The Zach Lowe Show - Breaking Down the NBA’s Latest Gambling Scandals With David Purdum. Plus, Blake Griffin and Trajan Langdon on Opening Week.

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

A loaded Zach Lowe Show begins with a huge announcement about how to see Zach LIVE and IN PERSON (0:00). Then it’s on to the latest breaking news from the gambling world (2:19) as David Purdum joins the show to tell us everything we need to know. Next, Blake Griffin hops on (27:55) to discuss what he and Zach have been seeing in the first few games: from the loaded West to the unbelievable Wemby! Finally, Trajan Langdon joins (1:13:45) to talk about his young Pistons team, his baseball career, and his enthusiasm for Halloween. Host: Zach Lowe Guests: David Purdum, Blake Griffin, and Trajan Langdon Producers: Mike Wargon, Jesse Aron, and Jonathan Frias Social: Keith Fujimoto The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit www.rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available Learn more and join waitlist at ScoutMotors.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Mickelope Ultra. Playoff season is here. So what better way to get into the spirit of things that with a tournament of your own? Compete to see who can make the best tip. Test your basketball skills with the game of around the world. Even better if Mickelope Ultra is on the line, especially since they're giving fans a chance to win courtside tickets,

prizes and more. Mickelope Ultra Superior is worth playing for. Enter now at michelope Ultra.com slash courtside. Michaelob Ultra Courtside 25 to 26. No purchase necessary. Open U.S. Residence 21 plus. Begins on October 1st, 2025 and ends on June 30th, 2026, multiple entry periods.

See official rules at miclelobaltra.com slash courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details. All right, we got a packed episode of the Zach Lowe show coming up. But first, we have an exciting announcement. The first ever live edition on stage of the Zach Lowe show or any podcasts that I've ever hosted before is happening in many. Timberwolves fans. We are coming to you.

We are coming to the theater First Avenue on November 12th. That's only a few weeks away. We're going to have special guests from the Timberwolves, from the world of media. Who knows who else might appear on stage with me? Because I can't carry the show by myself. It's November 12th at First Avenue. Tickets go on sale tomorrow, Friday, October 24th at 10 a.m. Central time.

You can go to the ringer.com slash events. That's the ringer.com slash events. for all the details. You could probably get tickets directly from First Avenue. But again, November 12th, live show, First Avenue, Minneapolis. There's no Vikings games. There's no Twins games. The wolves are off.

They're coming back for a homestand. I'm going to stick around for at least a game or two of that homestand. November 12th. Live edition, on stage. Zach Lowe's show. Will I fall off the stage? Will I barf out of nervousness? Who's coming?

Can we convince Anthony Edwards to come? Who knows? But go buy tickets. tomorrow, October 24th, 10 a.m. Central time. The ringart.com slash events for all the details. Now we'll get to the actual episode because we got a lot to cover. We got gambling. We got basketball.

We got Wemby! Oh my God. The Zach Lowe show coming up. You're listening to the Zach Lowe show presented by Fanduel. The S&BAs season put the power of the sports book in your hands with Fandul's Your Way. Your Way let you create bets you can't find anywhere else. You can set your own lines or customized player props and you'll get new odds instantly.

Plus, with your way, you can even make head-to-head bets by position or player. Just download the Fandle Sportsbook app to play your way. Must be 21 or over in President Select States and 18-year-over in D.C. Kentucky and Wyoming gambling problem. Call 1-800-G-Hoblinhobler or visit RG-8-8-7-7-7-7-7. Or visit ccccccg.org slash chat in Connecticut. Welcome to the Zach Lowe. show, boy, this day took a turn and it took a turn into very dangerous waters for the NBA

and for sports. David Purdom from ESPN, the betting expert over there. I would imagine your day has been pretty crazy, huh? Pretty, pretty crazy. We started hearing about the rumors of some sort of press conference last night. So we were trying to prepare as much, but text messages started showing up about 615 this morning about this. We have two separate indictments today. I've sat down and read them both. Indictment number one charges a whole bunch of people, including Terry Rozier, on sort of of an inside betting scheme tied to prop bets in the NBA. You and I talked about prop bets a year or so ago about Jonté Porter.

These prop bets are just an absolute menace. And the other indictment talks about Chauncey Billups and his participation in rigged poker games that have mafia links where he and Damon Jones, a former assistant coach for the Cavaliers and the Lakers. one point and a former NBA player, obviously, are the quote-unquote face cards used by criminals to get unwitting victims to come play in rigged poker games, rigged with all sorts of crazy technology, like card readers, rigged shufflers and all of that. And the key claim there is that allegedly Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones know that they are part of and in one case organizing

rigged poker games. I don't know, man. Where do you want to start? There's actually more connections between the two indictments and I thought there would be when I actually sat down and read them, including Chonsie Billups. But where should we start? This is your world more than mine. I think we should start by first kind of defining the lines between what is game manipulation, like actually rigging NBA games and what is sharing inside information. I feel like that's an important distinction.

There are seven games that were mentioned in the indictment. This is the sports betting indictment that it resolved some sort of suspicious betting or insider bet insider information sharing and three of those two of them were the John Tate Porter games he removes himself from the game after playing only a few minutes

so that his conspirators can win their bets on the under understatistics and then the other one is the Terry Rozier game from March of 2023. He was with the Hornets at the time he's playing in the Pelicans according to the indictment he revealed to one of his childhood friends

that he was not going to be playing very long in this game. He was not listed on the injury report. As soon as that happened, all this money started coming in on the under on Rosier's props, under on his points, under on his rebounds, under on his assists. And then when that happened, sports books halted wagering on him at a time. Then eventually the game came about. He took himself after playing around 9 to 10 minutes, so all those wagers won.

Now, the indictment revealed some new information about that, that his childhood friend and have actually met back up at Rosiard. House in Charlotte about a week after that game to count the money, as it says in the indictment. I've never sat down and counted money like that. And so you're distinguishing that from the sharing of inside information, which is an important distinction because also in the indictment are at least, I think, two, actually three or four instances of somebody, well, let's just take them one by one. Two of them involved tanking at the end of an NBA season. And they're all part of this same indictment. So they all share at least some characters in this wagering scheme.

The first one is a March 2023 Blazers game. And it says co-conspirator number eight told a defendant named Eric Ernest, who's a guy who comes up in both this one and the poker game one, notably, that the Trail Blazers are going to be tanking, i.e. intentionally losing to increase their odds of getting a better pick in the draft, and then people place bets on the Blazers not covering the spread in that game. Co-conspirator number eight. Okay, that makes me go back and read who co-conspirator number eight is. He's not named in this gambling indictment.

Co-conspirator number eight, though, is identified as, quote, an individual whose identity is known to the grand jury and a resident of Oregon. Co-conspirator number eight was an NBA player from approximately 1997 through 2014 and an NBA coach since at least 2021. That sure sounds like Chauncey Billups, who is named in the poker indictment as well. And so what we have here is Chauncey Billups telling this guy Eric Ernest,

I don't know who this dude is, but he apparently knows Tare Rozier's friends and Tare Rozier and he also knows Chauncey Billups. Hey, Tonsie telling a friend, hey man, just, man, I guess we're tanking tonight. You know, maybe he's bitching about the GM or the ownership forcing him to tank and he's just venting to a friend,

and then bets are taken on that friend. On that information, similarly, there's an Orlando Magic game. If I can get my sheet of paper out here. I want to read this to you verbatim. Orlando Magic Play the Cavaliers about two weeks later, April 6, 2003. A defendant named Marvis Fairly,

I don't know who that is, but he's all over in this indictment, and co-conspirator number one, who I think I can figure out who that is because it's a part-time NBA player. That player, he's identified as a player knows a player on the magic

knows a one of a player who's described as one of the magics regularly starting players player to an individual whose identity is known to the grand jury blah blah blah that player a regular starter for the magic tells co-conspirator number one hey man we're sitting our entire starting five tonight we're trying to lose this game co-conspirator number one tells these gamblers bets are made

that's the sharing of insight information and it's a weird, I don't know, this is, I'm out of my depth in the gambling world. It would seem natural to me that when you work for an NBA team or play for an NBA team, you're going to have people in your life, you're going to be like, man, I guess I'm sitting out tonight or, you know, hey, don't come to the, you know, tell your wife, hey, I'm not, looks like I'm not playing tonight, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, the fact that the guy that Chauncey is telling this information to that we're going to tank this game is also mentioned in connection with Rozier.

and is also mentioned in the poker thing is interesting to me to say the least, right? Oh, absolutely. And I believe he mentions that we're not going to play some of our regular players in that game as well. That's co-conspirator number eight who is playing career and coaching career matches up with Chauncey. So while Chauncey was not named in that second indictment, which is more centered on sports betting, he was mentioned and named as a defendant in the poker one. Certainly seems to be that he had some relationships with someone. these guys, this gambling ring, who I've been following for about a year and a half now,

originally started learning about them for college basketball, and then they started popping up with some of the same accounts, placing these weird bets on the rosier or on the Jonte Porter. So it's been something very interesting to follow. I don't think this story is anywhere close to over. I think we're going to get some more stuff out of college basketball pretty soon, and it wouldn't be surprised me of some more people in the NBA, whether current or former players are named. I'm going to come back to that and put a pin in that, current and former players. But then you have this Lakers games on February 9th and January 15th, 2024.

Damon Jones is mentioned here. Damon Jones, they talk about how he played and coach for the Cavaliers and the Lakers. So during many of those years, Jones was a teammate or a coach of a prominent NBA player. By virtue of his relationship with that player, blah, blah, blah, he had access to information. and he tells people in his life on February 9th, he texts, get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight. Milwaukee's playing the Lakers before the information is out. Player 3, the prominent player, is out tonight.

Bet enough so that D. Jones, him, can eat two. There only can be one or two players who that is. LeBron James did not play in that February 9th, 2023 game. No one is implying that LeBron James has anything to do with anybody. It's not even clear if LeBron James himself, told Damon Jones, hey, I'm out tonight. They're friends. It's a natural thing you would. This is the gray area that I'm talking about is like,

it's natural to have these kind of conversations with people in your life. And then you can't control where that information goes. So what am I to do? Like there's just no way the NBA can employ. You can't, NBA can't go to people and say you can't tell anyone in your life anything about anything anymore. Yeah, you're right. It's a very difficult spot.

But we know that they should not be relaying it to people they know are going to bet. now we don't think LeBron did that with Damon Jones, but Damon Jones clearly had some nefarious ideas here according to that text message and the indictment. So what are they supposed to do? Well, they've got to be very clear and transparent on those injury reports. Rozier in that March 2023 game, he was not listed on the game before and was telling people they leave.

We've got to make sure that that stuff is accurate and as well. I know that's a trouble spot just yesterday. We had a cat go out, say he was going to be. doubtful and then he's upgraded to questionable and then all of a sudden he's going to play. It's always going to be an issue, but we just have to make sure I monitor as closely as we can and get rid of the nefarious actors, right? If guys are doing this, passing it along to people they know are gamblers, first of all, they're going to get caught because now in the days of regulation, we see these unusual

betting spikes that come in. Hey, why are people betting on Jonte Porter? You know, nobody's betting on Jonte Porter except when there's something kind of untoward going on. So they're going to get caught if you're going to try to pull something off like this. And just hopefully this acts as a deterrent. I am just curious about these sort of the natural leak of information, right? I don't know what to do with that. I'm going to be honest with you.

