After months of uncertainty, the Boston Celtics found a new owner. The team’s current ownership group, the Grousbeck family, has agreed to sell the franchise to a group led by Bill Chisholm, co-founder of Symphony Technology Group. 

The team will reportedly be bought for $6.1 billion, a record for a North American sports franchise.

The Washington Commanders held the previous record after being sold to Josh Harris for $6.05 billion in 2023.

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The sale was confirmed by Celtics majority owner Wyc Grousbeck, who praised Chisholm as a “terrific person and a true Celtics fan,” in a statement Thursday, per Business Wire.

“Bill is a terrific person and a true Celtics fan, born and raised here in the Boston area,” Grousbeck said. “His love for the team and the city of Boston, along with his chemistry with the rest of the Celtics leadership, make him a natural choice to be the next Governor and controlling owner of the team. I know he appreciates the importance of the Celtics and burns with a passion to win on the court while being totally committed to the community. Quite simply, he wants to be a great owner. He has asked me to run the team as CEO and Governor for the first three years, and stay on as his partner, and I am glad to do so.”

In that same statement, Chisholm called himself a “die-hard Celtics fan,” and said he was up to the challenge of leading the franchise.

“My approach is to win and raise banners,” Chisholm told ESPN’s Charania. “That’s in the near term and the long term. I’ve had a couple of sit-downs with Brad and it’s been about aligning our goals, and extending the window of this team. The plans that Wyc and Brad have laid out make perfect sense to me.”

As part of that plan, Chisholm asked Grousbeck to stay on as team CEO and governor for the next three seasons, Charania reported.

With Grousbeck confirming the sale, Chisholm will need approval from the NBA’s Board of Governors before he takes over as the team’s owner.

The news comes nine months after Grousbeck announced he was looking to sell the team. He made that announcement just weeks after the Celtics defeated the Dallas Mavericks to win the 2024 NBA Finals. 

Grousbeck, with the assistance of an investment group, purchased the team for $360 million in 2002. Under his guidance, the Celtics won two championships and appeared in the NBA Finals four times. As of October 2024, Forbes valued the franchise at $6 billion, the highest total among all NBA teams. That valuation wasn’t far off based on Thursday’s reported agreement. 

Who is new Celtics owner Bill Chisholm?

Chisholm co-founded Symphony Technology Group in 2002 and serves as its managing partner and chief investment officer. Symphony Technology Group is a private equity firm that manages “data, software and analytics ventures,” per its website.  

Prior to co-founding the business, Chisholm worked at The Valent Group, a risk-management company; Bain & Company, a consulting firm; and PaineWebber, Inc., a bank and stock brokerage firm.

Chisholm received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and his MBA from The Wharton School. 

Chisholm’s group was one of at least four in the running to buy the Celtics, per Sportico. Those groups were reportedly required to submit revised offers for the Celtics on March 14. The Grousbeck family didn’t waste much time debating those offers, opting to go with Chisholm’s group less than a week after that deadline.

The numbers are startling: 33.2 points, 5.6 rebounds, and 4.6 assists over his last five games.

You’d be forgiven if you thought that was from MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and not a seldom-used player moved before the Feb. 6 trade deadline.

Those numbers belong to Quentin Grimes, who has taken Philadelphia by storm since his arrival a month and a half ago. The 6-foot-5 shooting guard has made the absolute most of his increased opportunity with the Sixers, as Joel Embiid, Paul George and standout rookie Jared McCain are out for the remainder of season with injuries.

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Grimes is unquestionably benefiting from the situation as head coach Nick Nurse needs someone — anyone! — to put up numbers on a night-to-night basis.

But calling Grimes simply a decent player on a bad team is doing him a disservice for a multitude of reasons.

Firstly, Grimes hasn’t just had five good games. As a Sixer, the 24-year-old has averaged 23.1 points, including a pair of 40-point performances, and done so on high efficiency.

Grimes is hitting 51% of his total shots, including 39.3% on 3-pointers, and is primarily scoring of his own accord. Only 36.5% of his 2-pointers have been assisted, and he’s created 27.1% of his own made 3-pointers since coming over from Dallas.

