Zach Lo, I always love having you on to preview the NBA season on this show because I love

the soap opera, right?

I love mess, as Marie Kondo would say.

But your crew passion here is actually just watching these games, right?

And so I have to wonder just how irritating it is to cover a sport where the actual sport

can often feel like an afterthought.

I'm used to it by now and I like the soap opera almost as much as other people do.

The Brooklyn soap opera has certainly been entertaining and then there are sort of less entertaining

sadder and more serious soap operas that are no fun to talk about.

But yes, I do think the NBA has some issue that it's a basketball league where a lot of

the fans don't really care about watching basketball, which is weird.

It's hard to imagine that being a problem in football or baseball.

I love the games and enough people seem to love the games that I still have the job.

So in the course of doing your job, what is the thing that immediately springs to mind?

When I ask you what you're just viscerally excited to actually watch the season, like

what's the person, what's the scene, what's the feeling that you're imagining as the season

is about to start here?

It's not one person.

It's the fact that this is as wide open as the championship race has been since I can

remember covering the league and everybody almost is healthy and there are at least

16s and probably more that can convince themselves we actually have a chance to win the whole

thing.

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