The Rookies

Tonight, while you baseball-loving dopes were watching that Pajamas guy and the All-Star Game, Anthony Randolph had himself a game (click it):

None of those numbers are typos.

And though it is the Summer League, this is only going to add to his growing legend.

See, Anthony Randolph is a strange beast, jackrabbit kinetics in his genes and an incessant motor under his sleek, 6′10″, vines-for-arms frame. He’s Kevin Durant with an inside game, Kevin Garnett with fifteen fewer years on his tires. He’s the apotheosis of “tremendous upside potential” or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

The stats back him up.

Bill Simmons has his back:

“Only eight current NBA players qualify for “There’s No Way I’m Missing Them If They’re In Town” purposes: LeBron, Wade, Paul, Duncan, Kobe, Durant, Howard and, strangely, Anthony Randolph (I will explain some other time).”

“He’s one of the most breathtaking rookies I’ve seen in person — ever — for all the reasons you just described. There has never been anyone quite like him. He’s like a cross between Josh Smith and Lamar Odom, only if you fed him 10 Red Bulls and told him right before the game, “If you can make 10 things happen during the 10 minutes you play tonight, we will quadruple your salary and you will start for the rest of the season” … and then he does just that, but the coach reneges on the promise so Anthony has a near-crying meltdown on the bench. That’s every Anthony Randolph game. I caught him once and, in the span of two hours, he made three “MY GOD!” plays and broke down on the Warriors’ bench because Nellie wouldn’t put him back in, followed by an assistant consoling him through an entire timeout like Randolph was a third grader who got in trouble for something he didn’t do, then had a meltdown and got kicked out of class. It was riveting. The odds of me missing another Clips-Warriors game for the next five years are 10,000-to-1.”

And no less an arbiter of power forwards with small guard skills than Lamar Odom sees greatness in the kid:

“He should set his goals high. He has All-Star potential, Hall of Fame potential, with that size, his ability to put the ball on the floor, he can shoot the three, he can pass. If he stays focused, the sky is the limit for him.”

Hell, even Free Darko has lavished praise on him as a beautiful aberration with this gem:

Graph by Tom Ziller.

And, again, all this praise is justified by lines like this.

Even in summer league play, against the closest things to scrubs a league of very tall, very talented, very athletic men has, that sort of score-sheet filling takes some doing.

For perspective, peep a list of the 40-point games from the 2008-09 season. Only four players (LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Dwight Howard, and Dirk Nowitzki) had 40+ and at least three blocks; only one player (J.R. Smith) had a 40-point performance in fewer minutes, and that required 11-of-18 shooting on three-pointers; his True Shooting Percentage for the game was .672, higher than the NBA’s highest mark last year.

But, in the real world, where mind-boggling potential is as evanescent as Darius Miles’ career, Randolph will have to be more consistent. He burned up Twitter tonight, but dig down far enough and you can find references to his lackluster outing against the Houston Rockets’ skeleton crew last Friday. Against immortals like Maarty Leunen and Joey Dorsey, Randolph reeled off a double-double—and nearly made it a triple-double with hacks.

All the plaudits from Stephen Curry in the world won’t help Randolph if he can’t stay on the court. And should he revert to whatever person/player that Don Nelson held out of games in the early 2008-09 season, he’s going to be subject to questions about whether he can tap his potential. (Playing with a team of shooters and scorers who can explode seemingly at random and will require much of the offensive oxygen in the Oracle Arena won’t help, either.)

But the most important number, as is typically the case with these freshly minted stars from the nebulae, is his age: 20. He turns it today, the 15th, making him over a year younger than his rookie teammate Curry, and the youngest player on the NBA’s youngest team. (Search for Golden State.)

There are a great many things Anthony Randolph can do. And, blessedly, he will have plenty of time to do them.

Highlights from his game thanks to The Baseline: