Brook Lopez has been disappointing from the threezone this season. His sub-30% shooting from deep has turned him into an inefficient overall scorer. When defenses stop bothering to contest his three-point attempts, his benefit on that side of the ball will be all but negated until he goes back to his bread and butter, which is dominating people inside. Of course, the downside of turning Blopez back into a post-up and midrange guy is that it ruins the spacing for Giannis.
None of that matters though. I still love Blopez, especially when he’s terrorizing opponents by channeling the late great Larry Sanders with his shot-blocking prowess. I often claim to not care about defense, but that’s not quite true: I care about defense in situations where there is a defensive metric that can be easily understood enough to be included in a standard box-score. Something like blocked shots.
Speaking of blocked shots, I swear that I looked at the box-score for this game at one point and saw that Blopez had eight blocks. Was I just hallucinating that number because I had been watching the Bucks game live and had remembered seeing Blopez erase a bunch of Knicks shot attempts? Or was he actually at eight blocks at one point due to unfairly lenient scorekeeping? We’ll never know for sure, because now the box-score says seven blocks for Blopez and it hasn’t changed in a while.