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Message: [QUOTE="Gurleyman, post: 5190546, member: 175"] Having a top rated freshman as a backup is sort of a normal progression. Kemba backed up Price. Napier backed up Kemba. Adams backed up Gibbs. Marcus Williams backed up Taliek Brown. Ben Gordon backed up Tony Robertson. The Covid era has maybe made things more difficult for freshmen to make an impact. You can get fifth year grown men for those same roles - but I think it was reasonable to expect Nowell to play 15 mpg and cut his teeth before maybe starting as a sophomore. Be a spark - have some games where you get it going and play more. But show flashes and contribute. He’s been injured so it’s hard to know what his progression might have been. I didn’t see much from him when he was out there. He looked like a too-small non-shooter/non-scorer who didn’t bring much to the table other than perhaps being a scrappy defender. I thought he wouldn’t help this year and was a year away - but I can be wrong. I didn’t see it from Castle (offensively) when he came back from injury last year. He looked kind of inept for a while, air balling 3 footers, throwing confusing ill timed passes, etc. - and Castle is putting up 30 burgers in the NBA this year. He had a tough role mentally trying to blend in on a veteran team that was clicking without him, so Nowell maybe has had some of the same issues and has more to bring to the table more quickly than I think. But if not, we may have whiffed on both Mahaney and Nowell … and that’s two big strikes. We may not know until next year - but some help this year would have been ideal. We aren’t that far from making a run at this thing. And a guy who can take the ball and create something when the offense bogs down is pretty much No. 1 on that list. [/QUOTE]

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