 What's the word, y'all? The money episode has always been weird, man. We got three days worth of basketball and three days worth of basketball story last to get to. So leave it like, let's jump into it. And I say three days worth of basketball, but we're starting today's episode talking about a dude that ain't even suited up this year because the Ben Simmons chronicles continue. And yes, I did that alliteration on purpose. I used to write poetry when I was a kid, believe it or not, won some awards. The 76ers find Ben Simmons his $360,000 game salary for missing Thursday's game and planned on resuming finding him until he cooperates with team physicians and his mental health issues and fulfill other basketball related obligations. Boom, those wolves from a few days ago. Now, the last time we talked about Ben Simmons, he came into camp and he was like, I'm not mentally ready to play basketball. The 76ers said, you know what, Ben? We can, we can completely understand. We're gonna allow you to take some time to yourself. But when we give you a call, you better pick up because we got team doctors, we got team psychologists and we can help you get your mental health in the right spot for you to play basketball again. So I guess they gave that man a call and he did not answer. And they said, hey, that $360,000 for one game per game? I know we see player side contracts all the time for 150 million, but to see it in that type of perspective, you know, you do know how much money that is. You're all working adults, I would assume. That's a lot of money. And you know what talks? That does, yeah, I would assume that he is going to participate and show up very, very soon. Cause that was on Thursday. He missed another game against the Bulls on Saturday. So 360 plus 306 is $720,000 has gone down the train because he hasn't reported to say, and I would assume he's going to report relatively soon. Right now, Ben Simmons gotta be fuming because this entire plan to get out of Philly ain't worked at all. So out to the 76ers for calling this bluff and just sitting on the Ben Simmons thing. Cause they could have traded my boy away from for buddy healed and Marvin Bagley and be like, okay, at least we got something. No. And another reason why he is losing is because the 76ers are winning. Look at the conference in the Eastern, Eastern Conference standings. At the top, it ain't Milwaukee, Miami, Brooklyn, the Chicago, no. At the top of the Eastern Conference right now are the 76ers. And that is why, and I know that they finished first seed last year, but you know what I mean. This team is missing Ben Simmons. They're all NBA player, the defensive player to your candidate. They're also missing Tobias Harris, health and safety protocol. They're missing Danny Green, health and safety protocol, Matisse Stiball, health and safety protocol. And they have only lost two games in a year. Hey listen, I got to see them boys up close and personal because they just beat my bulls back to back, right? So I am trying to figure out are the 76ers just really that nice? Or are the bulls frauds? And the real Andrews probably a little bit of both, honestly. It's so insane what Joel and Bean can do with a bunch of shooters. Now we talked about this a couple of days ago, so I don't want to wrap on this too long, but the team offense is the best in the league at this moment. They have the best offense in the league. And let me remind you who they started the other night. I have to even go look it up because I don't even remember who was starting that game, bro. The bulls should be the same and themselves losing this one. Or should they? Should they be ashamed or are the 76ers that nice? I don't really know. The bulls, they do need to be better though. So they started Tyrese Maxie, Seth Curry, Shake Melton, B-Ball Paul, and Joel and Bean. They had eight healthy players on the whole team. And they won a game. And Joel and Bean hasn't even been amazing. Now last game, he was really, really good. That he put up an empty performance. He was waving to the crowd in Chicago. I can't even be mad at him. You know what I'm saying? If you dominate and you deserve, like when Trey Young did the system at the Square Garden, he deserved to do that because he was dominating. Now when Joel and Bean waved to my home crowd, I could be, you know what I'm saying? I'm a little bit hurt about it, but I can't say otherwise because he bodied us. You know what I'm saying? So the team has been amazing. There's a lot of fluidity to it. George Nieng, again, one of the better pickups of this off-season. Four-cock Corkmans came into the game and did not miss. It felt like he didn't miss. And this is another thing. The defense is 12th in the league right now. And that was one of the major questions, right? Without their point of attack man, which was Ben Simmons for the last couple of years, he's the offensive player of the candidate. How will things look? How will things look defensively? It's good enough to be the better half of the league. And when you got the number one offense, that is a good combination. Now, how much of this do you believe is up to you, right? Seth Curry is shooting 51% from three. And though he is the most efficient three-point shooter of all time, I don't know if he's keeping that up. George Nieng is shooting 41%. Four-cock Corkmans 43%. Danny Green 44%. So these are players that we know to be good shooters, but majority of role players have hot streets. They cool down and get back to where they should be. And maybe this is just a collective hot streak. I don't know, but the offense looks way more fluid. And Joel and Bede has been throwing shots low-key. The chemistry that we have is really different from previous years. We're complete and we're on the same page. He also said something in that post-game interview after Dominator Montbull was saying something like, it's good to have a