Realistically, I should be having a conversation with myself over Luke Kennard’s eligibility on my scrubalicious highlight channel. I’m having a lot of conversations on that topic regarding many players right now (I think my last description was about the same topic but with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander), but most of those conversations are easy to resolve in the “he’s excluded” direction, because I don’t really care about the player in question. Not so with Kennard. I like Kennard. I like watching him play, I like his doofy shooting form, I like that he looks like Peyton Manning.
The fact is, though, that he’s averaging near 20 points per game and is either the first or second banana when it comes to scoring on the Pistons. Andre Drummond doesn’t really count as a banana because all he can do is dunk and throw up garbage hook shots. Derrick Rose might not count either if he can’t stay on the court consistently, same with Blake Griffin, and if all those dudes don’t count, then all of a sudden Kennard is the first option.
Griffin returning to the lineup should, theoretically, have a deleterious effect on his scoring output, so we’ll wait and see. And even if it turns out that Griffin’s reappearance only makes Kennard more of a beast, and he starts averaging 25 despite Dwane Casey trying to hold him down at every turn, I’m probably still gonna keep making vids for him. Because he’s awesome. I made a terrible mistake not doing T.J. Warren vids this year (and it’s too late to go back now), and I don’t want to make that mistake again.