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 >>
Clippers Dominate With Deep Bench, Turnover-Forcing Defense
The Los Angeles Clippers are clearly the best team in L.A., but the team’s floor general and star, Chris Paul, has repeatedly said he doesn’t care about that. It’s all about a championship and for the first time in history, a ring may not be out of the question for “L.A.’s other team.”
After Friday’s games, the Clippers hold the league’s second-best record, just percentage points behind the defending Western Conference champions. They didn’t lose all December, posting a perfect 16-0 mark as part of a 17-game winning streak. The winning streak was the longest since the Celtics rattled off 19 in a row four years earlier. During the Clippers’ impressive streak, they had the luxury of playing 10 home games and a slew of weak opponents. To their credit, however, they won in Utah twice, where road opponents other than the Clippers have gone a miserable 2-10. Over the 17-game winning streak, the Clippers held their opponents to 90 or fewer points 10 times.
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