You can debate semantics all you want, but here’s the deal: this is the first game for Trey Burke with the Mavericks this season, after spending most of it with the 76ers. Thus, it is his “Mavericks Debut”. I don’t care that he was with Dallas at the end of last season. That fact is irrelevant to me.
I will not debase myself by using the non-word “Re-Debut”. If you don’t like that, you can start your own channel where you can use whatever words you want to describe your videos. But for me, this is his Mavericks Debut. No qualifiers. Straight up.
And what a debut it was. The Rockets must have been scared that he was a plague-carrier or something, because he was wide-frickin’-open on a bunch of his threes, eventually hitting 8 of them and scoring 31 points. Not even close to a career-high, but really good for a guy who got waived (??????) by the 76ers in February. Getting waived by the 76ers is not the indictment of quality that it has been in years past (imagine getting waived by them in 2015, you’d be the worst player ever probably), but still.
I don’t really know what was going on with him in Philly this year. Wouldn’t the 76ers FO/coaching staff realize that having a player that heavily resembles Allen Iverson playing for them significantly increases fan interest? And even barring that, he’s a good player. But he was barely getting to play, and he wasn’t effective when he did play. I’m going to go with the old “he was getting misused” line here.
The Iverson comps for him are looking a little less sure after this game. For one thing: no headband. For another: there’s no way that Iverson ever hit 8 threes in a game; he was a chucker, but not that kind of chucker. And now that I look, I’m right. The most that midget ever hit was 6, and that was as a rookie. So we’re going to have to find a new comp for Burke. I’m taking suggestions, because all the new comps I’m coming up with are way worse players than Iverson, and I don’t want to downgrade Burke just because he hit 8 threes.