I predict that everyone on earth who happens across this video will be surprised that 23 points represents a career-high for Jonas Jerebko. I was only a little surprised, but surprised I was despite following this dude for his entire career. The Warriors commentators were definitely surprised. I think Mark Cuban was surprised, but they didn’t show him sitting in the stands shaking his head and muttering obscenities.
Jerebko has been in the league for a long time, almost a decade, and he’s been a pretty decent role-player for that whole time. And decent role-players, usually, typically, normally, have at least one game where everything goes their way and they score 25. If not 30. Hell, even sub-role-players have games like that all the time. You could compile a list of active players with a higher career-high than Jerebko and it would be several hundred names long, I bet.
This game doesn’t do much to change that. It is a new career-high, sure, but it’s still “only” 23 points. While it was going on, it didn’t have the transcendent feeling of “this guy is having the best game of his life and I’m watching it!”, unlike a certain other career-high performance that I just uploaded (Thomas Bryant, if you’re from the future and that video got deleted because of spurious copyright claims from shady semi-corporate entities). Jerebko was just out there, making his shots, and getting a few bonus buckets on the offensive glass. Nothing insane.