A recent former top-three lottery pick recalls that his encounter with nine-time All-NBA Milwaukee Bucks power forward Giannis Antetokounmpo supplied his inaugural “welcome to the NBA” moment, initiating him into the league at large.<\/p>\n
Houston Rockets power forward Jabari Smith Jr. was the No. 3 pick in the 2022 NBA Draft behind All-Star Orlando Magic power forward Paolo Banchero and champion Oklahoma City Thunder center\/power forward Chet Holmgren.<\/p>\n
During an appearance on the podcast “The Young Man & The Three” earlier this week, Smith unpacked their meeting.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh my gosh, I remember this like it was yesterday,\u201d\u00a0Smith told New Orleans Pelicans forward Trey Murphy III of his “welcome to the NBA” moment.<\/p>\n
Upon entering Houston’s team locker room that fateful night, Smith noticed that on the team whiteboard, he had been tasked with defending Antetokounmpo.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike, we in film. We prepping. Like, we obviously saying, \u2018Build a wall,\u2019\u201d\u00a0Smith said.\u00a0\u201cIt was no wall the whole game. Like, I feel like I was on an island. I\u2019m coming to the bench mad. I\u2019m like, \u2018Where everybody at?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This story will be updated…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A recent former top-three lottery pick recalls that his encounter with nine-time All-NBA Milwaukee Bucks power forward Giannis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-42979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}