Jeff Sheppard – Washington Wizards Summer League Highlights (2001)

Jeff Sheppard – Washington Wizards Summer League Highlights (2001)

The father of Reed Sheppard (the No. 3 overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft), Jeff Sheppard won two NCAA championships during his four years at Kentucky. As part of a 1998 Kentucky team that featured six NBA players, it was Sheppard who rose above the rest to walk away with the NCAA Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award, highlighted by his 27-point performance in a one-point semifinal win over Stanford.

After going undrafted in 1998, Sheppard signed with the Atlanta Hawks at the outset of the NBA’s lockout shortened 1999 season. Sheppard averaged 2.2 points in 18 appearances in his one year with the club.

Following his time with the Hawks, Sheppard spent two seasons playing pro ball in Italy before returning stateside for a 2001 Summer League run with the Washington Wizards. After missing the cut for a team that’d eventually welcome back Michael Jordan later that summer, Sheppard returned to Italy. That September, his basketball career, and life, took an unexpected turn.

“It was in 2001,” Sheppard wrote in a piece for Deadspin, “and I was in Rome, Italy, when the terrorist attacks happened on 9/11, and my daughter was just born. She was born in the United States, so my wife and my daughter were in the United States while I was over in Italy getting the season started. And they were getting ready to fly over and be with me in November, and, you know, that day changed the world. Especially the months and years right after 9/11—it just changed how we thought and how we traveled, and so we had to make some hard decisions, and I made one of those really hard decisions.

“I didn’t want to stop playing basketball from the athlete’s perspective. I wasn’t injured. I was with a good team. I was kind of established as a nice European basketball player, and I had another several years of a career, and possibly another cup of coffee in the NBA if the right situation presented itself. But at that point I was pretty much going to be an international, a European basketball player, and I could’ve had a few more years of that being my career. But I just felt that it wasn’t the right thing to do to continue playing. It was better to be together as a family and then move on with the next season of my life.”

Sheppard stepped away from the game for good at age 27.

For more on Sheppard’s premature retirement: https://deadspin.com/how-a-career-ends-jeff-sheppard-kentuckys-great-dunki-5898122/

Sheppard dunk highlights and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnmnLrIWtQ8

Full footage of the Summer League game above and be found via menbehindthesweaters: https://youtu.be/lmnCXpRdlxc