Welcome to the morning shootaround here on the Athletic NBA Daily.

It's AM for me and for Dave right now.

That's right.

Shout it to us for making that happen.

I hope everybody's doing great on this Wednesday morning. We are here to talk some

NBA. And I thought one thing we could do is, you know, people are always talking about,

oh, this is a contender, that's a contender. We're going to make a contender pie, right?

That shows...

One part sugar, one part ball handling.

I just want to just show everybody what we really mean whenever we say this.

Okay?

Because maybe we think the Lakers are a contender,

but maybe they're only a small sliver of the contender pie. I don't know. Speaking of, Dave, your favorite kind of pie?

Man. You're going to say, all right. You're going to say pumpkin. Pumpkin. Yeah. I like pumpkin.

Yeah. I like pumpkin. You like whipped cream? Uh, no, I don't. You don't. No, I'm not a whipped cream guy. Um, but like pumpkin. You like whipped cream? No, I don't. You don't?

No, I'm not a whipped cream guy.

But like everything's giving growing up, I had my own pumpkin pie that was just set aside. I remember you telling me this before.

Yeah.

But no, you don't do any whipped cream on it.

Never did.

Mm-mm.

No.

...