I’ve been ragging on Marcin Gortat the whole season long, concocting plans to lure him back to Poland so that the minutes he takes up with his uselessness can instead be given to players who deserve them way more, Montrezl Harrell and Boban Marjanovic. And, up until this game happened, I would say that I was entirely justified in my frustration with Gortat’s existence; he can barely score and his shooting has declined significantly from where it was during his Wizards tenure. Despite the fact that he only gets sixteen minutes per game as a starter (he’s one of “those” starters), those sixteen minutes could easily be distributed between the other bigs on the roster.
But I’ll have to change my tune, at least temporarily, in the face of this new information: Gortat scored eighteen points (way higher than his previous season high of twelve) and grabbed thirteen rebounds (also a season high). He showed that he can be productive as long as the game is a REVENGE GAME against a former team (in this case, the Suns) and he gets to match up against a rookie who is known to be, as they say, a “defensive liability”. That’s a very specific set of circumstances, but I could totally see him going up against Vucevic and the Magic and destroying them like he destroyed the Suns.
Okay, “destroyed” is way overstating it. But he definitely served up a sizable portion of his special-recipe Polish kielbasa right into the face of DeAndre Ayton.
In case you’re wondering: no, this game does not alter my plan to start a GoFundMe, buy a Polish-league basketball team, then lure Gortat to that team with a large contract so that he never comes back to the NBA again.