Browsing articles tagged with " Ben McLemore"

Return of the Mc: Ben McLemore Improves in Year 2

Dec 8, 2014   //   by admin   //   Basketball  //  Comments Off on Return of the Mc: Ben McLemore Improves in Year 2

MclemoreLayupJust 21 years old, Ben McLemore sat in front of his locker after the Kings’ 2013-14 regular-season finale, a loss to the Phoenix Suns. He answered reporters’ questions about his 31-point, 5-assist, 5-rebound performance. He knew it, and they knew it: his performance that night was an outlier. Whether or not that sentiment was verbalized, there was no getting around the fact that the No. 7 overall pick’s rookie season had been an utter disappointment, featuring no shortage of struggles on both sides of the ball.

The big question lingered – how would he respond to this setback, a season in which he shot 37.6 percent from the field (32.0 percent from deep) and struggled to defend his opponents on most nights?

While Kings head coach Michael Malone was supportive of his young shooting guard all season, management opted to spend its 2014 first-round pick on yet another shooting guard, University of Michigan sophomore Nik Stauskas.

According to McLemore, the team drafting another shooting guard motivated him to some extent, but he has always set high expectations for himself.

“It just pushed me to just keep getting better each and every day,” McLemore told Cowbell Kingdom before the Kings took on the Toronto Raptors on Tuesday night. “Them drafting Nik Stauskas wasn’t like ‘Aw, man. Now I gotta step my game up.’ That’s the type of player I am. I’m gonna step my game up regardless and get better as a player. It’s just another opportunity getting better going against another guy that’s playing my position.”

The moment the Suns game ended in mid-April, McLemore’s offseason began. In college at the University of Kansas, as well as in Sacramento, he’s been known as an incredibly hard worker, but there remained a level of uncertainty as to how exactly McLemore would translate his offseason training into a significantly better second season. Read more >>

Like Peja Stojakovic, Can Ben McLemore Overcome Rookie Struggles?

Apr 17, 2014   //   by admin   //   Basketball  //  Comments Off on Like Peja Stojakovic, Can Ben McLemore Overcome Rookie Struggles?

MG_4764Selected after Kobe Bryant and immediately before Steve Nash in the 1996 NBA Draft, Peja Stojakovic spent two more seasons in Europe before making his Sacramento Kings debut. When he finally made his way stateside, the 6-foot-9 Serbian forward was just 20 and still had some growing up to do both on and off the court.

Sounds awfully similar to Kings rookie Ben McLemore, who went pro after one season at Kansas and likewise showed inexperience with glimpses of potential during his rookie campaign.

“He went through the struggles of trying to learn the NBA game versus playing overseas and how physical it was,” says Kings assistant coach Corliss Williamson of Stojakovic, whom he played alongside for two seasons (’98-’00). Williamson played ahead of Stojakovic at small forward, but despite his competitive nature could already recognize the rookie’s tremendous potential.

When McLemore entered the league, he was also 20, but had always played at the amateur level. Stojakovic, on the other hand, had been playing professional basketball in Europe since the age of 16. Even so, Stojakovic’s inaugural NBA season came after the 1998-99 NBA Lockout, which meant that his rookie season would be significantly shortened.

“It affected everyone that year, even the veterans, just the timing of things,” says Williamson. “So instead of him having 82 games to develop, he only had 50 that year and did it in a short period of time. So it was tough coming in as a rookie after a lockout, during the shortened season, but as you can see, he recovered from that well.”

Stojakovic steadily improved the following season before becoming a full-blown star in his third year, but a closer look at Stojakovic’s rookie numbers could confuse even the most detailed of Kings observers. Why? Because his per-game averages look eerily similar to those of McLemore. Read more >>

Ben McLemore's Failure to Launch

Mar 13, 2014   //   by admin   //   Basketball, Multimedia  //  Comments Off on Ben McLemore's Failure to Launch

Ben McLemore is certainly not in Kansas anymore. Screen Shot 2014-04-16 at 3.05.52 PM

Precisely one year ago, the 20-year-old college freshman had just finished a spectacular regular-season campaign with the Kansas Jayhawks. He led the team in scoring, thanks to a sweet shooting stroke as well as an impressively athletic burst to the basket.

McLemore’s Jayhawks proceeded to sweep the Big 12 Tournament and as a result, earn a No. 1 seed heading into the NCAA Tournament. For the season, the St. Louis native averaged 15.9 points per game on 49.5 percent shooting and 42.0 percent from beyond the arc. He was money.

Now in Sacramento, the 2013 seventh overall pick’s shot seems to have deserted him. He shows occasional flashes as one would expect from such a high draft pick, but his play hasn’t been consistent. On back-to-back nights in late-January, McLemore strung together a combined 32 points, only to follow those performances with a six-game stretch of 5.5 points per game on 32.5 percent shooting.

While McLemore’s shot has regressed – at least statistically-speaking – every month from November through February, the hope remains that the promising shooting guard will rediscover what made him so successful in college. Read more >>

BIO

Aaron Fischman is a sports writer, editor and multimedia journalist, who currently hosts the On the NBA Beat podcast, a weekly interview show he co-founded with fellow USC alums Loren Lee Chen and brother Joshua Fischman in advance of the 2015-16 NBA season. On the podcast, he and the crew interview some of the league’s best reporters on their particular beat. Fischman is also currently hard at work on his first book, a nonfiction baseball story. Read more.