I’m excited for the start of training camp next week. I’m not nervous, but I’m excited. Very excited. I’m ready to get started. I want to get into practice and push the veteran players, make them work, become a better player and just try to get some playing time in games. I’ve got to keep working.
That’s what I’ve been doing all summer. After Summer League in Las Vegas, I took about three or four days off, then started working out in Memphis, back home. I worked out with Adam Wilson, my trainer. I got a lot out of it. He really helped me with my moves. We worked a lot on my ballhandling.
My focus in training camp will be on defense. I know I can score. I just want my main focus to be on playing good, strong defense. Coach Q told me it would be important, as a rookie, to play strong defense.
I hurt my left ankle earlier this week when we were hooping. It’s not serious. I caught the ball and tried to make a real quick move and I rolled it and fell to the ground. But it’s nothing serious, no big deal. I’ll be ready to go for camp. I’ve been here in Auburn Hills the past three weeks and I’m comfortable and settled in and ready for camp.
I don’t know if everybody has seen the video of what happened at the rookie photo shoot, but I know a lot of people must have seen it because as soon as that day was over, like two hours later, everybody was calling me and saying they saw it on TV or wherever. I was like, it was no big deal, it was just dunking. People were telling me the between-the-legs 360 was amazing. I was like, I’ve been doing that since high school.
We were kind of dunking all day. There were so many stations you had to go to for the photo shoot, so between stations we would go and shoot around and dunk. So when it came to the end and some of the other guys started dunking, I was sitting down and everybody was telling me to get up and start dunking.
At first, I didn’t really want to dunk. I had on all my stuff and was getting ready to leave. Then everybody started looking at me – I guess because they’d seen me dunking throughout the day – and it was like, well, what are you going to do?
So I went out and dunked and luckily I made my dunks. After the last dunk, I looked down and my shoes weren’t tied. I thought, man, I could have hurt my ankle bad or something. I didn’t realize that my shoes weren’t tied until after we had dunked already.
I was in two dunk contests before in high school, my senior year. I won one of them. The second, I was just playing around. But the first one, I did that between-the-legs 360 and won it. The first time I ever dunked, I was a freshman in high school, maybe 14 or 15. It actually came in a summer league game. It was a fast break and I jumped, I went up and when I saw how high I was, I just dunked it. The first dunk in a high school game was my sophomore year. The crowd got really excited. After that, I just started dunking more and more.
I would participate in the NBA dunk contest if they asked me. We’ll see. The between-the-legs 360, that’s kind of my best dunk. I really have a whole lot more I can do, but that’s my main one.