CENTERS AREN’T A WEAKNESS!! | Collin Sexton is a THIEF! | Walker Gives Thanks

CENTERS AREN’T A WEAKNESS!! | Collin Sexton is a THIEF! | Walker Gives Thanks

Coming up today on the Lockdown Hornets podcast. Oh, it was beautiful. The Hornets, they beat the Bucks in large part because of their center play. A position that was supposed to be a weakness and it might be for the rest of the year. It might be in a lot of games. It wasn’t last night. Centers were a big reason as to why the Hornets got the win. It’s time to praise Colin Ston. All the new additions, the rookies, the positive vibes. They’re back and we’re here to talk about it all today. Locked on Hornets. You are Locked on Hornets, your daily Charlotte Hornets podcast. Part of the Locked On podcast network, your team every day. In a minute, cuz we live. [Music] It’s Locked on Hornets, part of the Locked On Network. It’s your team every day. Hey, thanks for making us your first listen. We’re free. We’re available anywhere you get your pods and that includes YouTube. Big shout out to Doug Branson helping me out going solo yesterday. Go check him out on his Substack. Every hornetsbox.com. Also, go check out Yahoo Sports Daily. He’s working hard folks behind the scenes. Jason Fitz, Caroline Fittton, everybody doing a great job over there. So, go check out Yahoo Sports Daily. And I’m Walker Mail. Listen to me. WFNZ every weekday from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. This episode is brought to you by FanDuel. We appreciate them as always. Right now, new customers can bet just $5. And if your bet wins, you’ll get $300 in bonus bets to use across the app. Head to fanduel.com today to get started. Oh boy, we got a lot to talk about, man. First off, okay, wanted to thank everybody for the overwhelming amount of support. I don’t want to spend a lot of that a lot of time on it in the first segment because I’m going to reward the PE reward. My god, how self-indulging. I’m going to talk about that later on in the pod. Here’s what I’ll reward people that are listening to the pod with right now. The actual game stuff like I’m going to talk about the victory, but there there was an overwhelming amount of support that I really do want to discuss. So, I’ll I’ll get to that in the third segment or even in the last half of the third segment if that’s something that interests you. But, we got to start off with the win because that that’s the most important thing. Hornets got it done. They’re four and seven now on the season. And if you look at that little If you’re watching YouTube, got that little middle bullet point right there with the little B emoji and everything. Positive vibes are back. The last time I did a solo episode, that little middle bullet point, I don’t know what kind of emoji there was, but it wasn’t positive vibes. I said, now that the vibes are kind of negative, and it really all revolved around Lamela Ball being injured again, missing, I think, at the time, a fourth straight game with the same old injury, the ankle injury. This time, we just have a new word on it. It’s the same one as the end of last year, ankle impingement. It held him out yesterday. Okay. Negative vibes for sure. don’t want our best player to be out again. But if you look nationally, we’re starting to get a lot of praise around here. Jeff Peterson, Charles Lee, the rookies, the players that are suiting up, they’re starting to get a lot of praise. And I’m here to praise the centers and everything that they did. And I talked about it on the broadcast last night. I thought they were excellent. We can start with Ryan Cochrrener, who if you’ll remember this off season when Doug and I were going back and forth on what we could expect from that center spot. We were trying to figure out ways that Ryan Cochrrener would get majority of the minutes at five this season. I don’t know if you guys remember this episode, but we were going like, “Okay, here’s we’re we’re like pitching ideas to one another on how it is that Coaulriner just outright starts or plays the most minutes, even if you have Musa basically play the same minutes that he is right now.” And and Kaul Rener, you know, gets more than that, right? And Musa just so happens to start, but playing the same amount of minutes that he is right now. We were going back and forth on how that might look. Even if we didn’t believe it was going to happen, it’s like, “All right, well, we know they want to get up and down. We know they want to play real fast, get out in transition.” One way to do that is be more aggressive in the passing lanes. Have Ryan Caulbrrener anchor your defense so you can be a little riskier in those passing lanes. Long Arms, LaMelo, Brandon. Remember, this is at the time those guys were supposed