If there’s one thing that you should know about DownToBuck, it’s that he loves pandering to the citizens of the Balkan states. If it was once part of Yugoslavia, you can bet your bottom dollar (or your bottom dinar/kuna/mark/lek/euro) that I’m going to make videos of the players from that country no matter how good or bad they are. I will also look up the country on Wikipedia so that I can sneak in some knowledgeable anecdotes that further ingratiate myself to the citizenry of that country. In fact, I am doing that right now with Bosnia and Herzegovina. On my triple-monitor description-writing setup, monitor #1 is for research materials (Wikipedia in this case). Monitor #2 is for my text editor (Sublime Text is not just for code, plebs). Monitor #3 is for…personal entertainment. And we’ll just leave it at that.
The only problem is, there aren’t a lot of Bosnians in the NBA right now, so it is really hard to draw Bosnian viewers to my channel. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, heck, even Montenegrins have big-name NBA players to call their own, but the biggest name in Bosnian basketball, Jusuf Nurkic, was out the whole season recovering from a gruesomely broken leg. You start digging around, and there’s not a lot of other Bosnians to choose from. Mirza Teletovic was a really nice stretch-four for a while until his pulmonary blood clots started clotting up the wrong parts of his pulmonary system. If life was fair, he would be winning a championship with the Bucks this season. Then you’ve got…Dzanan Musa. And that’s it for Bosnians in the NBA. There’s a bunch of players who were born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but very few ethnic Bosnians.
It is what it is. I have to work with what I’ve got. And what I’ve got is Dzanan Musa, the second-year Brooklyn Nets forward who spends most of his time on the bench or in the G-League. His general ineffectiveness in the NBA makes pandering to my Bosnian viewership quite a bit more difficult, but I’m not a quitter.
I’m not exactly qualified to make judgments about Musa’s game, but neither is anybody else except for hardcore Nets fans and hardcore Bosnians (brb, typing a search term into monitor #3), so I don’t really feel guilty about saying this: Dzanan Musa doesn’t look like an NBA player. At all. Every time he tries to score in the paint, it looks forced. Taking contact at the rim seems to be a no-go for him. Shooting crazy floaters is his specialty. And his three-point game, while impressive-looking in this video (because you only see his makes), is anything but impressive: this season, he shot 15-of-65 on threes, good for 23%. I feel like you could take the average Div. 1 NCAA player at Musa’s height (6’9″), throw them onto an NBA roster somewhere, and get roughly the same production at the same efficiency as you get from Musa.
Musa has good G-League stats. Like 20 PPG on 50% from the field and 40% from three. But that’s just an example of a player who is skilled enough to thrive against equal competition and then get completely overwhelmed by the higher level of competition in the NBA. If we’re lucky, some actual real-life Bosnians will come into the comments section of this video and tell us about how surprised they are that Musa is in the NBA and not toiling away on some tier-two Spanish team.
The good news is, Musa is still super young (he just turned 21 while locked away in quarantine), and he’s under contract for one, maybe two more seasons. There’s time for him to keep developing as long as the Nets are patient. He also gets to hang out with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving all the time. Those two are the best role models that a young, unestablished NBA player could ask for. Now Musa has the confidence to go after haters using an army of sockpuppet Twitter accounts while also espousing alternative theories about the shape of planet Earth (specifically, its non-sphericity).
The other good news is, Musa is still Bosnian, which means he has the stout blood of his Bosnian forefathers being pumped through his veins by a heart which knows neither fear nor failure. That can only work to his advantage as he tries to solidify his role in the NBA.
And you thought I forgot to pander, didn’t you?