Nemanja Bjelica has cooled off since his hot start, but the trend remains the same: when he does good (I’m defining “good” here as “scoring points”), the Kings do good. If he scores in single-digits, they’re almost guaranteed to lose. This trend, obviously, exists for a lot of players in the league, and it usually indicates who the important players are. Sometimes those players are maybe the players you don’t think are important.
Right now, though, everyone watching this video is Serbian and they all obviously think that Bjelica is second in importance on the Kings only to Bogdan Bogdanovic. And, surprise, Bogdanovic has the same correlation between personal success and team success. Whereas someone like De’Aaron Fox doesn’t.
Bjelica had 18 points tonight, which is a nice amount, and he also technically had the assist on the game-winner by Bogdanovic. It wasn’t much of an assist, it wasn’t like he was throwing a perfect lob for a dunk with almost no time he left, he just kind of passed it in to Bogey who did his thing for a bit before chucking a deep bomb that somehow went in. So I didn’t show it, and that’s okay, because you definitely already saw it. There’s no way you didn’t.