https://youtu.be/GCrFg1Qj60M
Danilo Gallinari hasn’t been very good this year. His regression has kind of gone under the radar, because basically everything he’s done so far in his career has gone under the radar, but he’s definitely experienced a major decline in minutes, scoring, and efficiency (in case you were wondering why he’s back on my channel after a multi-year absence). He’s gone from a 20 ppg guy to a… 10 ppg guy. Scratch that. After this performance, he’s gone from a 10 ppg guy all the way up to an 11 ppg guy. Still well short of his standard, but a 1 point bump in average because of a single game is pretty cool (unless it’s within the first five games of a season).
Is age finally catching up to him? He came into the league young, so he’s not as old as you might imagine considering how many years he’s been around, but 32 is getting up there. Still, I don’t think any decline in athleticism should be causing him too many problems; he’s been playing like he’s 40 for at least the last five years, except for the occasional surprising poster dunk.
No, I think the real problem is that he’s on the Hawks, and the Hawks don’t have many opportunities available for people not named Trae Young. That’s the just the fact of the matter: if you aren’t a midget balding chucker, you’re not going to get the minutes/touches that you perhaps deserve. I’ve been doing some back-of-napkin calculations, and as soon as three weeks from now, there will be a grand total of one (1) possession available for the Hawks that isn’t used by Young. And that possession will belong to Tony Snell.
So it’s a good thing that Gallinari got this performance in before the rapidly approaching Young-ballhogging singularity. 10 threes! That’s more than Young has ever hit in his career, and Gallinari only needed 12 attempts to get that many. Of course, when you see something like that, you have to think that he should’ve been chucking way more shots, maybe see if he can get the NBA record and not just the Hawks record, but you know Gallo “ain’t ’bout dat life”. The life that he’s about is the life of being a refined gentleman who enjoys the arts, fine wine, and making Celtics’ fans collective lives somehow even worse than they already are.