The Nuggets have long held hopes that Jamal Murray could be turned into a point guard. If what they mean by point guard is “a true floor general who brings the ball up the court and sets up the offense every time” or “chucker who sometimes is forced to pass because of the triple team on his fadeaway jumper” or something in between, I don’t know. But until Monte Morris came out of nowhere to be pretty good, he was their main option at the position, however suited he was for the job.
This game has the feeling of being a huge anomaly rather than any sort of turned-corner. 15 assists is way out of his normal range; his previous career-high was 10 back in his rookie season, and he surpassed that mark in the first half of tonight’s game. He has had a fair amount of 8/9-assist games this season, so maybe things are changing for him. That would be impressive, because I don’t feel like passing ability is really a learnable trait by the time someone is in the NBA. Maybe for bigs they can go from “not ever passing” to “finding cutters”, but guards don’t usually transition into point-gods after being scorers earlier in their career.
Yes, there are tons of examples of players doing exactly that. I don’t care. I have a point here and I’m not going to let a couple dozen outliers ruin it.