Again I am going to register my surprise that Larry Nance Jr.’s career high is only 22 points. It doesn’t even seem possible that Nance, who is not even close to being the most hopeless scorer in the NBA, and is currently in his fifth season, would have a career high that was so low.
Nance fits the profile of a good scorer. He’s athletic, he’s tall, his jumpshot is not completely mangled, and he has some basketball skill aside from his athleticism. He’s also in his physical prime right now at age 27. The problem is, he just doesn’t try to score at all. It’s hard to tell if he even has the ability to create his own shot because he so rarely tries to. Sometimes the stars line up and he gets a large amount of opportunistic buckets (like tonight), but most of the time he just…runs around and presents a vague lob opportunity that must be defended, I guess?
It would be easy to blame Cleveland’s point guard situation for Nance’s low usage, and the fact that Collin “two assists per game” Sexton is the primary hallhandler for the Cavs doesn’t do Nance any favors, but he touches the ball often enough that he could try to score whether or not his teammates are specifically looking to get him involved. Nance just doesn’t seem to have the scorer’s mentality. So, instead of Aaron Gordon 2.0, we get Aaron Gordon 0.7 pre-release version instead, and since DownToBuck is all about dudes getting buckets, his wasted bucket-getting potential is hereby officially declared to be NOT COOL.