For the second straight day, I am undermined by the NBA’s lax allocation of assists. At 2:10 in this video, a player who is clearly not Dejounte Murray passes the ball to Kawhi Leonard, who takes a few dribbles and then shoots a three. The merits of even awarding an assist for that play are debatable, however, what is not debatable is that Kyle Anderson is the one who threw the pass. Murray never touched the ball.
I get it. Murray and Anderson look somewhat similar, both being lanky and with similar skin tone. Score-keepers are human like the rest of us and can make mistakes. But, let’s be real here, Kyle Anderson really needed that assist. Forget about Murray for a bit even though he’s the subject of the video. Anderson needs assists because Spurs fans are getting annoyed with him that he doesn’t do anything when he’s on the court. Just one additional assist goes a long way to showing that he’s contributing in a way other than taking up space.
Murray needs the assist too, but since he’s a rookie he gets a pass if he doesn’t get as many assists as you hope for. He also scored enough in this game that nobody would have cared had he ended the game with five instead of six assists.
I again tried to infiltrate the NBA headquarters this morning so I could modify the official record myself. When I threw a rock at one of the windows a bunch of alarms started going off, so I ran. If somebody on the inside who is sympathetic to my cause reads this, can you get me like a fake ID badge so I can just walk through the front door? I’m bad at being a criminal.