Welcome back. I’m sitting on my couch exhausted after taking my three year old to the zoo today. His favorite animal was the em-eyph-ant aka elephant, mine were these cuties.
Now I’m sitting on the couch watching NBATV in heaven. There’s so many exciting games tonight, fifteen total! Play-in tournament starts next Tuesday. Hells yeahhh
The boldness and wildness of D’Angelo Russell is fascinating.
I forget which podcast I was listening to, it might’ve been the Hoop Collective, apologies if I’m fucking that up, but they said something like D’Angelo is a player that needs to be wild, needs to play out of his head a little, wild in a good way, in order to feel like he can be freed up enough to play his best game; that his skill lives in his bad decision making as much as it does in his good decision making, that in order to make good decisions he is a player who might have to make bad ones.
It’s a bad religion!!!!!!
D’Angelo Russell, a guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, for anyone who doesn’t know, has had a fascinating playing career. After being drafted by the Lakers in 2-0-1-5 he bounced around the league, played a little for the Nets, the Warriors, and the Timberwolves, before making it back to the Lakers late last year in a mid-season trade centered around Russell Westbrook.
Pretty much ever since then he has been in trade rumors, the NBA equivalent of being a traveling hospital nurse with no control of their schedule. Last year he was in rumors for Kyrie Irving, over last summer it was for Kyrie Irving again, and I suspect that Kyrie Irving was one of the targets the Lakers had in mind as they spent the majority of this season attempting to trade D’Angelo Russell again.
They probably would’ve traded him in December but D’Angelo started to put some things together, real game, which suddenly made him an asset worth holding onto. His scoring was high but also efficient. He became a serious threat from beyond the arc in Caitlin Clark city.
Honestly, I’m not sure I ever fully understood the desire to trade him. He played really well for the Lakers in last season’s playoffs, helping the team advance into the third round, a feat that wouldn’t have happened without him. He started this year off poorly, but so did Austin Reaves.
Though unlike Austin, he has his haters:
Workout disses? Wow. That’s pretty cold.
Look, it’s not like his decision making has evolved into savant status, he still makes decisions on the court that can feel somewhat random or silly. But then there’s the recent track record of scoring and shooting percentage, in particular from the three-ball, that goes along with it, and you start to look at his decision making, and the randomness of it, and instead of seeing it as a vulnerability, it begins to look more like an intangible.
That, not only is Russell’s randomness on the court not a problem, it’s a necessity for him, essential to his overall success in other areas.
Take the flaws of his game out, and like a virus-infected brain, you don’t just remove the flaws but you remove everything.
This world that we live in keeps people down with its subtle expectations.
There’s a good word for one such tactic and you see it everywhere.
To regard anything short of perfection as unacceptable sounds like a pretty depressing way to play basketball. There’s no such thing as ‘perfect’ in basketball, or anywhere else really. Okay, <maybe Ivan Drago> was perfect but fuck him.
I realize that Russell’s game has been questionable over the years, and his decision making suspect, but perhaps that was part of the secret sauce all along.
It’s soothing to think that someone like D’Angelo Russell has been able to work through his mistakes, and get to a point where his flaws are a necessary part of his ability to play winning basketball.
Perhaps the script on D’Angelo Russell can go from ‘unreliable player who makes too many mistakes’ to ‘Reliable player who will deliver for your team if you allowed him to make mistakes.’
That feels a little more forgiving, and realistic.
I realize fans want to see perfection from every player, and always need to find a scapegoat if their team underperforms, but I’m hoping that, ahem, the Lakers fans this year can see the bigger picture during our play-off run.
Rather than blaming D’Angelo Russell for our HYPOTHETICAL playoff failures, like we did last year, we should thank him for helping us get to April basketball in the first place. We would not be here without him.
After Lebron and Anthony Davis, D’angelo, the guy experts say this about:
The “show pony” has been one of our most solid and reliable players this year, playing 73 games, shooting 41% from 3 on 7 attempts per game and averaging a reliable 18 points and 6 assists, according to State Muse.
Without this flawed man, and his mistakes, all of his mistakes, his team wouldn’t be in the playoffs at all.
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