You're Locked on Warriors Daily Golden State Warriors podcast. I am Daniel Ruer, your host,

and so happy to bring you your team every day. The Warriors have an off day between playing the

nuggets, losing to the nuggets, and playing the Kings in their last game before the All-Star

Break. And I went through a bunch of different ideas for what to do with this episode, and

inspired by the events of this morning in particular,

I decided to do a podcast that is not as Warriors-centric, but is Warriors-related, which is

running through the teams that I think are the biggest contenders for the Warriors in terms of

winning the championship, the biggest threats, and discussing where they are right now,

where I expect them to be later in the year, and also what they could do at the trade deadline,

because the deadline is nine days away, and some of these teams could be pretty significant

factors in it. So I'm going to go through the teams in the order of their threat. I think

that's the best way to do this

and go into a little bit on each one of them and why they're relevant to the Warriors and what they do

well. Not a ton of time on each team, but a little bit. And unsurprisingly, that starts with the Cleveland

Cavaliers. Cavaliers are 38 and 16. They're still first in the east for now. That could change due to stuff I'm

going to talk about in a second. They have the fourth best offense, 20th best defense, and a plus

4.4 net rating, which means they're outscoring opponents by 4.4 points per 100 possessions.

The big news for them in recent time and over the last month or so has been injuries.

J.R. Smith is out with a broken thumb.

The current estimate is that he will be back around mid-March.

There's been some reporting over the last couple days that maybe he's a little bit ahead of schedule,

but we'll have to see.

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