We, as in the people who watch a lot of basketball, pour a lot of sweat into trying to understand what’s going on out there. Intricate set breakdowns, hours of sifting through tape, perusing the stat pages to test your eyes against the data, all in the interest of trying to not sound like a total doofus when you talk about the games.
And yet for as fun as the pursuit of higher basketball learning can be, nothing quite matches the thrill of the inexplicable. Sometimes pro hoopers do stupid cool things that make absolutely no sense, leaving you with no recourse but to sit back, enjoy and accept that some things are just beyond grasp of our puny human minds.
Chris Boucher scoring 17 points on nine shots in one quarter to help the Raptors take down Steph Curry’s Golden State Warriors, capping off a week in which he’s gone 25 of 33 from the field and roared back into the Raptors’ rotation, falls under that umbrella. Boucher’s on the heater of his life, and it just might go down as the high watermark of his seven-year Raptors career.
There is of course a little logic to Boucher being on one at the moment. Throughout his extended Raptors tenure, he’s been prone to spells of extreme hot and cold. He’s the NBA’s foremost human roulette wheel, capable of spellbinding stretches of heat-check shot-making and highlight reel blocks, offset by runs of driving fans’ faces directly into the soothing embrace of their palms. As we dubbed him on an episode of the podcast earlier this year with our pal Keeks, there’s a case to be made that Boucher is the most sustainably unsustainable player in the league; what happens one night is likely to invert itself the next, and you live with it, because the highs are so hysterically fun.
“He’s been playing great. I’m telling you like he’s such a professional,” Darko Rajaković said of Boucher, about whom he joked pregame Monday that the source of his recent powers has been a steady dose of pregame espressos, which clearly kicked in just in time for the fourth.
“He’s been around. His voice is very important with the team as well and I’m really happy for him when he plays the way he played tonight,” the coach finished.
That veteran know-how and his propensity for hilariously productive nights are why Boucher’s latest bucket bender might be his last in Toronto. The realities of the league are what they are, and 32-year-olds in good form on expiring contracts who play for rebuilding teams are rarely going to dodge pre-trade deadline scuttlebutt. Boucher very well could be on the move to a contender in need of some bench juice in the coming weeks.
If that is the case, Boucher’s going full-Costanza, ensuring he leaves on the highest of possible notes. The great appeal of Boucher has never really been high-leverage, two-way play that translates to all kinds of winning, though he’s certainly had his moments in that department. Rather, Boucher’s nights of manic production have helped soothe what’s been a pretty rough handful of years for those who watch the Raptors night in, night out. His pops and flourishes keep you going on cold mid-season nights, even when your team loses more than it wins, maybe never encapsulated more clearly than on Monday against Golden State.
Toronto will not win many games this year, and of those, only a handful are likely to stand out in the memory of the true sickos who kept on watching all year long. You can bet for damn sure that his fourth quarter heroics on Monday will hold up as one of the defining wins not only of this season, but of Boucher’s 390+ game run with Canada’s team.
There’s no way to know exactly what’s next for Boucher, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Today on the podcast, Vivek Jacob and I ran through Boucher’s incredible 4th quarter in the win over Golden State, talked Scottie Barnes and Ochai Agbaji’s strong nights, Jamal Shead’s shooting uptick and more. Enjoy the show!
