Not every basketball player who shows flashes of brilliance is cut out to succeed in the NBA. Some, like Donatas Motiejunas, have accepted that. He even admitted that he wasn’t ready for the NBA when he entered the league, but he believes there’s just one person who was ready to shine at such a young age, and that is LeBron James.
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Sometimes, the grittiness of the league can throw off an entire player’s game, and Motiejunas knew he lacked in that aspect. The 20th overall pick by the Houston Rockets in 2011, the Lithuanian forward was drafted at 21 but sat out his entire rookie year.
When asked if he was ready for the NBA when he eventually took the court at 22, the former forward argued that nobody is truly physically ready for the league when they first arrive, not even the number one overall picks.
“I mean, no one’s ready there… Only maybe number one. I mean, even those guys aren’t ready,” D-Mo said on the MW Podcast. Very few players are truly ready for the NBA’s level of physicality when they are drafted as teenagers. After all, they are playing against grown men, some of whom are in their 30s. Natural strength is inevitably going to play a factor with such a significant age gap.
D-Mo then mentioned that only one guy was ready to play in the NBA at 18. “I think the only guy that was ready was LeBron James,” he stated.
LeBron had one of the best rookie seasons we’ve ever seen from a 19-year-old in the NBA. He averaged 20 points, nearly 6 assists, and 5.5 rebounds per game. The King also added 1.5 steals per game and ran away with the NBA Rookie of the Year Award. D-Mo also pointed out that LeBron was already a grown man at 18, which he believes comes down to the difference between American and European physiques.
“At age 18 or 19, he was a grown a** man. Americans are different. Their bodies they develop way faster than us Europeans. For sure, I was not ready,” Motiejunas said.
D-Mo may not have been as ready as LeBron was in his rookie season, but he understood why he was drafted where he was for his age. He explained that good NBA teams often like to draft projects to develop, and at the time, he fit that mold perfectly. That said, he quickly realized that the competition around him was far superior, and that his skills weren’t going to be called on as much as they were in the Euro League.
“When I came to the States, it was the same thing. You’re nothing. They don’t care. They have their own James Harden, Russell Westbrook, and Kevin Durant. You know? You’re not there to be that guy,” Motiejunas expressed.
Motiejunas then argued that players who aren’t superstars have to find one thing they’re better at than others to prosper in the NBA. “You have to figure out who you’re going to be. And this is the crazy part. If you do one thing better than everyone else, you’re going to have a long and great career in the NBA. You just need to figure out the one thing.”
For D-Mo, that one thing was his versatility. He was 7 feet tall but could play both the power forward and center positions. Not only that, but he could shoot. That’s right, Motiejunas was one of the first original stretch fours in the NBA. But it didn’t last long.
In the end, Motiejunas was just ahead of his time, and the former Euro League star, who was with Monaco until 2025, eventually went back across the pond to finish his career after just six NBA seasons. It’s a sad reality, but not everyone is cut out to be LeBron, and most prospects are going to flame out with potential never being met. The NBA machine chews up and spits out rookies yearly. It’s just the way of the sport.
