 What's the word y'all? Back from the hiatus. Sometimes I lose motivation to film anything. But now the 2K drop, this is gonna be weird because I know we always talk trash about 2K. Every time a new 2K drops, I'm in content, content, content mode, and I got something to talk about today. I think the title of this video is predicting the NBA is impossible, right? And obviously, exaggeration, it's not impossible. I'm sure there are some people out there in the world, one person that looked at the last season and thought, yes, we're getting Bucks versus Sons. It was one dude, but he did it. But for the most part, predicting the NBA is extremely, extremely hard. And the reason why that's on my mind right now is because I keep seeing people talk on whether it be TV, whether it be on Twitter, saying that the Lakers versus Brooklyn that's finals is inevitable, which I can't completely understand. Both teams are stacking up to the brim and talent. Both teams are led by some bona fide hall of famers, bona fide all-time great players in the game of basketball. I can completely understand the idea of these two teams being shoo-ins for the NBA finals. But more than likely, that won't be the case. Now, I know we have had years where we knew that LeBron was coming out of the East and the Warriors were coming out of the West. We're gonna eliminate those years because I want to for the sake of the narrative of the video, there's no other reason for me to eliminate it. But let's just, we're talking basketball here. Stop trying to counteract my points. The other years around that, there's always a domino effect where the thing that we thought would 100% happen gets messed up. So think about the paths from each team last year. Anthony Davis gets injured in the first round for the Phoenix Suns. Then they go against Jamal Murray-Liss Nuggets. Kawhi Leonard is out. Suns get to the championship. Now I'm not discrediting the Suns at all, but I'm just saying things had to go right for the Phoenix Suns to make it to the finals and that completely turned around what most people thought would happen in the NBA. A look on the other side of the things, James Hardy got injured, Kawhi Irving got injured and Kevin Rentsch-Hugh was on the line and then the Bucks took advantage. A lot of things had to happen for us to get the finals that we got and that can be set about every year in the NBA, every single season. And we're getting around that point now. General managers do these GM surveys. It started in 2016 and shout out to John Schumann. I think he's the one that created it. He's the one that's credited for the very first one. So I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this was his idea. It is a beautiful idea to survey the GMs around the league just to ask them, what do you think about this upcoming season? And if there's anybody that's qualified to make predictions or qualified to know anything about the NBA, it's the people that are in the seats building these teams, right? But I wanna take a look at some of the past years of the GM survey and just showcase how hard it is to predict things. And I'm not even just talking about the NBA finals. I'm talking about breakout players and VPs. All of those things are very, very hard to predict. And that's why every single season, once we get to this point and teams are in training camp, I'm hype, man. Cause again, even in the years where it felt like an inevitability that the Cavs and the words were going to meet each other in the finals, I was still excited to see how those paths were going to align. So I started off last year, the 2020-2021 GM survey. Of course, this is our first year back in arenas after the bubble and everything. So I see some of the predictions that GMs had. Which team will win the finals? 81% of people said the LA Lakers. And it's felt like a good pick at the time. You gotta think about it. They were just coming off a championship. And then they reformulated their entire team. Think about it. This is the third year in a row with the Lakers that reformulated their team. Now they have Matrez, Harold and Dennis Schroeder. They re-upped after just winning the championship. So it made sense. And the Lakers were a pick that majority of people had off a championship, new looking team, but still got LeBron. And LeBron just went to the bubble and just looked like he was 30 years old again. Yes, this makes sense. But again, a lot of things change. We had some injuries. And instead of being the NBA finals team, they were a first round exit. Then it was followed by the Clippers. Also dealt with injuries. Followed by the Brooklyn Nets, the Miami Heat. None of these teams won a championship. None of these teams ended up winning the championship. Every team that got a vote was eliminated. Now the GMs were correct in predicting somewhat of the standings. They knew the Brooklyn Nets would be a good regular season team and they were. The Miami Heat kind of disappointed when it came to the regular season, according to the GM survey, but a lot of things went into that. They had COVID stuff. And then obviously once you got to the playoffs, they heavily disappointed. But the team that actually won the division was picked fifth. People didn't expect the 76ers to dominate the regular season as they did. And nobody expected Utah Jazz to come out and dominate the way they did. A lot of people had them at the most, the three seed or the four seed or not even in the top four ranking. And they did that. The Lakers dealt with a lot. And because of that, when they were predicted to be 86% of the people thought that they would be the one seed reality, they ended up being the lower seed. The Phoenix Suns got one fourth place vote. One MVP pick. Only 4% of the people thought it would be Yolkic. Now this is the question that I'm super excited to see what they picked this year. If you're starting a franchise you pick, a lot of people said Yanis. Same percent of people picked Luka Donchich. Yanis is now coming off the NBA championship. So I would expect the Yanis number to be higher than 43 this season. But I could also see Luka's number being higher and kind of eliminating Anthony Davis or even eliminating LeBron because LeBron is almost 40. If you're starting a franchise, you might want to go with somebody that's a little bit younger. So I would like to see these two numbers and I would expect them to go up. And this is after Yanis's decline because the year before that 86% of GM's was like I want Yanis, I want Yanis. And then last year they went to the bubble. They got eliminated by the Miami Heat and people were a little bit turned off by Yanis. And now I bet he turned them back on. Breakout season. A lot of people predicted to be Shea and Michael Porter Jr. And that was pretty much true. Both of these players had stellar seasons and made names for myself for even the casual fans know these names now. But a name I don't see in here is Julius Randall who was the breakout player of the year. Now a majority of GM's did see the fact that the Phoenix Sun's going to get Chris Paul was a huge move and that was 100% true. Some GM's also saw that the addition of Drew Holiday was a big move getting about 7% of the votes. Which one player acquisition would make the biggest impact? Chris Paul and Drew Holiday were one and two. And both of those teams made it to the finals because of the impacts of these players. I'm excited to see this one. What is the most underrated player acquisition? And I would love for them to have an overrated one because I'm curious of what people would pick. I would guess that people would pick DeMar DeRosen as the overrated acquisition. Which Ricky would be the best in five years? I would guess that a lot of the GM's out there would change that 36% to James Weisman. I said that he can't be. I don't want you to misinterpret. But what I'm saying is I think more people would be high on a guy like Lamello after his Ricky season. Even though a lot of them were high on him already but he might have even exceeded expectations. And I think we can all agree that predicting the NBA is hard. Because if it wasn't hard to predict, I don't think it would have as many eyes as it does. Anthony Rizzo just hit a two run, home run to tie the game up. Look at that. And that's part of the reason why we love the game so much. It may not be as volatile as some of the other sports out there as far as like, you don't really know who's gonna win the World Series the year before or you don't know who's gonna end up in a Super Bowl. It might be more predictable than those sports but it still is an unpredictable sport nonetheless. Whether that be due to injuries or players outperforming what we expected them to, the game of basketball is just so fun because it is hard to predict.