player on our team that when you draw a player for him to shoot the ball, he's going to shoot the ball. He was talking about Four-Con Corkmans. And obviously, bang, bang, bang, shots fired. And then he shot his own teammate, George Nieng. He said, yeah, I thought George sucked. And obviously he don't. So it's a cool story. And now I got people arguing on Twitter what the 76ers should do. Hey, we're a good team right now. Now let's go get some more depth. We were thinking about getting a star player in picks for Ben Simmons. Now we can settle because we know that the team that we have now is good. I don't like that at all because when we talk about the playoffs to win a championship, which is the ultimate goal for Philly fans and everybody across the league, you need two stars. You're just going to need two all-star caliber players. And right now you got one and that is Joel. You got a great amount of good role players. But when the playoffs series comes around and you're going against Brooklyn or you're going against Milwaukee, I don't know how much I trust all of the great shooters to continue to shoot great. We haven't seen a ton of Tobias because it helped to save the protocol and stuff. So maybe he is that second guy. Maybe he's not. But I wouldn't be like, hey, since we're so good right now, we'll settle for buddy healed. I'm good. Let's just continue to call the bluff on Ben Simmons and just wait. But then again, this could hurt Ben Simmons's overall trade value because now the Portland Trailblazer, they see like, man, we thought this man gave the 76ers a lot and they better without him right now. So should we give them what they need? I don't know. That's enough time talking about 76. Shout out to them though. And let's talk about the NBA finals from a few days ago. At least that's what Twitter was calling it. The Utah Jazz versus the Miami Heat. But when I'm watching this game, I cannot help to see the crazy amount of similarities in the personnel between the teams. Hear me out. We got a ball handling bucket getter that is the Donovan Mitchell slash Jimmy Butler. We got an aging point guard that box score might not say it, but this man is super impactful on the court. That is Mike Connelly and Kyle Lowry. We have a defensive player of the year candidate that is Rudy Gobert, bam out of bio. We got a hard-nosed defensive player. Everybody knows him for his defense. That is PJ Tucker and Royce O'Neill. Off the bench, we got a shot. Chakra do that can immediately catch fire. That is Tyler Hero, Jordan Clarkson. That was the only thing I can think about while watching this game. Obviously offensive schemes, defensive schemes are different in everything, but personnel-wise, personnel-wise, it's kind of crazy how similar these two teams are. Like, look at this. Utah, second-best offense in the league. Miami, fourth-best offense in the league. Defensively speaking, Utah, eighth-best defense. Miami, fourth-best defense. Point differential, we got fourth-best for the Utah Jazz, second-best for the Miami. These are the two same, they're the same teams, bro. They're the exact same teams. Who do you trust more? Who do I trust more? But like I said, schemes really, really different because the Utah Jazz only shoot threes. In the Miami Heat, only shoot threes if your name is Duncan. That's how they're different. That's how they're different. Okay, let's talk about the Orlando Magic. I was gonna make a video, and maybe I'll see what we'll do is ranking my favorite league pass teams and to be qualified to be one of my favorite league pass teams, you just have to be fun. You don't have to be great. You don't have to be anything other than fun. And the Orlando Magic classified. They are now three and eight with a win over the Utah Jazz. A big win for them. Again, Utah Jazz just had a dog fight against Miami and got a flight to Orlando for this. So a back-to-back loss, a scheduled loss, if you will, for the Utah Jazz. But that's not taking anything away from the Orlando Magic because what they got building over there is immaculate. I feel like I've talked about them quite a bit for a team that is three and eight, but let me talk my trash about Cole Anthony, who in this game, what did he ended up with? He ended up with 33 points, three steals, three rebounds, two assists. He had been a dude that had been killing a rebound number. Today was not that day. Five threes made. Great, great performance. But I want to sound a light on the other dude that had an amazing performance because I still got nothing below for Wendell Carter. 22 points, 15 rebounds, six assists against Rudy Gaubert. That's amazing, bro. And when he has a performance like this, or when Franz Wagner has a really good performance, I get a lot of tweets from Magic fans. How's the Lucic trade now, Kenny? And y'all be acting like I was the one to pull the trigger on the Lucic trade. Or that I was the one saying that y'all got finesse when in reality, I will remind you to go watch that video again. I was saying that's a win-win for both teams because I still think that Wendell Carter had a lot in the tank. He was like 22 years old. And the overall pick ended up being eighth and boom, you got Franz Wagner. The Bulls got a player that they needed in the moment was the Lucic. It's just unfortunate that Zach Levin got the virus right before he's about to go on the run. And yeah, Vulsovic has been doodle-kicks this season, but legit, the Marta Rosa said that one of the reasons he signed here is because he wanted to play with Vultra again. So maybe if we don't do the trade, then we don't get the Marta Rosa who's the best player on the team in this exact moment. Two things can be, two people can win something. And we both win it right now. You win in your development and we win in standings currently. Who knows how long that's gonna last because I think we got Brooklyn coming up and Brooklyn is