Elfrid Payton can put up all the statisticals that he wants, but there’s nothing he can do to make people care about him. The little amount of care (which could more accurately be termed “derision”) that people previously had for him went away when he lopped off his hair tower and started looking like a normal person again. He’s had streaks of multiple consecutive triple-doubles, really stuffing the stat sheet, and even that couldn’t get him any acknowledgment from anybody.
And now he’s on the Knicks, the place where hype goes to die. He’s been putting up some nice numbers recently, including a fairly substantial triple-double, but has anyone besides me noticed? No. Okay, maybe a few Knicks fans who are still hanging around, trying to partially enjoy their team’s recent resurgence have noticed. But you know most of even that small group of diehards is watching Payton doing his thing and just desperately hoping for Frank Ntilikina do be doing that instead.
You just know that if Ntilikina was getting the kind of statlines Payton gets regularly, people would be losing it. There would be so much hype. And I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing. I try to love all my role-player and scrub children equally, but if this video was Ntilikina putting up 19 and 8 instead, I’d be embarrassingly showering praise on him in this description instead of being resentful that I even had to make the video in the first place.