Throughout the pre-season, we followed the French basketball pair, double-European champion with the U16 and U18 (MVP last December), leader of the finalist Strasbourg in Pro A, French the youngest and the highest selected in the Draft (pte ton CV), which is preparing to make its entry in the NBA by one of the biggest doors: New York. But if all the signs seem to point to a positive development (imagine, the Knicks even really pressed the button "rebuild" after fifteen years of stubbornness!), "French Prince" did not participate in the Summer League and n ' was able to test the floor of Madison Square Garden for only 18 minutes in the first game of pre-season (each time due to a shock to the right knee) ... enough to create a little more suspense.
First part: we summarize the summer preparation of the leader and his discovery of Big Apple, until his first pre-season game. His speech confirms everything that we heard about Frank Ntilikina: a hyper-builder who remains focused on the game and is not too distracted. Precocious and cautious.
Frank, all the feedback we got was that you worked a lot this summer. Can you tell us a bit about the program?
Yes, as you say, I worked a lot this summer. I spent most of the time with all the Knicks coaches, to do individual work. Lots of room in muscu too. My work was fairly complete. I tried to work on all aspects of my game. So physically, but also technically. Whether it is my defensive or offensive game, we took stock of everything. To learn the most things. A rookie needs to learn the whole game! So that's what we did.
Did you see a real change with the French approach?
Ah ... Well, we do work in France eh! It should not be minimized ... But it is true that here we work a little differently. The infrastructure is different, it allows us to do a lot of things. It's true that the work here is different. So we can say that it was a discovery yes, or something else ... The exercises that we did were quite different from what I had known. But as I like to learn new things, to improve myself, it pleased me what!
Can you give us an example?
A machine I had never seen in France, for example, is the versa climber (a vertical axis with handles and steps that makes the whole body work). It is a machine for the conditioning and when I arrived here, I saw in all the sports halls! Or practically. This allows you to work while you do not even run what, it's very useful.