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input: “today was a good day”
output: today was a good day at the gym. We’ve got some of the best.
“It feels great. That’s the way I played.”
This was his one-on-one meeting this spring with the Dallas Mavericks. With six months left on the floor against the Toronto Raptors, he was not needed.
But he impressed.
“Me pushing me,” Malone recalled. “My big brother told me, ‘I’d love to go to another team and I need to go to them, but I don’t know if you can’t go out there and be as effective as him.’
“The first time we met, it was just, ‘Come over there and start pushing your way.’ Then we played a game together. Then it was all smiles. It was great.”
The Mavericks found way for the rookie tough guy.
“He was funny,” Malone said. “He had the quickness to break his back, run fast, get faster. And he got out into the attack, out into the paint, as fast as he could to get on the break.”
“He has a way of teaching you how to hit shots efficiently and I think that’s what the difference is is that he’s got a smart mind, able to do what he wants to do” if called upon or if there was no need to.
On this night at Dallas, Malone could watch game action and see how the Mavericks got to that first quarter, but as the first quarter began, he wasn’t ready for the second half.
“It was about a 3 but after that it was me,” Malone recalled. “That’s when the guys are going to be in and I was watching all of them.”
“He was all right,” Mavericks coach Dirk Nowitzki said. “He had the long jab, the big man, the knock down, the smarts and all that. I’m glad he didn’t give me the jab.”
A few minutes later, Malone was back on the floor as Dallas had lost 5–10 following a four-game losing streak in which he lost every time he stepped on the floor. The two leaders of the Dallas shooting exhibition team looked comfortable on the boards and it was his first time as the Mavericks’ starting shooting guard.
“That’s what he had in mind,” Nowitzki said. “Somebody’s more comfortable, some people who didn’t have the ball, the way he knew the game from the point guard spot.”
When Malone returned, Dallas’ captain, J.J. Hickson, scored three points in what was a win for the Mavericks. It was a familiar situation to Malone because Malone was the youngest player in NBA rookie history to make the NBA debut for either a four-year team or a rookie team in each of the past two seasons.
The Mavericks entered Dallas on the final day of training camp last season, but they were swept away by a shaky New York team.
“We knew we had the chance of winning and we just had to show them,” said Nowitzki. “We knew we still had some talent there and we had a lot of stuff going for us. I was happy for just one year for me and J.J.’s team.
“The Mavericks don’t get any more confidence, the way they’re going to have confidence, the way they’re going to win, things like that. Then when J.J. sees what’s going on and he wants to show a team we can win, he makes them feel good.”
It was then that Malone was a big part of why Dallas has kept J.J. on the bench for so long. That was why he decided to join the Mavericks’ bench this season, knowing that when J.J. was playing, Dallas had the first available starting center in the league.
He’s only 18 years old, and even though he played as a rookie last year, his team has become the best in college basketball.
The Mavericks’ two-time All-Star and the first member of the NBA Basketball Hall of Fame to start the season, Malone has a long history of developing young players — some older than in today’s NBA and plenty of them — and having such players become more successful than in past seasons can lead to growing pains that even the best of a player could not comprehend.
“The thing I found for myself is that if you are going to play as a rookie, you really are going to need to build you up,” Malone said. “That’s why I have a mentor for three years and it’s been good for him.”
“I think that was a great move to take a step forward and see where he can be a successful young player. I think he could be that player now,” Nowitzki said. “I think that’s a great thing for all of us.”<|endoftext|>In the wake of his controversial decision not to pursue a lawsuit against the NFL
