By some metrics, Miles Bridges has improved between his rookie season and this season. By some other metrics, Miles Bridges as regressed in that same period of time. I’ll leave the advanced analytics mathematical wizardry to the mathematical wizards with their notebooks full of equations and their egghead algorithms, but there’s one major metric where Bridges has declined, a metric which is very near and dear to my heart…
Dunks.
Bridges had 71 dunks last season, but only has 33 dunks this season, and we’re 50 games in! Last season, dunks (or dunk attempts) comprised 16% of his total field goal attempts, but this season, that percentage is down to 9%. For every ten shots that Bridges attempts, not even one of them is a dunk. That is disturbing not only from a player development standpoint (he’s Blake Griffinizing himself way too early in his career), but also from a DownToBuck dunkilation perspective.
If Bridges can’t even muster fifty total dunks, how am I supposed to justify making a dunkilation for him? Dunkilations are reserved for high-volume dunkers unless I’m trolling everybody with my unexpected Nikola Jokic dunkilations. If I made a dunkilation for every middling dunker, you would see dunkilations for Moe Harkless and, like, Al-Farouq Aminu and stuff. And they’d be sitting there on my channel with maybe three hundred views total.
Bridges, if you’re out there reading this, please dunk it more often. The fans don’t want to see you take jumpshots. There are other players on the team who can do that. You need to dunk it hard and often. Please. Please.