Bill Simmons and Tim Legler discuss how many wins the Thunder would have this season if you replaced SGA with Brandin Podziemski (Simmons says they would win 53 games, Legler says mid-high 50s)
50 if you take out sga, 45 is you add podziemski
Bro makes some truly strange plays
The broccoli will get into your brain
Podz last 20 games stats, 18ppg, 5rbs, 3ast
Yea but he leads the league in strange plays per 36
This is his 3rd season in the league and his BBIQ just isn’t at that young star level. He’s a solid role player, but with no Curry/Jimmy for most of the season he seems awkward trying to run the offense.
I don’t think anyone expects podz to reach star level anything. Except maybe podz.
It’s either that or he’s a basketball terrorist.
lol yeah my first reaction was “well do they HAVE to play him?”
Podz wouldnt play on this OKC team. Ill take McCain, Wallace, and Mitchell over him.
And warriors were adamant that they would not include him in the trade for Markkanen lol
I wonder if I would find him as annoying if he got a haircut.
…
My lawn? Please remove yourself from it.
Do people understand how crazy it is for a player to account for 10+ wins by himself??? I don’t think this is insane at all. The Jordan less Bulls won 55 games one year. Yes basketball can often be changed by one player but when you’re talking teams who are winning over 65 games, it is actually insane for one guy to be so good they elevate your team from good to all time status. A player making a 50 win team a 65 win team is MUCH harder than one making a 35 win a 50 win team.
Not only that, but there’s an upper limit to how good a team can be. If you replaced SGA with prime LeBron last season, that team is not going to win significantly more than 68 games. Does that mean prime LeBron is only slightly better than Shai? Obviously not
Lebron himself never won more than 66 games in a season. Just goes to show how crazy a 68 win season is.
Why are people acting like this is some outlandish take? This is quite literally what win shares are for.
It’s just OKC fans. They love shitting on their own team to elevate Shai for some reason. They like to pretend he’s LeBron in 2007 carrying a bunch of bums
Thats just cap.
What it is said is that OKC needs SGA badly on the offensive or the results range from mid to bad. Which the numbers support for a few years now.
The Rockets offense is ass and they still have 51 wins right now. A great defense goes a long way
All i see in the thunder sub is how hard they get that their third team is as good as it is
It’s also why that metric is pretty bullshit.
If you swap chet with Jokic, would SGA get better or worse? Would Jokic get worse? Defensively they’d drop but having the goat offensive big man would have to make SGA better. Would SGAs win share go up? If so, its a metric that can’t be truly trusted.
Solid point
For sure. I think you can see more win improvement on the low end exactly because of this. Cleveland went from 17 wins to 35 when they added Bron. Not much change in the team besides Jeff McInnis for 31 games and Eric Williams for 50. Neither were great.
And that’s a rookie Bron, so inserting a peak Bron obviously adds more.
Agreeing here. Assuming OKC has ~53 wins (and some of their competition therefore wins more games) that makes them the 5-6 seed in the West. Saying “Shai takes the 6th seed and makes them the best in the stacked West 2 years in a row” feels more complimentary
They’re 8-4 without him this year which is 55 win space. Wins vs UTA, MEM, LAL, PHO, BRK, CLE, TOR, CHI. Losses vs SAS, HOU, MIL, DET.
Spurs are 12-5 without wemby
U think they’re 58 win space?
50+ is definitely possible. Talented team.
They’re definitely a 50 win team without him at least considering how good they’ve looked in games he hasn’t played.
100% Wemby is not as good as Shai and Spurs are arguably deeper than okc
I’m not even sure what “not as good as” means in the context of Shai vs Wemby. They are generational talents with major differences in team roles, position, and style of play. Direct comparison is silly outside of end of season awards discussions. If I’m creating a team and building around either, obviously you can’t go wrong with either, but I’m personally choosing Wemby over Shai for this year and for the future.
And I have to strongly disagree about bench depth. Yes, we have a solid 8-9 man rotation, but OKC with JW back might have the deepest bench literally in the history of the NBA.