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Grimes is handling the ball more than ever and is confidently taking pull-up triples, driving to the rim and hitting mid-range pull-ups off the bounce to present a devastatingly good all-around scoring touch.

One might be inclined to wonder if this is just a hot streak, especially as Grimes has been routinely reserved for spot-up duties over the course of his career.

If he were producing at a lower rate, it’d be easier to sweep his efforts aside. But for Grimes to not only maintain a high output, but add substantial efficiency behind that volume — all while breaking out elements of his game we’ve never seen before — then it’s fair to say there might be more to him than we thought.

Grimes isn’t a lock to become a year-to-year 20-point scorer. That shouldn’t be the takeaway from what he’s currently doing. The takeaway should be that his game consists of more than what teams believed it did, and he’s proven himself capable of scaling his hidden talents up to a point where teams can no longer justify solely using him as a spot-up guy.

Essentially, our perception of Grimes now needs to change based on what he’s done in Philadelphia, even if he won’t be able to duplicate this exact production in the future.

How did Grimes get here? Well, it starts with the Dallas Mavericks sending him out for a worse return, making the Grimes trade the uncomfortable sequel to the Lakers’ deal that still has Dallas fans reconsidering their fandom.

According to Yahoo Sports NBA senior analyst Kevin O’Connor, Grimes insinuated he wanted to leave Dallas after the Luka Dončić trade. The Mavericks fulfilled his wish, but perhaps they shouldn’t have.

Grimes was already playing at a high level in the role he’d been given, as the prototypical 3&D wing next to Dončić and Kyrie Irving. Those players aren’t always easy to come by, so even if Dallas had no inkling of his pending explosion, moving off him was always an odd decision, especially when taking back Caleb Martin, who’s older, injured and just, well, worse.

The Mavericks became yet another team to give up on Grimes prematurely, as the Knicks and Pistons also relinquished him in questionable deals.

It seems Grimes, now on his fourth team, finally got the chance to show the league what they’d been missing out on.

Of course, the tale doesn’t end here.

As is always the case with the Sixers, contractual elements stand before them, relentlessly taunting their future salary-cap obligations.

Grimes will become a restricted free agent this summer. And while the league has seen a dramatic decline in players receiving offer sheets, Grimes might be too good for, say, the Brooklyn Nets not to troll the everlasting heck out of the Sixers.

Nets general manager Sean Marks has a history of doing this. Otto Porter ($106 million), and Allen Crabbe ($75 million) being two major examples of where Marks forced the Washington Wizards and Portland Trail Blazers, respectively, to match deals with players those teams felt uncomfortable completing to begin with. Neither Porter nor Crabbe stayed with their teams for the duration of those contracts.

Grimes seems like an obvious candidate to swing on if you’re the Nets.

The Sixers are already in salary-cap hell given the albatross contracts of Embiid and George. If the Nets offered Grimes $100 million over four years, that would put Philadelphia in a tough spot.

Grimes might be worth it, but that wouldn’t be the issue. The fact that the Sixers would have to balance Embiid, George, Tyrese Maxey and Grimes, all on big deals, would be the challenge.

Of course, you could argue the Sixers shouldn’t compound mistakes by letting high-quality talent leave, only to be stuck with talent that’s perpetually unavailable. But since ownership signs the checks, that could become a tough sell.

Whatever happens this summer, one thing seems abundantly clear: Grimes has elevated himself to a place where several teams will have interest, and that is more than what can be said from the situation a year ago.

Hall of Famer, TNT commentator and G14 classification enthusiast Shaquille O’Neal recently made some waves with a pair of unflattering statements about the fightin’ Detroit Pistons.

First, Shaq dismissed Detroit as a boring team unworthy of attention because they were “four games under .500” (Note: they are eight games over .500) and “not winning no f***ing championship.”

Then, during a recent episode of TNT’s “Inside the NBA,” Shaq appeared to offer an olive branch to the Pistons and their faithful, praising All-Star guard Cade Cunningham and the team’s general willingness to “play hard” under head coach Chauncey Billups.

