At the time of this writing, Julius Randle is scoring 18 PPG in just 23 MPG. That puts him 12th in the league in per-36 scoring when you exclude players like Chris Boucher and Brad Wanamaker who obviously don’t count. He’s also the best off-the-bench scorer outside of Boban Marjanovic.
All this is setting him up as an early favorite for the 6MOTY of the year award. While normally the domain of shooting guard chuckers in the Lou Williams/Jamal Crawford mold, there’s no reason why it couldn’t go to a power forward chucker like Randle. He’s not a chucker in the sense that he bombs threes and long twos with abandon, but he will bully his way into the paint and throw the ball at the basket whenever he wants (which is often).
This video is marred by an overabundance of free-throws, but it shows why Randle is so unstoppable: a wiry center like Zach Collins is just too weak to contain Randle, while a beefy slab of man-meat like Jusuf Nurkic is too slow to hinder Randle’s surprisingly nimble moves. In fact, I’m struggling to come up with a negative thing to say about Randle, and that’s making me seriously uncomfortable.