Eastern Conference Roundup and Trade Preview With Mo Dakhil

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All right, right, coming up on the Zach Lowe Show, I hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday weekend. There was a lot of basketball.
There was a lot of Emirates Cup basketball.

We binged a lot of games and we got a lot to talk about. And luckily, we've got the one and only Mo Takill here for a Mondays with Mo

bounce around the NBA. We're going to focus on the East.
Holy smokes, how muddled is the East? From top to almost bottom, everyone's jammed up. What's real? What's not real?

How are the Celtics winning with the number four offense in the NBA? The Knicks are hot. What's up with the Cavs? 12 and 9, kind of middling on offense.
Is it all health? Is it all injuries?

Or is there something else going on? Give some love to the Raptors, the Heat, the Magic without Bancaro, the Hawks without Trey Young. What's going on? They're Philly.
Got their team back.

Minus Kelly Hubre, but Embiid played. Edgecombe played.
George played. How'd they look? And a crazy double overtime loss to the Atlanta Hawks.

Then we're going to talk a little rapid fire Western Conference. Trade season, not quite upon us, but will be coming soon.

What does the trade market start to look like for some of the, you know, high, high, high-value, high-salary players that may or may not become available? Who's a buyer? Who's a seller? Mo and I.

We'll get into all of that coming up on the Zach Lowe Show.

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Welcome to the Zach Lowe Show. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving weekend.
Mo DeKil is here. I like this Mondays with Mo thing we've got going on.
We're going to bounce around a lot of teams.

Are you ready, Mo? Did you have a good Thanksgiving break? I had a great Thanksgiving break. I gotta give a shout out to my wife.

She cooked an amazing meal for me, her, and her, me, my mother-in-law, and herself. And it was topped off, Zach, by my favorite thing that she makes, which is pumpkin pie.

And she makes the puree by scratch. Like, she eats the pumpkin, does the whole thing, makes the puree by scratch.
It's, it's absolutely my favorite thing.

And it's like, I look at it, I eat the whole meal, which is amazing, and then I just look at the pie.

I'm just going to

get the takes here because Thanksgiving takes is apparently a mandatory podcast segment that I did not do. I don't want to give them any time.
I'm just going to say my takes.

Number one, I went to a friend's giving on Thursday. The cook, I'll just refer to him as Nathan, went ham instead of turkey.

Thumbs up, didn't want to see a turkey again after having the Thanksgiving ham. Pumpkin pie, I don't get it.
I never got it. It's not for me.

Number three, I'm I'm going to give a shout out to myself because I make a mean ass apple crumble and I made two batches over this weekend. Rave reviews.
Look out. Look out for this guy.

Love it. Love it.

Mo, I have not done an episode since Wednesday because of the holidays. So that just means I binged a ton of games.
A lot of stuff happened.

And I want to talk about the East because the East is getting wacky. And I'm just, I don't even know what to think.
I don't even know what I think anymore about the East.

We're going to hit some West stuff, but the East right now, Detroit's still in first, had a two-game losing streak. They rebounded.
They're 16-4.

After that, there are three games total separating the number two New York Knicks at 13-6 and the number nine Philadelphia 76ers who actually had their whole team minus Kelly Hubre

for the first time all season in a double overtime crazy bananas loss to the Atlanta Hawks, Kakaw, on Sunday night. And you look at the stadiums like Knicks have won four in a row.

The heat have been pretty hot. The Hawks are surging.
The Magic are eight and two in their last 10 games. The Celtics, we have to talk about the Celtics, seven and three in their last 10 games.

Toronto on a two-game losing streak, and yet they're eight and two in their last 10 games. The Bucs are lurking below all of this at 11th.
Just got Giannis back.

They were not surprisingly completely helpless and unable to win any games without Giannis, but he is back and they're lurking.

The Bulls, in the words of I think Dennis Smith, is that the name of the head coach? The Bulls are who we thought they were.

It turns out that six and ones a long time ago, they're nine and ten.

So the East is getting a little muddled. And so the general framing I would have, and I talked about this on Prime on Friday, is if we fast forward six weeks,

we came into the season. It was Cleveland and New York, and then a big drop to everyone else.
Well, the Knicks are 13 and 6. They're second.
We'll talk about them. Cavs are seventh at 12 and 9.

Injuries have decimated them all season. If we fast forward six weeks, Mo,

two months, whatever it is, do you think the East looks more like Cleveland and New York and everyone else than it does today that it begins to normalize?

Or do you think this is just sort of the state of reality for the rest of the season in the Eastern Conference, that it's more wide open than people thought and perhaps the most wide open conference in the modern history of the NBA?

So I think, yeah, if we flash forward, I think it's going to be more of what we have now. I haven't seen enough where we look at Cleveland and say, okay, they're going to be healthy and ready to roll.

And they're fully capable of going on a big run. And like you said, there's not a lot of games separating them.
But everybody seems to be going on a run right now in the Eastern Conference.

Like everybody you lined up is eight and two, seven and three.

Like there's all of these. these runs there.
I think we're going to see this thing be muddled. I think it's great that it is.
This is going to be more fun.

I don't think the Pistons are going anywhere.

so i think they're going to be at worst case scenario a three seed this is being said literally november 30th but or december 1st even i didn't even know we changed the calendar yet uh but it's really early but i still think they're going to be right in that mix with just the start that they have and everything we've seen from these teams for the most part is sustainable like it's not like i look at these things and go okay that's not going to last that's something that's a blip more than something that they're going to be able to do all season i think a lot of the stuff we're seeing is sustainable.

So I think we're just going to have a muddled Eastern Conference. And I love it because they've become so much more interesting when we're in this scenario than it's just these two top teams.

I think when I look at it, it's going to be a fun one right now.

I'm with you on Detroit. I actually think their last three games, even though they were one and two, were healthy for them.
Tough last second loss to the Celtics.

Nip and tuck the entire way in the cup game against the Magic. One of my favorite games of the season.
Physical, intense, close the whole time, a lot of back and forth.

And then they rebound from their first taste of adversity with a win in Miami on a back-to-back. That's a good set of like a tester kind of games for them.
I agree with you.

I think this is just what the East is going to be.

I think it'll probably,

the wild card is Cleveland, I think, will get healthy and normalize things a little bit.

I just think the standings are going to be like this the entire season with some teams rising, some teams falling here and there. But I'm not, I don't see this changing much in the regular season.

Let me reframe the question for you. I looked up the fan duel odds today just because, you know, I like to see what Vegas thinks.

Win the East odds. Cavs, plus 250, huge favorites still.
Knicks, plus 390. And then a big drop to the Pistons and the Magic at plus 650.

I don't even really know what those numbers means, but low is good, high is bad.

So Vegas still sees this as Cleveland and New York and everyone else. So I would reframe the question to you this way.
And this is almost a more interesting question.

If this were like an actual bet you can make, and for all I know, it is, would you take one of Cleveland or New York to make the finals? We're not talking about standings and muddled stuff anymore.

Would you take one of Nick's Cavs to make the finals or would you take the field over both of those teams to make the finals?

I'm going to take the field. And

this isn't a prediction that neither of these teams are going to make it. But if I'm making the bet, I'm going to take the field for a couple of reasons.

One, and this is a little bit apart from the, the, that takes us a little bit away from the question, but we've had so many surprises in the finals the past few years.

And I don't think we're going to really have one in the Western Conference that if we're going to have a surprise, it's going to come from the Eastern Conference.

And this could be a team like Detroit, could be a team, you know, who knows who gets hot at the right time with everything there. So I'm going to take that there.

Second, as much as I think once Cleveland gets healthy, they're going to be so much better. I'm not convinced this is a team that can get to the finals.
I'm not sold on them right now.

I have a lot of, I have questions now.

I'm almost in

alarm mode at this point. I think the Knicks have a better chance than the Cavs.

So for me, it's almost more of like Knicks are the field, and I'm going to just take the field because it's the Knicks, man. Something always happens.

That's the analysis. Sorry, folks.
It's not like the most amazing analysis, but it's the Knicks. Something always kind of

comes together

and weird forces and Hall of Burton's shot hits the back of the rim, pops straight up, waits in the air for 10 seconds, then drops straight down. Like it's all those types of things that happen.

It seems to always happen to the Knicks in the playoffs.

So I did the thing where I made up a question and then I agonized over my own question for way too long. Self-inflicted torture.

So here's how I would answer it. I picked the Knicks to make the finals at the start of the season.
I am still picking the Knicks to make the finals now, as I said with Stan Van last Wednesday.

I went, I flipped and I flopped on this field versus these two teams question.

I almost went with the Cavs and the Knicks over the field because I do trust those two teams the most.

And we'll talk about the Cavs, but their lineup data is actually pretty encouraging for the theoretical healthy version of them. I'm still taking the field.

I just don't trust the Cavs or the Knicks enough.

I don't trust them combined enough to just to take them easily over a bunch of good teams, the craziness factor, the Mitchell Robinson health factor, just there's too much going on.

