I’ve ragged heavily on Jusuf Nurkic in the past for being out-of-control with his scoring moves and for taking ill-advised shots. I’m not going to backtrack and say that he wasn’t doing those things in past games, because he definitely was, but I will acknowledge that Nurkic was under control and composed in this game, and it resulted in a highly efficient nine-of-ten shooting night. It helped that smaller dudes were, for some reason, always switching onto him, so their resistance to his post moves was less resistant than a bigger dude’s resistance would have been, but I still half-expected Nurkic to throw up a blind hook shot from ten feet out every time.
Nurkic’s efficiency was garbage for the first three months of the season, but has been good since then, so I might just be living in the past when it comes to his supposed shortcomings. That’s fine. The past was cool. The past had Jalapeno-Cheddar flavor 3D Doritos. It also had Nurkic shooting an even 40% in seven games in the month of October. The past was awesome.
Unrelated, but I also want to personally thank the NBA scorekeepers, and Adam Silver himself, for ensuring that all four of Nurkic’s blocks were actual, real-life blocks where the blockee was inarguably attempting to make a shot. When I think “blocked shot”, I think “big dude erasing shot attempts out of midair”, and that’s exactly what we get in this video. Nice.