Vanderbilt Basketball Player Preview: Quentin Millora-Brown

The foot injury to Liam Robbins last season wasn’t as bad for Vanderbilt as it could have been — mostly because of the emergence of Quentin Millora-Brown.

Expected to come off the bench, Millora-Brown instead started 30 games and averaged 24.3 minutes per game — a big increase from the 13.5 minutes he averaged in his first season with the Commodores, when he was backing up Dylan Disu. His offensive usage wasn’t much; in spite of the big increase in playing time, he only averaged 3.2 field goal attempts per game — and he was an adventure at the free throw line (48.9 percent, which is actually an improvement over his career 46.1 percent at the charity stripe — but he was willing to do the dirty work of, say, holding Kentucky’s Oscar Tshiebwe to one of his worst games of the season.

That’s fine for a guy we expected to be a backup. So what does that portend for 2022-23?

Well... that really depends on two things. If Robbins is healthy and returns to the form he showed at Minnesota in 2020-21, he’s going to play quite a bit — probably not 30 minutes a game, to be clear, but Robbins will definitely play starter minutes. Robbins by the numbers was a superior defender; he posted a 93.1 defensive rating last season compared to Millora-Brown’s 99.5. The latter number isn’t bad by any stretch, but it’s worse than Vanderbilt’s team defensive rating. The other question is whether Robbins and Millora-Brown can coexist — in theory, they could, with the 7-foot Robbins potentially playing a stretch four — but if that’s not the case, Millora-Brown will just play when Robbins is off the floor.

My guess: 15-20 quality minutes a night and entry into the Ted Skuchas/Josh Henderson tier of fan favorites.