So I'm going to go with the field. Let's talk about the Cavs.
You just said the phrase alarm bells. 12 and 9,

14th in offense.

9th in defense. Their schedule has not been very hard or very easy.
Garland has only played seven games the whole season. He's shooting horribly.

Impact a little bit muted compared to how he was last year. Struce hasn't played at all.
Jared Allen's missed games here and there. Hunter's missed games here and there.

Sam Merrill's missed a bunch of recent games. You can just say,

well, when they're healthy, we know what this team is. They're the best team because you look at the lineup data and there's not much of it, but Allen and Mobley together.

120 points per 100 possessions, 109 allowed, plus 11. Similar when you throw Mitchell in.
So they're three best players. Their big four has only played 57 minutes together the whole season.

They're plus 35 in 57 minutes with a plus 29 net rating, which you can throw in the garbage if you want because it's 57 minutes, but they were also very good last year.

So you can just say once they get healthy, the team still is who they are. They haven't shot well from three yet, and they take a ton.
They have not,

their opponents have shot well from three. So you combine health plus that normalizing.
This could still come out in the wash, the equivalent of last year's 60, whatever win team.

All that's, and those numbers are encouraging to me. And I would be encouraged by them if I were a Cavs fan.

I just, something just feels off in the water there.

And part of it is, you know, the lack of rim pressure all season that people have talked about. They're 25th, I think, in drives per 100 possessions after being top 10 last year.
It's creeping up.

It's creeping up now that Garland's back, but he doesn't quite look the same.

Again, he's still doing what the toe thing. Mobile has been good, but not great.
And I was promised great, Moe. I was promised great.
The hype machine promised great, just good.

And it just feels like

the kind of verve they had last year where they would, the ball would just be flying around. Their passes are actually up.

But those sequences last year where the ball would just fly and they would score 15 points in like a minute and 10 seconds. You'd be like, what the hell just happened?

It just, it seems like there's a little bit less of that and a little bit more of like, all right, Donovan, we need 40 tonight, man. Just make a bunch of pull-up threes for us to keep us in this game.

I'm TBD on them, but

I don't love the experience so far.

Yeah, I don't love what I'm seeing in general when I'm watching them and the way that when I see them, it's like you're saying there, it does feel like something is missing.

And it goes beyond than just, they're injured. We'll see what it looks like when everybody comes back.
We know how good they were last year. So, you know, in theory, this should all be fine.

Well, one, there's no guarantee these guys will be coming back and stay healthy. I mean, you talked about Garland.
This total thing feels like it's going to bother him and nag him all season.

They were talking on the broadcast last, was it last night they played Boston 29? I don't know whatever the last.

About how he's putting different inserts into his shoes and trying to find the right thing. I'm like, this doesn't sound great.

Like the guy is like, is the team going to like Foot Locker trying to find, or are they going to like orthopedic surgeons trying to find orthotics? Like this doesn't sound super encouraging to me.

No, it's, it's, it's, that's what scares me a little bit when we're looking at Garland is just like, this thing is going to nag him all year.

It doesn't feel like, okay, this is just going to get better with time or if he sits out two weeks and rests, he'll be fine and then he'll be ready to go.

It feels like this is just going to continue to bother him all year. And you're right.
He hasn't looked like he's had the same spark. And I think that's part of the problem for the team.

I think the other side of it, too, is Evan Mobley. Like, this is a big one here.
First off, I'll say it off the bat, development's not linear.

He made a big leap last year, and a lot of it was Kenny Atkinson letting him kind of go and get on a run and get moving and

do more with the ball. But this year, it's kind of just, all right, it's exactly what we saw last year, which was great, but not what we're hoping for.

Like, if this team's going to take that level and really jump to another notch, he's got to be your second best player.

That's kind of firmly what I believe now: he's got to be your second best player. And we saw glimpses of this last night against Boston.
That start in the third quarter was damn impressive.

Starts out the third quarter. They run a little weave action.
He pops out for a three. Next possession, Garland throws a terrible pass.
Turnover, that's not on Mobley.

The possession after that, he gets it off a pop.

Pump fakes on the three, drives down the lane, gets a gets a bucket. Possession after that gets another three where he pops out, or excuse me, inverted pick and roll with Garland.

Comes off, they go under, he drills the three right off the bat with eight points.

Had 15 points in the third quarter, the way he attacked over and over again in that third quarter, and then it disappears. Then it's gone.

Nothing in the fourth quarter, two attempts, and one of them was a tip dunk, which, you know, nice, but like, that's all we get, you know, from

Mobley. We lose him in that sense.

and if this guy's got to be your second best player which is if you're gonna be that low that's my belief you got to get keep him involved all the way through i looked at the numbers his usage rate from the first quarter through the course of the game first quarter about 26 usage rate after that it drops to like 22 then it's 20 and then 20 like that's not gonna work for you this guy can really open up your offense in ways that that attacks and and and and puts pressure on defenses and we're just not seeing it from mobley So he is their second best player.

I think what you're meaning to say, and what I would say is

he's got to be like co-number one player with Donovan Mitchell or very close to it.

If it's like Mitchell and then a big gap to everyone else on the team, I've seen that formula combined with the health issues that seem to hit this team at the wrong time every year.

And I've seen what it does to them in the playoffs. I just

alarmed. I'm just a little like,

something

on this team.

The Knicks, but we're just going to bounce around.

One quick thing with just Mobley, because this did occur to me on an analogy. I don't know if you saw the movie Swingers, but all did I? Okay, stop.
Mo, I'm a 48-year-old middle-aged man.

I mean, like,

I played Sega Genesis hockey with my friends, and Jeremy Roenick was a huge character in my Sega Genesis hockey life. Have I seen Swingers? Yes, I have.
But this is Mobley is Mikey.

And I just feel like everybody else has got to give him that speech at the bar.

I literally, I just, you said the word Mikey, and I got uncomfortable thinking about the voicemail scene. I was like,

that's awful. I got physically uncomfortable.

Yeah, I mean, Vince Vaughan, I say this lovingly, has been playing the same guy in almost every single movie he's been in since then. And I just, I don't want anything else.

Like, it was cool that you try to be Norman Bates in Psycho Remake. Like, I don't need to see that.
Just be, be like the arrogant, jerky guy in every single thing. I'll watch it every time.

But he's got to be like, that's Mobley, right? You got these big claws. You got these big teeth, you know, and you're just kind of playing with the bear, like with the bunny.
Like, you need to go.

I want to see Mobley tear the bunny up. And that's really what I want to see when he's on the court.
And I want to see him do it for an entire game. Then I'll start to feel better about the Cavs.

The Knicks, my pick to make the finals, trending well, have won four straight, not great competition, and got the Raptors on a back-to-back after an overtime game for the Raptors the night before in Charlotte.

By the way, random hot take number one. I might as well get out of the way.
Now, it's not a hot take.

The Orange Charlotte uniforms. I don't know what we're doing here.

I don't know when Orange, I'm sure there's some backstory like, well, there's a local Orange Grove that somebody who's a big Hornets fan.

I'm sure there's some stupid backstory that all these uniforms have. No, hard no, light them on fire.
I never want to see them again. Okay, the Knicks.
13 and six, third in offense, 11th in defense.

If you stopped right there and were like, what is the roadmap for the Knicks making my finals prediction come true? That's it right there. Elite offense and good enough defense.

Josh Hart has been playing out of his freaking mind for the last three weeks, finally got healthy.

Mike Brown has all but said that when Ananobi comes back from injury, they're going to go back to last year's starting five, which was a sort of a controversial lineup.

I think the controversy was a little overblown, but we'll get there. And still bring Mitchell Robinson off the bench.
And I think that will be interesting to see.

Can you do that and still get enough cat Mitch combined minutes with the double big lineup when it's needed?

The bench guys are starting to show some life. McBride shooting 43% on threes.
Kolek's had some nice minutes. Shamett, although he's injured now, is kind of carved out a real role.

Clarkson is Clarkson. He's up and down.

I think the offense is 100% real. I have no notes.
They're going to be a great offensive team. 11th in defense is interesting to me.

And I want to know how real you think that is after I read you these stats.

Only one other team in the entire NBA allows more threes than the Knicks.

And only seven teams allow more shots at the rim than the Knicks. That's normally a recipe for a very bad defense.
And the Knicks are not a very bad defense. How are they doing it?

And what about it is sustainable? Well, I think to start with, you know, when they're giving up shots at the rim, it's also, you know, most of these are going to be contested, right?

You have Mitchell Robinson there, you know, sometimes. Sometimes.
Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes you got Mitch there.

You know, you have guys, you know, when you have OG on the floor, these are going to be tough. It's tough routes to get to the rim and then have to finish that stuff.

And I think that's an important distinction there. And I think that's an area where like you, you wish it was a little bit better with, you don't want to give up that many shots.

But I think that's, I can live with that if I know, and that's a scary proposition, knowing I'm going to have Robinson around and healthy for most of the season.

