Why We Were All Wrong to Doubt Ricky Rubio
When Ricky Rubio was first drafted, he was a seriously hot topic. Then as the years passed and he failed to develop the way we thought he would and didn't put up the numbers we thought in Europe, we all assumed he would be a bust.
Let's be honest here. Probably there are a few exceptions, but how many of us really ever honestly saw him play a game in Spain? I'd venture to say that five percent would be about five times too generous a guess.
I think that they put some European league basketball on NBA TV every now and then, but honestly, how many of us ever watch it?
At most, we might have watched a little bit of Euroleague or Olympics or something and seen him for a game or two.
It's something like evaluating an NBA player based on his sophomore year of high school in an All-Star game. You might see some flashes of greatness, but you're mostly going to see bad basketball.
What NBA player would we evaluate based exclusively on that, though?
In essence, that's what we've done with Rubio. That's the five percent of us who will actually leave it on Euroleague basketball. The other 95 percent just read.
What we knew about Ricky Rubio was mostly from what we read about Rubio and from what the stats looked like, and even those were hard to know what to make of.
European stats don't translate that well to the NBA.
Honestly, most of us didn't even know what the stats were unless they were in an article we read.
Then there wasn't exactly "the" opinion about Rubio. There were differing opinions. Probably at least half (and again I'm being extremely generous here) of those opinions were based on snippets, YouTube clips, box scores or other people's opinions.
Then one regurgitated opinion became someone else's opinion and then that got passed on to the next person. I know this as I was, in fact, a regurgitator.
When it comes to hype, we first buy into it, but then after a couple of months we turn against it. We don't like having things force-fed to us. So when we started hearing about Rubio being an overrated bust, it was easy to believe.
The fact that he was a Timberwolf-to-be didn't make it difficult—ust another stupid David Kahn mistake.
(Coincidentally one of those "mistakes" from the same draft, Ty Lawson, is having a breakout year in Denver right now, not that it's relevant.)
The truth is, if we're being completely honest, the reason we are so surprised by Rubio's success is that we bought into the "unhype." We love "unhype" in America even more than we love hype.
That's why every Presidential campaign is more about why to not vote for the other guy than it is about why to vote for this guy. We're pessimists and we love it.
We eagerly anticipated the epic fail. Oh how we laughed at Minnesota. New Orleans and David Stern fought for that pick for all they were worth because it was a guaranteed lottery pick.
Someone forgot to tell Rubio he was a bust though. All he did was come in and start playing up to that initial promise.
If there's one thing that Americans love even more than a bust, it's an underdog. We heard about the things Rubio was doing up in the frozen tundra of the Target Center and the number one choice on League Passes everywhere became the Timberwolves.
This kid was doing crazy things. Heck, he was making the Miami Heat need a last-second shot to beat Minnesota.
The reason we were wrong about Rubio is we just believed the wrong people because we wanted to believe them. When you see the crazy alley-oop to Derrick Williams and get introduced to Lob Tundra, though, it tells this kid is for real.
Rubio has been a joy for two reasons. First, just because he's a joy to watch. Second, it's just nice to see all the uptight naysayers (present company included) wrong.
