 What's the word, y'all? Today, we're trying to figure out what team is going to win the 2022-2023 NBA Championship. Because right now, I can't call it. It's funny, though. All season long, from the offseason, I've been sending the Bucks and my pick to win the championship. And no matter the ups, the downs, the injuries to Chris Middleton, this, this, this, no matter what, I didn't waver. I thought that the Bucks were the best team in basketball. And a few weeks before the playoffs started, we dropped the video and we were trying to determine what a real contender was. And we looked at the data over the last 20 to 30 years in the NBA season and saw that if you want to win the championship, you have to be top 10 in the office, top 10 in the defense. You have to have a player of this caliber. You have to win X amount of games in the regular season. You have to be this seed. It was a lot of stipulations in this formula. And the Bucks then meet the formula to say that they're going to win the championship. But I was like, wow, it ain't no big deal. I still believe in the Bucks. I should have looked at the formula and paid as a steward. Because this is a lot different than if the Bucks would have got to the finals and lost in 6-7. The boys got ran out of the gym by the 8-seed, you know? So maybe we should be looking at that. And I hate saying that as a, you know what? I'm not an eye test guy or analytics guy. I think I still write in the middle. I think that they both have their own place. But the data told us that the Bucks weren't a contender. They didn't end up being it. Again, of course, injuries mattered a lot. Giannis practically missed three games out of five. Still, they lost. That's all, whatever. So now I'm trying to figure out all the teams remaining. What team am I confident in being the champions? The short answer is I'm not confident in anybody. And I think that's what makes a good league. Before we go any deeper, I want to let you know this hat that we've been wearing in every video almost for the last, I don't know, year or so, is back on sale. It is a very small batch. I'm be honest with you, we ain't print 5,000 of these. 1,000, not even 1,000, not even 500 of these. You know what I'm saying? This is a very, very limited drop. So if you're interested in getting your very own enjoy hat, it is live as of right now. Once I press upload to this video, it is live. So get in while you can. I've seen three of them in a while in my lifetime, which is crazy. This is me walking around and be like, I made that hat. You can join in too and get in because I don't know how many other drops you're gonna be doing. So don't miss out, link is in the description. So I'm saying that this makes for a good league because I, or I guess majority of us probably have gone through so many different eras of basketball that was, we know what team's gonna win. East is usually a LeBron lead team. And we have a general idea of what team is gonna win the West and that would have been, at least in recent history, the Golden State Warriors. And not saying that all the other series weren't fun or it didn't matter, but again, you knew that LeBron, and it wasn't a team out East. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves that the Raptors are gonna do it, or no matter how much we convince ourselves that the Bulls would do it in the early Heedle days, we felt pretty damn confident that LeBron was coming out of Eastern Conference and the Warriors are doing a thing, oh, and then they added Kevin. So it was like, as long as these two teams stay healthy, we know who's gonna be in the finals and we played 82 games, plus all of these postings of games for the end result to be which of the two teams are better. And I can't say I hated that either. You know what I'm saying? I think that it led to moments where when those juggernauts were on the ropes, it was as fun as can be. When Ricky Tatum went to the Conference Finals and dunked on Bronn, I was, I didn't know the word. Jubilant? Maybe, I don't know if I'm using that right. When the Houston Rockets went up 3-1 on the Warriors, I'm like, yeah, the juggernaut is falling. So I enjoyed that version of ball too. But this version, where like this is, I would say these last two years at least, have been the most amount of parody I have experienced as a Die Hard NBA fan. And I saw a tweet the other day that had the opposite opinion. That was like, hey, I liked it better when it was one team that we saw as dominant and we wanted to see that dominance and get knocked off. So I could see it both ways. But the parody for me makes the NBA playoffs way more enjoyed, at least it has been this year. It reminds me of, Kenny Baseball is a channel on this YouTube platform that I've uploaded on twice as the MLB season has started. But it reminds me of Baseball, where we've seen plenty of times to our history where a wildcard team that had to win to get in gets ultra hot and find themselves in the World Series. And it happened last year with the Phillies, right? A wildcard team got hot, made their way to the finals, they went, but they made their way to the finals and those type of runs are just as fun as any. We haven't had that version of parodies just yet. Because Game of Basketball is so talent oriented. There is a form of luck, but it's a lot different than like a baseball. Not luck, but like, he's on fire. It's not like NBA Jam, where in Baseball, you can get a hitter that's like, for this week, he's killing everything. And I guess you don't really have that same level of anything in the NBA. Maybe this is the year that we see a wildcard team, in this case a playing team, making a deep run with the Miami Heat doing everything or the Lakers being up 3-2 on the Memphis Grizzlies. But it makes for fun because we will have situations like this year where the 1C goes down early and now we just looking around like, whew, what team do we trust most the next? Next the most, whatever. Because I'm looking at the teams that have advance and of course each one of these teams has done something to impress, but does it feel like these teams have done enough to impress for me to say, definitely, this is the team I think is gonna win the NBA Championship and that's hard for me to do. Oh, I do want to say this though. I should have said this at the beginning of the playoffs because I know there are new people coming in and out. Just because I predict a team to win a series doesn't mean I'm rooting for that outcome. Being