Like an Orlando Magic player telling a friend, man, fuck, we're tanking tonight, man. I was looking for it. I wanted to score 30 tonight or whatever. Like that's a natural thing. And I can't know where that information is going. I'm trying to think of a parallel to this. in like the non-sports world. Like the insider training would be the obvious one,

but that's that's, that's apples to oranges. I agree, but there is a line, right? I don't think it's this player relaying it to his friend, but once that friend takes it to known gamblers and knows that they're going to use it for their betting advantage, that's a clear line, right?

Sure. We know that thing. So maybe we don't punish the players for that, but anybody that knows and takes this to a known gambler who's going to do this, yeah, I mean, you've got to get that person out of the line. week. Well, Jonte Porter's out of the league, right? Terry Rozier's lawyer released a statement to Pablo Tori and others today saying essentially, like, we disagree with this. We've cooperated,

blah, blah, blah. So we'll see what happens with Terry Rozier. But it's very clear, like, if you are caught in the middle of this knowingly, knowingly, you're going to get banned from the league. Chauncey Billups has been placed on leave, by the way, Tiago Splitter is now the acting head coach of the Portland Trailblazers. If any of that, we haven't even talked about the poker stuff yet. If any of this stuff is substantiated, I would find it very likely that Chauncey's career in the NBA is over. It doesn't seem recoverable to me. By the way, I interviewed Chanty Billups a week ago about Scoot Henderson. Everything was completely normal, blah, blah, blah.

What was I saying? Oh, look, I know everyone's in bed with the sports gambling companies. Like, I don't gamble on sports. I've never placed a bet on any of these gambling platforms. It's just not something I would do. I'm also not naive to like who sponsors this podcast, who sponsors the ringers podcast, who sponsors all, like we're all, we're all complicit in some ways. I don't know how else to just be more baldfaced about it than that.

But like, it's just a freaking mess, man. I don't know what the NBA has to do to clean this up. It's one thing to say these prop-beps need to be just vaporized. And we've talked about that before. You just shouldn't be able to bet on like random role players doing X, Y, and Z in these games. That's one thing. It just seems like there's a mess. There's just a larger mess here.

And this is before we get to gamblers harassing coaches and players about their performance and you cost me money. That's an inevitable byproduct. I don't know there's anything you can do about that. But, man, you said, like, you wouldn't be surprised if there's more names that come out. Sure, I wouldn't. I think that especially the ones that are running around in the poker circles, there were athletes definitely playing in these games more than just the ones that were named.

I think we'll hear about them eventually. So it wouldn't surprise me at all. And you're right. I mean, it's a mess right now. It's a mess right now. However, would we have known about this if all this was still done in an underground sports book with the local bookmaker or with an offshore? Probably not.

Okay. So one way, we're seeing the visibility into the market. We're able to see these things and catch these guys. And hopefully people will notice that now, hey, we're going to get caught. If we try to do something like this, it'll end our course. rear and they don't. The other side of it, he mentioned all the prop bets and Commissioner Silver, he's just on our network the other day talking about his concern about the prop bets. And I am a little concerned too. Because the betting menus on these prop bets are too big. There are too many

offerings. You can move the over, under, on points down or up to whichever you want to, and they're on every player, and they're on first baskets, and they're on all these things. I fear that that's betting menus, just open up opportunities for people to try this. They almost incentivize you to try it. It's not only the offerings of the bet, but it's the betting limits that they're taking on these things that are so easily to try to manipulate if we were to offer whatever you want, but you're only going to be able to bet $20.

You're not going to be able to parliant. So I think there are things that the sports betting industry can do on the same thing. I think the sports industry has done their job, their job here in terms of identifying it and getting these guys caught. You're making me remember the baseball thing from a couple months ago where I believe it was a Cleveland Guardians pitcher. It was the bet was the first pitch will be a ball or a strike or something and he threw the ball five feet outside. And it's like, and what you're saying is the Adam Silver argument has long been the sort of sunshine transparency argument of bringing

this all into the light will make it policeable. And in that theory, I guess right now we'd be going through the sort of inevitable five to 10 year learning curve of, yeah, this is really policeable. People will figure out that because it's regulated and policeable, you are going to get caught. And when you get caught, you're going to be banned. And that will have a chilling effect on anyone doing it anymore. I guess the flip side would be it's actually now so widespread that maybe the sunshine alone is not a solution. And maybe this is just not a five to 10 year learning curve that will be quelled. But the new reality, I don't know. I don't know the answer. to that, but there's a lot going on, man.

Your beat is not going to be like. I mean, I don't know. I don't even, I'm not even asking a question. I'm just saying those are, those seems to be the two kind of prevailing schools of thought. You know, this has been 2018 is when they legalized sports betting, right? Before then, you would maybe get a link about the opening line for the Super Bowl on ESPN.com. About, well, it was probably half a year ago. There's a, what, six or seven?

headlines on the news stack for the top headlines on ESPN.com, four of them dealt with betting scandals. It was like half. And it was all these different ones that were going on, college, MBA, Major League Baseball, NFL, you name it. They've all been touched by these scandals. Hopefully, it will slow down a little bit and people will learn, like you mentioned, that you are going to get caught and that you will end your career. And in some of these cases, you're going to serve big time jail time. But right now, it's a mess. Turning to the poker one. That's, that is, you, you are focused on the kind of sports betting that we're talking about right now.

Is this your world at all? Is that also like, you know, not that you play, but is that even something that's been a, like, mafia rigged poker games, infrared playing cards, all this stuff. It just seems crazy to me, but I guess this is going on. There's been an overlap in the poker world and the betting scandals for quite a while. It went back to John St. Porter. a lot of people said he got in debt through poker. But you're right, some of these things that they do to manipulate these poker games, automatic shufflers that they can control and then relay the information to somebody

who can see all the cards and they feed it back. There was a story about people wearing such tiny magnets in their ear that were transmitters that you would have to take them out. You would have to take them out with a magnet. You stick it in there and get it took to pull it out because it was so small. So the sophistication of these things that are going on, it is wild. Yeah, and just to be clear, just to read a sentence out of the poker indictment, which is a different one and how it relates to Chauncey Billups,

this is the one he's actually named in. He's not named, remember, in the NBA gambling one. He's just sort of pseudo-identified. This is from the poker one. For example, in furtherance of the rigged poker scheme, in or around April 2019, six years ago, several of the defendants participated in rigged games in Las Vegas, Nevada, in which they defrauded victims of at least $50,000. By the way, there's victims here who lost six figures. This is, this is chumchanged compared to that.

The defendant's Chauncey Billups, Eric Ernest, who again is the guy who is informed that the Blazers are going to tank games and is connected to Terry Rozier in other cases. The defendant's Chauncey Billups, Eric Ernest, Jamie Gillette, Robert Stroud, and Sophia Y, organized and participated in these rigged games using a rigged shuffling machine. supplied by Stroud. So you can see a world in which Chauncey and Damon Jones and other quote, they call them quote face cards. The people, the celebrities who are there to draw the fish into the game would argue, well, we didn't know. We thought we were being invited to an honest poker and we like being poker.

We like being big shots. The allegation is that they indeed knew everything that was going on and we'll see if that is borne out. But again, there are characters who appear in both of these indictments. And that was what was sort of most interesting to me. Yeah. Like I said, there's a huge overlap in the poker community in the sports betting world. People are professional poker players are also known as advantage players in sports betting.

They're very good at getting the information before everybody else and putting it into the play into the market before everybody else. There's always been an overlap for athletes that like playing cards. They do it openly on the World Series of poker. You've seen guys play out there. So again, the overlap in this between poker and sports. betting is going to be one to follow for sure. I think it will be the reveal some of these other names that we're waiting for.

Yeah. Again, it's one thing if you're talking about sort of semi, no, not semi, honest decisions by teams that just get out into the world before they get out into the public, that we're sitting players, that this player is hurt, that whatever it is. And we can talk about tanking on a, this is just yet another consequence of having a reverse order or semi-reverse order, weighted lottery, whatever, is that these kind of things can happen at the end of a season. That's distinct from guys just manipulating their own performance to help betters or help

themselves earn money. That just gets at the integrity of sports. And once, if you lose that on a larger scale, you've lost the sport, but we're not even close to there, obviously. it's easy for me to be like if you're in the NBA, if you're in professional sports, just don't bet on sports. How about you just don't do it?

It's easy for me to say that because I don't bet on sports. And these people are making enormous amounts of money. Why do they need to bet on sports? But we've also seen that it's a very addictive and fun thing for people. And once you get into it, I mean, I've had friends who have lost marriages to it. Like, I've seen it up close. It's hard to stop once you start.

And, you know, it is, it is legal. And, and it's, and some of these guys do run in, like, to debt problems that they try to climb out of in, in counterproductive ways. Just like regular people outside of sports make mistakes to, like, pile a mistake on top of mistakes. So it's easy for me to say that. It should, like, I, like, if you play sports, if you play proximate, You just shouldn't bet on it, but it's, it's, I guess, not that simple. And it's sort of naive of anyone like me to just sort of get on my lectern and Tisk, tisk people like that.

It's hard to imagine, though. I mean, these guys, how much did you rank? $100 billion in a first career. And he was willing to do this for how much over money they got, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars down for his share. I mean, it is dumbfounding to me. I will say, though, to your point about addiction. When somebody is battling addiction and not betting,

responsibly within their means, you're not making good decisions at that point, right? You're in the thralls of an addiction and it is impacting your judgment. So you're making decisions that are just not very good ones. And to your earlier point, you know, we're 100 plus years into gambling, chipping away into sports in one way or another. And in the case of the Black Sox sort of, you know, chipping away at the integrity of a World Series in 1919 more than 100 years ago. So it's not like a new, new, new phenomenon,

but it is the kind of thing where it's like, if I'm Adam Silver, I want to get everyone in a room and just say, like, delete all your accounts. You don't, you're just like bright line. This is just not something you need to be participating in. Yeah, I completely go. You shouldn't joke about sports betting if you're playing sports.

You shouldn't play bets. If you're playing sports, you should just stay completely away from it. But again, that's one thing. but, you know, telling your friend who has a friend, who has a friend, you know, that your knee hurts or something is something distinct from that and pretty innocent to me. Yeah. What am I not asking you?

What should I be asking you that we haven't touched on? Just another, it feels like we have a wild day like this every other year, but this is going to be, if it's the end of a head coach in Hall of Fame player's career in the NBA, this is going to be a before and after day in the history of sports and gambling and basketball. When we started hearing a coach was involved, I knew that this was going to be way bigger than if Terry Rozier had just been arrested on this. We've been reporting on Terry it would have been a big deal. But once we started here at coach, and then when you start thinking about the co-conspirator

number eight that we talked about at the beginning of this, this is a guy that is transmitting information, not only saying we're tanking, because if you follow basketball, you you follow the league, you know which teams are out of it and, you know, just playing for traffic status. But he was relaying injury information. And so this person had insight into guys that were not going to play before they were listed on the injury report. And the process was relay it to a gambler.