Cason, Caruso, Jaylin, Isaiah, Wiggins, Mccain, Ajay. They literally have 11 guys that could start on half the teams in the NBA.
In comparison, we have Keldon Johnson, Harper, Barnes, and Kornet. It’s not really a comparison. Yes, it’s a good rotation, but it doesn’t really compare.
They have like 3 top picks outside of Wemby. Castle will likely be All-NBA next season.
He strategically sat some games vs bad teams earlier in the season when he actually got injured we went 5-4 without him
do keep in mind a lot of the losses without SGA were also without JDub
When they have him available as the next man up, they’re still an excellent team (they went 4-0 without SGA when JDub was in the lineup).
Hundred percent. But he hasn’t been there this year. Which i believe is what Simmons is considering. He isnt saying SGA only misses the games JDub plays. But you are right that plays a huge factor in how the squad plays. Same with who we play.
Which is why this comparison is bullshit. If SGA rests against the Jazz 4x we get 4 wins without him. That doesn’t hurt his impact at all. It says more about the Jazz than OKCs lineup. You can say the same about Jokic and Wemby. I hate this “swap players” narrative comparison because its so non-scientific and disingenuous.
Very good point here, send this one to the top
A difference in 10 games is so massive.
You are 46 and 36. Win 10 more then you are 56 and 26. That’s the difference between being 10 games and 30 games over .500.
Also, elevating a team from 50 to 60 is harder than a team from 40 to 50.
A 40 win team is expected to have about -0.3 netrating. A 50 win team about +4. A 60 win team about +9.
The more wins, the gaps increase a bit more. A 50 win team is closer to a 60 win team than a 40 wins one, in theory atleast
The best way to understand the difference between 50 wins and 65 wins compared to 35 and 50 is the amount of games you need to win per loss.
For 50 wins you will have a loss every 1.56 games. For 65 wins you will have a loss every 3.82 games.
For 35 wins it’s a loss every 0.744 games. For 50 wins it’s a loss every 1.56 games.
As you win more games the amount of total games available to lose a game starts to go down. Going from 50 to 65 wins is insanely hard compared to 35 to 50. So a player by themselves missing accounting for 10 losses when the team has won 65+ wins is insane value.
Your but Jalen Williams missed essentially the when season. Caruso plays half the games. They wouldn’t win 50 games.
Bill specifically mentions Ajay taking up the slack and starting for SGA, but he was also out for much of the season.
There are tons of other counter-examples, too.
1989-1990 Spurs draft DRob and go from 21 to 56 wins
1996-1997 Spurs losing DRob go from 59 to 20 wins
1997-1998 Spurs getting DRob back + Duncan go from 20 to 56 wins
2009-2010 Cavs lose LeBron and go from 61 to 19 wins
2025-2026 Pacers lose Haliburton and go from 50 to 19 wins
Yeah, obviously there were other changes too, but losing a superstar can be devastating to a team.
At the extreme like those there is also typically tanking involved.
It can be but typically when a team wins 60+ games, it’s usually not one player. LeBron’s peak was in Miami yet that Heat team only won more than 60 games once . A lot of the examples here are teams either tanking or just punting on the season.
So right.
Always chuckle when people say that SGA marginal value is lower than let’s say Giannis or Embiid or any player in a weaker team. I mean, it’s obvious that it’s harder to move a team from 55 to 65 wins vs 35 to 45 wins
lol this is a hypothetical though that’s probably flat out wrong
The Bulls had another top 25 all time player to take that load.
Agreed, the record for most Wins About Replacement in MLB history belongs to Babe Ruth with 182.6 out of 2503 games played. Which means he represented about 7.3% of his teams wins over his career. This is with a larger roster in baseball, so to say that an MVP represents about 20% of his team’s wins in the NBA is not ridiculous at all
Sure. And the Bulls were 34-31 in 95’ when he came back and went 13-4 his remaining 17 games to finish 47-35.
