Good afternoon and welcome to Lockdown NBA Daily.

On today's show, we're discussing which players are locks to make the All-Star game.

Then we're going to draft the fringe All-Star candidates that we think should make the team.

It's all coming up on Lockdown NBA.

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Thanks so much for making us your first listen every day. Today's episode is brought to you by Fandual. Before tip off, check the Fandualdial app and see what's dropping during NBA Happy Hour. Every Friday from 6 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern. I'm Wes Goldberg and today we are drafting our all-star selections. We're doing it with the help of Lockdown's local experts. I have two of the best with me, as always from the Lockdown Nuggets podcast, senior NBA writer for the Action Network. It's Matt Moore, Matt.

Yeah. with the help of Lockdown's local experts. I have two of the best with me, as always, from the Lockdown Nuggets podcast, senior NBA writer for the Action Network. It's Matt Moore, Matt. We had a small slate last night. It got smaller when Bulls heat got delayed or postponed because of condensation on the floor. Hayes, what are you doing? What are you guys doing in Chicago? What, come on?

Come on. Blame the Blackhawks. That's all I can say. At least they're winning. It was a rain. It was like, it was just the roof. Well, no, no, no. I ended up finding out that it actually wasn't the roof. It was the, um, from the ice that was underneath. they did something where were there with the AC settings and the condensation was coming up.

That's why they couldn't get rid of it.

Hockey. Always hockey.

Blame the Canadians.

There was a game, a Miami Dolphins game a few years ago where the sprinklers came on in the middle of the game.

I don't know if you guys remember this, but it was just so indicative of a poorly run organization. It's almost like, of course, the dolphins would have their sprinklers come on at 1.15 in the afternoon on a Sunday. No offense, Hayes, but like when the Chicago Bulls couldn't figure out how to make their court not slick, I was like, yeah, the Spurs would never be caught doing that. They just, they, they, they killed their ace went out in the finals game. That's right. All right. We got a bunch to get to today. So let's just jump in. The prompt for today's show is that we're drafting the fringe all-star candidates that we think belong on the final all-star teams. But before we get to the fringe guys, I think it makes some sense to decide on who we think are locks to be on the teams in each conference in the first place. So let's start with the Eastern Conference. We'll do the Western Conference in the second segment. Reminder, it is 12 players per conference and it is positionless. And at the end of this thing, it's split between USA and World. We're not going to worry about that, guys. I don't care about that stuff. It's dumb. We don't need to do it. Let's just focus on the players who deserve to be on this thing. In terms of locks in the Eastern Conference, we've got Janice, Jalen Brunson, Tyrese, Cade Cunningham, Donovan Mitchell, and Jalen Brown. So those are six locks. Hayes, do you, any alterations to this, or do we think we're good there? No, I think we're good there. All right, so we flipped the coin before we started recording here. Matt, you won the coin toss, which means you get first pick of our draft. We're going to do this snake style with the locks now out of the way, six locks,

which means we have six players left in the Eastern Conference to decide of the fringe All-Star guys.

Who do you think belongs on the final Eastern Conference All-Star team?

Matt, you've got the number one pick.

Usually I want to reward teams that are winning, but I'm going to go Jaylon Johnson.

He's just been awesome.

He's just been so great, great man.

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