 What's the word, y'all? The Devin Nuggets are going to the NBA Finals, man. What a story, I'm super excited for them. Now, of course, we've known that they were gonna go to the NBA Finals after they went up 3-0 a couple days ago because no team in history has come back from a 3-0 deficit. Even though there was a moment in the post-game after game three, where LeBron was com cool, collected when asked about potentially making history again because of course he was the first person, he was a part of the team, the first team to come back down 3-1 in the NBA Finals and was very reminiscent of the 1. Interview where he had the shades and it said, no team in history has come back down 3-1. That he felt good about it? Yeah, nah, nah, there was not a lot that I looked at in those first three games that made me think that the Lakers had a chance to win four in the row against this dominant Devin Nuggets team and I didn't know if it was gonna be a four or five or six or seven, but I definitely knew that they was gonna win this series and they got it done in just four. This has been an extremely dominant run from the Devin Nuggets. First round was what it is. I told them in these videos that the playoffs don't start for the Devin Nuggets till they get to the second round because we got respect for Anthony Atwoodson, all these duels, but the most they're gonna take was one and they took one. In the second round, I think it was kind of split. A lot of people believed that the Phoenix Suns had enough to win the series. I personally picked the Phoenix Suns. I saw some comments on yesterday's video when I admitted to the fact that I picked against the Miami Heat, not when any ill will involve but I just thought that the other teams were better and of course I've been wronged on that tip. And there was comments like, you couldn't pay me to admit that I was wrong three times in a row, but this is what we do around here. We talk ball, we try to give logical answers and sometimes those logical answers don't end up a reality, it is what it is. So I picked the Phoenix Suns because I thought that Kevin Arendt and Devin Booker were gonna be good enough to do a lot of the stuff. We also saw Chris Paul go down. I don't think Chris Paul would have changed the series too much, but for the most part in that series, the Devin Nuggets coasted as well. Now you do have the two games in Phoenix where Devin Booker didn't miss a shot, but as long as Devin Booker was a human being and not a cyborg, they did what they were supposed to do. And now they get to the conference finals where they go against the Lakers to one of the greatest stories in basketball. They're one of the worst teams in their conference through the first 12 or so games. They make some big moves to the bet line and they went from a team that nobody had a lot of hope in after they started off two and 10 to beating the defending champions in the series and then get into the NBA finals. Like that team, that Lakers team was good. You know what I'm saying? Like we might look back on history and say, oh, it was a furrow sweep. That's not it. No, the Lakers were a good team, but the Devin Nuggets were just better. Before we talk more about this series and the Devin Nuggets and the Lakers, I do wanna let you know in about 24 hours, I have a drop when it's my enjoying basketball brand and icy dog. When I was a kid, you could not keep me away from icy, bro. And to be here, to have a collaboration with them is crazy. In about 24 hours, this ball is dropping and it's about as clean as can be. Even got my ciggy down here. This is actually the best version of my signature. If you got something signed by me today, it looks nothing like this because I'd be speeding through, but I wanted to make sure it was perfect. We got the ball. We got the cups. We got the cups. And we also got tee shirts and hoodies. So I'm just giving you a 24 hour heads up around this time tomorrow. They will be live and they are limited as all of our drops are. Shout out to icy, shout out to y'all because they wouldn't be interested in any of the stuff if y'all then sell out the last couple drops. So thank you for that. But be on the lookout in 24 hours. The Denver Nuggets are a great story, man. No matter what. Again, the Lakers were too, but the Denver Nuggets are definitely a good story because this is a team that has drafted well throughout the years, made timely trades, and they made great acquisitions through free agency. For the Aaron Gordon trade was dope. When Aaron Gordon got traded to the Denver Nuggets, he played like, I don't know, four or five games. And then Jamal Murray tore his Achilles ACI. All of those leg injuries looked the same to me. I don't remember what it was. And of course, when he went down, the championship odds went out the window with them. But in those small amount of games where you had Yokech and Aaron Gordon and Jamal Murray, they were dominant on both sides of the ball. You could see the vision for this team to be good. And if Jamal Murray didn't get injured, they might've made this one two years ago. But boom, Jamal Murray gets injured. And Yokech said, all right, I'm gonna thug it out with Campazo as my starting point guard. I'm a winning MVP and I'm gonna get to the playoffs regardless of our team not being very good. And I'll never forget this series because this series corresponded from when my daughter was born. So I remember being in the delivery room, watching Warriors versus different nuggets. And then after my daughter was born, SportsCenters on TV or one of those talk of head shows and they were talking about how difficult it would be for a team that Nikola Yokech is the starting center of to make a deep, deep playoff run as far as championships because his inability to garden space when you go against so many players that would want to bring him out and try to ice on him. That's the real Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors. They really did that to Yokech last year. But again, what was this starting line up? You know what I'm saying? It's a lot tougher to win series when you don't have your second best player and your fourth best player on the roster with you. But either way, there's real conversations