On the heels of a rookie season filled with highlight plays and big, meaningful production down the stretch, Justin Anderson’s biggest challenge ahead of his second season appears to be narrowing his focus, not getting caught up — as we all tend to do — in thinking of the player he could become.
That has got to be the best course of action for Anderson to take in his first summer as an NBA player, especially given the relatively low volume of minutes he played in his rookie season. While it might be hard to think of the 2015-16 Mavericks without Anderson almost immediately coming to mind, the rookie played only 647 minutes in the regular season. Almost 13 percent of his total NBA playing time has come in the postseason.
So, while the sky is literally the limit for the 6-foot-6 wing with a 7-foot wingspan and 43-inch vertical leap, the Mavs and Anderson know he’s got to keep things simple in his first offseason as a pro. That includes working with athletic performance director Jeremy Holsopple to maintain his strength and build while also increasing his efficiency of movement, in addition to conditioning his mind. Anderson told Mavs.com his biggest development in the last calendar year has been on the mental side.
“I just see the game differently. I’m able to float out there a little bit more and understand the game, and the game is so much slower,” he said. “I’m making better reads and reacting better. So that’s been the biggest difference, just the knowledge of the game. And that helps so much, being with a veteran team and learning so much in our locker room from our guys.”
One of the biggest challenges rookie players are prone to face when playing on a team full of veterans is simply finding a way to keep up with them mentally. The Mavericks had an average age of 30.3 last season, third-oldest in the NBA according to Basketball-Reference.com. Anderson is 22. When you remember how many times Dirk Nowitzki and other vets said Anderson was playing at 100 miles an hour, you begin to understand what the wing is talking about when he says the game is slowing down. Slower will suffice, even for a player who could outrun and out-leap most everyone in the Association.
There are no ways for us to quantify the impact mental development and floor awareness can have on a player, but we can track a whole bunch of other things. Anderson stuffed the box score late last season once he became a rotation player following a string of injuries. In the Mavs’ last nine regular-season games — Anderson started in eight of them — he averaged 7.7 points, 6.3 rebounds, 1.2 blocks, and 0.8 steals. He finished the regular season with a 3.2 block percentage, meaning he rejected 3.2 percent of the opponents’ 2-point shots while he was on the floor.
That ranked third on the team behind Salah Mejri and JaVale McGee, and the only wing in Mavs history to have a higher block rate was Al-Farouq Aminu (3.7 in 2014-15), according to Basketball-Reference, but he played a ton of minutes at power forward. Anderson played 91 percent of his minutes as either the small forward or shooting guard. He also became the first Mavs wing in six years to dunk four times in a game.
He carried that explosiveness into the playoffs, where his last-second block of Kevin Durant in Game 2 helped the Mavericks steal a win on the road. Earlier that night, he had a put-back dunk off a missed free throw. In that five-game series with the Thunder, Anderson’s opponents shot just 25.0 percent against him from inside of six feet, according to NBA.com.
Needless to say, the weight of fan expectations will only grow heading into Year 2 of his young career, but it’s important to keep in mind that, including playoff action, he has played less than 16 full NBA games’ worth of minutes.
With his rookie season behind him, Anderson said he took some time earlier this summer to decompress. He spent time at his home in Virginia to visit with his family, with whom he keeps in contact during the season via FaceTime. He recently got back from a trip to Las Vegas, just in time to take on a local radio personality in a classic game of Madden. Later this week he’ll host a youth basketball camp in Virginia, with an elite basketball camp for high schoolers coming later this summer.
After camp, though, it will be time for him to focus on his second trip to Vegas of the summer, but this time for Summer League. He averaged 17.5 points per game in Vegas last summer, playing alongside Dwight Powell.
Powell won’t be there this time around, however, which means Anderson could have an opportunity to be the focal point of the team, as he was anytime he would play in the D-League with the Texas Legends last season. Obviously at the NBA level Anderson won’t get 15 shots a game — for a while, at least — but performing while bearing the burden of responsibility can help a player’s confidence. It certainly helped Anderson last season, so expect a strong showing from him. The Vegas League runs from July 8-18.
Somewhere, deep down, Anderson surely has grand visions of the player he could one day become. So do his fans. But until he arrives to that finish line — it could be one year, or five — he will continue to work to get there. How do we know this? Anderson watches Nowitzki’s workouts with Holger Geschwindner every chance he gets and picks the German’s brain for fun. He works with a software called Axon to improve his play recognition and anticipation. He’s the classic “first one there, last to leave” type of player, and he has the humility and maturity to understand that’s the way it should be for a young player on a team with an average age north of 30.
The Mavs’ organizational goal is to get younger sooner than later, and Anderson fits in with that vision. He’s 22 years old with unprecedented athleticism, the right mentality, and a hunger to get better at whatever he can, whenever he can. That’s a rare mix to find in any athlete.
As most of us have been, Anderson is keeping up with the postseason, watching these teams closely and taking note of the hype. He’s learning even while he isn’t playing, carefully paying attention to the Warriors’ and Cavaliers’ every move. As he watches, and as the series develops, he begins to understand something else: He feels like his team is closer to reaching that stage than you might think. He’s got confidence, too.
“I think I’ve learned the most here in the last three or four weeks, just in the sense of watching the game and saying, ‘Hey man, we belong,'” he said. “I’ll take our team, I’ll some some of our stars any day. I think we’re a good enough team, and in watching it, I know I can compete and I know I can play at that high level. One day I hope I’m in the Finals, because that environment is awesome. It’s go big or go home. You can’t be scared. You’ve got to go out there and you’ve really got to lay it all out on the line, and there’s no better way to play. That’s how I play. Every possession is so important, and playing hard every possession is so important.
“The world is watching. Everyone right now is talking about two teams. Hopefully one day I’m a part of those two teams that they’re talking about.”
On the heels of the five-year anniversary of the Mavs’ first championship, it’s becoming more and more clear that if Dallas is to get back to that stage anytime soon, Anderson will be a big reason why.
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