by Steven Adams
When the trade deadline got near, we knew Reggie wanted to leave. And because we knew he wanted to leave, we wanted him to leave as well. Why would we want to work every day with someone who wanted to be somewhere else? When he was finally traded to the Detroit Pistons we forgot about him pretty quickly because we had new guys to welcome to the team. The guy who I immediately connected with was Enes because we were both bigs and had the same hustle. It was a little weird to have a guy my age join the bigs practice after spending my rookie season going up against old guys like Perk and Nick. We were almost the same height and a similar weight, we were both overseas recruits and we both talked a lot of shit in practice. The only difference was he talked shit with a Turkish accent. In other words, we were a bromance waiting to happen.
Enes was just as vocal as Reggie during games but was the complete opposite. Sometimes when guys get traded it can take them time to get used to the new team, and you can see some of their old team habits hanging around. Not Enes. As soon as he walked into our locker room, he was a Thunder guy. His fierce loyalty went wherever he went, so as soon as he arrived in Oklahoma he was ready to put his body on the line for his teammates. We respected that and encouraged it. He might have talked more in one game than I’d spoken in a whole season, but it didn’t matter. Different personalities can work well on a team as long as everyone has the same goal.
Enes arrived in the middle of my injury month and had his work cut out for him, with me injured and Perk traded. He didn’t hesitate for a second and did the work of two big men. It was surreal seeing someone wearing the Thunder uniform and playing my position, executing in all the areas I had been trying to improve. But, at the same time, he was new to the team and didn’t know all the plays, which is where I came in.
Getting traded mid-season meant there was literally one day of transition before Enes threw on a singlet and played for us, so he had to learn on the fly. I don’t think anyone would have predicted me helping out trade recruits in my second season, but I loved the extra responsibility. Every time he came out of the game and onto the bench, I made sure he sat next to me so I could explain what plays we were running and what we were doing on defense. When he picked it up quickly, I let him know he was doing good. He seemed surprised by that. I guess he was used to competing for the spot, not working together to make the team succeed.
When I was finally cleared to play against the Toronto Raptors exactly one month after the fracture, I started on the bench. Being cleared to play doesn’t mean you are 100 percent healthy. My hand could work just fine, but it was stiff from underuse and still caused a lot of pain when I caught the ball a certain way.
It took a long time before I could get through a full game without needing a massage or ice to help with the pain. I started to think of all the games I had played without pain and how I had taken them for granted. It was a bit like when you get a toothache and immediately start remembering how you never thanked your teeth for not hurting before.
In the week before my injury we had played the New Orleans Pelicans in back-to-back games. It doesn’t happen often in a season, and it almost feels like a mini playoff series. We won the first game on their turf despite KD being out injured again (he was injured a lot that season). Then two nights later we were back in OKC and playing them again. It was a tied game, 113–113, with one second to go, and the Pelicans had the inbound. They gave it to their star Anthony Davis, and he sank a buzzer-beater three for the win.
We were gutted. Every win counts and every win when you’ve got injured players feels a bit sweeter. But we didn’t dwell on it because it was one game in an 82-game season and probably wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference by the time the playoffs came around. Little did we know that one particular loss would come back to bite us in the arse.
As we settled in with our new teammates and headed into the final stretch of games, we got used to playing without KD. His foot had given him more problems when I was also injured, and he sat out for a few weeks. We thought he might make it back for the last bunch of games, but he got surgery at the end of March and was out for the rest of the season.
We had a good run of wins in March, but for our last 10 games we came up against most of the top-placed teams and went on a losing streak. By the time our last game of the regular season finally rolled around, most of us just wanted the season to be finished. I’d missed 12 games, Russ had missed 15, and KD had missed 55.
We were tied with the Pelicans on 44 wins and 37 losses, and we were placed at eighth and ninth in the standings. The outcomes of our final regular-season match-ups would determine who went to the playoffs and who didn’t. We had the advantage playing the last-placed Timberwolves, while the Pelicans were up against the Spurs.
We went out and beat the Timberwolves in time to catch the moment the Pelicans beat the Spurs. Because we were tied on the table, the team to advance would be the one that won the most games in our regular season series against each other. The Pelicans won our season head-to-head 3–1. Anthony Davis’s buzzer-beater to win game four had sent the Pelicans to the playoffs and the Thunder somewhere they hadn’t been since 2009—the post-season bottom seven.
In a way it was good we didn’t make the playoffs. KD would still have been injured and there is no way we would have gone far without him, especially with Russ and me still working through issues with our hands. A long off-season would be good for everyone to rest their bodies and recover after a sluggish, painful six months of basketball.
We went away relieved to have a break and I left Oklahoma immediately. I left so quickly that I found out via Twitter that Scott Brooks had been fired as our head coach. Of course it came as a shock to me. We had clearly had a crappy season, but the reasons for it were easy to see. All you had to do was look at the regular line-up of players wearing suits instead of uniforms at our games.
