Brandon Ingram’s Sophomore Season
Ingram showed a lot of promise in his rookie season and that optimism carried over into his 2nd season.
Going into the 2017-18 season, so much of the focus had been put on Lonzo Ball who, like Ingram before him, was selected No. 2 overall in the 2017 NBA Draft.
With Ingram now a year older, we were excited to see how he would pair up with Lonzo Ball and his passing abilities that made him such a high draft pick in the first place.
Unfortunately, we only got to see one game of this duo in the Summer League. After Ingram scored 26 points in the Lakers’ Las Vegas Summer League opener, he suffered a leg injury on the very last play of regulation that kept him out of the Summer League entirely.
Unfortunately, Ingram had a lackluster showing in the preseason that was overshadowed by the emergence of the Lakers No. 27 overall pick, Kyle Kuzma.
It didn’t help that Ingram scored only 12 points in the season opener against the Los Angeles Clippers on 3-for-15 shooting from the field.
However, Ingram quickly turned that performance around by scoring a then career-high 25 points the very next night against a poor Phoenix Suns team, who ended up firing their head coach Earl Watson not long after that loss.
Throughout the offseason, there were reports that Ingram had gotten stronger and gained more muscle to help him with the brutality of the NBA.
Although he wasn’t getting pushed around as easily as he was the previous season, me personally, I couldn’t really tell that he had added more strength but, I digress.
Aggression was no longer a concern for Ingram, and his numbers and percentages across the board were all up from his previous season.
Ingram’s welcome to the league moment however, came in the Lakers November 29, 2017 matchup against the Golden State Warriors in which Ingram scored a career-high 32 points in a loss against the defending NBA Champions.
To top that, on December 7, 2017, Ingram scored 21 points including the game-winning three pointer to beat the Philadelphia 76ers on the road to break the Lakers 5 game losing streak.
It was a season in which everything seemed to be going right for Brandon. But, sooner or later, injuries would begin to rear their ugly head. Unfortunately, Ingram suffered a strained groin against the Miami Heat that forced him to miss 12 games.
He would return but would later suffer a concussion on March 30, 2018, against the Milwaukee Bucks that would cause him to miss the rest of the season.
Ingram finished the year averaging 16.1 PPG, 3.9 APG and 5.3 RPG.