So I was looking at Jaren Jackson’s game log, and I was like “wow this guy fouls a lot!”, because he has so many games with 4 or 5 or even the dreaded 6 fouls. So then I’m like “I bet he’s leading the league in fouls!” and I go and check and he totally is. He’s now 1 ahead of Karl-Anthony Towns and 12 ahead of Patrick Beverley, the third place fouler.
That’s the cruddy thing about being a teenage rookie bigman. Especially one who wants to block lots of shots. You have to play too much defense, and you don’t really know how to do it yet, so you keep getting in bad positions and then have to take wild hacks at the ball/player/referee. And it doesn’t help that most of the dudes you’re going against have a beefiness advantage over you as well as their savviness advantage.
I was coming into this description all ready to teard into Bickerstaff for not playing this guy more, but maybe it’s not all his fault. It’s hard to play a guy big, consistent minutes when he’s almost fouling himself out of every game.