Welcome on to a very special Hollinger and Duncan, the type of episode that can only happen during a very special time of year, and that is your team's player who had off-season surgery won't be ready for the start of camp week. John, how are you enjoying it so far?

Oh, it's been a blast. Yeah. Really, you know, usually this is optimism week, right, where everyone's just singing their team's praises,

hey, we're going to run and press more and we're going to, you know, use the whole bench.

And we're so excited about all these young players we have.

And instead, there's been a lot of injury sad trombones instead.

Well, we will know that Ben Simmons will be a go to begin training camp on October 1st

with no restrictions according to his agent.

But of slightly more concern, Kauai Leonard had an off-season procedure on his knee.

And because we didn't hear anything about such a procedure right after the season,

he had said he had really kind of only been full go for two weeks right before USA

camp.

And then, of course, wasn't able to actually fulfill his role on the team.

And they elected to replace him after he really was struggling in camp.

And so one would imagine that he then had a procedure and now he's still experiencing swelling

with those. Supposedly it's not as bad as it was at the end of last season.

But he's like not even going to be doing drills apparently at the start of camp.

Yeah. This is this feels like a bit of a red flag. I mean, he basically got cut from the Olympic team, right? Which is pretty much never happened before. So definitely right away there, you knew something might might not be right. But I think this ties back to a little bit. He actually played 68 games last year, which is the most he played since 2017.

And I just don't know if we can ballpark a number anywhere near that for this year, unfortunately.

And I think this ties into another decision the Clippers made that talking to people around the league,

they were scratching their heads a little bit that they didn't opt to bring back Paul George in the

position they're in and just go ahead and pay him the max and maybe trade him if things don't work

out. And the one thing that I kind of countered with when I talked to these people is, what if the

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