The crucible is upon us.

2026.

The playoffs are here.

Who will survive and who will turn to Ash?

I really thought we were going to go to like the 27 minute mark before we got to that.

But you just broke the seal right away. well i wouldn't want anyone to keep watching or listening i i

hopefully uh the like post treatment noise gating will prevent it anyone's your drums froms from being completely destroyed. But by that. All right. Well, this is our annual playoff outlook. And we got a bunch of interesting categories here to look ahead. We'll do all of our playoff picks as well. Take it through to the eventual NBA championship. I want to ask you real quickly, though, since I haven't taught to you since last week

when we're at the Hoops Summit together, what do you, like some of these teams that just like

rested guys going for certain matchups, like Denver seemed like they wanted to avoid Minnesota

and then they got them anyway.

And the Spurs resting Wembeenama to they could have maybe got denver out of

their bracket orlando playing dozen bane the first six minutes and then in the fourth court

being like oh shit we might lose we better bring them back instead of just like taking care of

uh taking care of business with them uh Atlanta maybe uh them winning against the heat could have got them the five seed.

Maybe they wanted to play the Knicks.

I don't know.

Maybe they're just assuming Orlando was going to win, as Orlando was also assuming that they were going to win.

And what do you make of all that?

I think in Atlanta's case, it's a little more direct to me. I do think they thought

Orlando would win. Yes. Yeah. I also think they thought they weren't going to beat Miami anyway.

They were out of gas. Like, Jalen Johnson has been running on fumes. And because they've had to go

basically hard out these last, I don't know if you've seen like their minutes these last couple weeks when they've been playing real teams, but they've been playing the starters like 40 minutes every single time.

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