Hold on for just a sec. I’m watching the Spurs-Nuggets game and the Nuggets are down by one with the ball and thirteen seconds left on the clock. I can’t concentrate on this video description until I know if Jokic becomes Chokic or if DeRozan truly is DeFrozan. I’ll be back in a little bit.
Okay, I’m back, and the Nuggets lost. Maybe Raptors fans don’t feel so bad now that their two-seed counterpart in the West also gave up the first game of their series to a (nominally) inferior opponent. Or maybe they feel just as bad as before but now have a fanbase to commiserate with.
Anyway, Pascal Siakam did what he could tonight, taking 24 shots to score 24 points, which isn’t great in today’s era of efficiency. 24 is the second-most shots he’s taken in a game this season; when he took 25 in a game, he ended up scoring 44. When comparing those two games in which Siakam shot a nearly identical volume of shots, this one looks like total dumpster diapers. I won’t explain the math because it gets pretty complicated, but the Raptors would have beat the Magic tonight if Siakam had scored 44 instead of 24. Easily.
I’ll leave it up to Raptors fans to decide if it’s encouraging that Siakam took the most shots on the team, signifying his development as a player and his desire to become the leader of the team, or if it’s discouraging because his shot-hungry playstyle prevented other players from getting into a rhythm (coughcoughKYLELOWRYwheeze). For once in my life I’m not going to pretend to have the answers because it seems unfair to speak for their fans when I’m the farthest thing from a Raptors fan in the world.