Sam Quinn, CBS Sports NBA Reporter

Oh, such a clutch pickup, Dave. I know, right?

I was worried we'd bring back the same team. Oh no, I meant those blackout motorized shades. MVP of the room.

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Even you could do it. Nice. I installed these and then got some for my mom, too. You fly across the country to do the install?

Nope. Blinds.com can do it all. All she had to do was pick what she wanted.

She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install. Look at you, a Hall of Fame sun. Oh, I just picked the winning team. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Oh, Blinds.com is the GOAT. The GOAT. He shoots.

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Price and coverage match limited by state law. Sam, how are you, man? I'm wonderful. I'm like you. I want to get to the second round. The first round usually is good for, you know, two or three good series. Second round is where we really get to dial in on the best teams. You know, I think I'm ready to be done with Cavs magic. I'm ready for the podcast to start. Yeah, we're.

Listen, man, we're in the same boat. Well, we got a couple of teams that can be eliminated tonight. Let's talk about the matchup in the game that's going to get started in about 10 minutes from now between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Pacers. We see that Damian Lillard is going to try to give it a go tonight against the Pacers and the Pacers are going to try to eliminate the Bucks. Do you think that the Pacers have enough in them to get them the hell up on out of Dodge or you think the Bucks are going to try to push it to seven? I think the Pacers are going to close it out tonight. I mean, I hate how often this postseason, especially especially after like a relatively healthy regular season. I found myself saying the words. I'm not a doctor.

Look, I don't know. I don't know how healthy Damian Lillard is. I probably wouldn't be playing with fire with an Achilles injury like that. The risk just tends to be so, so high. We obviously remember what happened with Kevin Durant in the finals a few years ago. I just think the risk reward for them is not is kind of out of whack. You know, like you're down three to you got to win two to two more games just to get to the second round where you'll again be an underdog against the Knicks. And then after that, you'll be a huge underdog against Boston.

I'm sort of of the opinion that like the risk here is too high for the reward. The Pacers have looked so much better offensively at home. The Bucks kind of just punched them in the mouth in Game five.

And look, that happens. This is a young team that's never closed out a series before. I think on their home court, they're going to have a much easier time controlling tempo. Look, Damian Lillard in the best of times is not a good defender. Damian Lillard playing potentially on one leg. That's just you might as well just stick a bullseye on his back. I'm sure the Pacers are going to gear a lot of their offensive game planner out.

Let's go with the guy who may not be able to move. So I expect Indiana to close it out tonight. I generally don't like picking against the home team this late in the series. So, yeah, it's not great for the Bucks. I just think they're taking a really big risk here tonight, one that I probably wouldn't endorse. As Sam Cornish here with us from CBS Sports. Sam, if that if that happens, ensure it has to happen.

It has to happen first. What what would this offseason look like for the Bucks? For the Bucks, you bring in Doc Rivers, you have Giannis, you have Lillard, everybody else is these guys are older. This is a 30 over type squad just about. What could they possibly do to be as competitive as people thought that they were going to be?

Anything? You know, these injuries, injuries are always a bad thing. Obviously, you always want to be at full strength, give yourself the best chance to win. The real danger long term for the injuries the Bucks have had in this series is that it gives them an excuse to do nothing. Where they can kind of look at this and say, oh, yeah, we would have beaten the Pacers. We took them to six. We would have beat the Pacers if we were at full strength. So let's run it back. Let's try it again. No, absolutely not.

You should not run it back and try it again. Just look at what happened in the regular season. You know, this is the worst rebounding year they've had, at least since before the Mike Wootenholzer era. Their point of attack defense has been maybe the worst in the league. Their offense dies whenever Giannis goes to the bench. Like there are a lot of really serious problems with this roster.

That they might just try to hand wave away and say, oh, we were hurt. Doesn't matter if they had been at full strength, they would have lost probably to the Celtics, maybe to the Knicks. This was not a championship team. It's not going to be a championship team next year. They need to make serious changes. And those are going to be the kind of changes that teams tend not to want to make.

Like, look, nobody in Milwaukee is going to want to hear this. Chris Middleton just had a very good series. His value is probably never going to be higher. It might make sense for the Bucs to say, can we trade him for some perimeter defense, balance out our roster a little bit, and trust that in the second year of Damon Giannis together, those two are going to be enough offensively, where we want to have some balance, want to have some perimeter defense. That's something that I would consider.

I'd consider Bobby Bortis trades as well. You have to find some way to defend the perimeter if you're going to be a viable contender next year. The problem is, what they're most likely going to do is just bring this group back and say, no, no, we're going to find the right minimum salary for agents. And that's all they're going to have. They're going to be a second apron team. They don't have draft picks to trade. It's going to be shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. They're going to come back next year with a slightly different roster.

