Kendrick Nunn had gone from averaging 15 PPG per game in the regular season to averaging 3 PPG (now up to 5 thanks to this performance) per game in the ‘offs. The clear and obvious culprit for the dropoff in his quality of play: COVID. He did recover in time to play a bit in the series against the Pacers (even managing a regular-season Bubble game), and he continued playing a bit against the Bucks, but by that time, things were going so well for the Heat that there was no reason to try and reintegrate him fully into the lineup. And he was doing so poorly that he lost his already meagre minutes to a guy named Solomon Hill who is probably a hobo that the Heat found wandering around the Disney campus.
But even before the pandemic, before The Bubble, back when everything was normal, there were signs that Nunn was fading. He was buoyed by an incredibly hot start, but by February, he was putting up more and more single-digit scoring games. COVID didn’t help, but maybe a non-scoring version of Nunn isn’t exactly what the Heat were needing at that point anyway.
But now things are going badly for the Heat. Things were looking great for, like, the first 6 minutes of the game, and then the wheels fell off, rolled away, and hit Spoelstra in the nuts. In his pain and confusion, with the Heat down by 30-plus in the third quarter, he inserted Nunn into the game, presumably to see if he could shake some of the rust (“rust” in this case being “stray COVID viruses”) off.
And he did! 18 points in 20 minutes of garbage time, I would classify this performance as “Vintage Nunn” considering that he was averaging this amount early in the season. I would, however, refrain from classifying it as “Nunnsanity”. I’m hyped, but not THAT hyped.