Dereck Lively II’s hard-won gravity

We caught up with Dereck Lively II to discuss his breakout rookie season in the NBA and a whole lot more in the NBPA’s Brotherhood Deli at Las Vegas Summer League.

LAS VEGAS — Not many people come to Las Vegas for self-reflection. To lose themselves, yes, but to veer into the meditative is a direction at odds with the city itself. Distractions abound, the lights, sound and heat will drain from you what the casinos don’t take, and your grasp on time will eventually and assuredly slip.

At odds with these time-bending qualities is the reality that for many in the NBA, Summer League is as reliable a marker for a year going by as they come. Not all NBA athletes make it to All-Star Weekend, fewer make it into the postseason, but for 20 years many of them have hit the floor in Vegas for their first taste of NBA basketball. Dereck Lively II did last summer, and after the profound year he’s just had, he finds himself reflecting in the familiar din of UNLV’s Thomas & Mack concourse.

“I think about it a lot. Seeing myself a year ago, I was a completely different player — I feel like I was a completely different person overall,” Lively says, tucked into a relatively quiet corner of the NBPA’s Brotherhood Deli pop-up. “Taking a step back, seeing the long journey that I’ve been on — I wouldn’t say it stopped — but it’s the beginning of the long journey that I have in the NBA.”

To Lively’s point of being a different person, the ways his life has changed on and off the court in the last year are profound. Less than a calendar year after he was drafted, Lively made it to the NBA Finals. His postseason efforts saw him steadily improving series-to-series, with his teammates readily trusting him and notably, Dallas’ star and leader Luka Doncic saying the Mavs wouldn’t have made it to the Western Conference Finals without him. Lively also lost his mother, Kathy Drysdale, to cancer a few hours before Dallas’ last game of the regular season. She was 53.

That profound loss and great achievement happening nearly in unison are not comparison points. Both realities exist in tandem in Lively’s young life. He’s been honest about the loss of his mother (and prior to her death, her diagnosis and treatments) and he’s also been candid that what she would want for him — what she always coached him to do — was to “keep it moving”. Given his grounded, palpably even-keeled demeanor, Lively’s teammates have admitted they tend to forget how young he really is, but even a person predisposed to level-headedness doesn’t accomplish Lively’s ready balance without serious work.

“I feel like that’s where you find yourself and figure out who you are, is in those high-intensity moments,” Lively says, shifting to cite a hypothetical in-game situation as an example, “whenever there’s three seconds left but only a two point difference, and there’s only one play that’s going to happen — in those moments, that’s when your heart is beating a different way, you can tell that you’re enjoying the game that you love because all you want to do, and all you’re focusing on, is winning.”

To use a real-life example, a door in the corner of the pop-up continues to fly open from the inside and deliver Summer League staff from an arena corridor into the crowded space. Lively extends a preemptive, protective arm each time the door swings open to shield us, but his attention never shifts. It’s by no means as intense as postseason basketball, but it brings to mind the focus he needed to navigate the league’s steep learning curve to help his team make the Finals, and excel throughout his rookie season.

“It’s putting yourself into a sink or swim situation. You’re either going to float, and breathe air, tread water, or you’re going to sink and fail,” Lively says of his rookie season mentality. “I have to be able to learn, have to be able to adapt, and I can’t be the same person I am in the first quarter to the third quarter, because everything’s always consistently changing on the floor.”

Asked if he had any moments where a lightbulb went off to highlight an in-game adjustment to a play as it was unfolding, or a response that came too late, and Lively only looks to the work. His progress throughout the playoffs was proof of that. In Dallas’ first series, Lively recorded a -19 over 19 minutes of play in Game 1 against the Clippers. He moved to rebound and block, but took a backseat on the offensive end of the floor. By Game 5, he was recording a +24 over as many minutes, with 12 points, 7 rebounds, plus the earlier defensive intangibles.

