I am currently facing a dilemma: do I, or do I not, allow Zion Williamson to continue appearing on my channel?
This is a tough one. My stated rule has always been that rookies are guaranteed to be eligible for their entire rookie season UNLESS they are named an All-Star. That’s the only exception. If a rookie isn’t an All-Star, they stay on DTB no matter how good they are. That’s why immediate-impact rookies like Luka Doncic and Karl-Anthony Towns were channel fixtures in their early days despite being star-level players right out of the gate.
But Zion is defying my expectations of him by not only living up to the insane levels of pre-NBA hype for him, but possibly EXCEEDING them. I never expected to be thrown into this tough situation. He might be the one player who causes me to break the rule I set for myself. His existence is both well-suited to my channel (showcasing young players before they make it big in the league) and completely antithetical to it (I’m not supposed to be uploading videos for players who are, you know, actually good).
It’s in tough times like these that I seek the counsel of my smart little kitty Japurri Purrker. His wisdom in these situations is like a lighthouse-beacon guiding me through the storms of uncertainty and the crashing waves of confusion, and he answers my questions quite concisely: meow for “yes”, silence for “no”. While my human peers would articulate their thought processes aloud in response to my queries, Japurri’s limited vocabulary results in blessed brevity that even the most terse human advisor would never be able to achieve.
Thanks to the tablet I keep next to his food dish, a tablet which only shows a constantly-updated, endlessly-scrolling list of statlines for every player in the league, Japurri possesses surprisingly vast knowledge of the current state of the NBA. Way more than any real-life person I know. Except me, of course. I view Japurri and myself as equals when it comes to knowledge of the NBA, it’s just that I’m a really fast typist and he’s really not. Otherwise he could be totally writing these things for me.
So, after this game ended, I asked Japurri, “Should I keep making Zion Williamson highlight videos?” Japurri had just been fed when I asked him this question, which was good for two reasons. One, he had been reading the boxscores while he was munching greedily on his Fancy Feast, so he knew that Zion had just scored 32 points. Second, his never-ending hunger was temporarily sated, so his meows of assent to my question could not be mistaken for meows commanding me to feed him.
Japurri meowed when I asked him the question, so I guess I have my answer. For now, I will continue uploading Zion Williamson highlight videos to my scrub-themed highlights channel even though Zion is as far from a scrub as it’s possible for a rookie to be. You can rest assured, however, that I will be consulting my tubby little kitty at regular intervals throughout the rest of the season, and if we are in agreement that Zion has become too much of an unstoppable beast too quickly, he will be banished from these sacred halls of scrubdom which are my domain.