Now, think about everything. You could say he may not have known. He was just relaying it to a friend. Now, this friend happens to be mentioned in the poker indictment. as well, but let's give the ultimate benefit that I'd say he's just gossiping to a friend. Sure. Yeah, it doesn't look good. Have I been derelict and not asking something else about any of this?

We barely told. And again, the poker is the one that Chauncey has been arrested and charged with. The other stuff, he's just, he's not charged with anything. It just has mentioned that someone matching his description told a guy with connections to the gambling world that the Blazers were. tanking that particular. That's correct. No, I think you did a good job. I just want to reemphasize that I believe there is a clear distinction that should be made between sharing of inside information that allows better and then actual players participating in schemes to go out there and manipulate their performance. I think that's a big, big deal. And right now we've only seen that

in two instances, three games total, two players where the rest of this stuff, what seems to be sharing of inside information. All right, David Purdom, you've got a lot to do today. Thank you for making a little time for us at the Zach Lowe show. We'll see you down the road. This episode is brought to you by Scout Motors. Everyone loves a good comeback story like when Michael Jordan broke his foot in 85, and then returned that same season instead of new record for most points scored in a postseason game.

Another comeback that's just as exciting. The Scout Traveler and Scout Terra were returning new and improve with four-wheel drive and a projected 1,000 pound feet of torque. Join the wait list at Scout Motors. com. Concept vehicles not available for sale features and performance specifications are preliminary and subject to change. Joining the wait list is not guaranteed to purchase. Visit scout motors dot com for details. All right. First change of pace we're going to talk about basketball that was played on the basketball court. Blake Griffin is here. Six-time All-Star. I'm going to say it.

Future NBA Hall of Famer. Rookie of the year. Current Amazon analyst guru. I don't know what you are to what your title is, but I look forward to this great crew you've got going on Amazon. And thanks for coming on, buddy. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Glad to be on. Last time I saw you, we were reliving one of the lowest moments of your career. Yeah, man.

Watching Game 6 of the 2015 Western Conference on final. We won't talk about that, though. That was a tough one for you. That was fine. I imagine when you guys going to come on the pod, it was like, hey, we're just going to talk about you getting traded to Detroit. That's just going to be the topic for it. there. We were going to go a little longer today than there was some big breaking news. So let's just, I thought a simple way to just, you and I have been binging all the games,

as many games as we can. There were a million last night. We're recording this Thursday afternoon. A good way to get off some of our early season, first impressions, overreactions, whatever, would be, let's just, now that we've had a game to watch almost every team, let's pick our top six in each conference. I haven't done that actually in order. And then we'll just sort of riff a little bit. We're going to start with the Superior Conference, the one you spent most of your career, in the Western Conference. Blake Griffin's top six, we don't have to go through the play-in to get into the playoffs in the Western Conference. Let's go. I've got the pretty obvious Oklahoma City Thunder.

I mean, I think they got better from last year, from last year just by the simple fact that they have experience of the deepest playoff run you could possibly have. Chet looks good. Kaysen Wallace looked good. They didn't have J-Dub. Like, they just have guys that you're just like, yeah. They got it, you know, and barring injuries, I think they're the heavy favorite. So let's go Oklahoma City. Do you want to go rapid fire here?

Yeah, just go rapid fire. Just go, okay, okay, okay. Oklahoma City, I got Denver. I got Houston, Minnesota, Warriors, Clippers. Okay, we have the same six in a different order. What do you have? Say your, say yours again. It was, it was.

Oklahoma City. Okay. Denver, Houston, Minnesota, Warriors Clippers. Okay. I have Oklahoma City number one. It's a no-brainer. And I don't think they actually looked great against Houston in the first game. They looked like a team who needed their second best offensive player.

But everything that I saw from Chet was everything I expected to see from Chet in what is basically his second season or third season, rather making a leap like that. Kason Wallace, I've mentioned many times as like a sleeper, most improved player candidate for me and just awesome game all around. Denver number two, there are another no-brander for me. I just think they levitate above the rest of these teams. I went Warriors number three. Wow, really? I thought they looked awesome against the Lakers, who neither of us have pointedly.

By the way, Draymond, congratulations. I was at the Knicks-Cabs game last night, and someone who was there was like, Did Drayman, has anyone looked up whether that was the most, the quickest in-season technical foul from a player who was not even in the game? That has to be the record for quickest bench guy getting a tech. Oh, bench guy, 100%. Was it, were we, were we six minutes in? About about six minutes in. I don't even know what he was mad.

I think he was right. Whatever he was mad about was right and the technical free throw is missed and he went all ball, don't lie. Okay, I just thought they looked awesome. For Minnesota, starting Devenzo over Conley is a move I hinted. at on this podcast last week. Conley playing only 13 minutes and looking eh kind of concern me a little bit. DeVincenzo and it kind of concern me a little bit. But I like Jalen Clark. I like Terrence Shannon. They're just rock solid. They go in at four. Houston, let's talk about it. You had them third. I have them fifth. And then I have the Clippers six. And boy, will we talk about that.

What did you see from Houston in an opening game loss at Oklahoma City that encouraged you, worried you, whatever the right? What did you notice? I'm going to start with worried me. They're just lack of ball handling. I thought Oklahoma City. The good news is there's probably not another team that can pressure you as much as Oklahoma City. The bad news is you have to beat

Oklahoma City if you want to win a championship. So they're going to have to see them in the playoffs. Now, that's not going to be a continuous problem is the ball handling in the regular season as much as it is against Oklahoma City. So I was kind of hoping to see Reed Shepard, you know, get some good minutes, be able to handle the ball. Defensively, it looked a little rough out there at times. I love them in Thompson. Absolutely love him.

And Singoon is a joy to watch. So just the fact that like those three guys, those two with Kevin Durant, not in Jabari. Like you have a really solid team. You have a great coach. And that's kind of what I'm banging on. And they, you know, they played a tough game. So I was encouraged by some things. The glaring lack of ball handling, I think, is going to come up to bite them if they don't, if they don't find somebody to fill that void.

Look, I was pushing back from second one on this idea that Fred Van Vlitz injury was, quote, a blessing in disguise for them. I just didn't buy it despite how excited I am for Amin Thompson and for Reed Shepard, who, but again, defensively. He can make plays. Like, he has a hand on the ball. He can, you get strips and even shop blocks, but in space was a little rough. Shengoon, just a little fun to that for you. Shengoon ran 15 pick and rolls in that game as the ball handler. Something you know a lot about, inverted pick and rolls, Blake Griffin.

15. His previous career high, his previous high in any of the last two seasons was five. So that was a sea change and I think indicative of how much they needed him to do stuff. Amman looked awesome, and I wonder if they win that game if he can stay in it. And instead he had that, whatever, that lower body injury had to come out. And they were clearing the floor for him, and they would have Adams come up at, like, Amman would have the ball on the right wing, Adams would come up to set an offball screen for KD, way high on the floor to clear everybody out.

Like, they couldn't do anything with Amin Thompson. He was scoring at will. But it just looked a little rough. The offensive rating was bad. Durant's workload worried me, and that was one of the things I said right when Van Vleet got hurt going against the blessing and disguised thing was like, there's going to be a temptation to overwork Kevin Durant in the first 30 games in the season, and they cannot do that. Can Adams keep this up? I mean, what a story. He's like sprinting coast to coast on rim runs, getting every officer.

This guy looked broken a year and a half ago. Can he keep it up? They do miss Finney Smith. It was just a little clunky. Tari Isson looked skittish and just indecisive. But I still think they're just a rush. Everyone three to eight and maybe they have probably three to eight. It's going to be pretty bunched up, maybe three to nine.

So like it's three, four, five, whatever. I just think Houston is pretty rock solid. Should we talk about the clippers? Sorry, you had Houston fifth? No. Fifth. Fifth. Okay.

Okay. I had Minnesota fourth, Houston fifth. You had Minnesota. fourth and golden state fifth so we just flipped houston and golden state and we both had the clippers sixth okay extremely problematic opening game from the clippers getting boat race by utah yeah discouraging opening game for the lakers and a holy shit opening game for victor wembanyama and i'm like i'm a week away from vaulting the spurs into the top six over the clippers and And I mean, I don't just talk about Wembe Nama.

That's why I really just want to hear you talk about Wembe Nama because that game, that was everything anyone could have asked for out of him on both ends of the floor. When I started seeing clips of Wembe Nama and then I saw like really like a highlight package of him when he was still overseas. I remember this was like around 20, 23. You know, he was whatever, it was coming up in my last year in the NBA. I remember seeing like some real highlights. since I've been to, Victor Mumma is going to enter the draft. Called my age, and I was like, I think it's time.

I think we hang it up. I think it's been a good run. I mean, this guy, like, listen, we can, and everybody does. We can go on about his height, his handle, his shot blocking, his touch, his shooting ability. Like, everybody talks about that. Everybody sees it last night with a perfect display of some of the other worldly things he does. I think what was almost just as impressive, if not more, is his mentality. Like this kid seems so focused.

He's going and working out with monks in the offseason. He's spending time with Elijah Mon. He's spending time with KG. Every interview you see of him is thoughtful. It's like his focus on like who he wants to be and how great he wants to be is by far first and foremost in his life. I can't think of another superstar or somebody with this potential that has this type of focus. and drive. So that's just like my big wendy piece.

On top of that, like, he has made strides. Like, in two years from now, when his hips get even stronger, when he gets a little bit more to his upper body frame, now some of these spin moves that he's doing, you know, he's spinning and he's still getting up there. He's still finishing over or slinging out a pass. I feel like in two years, three years, I was talking about Steve Nash last night. Like, those are just going to all be dunks.

Like his ceiling, he's already so good in his ceiling. I don't know where it is. The handle last night was noticeably not just tighter, but like faster. Like the pitter pat speed dribble. He had that coast to coast, lefty in and out dribble, blow by Anthony Davis, not some chump and dunk. He had the like dance with the ball. He did the chef. He did the chef thing after he fell over and hit the three.

and then that post stuff against PJ Washington when he upfaked him and then went up and under for the reverse my favorite part of that was he got PJ Washington thinking a little he got he got PJ he got in his head before he even got the ball by faking the old like shack

or used to even do this sometimes spin back for the lob Zion does it sometimes like he faked to spin to the baseline for the lob and PJ bit on it And from that moment on, Victor had him in his bag. And then he had one dunk against the Mavs were playing zone. And he got the ball at like the right elbow, took one dribble, two steps, and went up to dunk. And you could see him be like, am I going to hit my head on the backboard? Have I gotten too far underneath?

