Look at that smile. That is the smile of a man who knows he can hit threes at the NBA level. In this moment, Rui Hachimura is seeing the entire world open up for him. No longer will he have to be scrounging the midrange for chances to shoot jumpers. Now he can step all the way back to the arc with confidence, and perhaps, he can one day go even further.
He was 0-for-8 from deep before tonight. But when you add in his 3-for-3, you end up with a totally reasonable percentage for an NBA player. The kind of percentage where you see it and you’re like “yeah, that guy can shoot threes, maybe you don’t want him taking too many, but you can’t just leave him open from out there”. Source: those are literally the words that literally came out of my mouth when I saw his updated three-point percentage.
Looking at their roster, the Wizards seem to be lacking a real second-banana scorer. Bradley Beal is the first banana, obviously. Out of all the bananas on the team, he’s the yellowest and biggest. But someone else needs to step up. Who can it be? Since I’m typing these words in a description for a certain player, you know where I’m going with this, and it’s not in the direction of Moritz Wagner. You guessed it: seeing Hachimura score like this, in a nice variety of ways, it makes me think that he’s the one who can be banana number two.
The third banana can be Isaiah Thomas. He’s way too short and overripe to be the second banana.