True DownToBuck enthusiasts will realize how rare it is for me to explicitly include steals in a highlight video. If a player has only one or two, they will almost never be included unless they lead to alley-oop dunks or otherwise impact the game in a significant way. Even when a player gets three or four steals, I’ll usually just ignore it because steals are a nebulous, hard-to-define stat (similar to blocks). Often, I’ll look at a clip of a steal and be hard-pressed to figure out who stole the ball. Sometimes the steal goes to the player who makes the deflection. Sometimes it goes to the player who picks up the ball. Rarely is a steal as straightforward as some dude getting pick-pocketed and the other dude cleanly dribbling away with the ball.
But six steals from a rookie playing in just his second game is too juicy to pass up. Ignore R.J. Barrett’s five turnovers and four fouls here. He had six steals! Last season, only two players had more than six steals in a game: Kyrie Irving and P.J. Tucker (?). Sure, there were twenty-two other instances of players getting six steals in a game, but that doesn’t lessen Barrett’s achievement.
Hopefully this is the only time I have to include steals in a highlight video this season. It’s so confusing to be editing this footage and then be faced with a play where nobody even scores. I’m kind of a simpleton when it comes to basketball; buckets are the only thing that matters to me in the end. I want nothing to do with a stat that doesn’t reflect buckets in some way.