{"id":600601,"date":"2026-04-11T19:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T19:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/600601\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T19:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T19:08:09","slug":"lakers-bronny-james-joins-warriors-surprise-star-in-55th-pick-nba-draft-notoriety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/600601\/","title":{"rendered":"Lakers’ Bronny James joins Warriors’ surprise star in 55th-pick NBA Draft notoriety"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lakers’ Bronny James joins Warriors’ surprise star in 55th-pick NBA Draft notoriety<\/a> originally appeared on The Sporting News<\/a>. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Lakers<\/a> have been playing Bronny James by default of late.<\/p>\n

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A team without Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves due to injury doesn’t have a ton of options, after all.<\/p>\n

But in reality, Bronny has handled his increased playing time pretty well.<\/p>\n

And it’s worth remembering: The Lakers made Bronny the 55th-overall pick in 2024. There aren’t exactly a ton of successful players drafted in that spot.<\/p>\n

For a No. 55 pick, Bronny is doing well. Over his last nine games, Bronny is averaging 5.0 points, 1.0 assist and 0.8 steals per game.<\/p>\n

He has games in that recent stretch of 4-for-8 (2-for 4 3FG) shooting and 4-for-7 (2-for-4 3FG) shooting.<\/p>\n

He has two different games there with 10 points, another two with two steals, one with three assists.<\/p>\n

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Bronny isn’t seeing huge minutes, but he’s doing what he can.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0LeBron and Bronny James combine for NBA history<\/a><\/p>\n

It brought us down a rabbit hole to realizing that the Golden State Warriors<\/a> also have a former 55th-overall pick contributing, Gui Santos, from the 2022 draft.<\/p>\n

Santos is actually on quite the run. In his last five games, he has one game with 27 points, another with 25 points, a third with 10 rebounds and a fourth with six assists and two steals.<\/p>\n

For a shorthanded Warriors team, the Brazilian forward has really seized his opportunity.<\/p>\n

The last two seasons, he seemed like he had the skillset to be a role player. Now, he seems like he could be a long-term starter.<\/p>\n

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And when you think about it, Santos is a couple years further into his development than Bronny. Maybe he can be the path Bronny follows toward potentially finding an NBA starting role before his career is over.<\/p>\n

Bronny didn’t even get a normal season of college basketball as he dealt with heart issues, which made his development even more halted.<\/p>\n

Guys picked in that spot of the draft rarely make it. Bronny is doing his best to buck the trend, and Santos is some solid inspiration.<\/p>\n

More basketball news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lakers’ Bronny James joins Warriors’ surprise star in 55th-pick NBA Draft notoriety originally appeared on The Sporting News.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600602,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,30097,63,5848,5552,20443,7232,11473,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-600601","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-austin-reaves","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-bronny-james","12":"tag-golden-state-warriors","13":"tag-gui-santos","14":"tag-los-angeles-lakers","15":"tag-luka-doncic","16":"tag-nba","17":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}