With Dejounte Murray cutting his hair (among other Spurs players), and the general lack of names on jerseys, and my inability care about player’s jersey numbers, it’s very difficult to figure out who’s who on the court for the Spurs these days. Watching from a distance, Dejounte’ Murray could be DeMar DeRozan. He could also be Lonnie Walker or Keldon Johnson or Quinndary Weatherspoon. Basically the only player I don’t get him confused with is Drew Eubanks, but even that is tenuous at best, because I came away from this game thinking that Eubanks had spent the whole game hitting midrange jimbos. It turns out that Murray was the one doing that.
Murray has, as far as I remember, always had that hair puff on top of his head. Aside from his rangy length, that’s the one thing that I used to identify him. Now that this critical identifying mark has been removed, I basically just watch Spurs games in a drooling stupor, unable to make sense of anything that is happening on the court. This unfortunate situation just highlights the need for the NBA to ensure that all broadcasts of their games have little labels digitally affixed to all the on-court participants.
The technology is there to do this. They can slap Mountain Dew logos all over the court, and they can track players with the Synergy system, so they can obviously harness the power of machine learning to have little nametags following the players everywhere they go. You could even put their stats next to their name. The more I ramble about this idea the more awesome it sounds. Somebody pay me money for it please.