WASHINGTON, D.C. — Derik Queen gives the impression that he has never met a challenge he’s been afraid to look squarely in the eye.

Well, figuratively. Some challenges physically loom above even a 6-foot-9 center.

It was just Queen’s ninth NBA game when the already struggling New Orleans Pelicans took the floor in San Antonio against the Spurs and 7-foot-4 MVP candidate Victor Wembanyama.

Queen’s scouting report: “Wemby — he big as hell.”

But as for the matchup? The Baltimore native will take it. The other night, LeBron James guarded him — and Queen scored twice on arguably the greatest basketball player of all time who was drafted the year before he was born.

Every NBA rookie has good games and bad games — and so does Queen — but you’ll never find him with stars in his eyes.

“He’s not intimidated,” said Greg Monroe, a former NBA big man who now is a skills coach for the Pelicans. “He’s definitely kinda grateful, because you watch these guys your whole life. There’s a moment when you think, ‘Wow, I’m actually playing against this dude.’ But he is not intimidated by anyone, and he is not lacking in confidence.”

Terps basketball fans only had a year with Queen, but they already know. No moment seems too big for him — not in college, and not in the NBA, either.

If you expected homecoming jitters for Queen in his first pro game in the D.C. area, you expected wrong. Queen helped the Pelicans trounce the Wizards with 14 points, 16 rebounds and 12 assists for his second career triple-double of his rookie season.

Ho-hum, Queen said. Just another day in his new NBA life.

“It’s been good,” he said. “Just everything I’ve been working on, just trusting my self-confidence. It was pretty easy to adapt. I feel like I adapt quick.”

It would be surprising to see Queen unseat his old Montverde Academy teammate Cooper Flagg as the Rookie of the Year favorite this season, but truthfully he’s pretty close to the top of the leaderboard. Among NBA rookies, he’s sixth in scoring (12.8 ppg), second in assists (4.3) and first in rebounding (7.4), punching well above his weight as the 13th overall pick in the 2025 draft.

Monroe, a former lottery pick out of Georgetown who played 10 NBA seasons, sees a little bit of himself in Queen. Like Monroe, Queen is a stretch big who can hit the boards. Unlike Monroe, however, he can do a whole lot more.

“He’s more skilled and versatile than I was,” Monroe said. “For us, he can handle and score from all parts of the floor, and bring the ball up full-time if we need him to. He just has to continue to try to grow as much as he can.”

Queen carries more than just the normal pressure to succeed because of what the Pelicans gave up to get him. They traded forward Asa Newell (another one of Queen’s Montverde teammates) and an unprotected first-round 2026 pick to get Queen. The Pelicans are at the bottom of the Western Conference standings this year, meaning that pick has a good chance of being one of the top four in next year’s draft — two promising picks in exchange for Queen, which many NBA analysts panned immediately after the trade was executed.

That would be a lot of pressure on anyone else. For Queen, the hero behind one of Maryland’s greatest buzzer-beaters ever? Not so much.

When Queen arrived for Summer League, one of the biggest adjustments the team asked him to make was adapting to the speed of the game. Open shots or passing lanes evaporate a half-second earlier in the NBA than they do in college, and Queen (who has been used to controlling tempo as a player through college) had to work on making faster decisions as well as getting physically faster, period.

Monroe has watched Queen get acclimated, graduating to a starting role in November and improving his scoring efficiency throughout the season. The Pelicans drafted him with the hopes that he could evolve into a ball-dominant big in the mold of Denver’s Nikola Jokić or (perhaps more realistically) Houston’s Alperen Şengün. They’ve seen enough progress in half a season so far to believe Queen is headed in the right direction.

“He understands what was given up to get him, and while he doesn’t think about that part too much, he came into the season knowing that he had to prove people wrong,” Monroe said. “In our eyes, he’s done more than enough to justify the move. We’re happy with the results so far.”

Queen gets more advice on the bench from former All-Star center DeAndre Jordan, who splits his time between veteran sage and lighthearted jester. When Queen was giving a scrum on Friday to Washington-area media, Jordan came over to give him a friendly kiss on the head. When Queen helped New Orleans knock off the Wizards, it was Jordan who doused him with a water cooler in the locker room.

But there is real substance there, too, Monroe said. When Monroe came into the league with the Detroit Pistons, former Defensive Player of the Year Ben Wallace helped him figure out how to be a pro. Jordan does the same thing for Queen.

“DJ obviously has been a great vibrant personality his whole time in the NBA, and he’s here to help [Queen] learn how to be a pro, communicate on the court and off the court and be efficient,” Monroe said. “I’m happy that he has a vet like that. DJ has done a lot of the same things for him that Ben did for me.”

Queen said he’s sometimes struck by how quickly his beloved Terps team — the memorable “Crab Five” — scattered to the wind, but he stays in touch with all of his former teammates (as well as now-Villanova coach Kevin Willard). Before the Wizards game, Queen said he looked forward to the Baltimore “O” in the national anthem that reminds him of his roots.

But for a lifelong basketball junkie, being in the NBA feels less like pressure and more like an endless buffet. How much pressure can you feel when you get all the games you want?

“The only thing I didn’t like about college is you play every three days,” Queen said. “Here, you play every other day. I love basketball that much.”