Are we far enough into Devonte’ “Collateral Grahammage” Graham’s career that we can call this 26-point, 10-assist outing a “vintage” Graham performance? Graham’s been slumping after his extremely hot first month or two of the season, which seems like a very long time ago to me. Now that I think about it, things that happened in November of 2019 definitely seem vintage to me. Thanksgiving 2019 is vintage, for example. So if Graham does something that hearkens back to the way he played back in November, then it automatically becomes “vintage’.
Now that we’ve determined that this is a VINTAGE Devonte’ Graham game, we need to figure out what can be done so that he has these types of VINTAGE games more often going forward.
The first step is obviously to force him to keep the braids. The braids give him life. Without the braids, he is nothing. If he were to be so unwise as to shave them off or even pull them out of their braiding to make a hair puff, the only possible response by the Hornets would be to waive him.
The second step is to tell Terry Rozier to assume a strictly off-ball scoring-only role. No ball-handling for Rozier at all, for any reason, period. Rozier handling the ball only succeeds in preventing the superior ball-handler Graham from handling the ball.
The third step is to have Gatorades available at all times for the players, not just whenever one of the Hornets’ players remembers to go to Walgreens and buy a bunch of Gatorades. I know that the Hornets want to save money while their arena repeatedly fails to come anywhere close to selling out, but the solution isn’t to make players drink just plain water during games.
The fourth step is for Michael Jordan to challenge Graham to a game of one-on-one and then use his size to dominate him over and over until Graham’s psyche is broken in half. Then, you can take his ruined self-image like putty in your hands and rebuild it to be some kind of scoring/passing savant, like a Steve Nash 2.0 minus the floppy hair.
If you do all those things, BAM, it’s like vintage Devonte’ Graham all year ’round!