The Best N.B.A. Rebounding Training: Battling 14 Siblings

He went on: “Usually, honesty is quite ugly, and people don’t like it. But it’s important in the N.B.A. because you need immediate results. We play games every other day, so you need to get at the root of the problem.”

Sure enough, the interconnected themes of family, community and, yes, teamwork run throughout Adams’s 2018 autobiography, “My Life, My Fight: Rising Up From New Zealand to the OKC Thunder.” Adams is proud of the book.

“Threw some words together, didn’t I?” he said.

He writes about playing sports as a boy and about getting pushed around by his older sisters. (One of them, Valerie Adams, is a two-time Olympic champion in the shot put who recently retired after winning the bronze medal at the Tokyo Games in 2021.) He writes about struggling with the loss of his father, who died of cancer when Steven was 13, and finding basketball through the help of local coaches who guided him to camps and provided him with opportunities.

He also writes about feeling isolated at Notre Dame Preparatory School in Fitchburg, Mass., where he spent a postgraduate season before enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh. By then, Adams writes, he had gotten used to having a “tight-knit community” around him — friends who were “always willing to help out with anything.” Without that sense of community, Adams suffered.

So being a part of one — and even helping to create one — was something he prioritized when he joined the Thunder as the No. 12 pick in the 2013 N.B.A. draft. On a playoff-ready team led by Durant and Westbrook, Adams was happy to do the blue-collar work that came naturally to him: block shots and set screens, rebound and defend.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/sports/basketball/steven-adams-memphis-grizzlies.html