A Tale of Two Mullets.
You knew it would be me writing this one, didn’t you? Yes, it’s the season recap of The Barnet From Down Under, the Aussie Legend, the MulletMan himself, Jock Landale.
Look, you know me by now. I’ll try to analyze Jock Landale’s season with the Rockets in a rational, analytical way. It’s further down the page.
But we all know that stuff isn’t true. Go through the gallery above. When Jock came to the Rockets he was The Practically Perfect Backup Center. That’s what we thought we were getting. Then came The Buzz Cut. Like Sampson, minus the pleasurable company of Delilah, Jock CHOSE to cut his hair. He CHOSE to remove his Mullet of Antipodean Power. He CHOSE to betray his people, his homeland, and his culture. Himself.
And what happened? Like Sampson, he lost his strength, and his ability to play NBA basketball. Fortunately America is a land of second chances. Hair grows back. As Jock’s follicles pushed new hair out from his skull, so did his game, like the first shoots of spring, begin to grow, to flourish, and eventually, bloom.
Jock, we are begging you, as long as you remain a Rocket KEEP THE MULLET.
Ok, fine, if you insist on reductionist analysis, I’ll give it to you. But with a bit of a rumination on why citing blocks of stats isn’t really the same thing as analysis.
Citing a block of stats, for the season, we see that Jock Landale didn’t have a great one.
Here’s a per game average of
4.9pts/3.1rbs/1.2ast/.4stl/.6blk – 52% FG%, 25% 3P%, 13.6 minutes played.
Ugh. Why would anyone want to play this guy?
Well, it turns out that Jock was almost certainly hurt, with a severe ankle injury, and what appears to have been lingering concussion symptoms until about the start of 2024. I might not have been just the haircut holding Jock back.
By the time Jock seemed to be fully healthy, though, he’d lost the trust, it appeared, of the coaches, to play impactful and important minutes. The Alperen Sengun went down and the Rockets had 1.5 big men – Jock, and Uncle Jeff Green (who was, after all, drafted as a big small forward, all those years ago).
The Rockets effectively had no choice but to play Jock (or trade for someone to play center, which they sort of did, in the injured Steven Adams).
Here’s what happened, month by month.
nba.com
Here’s month by month Per36, which is a stat I like.
nba.com
You can see by these numbers, especially the +/-, that Jock started playing really impactful minutes in January and February. He was never quite as bad as anyone thought, overall, going by +/-. Though, to be fair, a lot of those minutes were garbage time, before Alperen Sengun’s injury.
Fully healthy and playing meaningful minutes, we saw a player who could rightfully be thought of as a high level backup center, and useful low end starter.
Looking at a single block of stats won’t tell you much about Jock Landale, as a fully fit and healthy player. You have to dig deeper, get at roots of the issue, which in this case, was the roots of Jock’s hair.
I fully expect the Rockets to pick up Jock’s option, and have one of the stronger groups of centers in the NBA next season. Jock is more or less in the “peak years” portion of his career, his salary isn’t high, and we’ve seen that even a normally very healthy player like Alperen Sengun can get hurt. (Fortunately not severely.) Having three quality centers will help the Rockets if they’re serious about making a playoff run next season, and I think they will be.