Bobby Portis was a good player for Arkansas back in his college days. As such, one would expect him to still have some fans from those days. Right? I’m assuming that he had fans there in the first place, which is almost a certainty, unless that program simply doesn’t have any fans at all (I am not fully convinced that the state of Arkansas has any inhabitants besides random mountainmen living in shacks in the Ozarks). But if he did have fans from those days, where are they now? They should be following his every move, praying with successive team that he goes to that this will be the team that unlocks his talents.
The whole point of players going to college instead of the G-League is so that they can develop a fanbase which will then follow them to the NBA. That’s literally the whole point of NCAA basketball right now, to generate hype for players. That obviously didn’t work in Portis’ case; he might as well have played for the Mad Ants for all the good his two years at Arkansas did him.
He’s pretty good still, a totally reasonable role-player, so the fact that he has no fans at all, from his college days or from his NBA days, makes me a little sad. Maybe if people see what he did in this game, they’ll jump on the bandwagon. He had 13 straight points for the Knicks spanning the end of the first and start of the second quarters, he was really cooking, and then Kevin Knox had to go and ruin everything by taking a shot (and missing it). Portis never really got back in his groove after that.
Hopefully this time Portis didn’t yell “I’m gonna get 40!” like he did that one time (spoiler alert: he did not get 40).