Just one problem with that: While Chauncey Billups was synonymous with the Pistons throughout the 2000s, leading the franchise to six straight Eastern Conference finals appearances, a pair of NBA Finals and the 2004 NBA championship, and while he is currently an NBA head coach, he is not the coach of the Detroit Pistons. Billups, in fact, coaches the Portland Trail Blazers. J.B. Bickerstaff coaches the Detroit Pistons — and has done so with such aplomb that he’s probably going to wind up at or near the top of a lot of Coach of the Year ballots come season’s end. (Though presumably not Shaq’s, if he has one. Is he going to get one? Do those come with G14 classification?)

When his commentator colleague Candace Parker called out the mistake, Shaq responded by … reasserting that the team he was just praising was beneath his notice.

“You know, first of all, I don’t watch Detroit,” he said. “How about that?”

Yeah. How about that?

In any event: Perhaps you, like Shaq, haven’t gotten around to checking in on the Pistons all that much this season, owing partly (maybe mostly) to the fact that they haven’t had the benefit of playing on national television all that much this season. Well, I’ve got some good news: They’re going to be on ESPN on Wednesday, taking on the Miami Heat. They’ll be getting at least another handful of national TV games in about a month or so, too, because the Pistons are on pace to make the playoffs for the first time in six years.

You’ll probably want to brush up on them before then. So: In honor of a team that hasn’t been this far above .500 this late in the season since 2008, here are five things worth knowing about the 2024-25 Detroit Pistons, who’ve been one of the best stories in the NBA all season long … even if not everybody’s been following it.

1. This is one of the most dramatic turnarounds in NBA history.

One reason why the general audience might be a little slow to pick up what the Pistons have been putting down? The last time they heard anything about Detroit, it was about how last year’s Monty Williams-led model was threatening to set a new NBA record for consecutive losses, futility and embarrassment. What a difference a year makes: Williams is gone, Bickerstaff is in, and the Pistons have left those bad old days behind.

The 2023-24 Pistons won 14 games all season. The 2024-25 edition tied that mark on Boxing Day, and doubled it before the All-Star break.

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Detroit enters Wednesday’s meeting with the Heat at 38-31 — 24 more wins than last season, with a winning percentage a whopping 38% higher than last season. By both total and percentage, that is, by far, the biggest turnaround in the league this season, topping the Memphis Grizzlies (16 more wins, +29.4%), Cleveland Cavaliers (eight more wins, +23.9%) and the aforementioned Trail Blazers (nine more wins, +17.9%).

(In fairness to Shaq, we really should like what Chauncey’s doing there. We just also have to know where “there” is.)

If the Pistons maintain their .551 winning percentage, they’ll finish with 45 wins — a 31-win year-over-year improvement. That would be the sixth-largest single-season turnaround in NBA history, behind only the 2007-08 Boston Celtics (who traded for Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen), the 1997-98 Spurs (who drafted Tim Duncan and got David Robinson healthy), the 1989-90 Spurs (who drafted Robinson), the 2004-05 Phoenix Suns (who signed Steve Nash), and the 1979-80 Celtics (who added rookie Larry Bird).

A cynic might ding Detroit by arguing that it had nowhere to go but up after last season, and that any climb is going to look more impressive when you start several sub-basements below everybody else. A less jaundiced eye, though, might see this glow-up as even more impressive than those top-five turnarounds precisely because these Pistons didn’t add any Hall of Famers. They just signed Tobias Harris and Malik Beasley, traded for Tim Hardaway Jr., handed Bickerstaff a roster full of untapped potential, and trusted that he could get more out of it. The results speak for themselves: This year’s Pistons are on pace to finish with the highest winning percentage the franchise has seen since the late Flip Saunders’ final year on the bench back in 2008.

“[Bickerstaff] kind of keeps us on track and lets us know how, since day one, we’re not just out here to do this,” Pistons center Jalen Duren recently told reporters. “We’re trying to make some noise. We’re trying to become a better team. And he’s carried that all season. He’s the guy who’s set the tone for the culture.”

