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The Volume.

All right, welcome to him tonight here at The Volume. Happy Friday, everybody. Hope all of you guys had an incredible week. We are getting into our contender rankings today. As promised, once a month, I want to kind of circle back to our teams that are currently in the mix for the championship in the NBA. Sometimes we'll have a guest. Sometimes we won't. I was going to have

Sam Vesini on today. He's feeling a little under the weather. So we're going to have Kevin O'Connor

to come on in our early February contender rankings. And then I'm going to have Sam come back on

in early March for contender rankings then. But as we head into the new year, I wanted to dig into

our top three tiers. There's been a lot of

change since our last contender ranking. Some teams moved off the second tier. Some teams moved

on to the second tier, whether or not I was going to put OKC in their own tier, all that we're

going to get into today. You guys know the Joe before we get started. Subscribe to the Hoops Tonight

YouTube channel. Like this video. And if you want to get mailbag questions into our

Friday mailbag starting next Friday, leave them underneath these full episodes on YouTube.

Put mailbag colon, write your question. We've got to them on our mailbags later on

throughout the season. All right, let's talk some basketball. So at this point,

I think there are 11 teams that have at least some slight pathway to compete for a championship.

I have three teams in the top tier. These are all teams that I think have a real, legitimate,

like massive shot to win the trophy this year.

These are the teams that like every day they're sitting in the locker room, they're like,

we can do this, we're on a mission to do this. I have four teams in the second tier. These are

teams that I think have a real championship ceiling, but they have some pretty glaring flaws.

They require a mix of maybe some favorable matchups, maybe some internal things going their way.

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