If you’re reading this, you probably knew the legend of Jeff and Stacey Reed Sheppard and their respective careers as Kentucky basketball standouts long before their baby boy entered the national picture, now seen as a likely top-three selection in the 2024 NBA Draft. Thing is, Reed Sheppard had no idea his parents played basketball at all growing up — by choice.
The Sheppards kept the awards, honors and accolades out of the house when Reed was a kid. Walking in, you’d have no idea they were Lexington celebrities. Instead, they just wanted to be seen as ‘Mom and Dad.’
“They were big for me, they’ve been with me from the beginning and have traveled to all the games. The thing I appreciate most about them is in the house when I was growing up, there were never any jerseys hanging up or trophies in the house,” Sheppard said in a sitdown with The Athletic’s Shams Charania. “They didn’t want to be known as basketball players, they wanted to be known as ‘Mom and Dad.'”
He didn’t know it at the time, but he appreciated their hands-off approach as local basketball legends. Sheppard played other sports growing up as a kid and then fell in love with basketball himself, was never pushed that direction. It wasn’t until later that he realized who Jeff and Stacey were on the hardwood and their respective legacies at Kentucky.
It’s helped him navigate his own journey, which will lead to shaking the NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s hand at the draft on June 26.
“That meant a lot because they were there for me no matter what. It wasn’t until like seventh or eighth grade I really knew about that. I knew about mom playing basketball, I knew they did something and I knew people liked them because of it,” Sheppard said. “But we would be out at a grocery store and someone would come up to Dad and be like, ‘Hey, can I get a picture?’ And I looked at them and I was like, ‘Dad, who was that right there?’ And he wouldn’t look at me, just acted like he didn’t hear me because he didn’t know who they were. They were just fans coming up taking a picture and I didn’t realize that.
“But having them with me through this whole process has been really helpful, just having two people that I can talk to no matter what, good or bad.”
That’s translated to a larger-than-life basketball career for their baby boy, exploding as a McDonald’s All-American, then SEC Freshman of the Year, followed by a top draft pick — the most unexpected one-and-done in recent memory.
How did he get to this point on the floor? By modeling his game after some of the all-time greats, including one that previously came through Lexington.
“Chris Paul is one of those guys where I look at him because of how he controls the game, how he gets his teammates involved, comes off pick-and-rolls and is never sped up. He’s just going to play his style at his pace,” Sheppard told Charania. “You look at guys like Devin Booker and how he gets to his mid-range game, how he gets to his spots and can elevate over you to knock down a shot. Or Steph Curry, how he moves without the ball. He’ll throw the ball and run a ridiculous amount just to get an open three, catch it real quick and get his feet down and shoot it. You look at someone like Kobe, just his mentality, how no one was going to stop him or beat him — he was better than everyone. He thought no matter what you did, he was going to be able to do it better. He was going to win.
“Just taking things from different players and watching their game and learning. You can watch everyone in the league and take something from their game that they’re really good at and put it into yours.”
He’s currently projected to go No. 3 overall to the Houston Rockets, according to ESPN’s latest mock draft released Friday.
That couldn’t have been done without Mom and Dad leading the way, letting him find himself as a basketball player and into superstardom.
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