about that. And again, I'll never, never forget it. So to see in 2023, Yokech have three straight series where there wasn't a second that I was watching them and it's thinking that they might be better defensively with Yokech off the floor. Like the Warriors putting him in a high pick and roll Steph Curry killed him on the ice. So they were just very cerebral. Obviously the Warriors went on to win the championship and they deserved that because they were just picking apart everybody. But they genuinely made Yokech look like a terrible defender. And if you've been watching Yokech for the last couple of seasons, you know that Yokech is not obviously the best defender in the world. He's not the best defensive center in the world but he has been a good defensive player for a few years now. But you've got to think about it. Some of these people that are watching basketball, they only really watched the moments that mattered the most was the playoff. So some of those people didn't even recognize that Yokech is a good defender in the regular season because once he got down to the nitty gritty in the seven game series, he got exposed. And the first round he went against Anthony Edwards, not a problem. And the second round he went against Kevin DeRent and Devon Booker. And though again Devon Booker didn't miss a shot for two straight games, Nicole Yokech is defensively held it down. And then this one against Anthony Davis, against LeBron James and against some of these other weapons, not a moment. Not one singular moment. So the narrative is completely dead. It's gone. And I love, I absolutely love when a negative narrative is just obliterated like that. You win a championship with Yokech as your center because the defense, man, cut it out. I talked about it a few weeks ago that if we are saying that Yanis is no longer the best player in ball because they got eliminated by AFC, whatever, whatever. Yokech is the best player at ball, man. You saw it again today. He hit the shot that eventually ended up winning the game, but he had the one jump shot. The shot clock is winding down. The Lakers are again, when the Lakers blew a big, big lead. And we're gonna talk about the Lakers, but I want to just praise the Denver Nuggets for a couple more minutes. The offense that was stagnant for the Denver Nuggets late in this game and Nicole Yokech had to throw up an absolute prayer and it fell in. And I feel like I've seen him throw up that absolute prayer a couple different times and this series is low. Now none of them were bigger than this in the fourth quarter and the game four to win the game. But like, you know, you had the one on Anthony Davis a few games ago where Anthony Davis had to put his head down and just smiled at the idea that Yokech hit that shot. Like he, give it to him with two seconds to go. He gonna make something happen on more times than not. But obviously it's not a one-man show because it feels a one-man show. They might've got business done last year against the Warriors. So now we have Jamal Murray back on this game. And in the playoffs, Jamal Murray is one of those dudes. You know what I'm saying? We talk about payoff P, even at this point, that's got different connotation. Jimmy Butler, Kawhi Leonard, these players that like in the regular season, obviously are very, very great. But once the lights are bright and they're in the playoffs, they improve their game. Jamal Murray is dead as well. And throughout the series, you saw that there were genuine times when Jamal Murray was unguardable in this series, man. And everything was going so great that they had the Lakers just tried to find a recipe. Tristan Thompson today? Tristan Thompson, not on the Tristan Thompson play. He had a couple of minutes that looked pretty good. But they called a post up for Tristan Thompson in 2023 in a game that you needed to win. They did that because Darvin Hammond and them didn't know what to do because they were just struggling to get stops. And then eventually they were struggling to score as well. And that's when the Nuggets went in that big run in the third quarter and it was no looking back. Aaron Gordon had missed every single three-point shot in the first three games of the series. And then tonight, he had three of five. I even think he hit one where his toe was on the line. So it almost was four made threes tonight. KCP was crucial. My boy might be watching all of the Lakers games on Twitch and every time KCP hit a shot, they were saying, he know these rams because of course he won the championship with the Lakers back in 2020, was that that long ago? This seemed drafted amazingly. Obviously drafting the two-time MVP, maybe greatest player in the world. And the second round was at a Taco Bell Subway commercial, one of those. They drafted Jamal Murray when they did. They drafted Michael Porter, Jr., even though he had the back issues and he fell all the way late in the lottery. That's three players that you drafted that are great. And then you also make timely and crucial trades. The Aaron Gordon trade, again, is magnificent work. The KCP for Monte Morse trade was one of the most underrated trades of all of the year. And I called it out at the time that Contagious Carwell Pope is the prototypical shooter guard. He wanted to play alongside Yolkets because he's not afraid to shoot the three-point shot and he's damn good at it. He's a 40% three-point shooter. And he also guards up. He is the prototypical shooter guard you want to put in the Cole Yolkets because he's not just a spot of do. He will run all around if you need him to. They're picking up Bruce Brown for what you did. Bruce Brown is one of the best contracts in basketball. So you have an MVP, one of the best players in the world. You have good management. You have good coaching in Mike Malone. That is a recipe for a championship appearance. And so far, they got that. Even Christian Brown, who didn't play tonight, good draft pick, at least that's what it seems like for his rookie season. And this team plays with that chip. If you watch it in the interviews for coach Michael Malone, like he is really upset about what the narrative is around him and his team, especially in this series versus the Lakers