 What's the word, y'all? Since the start of the NBA season, I've been to San Francisco, I've been in LA, I've been to New York City, but I haven't been here to talk all things hoops. Now, I apologize for that, but we finally home, and from what I understand, I ain't got no more travel for the next month or so, so we're back on our grind to talk things hoops. Leave a like. When I was just in New York, we did a pop-up shop for Enjoy Basketball. It was great. Shout out to the team, and shout out to everybody that pulled up. It was amazing to talk to all of the people that've been supporting for years, and telling me their stories and all of this, man, and I got back to my hotel, and I legitimately cried tears of joy or admiration. I don't really know exactly what it was, but I was filled with emotion to look at how much we've grown over the last 10 years of me making content, and I know this is not about basketball technically, but I just want to say I appreciate you for your continued support every single season, whether it be on this channel, any of my other ones. Seriously, love all of y'all, but okay, let's get into this stuff. After I promote the newsletter, we got the Enjoy Basketball newsletter. We drop Monday, Wednesday, Friday, all things hoop. If you want to keep up with hoops, this is the way to do it. I know you all see these videos to hear my takes, but I really recommend the newsletter because today we had a crazy slate, and I won't be able to talk about every single game, but the newsletter fills in those gaps, and we got some amazing writers and content creators, so we're trying to get to 40,000. We're extremely close, so if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, hit the link in the description. It'll mean a ton to me. All right, we're gonna start off this one, talking about the Brooklyn Nets because boy, yo, boy, our things, they've been embarrassing, but it's getting even worse. Today they lost to the Indiana Pace, a young, talented team. Shout out to the Pacers. Get them their flowers right now before we talk trash about the Brooklyn Nets. Enjoy basketball. Let's give them their flowers because the young court that they are building right now is so good. So yesterday they played a game on national TV against the Washington, which they pulled out, and then they got that win, and they flew to Brooklyn, and you wouldn't have known that they were on the second end of a back-to-back, but they took out the Brooklyn Nets. Benedict Mathering is a stud and fearless. Tyrese Halliburton is one of the most fun players to watch as well because you cannot speed him up. He's gonna go at his pace, and he's gonna hit his shots, and he's gonna play make for his teammates, and he's gonna say, Monte Morris is too little. They both went to Iowa State, so I'm assuming they have some type of connection, but I don't know for sure. He gonna talk his trash, and they got some dogs over there in India, and this is a team that I thought, and this might still be true because we're only two weeks to the season, a team that I thought was gonna bottom out because they want to continue to build that court, but through the first two weeks, they have been competitive in a lot of their games. I mean, the Bulls were up like 50 against them, and they almost came back to one last week, and they came into Brooklyn and hit like a crazy amount. I think they set records for the most amount of threes they've hit in a long time, so shout out to them. Let's talk Brooklyn Nets though because it is getting really, really bad. So there are a couple of different pillars. I want to start off by saying I am not talking about any of the off-court stuff because the Brooklyn Nets, it's always something, bro. It is always something off the court, and I'm extremely disappointed in the situation, but that's not what this channel is about. We're gonna strictly talk about the hoops because that's what this is, this is what we do. When I was in New York, I went to Brooklyn versus Dallas, and it was the best experience I've ever had as far as an NBA fan being in the arena. Went to overtime, and then Luca had a 40 point triple double. If you have the opportunity to see Luca play live, please do it. Go out there, go watch Luca because you're already amazed when you're watching him on TV, but to actually see it and get in the atmosphere of the arena, it's nothing like it. Luca is just an absolute dog. And you know what? The Brooklyn Nets don't have dogs. They just don't. And man, that feels like, I don't know, there's like this sub-genre of NBA fans that have that, oh man, if he ain't got the dog, and I'm on his bag, it's deep. That's not even who I am, but I look at that Brooklyn Nets lineup, and I'm watching him, and they know how to do his, that's super fiery. You know what I'm saying? And I think that plays a part. I think the number one thing that's wrong with the Brooklyn Nets as of right now is Steve Nash. Listen, KD wanted him fired like three weeks ago, and they washed over it. We go, Josiah said, we stick with our dudes, which is cool. I committed him for that because if he believed that Steve Nash shot marks for the two guys for his organization, I'm happy he didn't fold into KD. But now we six games to the season and the team looks like it has been one of the worst teams on court, offensively and defensively. You cannot tell me a team that has KD and Kyrie Irvin should be one of the worst offensive teams in basketball, but here they are. And they also one of the worst defensive teams in basketball. They don't guard the three and they don't guard the paint. That, those are the two most important things, the defensive basketball, and they don't