Norris Cole is a fine backup point guard, but I can’t discern any reason why he should be starting with Jrue Holiday’s minutes restriction now lifted. Yes, Holiday is putting up good numbers off the bench, but he would put up even BETTER numbers if he started. Not only that, but Anthony Davis deserves to play with a real point guard. He does not deserve to play with Norris Cole. No offense to Norris.
The statskeepers did their part to make Cole appear more suited to the starter’s job by giving him a bunch of assists that he didn’t really earn. Assists are often treated as some mythical thing that you can get a tally of to determine the worth of a player, but they’re so arbitrary that I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t even keep track of them anymore. The only stat we need is points. Points and dunks. Just those two. If Cole is going to get an assist for passing the ball to Ryan Anderson, who then strings together three different moves over the course of ten seconds in order to score, then we don’t deserve to have assists at all.