Andrew Schlecht and Alex Speers discuss the week of headlines in the NBA, and an update on the surprise teams and post All Star Break Leap players. Then they are joined by Dan Devine of Yahoo! Sports to discuss the NBA Playoffs, matchups they like, and then the guys do a contender draft taking the teams they think are most likely to hoist the Larry O'Brien Trophy at the end of the season.Then the boys play a fun edition of Andrew vs. the Beat, a trivia game where Andrew is pitted against a beat writer.Host: Andrew Schlecht and Alex SpeersWith: Dan DevineExecutive Producer: Andrew SchlechtAudio/Video Editor: Gonzalo Torres Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What are the top NBA headlines this week?
Well, Andrew, our top story this week was the end of the 24-25 regular season. The Phoenix Suns, owners of the league's highest payroll, missed the play-in completely, finishing tied with the Portland Trail Blazers at 36-46. In response, the Suns quickly moved to fire coach Mike Budenholzer, who was only hired last summer.
Now, assuming Devin Booker is still a Sun next season, their next coach will be his 8th head coach in 11 NBA seasons. Matt Ishbia met with the media this week and was defiant, promising that the Suns would win championships, quote, with an S at the end. Another word with an S at the end is picks, which the Suns do not have until I'm like 45.
The expectation is that Kevin Durant will be traded this summer. And while many have assumed Houston would be a likely suitor, Mark Stein reported this week that a Katie trade would be unlikely for the Rockets because he does not fit with the team's timeline. Now, it took all the way until game 82 to decide who would finish the season with the worst record.
And this year's reverse champion was the Utah Jazz, who finished with 17 wins, only three more than last year's Pistons team. The Jazz secured the worst record after the Wizards got a dramatic win in the final game of the season, a 119 to 118 win in Miami that ended on an impossible Bub Carrington floater at the buzzer. The Wizards finished the season with an average scoring margin of minus 12.4.
That is third worst in NBA history behind only the seven win Bobcats and the 92-93 Dallas Mavericks. Now, speaking of the Mavs, as we do every week, some good news finally happened for Mavs fans this week. but not before the Mavericks franchise could make something bad happen first.
The day before the Mavs 9-10 play-in game against the Kings, Nico Harrison offered to sit down with the local media for an interview with the stipulation that there would be no cameras or recordings made of the interview. Thankfully, he did not exclude writing utensils, and so the entire interview was still widely available.
When asked about Mavs fans' biggest misunderstanding regarding the Luka trade, Harrison said, quote, Defense wins championships. When asked about how creating a three to four year window after trading away the team's future first was in the best long term interest of the team, Harrison said, quote, defense wins championships.
When asked why he didn't believe the team he built last season, which went to the NBA finals, was a contender. Harrison said, quote, defense wins championships. Somehow, none of those answers were as bad as Mavs CEO Rick Welts comparing the Luka trade to Golden State trading Monte Ellis for Andrew Bogut.
The second trade comparison is many weeks from the Mavs, where it's unclear which side of the trade they think they are. Thankfully for Mavs fans, however, the week wasn't all bad as the Mavs completely demolished the Kings in Sacramento, getting up by as many as 25 points before coasting to the win.
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Chapter 2: Which teams were the surprise teams this season?
Wow, what a week. What a week right before the playoffs. Just so many unnecessary things happening from NBA owners this week. It was almost it's almost too good. Al, let's let's give us a prize team update. And this surprise team update is brought to you by our good friends at Bet MGM.
Yes, this is very exciting because last year we didn't have any surprise teams. That doesn't happen that often. In fact, since the 99-2000 season, there's only been four seasons without at least one surprise team. But we were spoiled this year because we ended up getting three surprise teams. And as a reminder, that is a team who won at least 10 more games than their over-under.
So who got it this season? Detroit, obvious. Over-under was 24 and a half. They won 44 games. That gap, 19 and a half games, that is tied for the second biggest gap among all surprise teams going back to the 99-2000 season. One of the teams they are tied with for second is the 0-1-0-2 Detroit Pistons. This was Carlisle's first year as coach. The team had Ben Wallace, Jerry Stackhouse.
They similarly had a 19... They won 19 and a half more games than their over-under. The other two teams, Portland Trailblazers, over-under preseason, 22 and a half, end up winning 36 games. Very impressive. And then... In what I would say is like the least surprising surprise team ever, the Chicago Bulls, 27 and a half preseason over under, they win 39 games.
Now for all these teams, I do the difference between their previous year wins and their current year wins. Never been a surprise team that the number was zero, where the Bulls end up being a surprise team despite winning the exact same amount of games they have scored in the previous season, which is just a great stat for the Bulls.
And I feel like it's very representative of the season the Bulls had. So those are three surprise teams. Very exciting. I don't know how me and Andrew managed to not pick any of those three teams. Very bad job. We did. And shout out to the listener again who made us the surprise team website, which you can go look at at tinyurl.com backslash surprise teams.
