The first thing I thought of, immediately, when I saw Antonio Blakeney was this:
Flattop-era Brandon Jennings.
I’m pretty sure Jennings scored 55 with that thing on his head, so this is a good sign for Sir Blakeney. Another good sign for him: his name really goes well with the title “Sir”. This is an underrated aspect of NBA player quality that I think goes unnoticed a lot of the time.
The Bulls really sucked tonight. They picked it up a bit by the time the game was almost over (always the best time to pick it up), but they were especially brutal in the first quarter. The Bulls sucking means one thing to me: their scrubs get to play minutes. Most of their scrubs already are rotation players, so a game like this means they dust off the true end-of-benchers. Like Blakeney. He’s a D-League god, but that means nothing in the NBA. The NBA is its own thing, and Blakeney proved he belongs at least a little bit, scoring 16 on 12 shots. For real, this is almost as good as Tyler Cavanaugh scoring the same amount. My two fave performances of the season so far.