to be healthy out in the passing lanes, especially with LaMelo being a one-man fast break. Let’s just get those guys on ball and be aggressive at the top. And if they get beat, we have Caulkriner, who is a four-time conference defensive player of the year, back home to swat anything that might go off of the glass. Okay, cool. That’s one way. The other is, well, maybe he’s just so offensively gifted that he’s the only real lob threat or dunker spot threat for penetration. Lob it to Caulkriner like you would with Mark Williams who was very, very good. And Caulkriner not athletic, not as athletic as Mark Williams, but still Musid’s not necessarily that coming from the dunker spot just because he’s not as tall. And then he starts because he played pretty well in the second half of what we saw in the preseason and he looked so much more improved than what he was doing in summer league and now he’s just awesome. Like can we just go ahead and call him an awesome player to this point? Like look for the naysayers that are trying to bring me down on Ryan Cochrrener or whatever, right? Like I’m speaking within the context of what Coaulbrunner was supposed to be, what he is right now, what he can be, what he’s going to be the rest of the season. But we’re seeing some pretty advanced stuff compared to what I think the expectations were. And even for the Caulkrunner fans, you guys heard us all offseason long. That was the guy we wanted at 29. It was Liam McNeely who was drafted. But we wanted him to be the pick if he was going to last to the early part of the second round. Then you get the 29th pick with that trade sending Mark Williams to Phoenix. Then we wanted him. Even us who wanted him pretty badly. Didn’t expect him to get this amount of run. And I thought he played his g best game of the season last night. Fresh off of having a kid. I know that has been talked about to death. It’s still a really cool storyline. But I’ll focus on the basketball here even. So to compartmentalize that and just control the euphoria that you’re experiencing and possibly being delirious because you haven’t gotten a lot of sleep. And he talked about that to go eight for eight to tie his career/season high with 17 points. But really defensively I thought he altered a lot of shots. And if you go to cleaning the glass, the stats website that neglects garbage time, you look at what Milwaukee shot at the rim, it was only 47.4%. That’s actually a number boosted by what they were able to do in kind of like faux garbage time. Garbage time here by cleaning the glass is defined by 20 point margin essentially in, you know, uh, end of game situations and meaningful parts of the game. Uh even so, like they were almost on a record for this season in the uh to by any NBA team to allow the worst shooting percentage at the rim. Like you only allowed 47.4%. A lot of that was because of Kaulk Briner altering Cole Anthony when he got into the paint. Uh you saw Miles Turner I thought was bothered. Kyle Koosma I thought was bothered. Even if Cochrrener wasn’t getting the block, man, that just slight slight off-kilter instead of going up strong. All right, well, here here’s the big guy, you know? All right, let me let me lean back a little bit. And it’s a tougher shot. That’s how you allow only 47.4% at the rim and it’s how you allow only 101.2 points per possession and it’s one of the worst marks in the league this season. Like Milwaukee just bad offensively in this game. And you also see the types of shots that they are allowing. It’s a lot in the mid-range, which if you were just doing it based off of shot quality, how to evaluate the Hornets, what they were doing offensively and defensively, you can see they’re taking the right kind of shots analytically speaking. I think with what their personnel is and that changes, I don’t want to get into the nuance of that. Yeah, KD, you get to shoot anywhere you want. Damn analytics. You’re KD get to shoot wherever you want. But shot qualityesque, Hornets are taking the right kind of shots. Not so much defensively. And you heard Zack Low talk about this on his latest pod. Like, yeah, they they were allowing they still even after this game, they’re still allowing a decent amount of shots at the cup, but in this game, they were only allowing a ton of mid-rangers. Like, they they didn’t shoot very many corner threes at all. That’s one of the worst marks posted in the NBA all season. They only shot uh 30% of their field goal attempts from distance. That’s in the 11th percentile of that mark this season. Just like there’s a lot of numbers that make me feel good. But even just the good oldfashioned eye test, that’s what makes me feel good about what I watched last night. And then I got to touch on Musa before