It is not outside of the realm of possibility that Eric Paschall will lead the Warriors in total scoring this season. If D’Angelo Russell manages to make it through most of the season in one piece (which will be hard given the All-Star-injuring curse that a symposium of various deities placed on the Warriors because they wanted an unpredictable NBA again), he’ll have the most points, easily. If not, then there isn’t really anyone to challenge Paschall for scoring supremacy.
It’s also possible that Russell gets traded and the Warriors truly embrace the tank. That wouldn’t be necessary, because Russell isn’t the type of floor-raising All-Star that would keep the Warriors from being anything but horrible, but it could easily happen. As long as they don’t trade for a scorer better than Paschall, I really want to look back on the Warriors’ yearly scoring leaders and see the large streak of “Stephen Curry” be interrupted by a single “Eric Paschall” before resuming another long streak of Curry.
This is Paschall’s second 30-point game of the season, and we’re only 15 percent of the way through the season. At the same point in Curry’s rookie season, he had no 30-point games. He eventually ended with a whole bunch of them, which is a shame, because I wanted to find a way to compare Paschall’s rookie year with Curry’s. I guess we can go with raw scoring average; Paschall is averaging 16.7 PPG per game this season, and Curry averaged 17.5. That’s really close! I’m expecting the same kind of career trajectory from Paschall that we got from Curry.