I can live with that because I got a rim protector that I can trust when we're giving up all of those things. So I think that's something they can kind of live by.

And I think when OG comes back, they're going to start to see maybe they do a better job of cutting down on that a bit more.

We'll see the defense kind of lock in a little bit better when they have him on the floor.

I think the three-point shooting, the shots they give up scare me because it feels like a lot of them are just kind of open, right?

And it's like over-rotations or getting sucked into the paint on those shots that they give up at the rim, and that leads to kickouts or offensive rebounds, skip pass, boom, open three.

Like those are the shots that scare me with this team. And that's the thing.
If I'm Mike Brown, I'm I'm probably looking to try. I got to cut down on the attempt somehow.

You want them to live in that middle range, right? Or the mid-range, exactly that. Like we want them to play in there.
So we got to close out harder at three.

I think that's something that they got to be a little bit more,

not just have more awareness, but more urgency to we got to cut down on the number of threes that we're giving up and that we're allowing. We got to run guys off the line.
One of these has to give.

Either we give up more threes, and that means we give up less shots at the rim, or the other way around.

But that's where I think at some point they got to make a decision, Zach, and it's got to come down to one of those. And then

I think it's more sustainable. I don't think it's sustainable giving up this many threes and this many shots at the rim, even with as good as I think their rim protection can be.

I don't think it's going to be sustainable because at a certain point, the dam is going to break. And what it does is you're over.

They're giving up so many threes because, and the coaching staff has talked about this publicly, they're prioritizing protecting the paint.

i i do think baked into that is you just have to allow fewer shots at the paint even though they're are they're allowing one of the lowest shooting percentages at the rim in the entire league because they have mitchell robinson because they have big wings who will challenge shots at the basket and cat is standing around nearby at times um

i but the eye test says to me I think in their effort to execute this protect the paint or bust mindset, they are overhelping a little little bit from the perimeter and they're over helping off of good shooters and they're overhelping in ways that I don't even consider like very useful.

So you can find a whole reel of threes against the Knicks this year that are like guy drives into the middle, defender on the on the strong side wing.

So one pass away, just sort of like lurches into the paint. Like he's not really helping.
He's just kind of reaching. He's not going to stop anyone.
He's not doing anything.

And then his guy relocates three feet and is suddenly wide open. Like I think they need to sort of

be a little bit more more controlled and precise with that kind of stuff. Be a little bit more controlled and precise about who gets a flyby closeout and who gets a short closeout.

I think that they can control some of that a little bit better in a way that's almost encouraging to me.

What's also encouraging to me is they're not getting lucky on three-point shots. Opponents are lighting them up from three.

They have like the fourth or fifth highest opponent three-point field goal percentage in the league. So they're not getting lucky.

And they're controlling what they can control pretty well. So second in defensive rebounding, big, strong team.
They should be. That's great.
Not giving up second chances.

13th in opponent free throw rate. Like, that's pretty good.
It's not great, but you're not giving them a lot of extra chances at the rim either. And they're 10th in forcing turnovers, which again,

they're not bad at any of those non-shooting things. In fact, they're pretty good at most of them.

I'm just interested to see where this goes, but if I were a Knicks fan overall, I'd be pretty encouraged 13 and 6 with this start, given Ananobi's been out for a while and Mitch is always in and out of the lineup.

Offense, I think, will be good no matter what. They got to figure out the Towns thing a little bit better.
Defense, we know teams are going to go after Brunson-Towns combination.

How do you mitigate that? It's just, that's just part of the team.

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Okay, let's bounce around some other East teams. We have to talk about Philly because they got their team back.
Embiid came back last night. Edge Coleman missed a couple games.

He came back last night. We finally got McCain is back and playing a little better.
Paul George is back. He played last night.

We finally got to see a somewhat real Philly team, and they lost a crazy double overtime game to the Atlanta Hawks. The Sixers are 10 and 9,

16th in offense, 20th in defense.

Tyrese Maxey is averaging 32 points and eight assists a game. And most remarkable of all, has kept his turnovers low.
And that's one of the secret sauces of why he's so good.

By the way, I saw a lot of Philly fans

upset with with the Ringer 100 placement of Tyrese Maxi. He was 15th.

I'm just throwing it out there. My ballot had him 11th.
I'm just throwing it out there. That's how good this guy has been.

You know,

I don't know.

I don't know. Did you see this game? Yes, I did.

Just, what'd you think?

One, just kind of... I was focused a little bit more on Embiid.
The one thing I found encouraging was like, he looked like he was moving well.

And the thing I found really was he was on the floor and it wasn't Embiid focused, which I think is an important thing in terms of like this is Tyrese Maxie's team. Like there's no question about it.

And even when Embiid's on the floor, it's Tyrese's ball. And there'll be times where we're going to give it to Embiid.
We're going to give him some post-ups.

We're going to give him opportunities to face up because when it's on, it's on. And that's really a difficult weapon for most teams to deal with.
But he's still working his way back into it.

They lost this game, but I was encouraged with a few things. One, Paul George's fight on that, that rebound off the missed free throw was huge to me because that's effort.

And that's stuff where it's like, he's coming back from injury. He had a bad season last year.
It's a terrible year last year. And now you just see an effort and fight from him in the SS.

He's not fully where he needs to be if this team's going to be.

jumping in and battling it out in the Eastern Conference and we're really going to go nuts about them. But like those encouraging signs is what you have.
I love Maxi.

I love the way Vijay Edgecombe started the season. We need to get him.
It's going to be a bit of an adjustment for him now, right? Figuring out how to fit in now.

There's a lot more guys than when he started the season. It's Embiid.
It's George. You know, Grimes is still going to get his touches.

You're going to have to figure out where you kind of fit in all of these things. McCain is back and beginning to play well.

You got to start finding your way as a rookie and figuring all this stuff out. I just overall like where this squad is heading.

And I think if they can just stay healthy, and I know that's the biggest freaking if that's out there,

I think by the end of the year, we're going to look at this team and they're going to have kind of a full understanding. Everybody's going to have an understanding of their roles.

I think Nick Nurse did a great job with this team. I thought offensively, running a ton of stuff, different things, you know, Iverson actions, a lot of movement.

which is something that we haven't seen a lot from the Sixers in the past. And I was really kind of like, this is an offense I think that's going to work for their guards.

And I think Embiid's going to find his touches in between in there. And I think this is going to be great for Paul George.
We just got to see more of it on the floor and see how it builds out.

But I love that everybody's roles are beginning to fall in place. Tough loss last night.
Jalen Johnson was incredible. But like, I think that's

the starting point, like, right here, is we're going to look at this, and I see where they're beginning to build. I like what they're doing offensively.

I think we're going to be going in a good direction if you're Philly.

I got no idea what to think, Mo.

I got no idea.

I disagree with you about Embiid. I don't think he looked very good.
Okay.

I just, he doesn't want to move on defense, which is fine. He's a big guy.
He wants to be around the rim.

Offensively, he looks just okay to me.

He's certainly not hungry for like brutalizing physical contact yet, which is is he's coming back from injury. He's trying to feel out his body and see what he can handle and what he can't handle.

But he's always coming back from injury. Like, this is just the permanent state of affairs.
He's always, we're always going to have this qualifier of, well, he just needs to get his legs under him.

He needs to come back from injury. We're going to say the same thing again in a month when he's coming back from another setback of some kind.
I don't mean to make light of it. It just is what it is.

I don't think he's moving particularly well on either end of the floor. His rebounding numbers are straight up alarming,

like career lows by so much. And it's not as if this is like, well, there are other guys grabbing rebounds on this team because he's boxing out.
They're bottom five in defensive rebounding.

They're a bad rebounding team. Now they are small and they're about to get smaller because they have all their guards healthy.
So they're going to play.

combinations of three of these five guys and they're all good and they all should play between maxi grimes mccain edgecom and i'm forgetting somebody um because that's what happens uh and then paul george at the four and that's just what it's small lineups.

And Embiid will look better if he plays more.

And there's a lot of talent here. All these guards are good.

Like you said, they can move the ball. They can drive.
They can attack gaps. They're fast.
Maxi is absolutely unbelievable. I just, you know, I don't know.

I just don't know what to think anymore. I don't know.
And

they are over the tax by enough that, you know, you could see Daryl Maury and ownership being like, hey, can we get under this thing without hurting our team?

But

they do have picks to trade too. I don't know.

I just felt like we should talk about them because they actually had their team. By the way, I think Edge Comb is great.

I think he has a chance to be a really good defensive guard, like super active, super smart, physical, rotates with urgency, has good hands.

I just don't, I'm like a, I'm like a shrug emoji with this team. I don't know.

It's tough. With just their situation, it's tough to really.
They are the team team that I felt like going into the season had the wildest variants. Like it's,

we had no feel for where they could be. It could be one of the worst teams in the league, or it all plays perfectly.
They get all the breaks they need, and they're in the top three in the East.

See, I don't even think that that's true anymore about the variants.

That was a fun thing to say before the season. I said it.
Everyone said it. I think what's happening right now is just about what they're going to be.

