“Obviously, the hate doesn’t stop. It keeps going,” Brooks said. “But just having my country behind me, my head coach behind me, the general manager, all these guys behind me trying to have me succeed … Nothing with the politics, nothing with anything to do with how I feel about contracts or any of those things.”
Noah’s technology tracks the exact point a player’s jumper passes through the rim. The company’s data, having logged millions of real-time shots, has affirmed years of physics studies conducted by several noted professors, concluding the optimal entry angle of an attempt is 45 degrees when leather splashes between iron. And so Noah’s system announces the angle of a practicing player’s repetitions immediately as it goes in.“And I just had that number in my head, every single time,” Brooks said.
“Just to try to take it to another level,” Brooks said of his mechanics. “It’s just being patient with it, and whatever just comes out of it. I never wanted to force shots or hunt it. That was one of my roles on this team, was shot selection. And I feel like I did a pretty good job in this World Cup.”Fernandez found something with Brooks this tournament, encouraging his original identity, while still attempting to keep the antagonizer from overflowing into angst.
Perhaps Brooks is founding an equilibrium between his production and his performance. When asked about cosplaying as a villain, after rising to heroics against Team USA, Brooks likened his mentality to that of Kobe Bryant, how the Hall of Famer once crafted the “Black Mamba” for whenever he stepped onto any 94-foot slab of hardwood.