I left at the end of the season expecting to come back to Scotty’s coaching at the beginning of the next season. Perhaps it was my naivety, but I had absolutely no idea that there was even a chance he would be fired because of our performance that season. He was the OKC Thunder coach and had been with Russ and KD from the start. He was tight with everyone, which is what made it even stranger to find out online that he had been fired. Since then I’ve seen that is how it works for almost every player and coach. We all find out what’s happening to our teammates, and sometimes ourselves, by checking the Twitter page of ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
It took less than two weeks for Thunder management to hire a new head coach—and once again I found out who he was via Twitter. Billy Donovan was the hugely successful coach of the University of Florida, which with him as coach had been one of the most successful college basketball teams in the past two decades. I read articles about Scotty’s firing to see what the reasons for it were because it definitely wasn’t the players complaining. I felt kinda stink about it while I was in New Zealand on break, but I soon told myself I had better get used to it because the NBA is a business, and a cutthroat one at that.
I spent my first two weeks in New Zealand relaxing for the first time in years. My school mates and I went wine tasting. As far as money went, food and wine were about the only things I spent it on. I still hadn’t bought a house, and rent in Oklahoma City is comparatively cheap. I hadn’t bought a car because a dealer loaned me a nice Ford pickup truck. I never wore jewelery so I wasn’t going out dropping thousands of dollars on chain necklaces or earrings. When you have simple needs, it’s almost hard to spend your money.
What I did happily indulge in was wine. You probably wouldn’t think it, but I know my way around a fine merlot. Apparently, Pop also loves a drop, and I’m still developing an elaborate plan that will see us going on a wine tour of Italy together. It involves an inbound pass from the Spurs bench, a succinct and flawless one-liner from me before I pass the ball in, and then playing it cool, leaving it to Pop to make the next move. This is the sort of stuff I start thinking about when I have too much time on m
y hands.
While I was home, the Adams clan had a mini reunion in Rotorua. It was our first one since 2005, but not much had changed for the kids. I’d gone from being the shortest to the tallest in the family photo, but otherwise I was still the baby. Sid, Ralph, and Warren were the only absentees. We tried to re-create the photo from 2005, but it wasn’t the same. Everyone had gotten a bit wider and we weren’t in Dad’s big backyard like before. And, of course, the old man wasn’t standing in the middle as the anchor.
I got another tattoo added to my arm, but realized I couldn’t keep doing that every year or I’d soon have no more body left. Instead I decided to wait for big moments before adding anything. Big moments like an NBA Championship.
I told Kenny and Gav I wanted to travel. I had never been anywhere just for fun, and it seemed like something I should do while I could afford it. I could tell they were a bit hesitant because I’d never been let loose on the world without a basketball coach or trainer nearby to make sure I was keeping up with my workouts. But they needn’t have worried. I was going to see my sister Val in Switzerland.
Val had been based there for a couple years with her new coach Jean-Pierre Egger. I thought that my life as a professional athlete was physically tough, but after spending a few days training with Val I realized I had it so good.
At the time, Val was by some stretch the world’s best woman shot-putter—a two-time Olympic champion, four-time world champion, and IAAF Women’s Athlete of the Year. She hadn’t lost a meet in five years. She was about as dominant as an athlete could possibly be at world level, yet she lived very differently from her younger brother who played basketball seven months a year and would have been glad to be considered in the top 500 players in the world. Part of the issue was that athletics generally isn’t as lucrative a sport as basketball. But a lot of it was simply because she’s a woman.
Val was living and training in Magglingen, a small Swiss town with a world-class athletic training facility owned by the government. The people who trained there were all full-time, world-class athletes. None of them were rich, though, including Val. She had based herself there because that’s where the best facilities and coaching were. And she was willing to live anywhere if it helped her performance. But she was alone over there and had to be her own motivator when things got tough. She lived in a single room with a shower and toilet. It was small for a regular-sized person and tiny for an Adams.
Val took me to one of her trainings and I nearly died. Lots of guys look at (most) NBA players and see strong men at the peak of their physical fitness. Those same guys probably look at strong women and think they could still beat them in an arm wrestle. I’ve never been foolish enough to think that because, with a sister like Val, I know better.
I was keen to train with her because I hadn’t seen her properly in a few years and we both seemed to be in the best shape of our lives. With that classic Adams competitiveness, things got interesting in the gym. Except I couldn’t even do the work she was doing, let alone do it well. My gym routines had involved a lot of core stability work, building up some leg muscle (but not too much), and occasionally some heavy deadlifting.
Val was throwing around weights that I didn’t even want to stand next to in case I got injured.
I told her I couldn’t risk getting injured trying new lifts so she took me through her other workouts for speed, explosiveness, and agility. If you think shot-putters just need to be strong, think again. Her vertical was almost better than mine and she would kill the standard basketball agility tests. It was amazing finally getting to see my sister in her element, and I wasn’t at all surprised to see her huge work ethic given she was an Adams kid.
Even though there’s a nine-year age gap between us and we didn’t grow up together, Val and I have a lot in common and are arguably the most similar of all my siblings. A bunch of us could have been world-class athletes if the circumstances had been right and the commitment had been there, but Val and I were the only two with enough of a single-track mind to stick at it long term.
