The best thing about carefully-curated highlight videos is that if they are curated hard enough, all sense of context is removed and the only thing that remains is pure basketball. Just balls going in holes. That’s the real, primal reason that these videos get watched; everything else is just our stupid monkey brains trying to assign significance where there is none to be found.
It’s still possible, however, to get a sense of the flow of a game by looking at the score. For this vid, if you want your opinion of Jalen Brunson to remain unsullied, I would suggest covering that part of your viewing device. I almost cropped it out myself, but it made everything else seem way too big when I did that. And I could’ve added a censor bar, but I decided to let people who for some reason want to see the score do so.
I’m suggesting this because there are things that happened in this game that maybe don’t make Brunson or the Mavericks look very good. I would also suggest not listening to the commentary. Put on some music instead. Happy music, not sad music. Definitely make it happy music.
Brunson had a nice game if you just watch this video and forget about the rest of the game. 21 points and 9 assists, that’s SOLID point guard numbers right there. More than solid, even. If the Mavs could somehow find a guy who averaged that many points (or more!) and that many assists, they’d totally be set to make the playoffs this year and would certainly never blow 30-point leads to teams missing most of their best players.