Like, I don't see a world where like, oh, this is a 52-win team anymore. But I don't know.
Again, shrug, shrug, shoulder shrug. We'll see.
Everyone's doing the best they can over there.

Let's talk about the team that beat them last night and their division mate, the Orlando Magic, two teams who are thriving without foundational players. Let's start with the Hawks.
13 and 8.

I don't even know where does that place them in a log jam, but technically fifth in the East. 15th in offense, 11th in defense.
Their schedule has been pretty easy.

Since Trey Young went out very early in the season, they are 11 and 5, 11th in offense, 10th in defense, 11th in net rating in that stretch. 11th, 10th, 11th.
That's good. It's not gangbuster.

It's not great. It's not contender profile, but it's good.

Galen Johnson, 23, 10, and 7 on elite shooting from all over the floor. Nikhil Alexander Walker is averaging 20 points per per game.
That's like double what he usually averages in a season.

The ball is absolutely flying. And it's not the raw number of passes that I care about.
It's every decision is so fast.

Every cut, every random screen, every like Dyson Daniels has become one of the best cutters in the entire league. Every just, okay, I'm going to like inverted pick a roll for Jalen Johnson.

Let's see if we get a mismatch. I'm going to roll out of that.
I'm going to cut over here.

Everything is like so fast that, yeah, they don't have a traditional sort of like number one ball handling option anymore.

But the collective speed at which they're making decisions kind of compensates for that and opens up all these cracks in the defense that they just exploit. I love the way they're playing.

I have always been of the mind that their highest ceiling and the ceiling they should aim for is reintegrating Trey Young into a team that continues to play like this with Trey Young and the threat that he poses as the head of the snake when they need him to be the head of the snake.

And they may not have any choice but to do that this year because he's under contract and he has a player option for next year.

I will say, Mo, I'm beginning to reconsider my the Hawks should extend Trey Young on a fair, and I remember pitching like four years, 190 or something extension, because this looks pretty real to me, what's happening here.

Defensively, we knew they'd be better without him. Offensively, 11th in a 20-game span almost without him is super encouraging.
It looks real.

I think it'd be harder in the playoffs against playoff defenses without an A-plus number one option. But A, Galen Johnson is something, getting something, getting somewhere close to that.
And B,

I said before, this 11 and 5 stretch with these net ratings and all that, good, but not great. But that's all they've ever been with Trey Young to begin with.

And I'm starting to look at this stretch and recalibrating my thinking into

not necessarily like I'm going to shop Trey Young and try to move him and whatever, but just like imagining what my team could look like if I took that $50 million salary slot and it was suddenly $0,

whether he opts out, I don't think he's going to, whether he's off the books in two years. What could I do with that combined with the pick I have coming from New Orleans, my own draft assets?

Like, how could I reorient this team? I'm starting to trend more that way. That doesn't mean better without Trey.
It just means maybe I'm recalibrating my team.

I haven't made a final decision, Mo, but I'm recalibrating. It's different without Trey is the way I would say it, right?

And I think what you're talking about, when you talk about the offense, that's Quinn Snyder's offense. That's what he wanted in Utah, right?

And then when they got Donovan Mitchell, eventually it became more slowed down and more pick and roll and ISO heavy.

This is the offense I feel like Quinn has been wanting to coach and run for an incredibly amount of time. All the things, quick decision-making, 0.5 seconds.

Remember all that stuff that they were always talking about in Utah, about being quick and making the decisions. We're seeing it come to fruition with this Hawks team in this way.

And then this is a Jalen Johnson leap. You know, he started it last year, got hurt, missed a whole bunch of time, just never paying.

We're beginning to see that now where I don't think he's a number one guy, but he's making that leap of like, yeah, I can help carry a team for a good run. We need one more guy to help stir the drink.

And I think that's going to be extremely important for them.

I don't know if it's going to be Trey because I think, and it's like you're saying, if he's going to come in, And they got to run more offense just around him and kind of go away from what's working, that's a massive problem problem for them.

That's a red flag. That's something they have to kind of nip in the bud right away.
I think for them, when they bring Trey in, and it's like you're saying, reintegrate him into it.

And he's got to have the understanding of like, I got to do all these other things. I can't just be on the ball, run, pick, and roll.

Yeah, I'm going to drop a great corner pass that's going to knock people's socks off, but. We got to find more ways to use him and maximize him.

It's a five-person guy, five-person unit on the floor on offense. So all five guys got to be moving and cutting, setting screens and whatnot.

Sometimes we're going to have the ball in our hands, sometimes we're not. That's what Trey's got to lock in on.

If you're the Hawks, this is a fun position to be in because I really think they should be trending more towards what you're saying, Zach, of like

maybe it's time we politely move off of Trey and then start figuring out what we are and how we can kind of reorchestrate it because we've kind of seen it with Trey and it's not going to take you far enough.

And this is a squad where you need to have more guys that can move the ball, keep it going.

You just need to have that one, just one elite, elite scorer that at the same time, and I know I'm asking for a miracle, that's not going to be a guy that needs to have a 30% usage, 35% usage rate.

You need to have a guy that can score and not kind of completely derail your offense. Here's the difference between the Orlando and Atlanta situations.

I think it's much easier for Bancaro to dial back his shot usage in the ways that the Magic probably need him to, the way they're playing without him,

because of his size and positional versatility and all the different ways he can impact a game on offense post-up, set screens, roll, make plays out of the roll, all of that.

I think it's easier for, and he's not a defensive liability.

I think it's much harder for Trey Young because no matter how much he tries to diversify his game on offense, and he has, I've ad nauseum said this stat that he set more screens, more ball screens last season than he had in his entire career combined.

Low bar, but he did it.

A, I just think I don't know what the ceiling on that is. I don't know that he's ever going to commit to like, yeah, I'll average 19 a game and run around and do all these other things.

And it's just not possible for him to be anything but a defensive liability. Like there's no, there's no chance of that.
Now,

we'll get into the trade universe later. I don't know what the market would even be for for Trey Young.

And there are all these like distressed guard assets around the league, like John Burant, LaMelo Ball. I think the LaMelo Ball situation is simmering a little bit.

He got benched in late in their game against Toronto the other day.

That's happened before. Trey.

And then you have like all the Sacramento guys.

And you have, you know, Zion. I don't know what the hell you do with Zion.

Got like Michael Porter Jr. is not a distressed asset.
He's actually had a great season, season, but will some team take a swing at him?

And we'll talk about the buyer-seller thing later, but I don't even know what the market would be. But

I really like the way they're playing. I have a dream of Trey Young sort of fitting into it.
I just don't know how realistic that is.

They do need, they do, it does make me nervous when Quinn Snyder goes full four bench guys plus one starter on the floor when all of Keaton Wallace is playing great.

Luke Kennard, Mo Gay, who's making a little leap, and Vic Crachie, who's turned into like Clay Thompson in the last three weeks.

When all four of them are on the farm, like, can we get one more starter in there? Now, part of that is poor Zingas has been, as always, in and out of the lineup.

And that cap space scenario that I laid out before, cap flexibility scenario, also like KP is a free agent after this season, and it would require moving on from him too. And they don't have a ton.

They're playing Mo Gay as their backup five right now, and he's doing fine. But I don't know.
I like this team. Orlando,

let's see where they are. 12 and 8, 8 and 2 in their last 10 have played a very tough schedule.
Ninth in offense, 8th in defense, top 10 on both ends of the floor.

Without Bancaro, or since Bancaro's injury, they are sixth in offense and 10th on defense, plus six for the season with Vancaro on the bench, six points per 100 possessions, plus 2.5 with him on the floor.

And it should be noted that this hot stretch, which is now a sustained stretch, started with Bancaro in the lineup. I feel like this happens all the time.

It reminds me of a couple of seasons ago, the Rockets finished really strongly with Shangoon injured, and everyone was like, oh, Shangun's injured. Amen.
Thompson's taken off. What does that mean?

And I would always say, like, they were, I'm just making this up, but they were like five and one in their last six with Shangun. Like, it started with Shangun.

Well, they were, the Magic were five and two. in their last seven games before Bancaro got hurt.
Not great competition, but it's not like they were losing games.

This is getting interesting, though.

Not the Bancaro thing, because to me, the answer to that is not complicated, but after a sluggish

start where the Jamal Mosley noise started murmuring a little bit, maybe the Magic are who we thought they were too.

Maybe they're just a really good team that is actually a threat to make the conference finals. And if like everything explodes into chaos, who the hell knows? Maybe they're just that team.

What do you think of them? Yeah, I mean, I probably jumped the gun the way I was killing them at the start of the season with how frustrated I was with their offense.

Last 10 games, they're beginning to find, Bain's beginning to find his way more. Just looking at the last 10 games, he's averaging 22 points a game.

You know, his three-point shot's not falling as much as we would like it to. But I guess once you go to Orlando, you can't make threes.
Just a thing.

We'll just have to accept it as a fact now at this point. But I like the way they're playing a little bit more on offense.
They're finding more fluidity.