do either of the two. They don't shoot the three ball well. And I'm assuming that's gonna come back up because Joe Harris has missed a bunch of time. He's just coming back. Seth Curry literally had his first game. So these are some of the best shooters in all of basketball that are on their roster and I'm sure they're gonna get the numbers up. Even Kyrie Irvin, known as a great three point shooter, he hasn't been able to put it together. I'm sure those three point numbers will come up, but they can't hit threes. They can't guard threes. And they're about as paper thin down low. One thing I do want to give Steve Nass a little bit of credit for. In the last two games, he basically told Daeron Sharp, you're reserved right now because Daeron Sharp minutes throughout the first three games or so was dreadful especially when they were pairing him. With Ben Simmons, are you kidding me? And then in the games that I went to, they kind of neutralized the Nick Claxton and Ben Simmons minutes. And I was like, okay, Steve Nass trying to figure it out. And then we get back here and they can't put together four competent quarters of basketball. Every single one of these games, they're right there. And you think, hey, I got Katie and Kyrie. Once we're right there, once we get to the last three minutes, we're gonna be fine. No, no, Steve Nass has done a terrible job. We see these, these former players get coaching opportunities and in a lot of cases is really good. Some of the best coaches in basketball right now are former NBA players. But one thing that a lot of those people have is experience on the bench before they got the head coaching job, right? I mean, there are a few that's like, oh, we just threw him into the fire. Steve Nass is one of the guys they threw into the fire and he has not been good, bro. This man, I got some notes. He complained last season, Katie's minutes are too damn high. Steve, do you understand? You are the coach, my boy. You can sit Katie down a couple extra minutes. So Steve Nass has done a terrible job of like getting his players to rally behind him. They did a players only meeting today after the game. So maybe that helps something. But I mean, we can't look past the fact that your star player wanted you gone and now we faggaged to the sixth games of the season and y'all are completely underperforming. Like I would not be surprised if Steve Nass is getting, is getting fire. But I can also see a world where Josiah gets kind of stubborn because he made the decisions off season to keep Steve Nass around. Pillar number two has been Simmons. Now, hey, be honest with you, this has been Simmons's best game as a bricklay net. He scored nine points. Next game he might hit double digits. This was his best game of the season. And I am, I'm not here to bash been Simmons because I do believe in time you would consistently get better. I don't know if we'll ever get back to the 16 point per game been Simmons. I don't know if we'll ever get back to the guy that was all NBA 13 early in his career. But the version we're getting right now is a third is a fourth of even that version of been and that version of him been had his deficiencies. When I was at this game, Luca Doncic was hunting been Simmons defensively. Been Simmons is usually a guy, you don't want guarding your best player. Nah, Luca's a different breed, but like they were going at been Simmons. And every single game they have this idea that we gonna run through Ben for the first couple of possessions and get his confidence up. And he'll score the first bats, the crowd erupts and then he might score another basket in the first quarter and then he never looks at the rim again. I've been seeing people say like, okay, Kenny, his defense missile, I'll give him that. He's still been Simmons. Even though Luca was roasting his ass, he got a big steal at the end of that game that led to overtime freestyle to him. Defense has been okay. People like Kenny, his playmaking looks really good. It looks all right. You know, he had nine points, nine assists, eight rebounds. They near triple double, sounds a bit, but like his assist numbers are definitely inflated. Let me show you what I mean. I'll show you one example, but this set I'm not an X's and no's guy. It's something Steve Nash and his team runs a ton. They ran into a ton this game. And out of been Simmons' nine assists, five of them were through this. And I can see you making an argument, Kenny, this is real life playmaking, but you tell me what you think. So they run this and this time been Simmons is sitting in that corner, give it up to Kyrie, who gives it back up to Ben and it's basically a dribble handoff screen that leads to an assist. And a couple of these times it was like this, same pretty much action, just a different spot. Hand it off to KD. And KD's good enough to hit a heavily contested double team, three pointer. And been Simmons gets an assist. Now he did get a couple really good backdoor cuts that he hit KD for and things like that. But like I'm saying, the numbers are slightly inflated. Either way, they're paper thin down low. And they need a new coach or something. