I’m not an NBA coach, but when you’ve got a guy on your team who is 8 out of 10 from three on the game, and you’re running an out-of-bounds play down by 2 with 1 second left, I make dang well sure that I get the ball to the guy who has already proven he can make tons of threes.
Note: this is not a hypothetical situation. This is what really happened with Nemanja Bjelica and the Kings. I just witnessed it with my own eyes.
Haters will claim that it is not that simple, that the defense will try and prevent such a player from getting the ball. That they will be aggressive in their efforts, in an attempt to have someone else beat them. But ignore the haters. Their minds, clouded by hate, are incapable of rational thought, instead mindlessly ejaculating their hateful, ill-considered, words onto a world which rejects them.
Remember: Bjelica was 8 of 10 from three. That means that if he got the ball and took a shot from behind the arc, it would have an 80 percent chance of going in. It’s math. You can punch those numbers into all the calculators and computers and abaci that you want, but you will always get the same result: 80 percent.
Instead of having their knockdown shooter attempt a three, the Kings were content with a doomed lob play that didn’t work at all, ending the game and ruining Bjelica’s career-high performance. If you’re going to throw a lob, at least throw it to Bjelica, who also happened to be 5 of 6 from two-point range. Again, those are great odds. Maybe that would’ve even been better, to send the game into overtime so that he could get the 40-burger that we all know he deserves.