In today's episode of The Sixers Beat, Rich and I go over the release of the regular season

schedule, then dive back into the listener mailbag. Going over how much we think PJ Tucker

will play as a small ball center, whether or not these Sixers can ascend to being a legitimately

dominant playoff defense, projecting the overall offensive and defensive ratings,

what lineups we think they will use to close games out,

and our expectations for Matisse Thibel's offensive growth.

Enjoy the podcast. All right, welcome, everybody.

This is Derek Biner.

joined by Rich Hoffman on the Sixers Beat, a part of the Athletics Podcast Network.

Now, Rich, I pulled you out a vacation.

I guilted you into coming on this podcast.

So how you doing, buddy? I apologize for that,

but I hope vacation is going well. Eric, it's going well. And you know what? Who knows? Maybe if I buggy

enough on Twitter, you'll even retweet this podcast out. Who knows? Well, look, don't, don't get ahead of

yourself. But look, podcasting is easier than writing. So if you pull me out to

talk to you for two hours and knock out a couple of podcasts here, that's fine by me.

All right. There we go. Well, the podcast for both this episode and next week's episode,

which will record at the same time so which Rich can ignore me for the rest of

his vacation. Both of them will be primarily, and trust me, when you can ignore me on a vacation

that is always better. They will primarily be mailbags. We will, of course, talk a little bit about

the regular season schedule, which was just announced here on Wednesday. You know, you and I were sort of talking about this in the week leading up, but we thought

we, we heard sources, didn't quite have it confirmed that this would be an 82 game season.

...