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a month into the season and the team still ain't hitting their expectations and Josai slash Sean Marks decides to blow it up because they probably should have done it this off season considering all the things that happened. So that's enough Brooklyn, let's talk, let's talk about some of the other games of the day. The Sacramento Kings finally got their first win and it happened to be against the Miami Heat two R2 and five on the year. I'm gonna give a lot of love to the Kings because it finally happened. They are no longer one of the winless teams of basketball, even though they did everything in their power to get this game away. We got to the third quarter. They had to have 10 turnovers in that quarter alone and the Brooklyn Nets, oh, not the Brooklyn Nets. The Miami Heat were doing a good job of turning the ball over or getting the turnovers and turning that into buckets for them. But at the end of the day, that man, Red Velvet came to play, man. And the rookie, Keegan Murray, being in that lineup for the last couple of games, he had another 22-piece game and Deere Fox continues to look pretty solid. Not his best efficiency night, but he had a couple buckets down the stretch that are really important and they finally get on the board. I was saying they were the best-looking winless team left in basketball and now they're no longer winless. Shout out to them. Are they heat-cooked? Oh man, it's hard to even say. I've been getting that a lot. They don't look very good. Now, in their defense, they've had a relatively tough schedule so far, but this is a game against the winless Kings that you should win if you're the Miami Heat. But yeah, they've lost against some really good teams so far, so it's still too early for me to tell. I just know once the half-quarter offense comes around, it's a bit rough on the edges. You know what I'm saying? So give me a couple more games to watch the Miami Heat before I have a full opinion on whether or not it's wraps. I said before this season that I didn't see them as a contender though, but right now they're not even in the playoffs. You know what I'm saying? So I don't think it's gonna go that far, but man. The Charlotte Hornets beat the Golden State Warriors. Whoa! Another team that I was super low on going into the season, the Charlotte Hornets, and they continued to impress. Dennis McJr is one of the best stories in basketball. He said that he was basically out of the league and he didn't wanna go play overseas no matter what. He was training to join the NFL. He was putting on muscle and right now they're a 500 team, which is Charlotte Hornets to a T, a 500 team. That's what they usually are, which is, again, I don't really love it, but so far I thought the season. Gordon Hayward has looked really good. He's been an all-star caliber player throughout the course of this. Like if the all-star game was today, he'd probably make the Eastern Conference team, but the real MVP of all lists was PJ Ross. They ended up with 31.7 rebounds and the most important stat that's not on the stat sheet is he won three jump balls this game in all an overtime. Three of them that led to possesses that led to points to close out this game. So he beat Wiggins. I think he beat Dremono one and I forget what the last one was. He won all of his jump balls. I'm still a huge fan. Didn't know I was gonna become a Nick Richards guy. He has really played himself into the rotation after two years of not really being in that and like getting quality, quality minutes. Now they start, they close the game out being small because they're going to get to go to stay Warriors, but the Warriors defense so far this season has been really weird, man. Both of the top two teams defensively last year with the Brooklyn net, nope. I keep doing that. Bosses Celtics and the Golden State Warriors are struggling out the gate defensively. I kind of see the Bosses Celtics one because you're missing Robert Williams, who was such a critical, critical part of your defense, but the Warriors aren't missing one of their pillar defensive guys. Now they are running more people than they probably want to with like Ty Jerome getting minutes, or to Michael Green getting 15, 16 minutes per game, but the defense hasn't been good. And I don't, I'm not hitting the panic button because they're the Warriors and I feel like they can snap it all like that. But we have to remember that in the second half for the regular season last year this is basically what they were looking like. We got to the playoffs and everything was different, but this is the version that we got like the last couple of months of the season. We need them to hit that switch. I will say once we got to overtime, Draymond Green was everywhere, which is a good sign. But we made a tick talk about this on our podcast platform, Stoodlewire podcast. And I got a lot of flak for it, but they asked me what NBA player do I think will disappoint this season? And my answer was Clay Thompson. And it wasn't like, aw, Kenny H. Clay. I've been a fan of Clay since he been in the league where I'm a big fan of Clay. But I do believe that people saw them win a championship, which was dope. He had a couple of really big moments in that. And then gave him one off season. It was like, okay, now Clay should be back to Clay. And I think it's going to take way more time than that. And he might not ever get back to the Clay Thompson that was making all star teams and things like that. But I didn't expect Clay to come into the season and look like the old version of him. And so far I've been kind of right on that. But luckily Jordan Poole has looked really good. Wiggins has been really good this season. But man, you know, I just want to give Clay Thompson more time. That's all. The Bulls nearly beat the 76ers, man. This man, Joe Alamide, absolutely hates the city of Chicago or he loves it. It's one of the other. We have not beat this man in his entire NBA career. I think it's nine and no now might be the record. If he is soon enough for the 76ers going to get Chicago Bulls, we basically stand no chance. And he hit the biggest shot of the game. But we were so in this one. We were missing Lonzo, we