Tuesday Bolts 9.10.19
Dennis Schröder nearly triple-doubled in a meaningless consolation-bracket win for Germany over Canada:
Tim Reynolds (Associated Press) disagrees with me, citing Danilo Gallinari’s role in Italy’s meaningful overtime win over Puerto Rico:
Speaking of the Italian devil, Zach Buckley (Bleacher Report) tabbed Danilo as the best NBA shooter at the small forward position: “While his accuracy has ebbed and flowed over his 10-year career, it ranked among 2018-19’s elite. His 161 threes were the second-most of his career. His 19.8 points per game, 46.3 field-goal percentage and 63.3 true shooting percentage were new personal bests. His 367 free throws were the second-most he’d ever made, and his 90.4 free-throw percentage ranked fourth among qualified shooters. With size for the post (6’10”, 225 lbs) and mobility for the perimeter, he can get his shot off at any time. He fits the cliched (but appropriate) definition of the walking mismatch: too big for smaller defenders, too quick for bigger ones.”
CL Brown (The Athletic) put together something of an oral history of Chris Paul’s early signs of stardom at Wake Forest: “Chris Ellis, forward: The thing is this. As a freshman, he came in yelling at the upperclassmen. Everybody was looking at him like, What is he doing? You haven’t earned your stripes yet. I didn’t understand it. He would yell at me the most because I was the 4 and supposed to get the ball out. He wanted the ball as fast as possible, so he could get out in the court. What I didn’t understand at the time was, he was yelling at us because he demanded perfection. He saw how the play was supposed to be run. He would not start the play until everybody was in the right place.”
Brett Dawson (The Athletic) has a Q&A with Thunder addition Mike Muscala: “I just felt that even despite the change in the roster, the personnel, that it would still be a good opportunity for me and that there would still be a lot that I could learn. I’ve never played the game with the approach that “Oh, I just want to win a championship.” It’s never been like that. For me, it’s been more about the people I meet and have met throughout my career who I stay in touch with. I think that’s what’s so cool about basketball. Being on the Sixers and the Lakers last year with a couple of younger guys, I really enjoyed getting to know them more. I’m not saying I was a big mentor to them, but just kind of taking them under my wing a little bit and talking to them. Maybe going out to dinner here there and just kind of throwing some ideas at them and things that I had learned through my first couple of years. That was really valuable to me. It felt good. And I felt that on this team now, with a lot of younger players, there would be an opportunity to do that.”
Rob Mahoney (SI) rolled out the first half his top-100 NBA players for this season. Surprisingly,
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and, less so, Schröder missed the cut: “Of all the young players under consideration, Gilgeous-Alexander felt the least predictable. His developmental arc is as amorphous as his game. Somehow, Gilgeous-Alexander is not quite a point guard, not quite a shooting guard, and not quite a combo guard, either, at least in the classic sense of the archetype. Where he goes from here is anyone’s guess, though there’s a lot to like in the way he feels out the game.”