Brandon Jennings Drops 55 on Golden State Warriors

Brandon Jennings didn’t want to go to college. He believed that if he was going to play, it would be for a paycheck, so, unable to enter the draft due to the age restrictions, the highly touted point guard became the first player to forgo college and make the leap from high school to professional European basketball.

Choosing to sign a one-year contract with Italian club Lottomatica Roma, the Oak Hill Academy star who won every major player of the year award as a senior believed he would see a substantial amount of action, thereby increasing his notoriety for the following year’s NBA Draft.

But things didn’t go as planned. Jennings spent a majority of the season riding the bench. When he did play, he only averaged five points, two rebounds and one assist in 27 games while shooting just 35 percent from the field and 20 percent from three-point land.

His struggles on the European stage would presumably hurt his draft status, but his lowly statistics did no such thing. The Milwaukeee Bucks selected the skinny 6′1″ 20-year-old with the 10th overall selection. Milwaukee thought enough of his talent not only to make him a top-10 pick, but also to let 23-year-old starting point guard Ramon Sessions leave via free agency. The job was Jennings’ whether he was ready to take the reins or not.

It appeared he wasn’t. He averaged a satisfactory 10 points and 5 assists during the preseason, but was woefully inconsistent, scoring three points and dishing one assist one game and then scoring 10 and racking up 12 assists the next. He had plenty of skeptics, and many deemed after the former performance that he simply wasn’t able to play in the NBA just yet. But, boy, has he proved them wrong.

Jennings narrowly missed out on a triple-double in his regular season debut against the Philadelphia 76ers. He scored 17 points, grabbed nine rebounds, and handed out nine assists, one rebound and one assist short of becoming the first player since Oscar Robertston to post a triple-double in his first game.

To prove this performance wasn’t a fluke, he scored 24 points the following night against the Detroit Pistons and 25 points three days later against the Chicago Bulls.

He struggled in his fourth game, posting a line similar to that in the preseason, scoring nine points on 4-16 shooting while compiling just three assists in 27 minutes. He has since bounced back from this mediocre performance in a big way. More at Bleacher Report

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