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The Volume.

All right.

Welcome to Hoops tonight here at The Volume. Happy Wednesday, everybody. Hope all of you guys are having a great week. It feels amazing to be back from Alaska. Just an absolutely unbelievable trip. If you stick around to the end of the show today, I'll tell you guys about it just because I can't imagine it going any better than it did. You know how anybody who's ever been to Alaska knows.

There's a little bit of a crap shoot with weather,

and we just got so lucky, and I got to see so many cool things.

I'll talk about that trip more at the tail end of the show.

Today, we're getting back into our player rankings with number 12 and number 11,

the beginning of a segment of this list that was far and away,

the hardest segment for me to rank. But we're getting to two more players today. You guys know the joke before we get started. Subscribe to the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel so you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at underscore Jason LT so you guys don't miss show announcements. Don't forget about our podcast fee wherever you get your podcasts on our hoops tonight. It's also super helpful if you leave a rating and a review on that front. Jackson's doing great work on our social media feeds on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, make sure you guys follow us there. And last but not least, if you guys want to get questions into the mailbags, we're doing Friday mailbags geared around the player rankings here for the next month or so. Again, if you disagree with the ranking, if you think a guy should be higher, lower, should have made the list, shouldn't have made the list, whatever it is you

disagree with, just lay that out as concisely as you can, a little elevator pitch in a comment

under this video that says mailbag with a colon, and we'll get to it in our mailbags on Fridays throughout the remainder of this list.

All right, let's talk some basketball.

All right.

So this was by far the hardest section of this list for me to rank.

Kauai Leonard and Joel Embed are very clearly at the bottom, right?

Like, we all know that Kauai can outplay the top players in the league.

We saw him do it against Yokic in game two, if I remember correctly, in that first round series.

He's capable of reaching that level.

We know Joe L. M.B. when he's healthy, could very well be one of the top two or three players in the entire NBA, right?

But they both obviously have this injury history that pushes

them towards the bottom. And Kauai is obviously in better shape now as someone who was able to

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