The result is probably going to be similar, though. Maybe they'll get hurt again. They're an old team. But even if they're at full strength next year, they're going to run into a team with good guards and probably lose then in the first or second round. Jalen Brunson, I think this year, averaged like 40-something points per game against them in the regular season. They played five times. I didn't think they were going to get past the Knicks if they had gotten past the Pacers.

I just, if I were them, I would be thinking a lot more drastically than, oh, we can make some minor tweaks. It'll be fine. We'll be healthy next time. Sam Quinn is here with us. Covers basketball for CBS Sports. Talking about another team that has been eliminated before we move forward to another game tonight. The Phoenix Suns. We know that they're pretty much saddled with Durant and Booker. Bradley Beal is not going to get any better of anything. He might stay the same or get worse.

What can they do? Just hope that Durant asks for a trade? There's no way in hell they get value for anybody except for Booker.

Yeah, I have no idea. I've been trying to look at this from every angle and it's like, okay, maybe you trade Durant. Okay, then Bradley Beal is your second best player.

You're built around two smaller guards. Are you really that excited about that? Probably not. Could you try to trade Beal? Sure, he has no trade clause.

Good luck getting value. Could you trade Booker? Well, yeah, you'd get a lot back for him, but he's also the only somewhat young and somewhat healthy guy on your team. Is a Beal-Durant role players team with both of those guys in their 30s really all that exciting?

No, there isn't really a good answer. You can't even tank because the Nets have all of your picks. What are you going to do? Are you going to trade Durant and Booker and get a haul of picks?

Well, then you're just Brooklyn without the New York market and McHale Bridges. You're just a team that has a lot of stuff but none of their own picks, so it doesn't matter. I have no idea. I think they're totally boxed in. There's no good move here. They're going to probably bring it back. That's what Matt Ashby has said. They're going to bring back the starting lineup. Maybe there's a coaching change. Maybe there isn't.

I would probably expect that there will be. They'll do some more of those box fringe signings where they are only going to have the minimum as well. They're going to be a second apron team. They're out of draft picks. They can't really make any trades.

Maybe you try to trade Nurkic for, you know, go down in salary a little bit. Maybe take back two cheaper guys. But there's not a good path there and I think a lot of these teams that went all in this offseason didn't know or weren't considerate enough of what the second apron was really going to mean for them moving forward. They kind of had to do it this year because the new rules just really give them no flexibility in fixing this. This is their team. This is their roster. There's not some magical, oh, we'll trade this guy and get our point guard. Or, oh, we can fix our defense by doing this one thing. No, you're pretty much confined to this is your group. You're going to add a couple minimum for agents.

Good luck with that. In a Western Conference this young and this deep, I'm not even sure the Suns are a playoff team next year. Like the Grizzlies are going to be back in it. The Rockets are presumably going to be a little bit better. San Antonio is the wild card here, but if they decide they're ready to win now, they have the assets to do it.

Like, nobody's talking about this. I think it's so hard for us to imagine a world in which, say, Lebron is not on a playoff team or Curry is on a playoff team or Durant is on a playoff team. There are going to be like 13 or 14 teams in the West that have rosters that we look at and say, oh, this is a 500 or better team.

Only 10 of them get to make the playoffs and only 6 of them lock in, the other 4 are in the play-in. We're going to be surprised. There's going to be some team with a lot of famous guys that doesn't make the playoffs next year. I wouldn't be that surprised if it was Phoenix.

Would you? Well, I mean, they need, they certainly need some help on that roster. And just like you, I don't, I don't know how the hell that they're going to do it. They were kind of middling throughout the course of this year, just flattened period. Sam Coyne is here with us, the JR Sport Brief Show on the Infinity Sports Network. You talk about a younger team or stars we saw the other night. I don't want to say a star was born, but he certainly had the performance of his career in Tyrese Maxey.

A lot of people paying him attention. We know the New York Knicks are down in Philly tonight trying to close them out. Do you think with the momentum having swung the Sixers away that they're going to come back and beat these short handed Knicks? I'm going to be honest, and I probably shouldn't say this as a basketball writer on a sports show. I kind of don't care.

And here's why. This is a placeholder season for Philadelphia. The way they've structured their roster. It's they're going to have a ton of cap space this offseason. They're going to first round fix the trade. I think the moment that they traded James Harden, they kind of knew this wasn't going to be the year.

