Shai Gilgeous-Alexander better watch out, or he’s going to find himself in a nice cozy spot on my exclusion list. I’ve been kinda busy with other stuff, so I haven’t yet publicized this year’s version of “the list”, which means I can add and remove names to it whenever I want. If I don’t want to make another Kelly Oubre vid, I don’t have to. If I want to reinstate Dennis Schroder for eligibility I can. And if SGA starts averaging basically 24 points per frickin’ game I can just say “no more” and move on from him forever.
“Forever” meaning “until he’s so old that he gets the senior discount at Denny’s”, so when he’s about 33.
I’ll give him some time, though. It certainly looks like he’s way more interested in scoring than passing right now, but that could change. It could just be an aberration. But with each game he scores in the 20-ish point range, the chances of that go lower and lower. I’m willing to bet that this new score-first version of SGA is the version of SGA that existed all along and was only released when he went to a team with two actual real-life PGs (Chris Paul and Dennis Schroder, yes, I know that Schroder is a chucker also) so that he was forced to a different position.
Here’s the deal, people can call players whatever position they want and it doesn’t have to be even based in reality. Calling SGA a point guard in his rookie season was fun because who doesn’t love a super-long PG, but the truth is coming out now: he’s a shooting guard, with a heavy emphasis on the “shooting” part.