One of the knocks on Doug McDermott coming out of college were his ludicrously low “stocks” (steals and blocks) numbers. Someone did some analysis and determined that players with so few of those defensive stats basically never turn into good NBA players. I guess the thinking is, if you can’t get your hand on the ball playing against players like Cletus McMeth from Central Idaho Mormon Institute of Theology, what are you going to be doing in the NBA? For reference, in the 4500 minutes McDermott played at Creighton, he had 34 steals and 14 blocks.
The good news is that he’s upped his stocks rate in the NBA. It’s still horribly low, but looking at his overall career so far, it’s about twice as good as when he was in college, indicating that either he’s worked on having active hands or (more like) the scorekeepers are more likely to give out those stats for plays that could go either way. After last night’s defensive spectacle, where he notched a whole steal, he’s sitting at 7 steals and 4 blocks on the season. In almost 1000 minutes played. I really should’ve gotten a clip of that and put in this vid. Maybe I’ll make a steal/block-ilation for him at the end of the season to make up for it.
But McDermott wasn’t drafted to play defense, and I don’t care about defense anyway, so why am I wasting two whole paragraphs talking about it? He was drafted to shoot the ball into the net, and he’s improved in that area greatly this season. He’s having his best year scoring the ball right now, his points per minute are higher than ever and his three-point percentage is edging towards 50. He had 24 on 9-for-10 and 6-for-7 from three a few games ago, and now he’s done it again, this time against the Warriors instead of the Nuggets. It took a banked-in three from straight away and a friendly bounce from the corner, but since no one watches games anymore, no one has to know that his nearly-perfect night was the result of some lucky rims.