Return of the Mc: Ben McLemore Improves in Year 2
Just 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 >>
Sacramento Kings Head Coach Michael Malone Still Learning in First Year
In Gregg Popovich’s first season as an NBA head coach, his Spurs struggled to a 17-47 finish. Seventeen years later, he’s still employed by the same franchise and has never again won less than 61 percent of his games in any given regular season. He has also won four championships.
Jerry Sloan was fired after three unimpressive seasons with the Bulls and had to wait six years before getting another crack at a head gig. Luckily for him, that second and final landing spot in Utah made his career.
But for every Gregg Popovich and Jerry Sloan, there are countless examples of head coaches who only get one opportunity. Certainly Michael Malone hopes his time leading the Kings will be a success, but the jury is still out.
A month before the season’s end, the Kings were already officially eliminated from playoff contention. That can’t be good. But it’s no secret that in a deep Western Conference, Malone is coaching a team with an awfully inexperienced core. And this is his first season as a lead coach at the game’s highest level.
Not even Malone, who spent the last 12 years as an assistant, could fully imagine the rigors of coaching in the NBA.
“I knew this was going to be a challenge,” the first-year head coach admits. “but going through it is a lot harder than I anticipated.” Read more >>