We hit it off right away, constant communication and trust and input from each other." And that speaks to his willingness to buy in. "And the great thing about it was once he got here, he averaged 20 points a game, shot 50 percent from the field and had career numbers from a lot of different areas.
Inefficiency," Malone told Bleacher Report earlier this month. "When we got him, he was shooting 38 percent from the field, and he was the poster child for the analytic gurus, about being Mr. When Gay does shoot, he chooses better (read: uncontested) shots and no longer pounds the ball in mind-numbing isolation plays. Two weeks ago, he hit double digits for the first time, with a 10-assist night against Toronto. He hit that mark just 11 times in his first seven seasons. Since joining the Kings last December, Gay has had 17 games with at least six assists. The proof is in the assists column, a section of the box score that Gay had long neglected.
Now I've learned how to be a better basketball player because of that. Gay bluntly admits the two trades "changed me as a person -not just a basketball player, but as a person. I want to be a player that guys will love playing with. "I don't want to sit back and look at my career and think about what I could have been, or how good I could have been, or what I could have done. "It's now or never, man," Gay said, stretching out his 6'8" frame on a mesh desk chair at the edge of the Kings' practice court. Some are still trying to evolve, but finding it difficult (hello, Carmelo Anthony).Īt age 28, married and with a baby boy arriving last spring, Gay said it was time to grow up-on and off the court. Others never figure it out - Allen Iverson, Steve Francis, Stephon Marbury -and find their careers cut short, unfulfilled. Some evolve over time, as Paul Pierce did in Boston. They arrive with grand ambitions, oversized egos and selfish habits born in the warped culture of the Amateur Athletic Union. It's a familiar story arc for the modern NBA star, particularly the big-time scorers. "I said, 'You're finally coming,'" Hollins said, adding with a chuckle, "'All that I said didn't go to waste.'" When Hollins saw Gay this summer at the wedding for Grizzlies guard Mike Conley, he approached him like a proud father. "He's making plays for people that he always had the ability to make, but he's not feeling the pressure that he has to go and make the play for Rudy Gay." "I think his game is so much more mature now," said Brooklyn Nets coach Lionel Hollins, who coached Gay for most of his career in Memphis. 566 -easily a career best, and a figure he should reach again once Cousins is back on the court, as he provides everyone more room to operate.Īnd amid this newfound dedication to passing and smarter shot selection, Gay is also averaging a career high in scoring at 21.1 points per game.
Gay's true shooting percentage, which accounts for two-pointers, three-pointers and free throws, was a stout. He is earning a career-best 6.3 free throws per game, a sure indicator he no longer settles for lazy jumpers.Ī recent shooting bender, precipitated by Cousins' absence and the Kings' desperation, has eroded Gay's efficiency, but consider this snapshot: As of a week ago, his field-goal percentage was a crisp. Gay is averaging a career-high 4.7 assists per game, more than double his average in his first eight seasons. Cousins is due back soon, Ben McLemore has broken out as a scorer and Gay is in the midst of a midcareer transformation from ball-stopping gunner to team-first star. There are shards of a silver lining here, however. Coaches had been preaching these ideals since the moment Gay entered the league in 2006 but, like many headstrong young stars, he wasn't ready to heed them. The solution wasn't complicated: Move the ball.
I had to figure out what I could do to be better, just be better altogether." "It was just kind of like a shock to my system," Gay told Bleacher Report after a recent practice at the Kings' suburban training center. If there ever was a moment for earnest reflection, this was it. He had been branded "inefficient"-toxic in an analytics-driven era.Īnd so Gay was sent trekking across the continent, packing and unpacking and repacking. These things aren't supposed to happen to a scoring star with a max contract.īut Gay had become known as something else: a "volume" shooter-an overpriced gunner whose deficiencies had been laid bare by advanced metrics. Two trades in 314 days, each one sending Gay further down the NBA power rankings, further from his comfort zone, further into the unknown. He was sent to Sacramento, an even more muddled situation with a woebegone franchise. Eleven months later, Toronto gave up on Rudy Gay, too.