All right, welcome everybody. This is Derek Bonner. I'm joined this week by Mike O'Connor, my colleague over at The Athletic, Philadelphia.

How are you doing, Mike?

I'm doing good, man.

I was just, right before we started recording this, I was watching the Celtics and Spurs,

trying to figure out why the Celtics aren't a better basketball team,

and I still have no answers at all.

Yeah, they will go through stretches for weeks of time where they look very, very good,

and then they'll drop four in a row.

Granted, three of them now against pretty good competition and the Charlotte Hornets.

But that collapsed the other night against Charlotte when they held that big lead hanging in the fourth quarter and they got smoked.

They are a team that feels very volatile.

A little bit like the Sixers at times where they can be up or down.

All the Sixers lately have been way more up than down.

But they're a team where I think every other fan base, every other top team,

Toronto, Milwaukee are looking at like we can beat them.

They're much weaker than we thought.

We had a better chance than maybe we would have thought before the season started.

The Sixers, yeah, we'll see.

I think there's still a lot of acknowledgement that Boston tends to bring out the weakest parts of the Sixers.

Some of that narrative, of course, may have changed this past week, and that will be a focus of this podcast, of course.

Yeah, I think the Sixers did make up some ground in the narrative department this week, for sure.

I mean, I wrote about it in my preview piece, but it just felt like there was such a psychological weight heading into that Celtics game.

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