Thinking Basketball podcast. My name is Ben. Welcome back to our first playoff show of

2026. My goodness, as of recording this, we are 11 games into the playoffs. Cody, this is always

one of the most exciting and most difficult podcast to do

because we usually record it while the next set of game twos are about to go on and things

happen so fast in the postseason that by the time I'm finishing, recorded with the show and

edited, there's like another huge thing to react to. So we are done with all the game ones. We had three game twos last night.

And here's my big question for you that I've been thinking about for the last 24 to 48 hours.

What have you learned? What are your big takeaways from what we've seen so far? And really,

if you go back to what we've talked about throughout the year and what we

talked about on our mega long preview episode looking at the whole playoffs from a zoomed out

picture last week, has anything changed for you? Have you looked at a team and said, oh, this team or

player has moved up or moved down, which is changing my perception of how the next few rounds

of the playoffs are going to take shape, let alone this first round set a series that we're

looking at. All right. So I'm going to answer the first one, like kind of the big picture things

that I'm noticing, because when I was watching, and I think this specifically happened when I

was watching Lakers Rockets, and then I happened to another degree watching Hawks, Knicks. And it's the importance not just of being able to space the floor, but passing and pushing the pace on offense, right? And you gain such an advantage. And I think there's kind of an old adage that's like, oh, the pace slows down in the playoffs. You can't push it so much.

That kind of offense isn't going to work, blah, blah, blah, blah. But actually, it's almost

the other way around. Defenses are so good and so dialed in that if you slow down the pace too much and you just walk it up and you let the other team set up their defenses in the half court, you're going to have a much tougher time.

But if you grab, you kick ahead, you push it, you get that team scrambling, or for the

Lakers, I guess the Lakers do the same sort of thing. But if you have a couple of guys that can swing the rock around, Bing, bang, boom, like, it doesn't matter if the spacing isn't great. Like, you can just find some openings when the other team is kind of scrambling around. So that's me hovering above the whole thing. And I'm like, yeah, shooting is great. But man, just like the Pacers last year, kick it ahead, scramble it around on offense, and just move that puppy around and see what cracks you can find in the defense. So that was the importance of passing? And what else? How would you summarize the- I would say pushing the pace? So they're kind of a one and two thing. There's the importance of passing and that kind of leads into like look for an advantage, not just in necessarily taking shots in transition, but kicking it ahead so you can kind of get your offense as set before the defense is really set. And you said you were going to answer my two questions. I didn't know I had two questions. So what were my two questions? Okay. So you said that. The other thing is what's changed so far, right? Yeah. No, I see what you did. You made my question much better than it was. Yeah. I was actually just thinking about like has something changed with any of these teams or

multiple teams and you're actually getting to something that we should discuss, which is,

for me, the biggest thing was what teams are going to look different and how's the game going to be

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