Look at Tom Brady in 2007⁄2008. The team almost goes undefeated and the next year wins 10 or 11 games with a back up.
I mean LeBrons Cavs went from a 50 win team to 16 wins right after. Luka and Jokic’s probably add 20 wins to their teams
NOT MENTIONED IN THIS CLIP:
Tim basically said it would be a 10 game drop for every team, Bill said Denver would win the fewest games without their MVP candidate but it wasn’t like some huge margin.
are they counting the lakers? the lakers would win the fewest by far.
Lakers are 12-11 since the Luka trade in games without Luka.
over that time span, without their star
LAL 12-11
DEN 12-10
OKC 13-4
and those OKC losses were ALL with Jalen Williams also out of the lineup
So they were missing their two top options in order to get tagged with those Ls
they have beat 2 teams with a winning record without luka.
And they’ve only played 6 games against winning teams without Luka. 3 of them without Reaves. 2 without LeBron.
If a player is this valuable to a team, this should definitely be one of the criteria for an award. Perhaps we could call it Most Valuable Player? Or, shorter, MVP?
😉
Especially if we’re saying the season goes the same otherwise. No LeBron for the first 20 games and then the Austin Reaves injury might have straight up made the Lakers start tanking by the new year
The Lakers absolutely would’ve been tanking by January if Luka wasn’t on the team, or in this hypothetical if he was swapped with Podz. I don’t think that’s even a question.
Bill Simmons either ignores Luka or bashes Luka. It’s been that way since Luka’s last couple of Dallas seasons before the trade.
Poor Luka and the Lakers. They never get the attention from national media.
He does seem to have some sort of disdain for Luka. I know he hates the lakers, but he does seem to overlook Luka’s importance
bronny would be playing 30 min a night lol
I’d rather Bronny play 30 minutes than Podz lol
podz has actually improved imo. he’s not a bad player. Bronny has improved too but he is worse than Podz
His numbers be respectable fs. He’s like a half step up from a washed Ben Simmons
Interesting trivia here: Bronny James has shot better than 40% in just 22.4% of career games played.
Maybe if they made a rule Bronny can’t foul out of a game, sure.
Bill didn’t include the Lakers, shouldn’t shock anyone. That would result in praising Luka.
I am trying to be fair to Simmons which is hard since he is such an obvious homer and intellectually dishonest person but Luka is not qualified since he is not going to play 65 games (except if he wins the arbitration or whatever it was over missing 2 games because of his kid being born)
Did they factor in injuries?
Because I find it hard to believe the Thunder win 55 games with J-Dub missing 60% of the season, along with IHart, Mitchell, Caruso, Chet, etc all missing a lot of games.
This is near incomprehensible English.
Tim Legler basically said that each of the teams with MVP candidates would lose about 10 more games this year if you replaced that MVP candidate with an average player because each of those teams are very good teams with good players.
Bill said Denver would lose more games without Jokic than the other teams would without their MVP candidate, but the discrepancy is not enormous.
Yeah idk what that says
Tim basically said was 10 games for every team/mvp candidate, Bill said it Denver would win the fewest but it wasn’t like some huge margin
Am I missing something or does this comment make literally no sense? How does this have almost 300 upvotes?
It’s always fun seeing fans of MVP candidates acting like their team is garbage to try and talk up their guy. Both can be good
Ngl Denver fans did this so much with jokic over the last few years and it was eaten up
The highly upvoted post last year that was like “OKC is 55 win team without Shai, Denver is 17 win team without Jokic” was one of this subreddits most embarrassing moments
Was some insane disrespect to their starters when that popped up. Denver issue was their shitty bench. MPJ, Jamal and AG are some of the best in the league. Hell I consider AG might just be the best non-superstar player in the league
We had good pieces but the team fell apart without Jokic. I blamed it more on coaching staff though.
