On Shaedon Sharpe's Anticlimactic Summer League Debut, And a Challenge From Damian Lillard
Like everyone else, Dame wants to see Sharpe play.
LAS VEGAS—Shaedon Sharpe's Summer League coming-out party will have to wait a little longer. Or it may not come at all.
Sharpe made his highly anticipated debut on Thursday night as the Trail Blazers kicked off Summer League against the Detroit Pistons. It lasted about five minutes—he shot 1-for-3 from the field before suffering a left shoulder injury that kept him out the rest of the game. Blazers Summer League head coach Steve Hetzel said they held him out for "precautionary reasons"; Yahoo Sports reported that he would be getting an MRI. The Blazers' next game is Saturday against the New Orleans Pelicans and Sharpe's status for that game is undetermined.
The news is disappointing for Sharpe, of course, but also for everyone who was hoping to finally see the Blazers' No. 7 overall pick play after a year of sitting out at Kentucky—including Damian Lillard.
Lillard was there, along with most of the rest of the Blazers' veterans (the only one I didn't see with my own eyes was Josh Hart), sitting courtside. At one point during the game, he gave an interview to ESPN's Cassidy Hubbarth, and his answer to her question about Sharpe raised some eyebrows on the Internet.
"He's super-talented, super-gifted," Lillard said. "But you've just gotta get out there and play. You've got to see it in live action and put him in the mix. When you're picked that high, you've just gotta have that pride about going out there and showing people why, and living up to being that high of a pick. I think everybody who's a top-10 pick goes out there saying, 'I'm a top-10 pick and I need to show these people.' I've been there. Now he's in that position, and we're looking forward to him coming out there and showing why."
The snap reaction online was, of course, "Dame thinks the new draft pick sucks but is too nice of a guy to say it on TV." I didn't read it that way at all.
Having observed Lillard for his entire career and covered him up close for much of that time and seen how he operates and how carefully he picks his words, I didn't view his answer as a shot at Sharpe's abilities so much as a challenge to the 19-year-old to start backing up a year's worth of "mystery man" hype.
When you think about their paths to the NBA, it makes sense why Lillard needs to see him prove it.
Lillard was not heavily recruited, played four years at a mid-major school and wasn't thought of by draft evaluators as a lottery talent until he declared for the draft in 2012 and started blowing teams away at the combine and in workouts. Sharpe, on the other hand, was a five-star recruit who committed to arguably the biggest college basketball power in the country and, once he got there, simply chose not to play his freshman season in order to protect his draft stock, and then still went top-10 entirely on the reputation of his physical talents and the allure of what he could become.
Lillard can't relate to that choice because of how hard he had to fight to be drafted where he was, and once he got drafted, had to fight to be respected as one of the NBA's top-flight superstars. He's been around long enough to have seen many a prospect with Sharpe's physical tools flame out in the league because they didn't want to put the work in.
He's also seen the best-case scenario in Anfernee Simons, a similarly enigmatic prospect who didn't play college ball and was drafted as a high-upside talent flier in the first round. Simons did put in the work to improve and will now be making $100 million over the next four years as a result.
Lillard, like the rest of the Blazers organization, wants to see Sharpe become the next Simons-type success story. He could be even better, considering where he was drafted. But in order to do that, he has to play. We'll find out in the next day or two how serious the shoulder injury is and whether he'll be available for the rest of the week. It will be a bummer if he can't play, not only for him but for Blazers fans who haven't had a real prospect to watch in Summer League since CJ McCollum in 2013.
I think coming to Portland, to the locker room Lillard has run so successfully for a decade, is the best thing that could have happened to Sharpe. Lillard has the status and the respect of his peers to be able to stay on someone like Sharpe, and his big-brother leadership style has gotten the best out of the likes of Jusuf Nurkic and Maurice Harkless in the past. There's no reason to think he won't give Sharpe every opportunity to accept that same mentorship and become what Joe Cronin, Mike Schmitz and the rest of the Blazers' front office saw in him.
What Lillard said on Thursday is exactly what he meant: the kid is talented enough for a smart organization to have picked him in the top 10. But once you're in the NBA, you can't be the "mystery man" anymore. You have to want to get on the floor.