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The Volume.

All right. Welcome to Hoops tonight here at The Volume. Happy Monday, everybody. Hope all you guys are having a great start-true week. I'm a jam-pack show for you guys today. This is step one of our NBA finals preview today. So today is just going to be pretty straightforward. It's going to look like a lot of our other series previews. I'm going to give you guys the season series information, the series prices from Hard Rock Bet, and then we'll talk a little bit about both ends of the floor. Over the course of the next couple of days, just so you guys know what to expect, Sam Vassini's coming on the show. We're going to do more of like a tactical, kind of like strategic breakdown of the series. Sam's always really been good with that. So that'll be on the feed tomorrow morning.

And then Wednesday morning, we'll have something that's more along the lines of like the

surface level storyline type stuff. What a, what, uh, storylines are at stake as we head into

the series before we go live on YouTube after the final buzzer of game one on Wednesday. But today's

just going to be kind of like that surface level series preview like we typically do. You guys know the Joe before we get started. Subscribe to the final buzzer of game one on Wednesday. But today is just going to be kind of like that surface level series preview like we typically do. 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. We are on the pathway to 150,000 subs. It's a big goal for us in this postseason run. So it mean a lot to me if you guys would take a second to scroll down and hit that subscribe button. If you're subscribed like this video sign up for post notifications that helps us a lot all right let's

talk some basketball so the season series went two one to the nix uh we had the cup championship

first the spurs actually had a 12 point lead late in the third quarter of that one the nicks made

five threes in the next five minutes, spanning the final

two minutes of the third quarter in the early fourth quarter. That kind of flipped the script on

the lead and ended up putting the Knicks up five. And they basically stiff-armed these spurs from there.

This was also the one of the games of the three games where the Knicks lit up the scoreboard

against Wemby. The Knicks had a great

offensive rating basically in every game, but of most of it had to do with them having success against

units that didn't have Wembe on the floor in the other two games. In the Cup championship game,

the Knicks offense scored very effectively against Victor Wemianama. Again, they did hold up better in the next two. Second game, a close Spurs win in San Antonio. Wembe goes for 31 in this game, but he leaves the game early with an injury. This was also the game that he was primarily guarded by O.G. and Ninobe. We're going to talk about all the different matchups. There's been a lot of discussion about OG and Anobie as a primary matchup for Wembe. I personally wouldn't go that route. Not to say that you can't do it from time to time during the series, especially in specific lineups, but I really like O.G. and Ninobe as a matchup for Steph Castle. We'll dig more into that idea when we get later on in the show. The Knicks had an

11-point lead in the fourth quarter of this game after Wembe had left, and the Spurs came back

to win without Wembe. This was the Julian Champany game, if you guys remember, he had 11-3s and had a

season high, 36 points in this game against the Knicks. That was a spurs win, a close Spurs win.

The Knicks hit kind of like a garbage time, three late that cut it to two, but they kind of were hovering around a five-point lead down the stretch.

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