The only person who would call him by his desired name was Thibs. That’s why when Obi gets chants, it clearly saddens him. That’s why, when Evan Fournier would try to encourage him, he would shut him down. He went from embracing his teammates to no longer trusting them. This caused a cosmic shift in Randle’s attitude.

Unfortunately, this teammates didn’t feel the same way. Randle felt that he needed to be called a new name this season based on his excellent play last year. My first theory: His teammates refused to call him “Don Julio,” which was his desired name for the rest of the season. Jay: I’m putting my orange tinfoil hat on like Alex Jones if he only worked for WFAN. So the purpose of today’s exercise is to brazenly, irresponsibly speculate as to what we witnessed this year, what happened to Jules and why? I’ll cede the floor for you to pitch the first theory, and then we can debate. It was a heel turn the likes of which I’ve never seen outside the WWE, and will hopefully never see again. He would get into feuds with refs that wouldn’t call fouls on contact that would go on for hours, weeks, leading to dumb technicals at inopportune times and hurting his ability to get future calls on 50/50 plays. When he played well, it was almost like he was doing it to spite the fans of the team theoretically supporting and rooting for him, giving us bizarre thumbs down, or grabbing end of game rebounds like it bumped into his child in a Penn Station crowd without apologizing or saying “excuse me”.

We were subjected to an entire season of clips that would drop on the timeline we’d study like Zapruder film, as he drifted further and further away from timeout huddles like a plastic bag floating on currents of wind. We rewarded that turn with $117 million dollars for the next four (now, blessedly, three) years.Īs unexpected and and pleasantly shocking as last season was, this season was its inverse, a stunning about face in which our arms and elbows star instantly, immediately transformed into a brooding, petulant child. That’s a real thing that actually happened.

I may have to spend at least another half season agonizing over our coach Tom Thibodeau’s bizarre rotations, and we have a first-round pick to look forward to debating.īut when I look back on this season, the real nagging questions, the one I will lose sleep over and will haunt my dreams, is what exactly the fuck happened to our “star” Julius Deion Randle? Last season he was a revelation, the hard playing on court star and locker room captain of our scrappy, ragtag bunch of expendable vets that somehow earned a home court playoff seed, and finished fifth in the MVP voting en route to a Most Improved Player Award. I will hopefully never have to read any morons defending the merits of “Point AB” ever again. We will have the next several months to reflect on many shoulda woulda couldas, many WTF moments, and many nagging questions. The vibes at Bunton’s were meh so I came home early and got to reflecting on what was one of the more aggravating Knicks seasons this century, which is really saying something. Abe: Jayson, it’s a very mid Sunday evening here in New York City.

Julius randle stats