It’s no coincidence that the Jazz have won all their games since Royce “Shaqueale” O’Neale was inserted into the starting lineup. Actually, I’m pretty sure it is a coincidence, because there’s no way that O’Neale, with his sporadic scoring and general wallflower-ness, is impacting the game in such a large fashion that he is causing these wins. More likely, taking out Ricky Rubio and letting Donovan Mitchell just go nuts is the real reason. But you never know. Sometimes players like O’Neale can be what you call a “winner”, where even though their stats suck and they don’t pass the eye test, they help their team win games consistently.
Patrick Patterson was one of those players, once upon a time. Now I’m pretty sure he just straight-up sucks.
But back to O’Neale. He kind of had a monster game tonight. 16 points, which you already knew because you read the video title (at least I assume you did). 5 assists, not shown because they were really lame and diluted the scoring prowess on display, but they still happened so that’s cool. And 11 rebounds, all defensive, I kinda want to know how many he stole from Rudy Gobert. Add in a block and a steal, and you have what is probably his best game of the year. Not like anyone cares; it would take a lot more than this to make the average fan care about some role-player SG with a horrible John Salmons-esque beard playing for one of the lower-excitement teams in the league.