Eastern Conference grades time on the Dunc-Town basketball podcast, the Dunc-Town basketball NBA podcast.

I should say thank you, J. Rikowski for that suggestion. We're sponsored today by Betterment.

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automated investing. Yeah, I think we're going to see just a little bit more red ink this time

around than on the west, which there really weren't any terrible off seasons in the west.

The east headed number of teams that just like actively hurt themselves.

Was it last year where there was like a ridiculous disparity in A's in one conference versus the

other? I remember one of the years that we've done this. There was, but this is another one of those.

Like I didn't have not only is there the general disparity, but there just weren't that many teams

in the east that had great off seasons too. No, that's true. In fact, well, I don't want to spoil it,

but there were not that is correct. Let's start with the Hawks. Big move, of course, was letting

Paul Millsap go. They also, and I thought that was the right move. They didn't, it didn't make sense

to keep him around, even at the lower salary he eventually got from the nuggets. They did not

really make him a contract offer. They wanted to hit the reset button and get back into the draft,

add picks, use their cap space to acquire more picks. And I thought that they executed their plan

extremely well in all of those regards except for one glaring exception. And by that, you mean

trading Dwight Howard for a guy with an even worse contract? Yes, exactly. It was a salary dump

that somehow managed to add salary years from now, an additional year on the contract for

plumbery, making about 12 million a year. And I understand what the thinking was was, hey, we got to

get rid of Dwight. He was poisoning the culture. That was the last regime's move. But Dwight could

still play number one. And number two, and getting off his money, he probably was a negative value

contract. So getting off his money was good. But with the return that they got, which also included

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