Hoops Tonight -Grizzlies rock Warriors, How Kevin Durant's injury impacts Suns, Mavericks ceiling

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you guys can get these shows. Jay Packs show Tonight the Grizzlies kick the Warriors ass something. I kind of saw it coming. I just don't think the Warriors were playing well enough to overcome their physical disadvantages for this type of matchup. We're talking a little bit about the Kevin Durant injury. And then at the end, I want to talk a little bit about the Mavericks from a more optimistic point of view. You guys know the joke before we get started. Don't forget to subscribe to the

volumes YouTube channels. You don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at underscore Jason lt so you guys don't miss any show announcements. And for whatever reason, you guys miss one of these shows and you can't get back over to YouTube to finish, don't forget. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts. Under Hoops tonight, all right, let's talk some basketball. So one of the themes of tonight's show is going to have to do

with physicality and athleticism in the MBA. Make no mistake, at the end of the day, skill is monumentally important in this game. But I think through narratives, you know, just some of the beef that you see between the way that you know the NFL is handled by the players versus the MBA, some of the old heads in the NBA and the way they talk about the modern game and they want to pretend like it's all offense and they want to pretend like, you know, there's no physicality.

You know, this guy wouldn't be able to survive in my era, which is all just stupid. People lose sight of the fact that the game of basketball is an incredibly physical game and that there's a lot more contact that takes place on the court than you'd think, and things like size and strength really do matter coming into this game, and I was especially worried, you know, coming off of the Draymond trash talk with Dylan Brooks, which we're going to talk about a little bit more here

in a little bit. Coming off of that, I was worried about Golden State's ability to win this game because the one thing that's guaranteed when you play hard is that your physical advantages will come through. Sometimes you shoot all the same shots you work on a million times, and sometimes they go in, sometimes they don't. Sometimes your mental focus isn't quite as sharp as it needs to be. But usually if you play hard, your physical attributes will

come through to the surface in a basketball game. And they were motivated to get that win tonight even without John morand a lot of people saw a lot of people going like, oh, they're without you know, John Moran. They're without Steven Adams, there without Brandon Clark and all that's true. But even when you get past those guys, it's like Tyas Jones is a bigger, stronger guard, a good size point guard compared to John morand in a

much better defensive player. You know, Desmond band is as big and strong of a you know, of a physical two guard that you'll see in the league. Dylan Brooks is one of the most physical perimeter defenders in the league. Jaron Jackson is a big, strong, monster of a rim protector. Davier Tillman is a big, strong center. Like they still are very much a very physically imposing team, and it was just gonna be tough for them to win that game.

And again, like Golden State was never the biggest or most athletic team, make no mistake, but they did have some supreme level athletes last year when they won the championship that we're not playing tonight. Andrew Wiggins still dealing with a personal issue. Hopefully he'll be back soon. You know, Gary Payton's still nursing an injury. Hopefully he'll be back soon. Those are two top tier athletes at their position in

this league. And then in warmups for the second time in as many nights, and an extremely strange circumstance, we have an NBA player get injured in warmups I think the same type of ankle spraining, although I haven't seen the video of the Jonathan Cominga injury. But now Jonathan Cominga is out. So with Andrew Wiggins and Gary Payton out, Jonathan Cominga is your best athlete that you have on the roster, and so without him, it just put him in a really tough to put them in a really

tough spot. I mean, there was a bench lineup out there for the Warriors tonight that was Steph Curry, Dante DiVincenzo, and I Jerome So three guards, a thirty nine year old Andre Iguadala, and Jamichael Green who's an undersized and not very not very big center who mainly plays for the Warriors because he can't miss from three as of late, that's been his big winning impact. And he's a smart player,

doesn't take bad shots and things along those lines. So they were kind of it was kind of stacked against them, and in that situation, you have to be incredibly sharp in every other detail of the game. I've seen the Warriors win tons of games without that physicality advantage, or I should say with a huge physicality disadvantage, even in the playoffs last year. Just in recent weeks without Andrew Wiggins, without Gary Payton, they've been able to win games with

physical disadvantages because they've been very sharp elsewhere. Clay Thompson emerging as this awesome half court shot creator, wasn't very good on offense tonight. Right like Steph Curry. He's back, but he's not like one hundred percent. So he struggled a little bit with Dylan Brooks tonight, although he still was above fifty percent from the field and at twenty seven because he's one of the best players in the world and that's the kind of thing that he's going

