One of the league’s top scorers becomes more technically deadly with the way he goes about his business…almost like they killed his dog.
Hello local talk cinema chains, I am not currently sponsoring any of you but I would like to give you some love. Let me promote a promo code or something please. Anyway, here are movies in basketball:
Phoenix Suns star guard Devin Booker is a total threat to the Philadelphia 76ers, winning seven of his last eight meetings and putting up flashy numbers in almost every single one.
Well, I’ve never (at least as far as I can remember) ever bound movies in Ball, which is a shame because I’m a huge movie-obsessed nerd. The devil’s advocate in the situation would say that there has never been an opportunity like this to draw comparisons: Booker is once again a calculated assassin against one of his old enemies on the same weekend that the next ‘John Wick’ movie comes out.
I’ve already mentioned that Booker is 7-1 against the Sixers in his last eight games, but the individual dominance goes even further, but it didn’t start that way. After Saturday’s win, Booker faced Philly 16 times in his first two seasons in the NBA and averaged just 16.0 points over his first four games.
Starting with a 46-point game — which would have been a new career high had it not been for the 70-point game nine months earlier — with one crazy shot after another, Booker notched at least 35 in eight of the last 12 sessions.
Just listen as former Sixer and current mainstream basketball media savior JJ Redick talks about the types of shots Booker made on the stretch of this 46-point game. It sounds exactly like a John Wick villain running out of answers against an unstoppable force.
Another key moment for me in this match dates back to November 4th, 2019, almost three and a half years ago. It was a 114-109 win for the Suns that put them 5-2 at the start of the first season of the Monty Williams era, just months before the end of the bubble.
At this point in his career, most of us knew Booker was at least on an All-Star trajectory (his first All-Star game came later that season replacing Damian Lillard), but maybe we didn’t know he was had the franchise GOAT potential like he does now.
On that November night, Booker showed people who he really was with 40 points on a 15-19 shooting in just 32 minutes. Of the 116 times a player has scored 40 points in the NBA this season, Booker was one of three to have under 20 shots. There have also only been six games in which a player reached 40 in under 32 minutes. This is the crème de la crème from #1.
That rude awakening at the end of the last decade may have helped raise a beast, if not for the rest of the NBA then at least for the good city of Philadelphia. It feels like a villain would be stupid enough to kill John Wick’s dog:
That brings us to Saturday night, a 29-point clinic with 5 assists in 32 minutes from Booker shooting 9-18. Booker stabbed defense the way John Wick dumps gangsters. He must have taken the referee’s talk seriously too, as he seemed to be making more of an effort to drive on the sidelines.
I’m just really glad that I have a basketball player that I get to see a lot and that gives me the thrill that a high-octane action movie franchise gives me. I’m also excited to see what it looks like with Kevin Durant back at his side as we head into the playoffs with just eight (!!!!) games left in the regular season.
We’ve already seen Boban Marjanovic do one miniature in a John Wick movie, but what would a cameo look like with Booker and Durant standing by Wick’s side and picking defender Gangsters loose one by one?
Continue reading
