Welcome to Lockdown Warriors, your daily podcast on all things, Warriors, part of the

Lockdown Podcast Network.

I'm Wes Goldberg, Warriors writer for the Mercury News.

I'm joined now by Chad Ford, host of

Chad's NBA Big Board on the Lockdown Podcast Network and an NBA draft expert and insider with over

20 years of experience, including at ESPN. He recently joined our network and his podcast is a must listen,

especially for Warriors fans looking ahead to the draft chat, thanks for joining me today.

Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Wes.

So as I understand it, you're living in Hawaii, and you said that over the last couple of years,

you've been living in an ESPN quarantine.

How have you been spending that time?

Well, I, when ESPN did their layoffs in 2017, I still had two years left on my contract

and they, they enforced no compete that just left me out of the draft for a couple of years.

And so in the meantime, I started writing a book. I'm a

university professor. That's my full-time job anyway. Doing conflict resolution, started writing a book,

Dangerous Love, which comes out in June, and just went back and spent some time just enjoying

the NBA and college basketball as a fan and looking back at past

drafts and trying to get some perspective on what went right, what went wrong, why it went right

or wrong, and just tried to get a deeper understanding of what this is about. And two years was a nice amount of time to get some perspective.

And in fact, about half of my podcast right now have been John Hollinger and I going back

and doing redrafts.

And a lot of that has been the sort of research and insight that's come over the last

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