And I don’t think that’s the only way to develop him, by giving him as many opportunities as possible when the situations arise and telling him or putting him in position to go guns blazing.
We have seen a lot of prospects develop by being placed in a winning environment where they are asked to play a smaller role, get good at that, then continue to develop more and more to their games over time. Butler on those good Thibs Bulls teams and Kawhi on the Spurs comes straight to mind. Those 2 were asked to defend and hit open 3s on veteran filled rosters winning lots of games as young players.
It wasn’t until they got good in that role that they were able to expand their games further, because without those first 2 skills you aren’t going to go much further in the current NBA.
This just comes down to a disagreement on how you go about developing a guy. I don’t agree with just tossing him out there and feeding him opportunity after opportunity while the team is short handed as the only way to develop him.
In my mind he is a guy who lacks offensive skill all across the board at the moment, so he needs to first get good at a role within his system that he can then expand upon.
All I see force feeding him doing to him at the current moment is shattering his confidence and setting him back as he develops bad habits.
Not every player takes the same path.
Right now, the most I've seen out of Okoro was when he was the secondary creator and forced to be assertive in that role. That's when he's been at this very best.
And unless he finds that and expands on that, it's gonna be REALLY hard for him to be a positive contributor. Because unlike Butler and Kawhi, he doesn't have all-world defense capabilities that those two largely possessed almost immediately. And that's mostly physical limitations. A 6'4 guard just isn't gonna be able to impact the game defensively enough to make up for that lack of offense. Not the way Kawhi and Butler could.
We'll see.
Right now I worry about two things:
1) That Okoro is gonna be left in the dust when this team is healthy and really trying to win. Already I'm struggling to see a role for him going forward. He should be behind Sexton. He should be behind Cedi. So you're looking at some spot minutes here and there in small ball lineups.
Or, the inverse:
2) That, because of his love for the kid, JBB insists on continuing to force Okoro into the lineup to the detriment of a team that is now capable of winning a lot of ball games. When, instead, he could use this time right now to help turn him into a player capable of contributing to winning basketball, which he currently is not.
If I were running the team, I'd either force JBB to develop the kid or look to move him.
Once the team is healthy, if I still believe in him, I'd send him to Canton.