The Lakers are evaluating players to be ready to pick at No. 2 and No. 23 in the NBA Draft. Los Angeles local Jordan Bell got his shot on Monday.
Jordan Bell reigns from local Long Beach, California where he played for Long Beach Poly High School. The Lakers are not too far away from his home, so you can imagine, working out for the Lakers is a dream!
The former Oregon Ducks power forward just came off a NCAA Final Four appearance. When the talk was mostly about the play of his teammates Dillon Brooks and Tyler Ennis, Bell showed up in his first and last Final Four NCAA game when it counted.
He logged four huge blocks towards the end of the game and made a name for himself.
After taking his team and his head coach Dana Altman to his first Final Four just barely missing the finals by one measly point, he felt horrible. He took the whole team on his back and blamed his inability to grab that last rebound as the reason for the loss.
Bell told us after the loss had set in for a couple of weeks, he was able to look back at his performance and felt better overall. The loss still stung, but he realized that he left it out on the floor learning what he could from the entire experience.
Oregon went 33-6 in the 2016-17 season, winning the regular season record garnering the team a No. 1 seed in the Pac-12 Tournament. The Ducks eventually lost to Arizona in the Pac-12 championship, but went much farther in the NCAA tournament.
At Oregon, the 6-foot-9, 225-pound junior wasn’t always the player who was talked about, yet he was a player who showed up at the right time in games to boost his team.
Bell notched 10 double-doubles (see per game tab in the Point After graphic below) last season, shooting a game-high 26 points against Cal, making 91 percent of his field goals.
Bell’s rebounding is what’s most impressive when reviewing his stats. Bell averaged 8.5 rebounds which as compared to the Pac-12 as a whole (4.0) was more than double that of the average of all other Pac-12 starters.
Bell felt it was time to leave his college, so he hired big time CAA Agent Aaron Mintz. Mintz just so happens to be both D’Angelo Russell and Julius Randle‘s agent. Get’s you thinking a bit, doesn’t it?
So, on to the next adventure. Bell worked out for the Lakers on May 29, 2017.
The Lakers should look hard at Bell, he has potential, and he doesn’t shy away from hard work. He can perform in the most intense situations, even in front of 70,000 plus fans in a football stadium. Bell has proven that double-doubles are a normal achievement.
On the personal side, I was able to get to know this young man over the last few years as I wrote about him for our sister Arizona Wildcats NCAA site.
When the Ducks came to town, the Wildcats fans were nervous. In his sophomore season, Bell’s Ducks beat the Arizona Wildcats at home for the first time in 49 games, breaking the school record for home wins.
Instead of Arizona celebrating its 50th straight home game, the loss sent the Arizona Basketball program into a tailspin and the ended up losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament that year, it was a huge victory for the Ducks.
Wildcats fans found out later, that the team’s reaction to the loss at home actually attracted NBA Combine headliner Rawle Alkins to commit to Sean Miller and Arizona.
I recently caught up with Bell at the Ballislife All-American game, where he and a few of his fellow NBA Draftees. including former UCLA forward T.J. Leaf came to enjoy the game they played in the year before.
We wanted to know what he had learned about himself from the time he entered college to now.
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Bell worked all last summer getting ready for the season, he played in the Drew League in Compton with and held his own. He is an LA local talent who gives back to his city, he has the heart of a Laker, and he has the winning mentality that the Lakers need on their roster.
Not to mention what a great man he has become and mentor, the Lakers should take Bell seriously.