How NZ's Most Unlikely Basketball Legend Was Built: Brother Battles, Bleeding Fingers, Zero Shortcuts

Okay, I have two questions for you.

The first question is, what was it specifically, if you can even articulate this, it might have been just you just enjoyed it more for kind of no reason, but if there's anything in particular about basketball that you fell in love with?

I just enjoyed it more than other sports.

Like I enjoyed that you could be, um...

It was a team sport, but you could, individually you could take over a game as well.

Um, that's what I liked about it.

Like obviously I love playing be- with my friends and things like that, but if you can be the best on the court, you can really dominate a game, and there's few sports where one individual can dominate a game, and basketball is one of those sports.

You're not gonna win the game on your own, but you can certainly dominate a game or, or go a long way to winning the game with how you play.

So, um, again, I enjoyed, um, the, the team concept, but at the same time I was very driven individually to, to wanna be the best as well.

I love this.

My colleague Hannah talks about, oh, she's gonna be frustrated with me that I'm not gonna get this right.

I think it's like strong link sports and weak link sports, or strong connection sports and weak connection sports, something like this, where there are sports like rugby where every single player on the team has to be showing up with their all, otherwise the team is gonna struggle, and there are sports like basketball where a single player can make such a massive difference.

And one of the things that they found in basketball, which again, forgive me, Hannah, if you're listening to this, um, I don't remember which is the strong or the weak one, but whatever it is, um, one of the things that they found in basketball is if you have a dominant player on a team and you take that dominant player away, all the other players will rise in their performance, and then if you bring that dominant player back, the other players will stay, like at a higher level.

And we saw this last season with the NBA with the Nuggets where Jokic was out, um, Aaron Gordon was out.

Uh, if you're listening and you're not into basketball, forgive me for these like, you know, deep cut references.

But, um, but we looked at, um, the players pre- when they were in and then their kinda points per game when they were out, and just how much they all kind of stepped up was pretty astonishing.

Yeah, and a lot of times that happens in, in the sport of basketball.

You don't realize how good some people are because they, they play the role they're given by the coach or whatever, and when they're given an increased role, they're able to step into that, um, seamlessly and be able to perform at a higher level.

And, you know, that's, you know, that's the, the joy of basketball is you can, you can have these moments and, and guys rise out of nowhere sometimes in one season, you know? And like they can just have a breakout season, and generally it's because a new coach has come in and given them a more responsibility.

They've always had the ability, but they just probably haven't been given the green light to go ahead with it.

So that brings me to my second question, which was you said you, you moved on, you had the same coach, which was helpful.