Reed Sheppard is the Rockets’ Franchise Player™

Dankstronaut · Aug 5, 2025 at 12:20 PM

Mathloom said: ↑

Honestly he still looked a little raw in the summer league.

At this point I think Sheppard‘s biggest weakness is physical strength. The second most detrimental thing to him getting minutes is his handle. These are more than a year away from being good enough to let’s say handle the ball half the time as the smallest player on the court (6’2-6’3, will mostly guard PG’s).

Shooting and putting on muscle should be his urgent goals if he wants lots of minutes asap. Even without an excellent handle he’d be an excellent off ball player. The handle he needs a couple of years work on it before he can run a contender’s offense.

This year FVV will play 32 minutes probably. Leaves 16 minutes for someone to guard the shortest player on the other team’s 2nd unit. I think he can handle that as long as in those 16 minutes we start him off completely off ball catch and shoot spacer. Then you let him bring the ball up a little and hopefully by the end of the regular season he’s comfortable with the ball in his hands on a few plays.

He can definitely fill that role if he can put on muscle faster. Can someone accidentally juice him up lol

Ultimately it’s just what I expected. His timeline is just one year later than what we expected before the draft. Instead of a 1-2 year project, he’s a 3 year project. Not bad.
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Did you ever see the new Jumanji? This reminded me of Kevin Hart saying “my weakness…is strength? How can strength be my weakness?”

dmoneybangbang · Aug 5, 2025 at 12:49 PM

Mathloom said: ↑

Honestly he still looked a little raw in the summer league.

At this point I think Sheppard‘s biggest weakness is physical strength. The second most detrimental thing to him getting minutes is his handle. These are more than a year away from being good enough to let’s say handle the ball half the time as the smallest player on the court (6’2-6’3, will mostly guard PG’s).

Shooting and putting on muscle should be his urgent goals if he wants lots of minutes asap. Even without an excellent handle he’d be an excellent off ball player. The handle he needs a couple of years work on it before he can run a contender’s offense.

This year FVV will play 32 minutes probably. Leaves 16 minutes for someone to guard the shortest player on the other team’s 2nd unit. I think he can handle that as long as in those 16 minutes we start him off completely off ball catch and shoot spacer. Then you let him bring the ball up a little and hopefully by the end of the regular season he’s comfortable with the ball in his hands on a few plays.

He can definitely fill that role if he can put on muscle faster. Can someone accidentally juice him up lol

Ultimately it’s just what I expected. His timeline is just one year later than what we expected before the draft. Instead of a 1-2 year project, he’s a 3 year project. Not bad.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I think his handle reflects the size and strength issues, which were my main concerns drafting him. It will simply take Reed a few offseasons to get his body to true NBA form, if he gets there ever. That may sound a bit pessimistic, but I'm still optismtic Reed will become a NBA rotation player as it will just take a bit longer.

I also never really viewed him as a primary ball handler, just someone more like Derrick White or even FVV where he can initiate or keep the offense moving while hitting 3s. Hopefully Reed can get those 16 MPG and quickly learns how to navigate those Adams and Capela screens for some basic PNR actions.

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Reed Sheppard is the Rockets’ Franchise Player™

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Dankstronaut Way, way out here.

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