I was so, so wrong about Pascal “Cameroonian Joel Embiid” Siakam. I didn’t go out and say straight up that he sucked (well maybe I did), but I certainly critized him for not being able to shoot as well as displayed a general lack of enthusiasm for him. I probably wasn’t even way off base; he didn’t look overly impressive at any point in his first two years other than a few flashes. There was, to my eyes, no indication of how much of a beast he’d become this year.
Maybe I wasn’t looking at him correctly, or through the correct lens. Maybe Toronto homers who proclaimed his greatness early were the ones who truly saw with their eyes wide open, and all the doubters and haters were blind.
So, he’s good now, but I still want to criticize him, so I will say that he hasn’t been doing enough spin moves lately. It’s good to diversify and not do the same thing every time, but it’s also good to complete a full 360 rotation while going to the basket in order to score. That’s more than good. That’s doubleplusgood.
Siakam did a good amount of damage from the three-point zone tonight, a fact which will surely cause salty Warriors fans to exclaim “why do role-players always hit all their threes against us?”, which is a slight variation on the universal “why do scrubs always go off on us?”. The answer is twofold. First, Siakam is definitely not a scrub anymore and is maybe exceeding role-player status, and second, it’s because at least one role-player for a team in a particular game will hit a good amount of threes. That’s just how things work.