we go to the second segment. So, Musadiate going for a season high offensive rebounds, collecting eight of those, 13 total off of the glass. And just go back, go back and watch that game again. Kind of wild that he’s able to grab as many offensive rebounds as he does. Just relentless. And you see Dell, you can hear him just kind of beside himself in disbelief at how Musa continues to grab these offensive boards. It’s it’s one of those things where, yeah, sometimes the basketball will bounce real close to him and then he’ll collect it that way. And you might say, “Oh, okay. Well, a couple of those are just luck offensive rebounds.” Except why does he keep winning every 50/50 ball that goes to him? You can that only Luck only accounts so much for that. and then he steals a couple of them. You think you have it. Nope. Musa beats you to the spot even if you had to run, you know, twice the distance. That just creates plenty more opportunities. You get threes off of it. It that’s a winning player. And the last thing I’ll say about Musa before we move on, so you you heard a lot of the praise last night. I know Doug talked about it a decent amount in the last episode of Locked on Hornets, but we’re at that point in the season now and we’re we’re getting there, right? We’re going to get into a rhythm where you’ll see this more and more, but Giannis, for instance, he’s got the knee injury. You don’t want to play him too much. This was the right time to rest him. You’re going to see load management. The NBA season is a grind. You know what’s not fun? Playing against that guy 82 times. You know what’s not fun? playing against that guy win the 40th game of the season when you kind of just want to chill against the Hornets. Musa is not chilling. Colin Ston isn’t chilling. Musa is like running into a brick wall. And Eric has mentioned it. I’ve mentioned it. That guy has the lowest amount of body fat ever measured in NBA combine history. So, it’s a brick wall hitting you repeatedly in the post, picking you up on the perimeter and hitting you. I I’m good on that. I don’t want to do that, man. That doesn’t sound fun. Goodness gracious. And and I think you could see Milwaukee deal with that like and and and have to deal with the ramifications of that. I think you’re going to see that a lot from a bunch of other teams as this team goes on. And what you see from these centers in different flavors, rim deter, rim protector. Musa has actually done a pretty decent job at protecting the rim, man. Like that’s the thing. You look at this Hornets center rotation and you say, “Oh, that’s a rookie who isn’t very mobile.” And then the mobile guy, I’m I’m just gonna shoot over. Yeah, let’s live in the paint. This is going to be cake. It’s not been cake. They’re They’re a little misleading with what you see from them, man. Like, you see what they’ve done so far is they’ve been in the orange quite a bit in terms of allowing low shooting percentages at the rim. the the only team that really beat him up in the paint, it was Miami earlier this year. It was the Lakers game and you could see that I even tweeted it out and it was Orlando, which you know they kill us because they’re monsters all over the place. Every other game they’ve been average to really good. It’s only been three times that the Hornets have been beat up in the paint. I just It’s so funny that this was supposed to be a massive weakness. It might be long term just because teams might figure out how to attack Haw Brener and Mousid Abbate, but I it it doesn’t feel like a big one anymore. It it feels like we can get by and pleasantly surprise some teams that think they’re just going to dominate and bully us down low. Coming up next on the Lockdown Hornets podcast, want to give some love to Colin Ston. want to talk a little bit more about the rookies because the Hornets are receiving national praise now. It’s not one of those, hey, why aren’t people talking about Khan Canipple? I I look, we can we can be excited about Khan. I don’t think we can say that anymore. People are talking about Khan Kipple as they should. Will talk about Khan and the rookies coming up next. LOH. This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Hold on, let me bring up their graphic, man. Like if we’re going to talk about Wayfair, I want to do it right. And I want to bring up the graphic for everybody that is watching us on YouTube. There we go. Shout out to Wayfair. The holiday season is right around the corner. And that means it’s time to get your home ready. Whether you need more seating for guests, cozy new uh linens, or fun serve for holiday hosting, Wayfair’s Black Friday sale is here to help you make your space shine. And the best part, you don’t have to wait. Wayfair’s Black Friday