Fred “Vleet of Voot” VanVleet was weirdly amazing last year for the Raptors. He had sick advanced stats despite just okay regular stats, and every bench unit he was on crushed the competition. I don’t want to say that he was untouchable for Raptors fans, but let’s just say I have an archive of screenshotted Twitters posts from them that range from “I wouldn’t trade Steady Freddy for Stephen Curry” to “Masai laughs and hangs up the phone unless a team offers 3 first-rounders for VanVleet”.
But as with all weirdly amazing players where you can’t figure out why it is that they’re so good, VanVleet regressed. He’s still, you know, pretty good, but the magic that was there last year has fizzled away. It’s times like these when we need to remember the sage advice of those insipid motivational things that have the text “Don’t be said because it’s over, smile because it happened” with some crappy unrelated image in the background.
Except I don’t want it to be over. I want it to keep going. Maybe tonight is the re-kindling of the magic that was lost? I want to believe.