He missed his OWN free throw? Wow. Ugh, I'm so pissed we didn't draft him. It was so fucking obvious and we blew it on a guy who can't get on the court in what is our weakest position.
Look: the reason Faried is playing is because there's been a rash of injuries. Congrats to him to making something of it. Sadly, we still have two veterans ahead of Nolan. Somebody nobble them and Nate will be forced to play Nolan. Remember, Faried was getting ZERO minutes in the early part of the season. It's not like Karl said "this guy's killing it in practice, we HAVE to find him time." So we can't say that Nolan was bad without a fair comparison. (And suppose we had drafted Faried: he would be sitting behind Smith, who we all loved in the early days of the season before everything turned to shit.)
The Felton fiasco should be considered the same thing as an injury. A starter sucks so play your backup. Unfortunately, I haven't really seen anything out of Nolan Smith that suggests he should be getting more minutes.
Nolan hasn't really been giving a real chance yet. Expecting a rookie to flash in 6min a game is pretty silly. Hell, 2 of the 3 last games he's been in his stats aren't even bad considering the amount of time he played. Not that I'm predicting a future starter or anything, but he hasn't been given enough time to show anything.
That doesn't mean he's NBA ready. The guy is buried on the depth chart and has been given little playing time. It's hard to draw any conclusions about what he's shown so far in a whopping 6 minutes a game, especially if Nate is trying to make him a true PG when his strength is being a scorer.
He's gotten plenty of significant minutes. It's not like most of his minutes come in garbage time. They usually come during times when the game is still on the time.
I'm looking at his game log and failing to see "plenty of significant minutes". He's been given spot minutes at best while being told just to run the offense when his strength is scoring.
He's playing minutes when the game is on the line and putting up a PER of 4.77 (Babbitt in comparison is 11.5). Spot minutes or no spot minutes, he clearly hasn't earned any playing time.
You did not just use PER for a player that plays spot minutes. He's been given 5-6 minute runs sporadically. Hardly enough to draw any concrete conclusions, especially when he's just told to run the offense. Sorry, not buying it.
