An unheralded inter-position battle is happening right now in Philly: Trey Burke is going against Raul Neto in the battle of former Jazz midget point guards.
Right now, Neto is winning, which comes as a bit of a surprise to me (Jazz fans will probably not be surprised, though). He was always so marginal in Utah that I thought the sometimes non-marginal Burke would beat him out. Burke has way more of a pedigree of being a productive player; his 42-point, 12-assist game is one of the sweetest performances of all time (and my video for it is still up). Neto has but a single 20-burger to his name, and his career-high in assists is only 7.
Neto must be doing something right, though, because he’s getting to at least play in most of the 76ers games this season while Burke is getting tons of DNPs. My own theory is that Brett Brown has no idea what to do with point guards who aren’t the size of a power forward, so he just chose Neto over Burke randomly.
It goes without saying that this by far the most productive game Burke has had all season. All it took for him to break out was for almost the entire game to be garbage time! He got to play a ton of pressure-free minutes, got to do his own thing, which was mainly shooting LAMEups instead of those sweet midrange jumpers he scored 42 with. Damn. I’m gonna go rewatch that video now. He was like Allen Iverson for real in that game, why the heck are the 76ers marginalizing the closest thing they’ve had to AI since AI left?