NBA PM: McDermott Motivated by Butler’s Redshirt Success

Doug McDermott Toiling Through Redshirt Rookie Season

When the Chicago Bulls traded up to select Doug McDermott with the 10th overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft, the general consensus was that they’d found a perfect complementary player for their team. While he wasn’t necessarily known for his defense, he did come into the NBA as one of the more mature rookies in the class and was known in college as a killer deep threat who could score from pretty much anywhere on the floor.

The Bulls needed that offense after two dismal years without Derrick Rose, but McDermott ended up getting injured before earning the opportunity to carve out a role for himself in head coach Tom Thibodeau’s rotation.

Now, as the regular season winds down, McDermott has only 35 games on his professional resume, with only 13 three-pointers and 109 total points tallied over the course of the entire year. It wasn’t the rookie season he wanted, but as Jimmy Butler has proven before him, it is possible to redshirt a rookie season under Thibodeau and still eventually see massive success.

In fact Butler, who averaged only eight minutes a night in 42 games his rookie season, has had conversations with McDermott about dealing with those frustrating DNPs.

“He said he didn’t handle it nearly as well as I did,” McDermott said about his chats with Butler. “He’s got that attitude where it’s him against the world, and he felt like he should have been playing. He said he didn’t have a great attitude about it, that he didn’t go in a lot, wasn’t working on his game enough, but he told me if he were to go back he would’ve done it the opposite way, because that’s the way it works here.”

Knowing that his approach already is ahead of where Butler was as a rookie gives McDermott optimism for the future.

“That’s a huge motivation for any young player, what he’s been able to accomplish,” McDermott said. “I looked at his rookie year—I actually looked at a lot of guys’ rookie years—and sometimes it just happens that way (where guys don’t play much early on). I just have to believe it will work out for me just like it has for Jimmy.”

Softening the blow is the fact that McDermott knows he missed his opportunity in large part because he was slowed by that knee injury.

“When you miss that many games, it’s not easy to get back into the flow of things,” McDermott said. “We’re on a veteran team where guys play a lot of minutes, so falling out of the rotation, it’s understandable. I can only control what I can control and can only try to get better, learn from some of these other guys and hopefully come out on top in the end.”

Further improvement is his sole focus as the season wraps up, even as fellow rookie Nikola Mirotic absolutely explodes toward the back end of his own rookie campaign.

“You can’t get too down early,” McDermott said. “Obviously I wish I was playing more, and sometimes it’s hard to see other rookies succeed, but I’m just looking at it as a positive. It obviously hasn’t been an ideal year for me as far as playing is concerned, but I’m on a great team in a great city with great fans and a great organization. My game feels really good right now, so I’m just trying to get better every day.”

He might not ever be an All-Star or a max-level player, but McDermott almost certainly has better days ahead of him. His teammate Jimmy Butler is living proof of that.

“If I could be half of what he is,” McDermott said, “I’ll be happy.”

Ben Simmons Itching to Join Utah’s Dante Exum

At last spring’s draft combine, Australian guard Dante Exum was a more delightful mystery than any other player on the docket. The biggest reason for that, of course, was because nobody had really seen him play outside of international basketball, so drafting the lanky point guard was going to prove quite the risk for some team.

That team ultimately proved to be the Utah Jazz, who have been pretty happy with Exum after his rookie season. Exum’s dear friend Ben Simmons, currently the No. 1 high school prospect in the country, has taken a different route by playing the last two years at an American academy and now by heading to LSU to play at least one year in the NCAA.

Scouts already have gotten a much better look at Simmons, and they like what they see. Recently named a McDonald’s All-American, Simmons is looking forward to joining his longtime friend (the two have been close since Simmons was 7) in the NBA.

“Growing up with Dante, we’re a similar age, so we played together a lot and we both had the goal of playing in the NBA,” Simmons recently told Basketball Insiders. “I think this generation of Australian players right now, we’re leading the way. Patty Mills, Andrew Bogut, guys like that have been a huge inspiration for us going to that level.”

While Simmons isn’t necessarily looking past his college experience, he does obviously have NBA aspirations, which is something he discusses with Exum.

“Dante is just busy,” Simmons said about his conversations with the Utah guard. “He’s got to maintain his body, eat well, just take care of his body. There’s more muscle in the NBA, but he says he’s handling it well.”

Simmons hopes that his route to the NBA will allow him a smoother adjustment to the strength and speed of the professional game. That’s why he moved to Montverde, Florida when he was 16 years old to play for Montverde Academy.

“I knew some of the Montverde coaching staff a little bit from adidas Nations, and while I talked to some guys from Oak Hill, I really liked Montverde so I decided I want to go play for them,” he said.

Luckily, the adjustment wasn’t all that dramatic for him.

“The weather is similar, but there are a lot of differences,” he said. “It’s another country. The people are different, the food is different. I had to learn how to drive on the other side of the road. It’s just everything.”

As the next great Australian talent, Simmons could be only a year away from taking the NBA by storm. Exum’s adjustments have been slow, but it already looks like Simmons will adapt much more quickly. We’ll find out for sure a little over a year from now.