All we're trying to do is get through it in one piece. And what happened with Maxey was just such a significant long term development where you can look at this year as a win, even if you don't make it past the first round. I mean, I think back to all of those playoff series over the years where Philly had Joel Embiid and kind of nothing else. There was that Toronto series in twenty nineteen where they lost the minutes that Embiid rested by like over one hundred points. There's the Atlanta series where Ben Simmons was afraid to take the shot. Obviously, there was the hardened year in Miami where he just says, oh, I'm sorry, nobody passed me the ball back.

What can I do? Just year after year after year, it's been Embiid with nobody else that he could really rely on. Now, with Tyrese Maxey, he has that guy. He has somebody that he can really trust to be a co-star in these games.

Maybe lighten his load a little bit. They have the two guys that matter and they're going to reshape the entire roster around them this offseason. So look, whether Philly loses in the first round tonight, second, third, whatever, I think we all more or less agree they're not going to be a championship caliber team this year. They only have two viable shot creators. The perimeter defense is so based on scheme and not enough on talent. It's just not a championship caliber team this year.

That's fine. They're going to go into the offseason. They're going to try to add a third guy or they're going to try to add a bunch of depth. Getting Maxey up to this level now is what matters. It was never about winning it all this year.

It was about feeling good that you had your two-man core moving forward and game five for Maxey was really proof. This is not just a sidekick. This is somebody that could be a true co-star for Joel Embiid. Someone we can really, really build around.

And now they know they have that guy. Well, Sam, you talk about this being a placeholder season. You mentioned also as well about the young players and young teams that are emerging in the West. When you look at who is left and who you expect to advance here in the NBA playoffs, who are you comfortable crowning as champs? Dare I say, are the Timberwolves with Anthony Edwards, are they going to shock the world and keep on rolling?

What do you think about these young squads and who can win the crown? Minnesota has a better shot now than I maybe would have thought a few weeks ago. Jamal Murray, we all remember the two-game winners against the Lakers, was not great in that series. He does not look like he's at 100 percent. Anthony Edwards, look, he's not the best player in that series. Jokic is the best player in the world. I think this is the first time during this Denver run where they've gone into a series and looked the other way and said, man, there is somebody there who could match Jokic shot for shot, who could really impact the game on a similar level. They have all that size to throw at Jokic.

It's weird, I mean, this is such an unprecedented situation. I hesitate to really make a pick in that series until I know what the deal is with Chris Finch. An injured coach is a big deal.

If your coach can't be on the sideline with you, if he can't be making those in the moment decisions, that's a scary situation to be in. So I hesitate to pick Minnesota. But I think this is probably the hardest series that Denver has faced since the beginning of last year's playoff. I think they have a reasonable shot. I think Oklahoma City has a reasonable shot, too. We saw them kind of face the version of the playoff, like, demons that we thought were going to hold them back. Where, oh, first round they run into the big center that we don't think they can defend.

And you know what I'm saying? Game one, he has a huge game, it's close, people kind of panic. And then games two, three, and four of the Thunder just totally take care of it, win pretty comfortably. And now it's just, I look at this and I say, I don't want to say it's wide open, but I feel like any team in the West, except for the Clippers now, has a reasonable shot. If you told me that Luca and Kyrie just combined to average 65 points the rest of the way, and Dallas makes the final side by it, I'm totally open. I think it'll be Boston on one side. In the West, I have no idea. I don't know what to tell you.

We're going to find out soon enough. Hey, Sam, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on. Where can people follow you and your work with CBS Sports? At Twitter, SamQuinnCBS, and then just go read everything we put up at CBS Sports. We've got a bunch of great writers there, we'll be covering everything tonight, covering everything throughout the playoffs, so check us out and thanks for having me. Oh, such a clutch pickup, Dave. I know, right?

I was worried we'd bring back the same team. Oh no, I meant those blackout motorized shades. MVP of the room.

Blinds.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy.

Even you could do it. Nice. I installed these and then got some for my mom, too. You fly across the country to do the install?

Nope. Blinds.com can do it all. All she had to do was pick what she wanted.

She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install. Look at you, a Hall of Fame sun. Oh, I just picked the winning team. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Oh, Blinds.com is the GOAT. The GOAT. He shoots.

He scores. Go to Blinds.com for up to 45% off and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Go right now for up to 45% off at Blinds.com.

Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Hey everyone, Boomer Esiason here. The NFL Draft is behind us and your favorite team is now gearing up for week number one. The free Odyssey app puts you right in the middle of the pro football conversation with the biggest sports radio stations from across the country. The local voices who know your team the best, giving you their unfiltered takes on the current state of your squad. It's always football season right here on the free Odyssey app.