Tyler Herro has been slumping a bit in the past month and, as a fellow white male from Wisconsin, that makes me sad. In fact, I believe that his slump has caused me to personally slump in my own pickup games, but I will take ownership of my own inability to hit shots rather than blame it on the brickiness of a guy thousands of miles away in South Beach. Our soul bond is strong, but my routine of practicing midrange jimbosfor fifteen minutes straight before every pickup game should be stronger.
Anyway, this is Herro’s first twenty-point game in over a month, and the last one he had wasn’t even that great (he was 7 of 20 from the field, so it barely even counts). That was after he had six twenty-pointers in the first month and a half of his career, setting everybody’s expectations (including mine) somewhere between the stratosphere and the ionosphere. Those expectations are still there, of course, but we’re not really enforcing them that firmly since it is understood that rookies will have their ups and downs. Herro just happened to start his career on an “up” rather than a “down”.
ROTY of the Year is completely out of reach for him now, but he’ll always be the guy in the NBA that DownToBuck can relate to the most, and that’s almost like an award in and of it itself.