Jonas Valanciunas is back on track! People will say he was struggling, and maybe the stats suggest he was struggling, as he had three games of 6, 8, and 6 points all in a row, but it wasn’t him struggling. Trust me on this. It was just a continuation of the trend of him being marginalized for no reason, a trend that has been going on his entire career.
Anyway, things are back to normal for him, at least for now. His level of “normal” isn’t the same as his end-of-season stint with Memphis last year, but I’ve given up hoping that they will utilize him the same way as they did back then. And I understand, actually, because Brandon Clarke is ALSO a total beast and it’s actually kind of a shame that they are on the same team. The Rockets of old found out the hard way that Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson couldn’t work out together. When is the league going to step in and break up this duo in the name of “basketball reasons”?
My ideal situation for Valanciunas is not him getting traded to a new tea, but involves the league expanding by 2 teams, with the new franchises getting to poach players from all the other rosters in the league. In this scenario, Valanciunas gets poached to play for the new-look Seattle Supersonics, and he ends up being pretty much the only half-decent scorer on the roster. A similar thing as with what happened to Primoz Brezec, who frickin’ averaged 13 points for the expansion Bobcats. If Brezec (who was really kinda awful) could average 13, think about what Valanciunas could do. Oh my god.