It’s hard to criticize anything that the Pacers are doing, since they’re one of the best teams in the East with what I consider to be a somewhat motley collection of players. But, just saying, if I had a guy on my team who was averaging 21/14/4 per 36 I would try and make sure he was on the court as much as possible. I would also write a bot that bypassed Google’s All-Star voting vote limits and tally billions of votes per day for him. Oh wait, I already did that. You can expect Sabonis to be an All-Star starter for sure this year since he’s going to have orders of magnitude more votes than anyone else. And if anyone gets suspicious, well, let’s just say that Lithuanians have a lot of time on their hands.
But yeah, he needs to play more. That is my (professional, I might add) opinion. His stats are just too good, and I don’t feel like they’re the result of his limited minutes. Maybe if you played him the full 36 he would foul out a bunch, but so what? Teams don’t use the six fouls players are allotted often enough.
Him and Myles Turner aren’t the greatest fit in the world, I understand that. But they could be a better fit of Turner tightened up his three-ball a little bit and Sabonis stopped being a pussy about shooting from out there. He’s shooting a blistering and totally sustainable 83 percent from deep this season, which leads me to suspect that he’s pulling a Kyle Korver: not shooting in order to preserve his elite percentages. Don’t believe me that that’s what Korver did? Just ask Jazz fans from a decade ago.