Hello, everybody. Welcome in to the Lakers Nation.com podcast. It's game day. Lakers Sons tonight 7 p.m. Pacific time. We'll be live on the YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Lakers Nation doing our play-by-play and live chat, as well as over on playback. Playback.com slash Lakers Nation. Big game tonight.

And joining me today to help break down the sun's side of things

it's Gerald Borgay who does a fantastic job covering the Phoenix Suns. Gerald my friend, how are you doing?

I'm doing great. How about yourself? Doing well. Happy to have the NBA back in action, fun time a year.

And I'll tell you what, your sons, there's some high expectations for the team coming into the season. I've seen a lot of people picking them to go pretty deep, including my front office show co-host, Keith Smith, picking the Phoenix Suns to be there at the end when the dust settles in the Western Conference. What's the sentiment like there in Phoenix right now? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of optimism. Obviously, most fan bases are

pretty optimistic around this time of year, but I do think the Sun's fan base is kind of rallying

around a lot of the changes that they made to address some of their weak points from last year.

You know, obviously adding two traditional point guards and Tyas Jones and Monta Morris being

able to get both of those guys

on vet minimum deals. They were pretty excited about fleshing out the bench a little bit more

with more reliable role players, adding two rookies who look NBA ready. You mentioned Keith Smith.

He loves our guy Oswee Godaro out here. I know he's excited about that and so are the Suns fans. So I think between all of that and then another year of

continuity and having a coach in Mike Boodenholzer who wants them to take more threes, there's definitely a lot of optimism that this team can go pretty far in the playoffs and potentially compete for a championship.

Keith is not even able to say, Oh Iguado at a normal, respectable volume.

He has to shout his name. That's how infatuated with Oso Keith is. But he's got good reason to be.

He's been really, really exciting to watch. So looking at this matchup tonight, we've got

Lakers, sons. These two teams battled each other,

a three and two record in the Lakers' favor last season, but a lot of back and forth,

close games. What are you expecting to see tonight? Yeah, I'm fascinated by this matchup because I feel

like these two teams have a lot of the same personnel that we saw last year, but are playing a little

bit differently in terms of the Sons being one of the top three that we saw last year, but are playing a little bit differently

in terms of the Suns being one of the top three-point shooting teams in the preseason in terms

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