It also didn’t help that Jamal was very bad last year
If Jokic had Tobias and Simmons instead of Murray and AG he would’ve left Denver lol
Jamal Murray becomes Ant when people talk about his all nba chances and then he becomes Podz when people talk about Jokic mvp
His first MVP year it was a very real thing. Bro brought Facu Campazzo, Austin Rivers, and Will Barton to the playoffs.
Yeah I’m not about to listen to these blanket statements frankly. Jokic HAS had reasonable help in broad strokes but he’s also bad to carry some really mediocre groups at times and gets the most out of his teammates more than any other player in the league. Luka has done it at times too in Dallas more so, SGA it’s hard to say because the good seasons OKC have had at present are with talented rosters
It’s hilarious revionism that frames itself as correcting revisionism
We essentially had no backup center in that era and the bench roster was TERRIBLE. So many guys who literally did not play within the next calendar year started for the Nuggets in PLAYOFF games.
One of the players this is absolutely true for is Steph Curry. The one season he missed almost in its entirety ended up with the Warriors having the worst record in the league and the #2 pick. This season he missed significant time and they’ve been absolute dog water.
That was the 2020 season, where they went from 57 wins and losing the Finals to winning 15 games. But Klay Thompson also missed that whole season (and the following one), and they lost Kevin Durant in free agency. The Warriors’ top 8 in minutes played for 2020 were (in order) Eric Paschall, Glen Robinson III, Damion Lee, Alec Burks, Jordan Poole, Draymond Green, Marquese Chriss, and D’Angelo Russell. So yeah, a lot more was going on there than just Curry missing the whole season.
This season they have 37 wins with 2 games to go, so they’ll finish with 37-39 wins. Last season they won 48 games. So, a dropoff of 9-11 games.
Yea great point the early Jokic arguments were all addition but subtraction. I was glad he finally won a title and excelled at the highest level bc for a while there Jamal Murray was schroedingers MJ
To be fair, as a Rockets fan it certainly dates beyond that. I was personally citing the “no help” clause in the 2015 MVP race between Harden and Steph.
This was said specifically about 24-25 bro and not without reason during the regular season
Thunder fans love doing it it’s funny hysterical. Like fucking embrace your likely dynasty squad lol.
The thunder simultaneously have a stacked roster of team first role players who can pass drive and shoot… and also can go completely cold and really struggle with the non-Shai offense.
I don’t think any thunder fans think the roster’s trash lol
yea honestly the only reason why the thunder are beatable is the complete lack of efficient offensive creation from anyone other than shai. honestly hes a poster boy for why helioball works when you elevate a team’s offense as hard as he does
None of y’all actually respect the Thunder like that tho.
You only do it to discredit Shai’s impact.
I remember reading so many comments on this subject about how Chet’s not an All Star.
You should see spurs fans on the “12-5 without Wemby” posts lma
Same thing with the Spurs lol.
You don’t respect any of the Spurs supporting cast until it’s time to shit on Wemby.
You think Fox is a bum who’s not an all star and doesn’t deserve half his contract. You think Castle’s defense is overrated and he just gets open looks.
You can’t name a single player past Harper, But when you need to hate on Wemby, Fox is the CPOTY again who’s carrying Wemby in the clutch and Castle is prime Derrick White on the perimeter.
The Chet discourse during ASB was so bad. I’m convinced none of them watched games, but there was a mass of people in comment sections everywhere saying Chet didn’t deserve AS and cited his ‘17 ppg’.
He’s about to be top 3 DPOY, 1st team All-D, and possibly 3rd team All-NBA. Shoutout all the clowns I was arguing with lmao.
Chet will be the perennial “not Wemby DPOY” winner for the foreseeable future. A shame he wont get recognized for putting up absurd impact stats when there’s an alien in the league who has similar stats AND narrative AND gameplan adjustments.
Thunder fans point out how injured we’ve been this season. Not the lack of a squad, most of us are aware we’re 14 deep😂
Yeah “best player on the best team” should and does have significance in the voting
They’d be significantly worse especially with the injuries to Jalen Williams, he’s only played 33 games
Yea that offense would be really rough without both for an extended period, feels like they would be more in the low to mid 40s range
I-Hart missed half year also
At one time we led the league in games missed due to injuries.
