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I think in Toronto my job was to score just based on the system that we had. We played a lot of iso basketball - a lot of one-on-one basketball.
I always have these debates with my friends, I was like 'can you imagine dropping LeBron in '75?' and I was like 'bro he'd win 15 championships in a row.'
I'm not a flopper. I hate when people say I'm a flopper. I don't flop. You never see me flying all over the floor. None of that. I barely fall down in games.
The structure of college basketball never made sense to me. The coach is the star and you get up at 5:30 A.M. to run before class. That was never appealing to me.
I've always gotten doubled. Coming off the bench, people try to eliminate bench scorers, so that's been my experience for years now. You just find ways to beat it.
I was raised in the NBA. I've seen some guys stay and I've seen a lot go. I've watched James Harden be a rival of mine for Sixth Man of the Year to an MVP candidate.
A.I. didn't ask me to do a bunch of stuff for him. He just wanted me around. Usually we were at the Friday's in Philly, which he should have bought, because he was there so much.
I can't shoot straight-up. I've always played crooked. One of my coaches says I play backwards. I do everything backwards. I don't have coordination. It's weird to watch me play.
I'm not going to be the guy that says, 'I'm the new point guard, look at me, look at me, put me on billboards and sell my jersey.' I'm not going to be him. I'm going to do my job.
Sometimes I just think we get caught up in the entertainment aspect of this business and people kind of forget that this is the way we feed our families and this is our livelihoods.
Once you're there, you'll love playing for the Raptors and love playing for the country, but by the fourth or fifth month into the season, you're just like damn man, I wanna go home.
I think my assist numbers dropped off in Toronto with the way we were built. We played a lot of isolation basketball. I know we were in the bottom half in the NBA as far as assists go.
A lot of guys ask me, 'Why did you go straight from high school to the NBA?' So I ask them, 'If you had the opportunity to take your dream job at 17- or 18-years-old, would you do it?'
I think as competitors, that's why we get into this, to gain respect from the guys who have played the game, and you walk away and they say, 'He was a tough cover - that dude was nice.'
If you look at the history of the NBA, guys that came out of high school are the guys that held the NBA together. You look a Kobe Bryant, you look at a LeBron, these are household names.
In the NBA they've taken away so much of the hand-checking and the physicality of how guys are able to guard you. So if you touch me, I'm gonna throw the ball toward the rim and get shots.
I don't sleep much. I think it's hereditary. My mom doesn't sleep. My dad never slept. My naps are definitely when I get the most sleep. I'm a big napper - that's when I get most of my sleep.
If you think that I got to come off the bench, then I am going to put you in a position to try to prove you wrong. Then after a while, it was kind of fun, and over the years it was my makeup.
I've always had jewelry over the years, but when it comes to clothes, I'm just a white or black Polo tee guy with some jeans and a pair of Jordans, and I'm cool. As long as I'm comfortable, I'm cool.
I played varsity in high school as a 9th grader. I came off the bench during the first game of the season and had 25 points. Well, I became a starter after that and in the second game I scored 53 points.
I was raised in a musical house. Marvin Gaye. Boyz II Men. Jodeci. My mom always played that Toni Braxton song, 'Un-Break My Heart.' When I hear that song, it still puts me right back in the car with her.
Whenever I'm out on the basketball court, I lace up and just hoop. Whether it's in summertime, at practice, in the games, playoffs, every time I step out on the basketball court, I approach it the same way.
A lot of the stories I got on A.I., I can't say publicly. Overall, I just really appreciated how he went about going into games. He got a lot of flak for the 'practice' comment, but every game, he gave it his all.
Playoff basketball isn't about who scores, stats or putting numbers up on the board. It's just about winning at the end of the day. When you play a game in a series, it becomes chess. It becomes who can outsmart the other team.
It doesn't really matter to me whether you start or not. I play a lot of fourth quarters. I think that's what's most important to me. I think that's what I've always cared about, just having an opportunity to finish games when it's really winning time.
It's not an easy thing to be in this league 10 years. Especially with me being a second-round pick, the 46th pick, and an undersized guard, to carve a lane for myself and have a career, for my family to realize that and appreciate that, it meant a lot to me.
When I got traded to the Raptors Kyle Lowry told me, 'We expect you to average 15 points a game off the bench.' And I said, 'Perfect, so you need me here.' And that made me feel wanted. So once he put that expectation on me, it just made everything fall into place.
I thought I was pretty average height. And then it just clicked to me - 'Yo, you're undersized.' I guess when I got older and my body started hurting, I'm like, 'I'm not as big as I thought I was.' So I always played with the mentality that I was bigger than I actually was.
I had the opportunity to play alongside Allen Iverson and Kevin Ollie at the same time. I kind of had the best of both worlds. I had one guy that was super talented and another guy that came with his lunch pail every day and that was a worker. I want to kind of be a mix of both.
Honestly, I was a troublemaker. The environment I grew up in, my mom and my sister, they decided they were going to sign me up in every single thing to keep me busy. I played football, basketball, baseball. Anything, whatever was in season, I was signed up for it. Basketball was one of the things that just stuck.
I wanted to prove that I could be a starter. And then once I realized I was gonna be a sixth man and it wasn't gonna change, I just relished the role. I just said, 'I'm going to make it really hard on whoever it is that has to guard me these next 10-11 minutes that I'm in here.' And after a while you just create an identity.
I'd never seen my father stand up. As far as I can remember, my father was always in a wheelchair. I always remembered that. And I remember my first basketball game, ever, he rolls into the gym, he stays by the door and he watches me play. And that was the only game he ever saw me play because he passed away shortly after that.