Caris LeVert can’t pinpoint exactly where he got his competitive edge, but he remembers his mom, Kim, mercilessly beating him in tennis. She would drag Caris and Daryl, his younger brother, to courts and never let them win. They last played when Caris was in seventh grade. He isn’t sure he ever won.
“She was pretty good,” said LeVert, the 2016 first-round pick who will enter his third season with the Nets later this year. “I don’t know if we played full games though. … Those games are super-long, so after a while, it’s just like, ‘OK, you got it. You can win. I don’t wanna be here anymore.’ ”
On a basketball court, though, LeVert managed to stand out while staying relatively anonymous. He played on the freshman team, then JV ball before moving to varsity in high school. When he ran into a coach at a department store over the summer, in the midst of a growth spurt, Kim had to prod him to spill the beans about his first offer.
At Michigan, John Beilein told LeVert he may redshirt, and for the season’s first month, he did. As a member of the scout team, weighing 160 pounds, generously, LeVert got into bigger, stronger guys on defense, playing like his life was on the line. He didn’t make varsity in high school until his junior year. This was just another hurdle for him to climb, and he did so with vigor.
“He was not trying to redshirt,” former teammate Spike Albrecht said. “We had several conversations and he was just talking to some of the coaches, just kind of using that as fuel. And just taking that and going into practice every single day and just trying to like, kill.”
In January of that season, with the Wolverines in the midst of a 94-66 beatdown of Northwestern, LeVert got some playing time late in the game. James Montgomery III, a reserve for the Wildcats, tried to pick him up at halfcourt. LeVert went right, then crossed over, shaking him for a brief second. Then he dribbled left. Montgomery giving chase, LeVert crossed back to his right and pulled up. Montgomery was still at the elbow when the 3-pointer fell through the net.
It was an innocuous moment in the midst of just another game during a long season, but it was when much of the coaching staff knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that burning the redshirt was the right move.
Last week, in the midst of a pickup game, LeVert got going. Someone was talking trash, explained Nets coach Kenny Atkinson, and that’s exactly how to push LeVert’s buttons.
He picked up a steal, he threw down a dunk, got another stop. Then added an assist for good measure.
“He just kind of took over the last five points of the game,” Atkinson said.
That kind of setting is where LeVert’s competitiveness makes itself known. He isn’t a trash talker, but if someone brings it, he’ll deal it right back. He doesn’t play much 1-on-1 anymore, but the stories from his college days flow like booze at a frat party.
There were the games between him and Trey Burke, then the National Player of the Year and now with the Knicks, that never seemed to end. Fast forward a couple years, and it was LeVert and Derrick Walton who took the young guys — Aubrey Dawkins, Kam Chatman, Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman, D.J. Wilson — under their wings, starting up games of King of the Hill over the summer.
“As a freshman you just kind of fall in,” Abdur-Rahkman said, “and what better way to do that than to follow one of the better players on the team?”
LeVert isn’t a vibrant trash-talker in games, but there, he wanted to make sure teammates had some fire in their bellies. Everyone was so close off the court, he thought, it made too nice and too friendly on it.
Those games, they set a culture.
“It’s his natural habitat,” Dawkins recalled. “He’s a 1-on-1 king. Really one of the best, most unstoppable kind of player. … There’s no weakness when it comes to his 1-on-1 game, so he’s a monster.”
Teammates from Michigan point to the “NBA 2K” video game as yet another competitive well from which LeVert drew. The trash talk there got so heated, the group would often drive to the gym, video games bleeding into real life.
“They’re talking smack, next thing you know, it’s like, ‘Well, I’d whoop your ass on the real court,’ ” said Albrecht, LeVert’s roommate for three years. “And next thing you know, it’s like, ‘We’ll go play right now.’ It’s like 11 o’clock at night and we’re driving to the gym.”
LeVert’s senior year, he lived with Albrecht, Walton and Zak Irvin at an apartment in Ann Arbor. Security would come up to their room, Albrecht remembered, because they got so loud over games of “2K,” well past midnight.
It would be wrong to say LeVert has mellowed out — the pickup game last week proves otherwise. More accurately, LeVert has matured. He still is playing “2K,” but not unless someone’s over at his house and wants to go at it.
“I’m pretty competitive,” he says, “but I used to be a lot more competitive when I was younger.”
Much as he downplayed the difference between college and the NBA in describing wear-and-tear, LeVert has been in the league long enough to have seen those differences.
He harkens back to the trade deadline his rookie year, when a teammate — Randy Foye, he thinks — told a story about a teammate getting pulled off the plane, told to pack everything up.
“Just seeing that and seeing how real that was, you know, me or anybody else on my team could have been gone within a matter of hours,” LeVert said. “Traded to another team. I was really like, ‘Wow.’ ”
It’s 22 minutes into the conversation when LeVert’s tone picks up. He’s animated, echoing imaginary critics and refuting their arguments.
“I think that a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, he only — he got hurt in the college season, where they only played 40 games. How is he gonna play 82 games in the NBA season?’ ” LeVert says. “They don’t really look at the fact that in college, you practice way harder than in the NBA.
“Cause in the NBA, you can’t necessarily practice that hard, ’cause there’s a game basically every other day. And if you’re not, you know, a starter playing 30 minutes a night, you’re not getting that type of pounding that you would get in college.”
LeVert is set to enter his third year in the league. It has been a while since he got hurt in college, missing large chunks of his junior and senior seasons at Michigan with foot injuries.
He doesn’t need to refute anyone — his play has done as much. LeVert notched 12.1 points and 4.2 assists per game and played good defense coming off the bench last season. At 23, he is a building block for the Nets, a team in desperate need of talented young players. That isn’t at the forefront of his mind right now.
LeVert’s two personalities are on display here. He is soft-spoken off the court, but not without the insecurities that come with being overlooked. LeVert is quiet, not peaceful; confident, not cocky, the type of competitor who makes an impression.
The chip on his shoulder festers. Even in the wake of success that doesn’t usually come for guys that don’t make varsity until their junior years, fail to add a fourth star to a recruiting profile and have injuries hamper their college careers, LeVert always will have more to prove.