https://youtu.be/YG85yR8qlC8
This is what the NBA is all about: some dude on a 10-day contract balling out in his first game with a new team while said team’s superstars are nowhere to be seen.
Some may disagree with me that the above scenario is what the NBA is all about. That’s cool, but those people are really, really wrong. As much as the NBA wishes it weren’t the case, what with their ceaseless and aggravating promotion of so-called “good” players, and with the omnipresent emphasis on winning games, the fact remains, glimmering radiantly in the hallowed halls of ultimate truth and indisputable fact: the greatest beauty to be found in the NBA comes when some not-so-good player throws off the shackles of not-so-goodness and ascends, however briefly, into a higher plane of NBA existence.
Which is what Alize Johnson did last night.
Because he put up 23 points on 11 of 15 shooting and grabbed 15 rebounds in his debut with the Brooklyn Nets while Kevin Durant sent passive-aggressive tweets from one of his burner accounts, Kyrie Irving went down a weird YouTube conspiracy rabbit-hole, and James Harden attached a breast pump to his moobs and began massaging them. And who even knows what Blake Griffin was doing.
I am, probably, more hyped for this performance than any other this year. Maybe it’s not coming through in this description, but I am suffering from some serious hype-related maladies right now. Can I feel my arms? Not really, unless you count a vague tingling around my right elbow. My breathing is shallow. One of my eyeballs is halfway out of its socket. And I won’t even mention what’s going on downstairs.
I don’t feel like thinking about it too hard, but I can’t immediately come up with any other single-game statlines that are this bananas. Sure, someone who isn’t even that good like Enes Kanter could do this fairly easily, but it’s safe to say that Johnson is not even close to a Kanter level as a player. How could he be? This is his 32nd game in 3 years, and most of those games were spent accumulating random single stats in garbage time.
Perhaps this isn’t SO unexpected. After all, Johnson grabbed 17 rebounds in the Pacers’ final regular season game last year. He’s shown (kinda) that if you give him minutes, he’ll use those minutes to relentlessly hunt rebounds. And he scored 11 points in that game as well. So it’s not like he’s NEVER scored points or grabbed rebounds before. If you consider his entire basketball career outside of the NBA to this point, he’s probably scored thousands upon thousands of points gand grabbed tons of rebounds.
Then again, this is frickin’ ALIZE JOHNSON we’re talking about. Putting up 23 and 15 against the best team in the league. FRICK.