Now, one more thing, Andrew, before we get to our guest this week, back right around the All-Star game. We picked a few names who we thought might make a post-All-Star break leap. And I wanted to do a first and second team all post-All-Star break leaps. It's a mouthful. So my second team, Shane Sharp, one of my picks. Zachary Richachet, Steph Castle, Aaron Neesmith, and Cade Cunningham.
That's my second team. Okay, first team, I'm going to go in a little bit more depth. First, we got Quentin Grimes, which was also one of my picks. He had maybe the funniest pre to post splits. 11-4-2 pre, 23-5-5 post all-star break. What? What's really funny, though, is if you look at net rating, like how the team played when he was on the court, pre-All-Star break, minus 0.6.
Post-All-Star break, minus 14.6 because he was playing on the Sixers, of course. Wow. Now, his true shooting percentage basically was unchanged. This was just a guy, which actually is very impressive because he got a lot more usage and he was still able to maintain his efficiency. Quentin Grimes might just be a good player. So it'll be very interesting to see what he gets this summer.
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Chapter 3: Who are the players to watch post-All-Star break?
And his net rating swing, minus 6.5 to plus 9.9. So once again, our first team, Josh Giddey, Paul Bencaro, Tyrese Halbern, Denny Avdia, and Quentin Grimes. So congrats to all those guys.
In hindsight, they all make sense. But at the time, like at the time, there wasn't a ton of confidence that Josh Giddey was going to turn this ship around, you know? Right. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, looking at it now, you're like, how can I be so dumb not to pick him? You know, that is definitely how it felt. OK, we are going to take a quick break.
And after this, we're going to talk to our guy, Dan Devine from Yahoo Sports. We'll be right back.
Hallo, etwas Glück to go bitte.
Gern, zum Rubbeln oder Aufreißen.
Hauptsache schnell, ich kann mein Glück kaum erwarten. Die Lose von Lotto Bayern, zum Rubbeln oder Aufreißen. Glück to go, der schnelle Weg zum Glück. Lotto Bayern, nimm dein Glück in die Hand, nur in deiner Lotto-Annahmestelle.
Spielteilnahme ab 18, Glücksspiel kann süchtig machen. Infos unter bzga.de.
All right, Al. It is my pleasure to welcome Dan Devine onto the show from Yahoo Sports. He writes, he does podcasts. That's it. Really excited.
Those two things.
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Chapter 4: What are the key playoff matchups to consider?
I think you can, that's a coin flip to me, but, uh, That was that's the one I look at. I'm like, you're going to be wrong kind of no matter what. So but then again, we're in the MVP season where you're wrong no matter what you do anyway. So at least we can sit. I can sit and live in that wrongness no matter what. It's great. I love it. I love the way this feels. Yeah.
So on the flip side, ignoring Boston Orlando, because I'm assuming you feel pretty confident about that series. Are any of these? Yes, exactly. Are any of these other series like you feel just locked in, like you feel like it's a particularly good matchup for one of these teams?
No, like I really I lack my confidence in this, but it's it's weird. It's almost it's the other way for me because I feel like I'm seeing and hearing a lot of confidence in the Knicks to kind of like pat the pistons on the head and dispense with them. And I don't I don't think so. I don't think it's going to be quite so easy. I like.
There's I've heard I feel like I'm hearing and reading a lot of Knicks in five, and that feels to me much more like Knicks in seven or maybe even Pistons in six. Like, I think the concern that I would have if I was a Knicks fan was, do you have an answer for Cade Cunningham in the pick and roll? Like he destroyed Carl Anthony Towns, Pesce Pesce Chua.
Whoever was playing center for the Knicks in drop, every time they played, he was awesome. He hit like 52% of his threes. He walked into pull-ups. When the big came up, he just dropped a pocket pass or a lob to Isaiah Stewart or Jalen Dern. Like, He has the answers to that test. Do the Knicks have another test to give to him? I'm not so sure about that. And so that's that's the one that gives me.
But I feel like I'm seeing a lot of confidence in that and I do not share it. But maybe I'm too low relative to consensus there.
Well, Dan, it's now time for an intermission. An intermission. We're going to ask you some more questions, but we're taking a short break to play a game, sort of. It's a championship draft. OK, so we like to do this every week during the playoffs just to kind of get a read on how we're feeling about all these teams.
So I'm going to show you what is now appearing on the screen for Dan is a beautiful Excel spreadsheet that I made with all the teams. And just in case you're out there wondering, yes, those are all the accurate team colors. I did pull them from the Internet. They're all correct.
Look at this. Thank you very much.
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Chapter 5: Which teams are likely to win the championship?
Chapter 6: What did Dan Devine think about the Bulls' season?
Can they shoot enough, as you mentioned, with the paint packing? Are they going to be able to, like, take them out of that? and find some ways for ants to actually get downhill and get to the paint.
I think that the way they're going to manipulate that or try to work with that, I'm really interested to see how that works, what they think their best pathway to points is, and just focusing on an ant more specifically. he, you know, we've talked already, there's been the discussion of he struggles with double teams. If you blitz him, you crank up the heat on him, you trap him.
