The Simple Source of Kemba Walker's All-Star Season: Work

Ramon Sessions has been in the NBA for ten seasons. He has played for seven different teams but never stuck with the same squad for more than two years in a row. He's served as the backup point guard to Mo Williams, Luke Ridnour, Jonny Flynn, Kyrie Irving, Derek Fisher, Brandon Knight, Darren Collison, and John Wall. In other words: he's been around, and he's seen pretty much everything.

And he's had a front-row seat in watching the development of the Charlotte Hornets' 26-year-old point guard Kemba Walker, who was just named an All-Star for the first time.

"I was able to be with Kemba three years ago, when he was a little bit younger and we were with the Bobcats," Sessions says. "Just to be able to see the way he grew, the way he has grown his game—people said he couldn't shoot the ball. Just to see where he's at three years later, four years later is just tremendous. The guy puts in a lot of work. It was a matter of time before he got his game where he wants it."

More than anything else, the work is the theme that comes up again and again when talking to anyone with the Hornets about their star.

"One of the best stories was after our second year [in 2014-15]. He had gotten injured; he missed eight weeks, came back at the end of the year, really struggled. Just could never get his rhythm," Hornets coach Steve Clifford says, clearly easing into yarn-spinning mode.

"So, I always try to get him out of there for a month or so. But we try to get our guys to stay in Charlotte, which he's been great about. So, I checked with [assistant coach] Steve Hetzel, like, 'Let's check in with these guys, see where they're at.' And he showed me a text. He had texted Kemba that morning and said, 'Where you at? When do you want to start?' And [Kemba] said, 'I'll be in Monday and I'm gonna be the hardest-working player in the NBA.' And that's just always been his mentality in the off-season. And again, you work hard, you get better. It's a crazy dynamic."

Walker came back the following season and posted career highs in usage rate, true shooting, Player Efficiency Rating, Win Share rate, Box Score Plus-Minus, and Value Over Replacement Player while also ramping up his three-point volume and connection rate, shooting percentage near the rim, and free-throw rate to career-best levels. That was last year. He has matched or exceeded each of those figures so far this season.

Where the work has shined through most noticeably is in his shooting. Through the first four seasons of his career, Walker made just 45.1 percent of his shots in the paint and 35.8 percent of his shots outside it. Both of those figures have taken a leap in each of the last two years.

He's now an above-average finisher and outside shooter, and it's not lost on Walker that those two developments are connected. It's no coincidence that he's taking a career-high 38.2 percent of his shots from three-point range and a career-high 33.1 percent of his shots from inside three feet. One feeds into the other.

"I mean, guys are not going under as much as they used to," Walker says. "Just because I'm able to step back into the shot. It just opens up other aspects of my game. Getting to the basket, just finding other guys to where they score or they make the next play for us to continue to score. It just puts teams in rotations."

Walker has a bit of a jitterbug feel to his game, a herky-jerky bounce that keeps defenders off-balance whether he's pulling up, stepping back, or zooming all the way to the basket. He moves at a different pace than a lot of other point guards, a trait that helps him create extra space to get off his shot—space he often needs because he's undersized compared to a lot of the players guarding him. (He's listed at 6'1'' but there's really just no way he's that tall. He measured 5'11.5'' at the NBA combine in 2011, per DraftExpress.) One of the most important things he's learned, he says, is how to use both his body and the rim to shield the ball so he doesn't get blocked around the basket. He works incessantly with assistant coach Steve Hetzel on all different kinds of tricky finishes: runners, floaters, bankers, reverses, even Isaiah Thomas–style fadeaway layups, all of which he may break out at any given time depending on how his own defender and the help man are positioned.

The improvement in his jumper can be credited to his work with assistant Bruce Kreutzer, who has helped Kemba hammer out his mechanics over the years. "I just put in the work in the off-season. I worked on my shot, especially off the dribble," Walker says. "It's really changed a lot of things for me, not only being able to hit spot-up threes but off-the-dribble threes, as well. It changes a lot of things, especially in my pick-and-roll game." The NBA now has off-the-dribble three-pointer data going back four seasons on its web site, and the difference in Walker's volume and efficiency in that area this year compared to the last few is stark (including the 2014-15 season when Clifford says Walker was hurt for eight weeks).