Legally Should be arrested for this take.
The Thunder have a +6.26 net rating this season in 1600 minutes with SGA off the floor. That would be the 6th best in the entire NBA this season. The Nuggets have a +4.9 net rating, Cavs +4.4, Rockets +5.1. All those teams won 50+ games this season
Celtics without Jaylen Brown are a plus 12.4 net rating. They’d be the best team in the league if they just cut him!
Lmfao the obsession this sub has with on/off and TS% is ridiculous
I think it’s because those stats are the easiest to understand tbh.
But people clearly don’t understand them
I think they understand them, they don’t understand how to use them. It’s the next step really in critical thinking. Most people just don’t know how to think of root level things in context because they’re lazy.
Most of that positive net rating is just OKCs bench vs other team benches? Meaningless stat to bring up lol
While there is some truth that OKC “bench” probably never plays against another team starting 5…your comment also has two other flaws…one is that teams always stagger bench vs bench unit. It’s not hockey, and while I only watched about a dozen OKC games, they definitely do not do hockey subs, and often have Shai playing “bench” minutes.
And more importantly, OKC without Shai just isn’t their bench, it’s 4 starters, including 2 max players, one a DPOY candidate the other an all-star.
this is just saying they have a better bench than other teams. ntm a portion of the time sga is off the floor the game is already over.
Bro missed 12 games not a whole damn season
Data from small sample sizes can be cool to look at but there are so many other factors at play
Every top team this year has winning records without their best players
Also increasing a good teams +- is harder then a bad ones. It’s easier to take a -5 team to a +5 then it is for a +5 to a +15. That’s what Shai is doing right now which is incredibly good.
If Shai was on a bad team you’d likely see an insane +/- split as well.
You can’t just do that. The minutes trickle down & this year’s non-SGA minutes are against non-starting and non-crunch time units.
There’s no way they would sustain that same net rating with SGA off if he was actually gone.
you guys are looking at it as sga slander instead of looking it as how well the thunder are built.
Yep, not just players and depth but cohesiveness and play style. Fuckin juggernaut.
Why? SGA has by far the best defensive supporting cast in the NBA. The offense wouldn’t be great but even if they were like 15-20 on offense, they’d still be a pretty good team.
Give them a bottom 5 offense (like 111p/100) and the still have the net rating of a 50+ win team, their defense is that good.
I bet if someone said at the end of last season the celtics would be the 2 seed if you got rid of holiday and Tatum people would think the same thing…
So a team with Ajay Mitchell as their number 1 option and no other real ball handler would win 55 games in the west ?
I remember when the bucks were a good team; people will try to devalue SGA by praising his supporting cast, but then turn around and say the team as a whole isn’t as dominant as they seem because of x, y, z… refs, close playoff series, etc;
It’s how you know you’re in a good spot.
They will also try to devalue the supporting cast lol. When Chet and jdub were named all stars this sub said that they were undeserved but then they say that okc is stacked
i think people are still trying to come to grips with the fact that any team with shai is stacked
Yeah that’s what I’m saying, Chet and JDUb either suck or are absolute monsters depending on the conversation.
When ur team is this good I honestly think it’s better to just appreciate it and not worry about repping your guys too much, they’ll cement their own legacy and the haters are never really defeated.
They have two other all star all nba players…?
They said Jalen Williams also misses a ton of games in this scenario.
So why was Chet an all star?
Because he’s an elite defender? Removing the offensive creation from Shai leaves a huge hole on that side of the ball that Chet is not making up for.
How many games has JDub played this season
33, and he was clearly less than 100% for most of them
Jdub has only played 33 games this season and been bad for most of them as he still was uncomfortable with his shooting hand. Chet isn’t even the thunders 3 option on offense and while he’s great on defense his not a game changer on offense.
