MONITOR LUKA LAKERS

“I still don't think those teams have been talked about enough. I mean, the thunder are 63 and 12, with like the greatest net rating in the history of basketball. And I just, you know, so many interesting storylines, like, oh, here comes the Chet-Hartenstein combination. How's that going to work? How's Caruso fitting in off the bench?”

“I announced late Sunday night that he is going to be joining the Ringer and Spotify. He launched the Zach Lowe Show, which you can subscribe to on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. It's going to be a video podcast twice a week, Mondays, Thursdays, maybe a couple other stunt special pods, episodes during the course of the playoffs.”

“I was asleep when that happened because I don't have a job. I woke up the next day and obviously my phone is just, there's a million notifications that I didn't even look at. I was like, I guess Jimmy Butler got traded overnight. And then eight more minutes passed and I looked, I was like, oh my God. I mean, we're going to talk about the Lakers a lot. I just can't even believe that he's on their team.”

“The low-hanging fruit with him was, well, he's just got to shoot a lot of threes and make more threes. And the Cavs were like, you can shoot some more threes and it would be helpful. But how about we redesign our offense, enable you as a passer? And how about you just beat the hell out of people inside and get super aggressive and physical? And it's really worked.”

“If you had told me the Clippers are going to be 43 and 32 in this four-team morass for five to eight, with Kauai having played less than half the season, and look on a lot of nights like, oh, do I got to get back in to this again? I don't see Ty Lue's name coming up a lot in Coach of the Year, and I think that he at least should be in the third place, second place talk.”