First off: I’m really sorry to the handful of you viewers out there who saw this video posted as “Jaylen Brunson” highlights. There are just way too many Jaylen/Jalen/Jaelynnes out there for me to be expected to keep track of them all. For the record, when I made the mistake in the video title I was preoccupied with thinking about Jaylen Morris and why the heck the Bucks wouldn’t keep him around on a two-way contract.
Brunson had a nice game tonight in the absence of Luka Doncic. I would even venture to say… his best ever? His best NBA game, for sure. I don’t know about college, and I’m sure in high school he dropped a couple 50-burgers, but those all don’t count. This counts. This was a legit performance against the “best” team in the West.
I’m wondering now if Doncic is nothing but a system player, because Brunson came right in and almost perfectly replicated his production. 22 points, that’s an amount Doncic would score. 5 assists, yeah, I can see Doncic getting that many. And the 6 turnovers is perfect. The only discrepancy is that Doncic would never end a game shooting 8 for 12 like Brunson did. If he even got the slightest inkling that he was hot, you know the ball is going up 20 or 25 times, including a half-dozen stepback threes.
I guess I have to offer a second apology (feeling apologetic today, and not in the Christian theology kind of way), because that whole paragraph was about Doncic but this video isn’t about Doncic, it’s about Brunson. Am I falling into the ESPN trap where I can only talk about role-players in terms of how they relate to stars and superstars?