Welcome to this league uncut in the world of twenty four NBA news. Just do you lose Chris Hanes, Di's go time, Mark Stein. It's show time, Chris Hans and Mark Stein. This liague uncutting is underway and on fire. This should be a good one. Let's get right to it, everyone, because this is why NBA Basketball, rather than Major League Baseball, is the hot stove league of the twenty first century.
This is why, as the Pelican CJ McCollum sagely tweeted in the wee hours of Thursday morning, you don't dare go to sleep this time of year. This is why hashtag this league is in the name of this podcast. Friends. I'm sure you're still digesting or just catching up now on the over night chaos. But Thursday's three pm Eastern time NBA trade deadline. It's fast approaching, and I promise there will be more, even though there's already enough to talk about and dissect to fill up a month's worth
of podcast. This is Mark Stein speaking, by the way, if he didn't recognize the voice, regrettably but unavoidably solo for this mini pod. We're rushing out because my partner on this league uncut the one and only Chris Haynes from Turner Sports. He had to travel cross country on this very wild Wednesday. He's going to be at the Arena. I still call Staple Center tonight to cover Bucks at Lakers for TNT. After covering Suns at Nets in Brooklyn
on Tuesday night. I was working in a TV studio myself in Dallas on Wednesday night, So there was really no choice for us to concede that our next full fledged edition of the pod, it's going to have to be Friday to the deadline. That's going to be our first chance to team up again and dive into all this craziness. But I wanted to do a quick soliloquy here in the interim after what we witnessed on that
afore lunch, aforementioned wild Wednesday. Kyrie Irving made his debut as Dallas maverick in Los Angeles, leading the MAVs to a win over the Clippers, with Luka Doncich watching in street clothes, and then, seemingly minutes after the final buzzer came the thunderbolt that Brooklyn has now agreed to trade Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns, the same Durant who Kyrie steered to the Nets in free agency in the
summer of twenty nineteen, Nets over the Knicks. Remember they went as a package deal, and now suddenly, without warning, the Nets have completely moved on from Kyrie and kd halfway through their fourth season together in Brooklyn, super team turned super flop. Now they're both in the Western Conference.
You've got the Suns pulling this off and teaming Durant up with Devin Booker, Chris Paul and DeAndre Ayton because they consented to trade four unprotected first round picks and a pick swap with Mikhail Bridges, Cam Johnson and Jay
Crowded of Brooklyn. But league's sources say what really happened here is that the Nets and Durant, after Irving requested a trade last Friday and then got dispatched to Dallas last Sunday, the Nets Durant they privately agreed to do a deal with the Suns as quickly as possible without waiting until the offseason. And look, the Suns have this exuberant new owner, Matt Ishbia, and exuberant barely covers it. If you watched Ishbia's introductory press conference on which also
happened Wednesday, closer to lunchtime. The matt Ishbia Suns were so clearly eager to announce themselves to the league as loudly and splashily as possible, as evidenced again by the four unprotected first round picks Phoenix tossed into this trade. We ended up with a blockbuster so huge that it rendered a three team trade hours earlier, people featuring the Lakers and the two teams that just hooked up in July for the Rudy Gobert blockbuster, Utah and Minnesota doing
business again. The Nets and Suns shoved that pretty significant trade to absolute undercard status. So Chris and I obviously have tons to discuss when we get back together, starting with the Nets and the Suns and what their futures look like after the mayhem they just cause. How the Lakers fared by bringing back D'Angelo Russell, bringing in Malik Beasley and Jared Vanderbilt to try to make up for their inability to win the Kyrie Irving trade sweepstakes. What
happens next for future Hall of Famer Westbrook. We know he's not going to Utah. He's not going to actually show in Utah. He is headed there. Theoretically, it will be his fifth different team. Now in the final year of that five year max contract worth an excess of two hundred million that he originally signed with the Thunder Thunder, Rockets, Wizards, Lakers, Jazz.
He'll soon be headed for team number six and the buyout mark it when he and the Jazz part whether it's just a wave situation or will he get a buyout, but we know Russ will be headed to the open market. That ensures the headlines aren't going to stop when the deadline passes. And look, there will be more trade action today.
Buckle up, the madness is not over. Maybe we'll see nothing more that quite reaches the level of either of last night's two trades, but Memphis and New Orleans are still presumed to have serious interest in Toronto's Oganna Noby. The Nets now have a surplus of wing players they could make more moves. Detroit's been looking for an unprotected first rounder for Boyon Bogdanovitch. They've said for months, for weeks, for months they won't trade Bugdanovitch. Well, unprotected first round
picks are flying around like crazy. Maybe the Pistons were lent there. The Raptors do seem open to trading Anna Noby, even after they made a win now move Wednesday by swinging a deal to reacquire Yaka Purdle from San Antonio. The Warriors are still looking for upgrades that can help live them out of a twenty eight and twenty seven lethargy. The defending champions have not been able to dislodge themselves
from Where will the Clippers go? What will they do to upgrade after players they coveted, like Kyrie Light de'angelo Russell went to rivals. What were the Nuggets the West's most consistent force in a season marked by an almighty jumble in the standings in the West from three to thirteen. What are the Nuggets going to do to strengthen their roster,
presumably by trading bones Highland. I am just generally confident that this will continue to be a very busy deadline day, because as we've seen now over the past half decade, you really have to take note of this teams all over the NBA map, they've embraced taking the biggest of swings at the trade deadline than waiting for free agency. The NBA's wildest of Wednesday's just slammed home that reality.
The trade deadline gets more and more significant as we go, and I promise Chris and I are going to get into it all Friday. We'll have a pod Friday, We'll have a pod Monday. Hopefully after those two pods we will have been able to sum up the state of things, and like I said, I'm fully expecting more significant action on this deadline day. Thank you so much for listening to this league uncut. Your support and the appetite for our first two weeks has been amazing. We are so excited,
We are so grateful. Please rate and review and subscribe to our humble little pod wherever you get your podcasts, and again, Chris and I will be back Friday together. We will get into it all and try to figure out where this league, this wacky league, goes from here. Talk to you soon, everybody, and then I'll do it for us. See you next time.