I like Sasha's progression from last season to present & he continues to look more comfortable on the court. It's unfortunate, but inevitable, that comparisons will be made to DM, as Sasha is his own player with his own strengths and weaknesses. This is difficult when the only sample is former Purdue players, but when making comparisons, it's helpful to ignore the racial component. I like this excerpt from "The Undoing Project":
The mere fact that a player physically resembled some currently successful player could be misleading. A decade ago a six-foot-two-inch, light-skinned, mixed-race guy who had gone unnoticed by major colleges in high school and so played for some obscure tiny college, and whose main talent was long-range shooting, would have had no obvious appeal. The type didn’t exist in the NBA—at least not as a raging success. Then Stephen Curry came along and set the NBA on fire, led the Golden State Warriors to an NBA championship, and was everyone’s most valuable player. Suddenly—just like that—all these sharp-shooting mixed-race guards were turning up for NBA job interviews and claiming that their game was a lot like Stephen Curry’s; and they were more likely to get drafted because of the resemblance. “For five years after we drafted Aaron Brooks, we saw so many kids who compared themselves to Aaron. Because there are so many little guards.” Morey’s solution was to forbid all intraracial comparison. “We’ve said, ‘If you want to compare this player to another player, you can only do it if they are a different race.’” If the player in question was African American, for instance, the talent evaluator was only allowed to argue that “he is like so-and-so” if so-and-so was white or Asian or Hispanic or Inuit or anything other than black. A funny thing happened when you forced people to cross racial lines in their minds: They ceased to see analogies. Their minds resisted the leap. “You just don’t see it,” said Morey.
Full article from Slate
