It wasn’t too long ago that I dreaded having to make George Hill highlights. This was around the time of his season with Utah where he averaged 17 PPG. I’m not sure what my rationale was at the time, but I had placed him in the “Reggie Jackson/Jeff Teague/Darren Collison” tier of point guards who would often have good performances but weren’t exciting enough for my liking. Whatever my reasoning was, I never cared for Hill as a subject of highlight videos. As a player, I thought he was fine, but not the kind of guy I wanted to spent time making vids for.
After that season, Hill’s career started taking weirder and weirder turns. He signed with the Kings after somehow getting duped into thinking that the team would be competetive. After multiple tweets consisting of nothing but angry emojies and cryptic threats aimed at the Kings’ front-office staff, he was hand-picked by LeBron to play in Cleveland and compete for a championship. The championship part of that didn’t work out, and then LeBron abandoned all his hand-picked teammates for “greener pastures” (LOL [lots of laughs]) in Los Angeles. After some time spent wasting his life on a tanking Cavs team, waiting as a damsel in distress for some heroic knight to whisk him away from the crumbling castle, he was traded to the Bucks, where his shooting numbers have fallen of a cliff in a backup PG role. At least he’s not on the Cavs anymore!
Despite the regressed shooting, Hill has nice on-off numbers, so he must be doing something right, and this seventeen-point performance finally pairs the theoretical goodness of his play with an indicator of goodness that my numbers-obsessed brain can understand. With Malcom Brogdon out until the second round (look at me assuming that the second round is a guarantee for the Bucks), the hope is that Hill can step up and be the player he was a few years ago.
At least he’s not going to, as a member of the Bucks, tweet seventeen angry emojies in one tweet.