The comparisons are inevitable, so here we go: during Deandre Ayton’s 24-point second quarter, I was reminded strongly of a certain mega-fornicator who also scored 100 points in a single game. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Wilt Chamberlain. Nike destroyed most of the footage of his playing days because of how embarrassed it made LeBron James, but we do have scattered fragments of highlights thanks to that Wilt Chamberlain Archive guy on YouTube. And watching Ayton was like watching those clips.
The rest of the game? Bleh, forget about it. It looked like the Nuggets made a point of him defending him better in the second half; his buckets were sparse and difficult. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to see if there was some ball-denial going on by the Nuggets or if it was Devin Booker doing the ball-denial. If it’s the second, then there needs to be a team meeting involving punches from Ayton contacting with Booker’s smarmy face. And if it’s the first, then the team meeting needs to involve Ayton angrily diagramming better plays on a whiteboard while directing obscenities at Kokoskov.
Now that he’s reached the 30-point mark, I don’t see anything except Kokoskov and Booker stopping him from getting 40. All he needs to do is take way more shots, and find some way to draw at least a few more fouls. Is he suffering from “LeBron-itis” where he’s just too big so it looks like he never gets fouled? Here’s the deal: good players flop sometimes. Some great ones flop all the time. It sucks, but that’s how to score free points in the NBA. Just something to think about.