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Thank you.

Hello. Hello and welcome to the tampering podcast, part of the Athletic NBA Show Network.

I'm Sam Amick, NBA National Writer at The Athletic.

Here, as always, with one of our usual suspects, we got Anthony Slater, barreling down the highway to cover the Warriors Clippers game here as we record on a Wednesday evening.

We also have the great Yovan Buha, Lakers Beat Rider, frequent guest of tampering.

And gentlemen, we're going to get into a number of topics this week.

We are recording a little bit early because I'm heading off to Indiana in the morning for All-Star Weekend.

But we are going to lead with the thing that occupied the vast majority of all three of our days

and talk about the prospect of LeBron James getting courted, I guess, by the Warriors, first reported by ESPN to give them a hat tip there and we tried to advance.

Some of that reporting, and I actually just really enjoyed learning more about that situation.

Look at that from a Lakers standpoint, a warrior standpoint, even a Nick standpoint.

We don't have our guy Fred Katz on the pod this week,

but we will talk about that aspect as well. Try to spin it ahead to All-Star Weekend. Like I said,

it's in Indy, a long ways for West Coasters like me, but going to get out there and then

freezing cold and see what kind of fun we can have. And, uh,

and talk about contenders, gentlemen. It is the all star break, which as you know doesn't come at the halfway point. It's not even close, but it is a natural time to talk about who's real, who's not. Lakers warriors, uh, we talk about a ton, but there's a whole bunch of teams a whole lot better with all due respect to the teams you guys cover.

All right, Yovan, I'm going to throw out your direction.

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