Dewayne “The Cacodedmon” “Judge Dedd” “Jumpin’ Jehovah” Dedmon can now officially be called a stretch-five. His primary role on the floor, at least for the past fews games, has been to provide spacing at the center position. And, guess what nerds? The Hawks have won four of their last five. I’m going to go ahead and attribute all those wins to the actions of Judge Dedd.
When your power forward is a guy like John Collins, who can brutalize people in the paint but has no midrange game to speak of and definitely no three-point range, what you really need is a center who can camp out at the three-point line to open up the interior. This is common basketball wisdom that has become so common that even I understand it, and I understand very little of the X’s and O’s of basketball. So Dedmon getting 28 MPG makes perfect sense. It’s not like Alex Len or Miles Plumlee can reliably shoot threes; the former is making a valiant effort, while the latter has a jumpshot rating in the negative numbers.
The only thing that would make Dedmon’s stretch-fiviness even better is if the Hawks broadcast would please, PLEASE, show closeups of him while’s he’s “dialing long distance” on his “phone” which is really just his hand. Yeah, it’s cool to see the bench doing it too, but I wanna see the man at work. I wanna see him make a hand-phone and hold it up to his face. God damn it.