While Josh Giddey’s ascension may be a surprise to some, others saw glimpses of his potential well before the Australian was lighting up the NBA.
In the first story of a four-part series, foxsports.com.au documented Giddey’s rise from an eight year old playing in the suburbs of Melbourne to a teenage sensation rewriting the record books.
In part two, foxsports.com.au revealed the text messages and 38 hours with an NBL legend that show a very different side to the Australian point guard.
Now, in part three, foxsports.com.au looks at the “chip on his shoulder” Giddey still carries today.
Thu, 24 Mar
Thursday March 24th
***********
Not everyone knows why it happened, but it did. Three times and all before Josh Giddey was even 16 years old.
Told he was not good enough, that he was not ready for state-level basketball just yet.
It is inconceivable, plain confusing that this is the same Josh Giddey whose name and flowing mane of hair is now known across the basketball world.
The same Josh Giddey that is just 54 games into his rookie NBA season but has already earned high praise from Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James.
In the space of just two years, Giddey went from not even being able to make his own state team to a breakout top-10 NBA draft pick.
MORE IN THIS SERIES
PART ONE: Inside Giddey’s NBA rise… and moment that changed everything
PART TWO: Blunt texts, gruelling 38 hrs that reveal side of Giddey we’ve ‘never seen’
“It’s crazy,” Giddey’s former Melbourne Tigers teammate Paddy Twigg tells foxsports.com.au.
“Josh stood out always compared to the competition. I saw it from the start. I was at some of those camps and he was killing it. I think he always deserved to make those state teams.”
He was far from the only one who felt that way.
“I personally thought he was probably good enough to make it,” Liam Conway, another Tigers teammate, tells foxsports.com.au.
“And most people did.”
Except for the people whose opinions truly mattered, leaving Giddey at a crossroads in his career, starting to think that a future in basketball may not be for him.
Phil Dernehl, assistant coach at the Tigers, can still remember the car ride home after Giddey was cut from the under-16s state team.
“You can hear a pin drop,” he tells foxsports.com.au.
“Josh thought: ‘I’ll go play footy’. He was absolutely gutted. I knew at 15, that was when it was going to be make or break for Josh.”
Giddey did not always show it but deep inside there was a fire burning, a “chip on his shoulder” as Dernehl puts it, that only pushed him harder to prove everyone wrong.
And it showed on the court.
“He was training like there’s no tomorrow,” Dernehl says.
By September the Tigers had won the state title and Giddey was crowned MVP.
“He led us, he put on a show,” Twigg says.
“It was almost like he was getting back at those coaches and Basketball Victoria for not picking him.”
And that was just the start.
‘I WAS SCATHING’: TRYING TO ANSWER THE QUESTION EVERYONE HAD
It was late on a Friday night, around 11pm after a Tigers game, when Dernehl’s phone buzzed. He answered to hear Giddey on the other line, saying he had another “bad game” and was wanting to train the next morning at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre (MSAC).
“I didn’t realise at the time what he was doing,” Dernehl says.
You see, all the state players were turning up at MSAC for training at the same time and it was no coincidence Giddey planned to work out on the court opposite them.
It did not go unnoticed either and soon after Dernehl would find himself trying to explain the very question he was wanting answered.
Tamuri Wigness, now running out for the Brisbane Bullets, was playing at Oakley in Melbourne later that year and he had dropped 50 on the Tigers in one game.
“So I turned up to watch him play” Dernehl says.
“The next minute there are AIS coaches coming at me going: ‘You know Josh Giddey, you know who he is?’ They are asking me all these questions. Was he injured, was he this, was he that, is he 6’3, why was he not in the state team?’”
It seems incomprehensible – that someone like Giddey, a sixth overall pick in the NBA draft, was just a few years ago considered not good enough to represent his own state.
But there were legitimate reasons he missed out, namely doubts over his defence and size compared to the rest of the competition.
Plus – as gifted as Giddey may have been, you also have to remember that Victoria boasts the best depth of basketball talent in the country.
Nick Abdicevic, director of coaching at the Tigers, says everyone at the club felt Giddey was “good enough” to make it to state level at that point.
But looking back, even he can understand why the timing just was not right.
“I think his size let him down and his speed and athleticism at that stage,” Abdicevic tells foxsports.com.au.
“Some other guards his age were just a bit quicker and a bit stronger at that time.”
Giddey’s father Warrick was “very diplomatic” about it all, although the same could not be said for Dernehl.
“I was scathing,” he says.
“I was like: ‘How can they not see this?’ But I’m there watching every night.”
And every early morning, every afternoon, every extra session when he had the time – Dernehl was there, getting a front row seat to the new Josh Giddey.
No longer was it important how many times Giddey missed out or why it was the case, all that mattered was how he responded.
The new Josh Giddey was about to take over.
HOW ‘FIRE IN THE BELLY’ TOOK GIDDEY TO NEW HEIGHTS
Dernehl saw Giddey’s game go to another level, powered by an unstoppable drive he compared to that of New Zealand basketball legend Pero Cameron.
Cameron would use the gym at St John’s College in New Zealand, where Dernehl went to high school, and shoot free throws — hundreds of them, until he got to 500.
“I’ve been around those sort of guys,” Dernehl says.
