Hello, welcome to the hoop collective podcast. We talk about the NBA. It's Wednesday morning.

A little bit late recording this week because of me has traveled. Joining us from the Bay Area

Oakland, California is Anne Skates, Mark J. Spears. How's it going Mark? Man, it's amazing.

It's before 7am for you right now. You're squeezing this in before you get to the airport and then

Andrew Lopez is going to join us on the back end. So I appreciate you getting up early.

Yeah, yeah, and I'm going to go see him. Right. Yeah, you're going to New Orleans today.

Yeah, yeah. So I'll see Andrew tonight actually. They played in Pembroles.

Oh, they're back to back. Yeah, they they they're pretty banged up right now. They had a tight loss

last night. So we'll talk about that with him. But I wanted to give you some props because

and look, it's January. We just we're just a hair past mid season. But in the preseason.

And then again, I think in the early season too. I don't remember the exact dates,

but definitely in the preseason. And I remember you kind of doubling down on it. You

said Sacramento Kings were making the playoffs. And you had reasons for this. You told stories about

some of the team building Mike Brown was doing. You told us about how much the

DeMata bonus was enjoying living there. And they got off to either an O and four starter,

a one and four start. And we checked back in with you. And you go, no, I'm sticking with it.

And so here we are. January 25th, it is right now. The Kings who just blew the grizzles out

of the water the other night. They won seven out of eight. That job didn't play in that game. But

I'm sorry. I don't have some reason my standings are messed up. They are in third place in the

Western Conference. And they are not, you know, standings are tightly packed behind them. You know,

they're not assured of anything. They missed the playoffs 16 years in a row. So we're not going to

say anything is done. But I do think that it's worth pointing out that you, here we go. Now I've

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