right, I don't know if you've been around for some time, you know that being right is not necessarily super important to me, right? The perfect example is that I picked the Cavaliers to beat the Knicks in 7. I thought that the Cavaliers would be a better team and seriously, obviously I was completely wrong. The Knicks ran over the Cavaliers in 5, but I did see some people that thought that me picking the Cavs was saying that, oh yeah, Cavs gang, what is they mantra of it? I don't know, I don't care. You know, if the Bulls are not involved, 97% of the time I do not care about the outcome. I just won the basketball and I would argue this series gave us the basketball. From the Knicks for sure, not from the other team. So I don't make my predictions in the idea that I have to be right or that I necessarily want to be right because it's not super important to me. I just try to give well thought out insightful opinions and sometimes they come true and sometimes they don't and I think that's okay. But if we do want to get into the numbers without my right versus wrong when predicting the series. Shout out to my guy over at TTW Clips. He watched every single prediction video from 2018 to 2022 to say that I shoot 79.5% from the field when predicting the series. So my field goal percentage has gone down because of this playoff run, but again, I don't care. So what team's going with the championship? Again, I do not know. I'm looking at our candidates right now. We have six teams advanced already. We still have to figure out what's going on between the Warriors and the Kings. With the Warriors being up 3-2 and having the next game at Chase, I don't know what's going to happen, but the Warriors are very, very good at home. And it felt like they found a new recipe for success. And with the Aaron Foxx injury and some bonus, not playing like the all NBA caliber version of himself, if I was going to make a prediction how the series ends, it's going to be with the Warriors winning. The Lakers are up 3-2 against the Grizzlies. We just saw Jha and Desmond Bain have their first game where they both had a really good game. So that's a plus, but it is a 3-2 series. I'm not going to Google it, but I feel like LeBron James' late team is never blowing a 3-1 lead. I could be mistaken here, but it feels like that's not the case. Even though 20 year into the game, LeBron is not the same. And you're kind of seeing that over the last couple of games, something that makes me not want to pick them to win the championship either. Those series aren't even wrapped up yet. So I don't even want to really touch on those teams because anything can happen. Like a 3-1 comeback is not, again, nothing that's too out of the ordinary. Well, we know the Nuggets have advanced and we know the Suns have advanced. Even trying to predict that series is hard for me. So I can't definitely say that one team is the championship team because I don't even know who I think is going to win this series. I think that both of these teams have their pros and their cons. For example, the Phoenix Suns, we're going to see a lot of pick and roll. I mean, they're a pick and roll heavy team to start off with, but now that we got Nicola Jokic as the defensive guy there in a lot of these cases, I think that they can abuse that. But in a superior numbers game, a mathematic equation, the Nuggets are going to get way more 3-point shots than the Suns in the series. And they just got to make more. You know what I'm saying? They just got to make more and the Suns don't have the depth and not sending the Nuggets do have great depth because that's how we get ridiculous numbers that are on and off for Nicola Jokic. But they just, they got the 3-point shot and they got a few people off the bench that are really good. But then the Suns got the star power. Devin Booker has been the second best player in the playoffs so far behind Jimmy Butler. So again, I can't call this series. So since I can't call that individual series, I can't call one of those two teams as my definite championship team. You see what I'm trying to say? Nothing right now feels great. And I think that's what makes it good. I think a lot of people look at the 2-3 matchup between the Celtics and the 76ers and say, hey, whoever wins that series is probably going to go on to win our Eastern Conference and that team is going to represent the East out in the finals and boom, that team might be the NBA champion. But I think both of these teams have done enough to be like, yeah, okay, cool. If you look at my predictions beforehand, I saw the Bucks as the favorite, but I also added the 76ers and the Celtics as contenders because both teams have showed us throughout the course of 82 game season that they have what it takes to win a championship, at least come close to it, when the Eastern Conference. But neither of these two teams have me super excited about this series as far as like, oh yeah, I think that the Celtics go win in this one. I think the 76ers go win in this one. I'll give you the reasons why. The Celtics did not have a good series against the Atlanta Hawks. They won, obviously, they were the better team and they had the moments down the stretch that mattered more than the Atlanta Hawks and that's how you win basketball games. But I didn't see enough in this and say, oh, that's the dominant force that's going to win the Eastern Conference. Same thing with the 76ers. Now 76ers is for a swipe that is the best you can do, right, so Kenny, what kind of gripe do you have about that? Jordan and Beds knee, he won't be won a brace. They say he's close to 50, 50. It's like, man, if they were completely healthy, maybe I'll feel more confidence in them, but he's not going to be completely healthy. And these two fan base between the Knicks and the Heat on Cloud9 as they should be. They were the, both of those teams were the underdog. If you look at every prediction for the Cavs, Knicks, majority of people pick the Cavs. Go to ESPN, go to BleacherPoor, all these experts, not all of them, majority of them pick the Cavaliers to win a series and the Knicks to carry them in five. Everybody, everybody picked the Milwaukee Bucks and the Heat to carry them five. So both of these fan bases on Cloud9 and they deserve to do that, but I feel as though I can't say that these teams are the championship winner either. Did I say anything in this video? Probably not. All I'm saying is basketball is great and parody is great and that's all I care about.