Thinking Basketball Podcast, my name is Ben. This is going to be a solo episode today. Just some quick

thoughts to get out of the way on the NBA playoffs. Cody is still busy on

father duty. We'll have him back next week to dive into some of these second round series.

But, but I wanted to catalog for posterity the best players of the first round.

And I think the way I want to do this is with

first team and second team.

So we'll do like an all NBA first team, all NBA, second team to basically get roughly

the 10 best players of the first round.

And as I said, I want to do this for posterity to put a stake in the ground.

But I'm also always interested and I've talked about over the years,

how do we evaluate players in small samples?

Like how do we look at the game last night? Oh my God the game last night,

the Knicks and the 76ers and that series and just as an aside, one of the most exciting series of the century probably

Every game was both incredibly stressful and incredibly entertaining and almost all of them went down to the wire.

The Nix had a, what, five or six point swing comeback at the very end of a game on the steel,

where it was a game two where they had the steel

and the controversial turnover on Maxi down at the end

and then another three off the

offensive rebound to score like five or six points in 20 seconds that swung that game

back to them and it was one to nothing going back to Philly instead of 1 1. Then Maxi in game 5 with the 7 points, 7, 7 points in the final 28, 30 seconds, the game there.

That one went into overtime.

Last night's game was crazy and came right down to the wire.

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