Welcome to the LaRue Don basketball podcast. I am Daniel LaRue, your interim host,

Subbing Infernate. I brought the theme song back because I wanted to. I'm enjoying it. That's the way it is.

And this episode has two big chunks in it. The first is catching up on news with Tim Bond-Temp,

so the Washington Post, the Jimmy Butler big story from early on Wednesday, the Mavericks news,

and a lot of other stuff that is built up over the last couple weeks. So Tim and I get into all that.

And then the other big thing, far bigger, half an hour and a half basically with Jared Dubin

about the Nick's super in-depth, really enjoyed it. So that is this episode. I think you will really like it.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. Absolutely, man. Happy to do it. Very busy day today.

Absolutely. A busy day. I mean, you had two big stories that happened at about the same time. We'll start with

Jimmy Butler. Butler, there were these reports swirling around. Originally it was going to be him

going to Minneapolis for a meeting with Tepado. Then it changed to LA for a meeting with Tepado.

And then the news that came out on Wednesday that he has requested a trade. And that is huge for

a series of different reasons. But another interesting part of this is what it sounds like are the

teams he wants to be traded to. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple things here, right? The first sign,

the things were going to not go the way they initially seemed to be was when this meeting got

moved for Minneapolis to Los Angeles was never really a great sign for the wolves that that was

that was the case here. Usually when something like that happens, it tends to signal that

you know, a player is trying to get on neutral territory and kind of set their own turns of engagement.

So, you know, that I don't think was an ideal sign for the 10 wolves. And, you know, look,

the timing of this whole thing is pretty strange to me. If you wanted to get out of Minnesota

this season, you would think you would think this would have been done in the summer. Or you would

have done it a little bit later in the season. It's almost kind of the worst possible time for

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