?

Yeah, I'm totally ready, Zach.

And I'm very eager for the draft, too.

I think there's going to be some fun movement around the NBA draft.

But yeah, I love this draft class.

I love

the rumors of all the drama that's coming.

Cooper flag at Summer League.

I mean, the NBA is just going to keep going after these finals.

He's going to be gone by the time I get there.

I don't get there until the 13th because I got some family obligations.

So I'm going to miss.

I'm going to miss the, he's going to be done.

He's going to play one game and it's going to be over.

It's going to be one or two games, but it's going to be electric.

But I love Vegas in July, and I'm not even being sarcastic.

I love Las Vegas in July.

I like Indianapolis in June, too.

And I probably need to go look at plane tickets.

Go back, dude.

For people who are

going to demand it.

I had a great time there.

I had a great week there.

Maybe I'll go back for game six.

All right, Kurt Goldsberry.

Any parting thoughts on the finals, the Thunder, the Pacers, the trades, whatever else.

Basketball lover's dream.

I don't want to hear about ratings.

I don't want to hear about whatever people are complaining.

This has been electric.

I love the new faces on the biggest stage.

I'm starting to think people should complain more because,

lo and behold, they did the dramatic thing tonight, Kirk.

Who could have ever have come up with this idea?

of showing the starting lineup introductions for an NBA Finals game on national television.

This is oral history.

Where did this start?

Because I first heard this was a thing this week.

Was this you?

No, it wasn't me, but like I, everybody loves starting lineup introductions.

It makes the game feel at March Madness games in the Final Four.

You see the starting lineups.

It makes the game feel big.

I want to, I love everything about a starting lineup introduction.

I want to see who sits where on the bench.

I want to see who's fidgety.

I want to see who's stone cold and just like, whatever.

I want to see who runs through the gauntlet high five and everybody.

I want to see who walks through coolly.

I want to see who doesn't even wait for his name to be called.

I'd like every bit of the, I like when like they would do the thing like mascots would do bits where they'd be like reading a news like on a beach chair on a launcher reading a newspaper during the weight team's intro i love all of it let's do it for every game it's it's like the wwe the whole thing is the ring entrances let's let's lean into that a little bit Last thing, do you have any takes on the logo on the court?

I'm sure your listeners, while we're here, do you want the final script logo?

Because you've done so many in-depth pieces about court design.

This was a controversy.

I'll tell you where we're headed.

I don't know how many years until it's going to be headed there, where all the courts are going to be like the LED courts from the all-star game a couple of years ago, where you can do whatever the hell you want to the court and it's all whatever that is.

I like the final script.

I think the big trophy in the middle looks stupid and I don't want it there.

Yeah.

But I like the final script.

But I don't, I can't,

you know what I like?

I like when, and this is a big deal when you go back and watch old games on YouTube.

I think it needs to be very clear for the sake of history.

I need to be able to go on YouTube and know for like this is game three of the second round.

I want all that info.

I want it to be blaring like Eastern Conference semifinals game two.

I want that to be in the Chiron at all times when the scoreboard's up.

I want clarity.

So whatever, however, we get clarity.

I want clarity.

I co-sign that.

I co-signed that a million times.

I love that idea.

I want to know where I am

in the tournament.

I want to know what game it is.

Yeah.

And I think that's not that hard to pull off.

But yeah, I think we've landed in a great place.

The number one takeaway from the last dance when it was the only thing we had to watch for two months was Michael Jordan's a psycho.

The number two takeaway from the last dance was the Bulls' starting lineup introductions were and are the coolest thing in basketball.

Why have we completely lost our love affair with this?

Let's bring back starting five introductions.

Let's make a big deal out of it.

All All right, Kurt Goldsberry, what do you got coming for us?

You got some charts.

You're going to post some stuff on social media about Tyrese Halliburton, who had no fuel goals today.

What else are you going to do?

Yeah, I got a hint.

I've been up in Maine for the last week or two working on an NBA draft piece for theringer.com.

So I'm excited for it.

I'm excited for it.

It's a monster.

It's 5,000 words right now.

I don't think my editor's going to like it when I send it to them tomorrow.

That's their job.

Tough.

Kurt Goldsberry, thank you for staying up late.

It's 1245 Eastern Time.

Thank you to everybody watching on YouTube.

I have no idea how many of you there are or if you've all left, but thank you for hanging out with us for a little while.

Thank you to Jesse and Jonathan on production.

That is it for our live show.

This will also be posted as a podcast.

Game six is on, I don't know what day, Thursday.

Game six of the finals on Thursday.

I'll be back at some point later this week.

Thanks, everybody.

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