Paul Millsap came very close to achieving the dreaded “Tony Snell” statline in this game by putting up a neat line of 21/1/0/0/0. The only thing he did other than score was get a rebound. One rebound. Somewhere, Tony Snell is shaking his head in disappointment.
It was an okay rebound. Troy Daniels missed a three and Millsap jumped up to get the miss with Alex Caruso kind of in the vicinity. But the Nuggets already had an eighteen point lead at that point in the game, so the rebound wasn’t exactly vital to the Nuggets’ win. If Millsap had mistimed his jump, or just not jumped at all and simply stood there, it’s not like we’d be seeing articles with headlines of “Why did Millsap quit on the Nuggets?” It just maybe would have been a 22-point win for the Nuggs instead of the 24-point win that it was in reality.
For a player getting paid thirty million dollars, and who has a reputation as a kind of “do-everything” forward, having such a sparse statline is definitely anomalous, even when taking into account that Millsap is averaging significantly fewer rebounds and assists than he was last season. Maybe he had a bet with Malik Beasley that he could only get one of a single stat of his choosing and zero of everything else, and do it in an unobtrusive enough way where he wouldn’t get benched for it and there was $500,000 riding on it. This is the version of events that I choose to believe.