to do. But in order to win a game when you don't have when you're when you have disadvantages in the physicality of the game, you have to be really sharp everywhere else. You've got to take care of the basketball. They didn't take care of the basketball tonight. I can't believe how many unforced errors the Warriors had tonight. Inability to make a post century pass or a swing pass, or just botching advantage situations on fast breaks just by

throwing the ball away. And it's so unusual because the Warriors have had issues with turnovers time again in the past, but it's usually like a game here, a game there, and they and they typically can overcome it with overwhelming skill. But they weren't hitting a ton of shots tonight. They're fifteen for forty five from the field. Those unforced errors

then start to really come to the surface. And you know, the Warriors for being as good of an execution team as they've been over the course of the last couple of years, it's it's been an iffy year for them on the front of execution and it's presented some problems for them. I want to credit Memphis. You know, Jaron Jackson Junior did a great job locking down the paint. Kevon Looney missed an easy layup under the basket because

he was overthinking it a bit. Draymond Green turned down some shots around the rim and missed a couple shots around the rim that he normally makes, so credits to them. Dylan Brooks did a really good job on staff, like he's done on a lot of players in the league this year. But they just weren't sharp enough. They didn't win the skill battle. You're a more skilled team than Memphis. Memphis' skills showed through tonight in a way that yours did not.

You know, you're a better execution team than Memphis. Memphis executed better than you did tonight. And so when you have all of those things and you struggle in the physicality of the areas of the game, that's going to

be a really tough game to win. And most importantly, they just weren't very sharp defensively, especially when you know you're gonna give up some offensive rebounds, you have to get a lot of stops because you know you're gonna have to get more stops than that on the rebounding mismatch, so like you're already the deck is already stacked against you in that regard. The big problem they were having

tonight was help defense. There's a lot of situations tonight where whether it was Taias Jones and a methodical ball screen rejecting a ball screen, or whether it was Desmond Bain was doing some really good work in semi transition tonight, just really hard, straight line moves to the rim. When the Warriors weren't quite set and taking advantage of the fact that if you beat that first man off the dribble, there was nobody on the back line, and a lot

of it was on the guards. There were a lot of plays where the guards were pointing at each other like, Hey, that's your help. Hey, that's my help. Everyone's looking around, like whose help is that. You can't hope to win in a setting like that without being sharp in all of those details of the game. And the concerning thing is these have all been consistent problems for the Warriors on the road all year this year. Not to be clear, as I've said one hundred times this season, I'm not

out on the Warriors. You know why because this story that I'm telling right now, this like, we rip off a five game winning streak with all those details sharpened, and then we immediately drop a game in Oklahoma City that we shouldn't have lost, and then we go into Memphis and get our ass kicked. That sort of dynamic has happened to almost every team in the Western Conference this year. Clippers have won a couple of tough games

in a row. What happened before that, they dropped a bunch of games that they shouldn't have lost and couldn't execute at the end of games. You know, the Lakers are on a run now, but they've had a bunch of down stretches during the season and they've dug They've dug too big of a hole. I don't think they're gonna be able to really get up into the top of the standings, so they're gonna be making an uphill

climb all season long. Minnesota will drop four out of five and then rip off three games in a row, right like. It's been like this for everyone in the Western Conference except for Sacramento, who I don't think anyone's scared of because they can't defend, and Denver, who has

their own question marks. I pointed this out earlier today, but the Denver Nuggets are allowing one hundred and twenty points per one hundred possessions when they play a top ten offense this year, which is twenty third in the league. Kind of a great example of what I've always talked about, where you know, you can put forth a fact simile of a good regular season defense. If you run certain coverages and you've got a decent guy who can protect the rim, you can do a decent job in the

eighty two. We saw this for years with the Utah Jazz with Rudy Gobert. Problem is, as you get into the postseason, then personnel starts to come to the surface, as scouting becomes a bigger issue, and now all of a sudden, those limitations that you have in personnel can become a problem. So there really isn't that big scary team like Milwaukee or Boston in the conference. And aside from Sacramento and Denver, all the other teams are up

and down all season long. So like the lucky thing for Golden State is they can't get their ship together, but neither can anyone else. And like you saw for the Lakers, they put together like three solid week of basketball and now they're right back into the mix. So for the Warrior's perspective, they're running out of time, but they do have some weeks left and they just have to be There's gonna be somebody or one or two teams in this mix. They're in the Western Conference that

gets it together. Who's it gonna be? And I will say that it will be a lot easier for the Warriors. They will buy themselves a lot more margin for error, when Andrew Wiggins gets back, when Gary Peyton can start playing in games again, when everyone starts getting slotted properly so that you don't have as many minutes for you know, like PBJ played a lot tonight, and you know he's a young player. That's a big game. He's a good shooter, but you know he missed a lot. I think he's

