When the Thunder traded Ersan Ilyasova for Jerami Grant all those years ago, I was incredulous. Why would they trade one of the league’s stretchiest fours for a still-raw pogo stick with few discernable basketball skills? At the time, it made no sense to me, and my only explanation was that somehow Ilyasova and Enes Kanters’ political views were causing unfixable locker room problems and one of them had to be traded.
I still think that Ilyasova would’ve been better for them in the short term, but NBA GM’s think in the long term. Unless they’ve received a mandate from the owners to make the playoffs RIGHT NOW and then everything goes to heck. It’s been a few years, and now Grant is clearly the superior player. I love Ilyasova, always have, always will, but he seemingly can’t hit a layup anymore and his only defensive skill is taking ludicrous amounts of charges. He’s looking a few years older than advertised (which he probably is). Grant, on the other hand, is still young and can run and jump really well. And it took a while, but now he’s added a three-point shot to his game, becoming the stretch-four that the Thunder always envisioned he could be.
If you really squint your eyes hard, like make it so when watching this video you can only see indistinct blurs, you can pretend that this is Paul George scoring these 23 points. That’s how good Grant was tonight. He wasn’t content to just get set up by Westbrook for all his buckets, no, he did one-on-one moves that looked pretty janky but were (sometimes) successful. Also, when you can take an extra step because the refs are confused as to what constitutes a travel these days, that’s an advantage.