It was just an absolutely bonkers performance across the board. There was also a dunk last night where he was like, he was on the way down for a long time and still just, dunked it. I can't remember what. I think it was a rip. It was a rip left and he kind of just went up and he's so far away. And it's, it's great. It's just weird to see like somebody go to their peak and then three seconds later, they're still, they still have the ability to dunk it. I agree. His handle to me, tight is just like, it's the speed and the, and the control, right? Like before he had a good handle, but it felt loose. You know what I mean? And people weren't necessarily ripping him, but his handle was all. within here. You know, instead of his arms are so long, putting it out here, I thought he was unbelievable last night. And obviously, like, there was some highlight plays, but, man, that kid. The Spurs also have a really light first 15 games, 17 games.

I think 15 of there's 17 or against possibly non-playoff teams. So that kind of gives, that's another reason I would like be so close to putting them in the top six because I just think they're going to have some runway to really work some things out and, you know, take off with a really good record this season. Yeah, listeners will know I have been way higher on the Spurs than Consensus since July when they sort of wrapped their offseason drafted Harper, who I thought looked pretty damn good last night. I think more, I don't think Dallas was aggressive enough daring all the Spurs perimeter guys other than Vassel to just shoot. and I think other teams will take a little bit of a bigger step back against Harper and against Castle

who also looked like Castle is so explosive. He's one of those guys who gets the ball and goes up in space and goes up to the rim. And it feels like he's still going up. Just keeps going up. And the defender is like falling backwards. When he picked Delo, that was not a great dealo moment. And I do think their lack of shooting is sometimes going to be problematic. but they played super fast last night.

They ran their cuts super fast. They screened super fast. Harper got a nice slot cut basket, which is going to be important for him playing off the ball, finding a way to punish teams who kind of don't respect his three off the ball. Same with Castle. I just really like the way they play. We didn't even see the Fox Wemby pick and roll.

No. Fox even increases that speed. And I agree that the three-point shooting is, will be an issue at times. But man, somebody like Wemby like are you ever out of a game well that's been my thing it's like the guy's just going to be so good like I just I'm very close to just jumping them into the top six already um and I think Fox is obviously going to help them so hand in play cornet cornette is a game changer for

them having a legit backup center who can also play a little bit with Wembonyama which we saw last night that's a big big deal he was really good for them huge he's been great I'm a big Cornett fan. He's just a guy knows his role, plays exact you know, there was those moments when you see him catch like kind of at the elbow and they're back completely off and he's

not even thinking about it. He's like, nope, I'm just going to go to that next thing, go find that DHO screen role. He's doing, he will play his exact role, which I think is perfect next to Wemby. And the fact that Wembe is 7-6 and Luke Cornette's 7-1 and they can play together is terrifying.

Yeah, I mean, the defensive stuff, it just it goes without saying he looks even more confident in his positioning and the way he can really scare people when they come to the lane but just by just by stunting at them and getting back to his guy he disrupted a couple of lobs last night like Flagg had one.

He just no shot. First impressions of the Dallas Mavericks and Cooper Flagg. So to be honest, I didn't get to watch a ton of that game. I was kind of watching. We had this Amazon dinner last night so we were kind of watching on our phones. It's just kind of in awe. I just thought they just looked flat. I thought defensively they looked like they were discombobulated.

It's funny, Sean Sweeney going from Dallas to San Antonio. I was talking until the other week, and he was just talking about sort of implementing sort of that same thing. It truly looked like Dallas lost their main defensive coach, and it looked like he went right to San Antonio. I thought their defense of schemes were just, there would be. They were just off. Again, Flagg, first game, I think he's,

I love his preseason stuff, I love his ceiling, but San Antonio was just, they just, they outworked them in every, every aspect. I was slightly, eh,

on Dallas when it came down to it before the season. I did bills, I mean, it's a funny day to say it, but it's on public record. There's no way for me to avoid the language. I did,

Bill's Over Under podcast last week. And Dallas's line was either 41 and a half or 40 and a half. And I took the under. And there were two reasons that I took the under. Big picture, if the season goes sideways, they seem like a let's veer toward the top of the draft kind of team. But that's a big picture. Little picture was everything I saw last night.

I was just worried their offense was going to be a little like, eh, a little stuck in the mud, a little clunky playing. these huge lineups with Flagg, Davis, and Lively, who I love, or Gafford who didn't play, or Powell, who inexplicably played a lot until he wasn't playing anymore. And that's kind of like it just, there wasn't a lot of without Kyrie and without a point guard in the starting lineup. And then with DeLo not really playing very well to be kind as a backup to the point that they then go to Brandon Williams and Jaden Hardy, it just kind of seemed directionless.

And defenders are going to go under on flag. they're going to switch on flag both sides directions. Like we don't we don't think you can bully our guards. We think you're going to settle for fadeaways. He did in the first half. In the second he beat up Champani on a couple postups. I thought that was encouraging. And we don't think you can beat our centers off to dribble if we take a step away from you

and dare you to shoot. And that all kind of bore out in the first game. It's only one game. It's a long season. There's 81 left. But they just kind of looked like, oh, wow. They need Kyrie or somebody like that even more. they anticipated.

Yeah, I think that was, I think the offense league that was like glaring. To me, they're one of those teams and sort of in the same way, like Philly, where it's just like they could, they could win 41 games, they could win 20 games. Health depending, I mean,

Clay, eight, we know how much AD's in and out of the lineup. Kyrie depends on when he comes back. I think you're right. If things go bad, it could get bad quickly. Well, I don't, I just, meant that like just the season has to go very badly for that tanking scenario to come into play and I just I took the under but barely I think they're going to be a solid team with a good

defense I just was a little worried about the offense um we only have seen the Lakers play once was a loss to the Warriors who again I thought looked awesome perfect Jonathan Kamenka game everything the word I was actually surprised they started him and draymond and butler all together those three barely played together last season because of the spacing concerns that Steve Kerr talks about all the time. Defended well, unselfish playmaking, didn't force too many like 17, 18 footers off the dribble. We'll talk a little bit more about him later.

Kind of a flat performance by the Lakers in a game that Luca was awesome. Reeves ended up with a pretty good stat line. No one else did much of anything. I don't know. What did you see? From the Lakers, I just, my biggest question is I just don't know how you guard

the back court with having to play Austin Reeves and Luke of 34 plus minutes a game. That was their Achilles heel last. I mean, rebounding was like Achilles heel. The Aiton experiment, I just will see how long, see how long that goes for. I thought they were incredibly flat. The one great thing, Luca looked great. He looked in good shape. He was active defensively, not saying he played the best defense, but he was active.

he had a couple of steals even had a block like I uh when they hunted him one-on-one he looked good against staff yeah and yes exactly I was also encouraged by how he looked in the second quarter in the fourth quarter like he still looked like he was a little bit fresh I know it's game one um but largely disappointed in most I think Austin Reeves scored maybe 13 in the fourth quarter or something like that and 11 of them were probably in the last six minutes so you know you look at the box score and you see he has, I think, 26, and you're like, oh, he had a pretty good game, but it was too little too late at that point. But I'm with you. I thought the Warriors looked great.

I thought they're just the warrior. I mean, they just have the same formula. Steph and Dremont, just people come in and they just keep it rolling. And it seemed to me like they were just like, hey, like, we're going to guard, we're going to put Kaminga on Luca and nobody else is going to, nobody else is going to get anything. They were trading, you know, Luca's mid-range. for three's and it just you mean you saw the result i saw you said a nice thing about caminga a couple days ago on running back i think uh with lou will and parsons and beetle and i can't

remember who else boogie oh yeah boogie um i've always been like a caminga is good guy and i understand the flaws i understand the limitations i do too and the thing i've always said is like he Because he plays for the Warriors who have this totally unique style, passing, cutting, movement, selflessness, he sticks out a little bit. And as a result of sticking out, he kind of gets typecast as a selfish score. And sometimes he plays that way. But I've always said, like, if you actually watch him play, he's trying to do warrior stuff. Like, he's trying to do the quick pitch and pitch back to stuff. He's trying to do the, like, pass and go run and set a screen.

It's not his natural game, but he's making an effort at it. There was one play in that game against the Lakers. He got the ball in the right corner, deep in, like, coffin corner behind the three-point arc. And I thought he was going to, like, dance with it and just say, you know, this possession is not going anywhere. I'm going to make it go somewhere. I'm Jonathan Caminger. And he did for, like, a dribble. And then he saw Draymond at the top of the arc.

And he whipped this pass off to Draymond. And he did it because he knew Draymond was going to hand the ball to Steph. And that's exactly what happened. I think Steph hit at three. And then he had another, like, simple just drive and kick to Pagenton. for a three where I was sure he was going to shoot it. But that first pass to Draymond is indicative of an understanding of, I'm not just passing to Draymond,

I'm kind of passing to Steph. This is like a hockey assist to Steph because of the way we play. I just thought he played a great game. The Lakers, I thought smart looked all right. Like for a guy who hasn't played much last year, I thought he moved okay. I thought Rui looked okay. Aiton, not enough.

La Ravia, not enough. I don't know. It's just hard in the way. man. I think the Lakers are good. I just think without LeBron, do they have enough juice against these other great teams? That's why they're not in either of our top sixes.

And my God, the Vegas love the Clippers. I like the Clippers on paper. They looked fucking horrible last night against the Jazz. Yeah. Let me go, one thing about the Lakers. LeBron not starting this season scares me and not knowing a lot about

where he's at. The Aiton thing, he's got to roll. He has to roll and roll hard. Two, three times early in the game, then he can maybe do his little thing. If you're trying to give him, throw him a bone and let him get those little short rolls like it feels like he wants to do, I just think it just feels like he's just always kind of in the wrong place. He's got like that next year to go to where, you know, he's a, he's a true, he doesn't have to be a 25 and 15 guy. He just needs to be a, 12 and 12 and make the right play guy.

And it will go so far for Luca, it will go so far for the Lakers, their defense, everything. So that was a little bit disappointing. I don't know that I was expecting, like, a huge turnaround from, like, the Aden that we've seen, you know, over the years. But that's just kind of what I saw.

I thought it was... Go ahead. Sorry, Clippers, I didn't really get to watch that game last night. I was sort of following along, but it just looked like everything was going in for Utah. I mean, I don't know, you tell me. Well, they just looked old and slow, which is really what they are.

And they were missing one key bench guy at Bogdanovich. But look, I thought both the Warriors and the Clippers would have strong regular seasons. I think the Warriors are a little better than the Clippers. But I shut the title window pretty tightly for both. And again, it's a long season. The Warriors, I think, are even a little better than I thought they were. Butler just looks awesome, but it's just when everyone is that old on your team and in some cases like Kauai injury prone, it's hard for me to believe. Like Oklahoma City, as young and deep as they are, was running on fumes at the end of a four playoff series.

Like they could barely gut it through to the end and maybe they don't even win if Halliburton doesn't get injured. They're just, both of those teams are just so ancient in terms of their key rotation guys that it's hard for me to see them getting all. the way to the end. But the clippers look very old and very slow. And maybe I was a little too pessimistic about the Warriors because they're just, they just are a machine that keeps on trucking. The Lakers, they just looked a little vanilla, a little predictable to me. And then I'm just monitoring Memphis at the bottom of this discussion because, you know,

as long as Morant and Jackson are healthy, despite all the injuries behind them, Jerome and Pippin Jr. and Edie and Clark, they tend to win a fair amount of games. I didn't see their game last night against who they played the Pelicans. but yeah so that's where we are in the west want to go east yeah let's do it top six in the east uh i'll let you go first just say your top six in order and and uh we'll see how much we agree or disagree top six i'm gonna still go cleveland one i'm going to go nix two orlando three i didn't i i'm going to go detroit Atlanta Milwaukee we have the same six teams again in a different order.

