DeAndre Jordan: Derik Queen being more vocal will help his career

Yahoo Sports senior NBA analyst Kevin O’Connor is joined by the longtime NBA center to share his thoughts on playing alongside the Pelicans rookie in New Orleans this season. Check out the full conversation on “The Kevin O’Connor Show” and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Video Transcript

And you played this shot last year with Derek Queen.

Yeah.

We talk about skilled bigs.

He comes in, he, in, in Maryland, he hits this, like, miracle shot.

Yeah.

Leaning floater, jumper, and he epitomizes, I think, kind of the growth of how big the bigs have grown- Yeah doing more stuff on the perimeter.

Defensively, he has some growing to do.

Mm-hmm.

What are the ways you saw him grow over the season in New Orleans?

Well, he, he talked more.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that that’s huge.

Being able to communicate to yourself, to your teammates, different coverages, plays, responsibilities from guys, that connection, it really, it gives everybody confidence on the floor when you’re connected like that.

And as a young player, it’s kind of, it’s, it’s tough.

You don’t wanna s- talk loud.

You don’t wanna, you may not wanna be wrong, and that’s, you know, a little discouraging for guys.

But at the end of the day, you’re trying, and I think that you’re gonna make mistakes.

You’re gonna have grow- growing pains and, different things like that throughout the course of your rookie season.

But I think that he and Jeremiah both really did a great job this year on talking and being more vocal and demanding things from theirselves and other guys on the floor, too.

Defensively, is that something you had to learn, how to communicate?

Yeah, Marcus Camby was on me every day about it.

And, I really owe a lot of my, I guess, defensive IQ to him.

he was extremely vocal, calling out plays, calling out players’ tendencies.

He knew the five most ran plays of the opponent, and I think that he even knew, like, side out of bounds and baseline out of bounds, which I thought was, I thought he was, like, a, a witch or a wizard, you know?

I was like, “There’s no way that you know all of this.”

But he studied the game, and that was contagious to me, and I wanted to be able to be just like that or even better.

What did you have to do to become like that?

Watch basketball, over and over.

Watch film of not only yourself, but the entire game.

because when I was younger, I would be like, “Hey, just pull my minutes.

I only wanna watch my minutes and see where I can get better.”

But it’s also, I’m coming in at a different flow of the game.

They, we may be on a run.

The other team may be on a run.

So I think for me, being able to go from just wanting to watch myself on video to me watching the game in its entirety kinda helped me polish myself on different lineups and changes and ways they attack, and it just, it opened my mind up to different things.

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