I was all set to write off Markel Brown in the NBA after his DNP-laden start to the year. When a second-year player can’t get minutes on one of the worst teams in the league, that’s when you start writing their epitaph. In this case, his epitaph was going to be “R.I.P. in peace Markel, we’ll never forget when you got ejected for dunking the ball”.
He’s not out of the woods yet; a handful of good games among a vast morass of bad ones doesn’t bode well. We’ve seen stuff like this before. A relatively unknown young player manages to show some stuff against other bad teams near the end of a disappointing season, and the fans optimistically think that if he develops he can become a nice role-player. And then, POOF, they’ve been shuttled off to Europe, never to be seen again.
Even if that ends up being Markel’s eventual fate, we will always have this career-high-and-also-kind-of-almost-a-triple-double performance from him. 21 points, 7 assists, 8 rebounds, that’s like what LeBron’s been doing lately pretty much.