Cleveland, New York. I was at that game last night. Such a bummer when you get so amped for an opening game and so many dudes are out. Orlando, I saw their game against Miami last night. Just another fall from a head loss from Miami who just made a whole season of them last year somehow opened the season looking good. Like I was watching the game. This is how I worked.

Like I was at Knicks Cavs and during commercials and halftime and everything, I was watching heat magic on like from behind. like, all right, I was like, I'm so glad I was high on the heat, a little higher than consensus on the heat. The heater are looking good. Norm Powell's jetting around. The heater doing interesting stuff on offense. Nick's game ends. I go down to the locker room. There's like seven minutes left in the heat magic game. Heat are up like nine. I get down there. I'm talking to people. I run into a Cleveland front office guy. And I was like, hey, see any score sign? Anything interesting? He's like, yeah, Miami blew that one, huh? And I was like, what? God damn it. So Orlando,

Atlanta. Look, I'm not going to talk about the Hawks. Hawks, you're on notice after one game. I spent the entire offseason telling everyone how excited I was for you for the third of the last four years. You can't even, you get run off their own freaking home floor by the Toronto Raptors who look great. That's awesome. Atlanta, you are on notice. You're on notice. You've done it to me before, but you're sticking at number four here.

Milwaukee 5, Detroit 6 for me. Little concerned Detroit took only 24-3s against you. Chicago in their first game. So we have the same top six. Look, Cleveland looked a little clunky last night. A lot of Evan Mowgli and Donovan Mitchell just like, all right, we got to create some stuff from nothing. New York missing heart and Robinson looked decent in winning that game.

Definitely. Did you see that game? I did. I watched most of that game. Did you sense that New York was playing differently on offense? Early on, it seemed like they were trying to make a concerted effort to play a little different offensively. My biggest thing for them was like, are we going to get just spread the wealth? Are we just going to get the ball out of Jalen's hands?

I was looking to see Kat used as like a hub a little bit more. Like, Kat can pass the ball a little bit. You know, he sort of loses his way from time to time. But he can sort of be that subonis-ish role. we just film the ball and let some stuff happen off ball, set some screens, rib screens, whatever it is. And then, hey, if nothing comes of it, like let them go to work or let them toss out, pick and roll, pick and pop, whatever it is.

I thought they did. I thought they looked pretty good, especially considering heart is out, and I think heart is very important for them. I'm interested because we've been hearing a lot about the Kat Robinson lineup. I'm really interested to see how that lineup plays out. But I was I mean in Cleveland

without Garland Without Struz Without Hunter Like I don't do They have such a solid roster Like of the guys that are playing Like Alonzo looks solid

Didn't score the ball that much But I don't know He just looked like he had his pop back Wade is always helpful Meryl is always helpful Played Crunchtime for them last night Yeah I'm not going to worry

About the cabs missing all those guys There was some optimism but I heard some optimism about Garland. Garland is tracking well, let's say, based on what I heard last night. The Knicks, I saw germs, germs of what they want to play. They played fast, which was unusual for them. And clearly, like, whoever gets the rebound, OG, you want to go coast to coast, grab and go. Brunson set more screens than usual.

Bridges got more pick and roll reps than usual. I got the cat piece is interesting because you mentioned Robinson didn't play. they start Huck Porty who's kind of like Robinson Light in terms of what he does on offense. And it was interesting to see Kat. Kat's always got that thing where he did it in Minnesota. Like I got to fit in around a rim running center. And he's got the jumper to be able to do it, obviously. But he likes to be a little bit more involved than that.

But the germs were there of a just were not like Brunson had one or two cuts on the baseline. One he missed a floater. The other I can't remember what happened where you cut and he cut hard. He cut the score and not just to jog around to get the ball. My other hot take from last night among these top sixes, if these Cleveland injuries linger, Orlando could get the number one seat in the east. It's in play for Orlando.

I don't think they will because I don't trust their offense enough. But I thought against a pretty spunky Miami team, I thought they looked good last night. Bain is just everything. The Bain fit was even more seamless than I thought. He got to handle it a lot. He set a lot of backscreens to kind of get their cutting game. going, try to hunt some smaller defenders, which was something they weren't able to do much

last year. Suggs only played 17 minutes. I thought he looked pretty good. De Silva looked I like Tristan De Silva. I think he's a good little player. I just think they're going to win a lot of regular season games. Yeah, I do too. I mean, I also think bronze Wagner. I mean, the shot was concerning last year. It looks better in Euro. He had a great Euro summer. I mean, from the looks of it last night, he's more comfortable. Like, he's sort of gotten that thing out of his head. I don't know if I have Orlando, like, getting the one seed. I'd love to see them for extended period of time play faster.

That group of guys being the slowest pace in the NBA last year is mind-boggling to me. I do think Bain fixes a lot of those issues. It fixes some issues for them. But I do love their roster. I love their coach. I said, you're right. It does kind of come down to Cleveland's injuries and how quickly they can get guys back in. Yeah, I wouldn't expect them to be the number one seat.

I picked them to be a third or, I think third. That was where I said just now. Yeah. I'm just saying, like, New York and Cleveland have some kinks to work out. And I feel like Orlando doesn't really and can kind of get off to a little bit of a head start. Little note on Miami I mentioned a couple of times hinted at

that they were tinkering with some stuff on offense because their coaching staff was well aware like this offense has kind of hit the wall and we just don't produce a lot of good shots at the rim it's a lot of mid-range jumpers it's just like full of motion and cuts and handoffs and doesn't really go anywhere just east west east west

and that there were I said I had little birdies telling me they're tinkering last year was kind of like a gas year pre-getting into media for you. I don't know. Did you watch Memphis a lot last year? I didn't watch Memphis much last year now. So they had this, they started this season with this much Ballyhooed offense,

kind of the brainchild of Noah LaRoche, an assistant coach, where like we're not going to run any pick and roll, and we're going to spread the floor, and we're going to run a lot of like ISO, kind of like a dribble drive offense. Like we're just going to drive, someone's going to drive. A dribble drive kick. And everyone's going to spin around and like a, like clear the floor and cut and minimize pick and rolls. And Miami, from what I heard, it has sort of looked at that, talked to some of the people involved in it. And I had heard like they're trying to incorporate it. And so last night, I'm like,

yeah, it kind of looks like a less extreme version of that. And sure enough, Miami ran 29 pick and rolls last night. Their season low last season was 41. So like a number that would have been their season low by far. Just something. They didn't win, but their offense looked okay. Just something I'm monitoring. So those are top six. Detroit was a little. discouraging. Atlanta is in timeout for me. We have to talk about Philly. Vijay Edgecombe, holy smokes. I didn't get to watch that game. I went back and watched all of his possessions this morning. For them to win a game on the road where Embed is almost like a no-show by his standards would not have seemed possible to me. And Maxie and Edgecombe,

combined for 74 points. I don't know if you got a chance to see Vijay at all, but he was awesome. Yeah, I was sort of going back and forth between the Knicks game and the Celtics game because we have Nick's Celtics tomorrow. So I was trying to watch a little bit of both.

But by the way, Edgecombe would have, he would have 36, he smoked two free throws. It almost cost him. Almost cost him. I mean, that was,

that was, it was great to see Edgecom just come out. Like, we hardly see rookies come out with that much poise. deliver. That's just silly, man. Like, they could win

20 games and they could win I was talking about Dallas, but like I don't know where to put them. My concern is Joel's knees. At times last night, it looked like he wasn't confident in his body. And that's a, I mean, I know that feeling. I know that moment of like,

oh, yeah, the brakes are the first thing to go. And it's like, oh, I can still physically kind of do these moves. The problem is I can't pop to like the next move. I can't stop and shoot. I can't stop and spin. I can't do those things that look like he wasn't confident in his body. And that's a huge concern for me. Maxie and Edgecombe and McCain when he comes back,

these guys can go get you some games. I just don't. I just don't see them. Don't see them doing that. Top six is not a high bar in the East in the junior varsity. and so they're on my list and they have been of like because you as you said

there's just no way to project them the variance is just so high given him B'd's health issues Paul George hasn't even played but I you know I had Bill on my podcast like a month ago and one of the just for fun we picked Team USA 2028

because Eurobasket had just happened and it was on the mind there was nothing else was going on and my toughest cut for that team was Maxi because I just love like his speed and the open floor would be a really good fit for USA basketball. They just don't like to take small guards.

But it was my sort of way of just pinning in my mind. He kind of got off to a slow start last year and didn't make the All-Star team, didn't make the All-NBA team. I still think there's an ascension that's happening with him. And last night, I mean, it's going to be overshadowed by Edgecombe, just 40 points, seven of nine on threes. I've got my eye on Maxi for an All-NBA third team, kind of. leap happening this season.

And Edgecombe, just the poise he played with, his ability to rise up in the mid-range, like just over Derek White. And I'm just going to get to my spot. Pogo Stick go up. They let him run the offense with Maxie and Embed off the floor. And I just like, I'm just Maxie Edgecombe Grimes. They played 19 minutes together plus 17. So that's interesting to me.

That's just, I'm just flagging it. You know Boston. is going to be competitive. Indiana is going to be competitive. Toronto looks like they're going to be competitive. You know, like we'll see. There's some, like Detroit look like a team that has some things to prove. Atlanta, you know, not talking about them, but.

Milwaukee's guard play really is a real question for me. I think Janice is going to have a phenomenal year. I think he's just going to go score stirreth. I think him, you know, Turner being there, I think is great. I'm just a little bit worried about Milwaukee's guard play. Atlanta, like, everybody was talking about they made some great moves. This all season, I agree. I think bringing in those guys.

There's just one of those teams that it feels like they have no direction. Like it just doesn't. They don't. And I think part of that, like this year, a big thing for Trey is going to be like, hey, can you get all these guys together who may or may not fit and just keep moving everybody forward? Last night was like a perfect example of like kind of just what I think of Atlanta. in my head. It's just like I don't know, I don't know what their identity is. What do they want to play like? What type of team do they want to be? What type of roster are they going to build? Every

year it's just kind of a little bit different. They're getting some nice pieces, but I don't, I just need direction. Well, and what you're really talking about big picture with them is Tray Young. And they're either going to find the right direction with Tray Young, like the way he likes to play is going to blend in a little a bit more seamlessly with the all-around skill of the guys around him, and they're going to find that identity. They're going to land in the right spot, and we'll know 30, 40 games in. And in that case, I think there's an extension to be had or a new contract to be had with Atlanta. If we get halfway through and it feels like there's not a tug of war, just a little bit of stylistic dissonance between how Trey has played in the past and maybe prefers to play versus

how Quinn Snyder wants to play, how Jalen Johnson and Eresace. and, you know, all Kongwu and the other young guys they have on the team want to play with the draft picks they have come in. And I think that's just an interesting dichotomy there. And maybe it goes the other direction. I've been optimistic. It's been one game. I'm not getting off my Hawks bandwagon yet, but it was not encouraging. By way, just going back to the West for a second, I saw Stephen A today said the Spurs could make the conference finals this year if Wembe keeps playing like this.

