00:00The Bay Area sports fans right now, we could use a little distraction.
00:05Yeah, we're hurting right now.
00:06Well, you know that I don't necessarily believe in that, like as a whole,
00:12but this little stretch right now here for the Golden State Warriors
00:18is a little bit of a migraine headache.
00:21This is pretty tough, and there's a number of ways we could attack this.
00:26Steph Curry's injury is lingering, and now we're getting into a spot
00:30where people, I think, are rightfully questioning whether we're going to see him at all this year.
00:34The same holds true for Kristaps Porzingis.
00:37Meantime, Jonathan Kaminga is putting on his own personal slam dunk contest with the Atlanta Hawks.
00:43People are chanting, thank you, Warriors.
00:45One of them has the name Dominique Wilkins.
00:47Look, I think this is kind of what I was getting at a week ago
00:51when I said to you, there's going to be nuance involved in this story,
00:56but I don't think you can expect the audience to understand or notice all of the nuance.
01:03That's not the way that we do this.
01:05This is the NBA.
01:07People just want to have fun, and when you combine all of these things,
01:11you combine Jonathan Kaminga, like elevating above the rim half of his body,
01:18Steph Curry's hurt, Kristaps Porzingis is out again tonight,
01:23Steve Kerr is having to, like, sort of half-apologize for something that he said to us on Friday.
01:30No prompting, by the way.
01:31We just asked him if Kristaps was sick, like regular sick or not,
01:35and he kind of launched into it, and he obviously regretted it.
01:40Just stack all this together, and what do you get?
01:42But it's kind of an embarrassing look right now for the Warriors, whether it should be or not.
01:47It just is.
01:48It's brutal is what it is.
01:50It's a brutal look, and you go back to the Jimmy injury, and, you know, that happens,
01:53and Steph, now he's got bad knees, and he's about to be 38 here coming up in 12 days,
01:58and Draymond Green, unfortunately for some, is available and plays basketball,
02:04and then beyond that, you've got a group of really young and hungry Warriors
02:10who are out there doing their level best, and, you know, sometimes it's good enough,
02:14and sometimes it's not, and you've got a coach, yeah, backpedaling off of, you know,
02:19debunking an illness that the own, the player himself had said that he had been dealing with,
02:25and that was a long time ago, and you've got, you know, a GM saying, you know,
02:29basically if there's no demand, then he can't make a demand,
02:33and it's been kind of a rough, I mean, forget like a week or two weeks,
02:37it's been a rough year for this team, no doubt, but I felt like this weekend was
02:42what I hope is the low point, I really do, the nadir, I hope, yeah, you know,
02:49when people are always like, this is rock bottom, I'm like, you don't know if it's rock bottom
02:52until you're looking backward at it, that's right, like we're in it, I don't know if this is rock bottom,
02:57but this was a one, two, three punch, we left here on Friday, Steve Kerr told us
03:05that the hope was that Kristaps Porzingis plays on Saturday night, he had practiced on Friday,
03:10and they hoped he would play on Saturday, by the time we get to midday Saturday,
03:15Kristaps is out of that game, Kristaps is already out of this game, coming up tonight,
03:20Clippers in town, Steph Curry's injury, he does an interview with Malik Andrews,
03:26he's like, meh, I don't really know when this is going to be over,
03:30they immediately announced at least another 10 days until you re-evaluate,
03:35which was the announcement they had 10 days ago, and meantime, the Hawks play the Portland Blazers,
03:42and they win by 30, and JK spends the fourth quarter with his entire head above the rim,
03:48and Dominique Wilkins, the human highlight reel, is out here, you know, this is the stuff that he's saying
03:55right here, FanDuel Sports Network, Southeast, hey, but Bob, I'm not surprised, I mean, this kind
04:00of play, when we've seen Kaminga do this before, you know, in Golden State, man, and how you give up
04:06on a guy that young, with that ability, is beyond me, take your breath away, if the windmill dunk
04:15didn't get you, that one did, yes, indeed, all right, snooty broadcaster guy, I don't like the
04:21other guy, Dominique, he gets respect, that's Dominique Wilkins, and take your breath away,
04:27shut up, I mean, he's not wrong, no, but that's, I'm giving you that it's not his fault, it's ours,
04:34that's what I'm saying, the whole weekend, felt like crap, it all felt like crap, and I didn't even
04:42get to the part where Steve Kerr's like, yeah, never mind, right, never mind, is it Potts,
04:49I don't know, it's something, but I'm not ever going to talk about it ever again, right,
04:54and it's not like you, you know, were grilling him on it, you asked him a question, and he went
04:59out and just said what he said about, yeah, about it not being Potts, I mean, it's one thing
