Hello and welcome to the tampering podcast, part of the Athletic NBA Show Network.

I'm Sam Amick, NBA National Writer at the Athletic, here with usual suspect, number one,

Anthony Slater, out on the West Coast.

We will not have our guy

bred cats on the east coast this week we got some breaking julius randall news unfortunately for the

knickerbockers he is out for the season going to have surgery on that shoulder fred is

jumping on that news and doing his day job uh in his place uh worthy replacement a guy who we have not had on the show for a little while, a guy who I got to hang out with a bit last week when he came through my part of the country. Tim Cato, esteemed Dallas Mavericks beat writer. Mr. Cato, what is going on, sir? Nothing much. Where, where have I been all season? That's a good question i know where's the invite been

i don't know who runs this pod but you should have been you know on here it's all right better late

than never well whoever that is uh you and me we're going to get to the bottom of this sam we're

going to find out who it is and we're going to make sure that's right we are reporters yeah that's right

we are reporters. We investigate.

No, yeah, I was a little guilty of sleeping on your Mavs during the course of this season.

And so on this week's pod, as you guys know, we're going to try to capture some of the pre-playoff chaos, the pre-play-in chaos in both conferences. As always, we'll probably tend to be a little bit west heavy

as we sometimes are on this west coast heavy pod texas heavy today i'm in tex are you in texas

were you at houston the big one tonight was play on play on play is it though not anymore they

fell no it kind of is yeah yeah yeah and ended up north tomorrow up north tomorrow? Sam's worried about... Dallas tomorrow? Dallas tomorrow, which is actually probably a more interesting game now. But Sam's worried about AL baseball. He's sitting about 25 minutes or even less from the Oakland A's new park. That's what he wants. Yeah, that is true. Slater's trying to turn this into a new

MLB pod. Yeah, that is a thing in town. The Sacramento A's mixed emotions here locally as

King's owner Vivek, Rana Deve, has created quite the safety net for a not so beloved A's owner.

But yeah, the A's are going to be in town for the next three years.

Reportedly, check that out at the Athletic as well. All right, on the hoops front, guys, like I said, we're going to make the rounds. There's a ton happening when it comes to the jostling in the standings. But I want to talk about Mr. Cato's Dallas Mavericks. I got to see them last week, the little kind of rare two games set where they rolled through Sacramento.

The Mavericks win both those games, you know, made the Kings playoff prospects infinitely

harder as a result.

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