because the Lakers are the Lakers, right? They were the most talked about team of basketball because not only are they in Los Angeles, one of the biggest markets, but they also have one of the greatest players of all time suited up on a team. So in game one after the different nuggets won, the conversation about, oh, we really had more was guarding the Cole Yolkets and it looked kind of good. Even I was talking about that on this channel because for like a four minute stretch, it seemed like the Lakers might have found a little bit of a thing. And then they tried to go back to that thing. Didn't market's good, the rest of the way. So Mike Malone was really upset about the narrative not being about how great we are, how much we do. It was more about what the Lakers aren't doing and how they can get better. They did the thing and I'm excited about it. Still undefeated at home, I'm assuming it's gonna be the Miami Heat who have been killing their opposition on the road. So we'll see exactly how this is gonna go. But again, we might have a week before game one of the finals and now. So we got a lot of time to start thinking about who's gonna win and what is gonna do. But to see Mike Malone are exposed or potentially going against each other in the finals should be fun, even though Spose got the advantage. But that don't mean Mike Malone ain't great. On the Lakers side of things, this was something to see LeBron James do what he did in that first half. There was a lot of hope for Lakers fans that this was gonna be the game that they take. And we just take a game by game, take a game by game, we take this one, we go to the Malhass City, maybe we still win at ball arena. You know, we right back into this series. LeBron had an amazing first half. There's the most points he scored in the first half. Maybe ever? I don't know, I think I saw a graph. It might have been ever if it wasn't ever in the long time. AD ended up with 24-14. A lot of those ended up being like in the fourth quarter. So, but the first three quarters, it felt like Anthony Davis was kind of sleepwalking through this one. And it started to gauge how to feel about the Lakers right now. You know what I'm saying? Whenever you have a 37, 38 year old superstar player that is of course aging and maybe showing a little bit of his age, the objective is basically championship or bust. And it was something we talked about months ago before Rob Hulink made those trades where he's like, man, Rob Hulink and him owe it to LeBron James to give him a roster that's competent enough to compete. And he did. The Rihachi War trade looks really good. The Angelo Russo trade looks maybe better a week ago than it did now. But it's better than what you were getting with Russo Westbrook on the roster. And that's not a shot at Russo Westbrook, but objectively, the team looked better once they added a little bit more spacing. So the trades that he ended up doing ended up helping the Lakers get to the Conference Finals after a slow run, but it is also championship or bust. So was this successful? Was this a failure of a season? I can't really call it. I guess it's all up to interpretation. Now this off-season gets really interesting because there's a lot of buzz through the first month and a half of the Angelo Russo being on the team about how excited they were to bring the Angelo Russo back because again, Angelo Russo was doing good stuff for them for the majority of these things. But we just saw in the series, well, sometimes it's hard for him to play at all. So from my understanding, it's only Anthony Davis, it's LeBron James, it's Jere Vanderbilt and Max Christie. Those are the only people that have guaranteed contracts for next season. And I read somewhere this morning that if everything breaks perfectly, and that means renouncing the rights of the Angelo Russo and potentially moving out of Jere Vanderbilt, that they can open up a space for about $35 million. And though $35 million is not a max contract, it's a really good number if you want to bring in a third star. But do you want to bring in a third star or do you want to continue to build the roster with the idea of depth? Because if you commit that $35 million to a third star, now you sign a minimum players for the rest of the way. And again, that hasn't been a recipe for success in this Lakers regime. Austin Reeves is about to get a ridiculous offer from some team. I don't know what team that is. It might be the Charlotte Hornets, it might be one of these younger teams that could just use good bodies, but he's got to get paid, you know what I'm saying? And the Lakers have the opportunity to match that contract, but he's about to get paid. And for good reason, he's a really, really good basketball player. But like now you look at some of those pieces from the big trade, the D'Angelo Russell, the Jair Vanderbilt, the Malik Beasley, none of those people in this series specifically made a positive impact on it. So should you feel attached to those dudes? Even though on the regular season, they were crucial to the turning of your season. I've only got a lot of the sense to make, man. I don't envy that man at all. Actually, I don't envy nobody in a front office job because if you mess up, it makes what is on your head, you know what I'm saying? They on your head. So I think I'm going to end it right there. Again, we got a week to start thinking about the matchup and everything. So I will take some of that time. I also have another channel named Hint of Hoops. I will put the link in the description. Why did I create another channel? Just the, I don't want to say troll, but sometimes I'd be looking for a way to talk about basketball in a creative way or do videos creatively about basketball that don't fit on any of my channels. And that's going to be it. I made a video where I watched every single Michael K. Gilchrist jump shot. That's fun. I made a video about the time that Bismek Beyond Boatrick, the team, to giving him almost $80 million. That was fun. And I made another video about Kevin Knox in Fortnite. I don't know. I got a list of fun videos that are going to be five minutes or less. And that is Hint of Hoops. I'll put it in the description if you're interested. Yeah.