05:04if you, you know, and Steve Kerr's never going to get put into a corner in an interview, because
05:10he's a gifted speaker, but you asked him, and he just, he offered it up, and then the next
05:15day, it's like, well, no, I shouldn't have said that, I regret it, and you know, it really wasn't
05:20his place, like the whole thing about HIPAA laws, we can never even like, I don't even know, I don't
05:25even know what they are, like, I know it's what people bring up every time someone talks about
05:29someone else's health, well, it's privacy, but what's the law, did Steve break the law with us on
05:34Friday, no, I don't think he broke the law, okay, it's more of a policy, for example, if you're out
05:40sick,
05:41and you have COVID, I can't ask you if you have COVID, the boss can't ask you, it would be
05:47cool
05:47if you let people know that you have COVID, that way other people can be like, oh boy, I've been
05:52around him, and that way I can go ahead and, you know, and get checked or whatever, but, and that's
05:57where, when we were at the peak of that, it was, you know, somebody around you in your office has
06:03been
06:03positive for COVID, but they wouldn't tell you who, unless the person said, yeah, go ahead and tell
06:07them, I don't care, so that is where the HIPAA comes in, it's privacy, and so I don't know if
06:13he violated the HIPAA law, or if the Warriors are, you know, if he, if he got written up by
06:19the
06:19Golden State Warriors. Well, he's talking about, he's talking about a condition that Kristaps has
06:23openly already talked about. Right. It's out there, this is public knowledge, what Steve did was he
06:28kind of told us that, no, actually, it's not that, that the Hawks general manager told me it's not
06:34that. He indicated that it was something else that he didn't want to say, and now none of us
06:39know, and I'm not, like, because of all this, like, I'm not even all that comfortable talking
06:44about it, because I don't, I don't know what it is either, and quite frankly, I say this with
06:51compassion for Kristaps, it doesn't really matter what it is. Exactly. Like, I hope the best for him
06:58as a person, but it doesn't really matter what it is. We've arrived at a spot, the question we asked
07:06Steve was, is this regular sick, or is this related to what he's dealt with in the past? And Steve
07:11kind
07:11of said two things, he's like, well, what he's dealt with in the past has been misreported, and no,
07:16he's just sick. But then here we go again, Saturday night, and again tonight, and my thought is, and maybe
07:24we should have thought of this, and I think we kind of did, you and I both, our initial reaction
07:29to Kristaps Porzingis as the return for Jonathan Kaminga is like, well, that's disappointing,
07:35not because I don't like the player, but because he doesn't play enough. But we move ourselves to a
07:42spot where we go, well, let's give it a look, maybe he's ready to go. They have done their due
07:48diligence, and maybe he's ready to go. And he plays one game. And how many is this that he's
07:54officially missed as of tonight? Is this six? I've lost track. Seven? Maybe six. Yeah. Whatever it is.
08:00And so now my mind goes immediately to Chris Paul. And I, you could disagree with this, but I always
08:07looked at the acquisition of Chris Paul as simply a salary slot that the Warriors wanted to expire.
08:13That's what they did with Jordan Poole. They felt like there was nothing else of value that they
08:18could do. They could just accelerate the salary slot. And I think that's what they did here too.
08:24Yeah. And it's bad business. It's bad business. If you are in the maximize Steph Curry's window
08:29business and yeah, this year, Jimmy gets hurt. It's kind of a little bit of a done deal. Even if
08:35you
08:35make the playoffs, are you going to go on a run without Jimmy? Who knows? I doubt it, but I'm
08:40not trying
08:40to be a naysayer, but you're running out of Steph Curry windows. Like right now you're down to this
08:46year. The window is probably not open. You got next year. You've got beyond that maybe, but you're in a
08:53spot now where to me, just getting a $30 million salary slot, that's not good enough. That's not the
09:00way you should go about doing things. It'd be better to keep a guy who is what, 24 years old
09:06and can at
09:07least play and contribute. Right. But they chose not to. Well, they kind of, I think as we've all,
09:13I think sort of agreed, they arrived at a spot where they, Jonathan included, all felt like this
09:20had to come to an end. Right. And therefore you're forced into a finish when the league is not ready
09:25to do anything about it. And so you don't get much in return. You may have gotten nothing.
09:29You might've gotten absolutely nothing. You got 18 minutes of, uh, of a Latvian seven foot three
09:36guy. You got a salary slot, right? That's what you got. And if you can't fill it with anybody who's
09:40any good, then maybe you actually did get nothing.
09:43Thanks.
09:43Thanks.
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