Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily for April 14th, 2026.

I'm Dave Dufour here with S. Barahenny and Fred Katz coming up.

We go deep on the play end.

We talk about X factors and we make our picks.

Good morning, everybody.

What is up? S. Welcome back, everybody. What is up?

S. Welcome back. Fred, play in tonight. You guys excited?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think it'll be awesome. I think I'm a big playing believer. I know there are some playing skeptics out there in the world, but I'm a playing believer.

Fred, how about you? I'm really excited to watch the last play in that doesn't have any teams

trying to tank out of it so that they can get the first overall pick in these flattened lottery

odds world. So you believe what Dave was saying yesterday that there will be some tankers in this

playing tournament? I mean,ers in this playing tournament.

I mean, not in this one, but in future ones, if they change the lottery odds,

I think, I think we could see a tanker. Are the Blazers not a test case of this, Fred?

Because they, their lottery pick this year is top 14 protected.

So they need to miss the play in, right?

I mean, this is my prediction.

My quote unquote bold prediction is that the Blazers aren't going to make it.

That would be, that would be really tremendous.

I'm sure Adam Silver would be absolutely thrilled if the Blazers took the floor and

Denny Avdia was out with injury management.

Yeah, I look, I don't think we're going to go that fine. I'm sure he'd be really excited. But I do believe they're going to find a way to lose. Let's, we're going to do the little play in preview. You know, a lot of these teams, it's not like they're on national TV all the time. So maybe you're not a fan of them. maybe you know this, this will be the first time you get a chance to sit down and watch them. So I thought we could do almost like a little bit of a viewing guide. But, but really I want to talk about these matchups because we don't get a lot of single elimination in the NBA. And it's kind of fun to look at it as a one off, you know, like almost almost like Fred S, give me your scout on these two teams.

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