Welcome back to another episode of Smallball with Kenny Beetsam on today's show.

We're going to be tier ranking all 30 NBA teams. Y'all know me. It ain't as cut and dry as these are the contenders and these guys are not the contenders and these guys are bad. Some of the tiers that we have, the name of these tiers, it's just maybe it's a little bit different. You know, it's a small ball with Kenny Beattam is really about. Before we get into it, remind you to leave a like on the episode and subscribe.

We are...

Let me double check this, a few days away from the start of the NBA season. I ain't going to lie to you. I'm locked. So, like, I've been watching preseason game. Like, like, like real life studying preseason games. we're going to talk about a guy that stood

out in his two preseason games later in the episode but just really really locked um we spent

a lot of the offseason i think i've mentioned this before kind of reflecting on the previous

year what could we be better at and so on and i cannot wait to continue to high-level content for y'all. We'll leave it at that. We'll leave it at that. Twitter's going

wild right now with stuff that's going on. But no comment. Damn it. Okay. Let's get into tier

ranking NBA teams. I think we start off at the top of the top, right? These are the teams that I see

to be title favorites, my real-life contenders. And as I was prepping for this episode, kind of

going through things, who do I believe in, who do I not believe in? This might be the shortest list

of a-tier contenders I've ever really had. I look back on my notes last year going into this season, and I had seven teams. I have four. I have four right now, and I'll get to those. I do want to say all of this is, of course, without the knowledge of what potential trade is going to go down, or injuries that's going to go down, or the super hot team that turns into a title contender out of nowhere. Again, this is going into this season.

This is always very fluid and maybe halfway through it.

We do another version of this to see what we were right about, what we were wrong about.

There's only four.

Now, that's not to say that I think only four teams can win.

But if I had 100 chips to bet on who will win the championship, I think 90% of my chips,

which I guess is 90 chips because I gave myself a nice round 100, would go on these four teams

and I'll put in the back pocket those last 10 chips to sprinkle on some of these other teams

just in case.

But this just feels like a year that one of these four teams are Walkout victorious. Of course, number one on this list is the Oklahoma City Thunder. After doing it what they did last year, people are speculating they could go get 70. And we talked about a little bit on numbers on the board a few weeks back. And I kind of pushed back on it because 70 is such a tough number. 70 puts you in an elite class of like three different teams to ever win 70 NBA games in the regular season. But the counter argument to that is like, hey, we won 60, what, 68 last year and Chet missed half of the season. Isaiah Hardinstein missed half of the season. We had J. Dub running full-time five-man for a month stretch. So knock on wood, if we have relative health, it's not out of the realm of possibility. You know, I guess I kind of look at like championship fatigue, but you listen to any interview that these guys have had, the people that just won a championship, them being so youthful already. I don't know if championship fatigue is going to be real for them. I remember when two years ago when we had Michael Porter Jr. on the podcast, but you know what? I will say, I wish that Michael Porter Jr. said some crazy shit on my podcast.

The 2025 offseason, he was on every show doing and saying whatever.

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