Williams has played less than half the games this season
Yes
Yes, because ur team is stacked.
This is an insane take by Bill. I can’t believe Legler is actually entertaining it and agreeing with it.
Probably yes
Ringer mafia is insane man
This is honestly right in line with win shares stats on basketball reference, which has Shai at 15.4 win shares for this season. The Thunder have 64 wins, which would put them around 50 without Shai, statistically.
And Podz himself has 5 win shares this season (really).
yeah kinda crazy that it actually aligns pretty well haha
They’re not even wrong
There’s no way they believe this
Why not? Okc are stacked as shit.
Defensively sure
Offensively they’re full of mediocre ball handlers and shooters that need Shai to be positive players
Strong defense is the easiest way to rack up wins in the regular season though, which they maintain at almost the exact same level without Shai
Have you seen Podz ever do anything relatively close to emulating SGAs most basic performances ?
Podz can be literally on the bench, that’s the whole point 😂
Bill I can see. But Legs was the best basketball analyst ESPN had. Surprising from him.
Not really. A singular player accounting for over 10 wins alone is massive.
Theyre gonna be so shook when sga leapfrogs their golden boy by the end of this season
Should have had Lowe on this too.. Lowe was trying to make the argument that the increase in Jokic turnovers was Jokic saving the team from team turnovers
So Podz will be the main ball handler in this case then? No way they can sustain the offense throughout the season if that’s the case.
Wouldn’t the argument just be that OKC has the best defense in modern NBA history and wouldn’t need to have a good offense to win 50 games? I think they’d be the kind of team that stacks regular season wins but loses early in the postseason
Nah, AJ Mitchell would start and Pods would come off the bench. Or maybe not assuming he’s behind Caruso, Mitchell, Wallace, Dort, McClain etc.
If JDub was 100% healthy then maybe I can see it, but with the injuries the team had, idk. The amount of times Shai had to will the team in the clutch to a win has been a lot.
Smoking Fent
I think they’re seriously undervaluing SGA
I think you’re underestimating how great a player has to be to take a 50s-win team into the high 60s
That’s fair. I just watch a lot of Thunder games and most 4th quarters the entire offensive plan is see what SGA can do
bruh most thunder 4th quarters ‘what SGA can do’ is rest on the bench cuz the game is over
going by this metric LaMelo Ball would probably be the MVP, Hornets have been and would be total ass without him
They’d be a play in team
there is zero evidence to suggest this.
-mediocre to poor half-court offense when Shai is off the floor.
-2nd option missing most of the season .
-they’re not a great 3-point shooting team
-They needed a lot of heroics from Shai to win a sizable amount of games.
-the west is stacked and the first team above the play in is Minnesota.
Podz isn’t even a PG! Lmao this is so disrespectful
This take seems kinda dumb, but the 93 Bulls went 55-27
Feels like that’s the exception to the rule and not the rule. Teams that have a bad season after losing a star don’t get remembered much because that’s exactly what you would expect to happen
Comment section playing basketball in a spreadsheet are fucking funny.
I’m confused why people are so upset about this.
They are a +7 NET without Shai this season. They were a 13!!!! NET without Shai last playoffs.
They routinely murder teams without him
The problem is you can’t use On/Off this way because you’re applying 0 context for lineups
If you actually believe in your argument, then if the Celtics cut Jaylen Brown, you’re saying they’d win 68 games. They have a +12.4 without him, surely removing him would make them one of the greatest teams ever is we’re using on/off this way
Shai frequently has to play with the worst players in OKC’s rotation, which, bc of the injuries this year, were often mediocre or bad players. There was a game earlier in the year where his teammates on the floor were Joe/Kenrich/Barnhizer/Carlson and they still were getting quality looks every possession. Podz is not making that lineup offensively viable
I agree they’re a great supporting cast for Shai. However the whole equation changes when you just don’t have to consider him at all when preparing for this team.
