Revealing Good Take's Team Of the Season | Good Take

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Wes Goldberg (1:00)

Welcome in to Good Take, Wes Goldberg here with Mike Shearer, the author of Basketball Poetry on Substack, recording this on a Thursday morning. Really excited for today's show because we are deciding on and revealing our Good Take Team of the Season. This is going to be the team that we ride with all year, so the pressure is on to get it right. Let's jump in.

So, this is the Good Take Team of the Season. You might be asking, what is that? Because we have never done that. This is our first time doing anything like this, and the idea is for us to pick a team that isn't considered a favorite or a contender, and we are going to adopt that team as the official team of Good Take for the entire season. We are going to check in with this team throughout the year. We are going to talk about this team. We are going to go in depth on this team. This is going to be our team. We don't want to do the contenders because we are going to talk about those teams anyway. We are going to talk about all the teams with the biggest stars, the best teams. We are going to talk about them throughout the season regardless. This is a way for us to talk about a different team that is still going to matter and exceed expectations, at least we think so. We are each going to make a couple of nominations for our runner-ups and then we are going to ultimately decide on who our favorite team is for the Good Take Team of the Season at the end, we are going to try to agree on that team.

Let's go over the parameters really quick. The rule is this team has to have plus odds to win 40 plus games.

So that's the goal. We are going to try to pick the team that has plus odds to win 40 plus games that we can actually reach 40 wins this season. So the hope is that this team is actually going to win 40 or more games. So that's what we are trying to figure out. And that's really it. Those are the parameters. The teams that that eliminates right off the bat, the New York Knicks, the Celtics, the Sixers, the Nuggets, the Rockets, the Cavs, the Pistons, the Timberwolves, the Raptors, the Heat, the Lakers, the Pacers, the Hawks, the Magic and the Trail Blazers. So Mike, we cannot pick any of those teams. Take them off your list. That leaves us with a handful of other teams that we think could potentially win 40 games this season. Hit me first with your nomination.

Mike Shearer (3:11)

Well, I think we should start with maybe not the sexiest team, but the one that mathematically probably has the best chance, the Phoenix Suns. So the Phoenix Suns went 45 and 37 last year, right off the bat. That's in a pretty good spot. They brought back a lot of their core, but not all their core.

But let's bring it down a little bit. And I want to start with a little anecdote. So I was in Detroit this last week. It was supposed to be three days, turned into five after my airport shut down and my flight got canceled. And it was quite a lot of drama, but I was visiting my in-laws and I had a nice talk with my brother-in-law who's a chemist about how breathing, the thing that is necessary for human life and everyone has to do it. This is not a consideration to not do it, but breathing is slowly poisoning us. All this oxygen gets in your body and it oxidizes your DNA and over time can do a little bit of damage. And that's sort of how I feel about Dylan Brooks. I love Dylan Brooks. I love the way he plays. I think it's necessary for people who love basketball to be like, yeah, this guy clearly gives more of a shit than anybody else on the court. He's trying his hardest at all times. Like, I love the attitude, I love his defense. But then you watch a bunch of Suns games in a row, you start to feel a little bad about yourself. You start to feel a little unwell. It's like, why are you taking so many mid-range jumpers? Did you have to get a technical foul in the fourth quarter when your team is winning by 32 points? Did you just headbutt Mike Connelly for no reason at all? I just like, I need Dylan Brooks in my life, but at the same time, it's not good for me, I think.