Is Nic Batum a geometry major?

for the butterfly, you hope the car was parked and the bug wasn’t on a kamikaze mission

of course, his “reward” for swinging the ball to the open man was a seat on the bench for nearly 6 minutes (while the Phoenix bench outplayed the Blazer’s bench…)

Anecdotal=hearsay

Nope. Hearsay is when you pass on something as evidence that you yourself didn’t experience (“My friend said he saw Batum make some amazing passes.”). Anecdotal is personal experience (“I saw Batum make some amazing passes.”). Your evidence is far better than hearsay, and in fact a little more than anecdotal, since, in theory anyway, people could go back and find that play in a recording of the game—it’s potentially verifiable. But it remains a single example, which does not make a very compelling case .

As far as these conclusions actually being based on one pass, not so fast. In the post itself, I mentioned Nic receiving multiple passes from Andre that Nic, in turn handled well, and this, in addition to other passes in other games in which Batum had done the same kinds of things that I had described here, just on a smaller scale. Would any reasonable person expect me to go into description after description of, "other," Nic Batum passes. I thought the post was getting long enough the way it was.

No. I don’t expect you to go into description after description. But without citing other in-game plays or providing statistical data, your contention does indeed rest on the description of a single pass.

If

One of the main points of the post was to ask people to take a closer, more critical look for themselves at his passing ability.

we may have witnessed something, “amazing,” that goes beyond any NBA marketing campaign.

With that in mind, I simply had to write this post just in case some may have missed the fact that Nic is working on his masters in geometry, or is it calculus?

I generally look very closely at Nic’s passes (and the rest of his game—he’s a personal favorite and I’m very curious what he’ll become as he matures), so I didn’t really need to be urged to look more closely. Had your post actually been an exhortation to watch Nic’s play, I wouldn’t have any criticism. But it’s not. It’s making a claim (that Nic’s an awesome passer) that you then expand on in your comments with such hyperbole as:

Nic has him in the skills and intelligence departments. He is a much better shooter, a better pure passer, and a more team oriented player. It will be interesting to see how Nic developes, but one thing I can say for sure, "Nic should get the opportunity to make plays," because he is most likely going to be better in the passing department than Scotty ever was.

The above is nothing but a string of unsupported assertions, continuing the pattern you’ve set out in the post itself. Statistics show that Nic is not a much better shooter (he’s better from three point range, and he’s been hot this year—well, until the last couple games—but small sample size & whatnot) and your claim that he’s a better “pure passer” (what is that, anyway?) continues to rest on your subjective impression of a single play. And using nothing more than one play and your opinion to make the claim that our 21-year-old Frenchman who didn’t even make the all-rookie team is or will be better than one of the NBA’s top 50 players of all time is sheer homer cheer leading. It should come as no surprise that it has brought scrutiny and criticism.

These are not the comments of an “ostridge[sic].” As you can see, my head is above the ground, eyes clear and open, looking around, hoping for signs of life, of thought.