They’d still be a playoff team and probably a pretty decent one. But I don’t think they could maintain a 7 net rating for a whole season without SGA. Doesn’t help that Jalen Williams has basically missed 70% of the year. If he was the player from last year I’d say it’s more likely for them to maintain it, but without him they just have a very pedestrian offense.
Best defense in the league and slightly below average offense still probably gets you 47-50 wins though, I just don’t know about a +7 for the whole year.
Because you are really telling me that a Podziemski, Dort, Holmgren, Wallace, Jaylin Williams (not Jalen) starting lineup wins more games than the Nuggets this season?
Playing limited minutes(like 15-18mpg and the occasional game off) without your offensive engine is much different than going the entire season without him. Especially with J Dub out this year, their half court offence was terrible without SGA. If they had to do every night with Podz instead of SGA they would be a defence fist team that would probably wind up in the mid 40s.
They’re right but it doesn’t negate shais ability. It’s harder to go from 50 wins to 67 than it is from 25-50.
Shai could easily carry a horrible team too. Shai does not have a good offensive eco system around him. Yeah he’s got an elite defense but any scrub team like the nets could surround him with defenders and win 48 games most likely.
What a dumb debate
Elite discussion fellas
Elevating a good team to one of the best teams in league history is more valuable and impressive than elevating an average team to a good team.
I like how people bring up that Mitchell would get more minutes. Mitchell missed 25 games.
Surprised this is a hot take
If you made the rest of their roster magically healthy? Yeah probably breaking 50. They’d have multiple guys (Jdub, Chet, Ajay, maybe one of Mccain or Joe) that would be able to average 20+ if you magically opened up SGA’s 33-34% usage a game. SGA gets ~20 registered field goal attempts and 9 free throw attempts (app. 4 more field goals) per game over the last 2 seasons.
If you distributed 24 more shots, even if the team’s efficiency goes down they’d have to get some of those points elsewhere.
What’s more important, too, is they’d still be the best defense in the league. And defense is what keeps you in every game each night. Offense has more ups and downs on shooting variance.
It’s really sad they need to just start making up pointless “what if” scenarios because it’s the most effective way to sell gambling ads to whatever unc demographic finds this interesting.
Regardless of if a I disagree or not, this is truly a random take. (Obviously Podz is nowhere near SGA’s level)
Wouldn’t adding Podziemski kind of nerf them? They’d just roll with Mitchell and Cason as their PG rotation, and I could see them winning around 50 games.
Podz is very underrated because he says stupid things in the media and so his lowlights are distributed because of that. But since the all star break he has been averaging 18/5/4 on above average efficiency. He would easily be above Wallace in the rotation.
[deleted]
why is it wrong?
AD is better offensive player than Duncan. That should not be controversial lol
This isn’t a bad take at all lol
Hartenstein only played 47 games this season, Jalen Williams only played 33. I love Jaylin Williams and Cason Wallace, but they aren’t starter-level players on a 53 win team
Cason Wallace would start on most teams in the NBA are we serious
I believe they’re still a playoff team, but there’s no way this would’ve happened especially if you consider how underwhelming Chet’s offense has been this year and that JDub was injured.
It’s 2026 and people are still listening to Bill Simmons and failing for this shtick?
what a stupidly pointless conversation to have… i guess they ran out of things to talk about?
This may be one of his weakest episodes in a while.
-Coping for Celtics losing to Knicks (psychologically they couldn’t take a loss if JB played) -Both Bill and Tim claiming they’ve never meant ANYONE who had an appendectomy. -Tim going on a rant about when he was in agonizing sternum pain, but battled on to finish game 7 commentary..
-and This podsiemski mess. Yikes.
OKC without SGA would be closer to Heat/Blazers level
I mean the Celtics just win 50 games with no Tatum. The Thunder could and would definitely do this.
They didn’t say they’d win a playoff series, but these great teams have such huge baselines and cultures that I think it’s hard to deny. Spurs would also win 50 games and look at the Pistons without Cade. They playoffs is when the stars would be needed