Hello and welcome to the Game Theory podcast.

I'm your Sam Vassini.

We are presented by The Athletic today on the show.

It's an NBA focused episode with a good friend of the program, James Edwards.

We're going to talk about the MVP race from hell, finally coming to a conclusion.

We're going to talk all four of the remaining NBA playoff series. These conference semifinals have been just fucking ridiculous.

They've been so, so great to watch. And then finally, we are going to close on some draft talk because James is our beat writer from Detroit.

He pays attention to these draft prospects.

And he has a take that, like, I have some questions about.

And I need to have a conversation with him about it.

So James, how's it going, man?

I'm doing well, Sam.

Appreciate you having me on as always.

And yeah, I'm excited to get to that because I've changed my view a little bit,

but I'm still not fully there.

And you convince me a little bit, and I'm sure you'll convince me more.

But we'll leave that tease there and we'll get to it at the end.

It's funny because it's a guy that you don't like at all. And I think that like, I don't know that I would prioritize

him like if Detroit got the number two pick, but anything after that, I'm really strongly

considering. But we'll get to that. I get it. It makes sense. Yeah, we'll get to it. Okay. So

Nikoliyokic won the MVP today, or at least sources have told Adrian Wojnarowski that he's going to win MVP.

And it ends in incredibly annoying MVP cycle this year, where it felt like fans from Denver, fans from Philadelphia, to a lesser extent, fans from Milwaukee, with Janus, just like fought back and forth, like tooth and nail instead of just actually recognizing how good all three of these guys were throughout the entire season.

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