Marvin “Marvelous Bags” Bagley did not, in my opinion, have a very good exhibition season. Kings fans agreed with me; he looked lost and ineffective. If they weren’t openly wondering why their team drafted him over a certain other highly regarded Euro, the thought was there in the back of ther mind.
The doubts that Bagley could contribute well on the NBA level were put to rest fairly soon in to his “real” career, but if there any of those doubts remaning, you can really put them to rest now. Because this is 32 points we’re talking about. He, officially, has gotten to meet a betogaed Carlos Delfino, keeper of The Hall of the Thirty Point Scorers and been granted the rare privilege of wandering about its palacial expanse for what seemed like an eternity but was really only a few seconds in the “real” world. Officially. That is officially what he got to do, because he has now scored 30 (or more) points in a real life NBA game featuring real life NBA defenders.
Assigning Dragan Bender the designation of “real life NBA defender” might be pushing it, but I’m trying to make Marvelous Bags look good here.
Not like he needs any help doing that tonight. This was an amazing performance by him, up there with the best performances of Willie Cauley-Stein’s career (is that a good thing or a bad thing… you decide!). For this game being a direct matchup of the first and second picks of the draft, there wasn’t much fanfare, but he totally dominated Deandre Ayton. Maybe not on a one-on-one level, because Ayton wasn’t really in the picture for most of these buckets, but just look at the point totals. And the amount of three-pointers. 32 is twice as much as 16, and 1 is infinity times more than 0. Or is it undefined? Math was never my strong suit.