Kadeem “Kadeem Albdul Jabbar” Allen has been a nice surprise for the Knicks as they tank out the rest of their season. This, for me, is what the NBA is all about: horrible teams finding diamonds in the rough during the last few weeks of the year that they can maybe use next season while still being horrible. All this other stuff, these “playoffs” and “awards” and “double-digit scoring averages”, those are all missing the point. I want role-players who weren’t expected to be role-players. I want scrubs who somehow un-scrub themselves just enough to play decent minutes on a real NBA team.
If only there were a league full of marginal and sub-marginal NBA talent, like a whole league with teams full of nothing but those kind of players. In a league like that, some of those players would naturally rise to the top and score 30, 40 points regularly. Even though they weren’t actually that good, that’s how many points they’d score, because of the nature of the league. A man can dream.
At another point in the season, for another team, the phrase “Kadeem Allen scored 18 against the second-best team in the league” would make a lot of people very excited. But for right now, it only makes me and his mother very excited. Everyone else is ranging from “that’s cool, I guess” to “who?”.