I think I may have been premature in undertaking the ritual that would transfer the “Bazed God” nickname from Kent Bazemore to Darius Bazley. To be fair to me, at the time that the transferral took place, Bazley had just had a good game while Bazemore was not doing much of anything. It seemed clear at the time that Bazley would build on his good game to continue to play well as a rookie for the Thunder, while Bazemore would continue to be buried on the bench behind Rodney Hood and Mario Hezonja.
That turned out not to be the case. Bazley has only scored in double-digits once since he scored seventeen points at the beginning of November. He is not taking full advantage of the Bazed God nickname at all. In fact, I could hardly think of a worse candidate to be bearer of the Bazed God nickname.
Bazemore, meanwhile, is currently benefiting from the fact that a bad thing happened to Rodney Hood. He’s also benefiting from the fact that Hezonja has fallen out of favor with Blazers coach Terry Stotts. Combine that with a general void in the lineup because of the injuries to Collins and Nurkic, resulting in a lot of minutes that need to be played by somebody with a pulse and mostly functional limbs, and you’ve got a perfect situation for Bazemore to pretend that he’s back in Atlanta chucking shots with no repercussions. He honestly should have the Bazed God nickname back.
I will start getting the ingredients and setting ready for the nickname transferral ritual. It’s a bit tiresome to conduct another ritual so soon after the first one, but it’s either that or allow this mistake to propagate through the ages until nobody even remembers that Bazemore was the original Bazed God.