Kings Seek To Deal Ben McLemore; Wolves Eye Him

TUESDAY, 12:10pm: Sacramento is “desperate” to trade McLemore, a league source told Sam Amico of Amico Hoops.

3:17pm: The Timberwolves are among the teams talking to Sacramento about McLemore, reports Darren Wolfson of 1500 ESPN Twin Cities (Twitter link).

MONDAY, 2:53pm: The Kings and Ben McLemore are working together to find a new team for the former lottery pick as the trade deadline approaches, report Marc Stein and Brian Windhorst of ESPN.com. The Cavaliers are one of multiple Eastern Conference teams with strong interest in the shooting guard, as Chris Haynes of the Northeast Ohio Media Group and the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported last week, though it appeared then that Sacramento was resisting offers for the Rich Paul client. Sacramento wants someone who can help them immediately and not future draft picks, Stein and Windhorst write. McLemore, the seventh overall pick from 2013, is making almost $3.157MM in year three of his four-year rookie scale contract.

The effort to trade McLemore is similar to the one the Kings made to try to facilitate a trade for Caron Butler in December, according to Stein and Windhorst. However, Butler remains with Sacramento.

The Kings drafted Nik Stauskas at No. 8 in 2014, one year after they took McLemore, but they traded Stauskas this to Philadelphia past summer, ostensibly designating McLemore as their shooting guard of the future. Instead, his minutes have shrunk from 32.6 last season, when he started all 82 games, to 21.0 this year. He’s shooting career bests of 37.2% from 3-point territory and 45.1% from the field, but it hasn’t translated into more playing time, and he wasn’t in the starting lineup for the last two games in which he appeared before going out with a wrist injury for Sacramento’s final three games leading up to the All-Star break.

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