Cavs vs. Thunder; Game of the Year | Giannis vs. Wemby
The Athletic NBA Daily
The Athletic
4.1 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2025
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
The Cleveland Cavaliers and Oklahoma City Thunder delivered a game of the year candidate as the two best teams in the NBA met for the first time. Dave DuFour, Es Baraheni, and Andrew Schlecht discuss Cleveland’s gameplan, what went wrong for the Thunder, and who has the clearest path to the Finals. Then, Es and Dave take a look at how Giannis manhandled Victor Wembanyama, the Bucks lineup change, and Paolo Banchero’s upcoming return.
Host: Dave DuFour
With: Es Baraheni & Andrew Schlecht
Executive Producer: Andrew Schlecht
Audio Producer: Grayson Moody
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily for January 9th, 2025. |
| 0:11.1 | Coming up, who, the Cavs ended the Oklahoma City Thunder's 15-game winning streak. |
| 0:17.0 | So we got Andrew Schleck to talk about it. |
| 0:19.3 | Wembe and Janice faced off, so we're going to talk about that, of course. |
| 0:23.1 | And Palo might be coming back for Orlando. |
| 0:34.6 | Good morning, everybody. Good morning, guys. How's it going? |
| 0:38.6 | A little bit of, we had like a Super Bowl last night. |
| 0:42.9 | Oh, my God. |
| 0:43.5 | Game of the year. |
| 0:44.8 | Game of the year. |
| 0:46.3 | Yes. |
| 0:46.6 | You know, I got to say, Andrew Schlecht, S. |
| 0:50.8 | Perah Henning, as I just jump right in because I'm too excited. |
| 0:54.6 | The game had a very heavyweight feel to it. |
| 0:58.7 | And it was nice. |
| 0:59.5 | I loved that the officials let these guys play. |
| 1:02.6 | Andrew, what about you? |
| 1:03.5 | Just your reaction to how the game felt like before you even talk about the game itself. |
| 1:08.0 | Yeah, for all the hand-wringing that's happened this season about style of play, whether the NBA is a good product or not, like, this is a great advertisement for the league to show all the general public because this was a great basketball game. Even though it was a high-scoring game, I thought the defense was superb from both teams. I thought the shot-making was just a little bit better. I thought it was physical. I thought there weren't too many threes. The possession battle was incredible, which is |
| 1:32.7 | something that I always look for in every Thunder game. Both teams shot 90 shots. I mean, |
| 1:37.3 | it was just a battle of two very good basketball teams that play the right way, that play great defense. |
| 1:45.2 | Like, this is it. |
... |
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