Fun fact: coming into this game, Darius Garland had the worst Win Shares of any NBA player, at -0.6. If you had asked me who held that dubious distinction, I would’ve probably answered either Marco Belinelli (who is NOT a spicy meatball right now) or Eric Gordon (who looks like a regular, non-spicy meatball all the time and is also playing like one too). Those guys are bad, way the heck down there along with luminaries like Jordan Poole and Terrence Ross, but Garland has them all beat out. I knew he was bad, because I wasn’t seeing his name in my daily ordered-by-points-descending performance lists, but not that bad.
That’s before this game though. This was actually a decent performance by him, and when your advanced stats are that bad, even “just okay” performances can improve them a lot. His 1.7 PER should go up quite a bit, he’ll be well on his way to a double-digit PER if he keeps this up.
Supposedly this guy was known as a sharpshooter in college and before, so that’s a good sign. Shooting at an elite level at any level of basketball is a better thing than never shooting at an elite level anywhere. You were hitting 60 percent of your threes on your fifth grade team? That means that there’s something there. Garland just needs to rediscover what he had at Vanderbilt (stuff like catastrophic knee injuries, tons of hot chicks willing to bang, and no responsibilities) in Clevaland and he should be hitting tons of threes in no time.