Malik Beasley just got his first twenty-point game of the season after having twelve such games last season. He may have gotten slightly worse as a scorer between this season and last season, but I refuse to believe that he wasn’t capable of these types of performances the entire time he’s been rotting on Mike Malone’s bench. Maybe Malone was playing the long con and positioning Beasley as a “secret playoff weapon”, but now that cover is blown. Shoulda given him a DNP, man.
This could also be a “showcase game” to trick a team into giving up more assets for Beasley in a trade. But it wouldn’t even be a trick because, as far as I’m concerned, the Beasley that scored 27 points is the real Beasley, and it’s the Beasley that other teams would get if they traded for him and gave him a bigger role than what he’s got now. If Malone failed to “showcase” him at any point, he would still have the same value as he does now, because every GM in the league saw how valuable Beasley was last season.
The downside of Beasley’s smaller role this season is that my fledgling cryptocurrency, MalikSerbCoin, is pretty much dead in the water. Nobody wants to use a cryptocurrency that’s tied to an NBA player who doesn’t even play in every game. Also, nobody wants to use a cryptocurrency where the transaction ledger is just a document in Google Drive that anybody can edit, and where there’s no actual cryptography backing the coin. I suppose I’ll just hold on to my vast reserves of MalikSerbCoin (approximately 99.9% of all coins in circulation are in my wallet) and hope that Beasley hits a game-winner in the Finals or gets traded to Serbia or something.