Rui Hachimura gets a lot of buckets for a rookie who was supposed to be kinda raw offensively. That’s the best thing about him. Buckets. Lots of rookies, their main talent might lie outside the realm of scoring. The might not even have a main talent. But Hachimura, he knows how to put the ball in the hole. Which is, I might add, the whole point of the game in the first place. That’s why they call it ballinholeball.
Before this game, there were a mere 64 NBA players who had more buckets than Hachimura on the season. His ranking will go way up after this 11-bucket performance, putting him close to the top 50. In the whole NBA. Maybe that’s not nuts to you, but it’s nuts to me. Players now looking up at him (instead of them looking down at him) in the ranking include players like MVP-candidate Nikola Jokic, Superstar Kyrie Irving, Euro sensation Kristaps Porzingis, and Joe Harris.
It’s all because of that midrange jumper, man. He just pulls that thing out with no hesitation (if you read that sentence in a different way it becomes way funnier LMAO). He’s always ready to shoot it. And since NBA defenders are conditioned these days to give up midrange jumpers, a lot of people just let him have it. That’s stupid. Joel Embiid, you’re stupid. Hachimura’s game isn’t so advanced that he can really punish people who close out on him hard, other than by just shooting the jumper anyway and have it go in anyway.