He’s not the only one:

2. Cade Cunningham is playing like the prospect he was projected to be.

There are two players in the NBA this season averaging 25 points and nine assists per game. One of them is Nikola Jokić, who might be on the way to his fourth MVP trophy. The other is Cunningham, the No. 1 pick in the 2021 NBA Draft, who has responded to playing in less congestion thanks to the presence of legitimate floor-spacers like Beasley, Harris and Hardaway by turning in the most composed, controlled and flat-out best play of his career, and who might be on the way to his first All-NBA appearance.

With more shooters and finishers on the other end of his passes, only Trae Young and Jokić average more assists or points created via assist than Cunningham; only Jokić, LeBron James and Domantas Sabonis have posted more triple-doubles. With more openings to penetrate off the dribble, he’s driving to the basket more often than anybody besides Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Brunson, Young and Zion Williamson, and generating points on 71.2% of those drives, by far a career-high. And when defenses try to play him for the drive by sagging off or ducking under ball-screens, he’s become devastating in the pull-up game, whether from midrange (where he’s shooting a career-best 47%) or beyond the arc, where he’s made 82 pull-up triples — more than double last season, and nearly as many as in the past three seasons combined.

You can quibble over Cunningham’s shooting efficiency: 51% on 2-pointers and 35% from 3, marks that establish the gap between where he is and where Luka Dončić, a similarly styled big processing point guard, was at a similar stage of his career. But while that is a big gap, it’s also one between “top MVP candidate” and “All-NBA-caliber huge-usage centerpiece of a team with a real shot at home-court advantage in the opening round of the playoffs.”

Which means that Cunningham has already bridged another very important gap: the one between the seemingly limitless promise he flashed as a prep prospect and the underwhelming-for-a-number-of-reasons results of his first three seasons as a pro. What Cunningham’s producing right now represents potential actualized; a promise, kept.

3. Ausar Thompson is an absolute menace.

Hey, you know how much you’ve enjoyed watching Amen Thompson tear it up down in Houston? Well, fun fact: They made two of him!

Ausar Thompson missed the first month of the season recovering from a frightening blood clot issue that curtailed his rookie campaign and kept him on the shelf for more than eight months. After a few weeks of ramp-up time, Bickerstaff slotted the 6-foot-7 havoc-wreaker into the starting lineup, where he promptly began … y’know … wreaking havoc.

He’s averaging 16.3 points per 36 minutes on 57.6% shooting over his last 33 games, to go with 8.1 rebounds, 3.8 assists, 3.1 steals, 1.0 blocks and 6.1 deflections — all while guarding the nastiest big wings and on-ball threats the opponent has to offer. Detroit’s gone 20-13 in those 33 starts, outscoring opponents by 6.9 points per 100 possessions with Ausar on the floor, and allowing just 108.4 points-per-100 — a top-two defensive rate — with him flying all over the court like a banshee.

If what you like most about basketball is hyper-athletes sprinting everywhere they go, playing physical and uncompromising defense, making the extra pass and eschewing 3-pointers in favor of flinging himself relentlessly at the basket, then I suggest you check this young man out. He might just be your new favorite player.

And if you’re not sick of 3-pointers …

4. Malik Beasley’s shimmy is a truly delightful celebration.

Legendary choreographer Martha Graham once said that dance is the hidden language of the soul. Well, your man Malik Beasley has spent all season revealing the words buried deep within his soul to opponents. It seems to be saying, “Hahahahaha — check this s*** out.”

There’s an irrepressible childlike joy to Beasley wiggling his hips in the general direction of his foes after knocking down a big 3-pointer. And if it seems like he’s getting better at it as the season goes along, it might be because he’s had plenty of practice: The ninth-year veteran has drilled 267 triples this season, second-most in the NBA behind only Anthony Edwards. Beasley’s launching more than nine long-balls per game and connecting on nearly four of them, a 41.8% clip — all career highs.

