It’s fun to hear a commentator say stuff to the effect of “it’s better when he lets the game come to him” or “this is the Dillon Brooks we need to see, taking it to the rim” and then said player goes and starts taking and making a whole bunch of swaggy jumpers, directly contradicting the commentator’s desires. For most of his later buckets, Brooks was definitely not letting the game come to him. He was coming to the game, taking the ball and shooting it.
What prompted him to do such things, I don’t know, because he hasn’t been good on offense since that 36 point game he had at the end of his rookie season. This season, especially, he’s been booty flakes on offense. 5 for 19 in the first two games, and not only that, he fouled 11 times. The fouling part doesn’t have much to do with his offensive woes, but I wanted to bring it up as a fun tidbit before the addition of more games to the sample size makes it less fun.
It’s a very real possibility that Brooks will have peaked in his rookie season as a somewhat decent scorer on a very bad tanking team. Is there as much of a role for him on a team that is actually trying to win games? Are the Grizzlies as they’re currently constructed such a team? So many questions, and we won’t get answers for a few weeks at minimum. A few years when it comes to the question of whether he has peaked or not. That’s the great thing about Basketball GM, that online basketball simulator that I get addicted to every offseason. If a season is going bad, or you want to see how stuff looks 20 years in the future, you can just zoom right through things. Not so in real life. Every time I go to sleep I wake up hoping I traveled forward in time a few years just so I can see all the cool NBA statistical happenings that happened, but no luck.