Could the Philadelphia 76ers’ other rookie be the next second-year wonder?
Matisse Thybulle is one of the best rookie guards in the NBA.
Call me presumptuous if you so choose, but I don’t even think that statement is up for debate; it’s even among the most fervent objectors of the Philadelphia 76ers. He can shoot an above-average clip from beyond the arc – even if the volume isn’t quite there – play defense 1-3 with the best of them, and is among the most statistically dominant stealers in the league regardless of age when he hits the court.
While the idea of trading up again with the Celtics for yet another Washington Huskie guard drew mild ire on draft night, it’s safe to say Philly won that move by a country mile, as no rookie Boston added this offseason has proven to be anything more than a benchwarmer over the course of the 2019-20 season.
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Tacko Fall, I still love you, but your biggest contribution to the NBA this season came as a glorified prop in the Slam Dunk Contest.
However, as you may or may not know Thybulle isn’t the only rookie on the Philadelphia 76ers’ roster this year, and his draft classmate, selected 34 spots after the Washington shooting guard, actually had a more dominant season capped off with a trip to the All-Star game.
That’s right, we’re talking about the Canadian Destroyer, the Poutine Mamba, Super Marial himself, Marial Shayok.
The 54th overall pick NBA Draft, Shayok didn’t come to the Sixers with high external hopes for his future. A three-star recruit coming out of high school in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Shayok played his first three years of college basketball as a role player in Tony Bennett’s Virginia Cavaliers offense, before transferring to Iowa State to become the offensive focal point of a pretty decent Cyclones squad. He wasn’t a particularly effective shooter, hitting a slightly above-average 38.1 percent from 3, didn’t really do much in the passing game, and finished out a relatively uneventful season with nary a spot on any serious NBA mock drafts.
That, however, didn’t stop the Sixers from selecting Shayok with their final pick in the second round – the only second-round pick they actually kept. From there, Shayok had a quiet rookie season, appearing in two games for the Sixers for a grand total of 10 minutes. He scored three points, shot 33 percent from beyond the arc, and hauled in a trio of defensive rebounds versus a single assist.
‘Hold up, wait a minute – I thought you said Shayok had an even better rookie season than Thybulle? How is that even possible?’
Oh snap, those are just Shayok’s NBA stats. My mistake.
On the off chance you only watch the Sixers and purposely turn a blind eye to their developmental department a few miles down the road in Wilmington, you probably don’t know that Shayok has pretty much taken the G-League by storm as the offensive focal point of the Delaware Blue Coats. Despite running basically the same system as their big brother club, Blue Coats head coach Connor Johnson has been forced to run the show through Shayok ‘Kobe Bryant-style’ due to his uncanny ability to score buckets pretty much any time he touches the ball.
Over his 36 game career in the G-League, Shayok has scored an average of .765 points per minute over a 1051 minute sample size. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s only .17 fewer points than the NBA’ current points-per-game leader James Harden.
Like Harden, Shayok is only shooting an average clip from 3 point range (35) but that, in part, is due to taking on a massive workload of over 18 shots per game, by far the highest mark on the team. Is comparing Shayok to James Harden and Kobe Bryant in the same article when, again, he’s only logged 10 NBA minutes a bit much? Yeah, probably so, but that’s the kind of high-usage, shooting guard style Shayok has brought to the Blue Coats this season.
Fun fact: Do you know who the Blue Coats’ second-leading scorer was in 2019-20? That would be current talk of the town Shake Milton.
As you can probably assume from the headline of this very article, there is a lot in common between Mr. Milton and Shayok. Both were selected near the bottom of the second round of the NBA Draft – with the very same pick, in fact – were upperclassman who statistically improved each year in college, and ultimately started their careers off on two-way contracts. While Milton is a much better shooter from range and a slightly better distributor of the basketball, Shayok is clearly the purer scorer who could take over the court as a second-unit scorer coming off the bench.
And most importantly, Shayok is technically eligible to play in the Philadelphia 76ers’ final eight games of the regular season, maybe even next to Milton from time to time.
Sidebar: A Milton-Shayok backcourt would *probably* be a nightmare defensively but hey, in the NBA Bubble, anything goes.
Now, as you may or may not know, the Sixers really don’t have a viable, long-term scorer who can take over the offense coming off the bench. At the moment, that role belongs to Alec Burks, but it seems like a long-shot that he’ll re-sign with the team when the season ends. He was off to a career-best campaign with the Golden State Warriors alongside his current teammate Glenn Robinson III and may opt to rejoin Steven Kerr’s club later this year when Steph, Klay, and company are all ready to go. Furkan Korkmaz has been a revelation this season after having his option declined last fall but he’s much more of an auxiliary shooter than a three-level scorer.
As crazy as it may have sounded a year ago today, Shayok has the potential to become the Philadelphia 76ers’ best second unit scorer since Lou Williams, only a Lou Williams who measures in at 6-foot-5, 196 pounds.
When the Philadelphia 76ers drafted Marial Shayok in 2019, it was a borderline non-factor. Fans were excited for the addition of Matisse Thybulle, sad that Carsen Edwards ended up a Celtic, and generally stoked on the prospects of the 2019-20 season. However, these are different times my friends and for the second year in a row, Elton Brand and his scouting department may have found yet another diamond in the rough second round shooting guard who could take the sophomore leap on a freshly minted four-year, rookie minimum deal that keeps him in red, white, and blue until 2024, where he can play against actual NBA players night after night. That worked great for Shake Milton.