The title of this video doesn’t really do it justice. Yeah, Matisse Thybulle had 15 points and yeah, that’s a career high. But as everybody knows, there’s a lot more to Thybulle’s game than just scoring. Actually, the majority of his game is something other than scoring. Scoring seems almost like a distracting afterthought to him, pulling resources from what he really wants to do, which is play defense.
You will find 15 points in this video. Definitely. But you will also find a large amount of tantalizing defense plays; 4 steals, 2 blocks, and it seems like all of them were on Buddy Hield, who kind of looked confused as to why someone would be playing such tough defense in a meaningless regular season game. This video would be a lot longer if it just showed all of Thybulle’s defense, even if it didn’t result in a boxscore stat like a steal or block. But at that point you might as well just watch the whole game (which you should be doing anyway, highlights never tell the full story). And even getting all those steals and blocks was draining for me, since I can’t bring myself to care about defense. Imagine me making a whole vid of defense! I think I would die before I got halfway through.
So that’s the sad thing with Thybulle; most of his value is on defense, but the majority of YouTube highlights focus on offense. Only the sickest, most depraved people make videos showcasing defense (or watch said videos). Right now, he’s pretty bad at actually getting the ball in the hole. And he wasn’t great at it in college either, so it’s going to be a while before he’s a true two-way player.
But there’s tons of one-way players (usually the other way) in the league that people love, so maybe it’s not too big of a problem after all.