With so much fanfare surrounding at the beginning of the season, Bronny James admitted that the pressure impacted him to start his rookie season.
It’s hard to imagine a rookie coming into the league with the type of media attention and focus that Bronny James did this season.
Many first-year players have entered the league with much fanfare, popularity and expectations. However, none have entered the league with specific expectations of playing with their father.
It led to quite the media blitz to start the year, and that’s to speak nothing of the criticism he and the Lakers faced for him even being on the roster. Ultimately, after the pair saw the floor together, Bronny faded into the background and developed in the G League.
After the season, he talked about how much his confidence had grown during his time in South Bay this season and revealed just how much he was impacted by the media pressure to begin the season.
“Huge difference in my confidence,” Bronny said. “At the start of the year, I’ll just say I was under a lot of pressure. I think it was getting to me a little bit. So, just having those games like the Bucks game, some of those games like that in the G League, just building my confidence every day and proving to me that I know what I can do. I’m ready to keep growing as a player.”
You can hardly blame him for feeling the pressure and the media attention. It was beyond ridiculous levels of scrutiny that made everyone act incredibly weird about him.
Fortunately, he was able to fall out of that spotlight and accomplish what was needed, which was to develop without the circus while in the G League. The fruits of his labors were shown toward the end of the season when he had his best career game against the Bucks, scoring 17 points.
His development will continue into the offseason where he’ll play in Summer League once again. That’ll be another barometer of how much he’s improved from last season. And while it’ll also be something of a media circus once again, hopefully some lessons learned from his rookie year will help him handle the pressure better this time around.
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