On Oscar night, Utah Jazz’s Oscar Tshiebwe shines

As the 97th Academy Awards were underway on Sunday night, with Oscars being doled out to the the biggest celebrities in Hollywood, there was another Oscar in Salt Lake City that was shining.

Oscar Tshiebwe — a Utah Jazz player on a two-way contract who has made his name in the G League as an other-worldly rebounder and one of the most cheerful and delightful people to be around — had the best game of his young career on Sunday against the New Orleans Pelicans.

The Jazz were incredibly shorthanded on Sunday night, playing without five of their six top scorers, and although there were a lot of defensive issues that Jazz head coach Will Hardy took issue with, he made a point to say that there was a bright spot in the Jazz’s 128-121 loss

“Oscar deserves a shout out,” Hardy said. “He played incredibly hard and gave our team a really big lift. I thought he guarded Zion (Williamson) very well. His strength really showed up in those moments.”

It wasn’t the easiest assignment for Tshiebwe, playing in just his 13th NBA game and tasked with guarding someone as physically imposing as Williamson. But Tshiebwe has slowly been improving in his time with the Jazz’s G League affiliate, the SLC Stars, and gaining confidence along the way.

“He’s a beast,” Tshiebwe said of Williamson. “When he’s attacking me, I was like, I definitely need help. But I’m big too. Sometimes I forget that I’m big and strong. But when you see Zion, and you see how he’s bullying a lot of people, your mind is thinking different. But I feel like I did good on him little bit.”

Tshiebwe, who is averaging 16.5 points and 17.5 rebounds per game in the G League regular season, said that he is still trying to find his voice as a communicator, even mentioning that his college coaches use to tell him that they were shocked that such a quiet voice was coming out of such a large body.

“Oscar, he has a really tough job, because he’s not with us much, and he does such a great job with the Stars, and there’s a lot of common language that we use with the Stars, but there are a few differences,” Hardy said. “I think ultimately for him to get way more comfortable being our lead communicator on defense, he would need to be with us for an extended period of time. I don’t want to be overly critical of that. I think Oscar does an amazing job of going back and forth. And he gets thrown in the rotation tonight and gets 21 minutes and I thought he handled himself great.”

It was the most minutes that Thshiebwe has played on an NBA court and it was his most productive NBA game. He finished with 16 points and 13 rebounds while committing just one foul.

It really was Oscar night, in every sense of the phrase.