deals are happening all month long with up to 70% off everything from sofas to spatulas in case you need both. Sofas and spatulas, babies, Wayfair, they got you covered. If you’ve ever hosted family for the holidays, you know how much a difference uh how much difference a few new touches can make. Wayfair makes that easy. Don’t miss out on early Black Friday deals. Head to wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair’s Black Friday sale for up to 70% off. That’s w a y f a iir wayfair.com wayfair.com sale ends December 7th. More lockdown hornets coming up in just a moment. Positive vibes are back. Rookies. Everybody talking about them. Shout out to Nikkias Duncan. One of the best basketball minds on social media and hosting podcast out there. Doing a bunch of different stuff. Just obsessed with Seion James like the sickos that we are. He’s a Sean sicko. I think we all are Sean sickos. Uh it’s easy to give praise to Kaul Runner and Khan Canipple. Seion deserves a lot of praise too for what he’s done. But but I guess we probably should focus on the top five pick. You go to NBA.com’s rookie ladder. A little fun storyline to follow throughout the season, especially if you have three rookies that are contributing really well. Then you see that Khan Canipple is the number one rated rookie so far this season. Real good argument that if the season ended after 11 games one, we probably wouldn’t be as successful as a pod if we were only doing 11 games. But if it ended today, maybe he maybe he just would win rookie of the year. He’s got that kind of argument with the way that he’s been playing. And then you go to ESPN.com’s rankings, he’s third. And it’s kind of funny to see that people think ESPN is duping him. like he’s a top three rated rookie by ESPN and there are people that are mad at that ranking. I I you know whether they’re right or wrong, I don’t think they are. Like I’m just going to sit back and be excited about people being mad and having a case about Khan being only number three on ESPN.com. And then you see Ryan Cochrren, he’s top five. Seion James is showing up in the top 10 list. I think that has been the biggest cushion to the fall with the LaMelo ball disappointment. I mean, that is a nice cozy bed that you’re landing on if you decided to jump off of the ledge. Like, we’re here to save you, man. It’s it it does represent, you know, I don’t want to get too exagger I don’t want to exaggerate too much, but like, yeah, there is hope with what these guys have been doing. I just hopped on locked on Bucks and did a hit with Camille Davis and she was saying, “Hey, you know, is this performance typical with what you saw on Wednesday?” And I kind of laughed and I said, “Well, it’s not typical with what we’ve seen over the last few years, but it is kind of typical with what we’ve seen so far this season. The W is not typical, right? We only have four wins. Let’s not get it too twisted, but the effort in which they play, the rebounding, the Hornets have not lost a rebounding battle all year long. It’s wild, man. They’re one of the best defensive rebounding teams in the league. And I don’t mean like top 10, I mean top three. You can pull those numbers up, but actually, you know, not being bullied down low, that’s not typical if you go back a couple of years ago, right? What’s typical and what isn’t? Yeah, it it changes a ton from this year to the past five or so. And this is without LaMelo. And look, as much as we can get excited about beating that Bucks team last night, yeah, they didn’t have Giannis. Do they win if Giannis plays? I don’t know. Maiden shot a lot of threes. Giannis changes everything because that’s a historically great basketball player. Top 20 all-time basketball player. argue with somebody else doing that podcast. I don’t know. That guy changes a lot and it changes a lot on that offense. I mean, so much of their offense is predicated on Giannis driving to the paint, kicking out to a bunch of good shooters, and you don’t really have a ton of self-creators. Ryan Rollins, I thought, uh, did a great job last night. I, you know, he’s been so good all season long taking guys off of the dribble. I you know I I kind of was in for a pleasant surprise with what he was able to do off of the deck. But even so, man, that’s how you generate offense with Milwaukee. Drive, kick, or drive, get fouled, and Giannis just scores 35 on you. And maybe he would have done that. Maybe he would have gone for 40. But even so, we can be excited about this win with some of the typical stuff that we’ve been seeing this year from the new additions, whether it’s a rookie or whether it’s Colin Ston or even Pat Coneton last night. How about 11 minutes and he’ll give you 11 points, a point per minute. Pretty