Join for a Thursday locked on NBA by the athletic Sam Amick. A lot of fun stuff going on in the

NBA. The Western Conference playoff race is turning into a DUD. The eight teams are set.

The Eastern Conference bottom teams are not very

interesting in five games below 500 so we shouldn't talk about them as

playoff teams that's a different discussion for a different time but there are a bunch of topics and

story lines to hit in the NBA Sam so I want to try to see if in this short

condensed daily podcast forum we can just kind of rapid fire through a bunch of them. I thought your

chat today on the athletic was just fabulous. People should check that if they

haven't. So let's just roll through. I've got about 15 different things. We'll see how many of them we get to.

The underlying story of the Laker collapse will get to is the clippers are going to make the

playoffs and give up a first round draft pick. How big a deal for the

franchise is it that they're going to make the playoffs and the Lakers aren't?

Yeah, I think that's the priority. That's the big deal. I wrote a couple weeks ago and as always Mr Locke

thanks for having me. I wrote a couple weeks ago that Steve bomber had made it

clear internally that he wanted to be in.

I was a little surprised by that and I've joked with people since that it was one of those things that you write and you feel pretty confident about,

but you certainly hope that their actions and their behaviors, you know, bear out your reporting if that makes sense and

certainly that it has they they are definitely all in on the idea of sending the message to

free agents that their operation is the one that is you know superior and more worth joining than the Lakers in fact I've written a couple times they even have an internal slogan so to speak that is the black top not the big top and that's a

clear shot at the Lakers and the surface atmosphere that they have and you know all I

got to say is beverly is not

part of the big picture for the clippers he should be getting some kind of

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