It’s happening slowly, but I think people are finally starting to notice how much of a beast Nikola Vucevic is. It helps that he’s playing, demonstrably, the best basketball of his career, but it’s not like he hasn’t played really good basketball before. It also helps that the Magic aren’t unwatchable bum-sauce this year, but there have also been stretches where they’ve been at least okay.
This game will only further his ascent. This game was against LeBron James and the Lakers. There are tons of casuals who only watch LeBron who will come away from this game thinking that Vucci Mane is an unstoppable force who is an elite center in the NBA. And are they even wrong? They might not know about all those years where he was a big softie on a losing team putting up empty stats, but they know what they saw tonight: an unstoppable force who is an elite center in the NBA.
I might be using the term “elite” too loosely, but let’s think about the center situation in the NBA right now. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but there are still a bunch of teams content to trot out some rando at that position. 20/11/3/1/1 on 55 percent shooting and 40 percent from three. That’s his statline. Is that not an elite statline? If some other young center put up that line, we’d never hear the end of it. I rest my case.