By Johnny Askounis/ info@eurohoops.net
The latest milestone for Shane Larkin was helping Turkiye capture silver in EuroBasket 2025. Rewind to 2013, he was a promising prospect coming out of Miami and selected with the 18th overall pick of the annual draft, but suffered an ankle injury in a practice with the Dallas Mavericks.
“I would tell myself to have more fun,” he shared advice to his younger self in a recent interview with HoopsHype, “When I got drafted, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make it work. And I kind of stressed myself out in ways that the game wasn’t as fun to me anymore. And I think because I got drafted 18th overall to Dallas, it was a winning franchise. We’re in win-now mode. I broke my ankle a week after I got drafted. So I was just sitting there for the first four or five months of the season just watching the team. And I knew at some point I was going to get an opportunity. And when I did get my opportunity, we were close to .500 right there, fighting for the playoffs. And instead of thinking about it as, ‘This is my first year in the NBA, I’m a rookie. Let me just go out there, be aggressive, make my mistakes’, and just have fun with the game of basketball and play the way that I had always played, which got me drafted. I thought more like, ‘Don’t make any mistakes. Go out on the floor and don’t f*ck up today. Don’t mess up’.”
“I remember the possession. I remember everything. I remember exactly why,” he focused on the serious setback, “We were in Dallas, about to go to the Summer League on the day. We had practice in the morning, and we were flying out after practice. I think this was the first practice Mark Cuban came to watch. And obviously, he just spent a first-round draft pick on me.”
“It was like a one-on-one break with the big guy kind of trailing me. I was like, ‘I’m about to punch this. I’m about to go up and put my whole arm in the rim.’ And I went to kind of take off, and when I took off, I kind of slipped a little bit, and my foot kind of turned in and just, just….just broke. I heard a big crack, and I was just lying there. I didn’t even get off the ground. It kind of just bent in on me. And I was just lying there like, ‘No way, dog, did not just happen.’ And trying to be the tough guy, I lay on the floor for a little bit,” he recalled, “I was in a little pain, but I got up and I walked off. Like very gingerly, obviously, I walked up the steps, put the game ready on, and I went in, and my ankle was like this on the game ready. And then after I took the game ready off, my ankle was like this. The team was traveling to Vegas later that day. And after I took the game ready off, Casey, the athletic trainer at that time, looked at me and was like, “Yeah, you’re probably not going to Vegas, bro’.”
The Cincinnati native went into more detail about reaching the NBA and eventually pursuing overseas career options.
“I was lucky enough to accomplish my goal at 20 years old, get drafted 18th overall, break my ankle a week after the draft, and then kind of hopped around. And then there was an opportunity where it was like, OK, take a non-guaranteed deal in the NBA and continue to fight for that or go overseas and play 30 minutes a night and kind of see what that looks like,” he mentioned, “And, you know, thankfully, I had an open mindset where I didn’t want to do that third point guard kind of non-guaranteed deal, wait for somebody to get injured. It’s like you’re waiting for somebody’s downfall for you to take advantage of it. And that just didn’t feel right to me. I felt like if I wanted to get that opportunity, it was because I deserved it because of my play, not because of somebody’s injuries.”
“You have to really experience it to fully understand it,” he continued about emerging as a household name in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague, “I’m not comparing myself to any star player in the NBA at all, but like the way I’m sure Kyrie Irving was being treated in Cleveland is the same way that Kendrick Nunn is now being treated in Athens, the way that I’m treated in Istanbul, Mike James is treated in Monaco. These superstar players live in these cities and they have these certain lifestyles that you wouldn’t really understand it unless you were over here and you got to see it first hand.”
In 2021 and 2022, Larkin won EuroLeague titles with Efes en route to being named on the All-25 EuroLeague Team. He is a veteran of 247 appearances in Europe’s premier club continental competition, alongside 267 NBA games with the Mavs, New York Knicks, Brooklyn Nets, and Boston Celtics.