I love April in the NBA. When a certain amount of teams stop caring about winning, that means that the lineups they put aren’t necessarily the lineups that are most likely to win games. But they ARE the most likely lineups to feature scrubs who need to increase their videographic representation on the DownToBuck highlights channel. JaKarr Sampson is one of those scrubs, but, given that he just scored 29 points, can he even really be called a scrub anymore?
If we’re being honest, Sampson doesn’t have much in the way of “traditional” scoring abilities. His jumpshooting and dribbling are suspect. In that sense, he’s a scrub. He’s also a scrub in the sense that his entire career has seen him play small roles on average to bad teams. But he plays with enough speed and craftiness that he can sometimes negate those deficiencies in his game. And if you randomly decide to let him shoot the ball a ton because you’re tanking, you might get a surprise scoring outburst like this one. Like a pinata sprays candy when you hit it hard with a stick, so does Sampson spray points when you hit him hard with 35 minutes of action in a single game and an unlimited green light.
You know what’s even better than Sampson scoring 29? The Bulls have a guy named Brandon Sampson who scored six points. While it greatly confused me at first, since the NBA play-by-plays don’t have first names, in the end it turned out to be a blessing because I can say the sentence “Sampson scored 35 points for the Bulls” and it wouldn’t even be a lie. That’s so awesome.