Jonas Valanciunas already had 20 points less than halfway through the second quarter tonight but, jaded as I am by years of various coaches blatantly mismanaging him, I did not have even a single vision of him scoring 40 enter my mind. Under normal circumstances, where a player has not been cruelly marginalized for their entire career, such a scoring outburst so early in a game would have me thinking possibly 50. Valanciunas has never had normal circumstances around him; I fear the only place he could find such a thing would be in the domestic league of Lithuania.
Valanciunas ended up only scoring 10 more points the rest of the game, with only one bucket to his name in the fourth quarter. A sad outcome, but an expected one. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him stop scoring entirely, so perhaps the fact that he managed a 30-burger should grant me some happiness.
Without Valanciunas’ deft interior scoring and fearsome three-ball providing the scoring punch, the ‘Zlies squandered most of their hard-earned lead during the second half, only hanging on barely. It is easy to say that this would not have happened if Valanciunas had gotten the same opportunities in the second half as he did in the first, but if more points had been scored by Memphis, it’s fairly likely that Devin Booker (who ended up with 40 just like Valanciunas should’ve) would’ve simply scored more in response. Now THERE’S a guy who doesn’t take no for an answer. When he wants to score, he grabs the ball and scores. Valanciunas is not blameless in his occasional passivity. Perhaps he can take some notes.