https://youtu.be/lR787ubADbg
Jordan Nwora has looked good enough this season that I’ve begun to question the Bucks’ coaching staff’s collective wisdom on the decision to barely play him. Note that my doubt of Coach Bud and his cronies on this subject has been festering for some time, and I’m not just instinctively reacting to the fact that Nwora just dropped a thirty-burger in the final game of the regular season. For a while now I’ve been thinking that Nwora deserves more of a role. It’s only now that the issue has come to the forefront of my mind.
Nwora has officially finished the season shooting 45% on three-pointers. That 45% figure includes all the step-back threes that he seems fond of taking and that he’s unnaturally good at making. He only played in thirty games so his volume isn’t going to qualify him for any rookie records, nor will it reliably tell us how he would fare if given a large role, but it does tell us that he is infinity times better at shooting the ball than Thanasis Antetokounmpo is. Now, I fully understand why Thanasis has to get minutes (it’s not basketball reasons), but Nwora should have been getting those minutes. He can straight up space the floor and he can straight up rebound. He’s like the second coming of Ersan Ilyasova but five shades darker. If he can’t take minutes away from Thanasis, have him take minutes away from Pat Connaughton, another guy whose minutes can’t be tampered with due to his relationship with Giannis.
Playoff rotations always tighten up, and it’s unlikely we’ll see much more of Nwora this season unless there are blowouts. But I’m paying close attention to him for next season. If he’s not Middleton’s primary backup at the start of the season, I’m going to brew my own goddamn batch of Polyjuice potion and turn myself into Coach Bud so that I can give Nwora as many minutes as he deserves. That is, if Coach Bud is even still with the Bucks. He might not be. Because he doesn’t give Jordan Nwora enough minutes.