https://youtu.be/y9WQe6e6D2o
The Houston Rockets only had seven players available to suit up for this game. Then, Kevin Porter Jr. left the game with an injury, so they were left with six. That kind of lineup is necessarily going to result in some inflated statlines for almost everybody who plays. Cue Opera Winfrey gesticulating wildly and screaming “You get a career high! You get a career high! You get a career high! You get 14 rebounds! You get twenty shot attempts!”
Tight seven-man rotations are uncommon, but not unheard of, once you get to the playoffs. But those seven-man rotations usually contain at least one superstar and one or two All-Star-type players supporting the superstar. Then the rest of the rotation is usually going to be high-end role-players. Rarely, if ever, do you see a seven-man rotation comprised mostly of lesser players, as we saw with the Rockets last night. And six-man rotations basically never happen. Excuse me while I look up the picture of Chris Kaman taking up eight chairs on the Lakers bench by lying across them.
The end result was Kenyon Martin Jr. notching a new career high with 23 points, and getting 6 assists to boot, trying his best to replace the missing production from his fellow “Junior”, Kevin Porter Jr. It would have been cool for him to really take over the game and score thirty (or even fifty, KPJ style), but when the limiting factor for a player is no longer playing time, a new limiting factor usually comes out. And for KMJ, that limiting factor might be that he’s just not enough of an all-around scorer to easily score thirty points, even when given enough minutes to do so. And that’s fine. Not every rookie needs to be a secret 30 PPG scorer in disguise, no matter how much we wish they were.