“Josh has got it. Josh has got the fire in the belly.”
A fire in the belly that saw Giddey take the Tigers’ second team to the state finals and all in a bold bid to get more playing time — even if it meant defying Andrew Gaze.
Gaze, who was a part of the Tigers’ inaugural NBL squad, put Giddey in the 16-1s as a bottom-age player.
But Giddey knew what that meant and, as Dernehl recalls, had other plans, telling Gaze: ‘Nah. I want to play. I’m not sitting behind these blokes’.
“The other guys were a bit bigger, a bit stronger,” Dernehl adds.
So, instead, Giddey played for the 16-2s and took them all the way to the state finals.
“That was all Josh,” Dernehl says.
“No kid in their right mind would do that ever.”
And no kid in their right mind would do what Giddey did after missing out on the under-16s state team.
He may have still been growing into his body but at 15 years old there was already a fearlessness to Giddey’s game, even as state-level accolades continued to elude him.
“I remember in one game, he’s in the under-16s as an emergency,” Dernehl says.
“This is when he didn’t make the state team. So, he’s playing the practice games and as there’s more practice games, he’s the one that is staying on the court because in Melbourne you push them against the older age.
“It’s called Youth League – the under-23 team. And Josh was the one that was handling it, the rest of the team were crumbling.”
Giddey did not see it that way though.
“Josh was so annoyed,” Dernehl says.
“I remember him going home in the car. Josh was like: ‘Phil, I played crap’. I said: ‘Josh, are you kidding me? You crossed up a 22-year-old. You are hanging with all these kids that are way older than you and make it look easy’.”
Making it look easy – something Giddey is still doing to this day, still choosing the best reads and still in a league where everyone is way older. His mentality hasn’t changed either.
“Which is great,” Dernehl says.
“His biggest asset is that he went through all that, not taking anything for granted, he’s very humble.”
In the end, all that was standing in the way of Giddey and his NBA dream was himself – he still had to believe he was good enough to make it.
“I don’t think he was overly confident he could match it with the best players in the country,” ex-Tigers teammate Twigg says.
That all changed in 2019.
THE ‘CHIP ON HIS SHOULDER’ GIDDEY STILL CARRIES TO THIS DAY
It was the Australian Junior Championships – Giddey’s first opportunity to play for his state, his first opportunity to show what they had been missing out on.
The 16-year-old finished the event averaging 20 points, 8.3 rebounds and 6.0 assists, emerging as one of Australia’s most in-demand prospects. Colorado, Washington State, Utah, TCU and Rutgers all made offers.
“The interest went through the roof,” Dernehl says.
“Then Josh went to the US twice later in the year and was getting offers from everywhere. He attended a NCAA exposure camp in Houston and played in an NBA Academy tournament.”
He also spent all of 2019 over 600 kilometres away from his Melbourne home, at the NBA Global Academy.
Giddey had first joined the Academy the year prior, still yet to play for his state at the time. It still played on his mind. But any time it came up while speaking with the Academy’s technical director Marty Clarke, Giddey heard the same message.
“Just affirming he’s good,” Clarke tells foxsports.com.au.
“You are what you are Josh. People make and miss teams for different reasons. Our perspective of you is you could be really good if you do the work to get there. It doesn’t matter what is in the past, it is what you do now to set up the future.
“There was always a little bit of ‘Am I really as good as I think I am, am I really as good as what people say?’. But that was the message we were always trying to get across to him – your best basketball is always ahead of you.”
And it was. But it still hurt. Missing out, not feeling good enough, like somehow in the midst of all the early mornings and extra shooting drills, there was still more that he could have done.
“I know it mattered a lot to him,” Chris Ebersole, the NBA senior director of international basketball operations, tells foxsports.com.au.
“We’ve spoken about it. I think at different points, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he was affected by it. He was emotionally, at different points, devastated by the sleight of not being selected for his state team.
“It would be very easy for another player in that position to give up and maybe believe in that narrative and say: ‘This isn’t for me, this isn’t working the way I want it to and I’m not going to pursue this anymore’.”
But Giddey was different.
“The fact he has taken that adversity and turned it around and used it as fuel and motivation to improve speaks to the type of character he has and mentality he brings,” Ebersole says.
“For him, this speaks to just how badly he wants it and the type of work he’s willing to put in, that he used that as motivation and carries that chip on his shoulder. I think he still carries that to this day if you see the way he works.”
Once considered not good enough for state basketball, a future in the NBA was calling.
“You couldn’t really see from outside that that had a huge impact on him but I’m sure on the inside he was hurt and he really wanted to prove a lot of people wrong,” Tigers coaching director, Abdicevic, says.
“And he did in an amazing way. We are all really proud of him and how he rebounded from not being selected. He never really complained, he never lost his love for the game.”
Now Giddey is passing that love for the game onto others, proving it is not adversity that defines you but how you respond to it.
“I think he’s just opened this new door for young kids to believe the system we have in place in Australia is second-to-none in the world,” Abdicevic adds.
“Credit to him, he really dealt with this in an unbelievable way.”
**********
In Part 4 of the Josh Giddey series, foxsports.com.au reveals how the 19-year-old’s story is inspiring the next generation of young Australian basketball hopefuls.
This news is republished from another source. You can check the original article here