My coworker brought this up today and I thought he was misreading his statline somehow. Looked at his stat page, and yeah, it really is only five on the year. I already knew he wasn’t one to draw fouls but you’d think you’d at least accidentally draw one shooting foul a game as a starter.
To his credit, he’s hit all five.
He’s got such a strange skillset. He likes to play with finesse- jump hooks, middys— But he also can’t handle the ball whatsoever, and he can’t really shoot 3s. So you’re not really playing him on the perimeter.
But he doesn’t want to use his insane physical gifts to dunk and draw contact, so he can’t be a rim-runner either.
So you’re left with a gifted center whose finesse in the least efficient/effective ways, and only physical every so often for small stretches depending on whether he took his adderall.
Great analysis… someone needs to get in his ear and wake him up!
Did you just describe Jhalil okafor?
He has a 43.5" vertical, he can outrun 99% of bigs (when he tries), and he covers the perimeter better than anyone his size. You could almost say he has the physical tools to be a Giannis type if he wanted to be.
That’s why he made his 2k player a shooting guard
Rich man’s Jahlil Okafor
It’s on purpose. He doesn’t want to shoot FTs.
He has terrible mental fortitude
You can’t be a great player without being able to draw fouls.
Remember when people were confused that the Suns gave Ayton away for a box of cookies? Yeah, it lasted less than a month of the season. He’s a skilled player, that is bad, it’s hard to explain, but it’s just who he is.
Ayton is not close to being a winning player nor he ever will be, the fact that Phoenix chose the corpse of Jusuf Nurkic over him shows that. There’s something so wrong with how he approaches the game that despite being gifted, he is such a negative that you’d rather have a washed player over him.