Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily presented by Amazon Prime for March 18th,

2026. I'm Dave DeFora here with Esperi. Coming up, the Thunder clinch of playoff birth,

Anthony Edwards is going to miss a week,

and S&I draft lottery teams by Who Has the Most Hope?

Good morning, everybody.

What is up?

Did you catch the baseball game last night?

Yes, Feliz studies to my Venezuelans, man. Shout out to y'all. Enjoy yourselves. Great time to be Venezuelan, Dave. S is a huge baseball fan as of last year. As of 25 minutes ago. Yes. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Shout out to my Blue Jays. We'll be back. Redemption, as you know. World Baseball Classic. Man, what a fun format for baseball. It's so good. Electric. Yeah. Again, you know, it made me think about the World Cup and how much fun that is. And if you guys get a chance to go to a World Cup ever, it's a lot of fun. Even Eurobasket, you know. Yeah, if we don't get priced out of World Cup tickets. Yeah, well, I mean, like the Olympic tickets, I'm sure are going to be crazy in 2028 out in L.A. Yeah. It's going to be crazy. Let's go to the NBA. Look, another night, another Thunderwin. They're now 54 and 15.

They handled the magic in Orlando, 113, 108. Actually, S, I think we should tip our caps to the Orlando magic.

Yeah, that was great game by the starters. They really played well. They were in it for, you know, basically the entire game. Palo Van Carro had a nice night, 32 points. Kind of the sort of game that we've been talking about out of him since the All-Star break. Yeah. Able to score. Other guys able to feed off of that. But the big story is the Thunder. They're the first team to clinch the playoffs, Sheikos is Alexander, 40 points, you know, I mean,

very casually. Again, I mean, this is like, it's like watching Michael Jordan right now.

He basically brought that up, Dave. Oh, I'm glad you brought that up, actually.

Oh, did we stumble on an organic bit? We did stumble on an organic bit. I'm glad you brought that up, actually. Oh, did we stumble on an organic bit?

We did stumble on an organic bit.

I'm glad that was, it's just poetic that you brought up Michael Jordan.

Perfect.

Awesome.

So look, the Thunder won 68 games last year.

They are on pace to win 65 plus again.

Okay.

The last time that a team did that in back-to-back seasons, very obvious answer here,

the Golden State Warriors, they did that in back to, actually, they did that three seasons

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