Playoff basketball is a whole other sport. Compared to regular season games, you have no room for error. Your opponents are ready to exploit any weakness in your game plan, so you need to be able to make adjustments on the fly, and that kind of game prep demands your entire focus and then some. You can’t afford distractions when the stakes are so high, which is why the playoffs are a terrible time to convert to Mormonism.
As excited as I am to be Mormon, I underestimated how difficult it would be to balance the pursuit of an NBA Championship with the pursuit of a new religion.
No one works harder than me. My career speaks for itself. So when two Latter-day Saints missionaries approached me in the Lakers locker room and convinced me to commit to the Mormon belief system and lifestyle, I thought I was ready for the challenge of studying Joseph Smith’s restoration of the Gospel while also game-planning for the Timberwolves. I wasn’t afraid to put in the extra hours at practice or Sacrament meetings. However, in retrospect, the amount of time I spent commuting between the Crypto.com Arena and the Mormon temple downtown was not ideal considering our entire season was on the line. Even for a veteran like myself, it’s simply too much to expect an NBA player to play hero-ball while the Mormon plan of salvation is occupying most of his emotional and spiritual concentration.
Reaching the Kingdoms of Glory and the NBA Championship are both incredible achievements, but they should never be pursued simultaneously. My teammates and I put in too much work to get to the playoffs for the media to spend press conferences asking about my baptism while our season’s one loss away from ending. My brain was absolutely scrambled jumping from reporters’ questions about whether I plan to retire this year (no comment) to their questions about whether I’m currently abiding by the Word of Wisdom (of course I am).
Do I plan to give the Mormon church 10% of my $48 million salary as a tithing? Yes, and happily. Do I, a team leader, need to be thinking about that during the most important games of the year? No.
It just feels impossible to get any momentum going in these games when the President of the LDS Church is sitting courtside, and all I want to do is ask him questions about Joseph Smith’s restoration of the Gospel, but I’ve got the ball in my hands and a major point deficit staring down at me from the scoreboard. Unfortunately, going Mormon at such a crucial part of the season negatively affected my playoff performance, and I’m not afraid to admit that I made a mistake.
I do not regret becoming Mormon. I just really, really wish I had converted during the regular season or after the playoffs.
You live and learn, I guess. All I know is that when I begin recruiting my fellow NBA players to the Church of Latter-day Saints, I’m going to strongly recommend the playoff contenders among them to hold off on that process until the off-season. If King James can’t pull off both at once, then no one can. See y’all at Temple this Sunday.
