Thanks to the all-around suckiness of most of the top picks in this year’s draft, Jarrett Culver has mostly evaded criticism for his own suckiness. Other years, a guy picked 6th overall who was doing as poorly as Culver is would get mercilessly skewered by all sorts of national media outlets. Even NPR would get in on the act, probably. But this year, RJ Barrett is sucking, De’Andre Hunter is kinda sucking, Darius Garland is sucking, Coby White is sucking (while fooling people with a few hot shooting nights), and Zion Williamson would probably be sucking but is too busy sucking down cheeseburgers while sitting with an injury.
That’s a lot of concentrated suck right there, and the sheer quantity of it makes it overwhelming for people to face, so they just ignore it. There are plenty of other fun things going on around the league, including fun rookies, enough to make it so that paying attention to cruddy rookies on cruddy teams is a waste of time.
I’m paying attention, though. And I must say I prefer the current state of affairs than last year’s state of affairs where a certain pair of rookies (one Slovenian, one balding) made my life a living HECK with their statpadded triple-doubles seemingly every game. My current rookie workload is very light, thanks in part to Culver’s propensity to brick every shot he takes.
And his brickiness makes the rare performances where he actually does good even sweeter. It just feels really good to see him have a legitimately good game on offense, to see him make a bunch of jumpers (even if he needed a friendly rim on a few of them). I didn’t really have any expectations coming into the season for him, but if I did, they would probably look something like this. And that’s a good thing. I think.