https://youtu.be/N-3XhLaHyEM
When Reggie Jackson got waived by the Pistons last season and then picked up by the Clippers, I was a bit surprised. The Pistons supposedly “did him a favor” by cutting him loose and letting him join a championship contender, and I’m sure Jackson himself was fully on board with the plan, but there are two reasons why it didn’t make sense to me:
1. Jackson was in a contract year and was willingly going to a team where his role would be smaller and his numbers would look worse
2. Jackson was willingly going to a team where his role would be smaller, even though this is the same guy who forced his way out of OKC because he wanted a bigger role
I, in my infinite wisdom, turned out to be correct on point #1. Jackson re-signed with the Clippers for just one year, 2.3 million dollars, way less than thirty-year-old starter-quality PG should be getting. I feel like if he had finished the season balling out for a crappy Pistons team, his numbers would have tricked some dumb GM into locking him into a long-term starter role. Instead, he’s the backup/spot starter for a playoff team, his usage is down, and he was even getting DNP’s at the start of the season. He might not ever get another big contract.
On point two, I guess it’s possible that Jackson matured as a person between 2014 (when he started being a cancer even though the guy in front of him on the depth chart was frickin’ Russell Westbrook) and 2020. A lot of people go from immature to mature during the course of their twenties. Just because I’ve been a fully-formed human being with well-regulated emotions since I was four years old doesn’t mean everybody is like that. Also, it turns out that, by my twenties, I had mostly lost my ability to feel emotions, so maybe I don’t have the proper perspective on this.
With this game, we saw a flash of what Jackson was doing on a semi-regular basis while he was the lead guard in Detroit. Jackson better save this video to his phone and show it to GM’s when he becomes a free agent next off-season, because it proves he can still be a potent scorer at the NBA level, and if he does end up getting a contract because of this video, he’d better cut me a check.