award-winning journalists new york times bestsellers no topic out of bounds no opinions left

unsaid an institution for sports talk and information this is the sports reporters here's mike

lupica mitch alb and bob ryan i'm mike lupica nlb dot com and the new york daily news i'm mch alpum of the

detroit free press and i am bob

ryan of the boston globe and espn we welcome you to the monday edition of the sports reporters we're

with you each monday and thursday and we've been together a long long time in different formats and

we we're enjoying our once again basketball basketball

gentleman is uh rearing uh it's not an ugly head at all but a very

enticing enticing uh competitive head uh as we get near the end of the season we have

this uh play in format going we've got all kinds of intrigue about and some

potentially juice a juicy matchup or two in this play-in business.

And, you know, the NBA is getting what it wanted.

People are interested and invested in talking about it.

And there's a lot of uncertainty as we head down the stretch.

We may end up with a playing game between LeBron James and Steph Curry.

And you can look back over the

recent history of the NBA and see how many NBA titles that will involve. And it's,

I was just telling the guy, I wrote about this yesterday. LeBron James became interested in this

format when he woke up one morning and he said, ooh, my ankle still hurts and realized his team might have to play a play-in game.

It's not locked in yet.

They won a very big game from the Suns last night.

But the Portland Trailblazers are ahead of them, have the tiebreakers on them.

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