Hopes were high for point guard Emmanuel Mudiay(who turned 20 yesterday) when the Denver Nuggets drafted him 7th overall. It’s easy to see what the Nuggets, and many other teams, saw in Mudiay. At 6’5″, he has great size for the point guard position. He’s quick, and a good finisher. The jump shot isn’t fully there yet, but that’s fairly common with young players.
Mudiay struggled early in the season. He shot the ball horribly, and was amassed a ton of turnovers, giving the ball up left and right.
Head coach Mike Malone reduced Mudiay’s playing time, and talked with him several times, and eventually Mudiay began to rebound from his early struggles.
From the Denver Post‘s Christopher Dempsey:
“He was either going to rebound, come back and have a very good rookie season, or he was going to go down further,” Malone said. “We had a couple of very honest, open, heart-to-heart talks. I didn’t try to tell him things that he wanted to hear, I told him things he needed to hear. I told him you have a choice, you can feel sorry for yourself or you can just continue to work harder and commit yourself that much more to the game.”
…
“That’s what I’ve been most impressed about Emmanuel,” Malone said. “For a 19-year-old kid, to kind of go through the adversity that he was going through, he bounced back in a big way. That gives me so much hope and excitement for the future.”
Perhaps Mudiay’s got it figured it out. In his two games played in the month of March thus far, Mudiay has averaged 23.5 points, 7 assists, 5 rebounds, and just 2.5 turnovers per game while shooting 52.8% from the field and 42.9% from long range. Of course, that’s just two games, but the improvement is clear, and hopefully this success will carry over to the remainder of the season.