getting things back together. In the business, we call it that a segue because there is a five-game win streak with the Brooklyn Nets at the moment. And slowly, I mean, really, really slowly, James Harden is starting to come back to, okay, he may not ever get back to the James Harden. We know because 50% of that man's points was coming from the free throw line, but he's slowly getting back to like, oh, he's an all-star again. Even though a lot of people are focusing on just, what was it, two plays for him? Where the first one was against the, both of them were against the Detroit Pistons. He tried to draw foul on Josh Jackson, hook his arm, and boom, offensive foul. And then the second one was Sadiq Bay clamped this man up and he gave up on a play. Some people saying that he didn't know Sadiq was behind him, yadda, yadda, yadda. Those are the two things that people are focusing on, but James Harden is slowly getting better and better every single game, which is a good sign for them. Kyrie might be able to come hoop again soon, which is better for them. Another winner of the weekend, the Cleveland Cavaliers. Another team that will be on my favorite teams to watch in the NBA League Pass teams. We were talking about at the beginning of the season, how I had an all-star ballot and the only thing on it was Ricky Rubio. And then immediately after I hit sin on that tweet, he started to shoot terribly. Where tonight, tonight, he turned to Steph Curry in the garden and they won a game, but they were missing Iska Kuro, Kevin Love, Kala Sexton banged knee so we don't know who's going on with him in his knee situation. They were missing some very quality players in their rotation and they went into the garden and won. A lot of that is Ricky Rubio, but the player I want to show my magnifying glass on is of course Evan Mobley. I've been watching Evan Mobley very, very intensively throughout his rookie campaign so far. I'm still trying to figure out which one of the rookie between him and Sadiq Barnes are my favorite to watch because I'm still watching a bunch of Raptors games too, but what I am seeing from Evan Mobley on the IQ part on the offense and the defensive side of the ball is crazy. When it comes to bigs in the NBA, we've had this conversation before, it takes a while for a big to get adjusted to the NBA game whether it would offensively or defensively. You know, Evan Mobley immediately came in and is a very good defensive player. He can switch onto guards and hold his own, but the thing that I noticed more than anything today is his vision, his core vision on the role. One of the closing plays of this game, it was a pick and roll between him and Ricky Rubio, right? And first of all, he is super blessed to have Darius Gardner and Ricky Rubio SS2 guards because both players are above average slash really good passers and a lot of bigs don't come into the league with that. If you're gonna be a high value pick in the draft as a big, more than likely your starting point guard is trash. So the fact that he's got some good passers on his team really helps him. But anyway, a pick and roll with him and Ricky Rubio, Ricky Rubio hits him. He is maybe just a little bit below the free throw line as a like two or three feet of space. He could float it up, but instead he dissed it off to Jared Allen, Jared Allen dunked it and it was like the icing on the cake. There were like three or four plays like that this game. Not all of them led to assist or moments where he could have got tunnel vision on the pick and roll and say, oh, I got the ball, I need to go score. But instead he looked, surveyed his options and he made the right basketball play. Oh my God. The ceiling on this man is ridiculous. I did not expect this draft class to be this good this early. Katie has already talked about Scottie Barnes. He said, what are you, 18, 19, 20. Wow, he's gonna get a lot better. It's hard to, it's rare to see somebody play with that much love of the game this early on. These dudes is crazy. I wish I had the fourth overall pick this year. Instead of last year, no disrespect to my boy P-Wheel, we love you, bro. But like, if we weigh in our options, Patrick, Scottie, you know what I'm saying? This sucks that Patrick is injured though. 26-5 assists, nine rebounds. That's against the Knicks in Madison Square Garden, y'all. His other really big game came against the Lakers where he was guarded LeBron and stuff. He likes big sceneries, big competition. And they are on a four game win streak, ladies and gentlemen, the Cavs are here. And that's with them dealing with injuries and I just had to say the protocol and things. I just, there are a few teams out there and this is gonna be the last thing I say before we end today's episode. I'm gonna give you a name of a bunch of teams that are playing decent slash solid. And y'all tell me if y'all believe them to be actual playoff teams, okay? Because right now, the Washington Wizards are on a two game streak. They are seven and three. They beat the Bucks today. The Cleveland Cavaliers on a four game streak, seven and four. Both of them right now are in the playoffs. The Raptors are six and five. Two games skid right now, but they just came off a five game win streak. They are at the eight seed at the moment. Do you believe in those three teams, one or two of three of those three teams when we're done with the 80 plus games to be in the playoffs? Not play in, but like in the top eight. Because it's interesting, man, because yeah, it's still small sample size, but we like 10 games to the season, which is like a little less than the eighth of the way through the year. At what point does it stop being small sample size to be like, oh, okay, we believe in this? I don't know. You let me know in the comment section. I appreciate all of y'all. And hopefully I'll see y'all tomorrow. Hopefully we get a good amount of basketball tonight.