Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (henceforth referred to as “SGA” because there is no way in heck that I’m going to continue to type his full name out like some kind of guy who has infinite time to type out pointless garbage) got a career high in points this game with 25. That’s prett sweet, and the sweetness isn’t even tainted by the fact that, as a talented rookie who will continue to develop, SGA is extremely likely to score more than 25 at some point in his career. Sure, this game is his career high right now at this very moment, but if we check back in five years, it won’t even be top ten for SGA.
What does taint this career high performance is the fact that SGA reached 25 points with five minutes to go in the third quarter (or about two-thirds of the way through the game). He then failed to score a single point for the rest of the contest. Since I wasn’t watching this game as closely as I should have (Factorio consumes a lot of one’s attention when your rail signals are causing trains to stop in unhelpful places), I can’t say what the cause of the scoring cessation was.
Did the Warriors just put the clamps on SGA because they were tired of him making the game too close? Did SGA stop being aggressive because he felt sorry for Steph “Stephanie Lurry” Curry? Did Patrick Beverley hog the ball? There’s a lot of options here, but I’ll have to wait for somebody more intelligent/observant than I to let me know why SGA didn’t score any points in the final third of the game. In the meantime, I’m going to withdraw into my own private fantasy world where SGA scored thirty and the Clippers didn’t choke away the fourth quarter.