one for six from three. That's gonna happen for a young player who's a little bit in over his skis in a big, tough road game like that. Ideally don't have to play a guy like that, so it will get easier for them as they slot, but they are running out of time and the urgency to kick in eventually. A couple notes on the Draymond trash talk thing. First of all, I am not a Dylan Brooks fan. I have very you guys know how I feel about the

game of basketball. It's sacred to me. I think I have the utmost respect for players who make it to the NBA. I think that's a sacred achievement. The game of basketball itself is something that I love so much that I hate it when it gets disrupted by Shenanigans. I mean, we're not gonna talk about it tonight, but I agree with some of the stuff that Fred van Vliet has been saying about the officials and them thinking they're the show I hate. But it goes the other

way with players too. The foul grifting, to me is like offensive and sacrilegious to the game of basketball. And one of the things that Dylan Brooks does that I have a huge problem with is he does unnatural basketball acts that can hurt basketball players. Obviously, I had a huge problem with what he did to Gary Payton in the playoffs last year. He had a couple of instances

like that this year. There was one recently where he liberately did like two barrel rolls to go up into Donovan Mitchell's legs, which could have tore up his knee or messed up his ankle, and and he hit him in the crotch in the process. Like to me, once you start doing things that blatantly start to threaten the

health and safety of players, I'm out on you. Like and there's a lot of things that I respect about Dylan Brooks, and I like the fact that he's grind Like there's a lot of similarities between him and Draymond at their positions with like, you know, Dylan's not an outstanding athlete, but like, and he's incredibly unskilled offensively, but like, he just competes his ass off every single night and has good instincts defensively, and he's weaponized all that to

carve out like a really nice place in the league, which I respect. But I just I can't handle the trying to injure players thing. That's just that's a line for me that I'm completely unwilling to cross when it comes to supporting a player. And the other thing with the Draymond trash talk thing is he was right like regardless, Like, yeah, it's two trash talkers talking trash, but there's a huge

difference there, you know, like trash. I've never been a trash talker, but I don't have any problem with it where I start to get a little bit like I think it's a bad look when you're not respectable, when you're not respectful to people that have accomplished a lot. I'll give you an example on my front, Like it'd be like if I just was like imagine if I didn't work for the volume and I was just going

at Colin cowhard every day. It's like, that's so disrespectful to the work that he's put in this industry to establish himself the way that he has. Regardless of how Dylan Brooks feels about Draymond Green is a person, he might dislike him, he might think he's a jerk. But when you start to like say things like like undercut his winning impact, you look like the idiot, and Draymond called him an idiot. Like think about it, Like, Draymond

has won a Defensive Player of the Year. There are four hundred and fifty players in the NBA and he got rated the very best defender. I think he's the best defender of this era. He's made a second team All NBA. We finished an NBA season and the media voted him as one of the ten most winning, impactful winning players in the league. The guy has won four

NBA championships. Like, he didn't even play very well and last year's a postseason, and they still were nine plus points better when he was on the floor versus when he was off, and they won all their minutes when Draymond was on the court with Steph off by a lot, Like by twelve points per one hundred possessions, regardless of If you don't like him, that's fine, But you look like an idiot when you start trying to tell us he's not a very good basketball player or that he

wouldn't succeed somewhere else. It's objectively false. You come off looking super disrespectful, and I mean, what do you expect? And look, he got to have some moments to night. He played a good game, good defensive game on Steph, had a couple of moments at Draymond's expense, had a nice driving layout. But everything Draymond said is true. The reason why you guys aren't ready to contend for a championship yet is in that locker room you have an

elevated sense of what you've already accomplished. And the truth of the matter is is it's incredibly hard to win an NBA championship, and most of the guys who do it are humbled in the time before that. Lebron James humbled in twenty eleven before he won in twenty twelve. There's pain and suffering and loss on the way because you have to learn that, like you, that it is an incredibly difficult journey, and it's a long pathway to

get there. And I do think that Draymond's right that there's an issue within that locker room with understanding their ultimate goal and how far away they still are from getting there, and how much better all of them have to get and how much more locked into the details they have to be in order to actually achieve that goal. So it's two trash talkers talking trash, but it's one guy who I don't like because he tries to injure people and you know, is being disrespectful to an established

great player in this league. But that's all I'm gonna say about that. So let's move on to the Suns. In the KD injury so super freaky, like I can't even remember this happening ever, I can't even think of I'm sure it has happened in recent years, but I can't think of a time recently where a NBA player got injured in warm ups And we just had it happened twice in two nights. And it really sucks because it probably takes Phoenix out of the running for the

three seed. I think they probably could have passed Memphis, but now that's going to be pretty tough, and that sucks for their event eventual playoff path because that four seed means you'll have to play Denver in the first round, and you'll probably have to play a much tougher opponent in that five seed versus somebody in that three seed.