were missing Aiya D'Souma, we were missing Drummond. Maybe it's better that we were missing Drummond because Jordan Beden Drummond, I mean, Drummond loses that match up 100% of the time. Boy, I really wanted this win. Both teams are coming off the back to back. You can really feel that energy, bro. It was not a pretty, pretty game. But I love the games that we're getting from Nicola Vucovic. She hit five threes. He had 19 rebounds. And I would argue his defense was really solid tonight. I think they had a good defensive plan to go against Jordan B, but Jordan B is still decent. You know, no, wait, that's disrespectful. He's still elite. And at all the people that played tonight, he was the only one with fresh legs because he didn't play last night. You saw that and they got a much needed win, in my opinion, and the Bulls didn't. But I'm starting to think that the Bulls are going to be pretty solid once we finally get healthy. It's just a matter of when that's going to happen. I think Yanis is on the road to winning his third MVP. Tonight he had 34, 17 and four assists. Now, I tweeted that. I tweeted that Yanis is going on to his third MVP, you know, based on the first two weeks of the season. And I got a ton of Atlanta Hawks fans like, it's Kenny, he gets all the crazy whispers. Now, he did attempt 19 free throws in this game. And I went back. I went back because I was like, okay, let me see what that referee whisper was really looking like. And I watched all of the fouls in the second half because first half, I don't care. I think he had four points in the second half for something like that. It was the second half, oh, in the first half, in the second half he really came out to play. There's always, when you have a guy as physically dominating as Yanis, he is going to be extremely hard to officiate for. We saw the same thing with LeBron. We saw the same thing with Shaquille O'Neal. When we have these bulldozer freight train level players, there's gonna be times where he's bulldozed into the paint and the referees have to figure out on the fly if the contact was enough to warn a foul. When in reality, every single time Yanis goes to the basket, he's getting fouled. It's just a nature. It's just the nature of the way he plays the game. But it's a matter of, do we call it now? Do we not? And sometimes, sometimes he's not getting fouled, but they're anticipating the foul and they blow the whistle. You know what I'm saying? In this game, like I said, we watched all these fouls. There were a couple that were maybe a little bit iffy, but I don't think that's the reason y'all lost this game. This is a really good game for the Atlanta Hawks, man. For the first X amount of games of the season, the Atlanta Hawks look really good, but they've also played against really okay talent and not one of the elite teams. They held their own against a very, very elite, one of the last, I don't know, the last undefeated team in basketball. They should be proud of that. Obviously, you can't say we happy that we lost, but like for a team that made a big time move this offseason to go against the team that a lot of people picked to win the championship, including me and hold your own as a good sign. And I wouldn't be mad if there's a seven game series. Joe Holiday was amazing. Yanis was amazing. Trey Young was elite. And one of my favorite things that I saw that makes me feel really good about this Atlanta Hawks team is Trey Young was taking over. Did I think he missed two shots in the fourth? And then Dejante hit one. I'm like, man, Trey Young didn't have that. Trey Young didn't have that extra guy to take off a little bit of pressure once he was a little bit gassed and you got that today. So I feel good about the Atlanta Hawks even though they didn't win this one. The Milwaukee Bucks are undefeated. Their offense still ain't completely put together yet. The defense is elite. Brooke Lopez. I haven't mentioned Brooke Lopez's name on any of the videos so far in this series, but his defense has been really good. I always give a lot of love to Drew as a one-on-one defender and a lot of love to Yanis as the best help defender in basketball. But I do need to give love to just a straight up paint protecting big in Brooke Lopez. The defense has been really good. The offense ain't even been put together and eventually Chris Middleton's gonna be back. I mean, come on, man. Like the team is ridiculous. Now these last two games of the night, I wasn't able to watch. Unfortunately, me as one of the captains of the non-thunder fan, OKC fan club, I feel like I haven't done my due diligence in watching Shea this season. I'm tuning in because with five minutes left in this game, they were down by 15 and they came back to win this game somehow. And I see Shea jump shot. Isaiah Joe, I see a lot of Isaiah Joe in this box. I got to go back and watch at least a five minutes plus over time because it looked like they did their thing. And I think was Luca in the dorsal chamber? 35% from the field? Might have been in the dorsal chamber. I'm gonna watch them with Thunderfans, I promise. And then lastly, the Utah Jazz won a game. And I was excited about this one and I found out Ja was in playing. And now I feel bad because it might have been the best game of the night according to the stats. I got to rewatch that one too. All right, man, that's all we got for today, man. I got to figure out how not to have these videos be a thousand minutes long. But I just have a lot to say. When I spent a full day watching Hoops, there's a lot to be said. And my notes, yeah, I didn't even hit everything. But at this point, it is what it is. Leave a like, subscribe, and I appreciate you.