They're finding more flow with how they look to attack, where they're looking to attack. They're trying to pick at defenses, weak points, and trying to get going.
Franz has been really good.

I think the other guy that's kind of been an underrated guy for them has been Anthony Black has been phenomenal, right?

Like the way he's kind of coming out, he's one of the few guys knocking down threes for them, shooting almost 39% from three, hitting his last 10 game stats, you know,

averaging 15 points per game. And I just feel like, again, the one thing I love about all their guys, none of them really take anything off the floor defensively.

Complete competitors on the defensive end. So when you put them out there, you're not worried about them kind of like, oh, no, now our defense is going to go to the crapper.

No, we're going to still be solid defensively.

I love the fight that they've had in the way that they've kind of persevered through all of this stuff because the noise was getting there for Jamal Mosley. It was getting really loud.

And I feel like they're beginning to find their way on offense.

Once Paolo comes back, it's like you said, I think it's just going to be an easier transition for him to reintegrate him into the offense and get him and keep this momentum going offensively.

I'm not worried about them in that regard. I just want to see them knock down some threes.

It's just too long now. We just can't see them make anything.
Well, what would really help

is if Paolo could become a reliable three-point shooter because the track record is getting worrisome. Career 31.7%

and about there every season. 30% as a rookie, 34%, 32%, 25%

so far this year. They're starting Tristan De Silva in his place.
I think Tristan Silva is a really nice all-around sort of Swiss Army knife as a role player.

The lineups really sing when they take De Silva off the floor and put another guard on the floor. So three guards.
plus Franz Wagner at the floor, plus a center. You feel both the speed, but that

like the elbow is much, the elbow area is much less occupied and much less cluttered, and everybody has more space to attack.

And that is the part of the paint, that part of the court where Paolo really lives. And Franz lives there a lot too.
And it just becomes a little clunky.

And they've done well with that space being blown open a little bit. And I'm curious to see sort of how Paolo fits into that because he's still going to be the focal point.

He's still the best offensive. Well, he's still the best player on the team, probably, although Franz is nipping it.

And the other thing that should be mentioned to Paolo's credit, I said this before, is Suggs is playing awesome on both ends of the floor, on both ends of the floor. He's making his threes.

He's running a little more pick and roll. He's ISOing now and then and making pull-up threes.

He really appears to be the skeleton key that unlocks the best version of this team.

And because his injuries at the beginning and Paolo's injuries now did not overlap, like they've barely seen the floor together.

And when they have seen the floor together, they are blitzing opponents in terms of scoring margin.

So maybe it's just as simple as Paolo plays more with their best and most important players is another way the situation resolves itself. But I love the way this team is playing.

One more team that we have to hit before we move on out of this chaos of the East. And Toronto, Detroit, Miami, I've hit you all your teams hard in the past.
Great stuff. Everybody, wonderful.

Enjoy it.

Boston is just way better than I thought they would be.

I took the under on them. I don't remember where it was.
Is it around 500? Might still get there. They're only 11 and nine.

They've played an average schedule all the way around, 10 home games, 10 roam games, average schedule.

The thing that is absolutely crazy to me is if you told me 20 games into the season, they would be the number four offense in the NBA.

Despite Derrick White not shooting great, Peyton Pritchard not shooting great for the first 10, 12 games of the season. He's starting to normalize.
He had 40-something last night against Cleveland.

I just would not, I would have been like, that's insane. Fourth in offense, fourth, they're fourth in offense, Mo.

It's, it's like, and we know how they're doing it. They take a whole ton of threes.
They're fourth and three-point rate. They do not turn the ball over.

They are first with a bullet in lowest turnover rate in the league. And Jalen Brown,

I mean, the mid-range game right now is absolutely on lock. 52% of his shots have come from the mid-range this year.
That's by far a career high.

28% of his shots, according to Cleaning the Glass, have been long twos. That's double his career high rate.
He is shooting 48% on mid-range shots, 53% on long twos specifically.

And that may not be sustainable, you know, totally, but he looks so comfortable and so powerful and puts more arc on that jumper when he needs to put more arc on that jumper.

His assists are a little bit up. His turnovers are a little bit up too.
But I just, I love the way he's played. And yet I still don't understand how they're fourth in offense.

It's crazy how good this team is offensively. Yeah, I think offensively, they've just kind of found their flow with where they're going.

First off, I think Brown, as you highlighted, is, I think he's... showing even more improvement as a playmaker.
Last night, 11 assists, making sure he was dropping some good dimes.

There was a great baseline cut from Pritchard. Brown's about to go go into his mid-range shot, finds him right underneath the rim.

It was a critical possession late in the fourth quarter where he does that.

And it's just being more comfortable and trusting his teammates and understanding too that, like, yo, I got to be the guy that kind of creates for everybody else.

But then the ball kind of does a good job moving. I mean, when Pritchard goes off the way he did last night, it's just going to be extremely difficult to deal with.
But they get downhill.

They do a good job. The one thing I found really impressed, I've been most impressed with Boston was early in the season, it didn't didn't feel like they could get a rebound to save their lives.

And now

they've kind of become a very strong rebounding team in the way that they're doing it. And the guy I really want to highlight more than anybody else, Jordan Walsh has been phenomenal for them.

And I think that's something that helps across the board, you know, not like scoring or whatnot, but he's going to get the hustle place. He's going to battle for boards.

He's going to get opportunities. And because he's battling for boards, he's going to get to the free throw line, have opportunities at that end.

It's just doing all the small things that they're doing.

And then you just have guys like when Brown's going to shoot the way he's shooting at the mid-range and more aggressively, I feel like you're going to start finding more opportunities because you got to put more effort in defending him.

And that opens up, guys. And then when Derek White's on the floor,

it's a guy that can knock down shots and then kind of create his own shot.

Then you have Simons coming in off the bench, and that's just a dude that's just going to get downhill and look to attack over and over again. And he's going to be really fast.

They put a lot of pressure on you defensively with just their individual talent, like how good these guys are. And I think that's what defenses are dealing with.

And Simon's impact has been like up and down and almost more down than up. I mean, a lot of games where it's like 14 minutes, two of nine, like, whoa, that's all they're getting out of him.

I thought at the end, look, we all know his defensive limitations and Joe Missoula's standards for getting on the floor.

You still would think he'll just come and be a microwave scorer every game for 25 minutes. And that hasn't been the the case.
It was last night in Cleveland. He went off a little bit.

Minot has given them good minutes. Baylor Scheierman has cracked the rotation again and has been pretty good.
And you mentioned Walsh, like

37% on threes, wide open, but he's making enough of them to be playable and defending the best perimeter guy on the other team every game. Massively valuable player.

And they won last night without Keda, and Keda's been incredible for them.

They'll play five wings at the same time and just say to hell with it. Good luck guarding us.
We'll switch everything and play super fast.

And Peyton Pritchard, after a rough start, 17 and a half a game, 46% overall, 34% on threes. He's shooting 62% on twos.
He shot 64% on twos last year and 59% on twos the year before.

And, you know, I remember talking about this with the Malik Beasley Peyton Pritchard six-man debate last year. I voted for Peyton Pritchard.
And to me, it wasn't a particularly close discussion.

It's just like those twos are not easy baskets that he's making. Like he's wriggling his way into the mid-range, cutting to the rim, getting offensive rebounds.
And defensively, he's tough as shit.

Like he's a little small, but you can't mess around with him. You can't back him down.
He doesn't make mistakes.

He is a, like I said last year, just a better all-around basketball player than Malik Beasley. That's why I voted for him.
He's just a really good player. Like just, and the decision to start him

has really paid off for the Celtics. Yeah.

I mean, it's just just when you go back to it, when you first kind of look at him, you're just like, all right, you know, even when he first came in the league, like, okay, this is a dude that's going to be kind of a TJ McConnell type guy, you know, and he's going to come in off the bench and bring a little juice, and that's about it.

No, he's a bona fide baller. Like, he just plays at the end of the day.
And I love the fight that he brings on the defensive end because he's not going to shrink in the moment.

He actually plays bigger than what he is. And he's going to kind of battle with you.
He's going to be physical with you. He's going to bump you.
He's going to give you a forearm, you know, sort of

bump there and here and there. Like he's going to take on the challenge.
He's not going to be afraid. And I think that's just a big part of his game, right?

In a weird way of like fearlessness of like, I don't care how big you are. I'm just going to try to go at you and do my job.
And then when he gets, again, he got so hot last night from three.

It was ridiculous. Just the way he was playing and was knocking down deep threes.
And then it opens up the stuff for them offensively for the Celtics when you have a guy going off like that.

Just you have to put more, you have to ship your defense more that way. And with that shift, it opens up other opportunities.

It's just, man, like when he gets going and stuff, I got to get Boston's way better than I thought they would be. I'm with you.

I wasn't, I didn't think this was going to be a great year, but I also made the mistake. I should have also known that there's no way Joe Mazzullo was going to allow this team to lose a lot of games.