NBA.com doesn't split out the dribble-jumper data to separate step backs from everything else, but there's no question that it's Walker's signature move. If you watch the Hornets, like, ever, this will look very familiar to you. A couple dribbles, a shoulder dip, and then a huge hop backward and (mostly) to the left. He may create more space with his step-back jumper than any player in the league. It's actually not so much a step back as it is a leap back. Even Walker himself is befuddled as to how he's able to generate so much separation. He couldn't help but ramble: "I have no idea. I have no idea. I don't know. I think a lot has to do with adrenaline. I have no clue."

Watching the video of him making defenders look silly with it over and over, it's easy to understand his bemusement.

That move has always been his go-to weapon, but it's been sharper this season than ever before. "A lot of times, people talk about guys working on their weaknesses, but it's also important—if you watch the best players—their strengths usually become bigger strengths," Clifford says. "And that's what he's done."

All of that improvement has congealed into the best offensive season of Walker's career: 23.3 points per game on 46-43-81 shooting splits, with 5.5 assists per game tacked on as well. Even during this 4-12 slide the Hornets are mired in, Walker's offensive production has kept right up—he's at 25.3 points and 5.6 assists per game with 46-40-86 splits during that time. It's the rest of the offense that's fallen off. Clifford, though, is not concerned that his team's scoring is so dependent on one player.

"I think if you look at every great team, for the most part—Golden State is different—but if you look at most great teams, there's usually a dominant offensive player," he says. "Or two, maybe. That's basketball. Basketball always favors, during any stretch of play, the team that has the best offensive player on the floor. They have the advantage. That's the way it works."

The Hornets do have that advantage over many of their opponents on a night-to-night basis, but they're still a team that has built its identity on defense and rebounding. Even with Walker's brilliance, Charlotte is still outside the top ten in offensive efficiency; they have to get stops and clean the glass every single night to hold their opponent to low enough scoring totals to win.

Teams with small guards often go out of their way to hide those players on defense, cross-matching every night to avoid mismatches. (Again, Walker stands south of six feet tall without his shoes on.) The Hornets, for the most part, don't really do that.

"Kemba works on his technique. He gets ball pressure consistently," Clifford says. "Rarely does he not guard his position. There's a couple guys where Mike [Michael Kidd-Gilchrist] will guard the point guards, but we don't have to hide him."

"If I'm guarding, like, Russell Westbrook, coach might want to have one of our bigger defenders on him. He's just a big point guard," Walker says. "It really just depends on who we're playing. For someone that's my size and that I can handle, of course I'm going to be the one guarding him."

Clifford takes it a step further. Not only is Walker capable of guarding his position, he says, but he's a very good defender. Why? "The biggest things that you have to be able to do now, he's good at: dribble hand-offs, pick-and-rolls, and flash action. Those are the majority of the things that the point guards have to defend. He's not just OK defensively. I mean, he's very good. To me, that's one of his strengths."

Both the eye test and the numbers say Clifford is being a bit kind with that characterization, but the point here is mostly that the Hornets don't need to twist themselves into pretzels to conceal Walker's shortcomings every night. He can hold his own at his position with all but the biggest guys. He is (like all Hornets) almost always in the right position and he's become an ace at playing the passing lanes. He's deflecting over two passes per game, per NBA.com's hustle stats, and recovering more than one loose ball per game as well. Only 33 players in the league are doing both. That, too, is a sign that he's just out there working every single game.

The Hornets themselves will now have to work just to hold on to their playoff spot. After losing five in a row, they're eighth in the East—only a game ahead of the Bucks—and falling fast. This is not a position they expected to be in, given their excellent defense and rebounding. With the way Walker is playing on offense, they should be better than this. The Hornets have got to get him some help on that side of the floor. Whether or not they find a way to do that, though, Walker himself will continue getting better, continue shouldering the load, and continue putting in the work.

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