Brandon Ingram has had enough good games recently where I’m starting to feel a small amount of remorse for all the mean things that I said about him earlier in the season. This dangerous flirtation with sympathy, which is an emotion that I’m not supposed to be capable of feeling, made me anxious enough that I did the only thing I knew to do: look at Ingram’s statlines from the first few months of the season.
It helped to give myself a reminder of just how unprepared for the NBA Brandon Ingram was. He still physically looks like he belongs in a Phillipine league of some kind, but now he at least is scoring at a decent enough rate that he’s not even the biggest disappointment in his draft class (that’s Kris Dunn).
“B-b-b-but DEE TEE BEE!” you wail. “I wasn’t disappointed in Ingram at all because I knew he needed a few years of development before he became comfortable scoring against NBA defenses!” Stop. Be quiet. You lie. What Ingram is doing right now, scoring in the mid-teens on a consistent basis, you hoped he would do that earlier in the season. Not only did you hope, you believed. You can pretend you didn’t but you did.
I’m just glad I never called him “Brandon Inbust.” At least, I don’t think I did.