I thought Coby White wasn’t supposed to be a passer. I thought that he was a tunnel-vision me-first chucker in the vein of Monta Ellis. I thought he was the kind of guy who would only incidentally get assists because he was handling the ball too much. Those are all things that I thought and I’m guessing you thought some of those same things as well. Whether those thoughts were based in actual observations or just on random notions collected and aggregated from untrustworthy sources is irrelevant.
After this game, you can throw all those thoughts out the window because White showed that he CAN be a passer, to the extent where he almost gets a points-assists double-double. Looking at his game logs, he’s had a few games similar to this one, but the trend for him is definitely to be a scorer. He recently had a seven-game stretch where he dished out a grand total of nine assists, and then he came out and got nine assists in a single game? Does this guy just decide before each game, “yeah I’ll pass it to my teammates tonight” or “nah, I feel like scoring the rock tonight”?
I wish I had the kind of basketball ability to just decide those things. My choices before a pickup game are “I’m going to do a lot of off-ball movement to get open and risk cramping up” or “I’m going to stand around and only move with purpose and speed when I get the ball or think I’m close to getting the ball”.