Chris Boucher checked in to this game with four and a half minutes left in the third quarter and the Raptors down by 27. This is the point where I tell you what the situation of the game was when he checked out, but he didn’t check out. He played the rest of the way and…
SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU ARE A RAPTORS FAN AND HAVE NOT YET WATCHED THIS GAME CLOSE THIS VIDEO IMMEDIATELY!
Okay, so he played the rest of the game and walked off with his team the victors, 110-107. I’m not even going to look at the plus-minus numbers for this one, but I bet Boucher’s were sick. Fine, I just looked at them, and I can confirm, they are sick. I know single-game plus-minus is the most useless thing ever, but it does illustrate points sometimes, and the point here is that Boucher combined with a bunch of scrubs (Malcolm Miller was involved, as was Terence Davis, and also Kyle Lowry) blew the pants off the Mavericks during the last 15 or so minutes of the game. The comeback ended up being from 30 points down, making it the best comeback I can remember since that one where the Kings beat the Bulls because of Jon Brockman being a beast.
How much of this comeback can we give Boucher credit for? It’s possible that he was just in the right place at the right time, but he did play some nice defense (now that Mitchell Robinson doesn’t even block threes anymore we need someone else to do it and maybe Boucher is that guy) and score some points. He wasn’t like Miller, who didn’t even score and was rewarded with a plus-29 plus-minus. He made a big impact on the game, even if a lot of that impact was him getting fouled over and over.
Which makes this video maybe not as good as you would hope since he only made 6 shots. But that’s if you ignore the context, which in a situation like this, you definitely should not do.