Denver Nuggets rookie Michael Porter Jr. is just beginning to scratch the surface of learning how to play off the ball at the next level, and he's still in need of constant assistance from his teammates. However, the main assist-man in this area of knowledge isn't Gary Harris, Torrey Craig, Malik Beasley, or even fellow big man Juancho Hernangomez, but rather the star of the franchise himself — Nikola Jokic.
Porter opened up about the learning curve:
“For me, it’s just about not disappearing,” Porter said Wednesday after putting his second-ever practice of an NBA training camp under his belt, according to Nick Kosmider of The Athletic. “When I’m off the ball, sometimes I have trouble getting involved if I don’t have the ball in my hands. So it’s just learning how to not disappear.”
Luckily for Porter, The Joker has kept his advice relatively simple:
“If you’re standing, you’re wrong,” Jokic said of how the team is telling Porter to implement himself into the offense. “He just needs one, two weeks to play with us and see how we are playing. You could see him, when had the lineup of me, Gary (Harris), Jamal (Murray), Paul (Millsap) and (Porter), and we were just moving and cutting, and he just didn’t know what to do. So we told him, ‘Whenever you’re standing, you’re wrong. Whatever you do, just move and that’s good.’”
Porter, like many highly touted stars coming out of college, has been a ball-dominant player his entire life, finding it difficult to fit within a role now that he's fully healthy after missing the entire 2018-19 season recovering from an injury.
The 6-foot-10 rookie will have to pick up how to have an impact on the game without dominating the ball — something he must first earn upon suiting up with a crowd of well-cemented players with title aspirations.
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