I spent much of the COVID-19-induced NBA hiatus mourning the loss of the scrubtastic last few games of the regular season. That time around mid-April where teams take all their worst players, insert them into the starting lineup, and see what happens. It’s the best time of the year for DTB. Almost Christmas-like (I thought about typing “yule-like” but it looks as gross as it sounds) in the amount of amazement I feel.
Even with the lineup that the Jazz trotted out today, as well as a few other odd minutes-distribution decisions (Talen Horton-Tucker waves as he hits yet another bucket), I mourn for what has been lost. Nothing will ever replace the scrubfests that take place at the end of regular seasons. But I appreciate what the Jazz were trying to do here. It’s like they were saying “it’s okay Dee Tee Bee, here, we dug out Miye Oni from the very end of our bench and put him in the starting lineup, just for you!”.
Sadly, Justin Wright-Forman “only” scored 8, Jarrell Brantley “only” scored 8, Rayjon Tucker had but 5, and Juwan Morgan could merely muster 5, those are all players I have not yet gotten a chance to make a video for this year. Luckily, Oni managed to do some real damage, scoring 14 points after making only 1 shot the whole season.
And he looked good while doing it, honestly. I didn’t have super high hopes going into this one, but he did some nice things. Angling for more minutes as the playoffs draw nearer? Well, maybe he’s angling, but his angling will get him no additional minutes. Not unless some serious injuries/infections start happening.