https://youtu.be/1qHiMMg-eS4
Every time I make a JaKarr Sampson highlight video, I express wonderment that he is still in the league. But he’s the one who continues to collect NBA checks (modestly-sized NBA checks, but NBA checks nonetheless), whereas the total of my NBA checks to date is approximately $0.00, give or take zero cents. So the joke is on me. Or maybe the joke is on nobody. But the joke is definitely not on JaKarr Sampson, who is in his sixth year despite not really possesing any discernible skills at scoring the basketball.
Sampson got his start as part of the Process Sixers in the 2014-15 season, a team which won eighteen games (they would go on to win just ten the next season). Out of the dudes on that team, many of whom were not very good at all, there are many that I would have expected to have longer careers than Sampson. Henry Sims, for one. That guy was decent. Brandon Davies was pretty good I thought, but maybe getting kicked out of BYU for the heinous crime of boning his GF ruined his confidence. Tony Wroten was a chucker but could have been decent if reined in a bit. Alexey Shved was nice and now he’s extra nice in Russia. All those guys had more of an offensive skillset than Sampson does even today, but Sampson is the one kicking around the NBA while those guys are all off in god knows where. Maybe they’re all chilling out in the Siberian wilderness with Alexey Shved, who is giving them tips on how to hunt grizzly bears using only your bare hands (and icicles).
The best thing about Sampson is how he averaged 20 PPG per game in the 2018-19 season. That’s not a lie. You can look it up and see I’m not lying. In four games with the Bulls he averaged twenty on the dot. So now whenever future people a century from now decide to look him up on the holonet, they’ll go to basketball-reference.holo and see a string of season scoring averages in the single digits, disrupted by a single twenty. That’s the most awesome thing ever. Hopefully when I become old and senile, I remember just enough about my past life as an NBA highlight maker to look up Sampson’s career stats and have my mind blown all over again. And hopefully the act of having my mind blown doesn’t literally cause my frail body to simply die right then and there.