I feel like I was talking about a similar situation just yesterday, but why is Jonathan Isaac out there padding his stats in the last few minutes of a blowout? Isaac isn’t, you know, a superstar or anything, but end-of-garbage time is definitely not for players like him. Maybe last year, but not anymore. Garbage time is for players who are (to put it bluntly) garbage. It’s for the fringiest fringes of the NBA to show their stuff without having to worry about getting dominated by legit starters.
I didn’t even see Josh Magette out there, which is damn shame. Probably got his minutes taken by Isaac. I’m getting madder by the minute.
If you take out his points in the final four minutes of the game, Isaac only had 14. Which is good, but not that exciting of a point total. So what’s happening here is he’s lying to us, through his statline, about how good of a game he had tonight. He’s LYING to our FACES. He’s saying “yeah, I had a really nice game, 22 points, that’s almost a career high” without adding “oh and by the way over a third of those points came during the time of garbage”.
I am not blameless. I am, sadly, complicit in the deception. The true title of this video should be “Jonathan Isaac 14 Points/4 Blocks Full Highlights” because points scored by good players when the game is out of reach do not count. They simply do not count. The NBA may count them, but who do you trust more: your old buddy DownToBuck, or Adam Silver and the NBA?