The Grizz would notch a then-franchise-record 56 wins that season. In January 2013, Memphis traded Gay to Toronto, basically for Ed Davis - the first big move of the John Hollinger front office. When the Rockets dealt him to Memphis in July 2006, it was in exchange for Shane Battier and the birth of MoreyBall. And from the moment he was drafted, he’s been swept aside to make way for something new.
Since 2007–08, he has scored at least 17 points per game. To stick with this admittedly thin metaphor, Rudy Gay is Coca-Cola - a dependable stock that is ultimately kind of bad for you. And every time Russy has a triple-double and the Thunder lose by eight, it feels like Ryan Gosling is pulling another Jenga piece out of the tower. Maybe it’s the fact that the league is chucking more 3s than ever before (two more per game than last season - the most ever), or just the general up-is-down period of flux we’re in, with 7-foot point guards and 6-foot-8 centers, but every once in a while, the numbers feel a little inflated. When you look at box scores at the end of a day, you see some eye-popping individual stats - Damn, is Wiggins taking 4-pointers? - paired with a lot of team losses.
McCollum’s 33-point Brooklyn brunch, and another 30-plus night (and another loss) for Russell Westbrook - but Rudy Gay threw DeMar DeRozan’s shoe into the Golden 1 Center stands, so he gets to be King of the Court, if just for one day. There were more gaudy stat lines on Sunday night - 40 points for Jimmy Butler, C.J. We’ll be keeping track of the best player of every night of the NBA season, and tallying the results as we go along. Welcome to King of the Court, our daily celebration of the best players in basketball from the night that was.