While making this video, I was getting the feeling that some of these assists given to Tomas Satoransky weren’t quite legitimate. In the interest of truthfulness and accuracy, I will go through each assist one-by-one to determine whether or not the assist should have been awarded.
Assist 1 (Zach LaVine): Legit bounce pass right into a cutting layup.
Assist 2 (Lauri Markkanen): Legit drop off leading directly to a dunk.
Assist 3 (Coby White): Legit offensive rebound and pass for a Koby three.
Assist 4 (Thaddeus Young): Not legit. Young stands there for like five seconds after receiving the ball, then takes four dribbles, then scores.
Assist 5 (Daniel Gafford): Legit alley-oop. No ambiguity on legitimacy.
Assist 6 (Thaddeus Young): Legit drive and kick-out for a three.
Assist 7 (Daniel Gafford): Legit alley-oop. Note that Sato and Gafford are mimicking the Doncic-Powell lob connection.
Assist 8 (Shaquille Harrison): Legit fast-break pass leading to a layup. Harrison doesn’t even dribble.
Assist 9 (Daniel Gafford): Legit. How many more of these are there gonna be?
Assist 10 (Kris Dunn): Less legit than the legit assists that came before it, but still legit since Dunn only needs one dribble to get into his floater.
Assist 11 (Zach LaVine): Also not quite as legit as I want, but these types of fast-break layups always end up with an assist awarded to somebody, even if the scorer catches the ball at half-court.
Assist 12 (Zach LaVine): Legit. Another alley-oop. Hell yeah.
Assist 13 (Zach LaVine): Not legit. LaVine does all the work. If Sato’s pass had hit LaVine more in stride to allow him to get right into his drive, it would be legit.
Assist 14 (Lauri Markkanen): Legit dump-off to Markkanen who shoots it quick because time is running out for a Bulls comeback.
So that was more legit than I expected. I think I was just pissed off by assist #4 which was totally bogus. The rest were at least somewhat understandable. And if you take out the two assists which I determined to be illegitimate, Sato still ends up with a career-high in assists.
If anybody from The Athletic is reading this, did you see how thorough and complete my expert video analysis was? Please hire me.