And people are going to laugh at that and say it's ridiculous. Like, I think that's a little much. but three to eight, three to nine in the West is going to be pretty compressed. And what Wembe did last night was just, it was terrifying. Well, it's crazy. I mean, he was making some crazy shots,

but I think impact-wise, like defensively, like, there's going to be some insane nine-block games, eight-block games. There's going to be, like, his, I thought he was fantastic last night. I think he can play better, which is crazy to say.

I mean, offensively, I think he did, he was fantastic. but I think he can still play even better. And that's not even a knock on how he played last night. I just, like I said earlier, I don't know where his ceiling is. All right. I asked you a tribute, not a trivia question, just a fun question before we did this. Pick your most important non-all-star in the championship picture this season.

Most important non-all-star X-Factor. And by non-all-star, I mean, has it made it and is unlikely to make it? make it. So I banned you from picking Chet Holmgren, Ahmed Thompson, guys who just haven't made it because they're younger, they've been injured. Like a legit, this guy has never made it, probably won't ever make it, but for whatever reason, he is massively

important to the championship picture. My non-all-star pick is Cameron Johnson. Same pick. Same pick. Same pick. I'll go Aaron Gordon, because you picked Cam Johnson, but Cam Johnson was my pick. So, a lot of everybody's

talking about Atlanta, their off-season, Nikola Walker, Chris Staps, you know, all the guys they added. To me, Cam Johnson going to Denver, Bruce Brown going back to Denver, like, they really, like, they are the team that got better

the most because it put them in such a good spot to contend for a championship again. They took Oklahoma City, I mean, yeah, they took Oklahoma City seven games. Like, they were right there. And Cameron Johnson is, to me, exactly what they need. And he's the type of guy who benefits greatly from Nicole Yokic. He's my pick too,

because I think Michael Porter Jr. was a great fit with Yokic also. And they won a championship. So obviously he was. I think because of all the warts in his game, inconsistent on defense, podcast game off the rails all summer, he's kind of gotten dismissed a little bit as like, oh, this is a no-brainer upgrade for the Nuggets. And I said right when it happened, the biggest upgrade is Cam Johnson ability to keep the offense moving off the dribble, to attack a close-out, make the next play. Michael Porter Jr. was just not comfortable enough with his handle to be able to do that. But on the flip side, he's 6-10 with a Durant-like three-point shot that he can get off over anybody. And Cam Johnson's a little smaller than that, needs a little more space than that at times.

So he's got to really leverage. And I'm not sure he's a defensive upgrade over Michael Porter Jr. He probably is in space, but he's not on the glass. Michael Porter Jr. is a better rebounder. He's a little bit bigger. He can make some plays at the rim. All of which is to say, Cam Johnson keeping the machine moving and making 40 plus percent on his three, he can't be like a 37 percent three-point sure.

He's got to be knocked down. Like, I want his catch and shoot three percentage this year to be like 44 percent. And he's really got to have like career best doing stuff off the dribble off of closeouts to make this a no-brainer upgrade. And if he does that, it is going to be a no-brainer upgrade. And their offense is going to be extremely hard to stop. The cliche answer would be Jamal Murray because it's always Jamal Murray. But I just feel like he's kind of an honorary All-Star because we talk so much about how he's never made an All-Star team. He kind of doesn't count for this.

Yeah, I agree. When I was going through this, Jamal didn't make much sense. I kind of did the same thing with Aaron Gordon. I mean, I think he's been so good for them. But to me, it's just damn John. And for all the reasons you said, I just really like a guy who you just know exactly what you're going to get from him. In terms of how the style of play,

I think he's going to greatly benefit from playing with Yokic. Did you make a finals pick yet on any of your many platforms or not? I've had done, I did the whole media, sir. I had, I actually, I went out of a limb and I said, not with the West, I had Oklahoma City. I wanted to possibly say Denver, but I have Oklahoma City and I went with the Knicks. Me too, same finals. I went to Oklahoma City over Knicks. But I just, just one game in, it's amazing just, and we're not even one, we haven't seen, like, there's like eight teams that haven't played in or something.

We haven't seen Denver. We haven't seen Denver. We haven't seen Denver just one game in it's like oh yeah there's so much it's like unwrapping presence It's like oh my god

this this toy looks like this there's so much we don't know All right Blake Griffin When are we going to start seeing you Like when is the full blast Amazon schedule start for you? We start tomorrow October 24th That'll be our first game

We got Nick Celtics We got Minnesota We got Lakers So yeah I'll be on every Friday and then we will start switching to some Thursday nights when Thursday night football ends.

So yeah, we're going. It's a great crew in studio. You guys are going to be awesome. Thanks for giving us a little bit of your time at the end of your media circus. Now the media circus is over and you just get to do the media. Blake Griffin, everybody. Thank you, sir.

Thanks, you have me, man. Appreciate it. This episode is brought to you by Panda Express. Look, it can be hard showing how much you love someone. But if you can't say how you feel, just say, Let's get some food or hey, takeouts on me. And if you really love them, pick Panda Express for delicious, authentically cooked American Chinese cuisine, whether it's game night or date night. Nothing says, I love you like orange chicken, honey walnut trim, Kung Pao chicken, and black pepper sirloin steak.

Have you eaten yet? Order now or is it a Panda Express near you. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever get hit with a plan out of nowhere and need something ASAP? Maybe it's an impromptu basketball game, a last minute trip with the crew, spontaneous date. that's when Prime's same-day delivery comes in. Get whatever you need. Delivered to you fast, so you can say yes to the moment.

Same-day delivery, it's on Prime. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to find millions of items delivered fast. Available in select areas, terms apply. This episode is brought to by eBay. You guys know that watching basketball is my thing, obviously, but you know what else is? Collecting basketball memorabilia, and that's why you got to love eBay.

It's like a never-ending merch store, vintage basketball cards, old-school jerseys, one-off fan-made artwork artwork. on eBay, you can always find whatever your thing is. From our collectibles and vintage cars to designer fashion, it's all there. Millions of fines each with a story. eBay, things people love. All right, let's bring in the general manager,

the president of basketball operations. I don't know when anyone's title is anymore of one of the hot young teams in the league. A lot of expectations for the first time for the Detroit Pistons. Trajan Langdon, how are you, sir? I'm good, sir. Good morning. Thanks for having me. It's a big year for the Pistons.

I almost said the Alaskan assassin Trajan Langdon, but I read that you don't like that nickname. Is that true? I wouldn't say I don't like it. I actually think it's a cool nickname. It definitely is flattering. I wouldn't say I don't like it. Yeah, I think it speaks to what I used to do with Duke and even did in Europe.

But, no, I enjoy it. I just don't go around calling myself that. Don't minimize the Europe stuff. You're one of the greatest EuroLeague players of all time. And you have said, I read a lot of interviews you did to prepare for this. you know, people ask you a lot, like, oh, do you regret that the NBA didn't work out, three short years, you went to Europe? And you've said all along, like, absolutely not. And now that you're back in the NBA and have been in front offices for quite a long time,

do you still feel that way? Do you feel that way even strong, more strongly? Yeah, I think the way that I see the world and see the game now in my day-to-day life of being an executive and just a human being, I think I wouldn't be here if it weren't for my nine years playing in Europe and just how you're able to see the world, different cultures, different, different, people and just kind of reframe what basketball really is in the context of life. So I'm glad I had those. I made some amazing friends, had some amazing experiences that I wouldn't have had if I was States State Side. I know you played for Cheska, Moscow for several seasons. What was your,

and I read somewhere like you were a little trepidacious about living in Russia. It was kind of a mysterious place to you. What was your like, what was your welcome to Russia moment where you greeted with vodka at the airport. Were you, I mean, what was it like, okay, I'm here. This is just how it's going to be. So I went back and forth with my agent at the time, and I had actually signed a contract in the ABA at the time

to go play for the Orange County crush. And the money just kept going up like every two days with the offer in Moscow. And finally, I turned it down twice and finally my agents called me and berated me on the phone. He said, you're making a huge mistake. So I called them back. I said, okay, take the deal.

And they said, okay, they want you to play in six hours. I said, no, absolutely not. They're flying you straight to Kazan to play a big league game. And I was like, no, I need to come and have at least one or two practices. So my welcome to Moscow moment, although it wasn't Moscow, I was getting into my apartment and realizing that I didn't have a bed and I had to sleep on a sofa for the first two months. Okay.

Yeah. But the Moscow itself was so big, so expansive, that people were, took a second to get used to, but Russians are just hard exterior, soft interior. So it takes you a time to get through that exterior, but great people that I enjoyed getting to know on my time there. Is it true that you were once gifted a Soviet rifle and do you still have it? So, yes. We won the EuroLeague title in 06 and the gift from the Kremlin to all of us was a rifle. It was a replica, but it was also told that it's just blocked. So if you had somebody go manipulate it, it could turn into a full-fledged working rifle again.

So I could not put it on the plane, nor I could put it or nor could I have it shipped. So it is still in Russia. That's probably a better, based on what you just said, probably better or less than I. You're about my age. I just turned 48. you're a little younger than I am. But we grew up 80s NBA, Lakers, Celtics, then Pistons, Bulls. First of all, who were you a fan of in Alaska?

Alaska, were they Sonics fans? Were they totally agnostic about the NBA? Did everyone just pick like, oh, the Hawks are on national TV or the Bulls are on national TV? Did you have a team? I had a team, but it had nothing to do with location. Like you said, the two, you know, they had NBA on NBC. obviously on the weekends. Or was it CBS?

I think it was CBS, actually. Weekend and basketball, the game of the week. And then TBS and WGN were the two stations we got. So obviously watched a lot of Cubs baseball and Braves baseball, but then Hawks basketball, Chicago Bulls basketball, and the games of the week were always the Lakers or the Celtics. So those are the teams I watched. Love the way that the Lakers played,

the way that they got up and down. obviously I love magic I loved Michael just watched Michael all the time obviously being a WG and I don't think I missed a game if I could have watched it but the guy that I locked

that kind of locked in on seeing he's different was Michael Cooper just great defensively on the ball locked guys up and then just played a role and obviously that was a day where not many threes were made and the whole crowd chanted coop when he hit a corner third

so I thought that was cool did you hate them Did you hate the bad boys like everybody else outside of Detroit did? And I mean that affectionately. Like they loved to be hated. That was their thing. I respected, like I'm one of the few guys who kind of respected when they walked off the floor against the Bulls before the series was over. I thought that was a badass move.

Did you hate the bad boys and Bill Lambert and Dennis Robben and Rick Mahorn? There was some animosity to them just because they were just decking people and there was part of me that said that's not real basketball. but in high school, we played a physical brand of basketball, and I had a huge head coach. It was 6.5, 2.30 that loved playing a physical brand, rough basketball. So I highly respected it, although I felt at times it was too much and over the top. I understood where they were coming from and they were competing.

