So many title possibilities this weekend, so little space! Anyways, my bare minimum goal was to at least not name another headline after Dame, even though the SEO gods demand it. It’s hard, I know! (Just the way your mother likes it.) And we’ll get to the continuing saga between Dame and making defense a choice (gimmie those aggregate hits baby!), but if you followed my writings over on the Football site for any measure of time, you know for a fact that the “buttfumble” meme was roughly 25% of our daily content. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve finally found something to top that, and since it involves Draymond Green, a lot more gratification and karma has been added to the process…
Look, I get it, this has zero fantasy relevance, but it is one of my fantasies, so y’all are just gonna have to let me enjoy this moment today. And maybe 30% daily. (Maybe 40%… I honestly can’t stop watching. Much catharsis, so little time.)
Oh yeah, talking about getting kicked in the nuts, but this time figuratively! (The best kind, in my honest opinion…) Has anyone here not seen Wemby play? If not, you are truly missing something mesmerizing… and I rarely use multisyllabic words, so you know I mean it when it’s +3.
I don’t want to take away from the Raptors come-from-behind overtime win against the Spurs, we’ll get to that, but just watch Victor Wembanyama defend OG Anunoby:
And that’s like barely a 3-out-of-10 highlight out of his entire catalogue so far! Just making players look like me at the Rec… Let us all pray for great health and longevity.
Credit goes to where its due… despite encountering a 10-foot-tall alien, Scottie Barnes contributed a 30/11/6 with 3 steals and 3 blocks along with 5-out-of-10 shooting outside the arc, helping fuel a 17-point comeback in the fourth quarter. Not for nothing, but Barnes has been averaging now 22.6 points, 9.9 rebounds and 5.9 assists so far this season. That’s on 51/42/76 and 61 total shot percentage…
CJ McCollum has been diagnosed with a small collapsed right lung and we should know more in a day or so. Not sure what the ramifications are, we’d probably have to get a medical license to know, but he has suffered from this before in 2021, which probably means something I don’t understand, maybe that his lungs need more air and I need more medical schooling? (He did recover just fine the last time though…)
Rookie Ausar Thompson has been a great contributor in just about every category you’d want and nearly had a 5×5, putting up 14/9/4/4/4 in just his seventh NBA game. His defense is only getting better, and if he can keep his current averages of 11/9/4/1/2 and maybe get that 11 points over 15, you basically have all-NBA Ben Simmons (lol, just bear with the example).
Bismack Biyombo did something! Crazy season so far or the craziest of seasons so far? In his debut with the Griz, he finished with a +18 by scoring 8 points with 11 rebounds, 4 assists and 3 blocks.
Despite LaMelo Ball‘s 21 points just in the fourth quarter (amazing effort and smooth handles right above), Grant Williams and his 18 points (and 4-for-5 from 3) for Dallas proved to be too much for the Hornets.
As teased a week ago, “As the Harden Turns” finally ended its season, concluding with the disgruntled star finally landing on his team of choice, the Clippers, forming a super team the likes of which no one ever saw coming and that would be favored to win a chip roughly five years ago. That being said, I do actually like James Harden a lot on this team.
Y’all heard the talking heads be very mixed on this if you’ve been paying attention, but no one is harder on the Clippers as Clippers fans are (there are dozens of us, dozens!) and think this weird experiment of starting Westbrook-Harden-George-Leonard-Zubac will be very dynamic. It’s also easy to forget that (health-willing, of course) the Clippers have some of the best defending wings in the business, so there’s a lot less risk of, well, whatever you want to call what’s going on with the Bucks is.
And so here we are, most of our recaps have started with Damian Lillard, so let’s end with him… “Damian Lillard is playing the worst defense of his career, and it might cost more than just the Bucks…” I mean, what can I say that this headline didn’t?
We were so young, so innocent just a short couple of weeks ago when the world cried out: “How do you stop this pick n’ roll?” I guess the answer was to score more points than the Bucks? Who knew it was going to be this easy?
On one hand, yeah, if you’ve watched Dame in the past, this is nothing new. He was already one of the bottom percentiles in the league when it came to defensive guard metrics and I’m not sure what a change of scenery would have done for that aspect of his game. Generally, players don’t change too much, and it’s not like “Dame-time” referred to his lockdown abilities… so one has to wonder a bit about the scheme and the way the Bucks are approaching this. Besides the obvious joke of the Bucks needing another plus-defender, say someone like Jrue Holiday for example (it’s not like they couldn’t win a championship with that group, RIGHT!?), it does appear that there are some major growing pains ahead with Coach Griffins.
I will say that their scheme looked better against the Knicks, but look, it’s the Knicks, right? Bucks won’t be this bad, I know it’s a big deal that the East Coast has discovered that Dame is a one-way player, but the one thing that does really worry me a bit is Giannis Antetokounmpo and his willingness to take a backseat, toning down is aggressiveness in response to this iteration.
Let’s reassess this in a few weeks, but I’d be more worried about Devin Booker and the mysterious moving injury that has gone from one leg to the other and moving up as every Suns report comes out. How many contested jumpers can Kevin Durant make until the heat death of the universe? Stay tuned to find out!
Jay is a longtime Razzball everything who consumes an egregious amount of Makers Mark as a vehicle to gain wisdom and augment his natural glow. Living in the D.C. area, he also likes spending time visiting the local parks and feeding lettuce to any turtles he encounters, including Mitch McConnell.
