7 Rookie Sensations That FELL OFF BADLY

Brandon Jennings reached the absolute peak of his career in only his seventh game in the NBA.
In a rookie head to head against Steph Curry Jennings completely went off scoring 55 points and getting the spotlight from the entire league.
Sadly, he was never able to even get to 40 points again in his playing days.
So when talking about guys who peaked as rookies and then fell off, Brandon’s name immediately comes to mind.
So let’s check out some other rookie sensations that got lost afterwards and never progressed.
What up everybody, my name is Stefan and this is Heat Check. Let’s get into it.
Before we move on to other players, I feel like I need to say this about Jennings:
Although he may not have lived up to his potential and the high expectations that were set early on, Brandon did have a natural progression up to his third year where he went from 15.5 points per game to 19 on better percentage. So not the typical fall of a cliff.
A guy who did go straight down however was from this same draft class, and actually the rookie of the year that season. And that is Tyreke Evans.
Evans grabbed the attention of NBA fans with his flashiness on the court. The great ball handling and crossovers that often left defenders behind him or even on the floor were often featured on the NBA top 10 lists.
He even had a game winner as well against the Milwaukee Bucks
All of this while scoring 20.1 points along with 5.3 rebounds and 5.8 assists were more than enough for him to win the rookie of the year award, and Kings fans had a legitimate reason to be excited. They found their franchise star and he was off to a great start.
But in his sophomore season- instead of a rise in production there was a drop off.
He wasn’t able to get into a nice rhythm which in part was due to injuries.
Evans played only 57 games and wasn’t able to get to 18 points per game.
However that season wasn’t all bad since it gave us one of the wildest game winners in NBA history.
Taking a look at his games played you see that injuries were a big part of his career and Tyreke never came even close to playing a full season.
And you can clearly see how his production continuously goes down for the first 4 seasons.
By then we all knew that he wasn’t going to become the player we thought, so Sacramento traded him to New Orleans where he further cemented his role as a supporting cast.
There is this weird bump in 2018 where Mike Conley got injured for the entire season in Memphis so they gave all the freedom Tyreke could ask for. But that didn’t result in anything besides some empty stats, as the Grizzlies ended the season with a miserable record of 22-60.
After that season he was initially disqualified from the NBA for substance abuse but this season the league announced that he was reinstated back.
Michael Carter Williams kicked off the infamous process for the Sixers. They drafted him with the 11th pick and he caught everyone by surprise right in his NBA debut.
22 points, 12 assists, 7 rebounds, and 9 steals the most steals ever made by a rookie on debut in a win over the defending champion Miami. All of this in the first game in his career.
Less than a week later, he had a 26-point, 10 assist performance and Sixers fans were thrilled.
In his rookie year Carter Williams recorded 2 triple doubles and with that phenomenal performance throughout the entire season he won rookie of the year.
16.7 points, 6.2 rebounds, 6.3 assists and 1.9 steals per game.
But this is where things go downhill for him as well.
At the end of that first year he MCW suffered a shoulder injury and had surgery.
When he came back in 2014-15, he didn’t quite look the same, and combined with the fact that the Sixers were in a full on tanking mode and trying to get a top pick, he was traded to Milwaukee.
But another injury caused him to miss more playing time and he started to lose his spot as a starter due to his poor performance which admittedly was as a result of injuries.
He is also another player that never came close to playing a full season, so along those lines you can also see how his points per game go down year by year.
He bounced around the league from the Bucks to the Bulls, Hornets, Rockets, and last time we saw him in a Magic uniform last season.
After yet another injury he was waived by Orlando and we haven’t seen him on a team this year as he’s rehabbing from surgery.
Jahlil Okafor had possibly the worst drop for an NBA rookie ever.
Even tho he had solid games to kick off his rookie campaign,
the Sixers were so bad as a team that they went 0-28 to start the season. Zero and 28. This is the longest losing streak by any team in professional sports.