Beasley has proven a perfect complement for Cunningham, an ever-present threat either spotting up opposite Cade as a target in the pick-and-roll or as a ghost screener in a small-small two-man game that can tie opposing defenses in knots. Send two to the ball against Detroit at your own peril. Before long, the ball’s probably going to land in the hands of a player who’s blossomed into one of the league’s premier perimeter marksmen, and a below-the-waist shimmy is soon to follow — much to his head coach’s chagrin.

5. They’ve been legitimately good for a while now.

Scoff if you must at celebrating a team that’s a mere seven games over .500 in a league where the Cavaliers, Thunder and Celtics exist. (It’s worth noting that more than half of the NBA’s teamswish they were seven games over .500, but I digress.) Since mid-December, though, Detroit is 28-15 — neck-and-neck with the Knicks and Pacers for the third-best record in the East in that span, and a 53-win pace over the full season.

The Pistons rank 13th in offensive efficiency and second on the defensive end over that 43-game stretch. Over the past six weeks, that’s up to eighth and first, thanks in part to the bruising interior intimidation and elite rim protection of Isaiah Stewart. Among 228 players to contest at least 100 shots at the basket this season, Beef Stew ranks second in defensive field goal percentage allowed, according to Second Spectrum, holding opponents to just 45.7% shooting on point-blank tries.

Since the start of February, only Cleveland and Oklahoma City — the two best teams in the league, two historically excellent regular-season squads — have a better net rating than Detroit. The Pistons won 14 games last season. Their preseason Las Vegas over/under was 24.5 wins. They enter Wednesday neck-and-neck a half-game behind fifth-place Milwaukee and a game back of fourth-place Indiana; multiplepostseasonprojectionmodels now have them as not only a near-certainty to finish above the play-in, but with a puncher’s chance of snagging that final home-court advantage spot.

Skeptics can dismiss Detroit as an also-ran fattening up on soft-serve competition, owing to its 10-20 record against opponents above .500 and its 28-11 mark against those below. Recent wins over the Clippers and Celtics, though — and tight losses to the Cavs and revamped Warriors — suggest that they’re capable of more than just gatekeeping, which is something nobody could have predicted back in October … and which is kind of what we’re all looking for when we tune in on any given night, right? Something unexpected, something fresh and new — a zag from the chalk, a burst of blood in the chest.

Surprises like these Pistons don’t come around all that often. It’s worth celebrating and savoring them when they do … even if it means having to learn some new names, and figure out who, exactly, is coaching them.

Stephen Curry missed Tuesday night’s 104-93 Golden State Warriors win over the Milwaukee Bucks to rest his back. Shortly after news of Curry sitting out circulated, he was officially listed as out on the NBA’s 4:30 p.m. ET injury report.

Warriors coach Steve Kerr told reporters after Monday’s 114-105 defeat to the Denver Nuggets that Curry was “exhausted” and indicated that sitting out on Tuesday was a possibility. 

“He’s tired. Steph’s been carrying us for a month. He’s amazing,” Kerr said. “We gotta get him some rest. You can see it. He doesn’t have his energy right now.”

Jimmy Butler led the way for the Warriors on Tuesday night, scoring 24 points with eight rebounds and 10 assists.

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Curry, 37, played 36 minutes against the Nuggets, shooting 6-of-21 (4-of-14 on 3-pointers) and scoring 20 points. Jimmy Butler III led the Warriors with 23 points, followed by 18 from Gary Payton II. 

In his past five games, Curry has shot 37% (32-of-86) from the floor and 32% (19-of-59) on 3s. So far in March, he’s averaging 25.7 points (shooting 38% on 3s) and 6.7 assists. But he was spectacular in February, scoring 30.7 points per game and shouldering the offense, as Kerr mentioned. 

“We try to take the pressure off him as much as we can,” Payton said, via the Associated Press. “He has a guy on his hip 48 minutes of the game. I’m pretty sure he’s a little gassed.”

For the season, Curry is averaging 24.3 points, his lowest total in five years. His 39% 3-point shooting is also lower than it’s been during the past three seasons. 

Curry recently achieved two significant milestones in his 16th NBA season. He passed the 25,000 mark for career points on March 8 versus the Detroit Pistons. And on March 13, he became the first NBA player to reach 4,000 3-pointers made against the Sacramento Kings.