solid. I’ll take it. Thank you very much, Pat Coneton, for showing up against your former team. Yeah. Uh, Miles Bridges, you know, I had a couple turnovers, wasn’t hitting from deep. Rose’s hands to the heavens after hitting his second three-pointer, eventually finishing two of 10. Like, even without them playing a perfect game where the turnover showed up in the second quarter, they kind of showed up, you know, a little bit earlier, I guess, in the third, like really early in the third. It did feel like they settled down and then got back to taking the right kinds of shots and just being relentless on the glass with Musa saving quite a few possessions. And with Khan Canipple finding his space in the corner, drilling a couple of threes, it what what’s interesting is it didn’t like Khan Canipple did not have his best game of the year. Like nobody would describe last night’s outing as Khan’s best game of the season. And he ended up with 16 points. He ended up three of eight from the three-point line and he was three of four from the foul line. Six rebounds. Did have the three turnovers. Need to cut down on that. And Khan looked good. And that was not I think what one of the two best performances maybe like top three, top four. Would you put it there? He had and still ended up with 16 points and you know, one of the six Hornets that ended up in double digits. Positive vibes. They’re back and LaMelo’s injury is always going to be something that is relatively dark surrounding us as long as he continues to miss games. But when he comes back now, we can allow ourselves to feel something even a little more different than we did before because he hasn’t had this kind of talent around him. So when he comes back, yeah, now it’s like, well, you know, who can we beat? Who can we compete with? I I don’t want to get too carried away, right? We got we got one victory. I understand. I understand. But even still, we just come back, Brandon. Come back, LaMelo. Let’s see how far we can take this thing. Coming up next on the Locked On Hornets podcast. give you some finishing observations in the third segment and then a heartfelt thank you to everybody that supported me on the FanDuel broadcast last night. That’s still to come. Last segment. LOH. This episode is brought to you by Built. B I L T. Nobody likes paying rent, but if you must, you might as well get something for it. That’s where Built comes in. Built is changing the game by turning your rent payment into real rewards you can actually use. And when you pay rent through Built, you earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next lift ride, and even more than that. But Built isn’t just about rent. It’s about rewarding you around your entire neighborhood. Built has made everyday life feel more rewarding from your neighborhood to your travel plans. So turn your rent into rewards and start earning points around your neighborhood by going to join bill. 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Just some finishing thoughts. Um, you know, I mentioned it to Colin in that interview last night. 16 points for him. Not a good shooting day. Um, you know, three turnovers. Even still, I thought Colin was really good. So early in the game, I thought he got uh things started with pace just as soon as he grabs the basketball. I I’m not sure if he even really starts with the basketball in his hands. Not sure how he does it. He might be a warlock decides to get going downhill before the basketball reaches his hands on the pass. And it’s not like the wide receiver that hears footsteps and decides to turn his head away from the football and therefore he drops it. It’s not like Colin Section is dropping the basketball. Maybe he did. I think there’s actually one time where I think he was probably a little too fast, but it was because of him running into some people in the paint. He doesn’t really drop it like that. He runs without the basketball in his hands and then it’s just a magnet. Goes straight to the palms and he somehow either scores a layup that he’s able to find the slightest little amount of space to get the basketball off the glass or he gets fouled. and he went to the foul line a few times last night. Was five of six from the charity strike. Yeah, not a great not an efficient night from him. But the other thing that he did was just his energy. It creates stuff for other people on the floor. Talk about stealing offensive rebounds. There was twice that I counted, maybe three, where somebody felt like they were going to grab the basketball and then he just pokes out the orange. Baby, nope. You don’t get it. we’re either going to slow you down so we can get back on defense or we’re just going to outright take it from you. Colin did that. Uh let me