But once again, like I said with the Warriors, what's working in their favor is they shouldn't drop any lower than fourth because every team below them cannot maintain good play for more than a week or so. We just talked about this earlier. The Clippers, the Warriors, the MAVs, and the Wolves. They all it's one week on, one week off with them playing good basketball. And the Lakers, who are playing really good basketball and have a lot more talent now they're too far back. They're not going

to pass Phoenix, right. So it is unfortunate. But we know how Kevin Durant is. He always seems to come back from these injuries at the top of his game. Doesn't have nearly the runway to get back in rhythm that we see from some of the other players in the league. The dude just like steps on the court and is the same bucket that he was when he got hurt, right so I'm not overly concerned about it. The way I look at it is it limits your opportunity to get the three seed, which is not it's

not entirely out of the equation. Job misses a bunch of time, and Devin Booker starts playing like you know, the player he did early in the season for the last month. They have a chance, but I think more than likely this means they're gonna end up with the four seed, which is going to make things just a little bit tougher for them. All Right, So I've talked a lot about the bad for the MAVs in recent weeks, and it kind of was on display again last night.

They lost on the road in New Orleans one thirteen to one oh six. Luca and Kyrie both played poorly. Luca left the game early with the quad strain, but the MRI was clean, so he shouldn't miss more than a game or two, so that's some good news. They got absolutely obliterated in all the physicality areas of the game again. They got outrebounded forty nine to thirty four. They lost points in the paint, they lost second chance points, they lost transition points, all things that are directly tied

to your size and athleticism on the court. They got lit up by C. J. McCollum, and yeah, I want to be clear, within this season, I don't see any hope for the Maps. There's there's no way they're gonna be able to overcome these physical advantages that they're giving up every night. But I do think that they're not overly far away within this summer to be able to go and target these sorts of things that they need.

So and I want to use the Lakers as an example because with the Lakers, you know, again all the focus was on the Russell Westbrook trade and Russ wasn't a good fit. And it's not an apples and apples thing to apples to apples thing with Kyrie, because Kyrie

is a much better player than Russell Westbrook. But take Russ out of the equation for a second and just look at who they lost, you know, losing Kyle Kuzma, who was a great rebounder for them and who was a solid on ball defender, Andy really good help defender for them. He was a very good above average spot up player for them. He's given him about one point zero five points per spot up possession, just a big

forward that could do a lot of things. Contavious Cabo Pope, one of the best lock and trail defenders in the league, one of the best transition guards in the league. He was a very very good spot up player for the Lakers too. In the ensuing salary crunch, they lost Alex Crusoe's top tier guard defender in the league, who has the size and strength to switch on to bigger forwards and is like a connective piece on the offensive end of the four great cutter he shot forty percent the

last year with the lay from three. They gave up all these different things, and then in the process they had nothing left. A completely devoid of offensive skill, completely devoid of size on the perimeter, and so basically for a year and a half when Lebron and even when Lebron and ad would play together, they were only about a five hundred team. Now, part of that was Lebron and Nady were constantly in and out of the lineup, so they were never in rhythm, which can disrupt those

sorts of things. But like still, for the two of them to play together and to be five hundred is pretty jarring, But it comes back to that thing that I talked about on this show all the time. There is a list of responsibilities on both ends of the floor that you have to fulfill as a basketball team. And what happened was is by get sending out all those guys when Lebron and Adi were in and out of the lineup, they just weren't checking enough boxes and

so they were a bad basketball team. Again, like basketball is a like, it's of all the American sports team sports, the major American team sports. The individual impacts winning in basketball more than any other sport, that's a fact, but it is still a team sport at the end of the day, and it does get much harder for even the best players in the world to win games when they don't have guys that can go out and fulfill

responsibilities for them. And there are a lot like let's zoom in on the MAVs for a minute, Like they have all the offensive boxes checked. They have two outstanding shot creators, Kyrie Irving excellent pick and roll, excellent isolation, can attack switches, can destroy drop coverage. Luca can do all those same things. Luca can also attack out of the post and create a lot of high quality opportunities there.

