I don’t really blame Jakob Poeltl for getting manhandled by Al Jefferson tonight. He’d probably never seen, much less defended against, a player with actual savvy post-moves. Maybe in practice Jonas Valanciunas tried that slow-ass jumper pumpfake on him, but that’s child’s play compared to what Jefferson was busting out against him.
Jefferson is the cautionary tale for a lot of bigmen coming out of college these days (I’m mainly thinking of Jahlil Okafor right now), but people forget all the sweet scoring he was doing for years and years. Sure, it was not the most efficient scoring and he kinda monopolized possessions and his defense sucked and the Bobcats paid him way too much but he went out and got buckets. That’s got to count for something, right?
What I should’ve done for this vid is shown his two (2!!!!!!) assists, just to prove that he can sometimes accidentally pass the ball to a teammate. Certainly, just watching these highlights where he spends 10 seconds at a time figuring out how to get the ball to go in the whole, one can come away with the impression that he is a black hole. Which he is, for sure. I guess I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Just watch the damn video.