The NBA draft is usually one of the following: a bane, a boon, a swing and a miss, a setback - or the pipeline by which the San Antonio Spurs cobble together a perennial contender with unknown role players. Usually.
For the Sacramento Kings, it is an chance to get fresh talent for their stupefying and potentially inadvertent game of rotation roulette.
They have picked no higher than 12th in seven years. The draft has emphatically not worked in their favor. Despite drafting talents like Tyreke Evans, DeMarcus Cousins, Thomas Robinson and Isaiah Thomas within the past few years, the worst team in California remains mired in mediocrity in the best Western Conference in recent memory.
I can't speak to the ethics of wasting talent so predictably; methodology either works or it doesn't, and it would be tough to find an owner - provided you don't seek out pre-2010 Donald Sterling - that hates to win. But there is something cruel about fiddling around with lineups with no apparent endgame, leaving some positions virtually unoccupied and others oversaturated and casting about blindly for a competent core group of guys.
Ineptitude tends not to discriminate; even Lebron James can attest to that (read: Mike Brown, circa mid-2000s). It affects all sorts of players and has in particular tormented the Kings, whose past, present and future were all in jeopardy last year until ownership was transferred. The ramifications are sprawling and occasionally dire, but when it comes to neophyte shooting guard Ben McLemore, they are brought into stark relief.
McLemore has not had a great season. Shooting just below 37 percent from the field overall and about 31 percent from three, he was omitted - "snubbed," according to the Sacramento Bee - from the rookie showcase during All-Star Weekend. His struggles -- partly attributable to his inexperience, partly to his situation - extend far beyond on-court play.
Impoverished doesn't even begin to describe his upbringing. Born and raised in Wellston, Miss., McLemore was always hungry. In fact, he attended school in order to eat, never sure of dinner later that evening.
From birth on, it seems obstacles - the likes of which most people would either shrink from or simply wither amidst - cropped up everywhere. McLemore lived with 15 or more people in a 600-square-foot home, where much of his family still resides. His first high school lost its accreditation and shut down.
McLemore will earn a combined $6 million this year and next, which is to say he and his family should be set for the near-future. Afterward, his bank account, will need to be replenished, a new round of earnings entirely predicated upon whether he meets ruination with the Kings.
The real danger lies not in McLemore's talent, which I believe has been manifest since his high school days, but rather in whether he ever gets a chance to showcase it. Twenty-six minutes per game is ample playing time for a rookie, but they will be of little value if the Kings can't orchestrate a more fluid offense.
In the litany of victims of the Kings' rotation roulette, guys like JimmerFredette come to mind. Like Fredette, McLemore will have many more chances to realize his potential, so the future hardly looks as bleak as I've forecasted. Still, as teams, hamstrung by a more restrictive salary cap, dispense funds more prudently, McLemore will not have as wide a window as did established stars.
For a kid who feels responsible for uplifting his friends, his family and his entire blighted community, that could spell undoing.
