There were times at the beginning of last season when Ochai Agbaji didn't know what his NBA career was going to look like or if it was going to look like anything.
After playing for less than a minute in the season opener for the Utah Jazz , Agbaji started a back-and-forth program with the Salt Lake City Stars and there were times that he feared he'd be stuck in the G League.
One day Agbaji would be with the Jazz at practice and the next day he would be in Stockton, California, with the Stars, then he'd be back practicing with the Stars and then called back up to play with the Jazz.
It's not an easy to find a routine or to feel any sort of stability, but he continued to remind himself of the work that got him to the NBA and the kind of work that would allow him to stay.
"There was times when I was like, 'I'm probably going to stay in the G league for at least another 10 games,'" Agbaji said. "I didn't know when or what was going to happen, so it was really just about keeping stable, keeping my mental right, making sure I was focusing my energy and putting my energy into the right things."
A positive attitude can go a long way, and Agbaji is convinced that staying positive and never complaining played a major part in how his role with the Jazz grew as the season moved along.
In January, he stopped going back and forth and became a regular part of the Jazz's rotation. Then as the season progressed, he found himself gaining confidence on the court.
By the end of the 2022-23 season, Jazz head coach Will Hardy was asking Agbaji to be more aggressive and to look for opportunities for himself on the court — a far cry from the early days when Agbaji was more of a spot-up shooter than anything else.
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Agbaji's rookie season finished on a high note. He was starting games — in part because of injuries and players resting — making big plays and proving that he was deserving of a larger rotational role by doing everything that was asked of him and more.
"Ochai does a lot of things that are not talked about," Hardy said. "He's incredibly sharp on his game plan awareness on both ends of the floor, his spacing on the offensive end, he crashes and gets offensive rebounds, he cuts and gets layups, he gets out in transition and he takes responsibility defensively."
The success at the end of last season has led to the Jazz coaching staff wanting to give Agbaji even more responsibility in his second year.
To put a finer point on it, Hardy believes that Agbaji has the tools, talent and athleticism to become a great defender, and that's where he wants Agbaji's focus in the 2023-24 season.
While Agbaji has shown that he is a pretty good off-ball defender, the Jazz want him to step things up on the ball.
"I would like to see him take another step forward in terms of his isolation defense," Hardy said. "Guarding the ball in a pick-and-roll and navigating those screens is a skill and it takes a certain type of athleticism.
"We talk a lot about good athletes in the NBA, but I think there's a difference between good offensive athletes and good defensive athletes and navigating a pick-and-roll in this league is really, really hard against the top players, especially with the size of some of the screeners."
The good news is that Agbaji is practically athleticism personified, and Hardy has no doubt that the second-year wing is up to the task. And Agbaji is going to take on this next stage of his development just like he did with last year's hurdles and the results will do the talking.
