All right.

Three, two, one.

Hello and welcome to the tampering podcast, part of the Athletic NBA Show Network.

I'm Sam Amick, NBA National Writer at The Athletic, here with usual co-host Anthony Slater, friend, colleague, not often enough guest on tampering, the one, the only, the goes, Marcus Thompson. Must be desperate for a guest. We just weren't California enough. We just, we weren't West Coast enough. We don't talk. We're not quite a lot. Yeah. We just don't talk West, you know, at all't we're so east coast heavy on this pod marcus

we were like man how many people flaked on you for you to get with me that's great you were like

number six you know come on top see it baby let's go no i know listen you do so much good work

on hoops adjacent with d a i don't want to make you do double duty here, but it is that time of year.

We've got to bring in the best voices. Guys this week, we're just going to dive into the

play-in, playoff pre-postseason madness. There's so much going on last night. I'm watching that

Minnesota-Denver game. And by the way, as a quick aside, and if you want to jump in on this

part, feel free, it blew me

away that not only does Denver handle their business and Joker had said that he didn't

care about the game, even though the West number one seed was somewhat on the line. And you

got Anthony Edwards saying he cared about the game. But on the broadcast, I feel like people are

working really hard to avoid the really compelling

Tim Conley subplot to this whole Minnesota Denver store.

You got this guy who, you know,

headed the front office in Denver and built the nuggets for the most part.

Then he goes over to Minnesota and builds a roster in the kind of way.

I got a question for you.

How many NBA fans?

What percentage of NBA fans could tell you what Tim Conley looks like?

...