This was awesome and a must-read. A snippet:
Consider this a sub-cult. For those of you who have been spurned by the Cult of Hedo Turkoglu, Chandler Parsons may hold the key to your happiness. Before he got lazy and grossly overpaid, he stood at the altar where point-forward fetishists prayed. While much of Hedo’s allure has washed away with age and sloth, we are only witnessing the beginning of Parsons’ career. As such, patience will be rewarded, but patience must be obtained first.
While we may have to wait for tangible evidence of Parsons’ awesomeness, we can already begin gawking at his versatile skill-set. In the NBA, where pick-and-rolls are king, Parsons has the ability to pop, roll, and initiate the sets after four years in Billy Donovan’s PnR-heavy offense at Florida. He has a clean stroke on his jumper, he can rebound the ball well despite his thin frame, and he already passes and handles the ball better than a lot of NBA wings.
The cult will start off slowly. Houston’s roster has a wealth of young talent in need of development, but the team doesn’t have enough minutes in the rotation to accommodate their youth while keeping their more proven veterans happy. Parsons will likely take up the role of Chase Budinger’s doppelganger as the tall and athletic floor-spacer, but with Terrence Williams and more widely-anticipated rookie Marcus Morris also deserving of minutes, Parsons won’t be playing much, realistically.
That’s okay, though. Everyone has faith in something improbable, something that has all the evidence pointing vigorously to the contrary. Cults exist beyond logical explanation. They exist to entertain a tantalizing notion, to watch that notion potentially grow into something special. So come join the Cult of Chandler Parsons. Because any chance of erasing the post-Orlando (first stint) Hedo Turkoglu from our collective memory will surely be worth the wait.