Like, he's just not, it's just, no way he was going to be okay with that. And, and, and he's, got to give him credit.
He's put a lot of work on this, and, and, and it's paying off.

I still, I mean, they're a play-in team right now, but as I said, everything is bunched. I still think they're probably a play-in team.
Now,

they do have a lot of interesting plot twists to navigate in the next three to four months. The trade deadline, their ability to potentially cut their tax bill or get under it altogether with a...

let's call it maybe a lose now trade or a talent out less talent in trade And they just, the Tatum noise won't die. The Tatum wants to come back noise.
The Tatum has a date in mind noise.

The, is this going to be a tug of war between the Celtics and Tatum, depending on where they are in the standings noise? Like, I don't know. I mean, I don't know.

But, and, and beyond that, sort of, what does he look if he came back this season? We cannot just project like, oh, yeah, first team all NBA, Jason Tatum's coming right in for the playoff race.

That's not realistic at all. But this is a

better team, certainly, than I I expected it to be and way better on offense. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow.
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Can we go through just a couple random notes from the weekend? Yes.

Detroit,

look, I've beaten the market and drum a lot.

Let's just leave him out of it. You know, Mark Stein reported over the weekend that the Jazz would prefer to keep him and build around him.
Like, I'm sure they would. Like, that's great.

We'll see what happens when a real offer comes to their door if there is one.

Marketing aside,

Detroit does feel a little bit ripe for a consolidation trade.

They go 11 deep in actual rotation, guys, before you get to Paul Reed or Marcus Sasser, who's been hurt, or Chas Lanier, who's giving them good minutes, like 11 legit guys

who have earned time. And you can already see J.B.
Bickerstaff now that Ivy's back and Harris is back being like, man, how do I get Dannis Jenkins into here?

Like, oh, Javante Green, I kind of forgot about him. But is Ron Holland our backup power forward? Karis Lavert and Jaden Ivey are like pretty similar players in some ways.

Both need the ball. Ivy's minutes have been kind of limited the past few games, and it just feels like something is potentially

ripe for something. But again, maybe the right, as Simmons talked about last week when we did a pod together, like standing pat, perfectly defensible, maybe the absolute right thing to do.

Maybe good enough to win this muddled Eastern Conference without doing anything.

I lean more to the strike while the iron is hot and really, really go for it and add some shooting that inoculates you from playoff defenses a little bit more.

But that perfect player may not be there. But I just, I'm monitoring the minutes distribution mode.
That's all. Yeah, it's tough, right?

Like, this is a tough situation when you're a coach and you have a lot of talent. And it's not just that.
You have to manage these guys in the locker room as well and keep them engaged.

And how do you keep them going in terms of doing that stuff? To your point, though, of like, do you strike when the iron's hot or do you stay on pat?

I think we've seen over the past few seasons that if you just assume we'll be better next year, it doesn't always work out that way, right? And try to kick the cans.

Like there's certain situations where that makes sense, but at a certain point, you have to recognize when it's your window or when it's an opportunity. You got to go for it.

The other side of it is the trade actually has to be there.

You don't just make the consolidation trade to make the trade because we have too many guys and too many minutes and not enough minutes and got to figure this stuff out.

You don't want to kind of just. make a throwaway trade and then it ends up hurting you in this stuff.
It's a great problem to have if you're J.B. Bickerstaff, right?

Oh, no, I have too many good players. How am I going to find all these minutes? Like, we know there are quite a few teams that would love to have this problem.

I think over time, we're going to see this kind of settle out, you know, and he's going to have to kind of stick to a rotation. 11 deeps too much.

You know, maybe during the season, you can get away with it. But once you get to the playoffs, we know your rotation is true.
And you need to kind of start preparing guys for their roles now.

I think it'll be interesting to see, like, the first half of the season to me, Zach is always experiment, figure out what we have, what rotations, whatnot.

Second half of the season, everything has to be dialed in by then. And you have to be ready to roll because now you got to go to work.
I mean,

it's nice if you can win games early on like the Pistons have, but you need to have your rotations and have a full understanding. And the players need to understand their roles.

by maximum halfway through the season. And I think it's really important at this point.
Now with Ivy coming in, what is Ivy? They got to figure out what lineups does he work with?

What lineups doesn't he work with? What pairings work for him and don't? It's going to be really important to figure that stuff out.

And if the answer is he's just not going to fit, then you start to say, okay, well, this might be something where maybe we can use him Tobias Harris.

And then if there's something out there, we can make a trade.

Other random weekend observations. I've talked a lot about the Lakers.
I don't want to talk about them too much. But does it seem to you

like Luca is whining to the refs less this year? A little bit. A little bit.
I've kind of noticed it a little bit where it's asked. It also looks like he's just goofing off a little bit more.

Like they had a fun little thing with Austin Reeves at the, you know, in between quarters and stuff like that. And so it looks like he's almost kind of a little lighter.
as a personality.

He is literally lighter.

Yeah. But I feel like he's personality, a little bit more playful, I should say, than we've seen in the past.
And I think maybe that's why we're also not seeing him bark at the refs as much.

Sometimes you don't notice, it's harder to notice the absence of something than the presence of something.

And I was just watching the Lakers over the weekend a couple of games, and he whined to the refs at some point, and then he ran back on defense.

And part of being in better shape is you don't, you're not playing four on five as much anymore. And he's chasing, he's like chasing guard Clay Thompson around screens.

He's really guarding this year, but he did argue with the ref over an on-call. And I was like, oh, boy, I don't feel like I've seen that nearly as much this year.
And it's not lasting as long.

It's not like kneecapping their entire defense possession, just something. Minnesota.

I can't watch them play close games anymore, Mo. I just can't do it.
I mean, they lost those games against Sacramento and Phoenix, and somebody else I'm forgetting. And it was like

you could not possibly melt melt down like this if you wrote a movie script of how a team blows a game.

Five-second violations, pick six hit-a-head passes, fouling other people 90 feet from the basket.

Excuse me, for no reason.

Possessions where there are no passes and someone just takes a jump shot. What, what, Ant is, Ant is, look, Anthony Edwards is amazing.
I had him six in the ringer 100. Absolutely amazing.

I've talked about point Ant already on this podcast two or three weeks ago before a lot of people started writing about it.

I think a leap in terms of his just, I don't even want to say playmaking, ability to helm an effective offense is in progress, even though the assist stats don't know it.

He's missing box outs late in these games over and over again in really costly situations. And he's just got to dial that in a little bit more.

Just, just, just, please get it out of your system now.

And the one other Minnesota note I have is the last couple of games, they have started messing around with opening the second and fourth quarters with Randall on the floor after spending most of the season resting Ant and Randall at the same time.

And they have a lot of offensive talent in those groups that they have: Nas Reed and DiVincenzo and Conley and McDaniels, but it's always been this sort of

thing in my brain: do they need to just keep one of them on the floor at all times? That's all. I can't.
You have any Minnesota?

I can't watch this. This crunch time stuff is like just outrageous.

Missed free throws, Gobert missed a couple of big free throws it's everything well it's a couple of things too i mean one shout out uh our buddy john at the athletic wrote the uh wrote about this

point he just point it but also wrote about their crunch time

issues after they beat boston and how they kind of got over it a little bit in their win against boston down the stretch i think a lot of it had to do with it's also just attention to detail understanding situations, when to make the right read.

You know, Ant talks about a play where he should have probably kicked it off to Randall, but he felt good about where he was and

got a three off. And he had enough space for his three.
He let it fly. But when you watch the stuff that he does, he makes a lot of smart reads.
In that game against Boston, it's tied 110, 110.

They run a high pick and roll. They double Ant.
He hits Randall on the short roll, and it's highlighted in the story. And then it's an immediate kick to a wide open Mike Connolly Jr.

who drills the three. And I feel like you're beginning to see that kind of evolution a little bit in their process.

I think by the end of the season, we're going to feel better about their crunch time offense. I just think this is the growing pains of point and

at crunch time. When do I make the right pass?

When do I hold on to it?

And it's going to come down to Randall also making plays. It's going to come down to guys knocking down shots, but those two guys having to make the right decision.

And I think now that he's more more and more in that position, we're going to see it get better by the end of the season.

Love to have this conversation at the end of the season when we look back and go like, you remember those games they blew? Like, we're not seeing that anymore. I think they're going to find that flow.

The other thing I found interesting, did you watch any of their game last night against San Antonio? I did not see that game.

They went on a massive run midway through the third. quarter, maybe towards the end of the third quarter, just put Rudy on the bench.
Let's just spread it out.

And then they just torched the Spurs after that. I mean, the Spurs were up at that point.
And then they end up taking this game.

We didn't even have to worry about crunch time. They just made sure they didn't even get to that point by playing small.

That's something I'm going to keep an eye on a little bit to see how they kind of handle Rudy towards the end of the game. So

I'm looking at the lineup data now. Reed, Randall, Conley, McDaniels, DiVincenzo.
So it's one of those lineups early fourth quarter that I talked about where Randall is on the floor.

