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Welcome to a Tuesday edition of locked on NBA, your daily NBA

I'm Wes Goldberg and I'm here with David Vermil and joining us from Chicago is the Washington Post Ben Goliver where he's covering tonight's NBA draft lottery before heading over to Milwaukee for the Eastern Conference finals, but I want to talk about all of that later on in the show because I'd rather start with tonight's opening

game of the conference finals between the Warriors and Trail Blazers, obviously the Warriors

are the better team.

And a lot of people propped up the last round between the Warriors and the Rockets as the NBA finals, but in that series,

Golden State lost a big piece in Kevin Durant. Durant didn't play in game six against the Rockets.

They won anyway.

And he's already been ruled out for game one tonight and I was at

practice on Monday they don't sound very optimistic that he'll be around for game two

but Ben does Durant's injury open the door for Portland? Well they couldn't have asked for anything more, right?

I feel like I've used the phrase War of Attrician during these playoffs,

like 75 times to describe all these different series,

but that's kind of what's happened, right?

I mean, you look at Portland,

he came into the post season without nirkage, canters banged up with the shoulder,

Rodney Hood gets the knee injury. It's like, what else could go wrong for them? But the biggest factor for them, matchup wise, is Kevin Durant.

They don't have the length, they don't have the interior defense to really take

away his easy stuff and he will be a nightmare cover for them if and when he returns healthy to this series.

So they couldn't ask for much more now.

They only have one day to get ready for it in between their game seven against Denver and game one in Oracle like you mentioned so that's a real tough

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