Daniss Jenkins plays as if he thinks he’s the best player on the court.
Against the Los Angeles Lakers and their future Hall of Famers, he was.
On Monday, March 23, the Detroit Pistons’ backup point guard scored a career-high 30 points and had eight assists against one turnover – though that wasn’t the half of it. He scored the Pistons’ last six points – including the game-winning shot, a 10-footer along the baseline he released at the top of his jump.
In basketball, the legs often tell the story. Right now, Jenkins has his firmly under him, and if he keeps them there, he could help change how the Pistons’ story unfolds.
His coach, J.B. Bickerstaff, had called a timeout before that last bucket, put the ball in Jenkins’ hands and asked his rangy and explosive guard to get downhill and make a play, only a couple of weeks after he’d benched Jenkins in Toronto. But then Jenkins is used to the undulating journey.
Just this season, he’s gone from a good story to a great story to the bench, though the folks that paid him didn’t figure he’d stay there for long. They believed in him.
It was getting in his way.
Expectation can be funny like that. So can money.
It’ll change perceptions if you’re not careful, and sometimes even if you are. It can also change how you go about the business that created expectations in the first place.
The 6-foot-4 guard figured that out recently and found his way out of the worst stretch of basketball of his season.
He’d gone from a two-way player to an “actual NBA player” – his phrase – back in early February, and it turned out it was more than he could handle in the moment.
That moment turned into a few moments, which turned into a few games, which turned into a full-blown slump, which turned into a DNP in Toronto, and sent everyone wondering what had happened to the player that made the Pistons want to sign Jenkins to a two-year, $7.8 million contract.
Even Jenkins wondered. Not why they paid him; he knew that. But why he was struggling to handle his new status in the league. He’d worked all his life for it. Never lost sight of the long game. Told everyone, but mostly his brother, that no player anywhere was better than him.
And he believed it.
Even as he made his way from the University of the Pacific to Odessa College to Iona – and that was just to get to St. John’s. Even as he went undrafted and landed in the G League. He told himself it was only a matter of time.
‘That’s the way God made me’
At no point did he worry about expectation or what someone else thought. All his life, he always thought he was the best player on the floor … no matter the floor. That’s how he felt again at Little Caesars Arena on Monday.
Never mind that LeBron James shared the floor. And Luka Dončić. Or even Jalen Duren, his All-Star teammate.
“From the second I got here it just seemed like he had irrational confidence,” said Kevin Huerter, his newest teammate. “In practice, [he was] talking [expletive], in shooting drills [he was] talking [expletive]. You get in games and it’s like he gets fired up by the moment and just by the competition of the game. Maybe it was him feeling slighted all his career.”
Whatever it was, said Huerter, “someone did him right in his life.”
God, Jenkins will tell you. He did him right.
So did his family. And his coaches. And his teammates. But let’s get back to God, because Jenkins says that confidence has always been with him.
“That’s the way God made me,” he said.
What happened to that belief after he signed the contract?
“I felt the pressure of expectation,” he said, “like they expected me to be good. When you’re a two-way, you’re just a great story, an American story, everybody loves it. But then when you get that regular [contract], and you’re actually an NBA player, now it’s like, ‘OK, the pressure of everybody expecting you to be great.’”
His teammates. His coaches. The front office.
Or so he thought.
‘Rise to the level of your work’
No one ever said a word to him about expectation. Oh, they talked to him about handling them, about navigating the life-changing money and the changing perception, but they didn’t put extra pressure on him.
He did that.
He said he lost the proper internal energy and had to get it back. It wasn’t easy. Not at first. He was pressing, which sped him up on the court, which led to tough shots, led to rough turnovers, and led to brutal efficiency and fewer minutes.
“That’s not easy,” he said, “to go from being low and playing bad, and then you’re out of the rotation, DNPs, and the next thing you know your number is called, and you’ve got to be there.”
He had to keep his mind clear. Had to rediscover what “makes me … me.” Had to be free.
He found it again, though.
In his first game after the DNP, when All-Star starter Cade Cunningham went down in Washington last Tuesday with a collapsed lung, Jenkins stepped up: 15 points, seven assists, a couple steals. A few days later, against the Golden State Warriors, he nearly had a triple-double – 22 points, seven rebounds, eight assists – in 38:25 on the floor.
Next time out, on Monday night, he played the most liberated game of his professional career.
It wasn’t just the points and assists and sticky defense; it was his command, and on a floor with a couple of all-time maestros. Here was the player the Pistons had seen in training camp, in practice, jawing at everyone and getting buckets.
Here was the player that made Duren say to himself the first time he saw him in summer camp:
“He one of them ones.”
Here was the player that Bickerstaff had been talking to every day during the recent downturn, trying to find the “triggers,” as Bickerstaff calls them, the buttons that would release Jenkins from his funk.
He knew he belonged. He’d proved he belonged. He just had to learn how to find a new goal. Or rather keep believing despite finally reaching the goal.
All his life he’d believed he was destined for the NBA. Then he got there and thought: What now?
Sometimes succeeding at the destination is just a matter of learning to believe what you believed all along. Jenkins is playing like he believes again and playing with that irrational confidence.
Luka? LeBron? The Lakers on a nine-game winning streak? The ball in his hands with the game on the line?
“At the end of the day, you’re going to rise to the level of your work,” he said. “When I get those big shots, I trust the work.”
Maybe that was the lesson all along.
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Daniss Jenkins was best player on the court against Luka and LeBron
Reporting by Shawn Windsor, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