He doesn't want to really get off the ball. He wants to get downhill and score, right? Like, yeah. And if I could do that, like Anthony Edwards could do that, I would want to do that too. But This is like in the hero's journey of a player. Like you make the playoffs, you then make your run in the playoffs. You have the, you run up against your sort of, uh, your weak link, your, your Achilles heel.
And then you got to show that you can sort of evolve with it. So, um, If that's what the Lakers are going to do, if they're going to throw two at him, if they're going to try to blitz it out of his hands, try to make somebody else beat him, is he patient enough for that? Does he trust it enough? Can those teammates reward that trust?
Does this become a series where instead of Ant scoring 40 every night, Ant's getting nine assists a night? I don't know, but I'm interested to see what questions the Lakers make him answer and what his answers for it are. So that's the one that I'm sort of most interested in from the group that we put together.
Let's talk about maybe the biggest snub from our little draft here, the Knicks. The Knicks did go one and three against Detroit in the regular season. Mitchell Robinson did not play in any of those matchups, however. How big of a factor do you think that he could be in this series?
I think he could be a really big factor. You know, I talked about the struggles that they've had in the pick and roll against Cade Cunningham. Mitch is way better at being up toward the level and has the wingspan to play to, to be able to influence the ball handler without losing track of the big rolling behind him and to be able to time out the pass and get up to deflect it.
Cat's not so great at that stuff. He's obviously better athletically overall, but that specific version of applying his length and his size and his physicality never been his strong suit. And Mitch...
Mitchell Robinson, before he got hurt last season, was having the best defensive season of his career, not because he was blocking so many shots, but because as your colleague Fred Katz wrote at The Athletic, he was just playing that, like, ground-bound, I'm keeping you from getting to comfortable places and forcing you, like... foul line floaters and jumpers that are lower percentage shots.
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Chapter 7: How did the Kings' management decisions impact their season?
This has not really been their identity this season, but it's a wild card and a trick up their sleeve that I think it'll be interesting to see how much they play.
I want to go back to Wolves-Lakers because you mentioned Wolves offense versus Lakers defense. I'm really interested in the other side because the Wolves defense, not as elite as they were last year, but we've seen individual games where that defense has looked just as terrifying as it was last year.
I mean, Thunder fans will remember a game right before the All-Star break where Rudy Gobert, Julius Randle were out and they played these small ball lineups that were just terrifying defensively. And so I'm interested in your thoughts on how they match up defensively team.
Yeah, it'll be interesting because I think that one of the big like talking points in recent years of NBA playoff discourse, what a lovely thing is like, well, Gobert gets played off the floor against teams that go small.
And that has never totally been true and has always been more based on the very loud highlights of teams hitting threes against him when he's tried to cover everybody or Luka doing it and then cursing at him in like, you know, four different languages at the end of last year's game.
So, I think if you're talking about them playing a lot of, like, Jared Vanderbilt and Rui Hachimura and, you know, guys, you know, or Jackson Hayes, obviously, but if the Lakers go smaller, there's still places that I think Rudy Gobert can guard. I think he can, like, stay in the corner or, you know... it's, it's a little bit of like, I'm going to make Rui Hachimura shoot me out of this.
I'm going to make Jared Vanderbilt like back cut and dunk me out of this. And I think that, so I think that's interesting to me. Like I, if Chris Finch, I mean, they still finished sixth in points allowed per possession. They were right there in terms of their defensive efficiency over the full season. It doesn't felt like it, but that's, they were there all season.
And then if they do go smaller, yeah, like what do those lineups look like? Randall kind of never played five in New York. Like Tibbs really didn't trust it. He didn't trust the rebounding of it. He didn't trust, even when they did bring in OG Ananobi, they only overlapped very briefly. But like when you did have a guard your yard kind of guy, he really didn't trust it too much.
So is Finch more willing to go with it? If he if he sees like this is a way for us to spread spread the floor, but also match up physically with a lot of like six, eight burly guys. I think the point of attack defenders, obviously, Jaden McDaniels is fantastic. Anthony Edwards can be fantastic when he when he dials it up.
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Chapter 8: What are the predictions for the upcoming playoff series?
Only one guy in the entire league. Wow.
This is a great question.
Thank you.
I don't readily have the answer to it. I was very excited when there was only one guy who did it. A hundred dunks is a lot of dunks. It's a lot of dunks. A lot of dunks.
Shoot. Goodness. It's probably a big man.
Did Jaron Jackson do it? Jaron Jackson, he did not do it, Andrew. So, Dan, you have a chance to steal. I'm going to go with my gut here. Is it Victor Wambanyama? So it's not. But after I did this question, I was like, wait a second. Wimby had to have done that. How did he not do that? And he had 91 dunks. Seriously. Before he got injured. So does Andrew get a chance to steal back?
No, but if you guys want to throw a name, if you guys had other names you were thinking of. Is it OG Ananobi? It is OG Ananobi. Damn it!
They went with my gut and they should have gone with my brain.
Yeah. That makes sense. Now, actually, I'm looking here. Let's see what Jaren Jackson, because he definitely had enough threes.
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