see the offensive rebounds that he collected. So, he got zero, but I felt like he poked the basketball out a couple times to uh Oh, no. Yeah, these were defensive rebounds, too. So, he’s like even saving you from allowing the other team to crash the offensive glass. And I thought his skip passes, especially in the first quarter to find guys in the corner, like I thought that was some real improvement. and and Colin seems to be a very self-aware player in the game last night. I asked him, you know, your role as being a primary on ball handler. What facilitating to everybody else, how comfortable are you with it? And he said, it’s not something that he’s really done all that much, but Charles Lee, trust him to do it, and he feels like he’s getting better every single day. Like, I don’t think that’s a canned answer. one, he’s letting you know that’s not something that he’s experienced all that much in the past. And he is letting you know. I It’s It’s taken some time, but I think I’m figuring it out. And I think he is, too. Uh just the cross the crosscourt passes, the skip passes, uh making things happen by just beating everybody down the floor. The Colin Ston paint touches. I I threw away some of my notes that I was taking, but the Colin Ston paint touches just created all sorts of open looks for people. I I just thought he was excellent. Even if you couldn’t tell it in the box score, you might look at that and say, “All right, 16 points isn’t bad. Eight missed shots, one of five from three.” Nah, man. I’m good on that. Three turn three turnovers. No, thank you. Okay. Okay. You didn’t watch. Colin was just really impactful in a lot of different areas. And Trey, man, I I thought after struggling early, got going with a couple of shots as the game went on, too. So, so it’s still an uneven, I think, season performance from what you what you’ve had with Trey Man, but overall I I thought as the game went on, I really liked what I saw from him. Okay, if you made it for the second half of the third segment, here’s what I want to say, man. So, I got to do the broadcast last night. I got to do pregame, halftime, and postgame with sideline reporting extraordinaire Shannon Spake, Eric Collins, Dell Curry. You know him well. They’ve been here for a while. And I filled in for Terrence Oglesby who’s doing a bunch of college basketball and has been doing it really like the second half of last year. And he’s so good at that. Like he’s been amazing. Field of 68, doing some ESPN broadcast. Like he he does an excellent job. like really one of the best college basketball minds in the game. So ESPN wants him and I filled in for Terrence last night on the broadcast. And look, as I understand it, I’ll be filling in a few more times. I don’t know how many times. I don’t have any more dates, so not exactly sure on the information, but that’s what it looks like right now. And one couple things here as far as your support. I’ll be honest with you guys like uh oh buddy that was an overwhelming amount of support and you know a huge thanks to Hornets Reddit which that account is just so wellrun for news and it it is it’s almost like the Hornets watering hole. Everybody goes to the watering hole and everybody’s there to take in the information. We kind of need it for Hornet’s life and all it is is good information. And it’s not always the best of news, but that’s not Hornets Reddit’s fault. It’s just the best information. You get either a bite-sized snippet of what news is happening, all the articles, you know, they do such a great job of uplifting local uh Hornets podcast like Locked on Hornets, like Busby, like so many other stuff out there. Anyways, Hornets Reddit giving me some love, saying, “Oh, hi. Hi to you.” Saying that I’m filling in for Terrence. And then that allowed everybody to retweet it and stuff like that. I just I see it. Hornets Reddit, you guys are the best. And with everybody retweeting it, liking it, commenting, uh I just got sent an hour ago a Hornets Reddit post on me filling in. And I I keep going back to this world uh this word. Hornets fans being overwhelmingly supportive of me being on there. So, I don’t want this to be crazy self-indulging. This isn’t the most comfortable, but I do feel like you guys it it here’s something I came across. This is what this is why I love radio and this is why I love podcast. It’s because we’ve built a relationship with our listeners that is so tight and so close that it’s almost like you feel like some form of you is on that television screen. And the reason I say that, I did not realize how many people were going to tweet or text or DM. I didn’t realize how many people would have some familial relationship with me. Even if there is no blood relation, I don’t know how many