The Warriors next host the Toronto Raptors on Thursday.

Sacramento Kings All-NBA center Domantas Sabonis will miss “at least 10 days” after suffering a sprained right ankle against the Memphis Grizzlies on Monday, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported. 

Sabonis had already left the court to head to the locker room once earlier in Monday’s proceedings prior to his ankle injury, after a first-quarter collision with Grizzlies guard Luke Kennard left him with a cut above his left eye. He’d return after getting it stitched up, scoring six points with four rebounds in 11 first-half minutes to help stake Sacramento to a double-digit lead at intermission.

In the opening minute of the third quarter, though, as Sabonis rolled to the rim after screening for teammate Zach LaVine, he stepped on the foot of Grizzlies defender Jaylen Wells, rolling his right ankle hard and instantly grasping for it as he crashed to the court in a heap:

The 28-year-old big man immediately signaled to the Kings’ bench that he needed to come out of the game, and needed the help of teammates and coaches to get to his feet and hobble back to the Sacramento locker room. Shortly thereafter, the team ruled him out for the remainder of the game.

The Kings would rally without their starting center, riding red-hot shooting from beyond the 3-point arc and the playmaking of LaVine, Malik Monk and DeMar DeRozan to build a lead that ballooned to 20 points in the fourth quarter and hold off the visiting Grizz for a 132-122 win. Sacramento improved to 34-33, remaining in ninth place in the Western Conference.

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Interim Kings coach Doug Christie, who looked shaken on the sideline in the moments after Sabonis’ injury, told reporters after the game he had no update on his star center’s status. His teammates sounded an optimistic note about a player who, in LaVine’s words, “gets bumped and bruised because he plays so damn hard.”

“I’m always concerned when my teammate’s not on the court,” Monk told reporters. “I really didn’t see the play until I looked up. It looked pretty bad. But Domas [is] strong. He’ll probably be back sooner than we think.”

The Kings will certainly hope so. Sabonis would miss six games if he’s sidelined for the minimum 10 days — leaving the Kings just nine games afterward in the regular season. They entered Tuesday 3.5 games back of the eighth-place Clippers, two games ahead of 10th-place Dallas and three games up on 11th-place Phoenix; an extended absence for Sabonis could deal a serious blow to their chances of remaining in play-in position. (It could also harm the chances of Sabonis — an All-NBA Third Team selection in each of the last two seasons — reaching the 65-game threshold for inclusion in year-end awards voting.)

Sabonis is averaging 19.2 points, an NBA-leading 13.9 rebounds and 6.2 assists in 34.8 minutes per game, shooting 63% on 2-pointers and 42.5% from 3-point land. The only other player hitting those marks this season? MVP candidate Nikola Jokić — a similarly bruising point-center offensive hub to whom Sabonis’ game is frequently compared.

While Sabonis’ absence isn’t quite as detrimental to Sacramento as Jokić’s would be to the Nuggets — although, y’know, try telling the Warriors that — it’s still considerable. For the season, the Kings have outscored opponents by 4.2 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with Sabonis on the court, according to Cleaning the Glass, and have been outscored by 5.7 points-per-100 with him off it.

That net-rating gap has narrowed somewhat since the Kings’ roster-remaking trade deadline, which saw the franchise ship out Sabonis’ running buddy, De’Aaron Fox, shooting guard Kevin Huerter and lightly used reserves Jordan McLaughlin, Alex Len and Colby Jones and bring in not only LaVine, but also veteran center Jonas Valančiūnas and combo forward Jake LaRavia (who played on Monday like he had a bone to pick with the Grizzlies team that jettisoned him). Valančiūnas, a stalwart per-minute producer dating back to his days in Toronto, has put up 9.5 points, 8.1 rebounds and 2.3 assists in just 19.5 minutes per game in Sacramento; the Kings are plus-27 in 321 minutes with Valančiūnas on the floor and Sabonis off it, according to PBP Stats.

