At one point during this game, Chris Clemons was listed as having 10 assists. The Rockets commentators even mentioned him having a double-double, so the stats they were looking at also had Clemons with 10. But now that I’m here making this vid, everywhere I look says he only had 9. They also gave Isaiah Hartenstein another assist which makes me recently-uploaded highlight vid for him annoyingly incomplete. And in case you’re wondering, no, they did not change a Clemons assist to a Hartenstein assist, because the new Hartenstein assist was to Clemons, who probably wasn’t credited as having assisted himself.
Yes, I know I care way too much about minutiae like this. But it’s kinda my job. I can’t be in the business of making “full highlights” without a keen awareness of an individual player’s stat totals.
In the end, 10 assists or 9 assists, Clemons still surpassed his prior career total in that category just in this one game. He had racked up a total of 6 dimes before this game, compared to his 79 shot attempts. For a player of his size, that’s a ridiculously low amount of assists, even considering his low minutes played so far. But anyone who watched Clemons in college knows he’s a shooter. He likes to shoot. And when he’s been on the court, usually it’s with James Harden or Russell Westbrook running the show, where he is a designated possession-finisher.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this passing performance beats anything he did in college, or ends up as his never-to-be-broken career-high. And some of the passes were actually pretty nice. The pick-and-roll chemistry with Hartenstein was so good it was almost like watching Harden and Capela.