Eric, there’s not a lot of deception in your first round the last few years. Is, is this just a situation of, you know, kind of recouping assets, you know, you didn’t have a second round pick, getting, getting another pick and, you know, you obviously have your eyes on someone else. Yeah, I mean, we have several players we like in this part of the draft, and we felt like we could slide down and still get one of the guys we’re very high on and then have an extra pick to hopefully pick up another one of the guys we’re looking at. A lot of insiders are making a lot of noise about potential movement that you can see in this draft. Were you surprised by how little trade movement there was? No, I mean, I, I, uh, my phone was lively. I, you know, there was, there was a lot of chatter about trades. I, I felt like there was a fair bit. I, I haven’t compared it to past years yet, but it seemed like people were interested in open. One of the things about having the remote draft is communication is way easier when you’re in the in-person draft and the next team is 3 ft away. It’s hard to communicate and it’s hard to talk across the table, and here we can really discuss our decisions and debate it and share information. It makes it easier to get some of that kind of stuff done and so I felt like there was sort of a lot of chatter going on because of that ease of communication. To follow up on that, what do you think of having a decentralized draft like this? Yeah, I, I mean, it, it, it makes it a lot easier to involve everyone in the conversations, you know, when you do the draft in person, you have a big table with 15 people at it, and 3 of them who are next to each other can communicate and talk and do everything and everyone else is just kind of sitting and watching. Um, in this setting, we can talk across the room and we can get everyone involved and we can have the scouts see our process for thinking through our decision making and get trained so that they can grow in their career and know how they could someday run a draft and, you know, I think it’s very good for the team to be able to involve everyone and communicate, um, you know, obviously there’s a downside to not having the networking experience and the social activity. Um, but in terms of actually running the draft, there’s a real plus to it. That said, with the communication, you surprised that there wasn’t more movement around the league, even if you guys weren’t involved, it just felt like by draft standards yesterday, today we’re pretty quiet other than the +11 big trade and one minor. Yeah, I mean this year it’s, it’s been a difficult year to get some of these things. Done because almost every team in the league right now is looking to get better. In most years, you have a few teams that are deep into rebuilds or starting rebuilds and are willing to move some of their veterans for picks. And this year, almost every team is saying if they move a player they want players back, and that makes it hard to get deals done because everyone’s trying to either, you know, if everyone’s trying to add to their team. There’s sort of, we can’t all that. It’s hard to do a trade where both sides add. And so, you know, I think that more than anything else has sort of slowed down the market right now. It’s just everybody’s looking to do the same thing at once. Other, uh, news today at CBA extension just your thoughts on that, just getting that the framework pretty much. Yeah, I mean, it’s great, it, you know, it’s, it is very important to have the league continue smoothly from year to year without any interruption and, you know, it’s, it’s really. A testament to the league and the PA that they were able to sit down and get their issues on the table and iron it out without any disruption and do it in advance so that we all know what the rules are gonna be and can operate under them and not have any issues. At one point in the first round did you get the. That you would be able to move it. Yeah, I mean, before the draft even started, I was talking to teams about if we are going to move back, here’s what we would be asking for, um, and then as we get closer, I, you know, sort of sort through the teams that are actually have a guy there that they want to move up and get and compare the offers and, you know, try and try and pick one. How confident are you that your guy will be there at 34? Yeah, I mean, you know, you can never know for sure, but, um, we feel like we’re in a good position to get two players who we really want out of those two picks. How much does it, I don’t know, kind of make things easier now that some of the big free agents have resigned obviously Bennett, you know, being the headliner, how much does that affect kind of what you might be doing? Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s there’s a lot left to do. I think we will have to see who hits the free agent market and what we can get done. Um, we’re also continuing to look at trades, of course. Um, I think one of the things we will see is that after July 1st, you know, teams will realize what they did and didn’t get, and there may be a secondary wave of movement there and there may be a tertiary wave of movement during the season because every team’s trying to get better now and not all of them will, and as we get halfway through the season. There may be players that come available then that aren’t available right now and so July or do you think? Yeah, I mean we’re still working on it, so it’s hard to say right now, um, hoping to get more done, but you know, it’s, there is work to do still. With the CBA changing in terms of contract term length, does that impact or how much impact does it have you on guys that might be RFAs have this upcoming. Yeah, I mean, uh, you know, I would say, um. If we can get deals done early that both sides are happy with, we always want to do that. We don’t really want uncertainty if we can help it. Um, there are times when both sides kind of need to let it play out, um, but we’re going to be talking to our guys and seeing what we can get done where we can. Eric, I’m just curious a little bit, obviously without giving away too much of your draft strategy. I mean, do you look for, you know, best player available or kind of best fit to what, you know, your needs are as a team in the. Yeah, I mean, it, it really has to be the best player available. The, you know, the, the players we’re drafting are 18 years old. They’re not gonna be in the lineup for 3 or 4 or 5 years in most cases, and we have no idea what our needs are gonna be 4 years from now. And so it, it’s. You know, you can wait a little bit towards where your prospect pool looks thinner or stronger, but for the most part, we just want to get the best players we can and if we have too many good players at one position, that’s an easier problem to solve than not having enough good players. I’m, I’m curious. There’s plenty of war rooms around the league where teams maybe don’t have a lot of draft picks. I’m sure the scouts look around the room and aren’t too thrilled that they put a whole year of work in and maybe don’t have a whole lot to do. When you go and trade a higher pick for two lower picks, what’s your, what’s your scouts reaction? Do they like the more picks or would they rather be picking up higher? Yeah, no, so they, I think we work well with them so that they can understand the strategy and see that, you know, we more often than not have still been able to get the guys that they wanted. And so, you know, it’s, they’re always happy to have the opportunity to get more of the guys they wanted, um, and ultimately, you know, they’re. They are, they work all year to try to find players and of course you have a little bit of desire to get the players, but they’re really here to win a championship. And so it’s not as much about how many guys do I get to pick, it’s about how close are we to winning a championship. Draft night is always very long and tonight is a little bit different given the format. Uh, what were you guys doing in there to pass the time slash stay engaged? Yeah, I mean, you know, we were following the draft. We were seeing who was getting trying to predict who is gonna be there for us, um. There was a little bit of trying to guess who was gonna get picked at each spot and um ongoing conversations with teams about trades um either up or down, um, just, you know, following the draft along tomorrow moves a lot faster and they’ll. There won’t be a question about how you stay busy on day two, but on day one, there is a little time to sort of think through what’s going on and what you make of it. Did you trading up at any point did you was there an offer on the table at any point for you guys? Yeah, I mean, we always look at it. I would say the players who we would have considered moving up for early enough that we probably didn’t have a chance to move up for them, um, but. There’s always a set of players who, you know, if this guy falls, we need to think about moving up to get him. Thank you.
