Robert Covington is one of the streakiest players that exists in the NBA.
Being a streaky player in the NBA can be very good for you, but not when your good streaks are complimented with streaks of awful, awful basketball. For Robert Covington, he has been one of those types of players — a player who can often get hot for 5-10 games or so at a time, but one that can also go on long slumps that can last close to 10 games.
Covington had a slow start to this season, only appearing in one of the team’s first 10 games due to an injury, and then a re-injury due to putting him back on the floor too soon. With a minutes restriction imposed on him for the first few games, he didn’t see a game with more than 25 minutes until November 21st, the team’s 14th game of the season. It takes most players a while to heat up, and that could be said for RoCo who didn’t score double-digit points or shoot above 35 percent from the field until that 14th game. Thus, his first lowly streak of the season. But this first one was to be expected, as he was recovering from an injury at the time.
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The next few weeks were incredible for Covington, as he put up a stat line of 15.6 points, 2.5 assists, 1.0 block, and 6.8 rebounds per game while shooting 43 percent from the field over a 14 game period. Covington had hit his first hot streak, and took it all the way into mid-December. But I think you know how this goes with Cov.
Next up was a lowly streak for Covington, as over a 13 game period he scored just 5.8 points per game on 31.7 percent shooting from the field. The rest of his stats over that period weren’t impressive either.
The rest of the season up to this point has been much of the same but in smaller quantities. Over 8 games he scored 15.5 points on 41.3 percent shooting, followed up by 3 games with 5 points per game on 22.7 percent shooting. Lately though, Covington has picked it back up with 14.8 points per game on 45 percent shooting over the most recent games.
All of this isn’t exactly terrible to see from Covington, as he does average out to a decent player. But it would be better if we had a player that we could rely on and know what we were getting every single night, rather than always having to wait for him to dig himself out of shooting slumps that he’s in. To make things worse, it seems as if when he’s in slumps, he’s convinced that he can get out of them by shooting himself out of them, taking several unnecessary shots that might be too long or too rushed.
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Here’s hoping we see some consistency in the final stretch of games from Covington this season.