people said, “It feels like I’m big bro watching little bro. It it feels like my brother is up there somehow having made it.” And then you guys seem to have pride with it. Like, you know, I expected some support. I didn’t expect that much. I didn’t expect it to be in that volume. I also didn’t expect that strong of a familial support, but so many people said it’s like watching my little brother having made it. It’s like, okay, I didn’t realize that. You know, it it does give a little bit more truth to the way that I have felt growing up on air in this city because I’ve gone to that very phrase. I grew up on air. I grew up on 7:30. I’ve I’m growing up I’ve grown up on WFNZ and and even if with me, you know, turning 33, right? I always say I feel old and then people, you know, curse me out for saying that I feel old at 33. But man, you got to remember like so many people have looked at me kind of like the younger one of the younger voices and then they see it and it they they do think, “Oh man, good for the like good for him.” Like he’s a little brother and that’s kind of funny. I didn’t realize that was happening and I appreciate that. Like I I I welcome that. I I’ll be your little bro. I welcome that. Um yeah, and I know that’s not the the only age group, right? I know that we, you know, have all sorts of different demographics, but I thought that was a really cool I thought that was a really cool thing to see. Um, and I just can’t thank you enough. Like, I can’t I can’t do this. I can’t get on that broadcast without everybody’s support on Lockdown Hornets. I I can’t do that without everybody’s support on Wesson and Walker on WFNZ. So, yeah, like I thought about writing a little something about it. I decided not to and uh I just can’t tell you how much I appreciate everything and you know I’ll give you some stories on the broadcast as well because I I think people they want to hear Eric Collins behind the scenes and and there’s there’s no secrets about him just people want to hear what it’s like and I want to give that to the people and one once more just the the biggest of shout outs to Shannon who like let let me tell you guys about Shannon who makes your job so easy. And and maybe you guys could could figure this out by watching the broadcast, but the first segment, the first half of the first segment, we’re doing it on the court now as you see like and the FanDuel broadcast usually was at the desk up, you know, close to the Hornets fan shop and they’re just not doing that anymore. They’re on the court now, which I think looks pretty cool. But when you’re doing it on the court, the difference in the two times that I’ve done it now is when the cameras come on and the lights from the camera hit you, it slaps me in the face as soon as we’re on air. And I’m like, “Oh, okay. All right. It’s time. It’s here.” And so you can see me, the radio guy, little bit uncomfortable with it. Like everything’s cool. It’s just jarring. And then Shannon just talking with me, like putting the ball on the tea, a real relaxed conversation type flow, the producers behind the scenes. I mean, I I’ve got plenty of thanks to give to people um to to give them shout outs cuz I mean that that whole FanDuel broadcast, like it’s just such a a tight-knit group that just wants the best for everybody to create something awesome. But Shannon makes life so so easy. It’s crazy how good she is at setting you up and just being in control. Everything’s comfortable, man. We’re good. We’re hanging out. Have fun. Like, hey, this if you don’t have fun, the listener isn’t it. The viewer isn’t. So, anyways, just a monster shout out to Shannon who is fantastic at what she does and and makes other people better at what they do. And so, I appreciate the support. All right, enough of that. I I will I will talk a little bit more about some of that stuff as these pods go on. That’ll do it for Lockdown Hornets. Thanks for making us your first listen. We’re free and available anywhere you get your pods and that includes YouTube. Go check Doug out on his Substack. Every hornetsboxcore.com. Also, go check out Yahoo Sports Daily with Jason Fitz and Caroline Finton. And I’m Walker Mail. Listen to me WFNZ every weekday from 12 to 300 p.m. Sports Radio 927 FM. Have a great rest of your day. We’ll be back with you tomorrow. [Music] Hey,

Walker Mehl goes solo to recap the first of two games against the Bucks and discuss how center play was an advantage. Will it continue to be a strength? Collin Sexton is stealing possessions and creating opportunities for teammates with more than just his passing. Finally, Walker thanks the listeners for all their support after his appearance w/ FanDuel Sports Network.

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