They have, you know, some reasonable movement shooting right, like like Tim Hardaway Junior can come off the screen and hit a shot. They have a lot of really good spot up players. They've got a They've got two pick and pop bigs with Maxi Kliba and Christian Wood. They've got a lob threat in Dwight Powe. They check a lot of box on the offensive end of the floor, but there's a lot of boxes on the defensive end of the floor too. You need guys who can guard

at the point of attack, dribble drive guards. You need guards that can fly over the or that can fight over the top of screens and compete and pick and roll coverages. You need guards who can lock and trail and chase shooters around. You need guard. You need um. You need big guys that can fight in box out against big physical uh bigs that like to crash the

offensive glass. You need big wings on the perimeter that can crash from the perimeter to win those contested rebound battles or to um you know, to to run up and down the floor and transition and cover a lot of ground. You need those wings to guard the bigger forwards in the league that will try to attack you in mismatches and things along those lines, and the Mavericks

are just about devoid of all of those things. They don't have rim protection, they don't have wing defenders, they don't have athleticism that can crack down from the wings and grab contested rebounders. They've got like a pretty versatile defensive forward and Naxi Kliba, a center in JaVale McGee that they can't seem to find a playtime for. They've got a good lock and trail defender and Reggie Bullock.

You know, Josh Green has shown some flashes of that winging defense, but like they're really thin in all of those areas. But this is where I want to go positive, because what sucked for the Lakers is they were in the difficult position where because of the way that Anthony Davis and Lebron James liked to play, they needed offensive skill off the ball to open up everything for them in the paint and to generate those high quality three point shots that they could convert at a high rate

or close out opportunities and things along those lines. They needed offensive skill. They tried that the first year with guys like Mellow and Malik Monk, right, and what happened They couldn't defend. Then this year they went all in on defense, but they didn't have any skill and so they couldn't score. They could only score and transition. It's expensive as all hell to get players that can do both.

The advantage with how good Kyrie Irving and Luca donche Jar offensively is you do not need nearly as much offensive skill off of them, because Kyrie's an outstanding pull up shooter, because Luke Dontage is an outstanding isolation player, shoot shots over the top, and the quality of looks that they're going to get off the ball are so high that even limited offensive players will be able to convert them at a decent rate. Again, it's all relative

to the shot quality. A stand still three for a average shooter is a just as valuable of a shot as a contested three is for a great shooter, right, And so that's the advantage that they're bought. They can afford to do what the Lakers did at the start of the season, target veteran minimum contracts players that are considered offensively limited, that have struggled fitting offensively. Other in other places around the league. Guys like a Troy Brown junior.

That's a great example. Guys like a Dennis Schroeder, that's a great example. You can afford to go after limited offensive players that succeed on the defensive end and plug them in alongside Luca don Chich and Kyrie Irving, and you're gonna be able to fulfill. You're gonna be able to steal survive offensively like the offensive drop off, like

right this year, Kyrie Irving. Since Kyrie started playing basketball for the MAVs, which was February eighth, I think the MAVs are scoring about one hundred and twenty points per one hundred possessions on offense. That's amazing. I think it's fourth in the league over that span. That's not going to drop off Berry fall far. If you bring in some size and athleticism on the perimeter or on the wing that have some offensive limitations, it might drop from

one twenty to one eighteen or whatever. But defensively, you're gonna be able to survive to a much greater stent. It's gonna be hard, they're gonna have. You know, there's the mid level exception. Reggie Bullocks on a team friendly deal, but I'm not sure if he's the kind of guy you want to give up. Again, maybe it's a piece for peace type of thing, a team that's looking for shooting in a lock and trail guy. Maybe you can flip Reggie Bullock for a team that has a plethora

of size and athleticism on the wing. Hell, like the Toronto Raptors. Call the Raptors get one of their wings, right, They've got it. At least one tradeable first round pick. Tim Hardaway Junior is a good mid size contract that they can attach the stuff you've got your mid level exception. They have options, and they have a larger scope of players that they can consider because of the offensive skill that Luca and Kyrie present. So again, I've been super

negative about the Mavericks. I don't think they can win this year. But I do believe that they have a very straightforward path this offseason to get it to get into a situation where Kyrie's offensive skill and Luca's offensive skill can come to the forefront. So I don't think it's all lost. I just think it's all lost within this season, all right, guys. That is all I have for tonight we will be back on I'm recording a video on Saturday night that will be uploaded on Sunday morning,

covering tomorrow night's games and Saturday night's games. As always, I sincerely appreciate you guys for supporting the show, and I will see you on Sunday morning. The volume