I always have liked to your point about the difficulty of, not difficulty, it's a great problem to have of juggling these three very good bigs.

I always like when they flash in there, one big, four smalls, put Jaden at the power forward spot. And they've done that a little bit more in the last week or so.
I just, I like that look for them.

I think they have the wing players to do it. I understand it's hard to get there when they have three big guys who are all worthy of heavy minutes.
I'm just flagging it. Steph Curry got hurt.

He's not going to miss a lot of time. Kaminga's back.
The Warriors are still afraid to shoot at the rim. I'm still afraid that the Warriors are

teetering a little bit at 11 and 10. No notes.

Oh, I mentioned to you, I wanted to talk about a couple of players

who were sort of under the radar helping round out their teams.

I just want to note it. Terrence Shannon Jr.
for the Wolves had a bad game last night, a couple of games before that.

If it's not going to be Dillingham, and he's been wildly up and down, I like Terrence Shannon Jr. I have faith in him earning a rotation role.

Jacoby Walter in Toronto starting, he's kind of nailed down the starting spot with R.J. Barrett hurt.
I just think a very good defensive player, making enough threes, big and rangy.

I just like the way he looks with their core lineups. And I'm interested to see his role when Barrett comes back, but he's leapfrogged Grady Dick.

He's leapfrogged Agbaji as sort of like the best fitting of those two guards. And I'm just monitoring it.
That's all, Mo. Yeah.
I mean, those are the guys to keep an eye on in terms of that stuff.

You need to be able to round out your rotations and things like that, having that on the bench.

And then when RJ comes back, you know, you have a guy off the bench that just makes your team deeper when you're going through these situations. I'm with you on Shannon.

Shannon's going to be so important for the Wolves just because that's why they let Nikhil Alexander

walk, right? Like was the thought was he'll be able to provide a lot of what Nikhil was for us.

And I think that's going to be important to see how that kind of continues to play itself out through the season.

Zach Eady has joined the party with some absolutely monstrous games for the Memphis Grizzlies, who are starting Vince Williams Jr. at point guard in John Morant's place.

The Grizzlies are part of what I have started calling in my own notes, the Western Conference Pentagram of Hell, which is the five teams who are designed to win now and all facing various degrees of catastrophe.

And ironically, the Grizzlies are in that group. And ironically, every single win in their current five and one stretch has come against other points of the pentagram.

They beat the Kings twice, including once by 41 points. They beat the Clippers once, and boy, do the Clippers stink.

And they beat the Pelicans and the Mavericks once apiece. That's the five, the circle of hell of five teams, which brings me to, and Zach E's looks great, and I can't wait to see how it all looks.

And the Grizzlies have played themselves into the play-in tournament at ninth

and that brings me to the end of this by the way a couple of clippers notes

minus nine total points so not bad with kawaii and harden on the floor but that's a bad sign kawaii Has it felt to you like you look at the numbers like, yeah, it looks like Kawhi Leonard.

And there's there'll be some mid-range jumpers and a defensive highlight where you're like, that's Kawhi Leonard.

But you get to the end of these games and maybe you're just projecting the feeling of a loss onto everything.

But I don't get out of these Clippers games feeling like, man, that was a dominant performance. Like, Kawhi Leonard asserted his will on that game and bent it to his will.

And I think part of it, very simply, Mo,

10% of his shots are coming at the basket this season. That is like alarmingly low for any kind of wing player, let alone one of his power.

And you're going to tell me, like, yeah, you know, that's Kawhi. His game is,

you know, mid-range and shooting threes and he does all that stuff well. This is a guy who would get to the rim at a reasonable rate.
And that is a marker of,

I'm just going to bring it up now. Last year, it was 20% of his shots at the rim, 22%, 25%, 30%,

like normal-ish numbers, still below average for his position, but normal. 10% is like, whoa, what's happening here?

And that, and that's a marker of, is there, I mean, obviously he's been in a lineup, just missed a bunch of games with foot and ankle stuff. Is it health? Is it age? Is it just he's not feeling it?

But that's a stat I'm going to now be checking every week or two.

Yeah, you have to keep an eye on it. And because also the aspect of it is when you attack the rim, that also opens up your mid-range game, makes you difficult to guard a little bit.

They got to be worried about that. They got to worry about you attacking again when you're at the three-point line and things like that.

If his percentage has dropped drastically, and that's a drastic drop, and maybe it gets better, maybe it doesn't.

My feeling is it's I won't be surprised if we don't see that improve much this year, and I think that's going to be a

big thing with what we have going forward with him. It's just him with all the injuries and everything.
Maybe he's going to be a little bit more reluctant to attack the rim.

It's also a little bit more crowded down there, it feels like, depending who he's on the floor with. So, he's not as inclined to get in that paint and do that battle.

But that's going to be a big one to watch for because the Clippers are a complete shit show.

Like, it's just, it's, it's a disaster when you watch them. The defense is terrible.
Turn the rock over over and over again.

Like, it's pretty frustrating to kind of watch this team because we saw what we saw last year and thought they'd be at least on that level this year.

And it's like they've just completely given up here at this point. Like, let go of the rope and let's see what happens.
And it's pretty frustrating. And you can watch it.

You see, Ty looks extremely frustrated on the bench. Like, it's, and that's a dude that doesn't usually show a lot of emotions, but you can kind of sense it from them.

It's, It's just not fun times right now in the Intuit Dome.

This is not reporting anything,

aggregators, whoever. This is just me saying something that is in my brain.
The Clippers and the Bucs loom to me as

two of the most interesting trade deadline teams because they're two of the only currently bad teams.

whose all of their incentives, almost all of them, would align towards we have to save this season.

The Clippers, because they are beyond pot committed to this aging, expensive core, and they don't control their own draft pick, and they have an owner who wants to watch wins and nothing else.

The Bucks, because they're Viannis.

They both have sort of recollected some draft picks that are available to trade. I don't, I mean, the Clippers can trade draft picks until they can't.

And I'm not sure what will happen with this whole Kawhi thing, but they have draft picks to trade.

And that's what makes the trade deadline stuff as it comes into focus very interesting.

There are sellers, like even in the play-in world, there are sellers. There are obviously bad teams who would like to trade players for draft picks.
There are three major issues, though, here.

Number one, some of the sellers just don't have anybody that teams want to trade real stuff for. I would put Washington and Charlotte in that bucket.

I don't think the Wizards are getting like real stuff for Chris Middleton or T.J.

McCollum or the Hornets for Grant Williams, who hasn't played, Josh Green, who hasn't played, Colin Sexton, who's been okay, but like these are not game-changing kind of deals.

Then you have sellers who don't have their own pick.

And so you wonder how incentivized is a team like New Orleans to sniff around the Zion Williamson trade market when they don't control their own pick?

How incentivize is a team like the Clippers, you could argue, should actually be sellers. Like would they actually cross the Rubicon with Hardin and Kawhi?

Would anyone touch Kawhi with a 15-foot pole when Uncle Dennis is attached to?

The Grizzlies with John Morant, but they've played their way into the playing tournament. The Grizzlies control their own pick.
I shouldn't lump them in there.

And then you have

a third category of sellers who do have players that people might want,

who do control their own pick, but also might look at the standings currently and look at the recent history of the lottery and be like, we're actually kind of cool trying to compete.

Like I could see Dallas saying, if we don't have a great market for Anthony Davis, or maybe we don't even want to trade him, we want to keep him. We're going to be, we're 6 and 15.

We're not going to catch Brooklyn and Washington and maybe Indiana and maybe New Orleans in the tank standings, no matter what we do. And

our chances are pretty good at moving up in the draft. If we're eighth or ninth in the lottery, maybe we'll do nothing.
I think they fall into that category.

Some of these other teams, too, do as well.

And, you know,

but that's why I look look at Milwaukee and the Clippers as super interesting. Are they willing to take a flyer on

a longer-term expensive contract to help them win? Now, like, if I'm, if I'm Brooklyn,

I don't know. Michael Porter Jr.
becomes an interesting trade candidate for me because obviously I'm not trying to win now.

He's been great, but if I can flip him into another thing and sort of double down on that trade, that's an interesting one to me. And it's going to be, it's going to be a very interesting

trade season from that regard because I do think there are all these sort of distressed asset kind of players that people don't know what to do with.

I mentioned all the point guards, and I do think we are going to hear some lamello noise. He rebutted a report that he wanted out of Charlotte.

Actually, believe him that he doesn't want out of Charlotte. I think the more interesting question is: what does Charlotte want? He's got three years left on his contract after this year.

It's a tough one to move. That's what I mean by distress.
It's going to be a tough one to move. Point guard.
Not everyone needs a point guard. The Kings guys, like, I'm sorry to the Kings.

You're not getting a Kings ransom, ransom no pun intended for any of them uh you'll get something for subonis the others levine de rosen shroeder who knows but they're they're open for business uh i'm sure it's just you know i i don't know how all this is going to to work out but yeah just a lot of stuff to keep your eye on it's it's the lottery odds have really changed teams thinking on on a lot of this Yeah, well, because you've seen the results over the past few years, right?

