Today’s Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes and 36 seconds

Good Morning. This the Daily Breakroom and we’re serving today’s updates street taco style. Small bites but there’s a lot of them.

Here’s what we got today:

🏀 Play-in Tournament Starts Tonight

🏀 WNBA Draft

🏒 Breaking Records

⚾️ It’s Getting Hot In Tampa

🏈 Ravens are spending 💲💲 

🏈 USC is getting who?

We’re going to spend a decent amount of time on the NBA play-in and then go rapid fire through the rest. Let’s do it.

NBA Play-In Starts Tonight

The NBA play-in tournament starts tonight with the 7 seeds taking on the 8 seeds in both conferences.

If you’re not familiar with how the play-in works, we’d be happy to fill you in. We’ll use the western conference for an example. Let’s start at the bottom left of the graphic and you’ll see the 7 and 8 seeds play tonight and the winner gets an automatic spot against the 2 seed. So let’s say the Lakers win tonight and Minnesota loses. Lakers will slide into the actual 7 seed and will face Memphis in the first round.

Tomorrow night, New Orleans and OKC will play. Here’s the surprise. Whoever loses that game is out of the playoffs for good. The winner of that game doesn’t get into the playoffs yet either. The winner will have to play the loser of the 7 vs 8 seed game. So if Minnesota loses tonight and New Orleans wins tomorrow night, they’ll play on Friday to see who gets into the first round against Denver.

Makes sense? Hope so.

So let’s chat about tonight’s matchups.

Western Conference

We have the Los Angeles Lakers hosting the Minnesota Timberwolves. We think LeBron will be feasting tonight on his favorite day of the week aka taco Tuesday. If you’re a LeBron fan you know he loves taco Tuesday with his family and if you’re not a LeBron fan, than you’re finding this to be extremely cringe.

The T-wolves had quite the night on Sunday with teammates fighting and the result was ugly. Center Rudy Gobert is suspended for tonight’s game as he threw punches at a teammate and Minnesota is also shorthanded because…. well… Jaden McDaniels broke his hand punching a wall in frustration on Sunday night.

With Minnesota having a weakened roster and the Lakers being pretty healthy tonight, we don’t think the Lakers will have a problem with this one. We’re going to take the Lakers giving 8 points tonight. Tip off is scheduled for 10:00pm EST on TNT

Eastern Conference

We have the 8 seeded Atlanta Hawks traveling to Miami to take on the 7 seeded Heat at 7:30pm(also on TNT). We think the Heat will win this one but likely won’t cover the -5 spread. Jimmy Butler loves showing up for big time games and the Heat are 27-14 at home this season. Atlanta is 17-24 on the road, which isn’t terrible but it still gives the edge to Miami.

WNBA Draft

The Indiana Fever drafted South Carolina forward Aliyah Boston with #1 pick in the WNBA draft last night. Boston averaged 13 points, 9.8 rebounds and two blocks per game this season. Boston is a 3x first-team All-American and back-to-back Naismith Defensive Player of the Year.

South Carolina had 5 players drafted overall. 3 in the first round, 1 in the 2nd and 1 in the 3rd.

Breaking Records

The Boston Bruins broke the NHL’s single-season win record after defeating the Philly Flyers on Sunday. Boston is 1 point away from tying the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens with the single most points in a season. The Bruins take on the Washington Capitals tonight at home and if they can’t break another record in this matchup, they’ll have a final opportunity on Thursday IN MONTREAL.

It’s Getting Hot in Tampa

The Tampa Bay Rays are off to a hot start this year. They are the 7th team in MLB history to start a season with a perfect 10-0 record and the first to do it since Milwaukee did it in 1987 with a 13-0 record.

The Rays might be able to match the record as they have 3 more home games vs the Red Sox before taking a trip to Toronto.

Ravens Are Spending Money

And it’s not on Lamar Jackson.

The Ravens don’t have a quarterback right now as Lamar Jackson wants little to do with a franchise tag and he’s even requested a trade. The Ravens went ahead and got him a little help in hopes that Jackson will stick around for at least another year. The Ravens signed Odell Beckham Jr. to a 1 year deal worth up to $15 million. We’ll see if OBJ can still be a WR1 after coming off ACL rehab last year.

p.s. It seems like Lamar wanted OBJ as the two partied it up at a Miami nightclub after OBJ accepted the contract. Maybe Lamar and the Ravens made up and we just don’t know it yet.

USC Is Getting Who?

As if USC Football wasn’t going to be good enough this year with Heisman winner Caleb Williams returning to lead the Trojans at QB, USC had to go and add someone else to the roster. We’re talking about the coaching staff roster.

Cliff Kingsbury will be coming to SoCal to work with the QBs under head coach Lincoln Riley. Kingsbury has extensive work with college quarterbacks as he’s coached Johnny Manziel to a heisman, Case Keenum at Houston, and Patrick Mahomes at Texas Tech. Kingsbury spent his last two season as the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals.

Watch out for USC to be a dangerous team this year. It might be time to grab a futures bet on them.

That’s all for today. We hope you indulge in some tacos today.

-The Daily Breakroom Team