Welcome to the Edge of Sports podcast. I'm Dave Ziron. So excited for this week's show, of course, brought to you by The Nation magazine.

I'm going to be talking with basketball savant, Ariya Shirazi,

and you might be thinking to yourself,

hey, you guys did an Olympic show.

Hey, training camp may have just started,

but the season is a little bit away.

What do you guys possibly have to talk about?

Well, later in the show,

I'm going to be talking some serious sports and politics

about Tyreek Hill and what happened in Miami. But with Aria, there is basketball stuff to suss

through. And we are going to talk about the five players that we are intrigued by watching

this season.

Now, there are a couple of rules to how we decided to do this.

The first is no rookies and no second year players, because that's just obvious.

Like who isn't curious what a rookie like, say, for example, Reed Shep Shepherd is going to do in Houston. I'm curious about

Reed Shepherd or or a second year player, someone like Victor Wembeyanama, like will they take

the leap or will scoot Henderson ever justify the hype? Those are easy ones. So we're not doing

first year or second year players. We're doing vets in the league, minimum entering their third year, and people were intrigued by now. Also, I want to say the other rule is that this isn't necessarily players we expect to make some big leap. Hell, it could be players we expect to fall off the face of the earth or could be someone in my case i'm

just telling you right now who if i'm curious if they can fill the role that's been assigned

for them because the quality of their team this year will not depend on this player becoming any

sort of all-star but just able to fill a critical role.

So I'm super excited about this.

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