Sunday Shootaround on Anthony Davis

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"It’s like NBA 2K and you just created the best player," Dante Cunningham says. "Tallest, longest, most athletic. Everything you want in a player is right there. Awesome teammate. Happy go lucky guy, always very constructive and leader-oriented. Very rare for a 21-year-old. He’s way above his age. "

And everyone in the organization swears by him: "He’s a guy that you don’t mind your children idolizing," says David Wesley, the team’s television analyst. "Now that I’m on this side I watch how these guys interact with their fans and with the public and he does it as well as anyone. To be that big of a star, you can still see the connection and that’s fun to watch."

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"Most guys worry about MVPs and scoring titles and all that," Davis says. "For me it was the Community Assist award. I was kind of pissed when Steph (Curry) won. That’s my brother, you know, but man I really wanted that award. Second’s not bad. This year I wanted to do more. I feel like I needed to do more and embrace the situation that I’m in."

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He’ll often text coach Monty Williams and take responsibility for the defeat.

"He’ll call me," Davis says. "He won’t text back, he’ll call me and say, ‘It’s not on you. It’s on us.’ He knows how I can get because I hate losing more than I like winning. It gets to me. He tells me, ‘In a couple of years then it’s going to be on you. But right now just focus on basketball and let me handle the rest.’"

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"I let him be 21. I’m not trying to get him to be 30 right now. Everybody wants to push him to be Tim (Duncan) right now. Tim wasn’t even Tim when he was Anthony’s age. He wasn’t even in the league, so why would we push him to be Tim right now? That’s not fair to him."

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The Pels were constructed with Davis’ evolution in mind. Demps has gone after what he calls, "young vets," talented players like Holiday and Evans who would be ready to play with Davis when Davis was ready to take flight.

"We studied what a number of teams have done in the past," Demps says. "Everybody says you should do like San Antonio did, but we didn’t have a Hall of Famer waiting on him like David Robinson to help him through the process. Everybody says, do it like Oklahoma City. Well they drafted two Hall of Famers in a row. That’s hard to do. What we really wanted to do was understand what kind of player he was going to become.

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