I won't speak for others, but I typically will look closely at a rookie's best performances when trying to evaluate their future (especially if they saw limited action like Reed). Young players struggle with consistency, so at this point, I'm looking more at flashes than whether they averaged at least 15ppg or whatever. In Y2 and beyond, this gets adjusted and eventually you do start looking for consistency. If Jalen Green won WCF player of the week his rookie year, then yes I would be excited about that. But if he shows in future seasons that he can only play at this level for a few weeks tops, and then he's...not great...the rest of the season (which is basically what happened), then yeah that cuts down on that excitement. That's kinda where I'm at with Reed. He showed enough flashes in his rookie year that I think justifies excitement for his future. He will need to show much more consistency in Y2 in order for that excitement to be sustained (and do even better in future years). I can go even further and note that it is important to evaluate what these guys look like when they have these great games. There's a difference between a guy scoring 25 points because he just got hot from 3 (finishing shots created by others) vs a guy who scored 25 points while dissecting the other team's defense. Jalen in particular is one of those guys who can go on these heaters because he will suddenly start hitting these crazy stepback 3s at a crazy percentage. This makes him largely unguardable when he's at this level, but this has also proven to be unreliable which we've all realized by now. Reed, particularly in that OKC game, appeared to flash an ability to pick holes in a very good OKC defense (and he got better as the game went on, implying he could learn/adjust). This wasn't a player that just got hot, but a player who managed to consistently make high level plays to generate good looks (i.e., not crazy stepback 3s). He did a bit of this in each of his starts IMO, though it looked best in the OKC game. Reed did have some games where he just got hot (or just had flukey good performances). He scored 15pts in just under 9m against the Jazz, but that was because he went 5/7 from 3 (and this game was already decided). Think he also had like 7 assists against the Nuggets in that final game in 17ish minutes, but I rewatched some of that, and honestly these weren't *that* impressive (*maybe* 3-4 were good, but the others were just those "home team scorekeeper" type assists). These are good games, but not ones you'll really see me go crazy about. I think another complication with the Reed evaluation is that while he was pretty meh most of the year, he was consistently good in the games where he actually started. Very small sample, but that might be related to my other take, which is that Reed (at least for now) is limited if you just make him this off-ball shooter in limited minutes. This is probably another reason people focus on those games vs the bad ones...because the bad ones came with a different role. As long as FVV is healthy, he isn't starting next year, so regardless he'll need to figure out a way to be much more productive in those off-ball/limited minute roles. Tl;dr while I agree it is somewhat convenient for people to primarily push the good games by Reed and largely ignore some/most of the bad ones, I think the circumstances that surround these performances can explain why it might make sense to do this. I think it is a bit more complicated than "Hey if you look at just the good games, he's pretty good."
