The 76ers are a different team when Joel Embiid isn’t standing around inhaling possessions like some sort of insatiable possessions vacuum. Slightly worse, and definitely different. Replacing him with Jonah Bolden has several implications, but one of the major ones is that it means Jimmy Butler gets to have the ball more often, which is all he really wants. If you were to instead replace Embiid with Amir Johnson, the main result would be that the 76ers would suck. Sorry Amir, I thought you were good with the Raptors, but you’re not anymore.
Bolden isn’t really that good either, certainly lacking in the “vet savvy” department compared to Johnson, but he certainly held his own against Karl-Anthony Towns, who is the kind of player where you don’t hold your own he’s going to drop 40 on you without exerting himself too hard. Instead, it was Bolden dropping an incredible amount of points on Towns, a career-high 19 by way of a whole bunch of threes. Not bad for a guy who gets DNP’s half the time these days.
Australians are no doubt familiar with their constitutional mandate to watch one (1) Joe Ingles highlight video per day. They’ve seen enough of their friends and relatives carted off in handcuffs to not be aware of their duty as Australian citizens. And don’t worry, there’s no such mandate for Bolden highlight videos. YET. I scraped together some of my Patreon money (sorry folks, but I never said I wasn’t going to use it to influence foreign governments) and sent a nice bribe to one of the more corrupt Aussie senators. It was, like, 50 dollars in dirty money, and I included a note indicating my desire to see the Aussie constitution amended to make the viewing of Bolden highlight videos mandatory. He hasn’t gotten back to me yet, probably because he’s too busy drafting the legislation as we speak. Keep an eye on the news, and I’ll be keeping an eye on my view counts, because they’re about to go skyrocketing.