I’m sensing a severe and sudden downturn in the amount of hype Bogdan Bogdanovic is receiving. He still has a lot of fans, a whole countryful in fact, but when it comes to popularity in America, he’s trending down. The reason is simple: he just hasn’t improved noticeably over last year. Meanwhile, someone like Nikola Jokic (same country) is a fringe MVP candidate, someone like Bojan Bogdanovic (same name) is unexpectedly leading his team in scoring, and someone like Luka Doncic (same Euro situation) is being a triple-double machine. All those dudes have the power of the narrative behind them, driving excitement towards their work on court, but what does Bogdan have? The Kings are unexpectedly almost a playoff team, but he’s not widely regarded as being the reason for their resurgence. Other than that, I’ve got nothing. He’s just a Euro role-player on an okay team. I love those kind of players, but everyone else? Indifferent.
Maybe tonight marked the end of that. Maybe from this point forward, we will see a newly aggressive and motivated Bogdanovic, one that wants to get triple-doubles (like Jokic), shoot swaggy stepback threes (like Doncic) and be really handsome (like DownToBuck). During the second quarter of this game, it looked like he had taken some notes while watching Doncic’s best highlights, and those notes said “just run up the court and shoot threes, people really seem to like that here in America”.
But that aggression faded until late in the second half, and what looked like a sure triple-double ended up as a pretty-good 24/9/8 statline. Way better than the middling games he’s been having for months now, but a tad disappointing after his second-quarter theatrics. The Kings are stacked with exciting talent, but maybe some of that exciting talent can take a well-earned break with the playoffs now out of reach. They can take a break and let Bogdanovic run the show all by himself like we saw at times last year.