D’Angelo Russell has gotten off to a pretty good start to his career as a member of the Brooklyn Nets. His latest big game came on Tuesday night, when he scored 29 points in a 125-121 loss to Orlando. It wasn’t Russell’s most efficient performance — he only hit nine of his 24 field goal attempts — and he only had one assist on the evening.
But despite the fact that he didn’t have a bunch of dimes, he still had a pair of crazy passing highlights. Both of them came at the expense of Magic center Nikola Vucevic, and both of them involved nutmegs.
The first one came when rookie big man Jarrett Allen set a screen on Russell’s man and rolled to the rim. Russell dumped a cheeky bounce pass right between Vucevic’s legs.
Allen was unable to finish because, well, he didn’t exactly go up strong. But still! This was quite a play by Russell.
The far more impressive ‘meg on Vucevic came a little later, when a pick-and-roll between Russell and Timofey Mozgov led to the young guard’s only assist on the evening.
It’s almost like Russell expected Vucevic to do this, as he dumped this pass down to Mozgov almost immediately after he rolled to the rim.
Vucevic didn’t have his best game on Tuesday during what has been an outstanding start to the 2017-18 season, but even though Russell got him a few times, the Magic are 3-1 and took down the Nets. He’ll definitely trade getting nutmegged a few times for that every night.
