https://youtu.be/fZwhLTZQ8Bg
A lot of young big men come into the league raw. Rawness is honestly expected when so few players stick around for four years of college. When these guys show up to the league as a jittery bundle of potential and fail to make an immediate impact, most fans will cut them some slack. Some will be busts, some will be worth the wait, but the early-career rawness makes it hard to figure out which players will follow which path.
Alexsej Pokusevski takes the concept of rawness and dials it all the way up to 200%. He then moves on to the next dial, which reads “physical immaturity”, and dials it to 999%. Who knew they made dials that went up that high? Pokusevski has some intriguing potential due to his combination of skills, which is why he was drafted 17th overall, but none of those skills are fully fleshed out. Add in the fact that he’s in possession of a body that is completely unprepared for the rigors of the NBA, to a degree that I don’t think the league has ever seen, and you get a player who just doesn’t have the tools to be effective on the court except in random bursts.
This game was one of those random bursts. Getting his first career start, Pokusevski set new career highs in both points and rebounds. He made some clutch plays in the final two minutes that ensured his team’s victory. He didn’t, as one might fear, suffer a catastrophic loss of structural integrity even when other players banged into him. At no point did any limbs snap in half or detach wholly from his body. And I have it on good authority that he took at least one small sip of Gatorade during the game, ensuring that his body received enough calories to continue functioning.
Are his season numbers still completely gross? Yes. His dismal 30% effective field goal percentage will go up some, but not much. If he gets enough minutes in the second half of the season, he’ll probably set some kind of record in terms of worst rookie seasons ever. But the Thunder have chosen to develop him this way, and if setting dubious records is what’s best for him, then I’m not going to argue too vehemently. My only recommendation to the Thunder is to try to graduate Pokusevski to solid food at some point in the off-season so that he can start putting some muscles onto those popsicle sticks that are supposed to be his arms and legs.
Honestly, the more minutes that Pokusevski gets, the more chances he has to put together a highlight-worthy performance, and the more chances I have to get Serbs to come back to my channel. I’ve been searching for a Nikola Jokic replacement for a while and I can use the memey-ness of Aleksej Pokusevski and Boban Marjanovic to somewhat replace the impact that Jokic had on my channel. So give him all the minutes he wants, and don’t you dare send him back to the G-League. His stats were awful there as well so there isn’t even any point other than to mess with his confidence.