But even with Valančiūnas and the versatile Trey Lyles to plug the gap, the Kings are 31-27 with Sabonis in the lineup and just 3-6 in the nine games they’ve played without him; that includes four losses in six contests that he missed earlier this month with a left hamstring injury. Even if they’re able to hold down the fort and hold off the likes of the Mavericks and Suns in the play-in chase, the Kings know their best chance of making any noise mid-April comes with their hard-charging center upright and fully operational.

“Domas wants to be out there as much as anybody,” LaVine told reporters. “We need to make sure he doesn’t rush back and takes care of himself, because we’re going to need him in the long run.”

(This article was written with the assistance of Castmagic, an AI tool, and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy. Please reach out to us if you notice any mistakes.)

In the latest episode of “The Kevin O’Connor Show,” longtime NBA player Marcus Morris joined Kevin O’Connor to discuss the Western Conference landscape, shining a spotlight on the Oklahoma City Thunder’s impressive run as the top seed in the West at 56-12. Morris, who has played for eight NBA teams, shared his perspective on the young OKC squad.

Morris expressed doubt about the Thunder’s readiness to conquer the playoffs, citing their lack of veteran presence as a glaring deficiency. O’Connor asked Morris, “Who’s best equipped to beat them then?” Marcus promptly backed the L.A. Clippers — with a caveat of a “healthy Kawhi Leonard.”

The Clippers’ potential clash with the Thunder could be a compelling first-round playoff battle, with L.A. currently sitting in eighth in the West with a 38-30 record. Morris illustrated his point, emphasizing the importance of seasoned playoff experience. “With a healthy Kawhi, I think they got a shot of beating them just because of the experience,” Morris said. Despite Leonard’s health concerns throughout his tenure with the Clippers, the possibility of him being fit for postseason action fuels optimism among Clippers faithful.

Oklahoma City’s young talent, headlined by BetMGM MVP favorite Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, is a dominant force. But as O’Connor argued, the Thunder’s youth could lead to underestimation by playoff opponents. Morris acknowledged SGA’s brilliance, but lamented the uncertainties surrounding his supporting cast.

It’s the ultimate postseason conundrum: Can raw talent edge out playoff-proven veterans and experience? As the playoffs loom, the Thunder have plenty of questions to answer.

To hear the full discussion, tune into “The Kevin O’Connor Show” on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

(This article was written with the assistance of Castmagic, an AI tool, and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy. Please reach out to us if you notice any mistakes.)

On the latest episode of “The Kevin O’Connor Show,” longtime NBA veteran Marcus Morris discusses the ceiling of the new-look Los Angeles Lakers, who are 42-25 and sit fourth in the West. With Luka Dončić alongside LeBron James, the stakes are higher than ever. Will the Lakers shake up the Western Conference? Morris didn’t hold back in unraveling the potential of this revamped team.

“Whenever you have LeBron James and Luka Dončić as your primary ball handlers … that’s 100,” Morris said. 

Unpacking the Lakers’ new blueprint

Marcus Morris was on a call with his brother, Markieff, when the jaw-dropping blockbuster deal went down: “Luka Dončić has just been traded.”

This bold move aligns perfectly with the Lakers’ bid to climb back to the top of the Western Conference. The pairing of Dončić and LeBron has the makings of basketball alchemy — meshing LeBron’s unparalleled leadership with Dončić’s dynamic style. James is still out with a groin injury, but his return is looming.

“LeBron’s become a knockdown shooter playing off Luka,” Kevin O’Connor said. It’s this ability to adjust that could considerably extend LeBron’s already legendary career.

What lies ahead in the Western Conference?

The ripple effects of the trade don’t just end with the Lakers. The entire conference must now reckon with the Lakers’ reinvigorated duo. If the Lakers can integrate their new roster efficiently, they are Marcus Morris’ pick to dominate all the way to the NBA Finals.

Having traded key players to go all-in with Luka, the Lakers have placed a significant wager on this recalibrated formula. As the playoffs inch closer, L.A.’s gamble becomes enormous: Will the LeBron-Dončić era usher in a new period of Western Conference dominance?

To hear the full discussion, tune into “The Kevin O’Connor Show” on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.