Monta Ellis feels like he's escaped from 'a deep hole' with the Mavericks
In 2007, two years removed from high school, Monta Ellis was the NBA's Most Improved Player. He'd been a key cog on an electric Golden State Warriors team that had snuck into the playoffs for the first time in 13 years, then toppled the top-seeded, 67-win Mavericks in a stunning first-round upset. Ellis was 21, with his star on the rise. And he was happy.
It's taken him a long time to get that feeling back. Ellis, now 28, has opened up to ESPN's Tim MacMahon about the dark years in between that distant Cinderella season, and this one, in which his Dallas Mavericks are clinging to the final playoff seed in a loaded Western Conference.
The bad [years] that I had, it took me so far in a deep hole that at some point basketball wasn't even basketball to me. It was more of a business. Being away and coming here really brought joy back to me, to want to enjoy the game and love to be in the gym and work and want to get better.
Those years not only saw Ellis toil away on mediocre teams in Golden State and Milwaukee, they also some him become a poster boy for a crop of outmoded "empty-stats" archetypes, derided and dismissed by the NBA's increasingly influential analytics community. The popular perception was that Ellis was selfish, one-dimensional, and, most damningly, inefficient. He may have been flashy, lightning-quick, and occasionally brilliant, but, as the story had it, none of those things made him a winner. Some of that criticism was fair and some of it wasn't. Mostly it spoke to a guy who was shouldering too big a workload on teams that lacked the talent to compete. Ellis was a man on an island.
"In this league," he explains, "you go through your ups and your downs, your sunny days and your dark days. It's just that I was young and really was stubborn to get help, because I always did things on [my] own... When I was going through that stress, I wanted to get through it on my own."
This season, his first in a Mavericks uniform, has done a lot to rebuild Ellis' confidence and his reputation around the league. Playing alongside Dirk Nowitzki has eased some of the pressure that he's been laden with in the past. He's upped his efficiency, found the right balance between scoring and playmaking, and proved that given the right situation, he can be part of a winning culture. His coach, Rick Carlisle, gushes about him. From the same MacMahon piece:
We love him. He's been a godsend for us. He fits what we're doing, he fits with Dirk. He's been extremely coachable. He's our leading minutes guy, so in many ways you could say he's as important as any guy we've got on this team.
That's not the way Ellis has been talked about around the league for the past few years. Maybe that means he's turned a corner or maybe he just needed to find the right fit. Regardless, he's clearly in a better place than he has been for some time, and it shows. Asked when he last felt this happy playing basketball he replied, "This happy? 2007."