https://youtu.be/2I3awa5Kmpg
With less than two weeks to go in the regular season, the Pistons are winding things down. Jerami Grant, Mason Plumlee, Cory Joseph, and Wayne Ellington are all sitting out with phantom injuries. Ellington in particular could have gotten some return value in a trade, but what’s done is done. Now the only thing left to do is give tons of minutes to the younguns and hope that they’re able to produce. Case in point: the closest player to a “veteran” that saw minutes in this game for the Pistons is, like, Josh Jackson, who is 23 years old and has four years of NBA experience. If you’re a scrubthusiast (“scrub enthusiast”) like me, then you’re starting to get a funny feeling in your privates right now.
Saddiq Bey has been getting minutes and producing all season, so there’s no need to worry about him. There are players on the Pistons roster whose NBA futures are uncertain (for example, Tyler Cook, who made a good case for himself by going 6-of-6 and scoring 13 points), but Bey is not one of those players. With his accurate (if wacky-looking) three-point shooting, his future in the NBA is assured. He’s probably hanging out with Wayne Ellington 24/7, collecting vast amounts of invaluable wisdom from the vet while the two of them share a large Jet’s pizza with pepperoni and turbo crust. And an order of three-cheese Turbostix with ranch dippy sauce. I’m so jealous right now.
I feel slightly misled by the fact that Bey’s last bucket came on a putback dunk with 0.3 seconds left where nobody was boxing out, thus giving Bey a meaningful total of 24, not 26, points for the game, but since Bey was on the losing side and not breaking any unwritten rules of sportsmanship, I’ll let it slide. At least he didn’t try to steal the inbounds pass and turn it into an alley-oop as time expired that would have given him 28. I would not abide by that.