https://youtu.be/0TdT7m3UvIk
The only time of the season that is more fruitful for scrubs/role-players than the very final game of the year is the game right after the trade deadline. Assuming, of course, that they weren’t traded during that time. The players that remain on some of the teams that got caught up in the trading frenzy and maybe went a little overboard with it are the ones who get to soak up huge amounts of unearned minutes while all the newcomers have to wait to pass their physicals.
Such is the situation that Chuma “Chum Bucket” Okeke found himself in in this game. The Magic, as you probably know by now, finally blew up the “core” that they had kept around for so many years while making no progress at all to being anything other than a low-seeded first-round-exit kind of team. Nikola Vucevic, Evan Fournier, Aaron Gordon, those dudes WERE the Magic for a long time (especially Vucevic, man, I hope they retire his jersey because he’s like the third-best scorer in franchise history, ahead of Tracy McGrady but just below Nick Anderson). It’s the end of an era, for real. A sad and pathetic era that resulted in only marginal enjoyment for Magic fans, but an era nonetheless. I feel like I should write some sort of epitaph, because this might be the last time I get to really consider that core and what they “accomplished”. Oh well.
On to the next era of Magic basketball: the Okeke/Birch Era! Okay, maybe I’m being a little hasty (though Birch looked damn good as well, you’ll just have to take my word for it because I’m not making a vid for his 14/15/4/4/2 statline), but Okeke got a big opportunity to show his stuff and show it he did. He showed it right to Carmelo Anthony multiple times, who looked like he was thinking he was way too old to be guarding a stud like Okeke. Combine these 22 points with his 17 points last game and you almost have a 40-burger on your hands. His “Chum Bucket” nickname is looking more accurate by the game.