I thought for sure, for absolute sure, that 19 points would be Jakob Poeltl’s career high. Because I know how much I know about the NBA (a lot), and I knew that I would remember something as momentous as Poeltl scoring 20 or more. I was getting all ready to rag on the commentators for not even acknowledging his career high, that’s how sure I was.
Who looks like a dummy now? Me. Because Poeltl scored 20 last year (in 20 minutes, even, holy crap), and I don’t remember it at all. Not even a little bit. I probably made a vid for it, but that’s not really the problem. I forget about a lot of vids that I make. That’s what happens when you make thousands of vids per year. But a vid of that magnitude, of Poeltl scoring 10 (which hardly ever happens to begin with) and then scoring 10 more after that, I’m pretty sure I have the ‘Zheimers, because there’s no other reason that I would forget about that.
For some reason, Poeltl just doesn’t look to score. Spurs fans like him, I think, but they’d like him a heck of a lot more if he at least pretended to be interested in scoring the ball. It would be better, perhaps, if his teammates looked to get him more easy buckets, but there’s got to be a certain reluctance to pass it to a guy when you know you have like a 5 percent chance of getting an assist out of it. That’s the only reason anyone in the NBA passes at all; the promise of earning a statistical unit for your efforts.
So, 19 points isn’t a career high. But it’s still really, really good for Poeltl. And it’s not like all the buckets were super-easy spoonfed lob dunks, no sir. He was kind of being aggressive once he got the ball. Now if only he could add a little midrange jumper to his game (should be easy, just watch the LaMarcus Aldridge midrange-ilation that I uploaded and take good notes), Popovich would have no choice put to play him tons of minutes.