When I see a skinny wing player in the NBA, I just can’t help myself. I have to compare them to Corey Brewer even if they play nothing alike. That’s why I think that the best NBA comparison for Mikal Bridges is Corey Brewer. It’s literally only because they’re both lanky small forwards.
Under scrutiny, the comparison holds up a little bit, so that’s better than a lot of the dumb comparisons I make. Bridges is already a better three-point shooter than Brewer ever has been during his itinerant NBA career, but their driving games are similar. The curse of skinny dudes is to get battered and moved around in the paint unless some serious contortion is going on to avoid contact. I see some of that with Bridges. Eddie Johnson claims that Bridge will eventually put on more muscle, but I wouldn’t be so optimistic. A lot of skinny dudes are cursed to be skinny forever. I’m one of them. My curse is to never be able to put on muscle. Bridges is already 22 years old, so you would think that, if he was capable of adding muscle, he would have done it by now. It’s not like his college didn’t have a weight room.
I’m also going to go ahead and compare Bridges to Dan Majerle so it looks like I’m some kind of genius NBA historian who knows what he’s talking about. The good thing about comparing nowadays players to historical players is that nobody on YouTube is old enough to have actually seen those older players play. So people will just take me at my word even if my word is just random guesswork.