The first video in the new “DownToStatpad” era of my channel, an era where I statpad the content of videos/the amount of videos in order to increase exposure, is off to a rocky start. The video itself is not a statpadded video, because Kelly Oubre scoring 20 points is a totally legit performance that would always be showcased in “Era 1” of DownToBuck. No, the real problem is that he had 5 steals in this game, presenting an easy chance to statpad the length of this video, and I didn’t take advantage. Old habits die hard, and at this late hour (the game ended, like, 12 hours ago), I’m definitely way too lazy to show a bunch of steals that hardly led to any points at all for the Suns.
6 steals, I’d probably go for that. That’s a lot of steals. 5? No way. Steals count as defense, and as everyone knows, I don’t care about defense. Defense gets in the way of dudes getting buckets.
Isn’t this vid way better because the bucketage is uninterrupted by seemingly random defensive plays by Oubre? It’s a matter of flow. Vids just flow better when it’s clear why a particular play is being shown. With buckets, it’s obvious: the ball is going in the hole due to the actions of the player. With a steal, things can be murky, maybe he gets a fingertip on the ball and nothing else, but it still counts as a whole steal if his team gains possession.
I make no apologies. Oubre can make his own video with his steals if he doesn’t like my decision. With that said, I hereby apologize (even though I literally just said that I wouldn’t) to Russell Westbrook; I underestimated how hard is to statpad.