Like teams that were the worst teams in the league didn't end up winning the

draft. And it becomes a problem for them, right? So it's like, why should we be the worst team? Like Dallas in their situation.

Let's just try to play it out and we'll see what the odds are for us and how that kind of works out and where we're at.

I agree with you.

The Clippers and Milwaukee will be the most interesting come trade deadline because it's going to give us insight into maybe how the front office is thinking and what they're hoping for going forward.

how they're going to kind of build out this team beyond this season. Sacramento is just Sacramento, Zach.
I throw my hands up. I'm not trying to figure them out.

Look, so I need, we needed just a moratorium. I'm not talking about the Kings.
I can't do it anymore.

But I just think it's going to be interesting. I think trade season, there's going to be a lot of teams that are going to be buyers.
I just don't know if we're going to have enough sellers.

Like Lamello ball situation, you know, who needs a point guard at this point? Like, who are you looking at that's going to go and give up stuff for LaMelo? And if you're Charlotte, yeah, like, why?

You have to really ask yourself, is this a guy we can win with? You know, it's going to be interesting to see how his kind of career plays out.

Somebody texted me this, you know, over the weekend about LaMelo asking me, is what? Is he like Jason Williams? Like, is he going to be a guy who's, you know,

all flash, no substance and has to get traded and eventually find his way, you know, lands in the right spot and then he kind of gets it? Because he's a, he can play.

I mean, his appetite for defense does not exist. And I think that's a massive problem.

But he has the tools, I think, to be a pretty good defender, at least in the sense of not being as bad as he is if he just cared a little bit. I will be very curious to see

who is going to, you know, take the chance on him. And I don't know if it's going to happen this season at the deadline.

It's just going to be an interesting thing to watch for and see how that plays out. Well, and I don't really believe in any of these.
You take my point guard, I take you. Point guard.

Musical chairs, fake trades with Morant and Trey Young and Lamell. I don't think really that makes a ton of sense.

I do think there are trades that make sense between bad teams.

You know, I like the Pelicans could use another

point guard. I mean, you could say just hand the whole offense to Fears.
I don't know.

Certainly the Kings could, and I'd be trying to fleece the Kings every chance I could.

Look, as one of the last people swimming in the Lomelo Lagoon, this season has been very tough for me.

His water is getting a little murky.

He's missed half the games almost, like usual. He's shooting 38%, 28% on threes.
Just got to make more baskets.

I just haven't loved what I've been seeing.

On the Clippers, I should mention there's another, I mean, there's another variable where they're like, I think $6 or $7 million over the tax. Is there a world where they can get under the tax?

Because they didn't pay the tax last year and they shouldn't pay it for this team.

Can they do that without kneecapping their current team as much as a tax dump deal normally would? How does that even look?

Someone mentioned to me, like, well, I think they're probably just going to run this back for one more year and then rebuild properly in the summer of 2027. Like, run what back? Right.

This team looks absolutely dead. It's morose.
What are we running back? Are we going to, it's like jogging back at the very best.

I don't know. Any concluding thoughts? Oh, the other random Western Conference note.

Reed Shepard cracked a starting five for the fully healthy other than Tara Easton Rockets Rockets over the weekend, taking the Josh Okoge slash Stephen Adams spot. Durant returned.

Reed Shepard's good, and

he certainly adds a fair bit of dynamism and spacing to an offense that needs both along with its crazy offensive rebounding.

You know, I've said all year, I think the league and the West is Oklahoma City. Small drop, Denver, drop, everybody else.

Houston, I think even more than the Lakers, is making a case that they belong right next to Denver. They are a very, very tough team to play against and have a bunch of trade assets, too.

Yeah, I mean, that game, Denver-Houston, you know,

was awesome two Fridays ago, I think. Yeah, two Fridays.
I was trying to figure out what exactly it was, but that was an awesome game. And just watching them kind of duke it out.

Start of the season with them and OKC, right? And I know Jalen Williams or all this stuff, but double overtime. Like this team is on that level.
And I've been blown away with Reed Shepard.

Maybe that's because my expectations were so low on him, but like I've been highly impressed with how he's kind of come in. He's at least competing defensively.

We know teams are trying to pick on him. You know, when he's on the floor, he's been holding up pretty well for the most part.
Granted, he's got so much length and size behind him. It helps.

But he's also delivering on the offensive end.

And even in that Denver game, like he had moments where he really got them, kept them in that game for a long stretch in the second quarter, in the third quarter. Like, I'm pretty impressed with him.

I'm with you, they're right up there with Denver. Like, I think the breakdown there, and then to me, it's the Lakers after that because their defense is so rock solid.

It's that's just going to sustain from them. They're going to be able to eat off that for an extremely long time.

And then, if Shepard's going to continue to shoot the way he's shooting, you get KD and Shangoon down the stretch,

that's a scary ass team to deal with, man.

The top six in the West right now,

when I was with Mahoney in Minnesota for the live show, we did, with the, with the graphics, we did a power ranking of the Western Conference.

We had the same top six, and it's the same top six that's in position now, in order of standings. Oklahoma City, Lakers, Rockets, Nuggets, Spurs, Wolves.

So the first round, the two-set series would be three Rockets versus six Wolves. And the Wolves are always sort of cast aside in these discussions.
The Wolves have made the last two conference finals.

If they can figure out this crunch time shit and get anything out of their young guys, like they can beat almost, I mean, they go toe-to-toe with Denver.

Like, they could beat the Rockets in a playoff series. They could definitely beat the Spurs.
They could definitely and have beat the Lakers as amazing as the Lakers were.

Oh, and by the way, another top 100 thing. Someone, I saw some angst him on Lakers' Twitter about where Reeves ranked in the top 100.
I think he was 32nd in the Ringer 100. I had him 21st.

Direct to rank. They're direct to angst elsewhere.

But so the first round round matchups would be Nuggets, Spurs in a 4-5 matchup of Jokic Wembanyama and Rockets, Wolves in a 3-6 matchup. And then, you know, Thunder Lakers at 1-2 play whoever gets in.

The Thunder just don't lose anymore.

I just, another thing I'm going to be monitoring all year, Mo, and maybe I'm overdoing it with this. Maybe I'm placing too much importance on it.

But right now, at this very moment, with the Nuggets missing two of their five starters, the Nuggets are fourth and the Thunder are first.

And if I'm every other team in the West, I'm hoping like hell that that stays into the playoffs so I don't have to face both of them to get out of the West.

They have to face each other theoretically in the second round. It seemed far-fetched when Denver was lighting the world on fire and winning every game.

They seemed like they were going to lock in at one and two. Maybe they will.
Right now, they're not.

I think the funnier side of the two is both, I think, OKC and Denver at the same time are just like, come on, man, we don't want to face each other in the second round.

Like, I think that's kind of, you know, that's, that plays perfectly for Houston, right?

Of all the teams, I feel like that plays perfectly for them.

You, you know, that's going to be something that everybody's going to be monitoring as we get closer to worrying about playoff seating and things like that. I think Denver is going to be fine.

I think once they get healthy, it's going to be, they'll get back to where they're at. And they're getting great minutes from guys right now.
Like valuable development.

We're going to need you in the playoffs to play like this minutes right now. And I think that's going to be really kind of a big thing that pays off for them once they get to the playoffs.

Mo DeKille, what do we need to promote this week?

Let's see. I have double dribble podcast with my buddy Jared Dubin.
That's an independent podcast between Jared and I. Please support us.
Check us out there. It's on everywhere you get podcasts.

We usually record on Wednesdays and then get it out to everybody. Make sure you are following me on Offside.

Follow it on all the socials. That's where I'm doing all my videos.
We got great creators. We got Jason Concepcion, Kirk Henderson.
We got everybody, Michelle Beadle. We got a fun group.

Zach Harper, whole squad over there. Make sure you're checking us out.
That app is going to be ready soon, and we're going to open it up for everybody to kind of join the platform and enjoy it.

The app's fun. We got stats in there.
We got a bunch of story links and things.

Check it out. You'll enjoy it.
If you're a basketball fan, you'll love it there. And then you'll see me and my videos.
And then just, I'm on NBA TV every other weekend or so.

You know, usually on Sunday nights, check out the Association weekend editions. I think that's about it, Zach.
Well, Mo, I'll say what I always say.

If you want to know what happened in the basketball game, why one team won and one team lost, what one coach tried to do, what one coach should have tried to do, but didn't, Mo Takil is one of the guys who knows what happened in the basketball game.

Mo, I always appreciate your time. I like Mondays with Mo.
We'll see you around the corner. Thank you.

All right, that's it for a crowded monday thanks to mo to kill for his time as always and his insight thanks to jesse jonathan and mike on production thanks to you for listening to and or watching the zach low show wherever you get your podcast we'll see you later this week for another episode who knows what will happen in the nba between now and then you never know thanks for listening

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