EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- That Richard Jefferson put together such a stellar personal season should be considered a pleasant development, but certainly not a surprise. You see: Jefferson, the 27 year old Nets forward, has always worked at bettering his game every chance he can and has steadily improved each and every year.
As an instance representative of his total work ethic, I look back to Monday January 21st of this season.
The Nets were two games and three days into a six-game, 10-day west coast road trip and the team had just made an early evening arrival in Sacramento, coming north from Phoenix. At around 7:00pm – it was an off night, the next night the Nets would play the Kings - a group of the traveling party assembled in the lobby of the team’s hotel on the way to dinner. The equipment manager appeared. Asked if he would be joining us for dinner, he said he would not; instead, he was asked by Jefferson to accompany him to Arco Arena – a 20 to 25 minute cab ride away – so that he could put up shots for an hour and work on his game in the empty arena.
The staffer said this was not atypical for Jefferson, who is frequently seen many nights at the Nets practice facility doing the same thing when the Nets are home.
It is this singular focus that lends credence to his career season this year, one in which Jefferson averaged 22.6 points, up over five points from his career norm and good for 9th best in the NBA. He also played all 82 games, something he hadn’t done since 2003-04. In the interim years, two of the three seasons were beset by injury: putting together the 2004-05 and 2006-07 seasons, he played 88 regular season games in total.
Plus, as Nets President Rod Thorn noted in his end-of-season talk with writers, Jefferson showed late in the year that he could be a solid distributor, averaging 5.5 assists in eight April games. As the longest current tenured Net he can seem like he has been here for a long time, but he is still young and still has room for even more improvement.
For the player referred to as “RJ” the major downer to his big season was the overall performance of the team. The Nets went 34-48 and missed the playoffs after six consecutive appearances, all of which he was a part of.
“Personal goals really get shot down the minute the team goals aren’t met,” said Jefferson.
“The minute you don’t make it to the playoffs it doesn’t matter if I led the league in scoring, if I was an all-star, an all-star MVP. If I was any of that stuff, it wouldn’t matter. I played in all 82 games, that’s the only one (thing to take from the year personally). And 82 wasn’t a number; it’s more of just you were able to get through a lot of the stuff this season. Because there were a lot of times – I remember when I got busted in the eye and I could barely even see in it the next night in Orlando but to go out there and still play and show my teammates that I’m in this. If it was about numbers that might be a day to take off. But if it’s about showing your teammates that sometimes things aren’t easy, then that’s the day you have to go out there and play with them.”
He hopes his teammates take the hard lessons of a missed playoff experience and apply it to a successful run into next season.
This off season, he certainly will.
“I know for myself I’m extremely hungry and looking forward to this summer and the training camp next season.”
“I’ll be just as driven, if not more. I won’t say that my work ethic will change. I work extremely hard every summer but I’ll have more time to work hard so hopefully that can help. (I have) no injuries going into the off season, so it’s more of just take a month off – take a month and a half off – and then start getting into it when some guys will still be playing in the playoffs -- so you can use that as motivation.”
For a player who goes alone at night to an opponent’s empty arena to work on his game amidst a long road trip, one thing is for sure: that motivation is certainly not in short supply.
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