Against OKC he was dynamic out of the gate, providing generative bursts of offense to disrupt a Thunder team that looked stumped at being outrun and outmaneuvered. Lively cut, bodied, and burst his way into the paint, all the while pulling defenders from Doncic. Against Minnesota, despite both teams mirroring each other in pace, Lively helped wear down a tired Wolves team to the point that the normally combustive Anthony Edwards looked a step behind, and Rudy Gobert consistently lost Lively under the rim. Lively was vocal, calling plays and urging teammates to their spots, a far cry from the watchful rookie of Game 1 in L.A.

When the NBA Finals rolled around, it appeared Lively’s real-time evolution met its match. Boston set ample pressure against him early in the series and never let up. Like the rest of us, they had been watching.

“It takes a lot of time and effort to understand the game, and understand what your opponent is trying to do, to then read what they’re doing. It takes learning to get there,” he says.

Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images

Of the growth of the team, Lively recognizes they were able to adapt and excel given the extra runway they had in the postseason following their midseason overhaul. Dallas looked as intuitive as they did, nearly enough to challenge a seemingly inevitable Boston team that’s been consistent throughout several competing seasons, because they had extra runway to click. Of his own growth, Lively knows it’s rooted at the core of who he is.

“I feel like my mom taught me that way of the game. She always taught me to be loud, be vocal, but to me it’s just thinking what’s going on on the court out loud,” he says. “And as I talk and my teammates see what I’m thinking, we all just click on the same cue.”

On a technical level, Lively marries recharging off the floor to what’s going to help him out on it. Lots of hand-eye coordination, like light-based drills to improve his reaction time, and doing things with his hands, like building Lego sets. He says he makes an effort to get out for walks, or drive in a pinch, and listen to music. He enjoys impromptu interactions with people he meets around the city and says their pride in him and the team underscores his gratitude to be where he is, doing what he’s able to do.

When Lively references time, whether in reps, development, or just the reality of it passing, it’s never in past tense. There can be an inclination in basketball to treat whole seasons as just the finite months on the calendar they take up, without the acknowledgement that progress can stall or carry over. Time, in the NBA, is treated as a neat, equatable thing, broken down into stats and results and wiped in preparation for the next year. Talking about next season, and looking forward to playing with Klay Thompson, Lively says that time is for “seeing how much trust we can have in one another” versus the impulse to imagine himself and the Mavs right back in the postseason they just finished.

Lively, aware of time’s simultaneous trickiness and fragility, seems to hold it in his head as a live thing.

“I try to stay in the moment because when I look ahead I get anxious,” Lively says. “There’s things that I don’t know what’s going to happen, things that I can’t control. So the only thing I can control is what’s happening today. I take that to heart, and I take that to game days. Just trusting your routine, trusting the things you’ve done in the past that will lead you up to the present, so that you can get you to the future. I feel like people are trying to get to the future without dealing with the present.”

In the present, Lively has come to value his teammates as his extended family. They may see him as older than his years, but they rallied tightly around him in tragedy. Sometimes that looked like empowering him in a must-win game, other times “it’s being there: picking up the phone, putting hands on him, loving on him,” Dwight Powell said in early May.

“To go to them and ask for guidance, and to understand you can’t always make the right play, but it’s the ability to bounce back after the wrong play — that’s something I’ve been taking to heart,” Lively says.

Part of Lively’s gravity, it’s clear, comes from facing tough feelings and difficult situations head on. Not in a rush to process, or get through what’s hard, but knowing that failure, loss and clarity go hand in hand. It’s been a hard-won truth for him.

“I feel like that pressure to live, that pressure to mess up, feel a failure, almost drives me to succeed more because of the feel of failure,” Lively stresses. “The feel of falling on your ass is what’s going to drive you to do your best.”

Flagging that it takes a lot of confidence to embrace the possibility of failing, Lively agrees, but highlights the discrepancy between confidence that manifests as blind certainty, and confidence that trusts itself.

“I feel like a lot of people are afraid to fail, but failing is a part of the journey,” he says. “You can’t learn without failing. You can’t just be going win-win-win-win, you’re gonna end up hitting a wall because that’s just life.”

Almost on cue, the heavy tunnel door swings open, barely missing us both.

Lively laughs. “Life’s going to bring you back down to reality, no matter how much on a high horse you get.”