I will always have massive respect for Val and everything she’s accomplished. Being a woman in sport means doing the same amount of work as men for a fraction of the reward, so only those who are truly passionate and driven stick around at the top for as long as she has. There were no multimillion-dollar contracts or hugely lucrative sponsorships, there was just enough money for her to train and get by from tournament to tournament.
Growing up and watching Val as she moved up in the world of athletics, I knew that it was even more possible to be a professional athlete if you had the Adams genes and work ethic. Getting to the NBA wasn’t a pipe dream for me, it was a realistic possibility thanks to my genes and the drive I had inherited from my dad and my older siblings.
I spent two weeks with Val in Switzerland, trained well, and attempted to throw the shot put for the first time since high school. I was way stronger than I was in school and it probably went further than my PB, but Val laughed at me anyway.
A month later Val had to return to Auckland for surgery and I made sure I was there when it happened. Undergoing surgery when a healthy body is what keeps you employed makes it a much bigger deal than when you work in an office. I had had a similar experience with my hand, and it was good to talk about the struggles of going through rehab and trying to get back to peak fitness.
It was a good, long off-season and by the time I got back to OKC for training camp I was well and truly ready for a better Thunder season. Everyone came back to training with a chip on their shoulder. The last season was in the past and we were ready to take full advantage of the team we had, now that we were all healthy again. Much like players come and go quite seamlessly, Billy Donovan settled in quickly as the new head coach. There weren’t many other changes because we had pretty much the same roster.
OKC TEAM ROSTER 2015–16
STEVEN ADAMS, center
D. J. AUGUSTIN, guard
NICK COLLISON, forward
KEVIN “KD” DURANT, forward
RANDY FOYE, guard
JOSH HUESTIS, forward
SERGE IBAKA, forward
ENES KANTER, center
MITCH MCGARY, forward
NAZR MOHAMMED, center
ANTHONY MORROW, guard
STEVE NOVAK, forward
CAMERON PAYNE, guard
ANDRE “DRE” ROBERSON, guard
KYLE SINGLER, forward
DION WAITERS, guard
RUSSELL “RUSS” WESTBROOK, guard
We started our preseason how we planned to continue, with everyone playing in a win over the Spurs. We hadn’t played a game with a full-strength squad in what seemed like forever, and it reminded us just how good we were as a unit. KD was back, though not pushing too hard in the preseason. Russ was back—and he doesn’t know how to not push hard. Enes was now a core part of the team and Dre was becoming our key defensive guy. As for me, I had some new moves I’d been working on that were finally ready to start seeing court time.
Every player works on new moves all the time. Some players will work on something for a week and then try it out in a game. Others work for a month before going public with it. I work on a move for seasons before any fan sees it. It’s not that it wouldn’t work or that it takes me ages to learn it, I just like to go for the sure option, and a brand-new move is hardly ever the sure option.
When I first arrived in OKC, the things I knew I could do for sure were rebound and dunk. Everyone else had all other areas covered, so I just did those two things and worked hard on my defense. But in the gym, MB put me straight to work learning the floater. I’d done floaters before with Kenny, but MB made floaters the shot. Every single practice I shot floaters—every kind of floater. No dribble, one dribble, from the elbow, off a spin… every sort. No matter what else we did during our bigs practice, shooting floaters was in there.
MB wanted to make it so that shooting a floater would be as instinctive as going up for an easy dunk. I wasn’t ba
d at them, even in the beginning, but it took a long while before I started to bring them out regularly in games. Even though it was an option for me, I figured any shot that Russ or KD took was probably a better option than me taking a mid-range floater. And I was right.
Floaters and hook shots are MB’s two non-negotiables. With the way the NBA is getting faster and big guys are playing as guards, every post player has to have a hook shot. Ask MB and he’ll talk for hours about why a hook shot is as important to a center as a layup, maybe even more important. I feel like I’ve shot more hook shots and more floaters in my life than I’ve thought thoughts.
We get 15 minutes with MB before we practice as a full team. Sometimes that will be 15 minutes of nothing but floaters. Sometimes it will be 15 minutes of only jump hooks. Sometimes it will be all post moves: drop step, or rip to the middle. Or it will be a seal day; I’ll seal a guy and he’ll throw it up to me. If you miss, you go again until you make it. But hooks will always be there, and floaters will always be there. They weren’t foreign shots to me, but I had never practiced them so much before moving to OKC.
One particular move that MB wanted me to work on was the quick spin on the baseline. It’s a good move. When you get the ball low in the post, the natural instinct is to pivot back into the middle where there is more space. With the baseline right there, it’s also natural to defend heavily on the open side to force a player to go baseline and risk dribbling out-of-bounds or trapping themselves. The baseline spin that MB showed me was a tight, quick, full pivot towards the baseline, using the defender’s body as an anchor. It’s meant to be done without needing to dribble at all. But because there’s no dribble, the footwork has to be impeccable or you’ll be called for a travel.