I have only myself to blame for getting all excited about how crazy the lineups were going to look from the last time Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot scored 24 points, back in April of 2017. I mean, he was on the 76ers. It was April. Who KNOWS what kind of crazy garbage players he was sharing the court with!
Tony Wroten was going to be there for sure. For frickin’ sure. Him and Furkan Aldemir.
But once I actually looked at the boxscore for that game, I was so disappointed. I mean, it’s kinda fun, but all these dudes he was in the starting lineup with are still in the NBA. T.J. McConnell. Richaun Holmes. Dario Saric. Justin Anderson. That’s not even that bad of a starting group, honestly. That might win 20 or 30 games right there. You can go to the bench to find some real scrubs, like Alex Poythress, Tiago Splitter, and Shawn Long, but that’s not the same. It wasn’t a WHOLE ROTATION of scrubs. What were the 76ers even doing? Did they forget about the process?
Reminder: TLC was going to be a major part of the finished process until he got unfairly jettisoned for Mike Muscala.
Luwawu-Cabarrot made the best out of a bad situation in this game, with the Nets trotting out some seriously talent-bereft lineups that needed scoring from anybody willing to shoot. He was a big part of a fourth-quarter run that saw the Magic’s lead dwindle from “insurmountable” to “small enough that you have to put the starters back in, but still fairly solid”. Can we expect more of this in the remaining Nets games? Sure! Someone has to score the ball. Why not him?