All right. Welcome, everybody. This is Derek Bodner and Rich Hoffman for the second time after a false start.

Here on this week's Sixers Beat, a part of the CLNS Media Network.

You know, we kind of waited a couple days after the draft and after the trade to do this podcast.

And I'm kind of glad we did because I think it lets us take a step back away from the emotion and maybe the shock of it all and really focus in on what the Sixers have and the merits to the decisions that they made.

But how are you doing, Rich?

I'm good, man.

The, yeah, it's, I think right after the draft, the key to me was the process and the

planning that went in to making such a bold move.

And now we can look back and see where the Sixers roster shapes up heading into this

important free agency period.

Yeah, it was interesting.

I think when the pick was announced at 10, and it was Michael Bridges, it was like, well,

that was the most boring, obvious, not necessarily wrong, but nobody was surprised by that move.

Nobody around the NBA was surprised by that decision.

And then I'm sitting there in the interview room with Bridges, and he's talking about how much he can't wait to play with Joel and Bede and how excited he is to play in his hometown.

And as that press conference is going on towards the end of it, I think maybe there were like two

questions left. I get the mobile notification from Shams that he had been traded for Zaire Smith

and a future pick. And at that time, we didn't know the details of what that pick meant. So it was a little bit of a shock. I sat there and I debated, like, you know, do you break the news to the kid now? Because he had no – like a lot of times you'll see trades on draft night where they go up and they wear the hat and they answer questions, but they already know that they've been traded. He had no idea. Flat out no idea. The sincerity was real. He was really excited to be with Philadelphia.

So you kind of debated, like, do you break the news of the kid right here? Do you say, hey, what do you

think about the Andre Aiton and the Phoenix Sons? And I think during the time that it took me to debate that internally, they had already

kind of gotten the final two questions.

They had already lined them up.

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