How John Wall transformed his game

Since returning from a knee injury, John Wall has been a different player, averaging 20+ points for most of March and posting a career-high 47 points on Monday night. John Wall was a great player before his injury, but since, his game has been on a different level. That’s not just because his knee is finally healed; last April, Wall sought the help of Rob McClanaghan, the famed trainer behind Derrick Rose and Russell Westbrook’s games.

Wall and McClanaghan put together an offseason workout plan to improve Wall’s game, namely his jump shot. They trained for one hour five days a week, focusing on Wall’s jump shot and switching up his speeds on the court, something which McClanaghan said Wall didn’t even know he needed to work on:

“Sometimes, he was too fast for himself. He never learned to slow down and I explained to him, this isn’t high school or college anymore where you can blow by a guy and lay it up. You have to be able to slow down a little bit, and change speeds.”

Wall said the best game of his career is a product of the work he put in with McClanaghan, whom he first heard of from Coach Cal. If not for the patella injury that sidelined him for the first half of the season, we would have seen it sooner. Wall says that the talk of him being an NBA bust was merely fuel for the fire: “I think this is the year I could’ve been an all-star. Being out for 33 games, everybody was like, ‘It’s over for him.’ Like it was over my career. That’s something you keep in the back of your mind, use it as motivation.”

[The Washington Post: John Wall traces success in March to summer work]