https://youtu.be/ZaS4x1yQbjk
It has been almost exactly two years since Kentavious Caldwell-Pope scored this many points. April 9, 2019, final game of the regular season, he dropped 32 (on 31 shots, NICE), following up another 32-point performance he had had the previous game. If there were any Lakers fans out there who were super optimistic about his prospects for the next season because of those back-to-back thirty burgers (and you know there were probably tons, just because of how many casual-as-heck Lakers fans there are out there, casuals who don’t know that they should never to be optimistic about anyone or anything, ever), there were surely disappointed. Because KCP had a pretty dismal year scoring after that, only hitting the 20-point mark one single time.
He also won a championship and scored 17 points in the deciding game, but I have a narrative here, dammit, and if certain things don’t fit neatly into that narrative, I’m well within my rights as a well-known basketball pundit to ignore them. So there. Deal with it.
He hasn’t been great scoring this year either, but now that he has a championship, he’s ascended to the point in his career where he can coast all he wants and still plausibly be able to say that he’ll turn it up for the playoffs. So it doesn’t matter that he can play 20 minutes and score only 3 points. He’s a CHAMPION. Obviously what he’s doing worked, and worked so well that it vanquished all 29 other teams.
But tonight was different. Likely because every good player (and some of the not good players) for the Lakers was out, KCP went out there and was aggressive trying to score the ball. No worrying about stepping on anyone’s toes, or hurting anyone’s fragile egos by taking too many shots. HE was the one who was allowed to chuck. Alfonzo McKinnie was the one worried about taking too many shots away from him (which he did, 5 shot attempts, are you serious????? stay in yo’ lane). This was absolutely a “vintage” KCP performance, I’m not afraid to say it. If you mess with the colors on your viewing device enough, you can make it look like he’s back with the Pistons, along with Andre Drummond, and I don’t know how I feel about that.