D’Angelo Russell has given insight into the best way he’s learned from teammate LeBron James.
It would surely be tempting to ask one of the greatest ever NBA players lots of questions to understand their mindset and inner workings.
But Russell has found this isn’t the way to go about things with LeBron.
“Bron is one of those guys that you can learn more from by sitting back and listening, watching…,” Russell shared on The Backyard Podcast recently. He’s a smart dude, he knows all the rebuttals, answers, responses, answers to that. He knows the little knick knacks to this, rules. He’s a very smart dude. For me, I feel like I benefit a lot when I’m just listening to him. Just watching. It may even be from a distance. Not on no weird sh*t, but how he’s interacting, how he’s talking, how he’s conversating. That’s something I really picked up on. And then on the court, Bron is really a machine. Because you can’t treat him as if you’re a fan of him on the court. It’s so hard not to say something fan-ish on the court.
“As an opponent, for a fact, but I’m his teammate and I want to say something. I wanna ask him all these questions, like fanboy sh*t,” he continued. “But like I know people when they play against him, they wanna ask him those same questions and he’s like ’That’s blood, I smell it. I’m attacking it.’ So it’s gonna to be around all those different dudes, for sure… I had to normalize that because I’m a fan. So the quicker I normalized that this was just LeBron James, alright let’s just keep pushing or whatever, the better I am. The better I was. The more myself I was. But if I was still stuck in the ‘Oh my god bro, can you sign this for me bro? Can we get this selfie bro?’ It just gets weird. That ain’t really me.”
Russell has gone to another level this season, and even became the Lakers’ all-time leader for most threes in a season (192), after recently surpassing the record (183) Nick Van Exel held from the 1994-95 season.
So, whatever he is learning from LeBron definitely seems to be having the desired effect.
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