Yeah, at times, I was like, ooh, that's probably a little bit much and shouldn't be fighting in the game of basketball. But what the hell did I know at that age? They were competing and trying to win a championship. Who do you think was more? universally hated. The bad boys or Duke in the early to mid-90s with Wojo slapping the floor? I don't think it's close. I think it's Duke. I think we, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say Wojo, although we would walk into arenas on the road and they would, I'd make sure I'd walk out with him because they would do him and I knew they weren't

pulling me. So that felt good. But I tried to give him some support too just to be there. But like when we went back to Maryland and played at Cold Fuel House and going to UV I mean, the booze he would get were just, it would fill up an arena. So, but he reveled in it. We reveled in it. But like, yeah, they, they, most of North Carolina doesn't like Duke. Like a lot of people don't understand that. That's a UNC state.

So around the U.S., we're probably loved more than UNC, but we're enemies in our own state. Did you ever slap the floor on defense? Did that ever trickle down to you? I mean, Ojo and I came in together. So he was always slapped. the floor. We were freshmen together. So maybe once or twice, but I was just more of like, let's strap up in guard. That just was kind of who I was and how I played. I was pretty emotional. Batier told me you were like supposed to show him around campus on his recruiting visit

or something and basically just ghosted him. Like he got to campus and you're like, all right, here's Duke. I got to go to, I got to, I got to maintain my 40 GPA. Have fun. Yeah, I wasn't a great. I wasn't a great. person to have that weekend. I had some stuff going on. Shane was great, but I do admit that I did ghost. And I wasn't the best host in the world for him. But he came a couple times.

And obviously I loved having him as a teammate for the two years that we're together. Good man. Yes, that's a hilarious story. He will never let me down. I mean, yeah, that's probably better than, you know, other recruiting stories. I've heard that and like badly in the opposite way. Like I, there was too much imbibed and I woke up in a room I didn't recognize it covered in my own urine kind of thing.

On another campus, right? I may be speaking from personal experience. This is going to sound like a joke question, but it's not dovetailing on the bad boys thing. Have you ever, have you ever sat down with Isaiah Stewart and Ron Holland and been like, hey, look, I respect the fight and the tenacity, but like, maybe dial it back a little bit on the fighting and the technicals? Not both of them together. Individually, I have.

It's more just talking about the texts and what can happen if there's more in the lead to suspensions. And I know you're doing it for the right reasons. And let's talk about this a little bit and how can we dial it back? But look, I know they have the best intentions. They're competing or they're having the backs of their teammates. sometimes it's hard to dial guys up. You rather have guys, guys are already dialed up

and have to dial them back than opposite. It's really hard to dial, you know, even keeled low energy guys. It's hard to get those guys going. So give me a guy that's going to get after it compete at the highest level and we'll work on getting it to a level where you don't get that many techs to impact the team. But I'm all for these guys being physical, impactful,

having the back of their teammates, as long as it's in the right boundaries. You came in to Detroit into the top role right before the 2024 draft. Like you picked Ron Holland, right? Correct. What did you see in him and what are your hopes for him in year two? Yeah, I think a lot of the things that we look at, you know, eyes, ears, numbers, things like that. When you do when you look at film, you watch him live, I got to see him live before he heard

his wrist out with the ignite, size for position, and then you hear about how much he loves the game, how much he studies the game, how much he works on the game, how coachable he is. But you're always going to hear varying opinions throughout the draft process. There's going to be some workouts or maybe you hear, oh, he had a bad workout. He couldn't make a shot.

Pro day, he couldn't make a shot. But then you started dialing in, listening to interviews. We got a chance to interview him in Chicago before I got there. I was actually with, still with New Orleans during Chicago. pre-draft. So I got to listen to the audio of Ron and I did a whole lot of digging on his personality and that was huge for me when we're trying to establish an identity is have somebody come in who's willing to work, who's a high character young man, size for position, has a chance to be a big time defender and we all felt that the shot could be fixed. So I think adding all those

things in, we just felt he had a chance to be a pretty good NBA basketball player. And I know he's going to reach his ceiling because he works, he listens, and he loves the game of basketball. Do you have a go-to off-the-beaten path interview question or technique for the combine? I don't really. I think we like to let the interview flow a little bit, ask a couple questions about who the person is, what drives them, how they got to the seat today. And usually, we allow them to steer the conversation. It usually gets to a place where they reveal something about themselves. We need to find out a couple things here and there.

We can grab it out of the interview. But I think the biggest thing for us is trying to let that person feel comfortable being themselves. A lot of these guys come in and they're all, they've all gone through the process of being, they know what's coming, right? And we want to get them out of the rose wrote answers of, oh, I did hear this. This is what I should say. No, no, no.

Say what you want to say. Feel comfortable in here. and that's hard getting them to that spot because they're doing six to eight of these a day and they're doing 15 over a three-day span. So they've all been prepped, but we want to get them to relax and have a good time. Do you ever put them in front of a whiteboard? I've had one team in particular, but I'm sure other teams do it, that will say to guys when they come to the facility, say we draft you,

place yourself within our starting five and like diagram a play that you'd be in and what you would do in the play. Do you ever do something like that? Yeah, we'll do it in Chicago. We'll have a whiteboard, especially more for guard play than any other position. Draw up their favorite play, what they want to get out of it. And then, you know, sometimes is do they draw it up for them or do they draw it up for somebody else on the team, right? And you get that insight into how they think.

And then, yeah, we'll do some things in terms of like retention, right? I think a lot of teams do. Like, here's a play. Let's go through the workout, draw the play up at the end of, of the workout, right? See if they can do that or run the play out on the court that we drew up 30 minutes to go. So, yeah, try to do some of those things. But really, what does that give you?

I don't know, 0.5% of the entire picture of what you're trying to data points to draft a certain player. But try to make it fun, try to make it interesting, and get as many data points to make you feel comfortable or figure out that this isn't the guy as you can in that month's process. By the way, not for nothing, but at least one team. that picked above you in that draft had the lottery at the ping pong balls or the picks flipped a different way would have taken Holland ahead of you. I know that for sure. So I'm interested to see what he does this season because, you know, it's just young guy on a good team. There's a big role for him potentially off the bench, right? Like you need like backup forward,

back up wing minutes. Yeah, I think, you know, Zach, he's been in the gym a lot as all of our guys have. And I think a lot of people saw what he did. And it's a few games in the Vegas and Summer League where he was the leader of that team took a step playing both ends of the floor, showed some things he can do at all three levels. And we're hoping that's transitions into the regular season as well. But he's got a chance to be good playing in his league for a long time. Did you get anywhere close on extensions with Jaden Ivy or Jalen Duren? You know, I will speak to the overall picture of extensions. and how these things can be difficult at times.

I think players and their representatives come in. I think they try to work with the team, but at the end of the day, their responsibility is to get their client the biggest, the most money that they can. And our job is to put together a roster that hopefully can be competitive for years and years, right? So I think in extension scenarios,

you can have two people in two days. different places in terms of what they're looking at doing and hopefully those hopefully those places can intersect to get something done and sometimes they don't sometimes it's just like we're in one place we're in another place we can get somewhat close I would say discussions kept being had let's put it that way but I think both we we just felt okay let's let's revisit it let's don't let's don't make this thing too contentious So I think talks were good.

They were professional. And I think myself, J.D. and J.I. were all in a good place heading into the season. Does the last minute plot twist like Jaden feeling pain in his knee and then needing surgery right before the season? Does that affect extension talks at all? No, because I don't think that that was not something that we feel is a big deal. Like to me it did not.

I think from the outside, it might see that it could, but to me it didn't. Can you? Obviously, if it's something more severe, maybe, it's, that's, but that's not something severe at all. Now that the procedure is over and you probably have a little bit of a better sense of it, can you, I know, I was reading that it was, it's right knee, he felt discomfort. It was, I think you guys said in a statement related to the broken left leg. He had last year.

Not related. Not related. Not related. Not related. Can you provide any clarity on what exactly like the surgery did or was? And is there any updated timetable? It's just it was a cleanup. Some cartilage that kind of was just some loose particles in there that was causing some discomfort.

So cleaned it up. I think he's feeling better already. He's walking. He's starting his rehab. We're going to make sure he's. good to go. I think that will go pretty easily. It was very,

very simple. It was nothing. He was literally in the surgery room for 15 minutes. Oh, yeah, it was quick. My daughter's elbow surgery lasted longer than that a couple of years ago. Would you bust it up her elbow? Yeah, and these guys

are, I mean, they're just ridiculous athletes and he was in really good shape. He had a great summer, and so he's going to get back off this quick. I mean, it's not like he hasn't been training. So, you know, but we won't rush him. You know, our biggest thing with him is, let's make sure you get back healthy and we keep you back.

Obviously, it's not easy coming back off of the ankle injury he had that was, you know, freakish back on January 2nd. He's worked on his butt off and then he has to have this and go back to it. But he's had a phenomenal mindset with this. He's going to attack it and he'll be back soon. I would say you asked for a timetable. So it's, you know, we're going to reevaluate in four, and I think it's unfair for me to say anything different than that.

You got to reevaluate. That's what reevaluating means. What was your vantage point for the Josh Hart uncalled foul on Tim Hardaway, Jr. at the end of game four in the first round? Are you in the stands? And what is the aftermath of that game? Because that's your first, as the top guy, that's your first, like, hot house playoff. Oh, yeah.

refs maybe did you wrong. How's the team going to respond? What do you want to project as the leader? What is that whole sequence like for you? Obviously a huge game for us because we wanted not only to keep the series. I think it would have tied the series up. But the fans were so good, Zach, going down the stretch for us in the last few months. And during the playoffs, I mean, that place was rocking.

We wanted to win one home game for the fans. That would have been not only for our players, but for the fans and for the city. We were competing at a super high level, and I think we put ourselves in a place to win a game. And sometimes that's all you can ask. And obviously, so where we sit is basically straight diagonal across the court from the play. And so I got a pretty good vantage point. And obviously, they're going to show the replay 100 times. from where the ref was,

that was a tough vantage point to see because it was kind of blocked. So in our talks and understandings with the league, we understood why he made the call that he made. Was it difficult for us to swallow and move on? It was, but I think you just have to. And I thought our J.B. staff and our guys did a tremendous job of moving on and going on to New York and get game five.

But it was it was tough in the moment. Obviously, you go in the locker room, guys are pissed, and they're yelling, and how does this happen to us? And is there any repercussions? And you just got to calm guys down. It's part of the game. It goes your way sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't.

What is one, so the playoffs, obviously, different game than a regular season, different level of intensity, different level of game planning. What is one positive, concrete takeaway you had from the team's first playoff experience roster-wise. Like, I learned this good thing about the roster and one negative or we've got to get better at that or we've got to address that need that you learned from the playoffs. I think our resilience was the thing as a team that really stood out. Like, lose the first game, come back, win the second game, and lose the first game in a fashion that I think we felt, you know, they went on a run and I think it was like something ridiculous, like 21 to 2 or 21 to 3,

fourth quarter run when we're basically felt like we were in control going into that fourth quarter and it's just a couple possessions right all of a sudden they get a couple easy ones crowd gets into it when the crowd was dead um and then we just didn't know how to respond in game one day later two days later our guys respond come out like nothing happened like no memory of it come out and win a tough game hit big shots down the stretch um I think it's just that's a big one that I learned about being resilient. Another one I learned is sometimes you let your guard down in game too. Like you relax a little bit when you feel you're in control.

