Hello, welcome to the collective podcast. We talk about the NBA, which we're doing on Thursday evening, joining us from the Barclays Center, where you've just seen pre-season game with the Brooklyn Netsis Tim Buntems.

Hello, guys.

Join us from Dallas, Texas, where he watched the Houston Rockets play on TV tonight is Ben McMahon.

Howdy, porters. That's news to me. I was actually mainly invested in some Taylor Swift show, also known as a football game, but let's continue.

Let's have a swift after the football game today.

Oh, yeah. Our man's tearing it up.

I just thought was 16, not the last. I looked another great Thursday night fair. Buntems, you want to see Ben Simmons play tonight for the first time in when was the last time he played.

Buntem, during the bladder part of last season, they keep from missed the final couple months of the season.

I should look, I should look that I would say February.

I'm looking at your talking. Yeah, so he, he played his first game earlier this week in Las Vegas against the Lakers.

And had some moments in that game had a hook shot over LeBron for a guy still dealing with back injury, et cetera, moved OK.

I know LeBron like hugged him and embraced him before the game.

And I was watching and he would go way under the screens, like almost exaggeratedly under the screens when he was on him.

Maybe I'm just extrapolating there. I, you know, I don't know how LeBron was doing it, but it almost looked like he was like, all right, Ben, let's see.

Anyway, it was a positive first step. What did you think of? Well, first off, this was there was more than just a basketball going on there tonight.

You could touch on that. And then also what you saw from Ben Simmons in person.

Yeah, so obviously there's a lot of terrible stuff going on in Israel at the moment.

And Macabre, Ronaldo was over here playing the beginning of a three game tour in the US.

They're going to play the calves on Monday and they're going to play the wolves on Tuesday.

But they got here last Wednesday before everything started to take place with Hamas attacking Israel over the weekend.

And they had to decide whether they were going to play these games or not or go home.

And the coach of the team, his friend retired from the army after 23 years in the army last month, re-enlisted this weekend and then died on Tuesday.

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