Welcome back to the Athletic NBA show.

Coming up, it's our Eastern Conference preview.

Can anybody beat the Celtics?

Which player are we completely overlooking?

And we try to guess who's going to make a leap.

With a little over a week until opening night of the regular season, it's time for our annual

conference previews. Joining me to hit the Eastern Conference, my good pal S. Berahenny,

what's up, buddy? Are you ready for the regular season? I'm ready, man. It came quick, honestly.

I think when it comes to the offseason, it was a little bit dead.

You know, there wasn't that type of movement that everybody wanted to see or wants to see,

usually, that transactional talk. But it came quickly. I'm excited for the NBA season.

I'm going to push back on that just a little bit because the Carl Anthony Towns trade

definitely got us through the dark times, right? It came, I mean, just we were in the dog days. You're right. Summer and Carl Anthony Towns just bailed us out, as he might do for the Knicks this season. Who knows? Thank you to the big bodega. Thank you very much. I got to tell you, man, I've probably been taking away way too much from preseason games because I'm falling in love with a lot of rookies right now. We'll get to that later on in the show when we hit some of these questions. But let's jump in because obviously we have a lot to get to with NBA parody the way it is. You just never know how the season's going to work out. And this is one of the best times a year because everyone's so excited. And I tell you all the time, when we're talking about what our job is right now. Right now, we are selling hope. And then later on, we're going to come and snatch that away when we tell you that your team is not as good as we thought they might be. But right now, we're on the positive side. So let's jump right in. And we're going to talk title right off

the bat on the NBA.com annual GM survey. The Celtics, the overwhelming favorite to go back to

back this year. They got 83% in the vote. So we're not talking Celtics. Ask what I want to know.

And I'm actually going to jump on this one because I've got a hot take here.

Okay.

Which team in the East has the best chance of dethroning the Celtics?

And I'm going to answer for this question right off the bat.

Why not the Knicks?

We have all said they're the second best team in the

east if it's not going to be the celtics why not the nix s well if you ask dante de vincenzo

...