A lot of times that just comes from youth because you haven't been in that situation where you understand now is the time. And sometimes there's just a time in the game when you're like, now is game winning time? And it might not be two minutes left. It might be eight minutes left in the game. And that's what New York did us in game one. They said, now is the time we're down 10.

We're going to hit him, punch them in the mouth and see how they respond. I think we, I learned too, that pretty good passing team, like we're unselfish. We moved the ball. The way that J.B. and staff got our guys ready, we bought into that. And I think we executed at a pretty high level in terms of game plan on both ends of the floor, which is cool to watch because that actually doesn't always happen, especially when the stakes are high and anxiety and nerves hit. But I thought we did a really good job executing our game plan.

I think then I think the one thing that happens to in that series is you just get fatigued. You have 82 games and if you haven't ever been through it emotionally, physically, you don't understand the fatigue that goes into those games because one, it's how physical the games are, but two, how much emotion is put into the games. I mean, you are gassed after those games because it's so emotional. And now how do you recover in a 48-hour time span? It sounds like it's a long time.

It's not when you're emotionally. spent and then you have friends and family around and you're entertaining them whether you're on the road or at home. So it's trying to block out the noise, focus on that when you've never done it before. And I think now when, you know, our guys and our team, it's a lot of good because we have a lot of continuity to understand what's coming. I think it allows you to prep better. Yeah, you mentioned the passing. And one thing I've said before is one of my takeaways was something about this Kade during Sarr Thompson trio. It's got its, it's got its weaknesses, shooting wise, youth, all of that. But something about that group works with with Jalen Dern's screening for Cade,

catching the ball in space, a SAR cutting. I was like, all right, that's, that's interesting. I can see that and crystallize that. And then you can build off of that, which is my way of saying, I picked a Sarr Thompson to win most improved player this year. And I'm very excited about him, what should I be excited about? And do you, do you know kind of what I'm talking about, that shell of those three guys? Like, there's something there with that group. Yeah, I think they are, they're connected in a way where they look for each other, which I think is cool. I don't know where that came from. It's, I think it's just being together. And honestly, I think going through the season that they went to the year before, when it's like, let's try

to figure this thing out. We're losing 28 games in a row. I think there is a, there's a galvanizing moment with winning a lot. And there's a galvanizing moment at times. And there's a galvanizing moment at times, especially with young players with hard times, right? They have to pull together and have each other's back. And I think that's what happened with that team the year before, especially going into the following year, is they do have each other's back and went through some tough times that I can't even understand the things that they were going through in terms of that losing streak and only winning 14 games. But they're incredibly unselfish. They come to work every day. They try to make each other better, but they try to make

one another better. And like you said, that that combo of three guys, they can be difficult to guard on given nights. And like you said, yeah, shooting sometimes can be an issue. But I think defensively, those three have a chance to be pretty good too. And obviously, like you talked about, 80, having a whole summer, a whole training camp, feeling good. I think his teammates and our staff trust him with the ball a little bit more. So I think that's what you're going to see it, but his ability to playmate or set the table a little bit more than he did previously in the past and get the rebound and go because he can do some things out

in the open floor especially. You have played zero regular season games as we are recording this, and I know you cannot talk about any specific players around the league, and you won't want to talk about any of your players. So I'll ask it as vaguely as possible. Will you be open to the idea of putting some chips in a win-now trade if the right scenario present themselves? Or are you just like, we're just going to build what we got and see what this is? Yeah, I was actually asked at an event at an event that I spoke at the other day. It's a great

question. There's no way I would have ever thought that I'd be a buyer at the trade deadline last year, right? And I just, there's no way until two weeks before the trade deadline that I told my staff, okay, let's go get a guy that can help us. And I didn't know that Dennis was going to be the one, but we were looking to see which would be the best fit for us at the time. If that opportunity presents itself, I think, yeah, we have to look at everything all the time to make us better. And so does that mean we're going to be super aggressive? Does that mean we add on the margins? Does it mean we put all our chips in?

I don't know right now. I do want to continue to see our young core grow and understand who they can be and who we can be with them as the pieces. and I think if you, in our eyes, if you pull the trigger too early, then maybe you don't understand who they are and some of their growth gets kind of, it gets hurt because maybe somebody gets in their way. Somebody's playing in 38 minutes when those minutes weren't eaten before. So we analyze that stuff a lot and we'll continue to assess our team and our players

as the season goes along and understand if that's the right path or not. Okay, two fun ones to wrap up. I had forgotten or never knew that you were a high level baseball player, high enough to get drafted and accumulate some minor league stats. Yeah, give me, give me. Bad ones, bad minor league stats. Hey, look, you know who else had bad minor league stats? Michael Jordan, all right? And so it's like, it's hard.

Hitting a round ball with a round bat, one of the hardest things. Do you have a player comp for like peak Trajan-Langdon baseball? And who was your, were you, was it Braves, Cubs? Was it a similar thing? Like, who did you root for? or who do you for now? I guess you could say the Tigers now. I probably have to.

Yeah, player comp is a tough one for me. Just because I, look, I pitched, probably pitching in high school was my best position that I was able to dominate,

but I just didn't throw hard enough to be drafted. I topped out at 86. But when Kevin Towers... Do you throw some junk? Do you throw like... I threw a lot of junk. Cut,

I threw a cutter, I threw a curve ball, I threw a knuckle ball. Wow. I threw a circle change. Yeah, I threw a lot of stuff. I probably had five pitches that I threw. But I just didn't throw hard enough.

And in Alaska, you can strike out a lot of people, I guess, without throwing too hard as long as you have the junk. But a couple scouts came. Kevin Towers, what the Padres came in a game that I hit two home runs, one left center, one dead center. And they drafted me as a third basement because they liked my bat and they liked my heightened wingspan at the corner. And I'd never played at the hot corner before.

So that was, yeah, playing the hot corner. not seeing it in minor, I mean in Little League ball or high school ball, and then you see it and yeah, it's a completely different monster, how fast that ball gets on you at third base. But, um, now I enjoyed it.

It humbled me tremendously playing every day, staying at days in, staying at holiday ends, getting $12 meal money on the road. Um, I think my first, my monthly check, my first year was about $450 a month.

So, it definitely was humbling coming from Duke basketball and going to play minor league baseball. And I played one year and one summer in Spokane and two summers in Idaho Falls. So I learned a lot of lessons, but also understood that you have to love the game of baseball to play it at that level. I mean, it is, it's a lot. It's a lot of time.

And it's every day. Did any of your, did any, I didn't look at your full minor league rosters. Did anyone make it? Were there any big leaders that you played with? One stands out. His name was Matt Clement. He was a pitcher from Pittsburgh. Yeah, played for the Cubs.

Yeah, he was my teammate in Idaho Falls. And we still stay in touch. He is a high school coach in the Pittsburgh area. Wow. Basketball coach, by the way. Yeah. Really? Yeah, he was basketball player.

87 and 86 career record, 4.47 ERA. That's not, that's a represent. That's a nice Major League Baseball career. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's hell of a picture. It's October 22nd. Somebody, and I truly don't remember who off the top of my head, said, Trajan really likes Halloween.

Is that true? Like, what are we talking about? Are we talking about like your house is crazy? Your yard is crazy. What's happening on Halloween? Okay. Somebody gave you a little insight. So two years ago, my wife and I did a party at our place in New Orleans,

just off a cuff. like let's do something for the organization and invite all staff and have a party. Didn't know where it was going to go and just people loved it. They obviously it was New Orleans. So they brought their best costumes and it just fit the city. You know, the city of New Orleans, they like to party. Anything they can find to have a good time, they're going to find it in a positive way. And so we've kept that tradition and did it again last year.

We do it at our house. Last year was fun and people really brought it. I didn't know what would happen in Birmingham, Michigan. And the whole staff, they brought it. They had a good time. So we're going to continue the tradition and do it again this year. Different themes. But try to have fun with it.

Let everybody get outside of themselves, show up with whatever costume you want, whatever face paint you want. And there was a couple people that showed up that I did not recognize who they were for about a half hour. Yeah, best costume with the whole thing. Do you give it an award away for this? Yeah. Yeah, a couple different awards, I think, first, second, third. And we had a staff member who dressed up as an escaped convict,

but with like almost like a zombie escape convict outfit, full, full makeup, full hairdo. It was ridiculous and I didn't know what the person was for probably 15 minutes. Amazing. So hopefully we'll have the same this year and have some fun. We have to squeeze it in in the middle of a three and four. So we'll see how that goes. Inconvenient. Do you have a costume plan?

Or can you divulge it? You got to surprise people, I guess. Surprise people. Definitely surprise people. The theme is Great Gatsby. Nice. So, yeah. So we'll see who does some things within that theme and stands out in different ways.

I wanted to be Mr. Met this year because I've been claimed my Mets fandom. And there is a Mr. Met costume you come by with a gigantic baseball head. and it was north of $400 and my wife very gently was like, I think that's a little bit ridiculous for something you're never going to use again. And then a friend was like, you could just make a paper mache thing,

like a big head. I was like, I'm not doing it for no chance. So I love Halloween, but good luck with the great Gatsby theme. I sure that's a good one. You got to go. You got game one today against the Chicago Bulls,

old school central division rivalry. Thanks for some time. Good luck. And I will see you around the block. Thanks, Zach. Glad we can make this happen. And thanks for having me on. All right, that's it for kind of a loaded Zach Lowe show today.

A lot going on. My head is spinning, as you could probably tell. Thanks to David Purdom of ESPN. Thanks to Blake Griffin of Amazon. Thanks to Trajan Langdon of the Detroit Piston. Sorry, you lost your opener after we taped Trajan, but hopefully better times our head. Thanks to Jesse, Jonathan, and Mike on production. Thanks to all of you for listening and or watching

the Zach Lowe show. We will be back next week on One day as the NBA season really gets going, we'll have a lot to talk about a whole weekend of watching team for the second and third time. Thanks, everybody. See you next week. Must be 21 or over in President Select States for Kansas in affiliation with the Kansas Star Casino or 18 and over in President D.C., Kentucky or Wyoming, Gambling, problem. Call 1-800-Gash-Help.com. Call 1-888-8-7-7-7-7-7-7 or visit ccpGambling.org in Connecticut or visit MDGamblinghelp.org in Maryland.

Hope is here. visit gambling helpline m a.org or call 800327 5050 for 247 support in massachusetts or call 18778 hope n y or text hope and why in new york ambition comes in all shapes and sizes at first citizens bank we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building fit for your ambition for citizens bank own it all pay off your home travel for life drive a Ferrari of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming

Yamava Resort and Casino and San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package the biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all

only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion.