Explain One Play: Alen Smailagic Dunks on LeBron

Fresh videos from the Lakers-Warriors game on February 8th, 2020

A list of all Explain One Play articles and videos is at The new Explain One Play index.

Video Analysis

The Warriors kept the Serbian youngster Alen Smailagic a secret until they could draft him. On Feb 8 2020, the mysterious rookie made a splashy national TV debut against LeBron James and the Lakers. This is a video analysis of how Smiley threw down an enormous dunk on LeBron James, with a look at Draymond Green running similar plays with Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant.

Explain One Play Mailbag

rcknfn asks: You know that you have create a E1P after every win - right? It's in your contract 🤪. So may be more wins is not a good thing? 🤔

I innocently started that tradition in 2015-2016. The reason I started doing E1P was that in 2014-2015 I did these long extensive breakdowns of schemes with multiple videos. And it was long and hard, and I maybe did eight a year of these epics and few humans could get through them. So I thought, let’s just do one play per article. I’ll be able to finish the video in a reasonable time, and people will actually read/watch to the end.

I figured the team was good for maybe high 50s wins in a letdown year after the first ring. And then of course the selfish bastard unloaded 73 wins and then another freaking 15 more playoff wins. So I was kind of expecting to do 50 and cornered myself into doing 88. So then I kind of felt determined to continue the tradition, and the buggers got KD and unloaded another 67+16 = 83 wins.

Honestly, that became a silver lining for losses... like RATS THEY LOST, but hey at least I don't have to stay up tonight working on film. And then Vox was making us at GSOM produce so many articles that the E1Ps were just getting lost in the tsunami of clicky short forms. So at LGW I’m determined to let the E1Ps have a little more time to breathe, to get exposure and to really be something I’m interested in.

And THIS 2019-2020 team is more my speed. 12 wins delicately sprinkled across a season… So I really enjoyed doing the D’Angelo E1P (which was in fact a request from Day 1 subscriber futureslave) but then the selfish Bob Meyers obsoleted it by trading Mr. Russell. And then GSW beat WAS and the truth is I did look through film and didn’t find a single thing I wanted to write about. Just knowing everyone was on the trading block sapped my enthusiasm.

But anyway, for the first time, I’ve done an E1P for a loss. I hope you enjoyed it. I don’t promise to have any rhyme or reason in the future about E1P scheduling, except that when I do it, it will be with love.

Question for Subscribers

Only subscribers can comment on this post. Do you have mailbag questions or requests you’d like to ask me or anyone else here at GSW? I promise to answer reasonable questions in a future mailbag.

(But please don’t bother asking for updates on comment powers. I have sent Substack a list of our comment power demands. Substack just gave us the ability to more finely control comments behind the scenes and has promised us better comment powers in “Quarter 1”. I don’t really know what that means. When does their fiscal year start? I don’t know. )

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