Can We Make It Through a Whole Season of P.J. Tucker?

P.J. Tucker actually is that player who does absolutely nothing but the things he definitely knows how to do.

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

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I don't really care for Draymond Green. That's not a particularly hot take in almost-2023, what with the decking of the teammate and the ridiculous TNT short film non-apology and the Warriors being 2-10 when playing outside of the Bay Area this season in and all that. But my dislike of Draymond predates all of that, and isn't even about how basically odious he seems as a teammate and overall hang. I just don't really like hearing about what a great basketball player he is while he averages seven points and only shoots under absolutely ideal circumstances from 3-5 very specific pre-prescribed spots on the court.

I mean I'm sure they're right, mostly. People much smarter than me say he's a Hall of Famer, he's certainly annoying to play against, and the Warriors have won a whole lot with him over the last decade, so chances are he at least has a baseline of Very Good. But I would not enjoy rooting for him, even he was a devout mensch in his off-court life. I just can't stand being preached to about players whose transcendent brilliance is oh so obvious to anyone who really knows the game when those players can only break double digits in scoring on nights when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars. You're such a fucking savant on the hardwood? OK, go take the big leather sphere and figure out how to put it into the orange carbon steel circle with the mesh hanging down from it. More than twice a game, preferably.

Naturally, this is all to say that I probably should've anticipated struggling with the P.J. Tucker experience.

It's funny, the things you think you won't mind about a player before you actually have to watch them every night. Plenty of us have said things about certain role players and prospects like "I don't care if he doesn't score a single point, as long as he does [role playery things x, y and z]!" But we don't often consider what it'll actually feel like when they take us up on that offer in six out of seven games. With P.J. Tucker at least, turns out it's not that great: It's frustrating and annoying and kind of insulting.

Which isn't to say that Tucker's been bad, necessarily, or that I think he was a bad signing, or that I even dislike him as a player (yet). His defense on Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kevin Durant is a big reason we won those games against Milwaukee and Brooklyn; he's an absolute master at knowing the exact minimum amount of space he can give an opponent without actually sacrificing any advantage to them, and at closing that space when the time comes. Even on offense, his knack for flare screen-setting to spring open triples for teammates has been transformative; I've seen Joel Embiid and Tobias Harris each set more of those for teammates in the first 22 games of this season than either had in their whole Sixers career to this point.

But man, when you just don't score at all, it gets real tough to appreciate some of that stuff. The thing about not scoring is that it shrinks your margin for error in all other facets of the game, basically down to nil. You could be playing a stout defensive game, moving the ball well on offense, being a leader on the sideline and all that good business... but if you're putting up bagels in the box score, then as soon as you mistime your jump on a rebound, as soon as a loose ball caroms off your fingertips and out of bounds, as soon as you get whistled for a block and not a charge, we're gonna go absolutely balistic screaming bloody murder about what the fuck purpose you serve and why you're getting any playing time at all. Let alone 32 minutes a night.

Really, it kinda makes you second guess everything about our relationship with Danny Green: How much time did we spend during his two seasons here just praying he would stop trying to do anything but the things we knew he was actually good at doing? There was good reason for that, obviously -- but now we know what the inverse is like, because P.J. Tucker actually is that player who does absolutely nothing but the things he definitely knows how to do. And what that looks like, at least on offense, is a guy who will take two shots and two shots only: corner threes where the nearest defender is still a good two steps away, and putbacks six inches from the basket when his closest defender is short enough that he can reasonably expect to be able to flip a hook over them. Anything else, it's strictly pass the dutchie. He's not interested in dribbling, he's not interested in posting, he's not interested in any kind of two-game game that risks bringing him south of the elbow. It's not as brain-liquifying as Adventures With Danny was, but it might ultimately be just as infuriating.

And yet: We absolutely need P.J. Tucker in April and May. Need. There is no one on the team -- hopefully Paul Reed in a few years, maybe more like a half-decade -- who can do what he does for this team on defense and in the muck. There's no one else on the wing who we'll trust in the playoffs not to fold like me playing a dealer's choice game of seven-card stud whose rules I don't really understand. It's P.J. Tucker or it's P.J. Tucker. And I do believe that in the postseason, his unwillingness to be in any way extra will be more of an asset than a liability. I think he'll hit more shots, get more loose balls. There's certain matchups I don't and won't like for him -- Boston certainly ate him alive in the season opener -- but we're not getting through two rounds in the playoffs this year without P.J. Tucker. We might not even get through one.

But we don't need a whole lot of P.J. Tucker before that -- and we certainly don't need him playing 28.5 minutes a night and averaging literally one point a game, as he's done over the last nine contests. (And that is counting his unprecedented scoring flurry of hitting two threes -- a team-high!! -- against Cleveland on Wednesday, I don't even want to do the math on what his Per 28.5 scoring was before that.) We're not far away enough from Yom Kippur yet for me to actually hope for anyone to get injured, and lord knows we have a full-enough IR on this team as is, but if P.J. wanted to take a month or two off for his mental health in the New Year, I think that'd be fine with just about everyone. Get us some more minutes with the three-guard lineup -- maybe even a little BBall Paul/Embiid frontcourt fuckery -- and save P.J.'s Basketball-Reference Game Logs page a couple rows of 0s. After 15-20 games of watching Tobias and Matisse try to contain opposing combo forwards, we'll probably be begging you to come stand in the corner with your hands in your pockets for 35 minutes.