Warriors keep winning, examining the new-look Mavs + saluting the Valkyries & Dream | The Dunker Spot

Nekias Duncan (0:00)

Hi, hello, we have a jam-packed episode of The Dunker Spot coming your way. First, on the NBA side, we bounced around some teams that have intrigued us. Hello, Golden State Warriors on the five-game winning streak. Hello, Dallas Mavericks, implementing some new things on both ends of the floor with Cooper Flatt looking fantastic. We'll get into some player shout outs from there. And then we flip to the WNBA side, where we just had the first seven game series in WNBA finals history. We salute the Golden State Valkyries for their journey. We salute the Atlanta Dream for their journey as well. And then we talk a little bit about the news when we got to New York there once again, on the hunt for a head coach. We talk about their season. We had a lot of fun on this episode. We hope you enjoy.

Hi, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Dunker Spot. We are part of the Yahoo Sports Network. I am your host, Nekias Duncan. And joining me as always is my cohost, the always excellent Steve Jones Jr. Steve. Happy Tuesday. Happy election day. How are you?

Feeling good. Feeling great. Happy to be here. Excited to be here. Thank you, Dunkers, for once again embracing your bounce. Nekias, how are you feeling today?

You know what? I'm feeling all right. I'm going to do my civic duty post-recording, so excited about that. Excited to be back home as I'm at my home set. I was like, wow, I really just haven't recorded the pod here, I guess in a week or so. It's cool to not be heading to an airport for a little bit, so that part is cool, but we're feeling good. I'm excited to talk to some hoops with you. Had a fun weekend of basketball across both leagues. We're going to get to throughout the course of this podcast. We just had the pre-election day 37 games late on Monday. We've got to bounce around with, so I'm excited to tap in. Excited to bounce around. Oh, no, I get it. I did the early vote. The early vote. It was 8, 15 a.m., got in, got out. We did what we had to do. Now, what I will say, this is basketball overstimulation week, because all the games were on Monday, which means there are no games today. There are all the games on Wednesday, and of course, it's time to respect the NBA Cup. So you're going to see a lot of games on Friday as well. So get in, get out, soak it in. Let's talk about some teams. Who is at the top of the mind for you, Nekias, as we enter this week?

Oh, we top of mind for me, Steve. I want to circle back to the Golden State Warriors.

They were one of the more interesting teams in the league, heading as we talked about on the division preview pod, in particular, where I'm just like, there's still high-end talent here, headlined by Stephen Curry. There's still a level of competence that Draymond Green brings to the defensive end.

How much are they going to be able to get out of this regular season before ideally you get Jimmy Butler back? We see what happens with Chris Stoxx-Perseng, as though that does not appear to have any kind of endpoint. We'll see what happens on that front. But just in general, how you carve out enough regular season wins to where you get a more healthy alignment close to the end of the regular season, you head into the play-ins slash play-offs, and now you are a dangerous team with Deb, youth, the growth, et cetera, et cetera. And what this has been, Steve, is seven starting lineups in eight games with Steph and Dray sitting out a couple as they're doing the maintenance deal on that front. You have interesting young players popping, headlined by Yaxle Lindeborg, which we're going to talk rookies in depth on Friday, but we are absolutely going to talk about Yaxle within this conversation because good Lord, has he been very good and has his usage been fun within this Golden State context. So that part has been neat. And so we land here, Steve, is where to get out to the 0-3 start. The first game was the Laker game in which Yaxle and Luka have the thing that becomes a whole storyline, yada, yada, yada. They have won five straight games. They are now five and three. They have the six best offense in basketball. On the year, they are 22nd in defense, but during this win streak, they have been 11th. They are forcing a ton of turnover. It's just like, I'm having fun watching this Warriors group. Because I am me, I'm also watching some of these wins like, well, here are some of the issues or some of the questions that I had heading into the year popping up in this quarter or during this stretcher game.