https://youtu.be/4qs8erzPNVM
Aleksej Pokusevski is quickly becoming my new “channel mascot”, a position previously occupied by such basketball visionaries as Nikola Jokic, Alexis Ajinca, and Ersan Ilyasova (notice a trend here?). I guess it’s a stretch to call Ajinca a channel mascot, but I love him, god damn it, and if I want him to be retroactively part of the mascot club, that’s my choice and my choice alone to make, god damn it. Somebody resign that guy. He can probably still move, and he can definitely still hit middy jimmies until the cows come home.
Anyway, since Jokic graduated from my channel, I haven’t really had a “go-to” player who brings views to my channel and is consistently first priority for me to make a video of. But now I do. Pokusevski is that guy who is at the forefront of my thoughts, the guy whose statlines need to be monitored very closely for emergent highlight-video opportunities, the guy who gets viewers from a foreign land (in this case, Serbia) to bolster my view counts.
Is it a coincidence that Jokic and Pokusevski are both from Serbia? No. It is absolutely not a coincidence. If I’ve learned anything from my eight years in the highlight-making business, it’s that Euros love to watch their comrades ball out on the big stage of the NBA, and that ex-Yugoslavians in particular love to watch their comrades ball out in the NBA, and that Serbs in particular-particular love watching their comrades ball out in the NBA more than they love anything else in their lives, even their spouses, children, or liquor.
Pokusevski set a new career high here with 25 points. Given that he’s doing all this while being the youngest player in the league and while not having eaten anything more substantial than individual sprinkles for the past six months, I don’t expect this to be his career high for long. Unless he keels over from malnutrition and has to retire. Then I guess Moses Brown would have to be my new mascot. Serbs, you like Moses Brown too, right?