Sixers' latest addition: 'Sauce Castillo'
Thanks to a mistake and a tweet that went viral, a marketing campaign about shooting guard Nik Stauskas was born.
THANKS TO a fumble by closed captioning and a tweet that went viral, new Sixers guard Nik Stauskas has had a wonderfully catchy nickname since March.
Call him "Sauce Castillo."
Andrew Unterberger was watching the Kings-Sixers game on March 24 when Stauskas hit a seemingly routine three-pointer in the second quarter with Sixers announcer Marc Zumoff at the mic. That's when Unterberger, a Lower Merion native who lives in Queens, made the following observation.
"My closed captioning just referred to Nik Stauskas as "Sauce Castillo" and I will never be able to not call him this again," Unterberger tweeted.
The moniker grew enough legs that Musashi Foods began marketing a "Sauce Castillo" ($4.95 for a 5 oz. bottle) and the Kings began selling $18 T-shirts. When your team is 29-53, you take your marketing opportunities wherever you can get them.
Everywhere he goes, Stauskas hears cries of "Sauce." Even his Kings teammates stopped calling him by his first name.
"I was so confused. I really didn't get it," Stauskas told the Michigan Daily, his alma mater's newspaper, in May. "The first time I heard it, I thought it was a little weird. I didn't love it. Once I saw how much everyone else liked it, though, I was like, You know what? I might as well roll with it."
The nickname seemed to - pardon the pun - even light a fire under his rump. In the games following the birth of his nickname, Stauskas shot 41.8 percent from the field, 41.4 from three and averaged 5.8 points. In his 61 games prior, he shot 35.3, 29.1 and averaged 4.1.
"It was almost like an alter-ego type of thing, which I enjoyed," Stauskas told the school paper, "like going on the court as someone else and just having fun with it."