Fanbases are uniformly guilty of assuming that their rookies (no matter where they were picked, or even whether they were draft at all) are going to come in to their inaugural season ready to contribute right away. Every single fanbase does this, so I’m not singling out Lakers fans here for penciling in Moritz “Dajuan 2.0 Auf Deutsch” Wagner for significant minutes at center. I like looking at hypothetical rotations before the season starts, and I swear every single one I saw for the Lakers had him playing like 10 minutes per game.
Credit where credit is due, I think, for the most part, they did accurately have Ivica Zubac getting his deserved 0 minutes per game.
No surprise, it took Wagner almost a month before he even got in a game, and another few weeks before he scored any points. He looked okay in Summer League, but his play didn’t exactly scream “I’m ready to be a role-playing center for a team with LeBron James on it”. He hasn’t looked totally lost when he’s gotten minutes, but that’s likely because he got a whole bunch of time practicing and getting used to other real NBA players before making his debut. If they had just thrown him into the fire right away, it would’ve been bad.
The Lakers’ patience is paying off. He hit five shots tonight, as many as he had hit the whole season prior to tonight, and he got to play in non-garbage time. I don’t care what the score said, if you’re playing in the third quarter, that’s legit. The fourth quarter is when things start to get really funky.