Jock Landale re-lives trade from Memphis Grizzlies to Atlanta Hawks, playoffs, play-in tournament

“You start to just f***ing panic.”

It was two days before the NBA’s trade deadline and Jock Landale had just received the phone call. He was off to Utah.

Watch NBA with ESPN on Kayo Sports | Stream an average 9 LIVE Regular Season games per week plus the best of the NBA Playoffs.| New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.

The Australian was “playing some of the best basketball” of his career with the Grizzlies and had found a home in Memphis — both literally and figuratively.

But now his life had been uprooted. Landale had been traded before. In fact, in June 2022 he was dealt twice in two weeks — first to Atlanta as part of the Dejounte Murray trade and then to Phoenix.

This was the first time he had been moved mid-season, and as was the case in 2022, Utah was just the first stop. Another trade was yet to come, and it came less than 24 hours later.

In fact, Landale was on the private plane bound for Utah with his Memphis teammates when it happened.

“We were like two minutes from closing the doors and taking off,” he told foxsports.com.au.

“That’s when I found out, and they were like, ‘Get off the plane’. So they helped me pull my bags off the plane and off I went.

“It was really that simple, so it just happened in the blink of an eye.”

One second, Landale was off to Utah. The next, it was Atlanta.

Or was it?

“Initially I was like let me go home and catch a breath,” Landale added.

“I got myself ready for the idea I was going to Utah and then that was flipped on its head.

“I was like, ‘Far out. All right, let me go home, and just have a breath’ because you start to just f***ing panic and it’s like, ‘All right, am I even going to Atlanta?’. There’s still another 24 hours (before the trade deadline closes).”

So, after he exited the plane he went home and took a moment to stay with his son Archie and wife India while also calling around to make sure he was actually going to Atlanta.

When he finally got confirmation, the next question was how and when he’d get to his new home.

There weren’t any available flights that day, but the Hawks waived his physical and offered to fly him in the next morning with the intention of him playing that night against the Jazz.

“They were just like, ‘Let’s just get to it’, and I was down,” Landale said.

So, that was the plan. That is, until his nanny pointed out that it was around a six-hour drive to Atlanta from their home in Memphis. Six hours for Landale to think.

And for someone whose career has now featured eight stops across Europe, Australia and America, there has been plenty of time along the way to do just that.

Time to reflect, both on how far he has come and how far he has to go, because feeling like he belongs in the NBA is something Landale has grappled with his entire career.

HOW ‘PERFECT’ MATCH WITH MEMPHIS ‘REINVIGORATED’ LANDALE

Belonging is a complicated word for Landale, and his understanding of it has “changed a lot” throughout his career.

Which isn’t surprising if you consider how his career started, or what Landale was being told long before he developed into an All-America-calibre center at St Mary’s only to still go undrafted in 2018.

As Landale told foxsports.com.au in 2023, he wasn’t like most of the other kids. The ones who were identified at a young age and carefully nurtured at Basketball Australia’s Centre of Excellence in Canberra, with access to the state-of-the-art facilities and elite coaching staffs.

He didn’t have any of that. But what he did have was an “unbreakable confidence”.

An “internal drive that’s really pushed me to get to where I am,” as Landale put it in 2023.

At that point, Landale was gearing up for the first taste of NBA playoff basketball, where he had already become a “fan favourite” according to Suns beat writer Dana Scott.

Much of that came back to the fact Suns fans “love to have an underdog” — and if there is one word that defines Landale, it is that. Which brings us back to that other word: belonging.

It is something Landale has struggled to find since the moment he didn’t hear his name called on draft night in 2018, and something he has continued to search for in his long and winding road to Atlanta.

“There was a lot of doubt in years past that I didn’t belong,” Landale said.

After going undrafted, Landale knocked back offers from NBA teams to attend training camp and instead prioritised job security and the opportunity to develop his game with Serbian club Partizan, before then moving to Lithuania to play with Zalgiris the following year.

Then came a brief stint with Melbourne United back home in Australia, before Landale got his first shot in the NBA. But after signing with the San Antonio Spurs in August 2021, he battled for playing time, averaging just 10.9 minutes.

Then he was traded in 2022. Twice. First to the Hawks, before being re-routed to Phoenix.

It was a prove-it year for Landale, who was set to hit free agency the following year, and he made the most of it. A four-year, $32 million deal with Houston followed.

It was supposed to be home. Where he belonged. It was everything he had hoped for too, until it wasn’t.

In reality, only the first season was guaranteed and after two years, Landale was waived.

“I’d quietly started to believe it, and was having conversations internally of trying to convince myself that if this NBA thing wasn’t going to pan out over the next year or two, that was all right, and I might find myself over in Europe, or Australia,” Landale said.

“Which isn’t a bad thing. I love my time out there and have a high level of respect for that competition.

“But I just kind of had given up on playing every single night in the NBA.”

Suddenly, Landale was back where he started, having to prove himself again. Prove that he belonged in the NBA. So, he signed a veteran minimum deal with Memphis.

Nothing was guaranteed, but for someone who had become so accustomed to surviving instead of thriving, it was a sacrifice he was prepared to make. All he wanted was an opportunity.

Opportunity is “everything”, as Landale said.

As it turned out, that is exactly what he got in Memphis. Injuries to Zach Edey and Brandon Clarke opened up a significant role for Landale, who could already take confidence in knowing he was playing for a coach in Tomas Iisalo whose intense coaching style “fit” his personality.

“We had an honest conversation,” Landale said.

“He said that there was going to be opportunity for me and if I was willing to get uncomfortable in how hard he was going to demand that I played that this would be a place that I’d excel, and I think that it has really pulled that out of me to the highest extent.

“That’s something, that intensity, on the first conversation I’m sitting at home with my first-born son in my arms, and I’m having this conversation with coach it was kind of perfect matching of personalities and intensities, and not beating around the bush and I knew that he wasn’t going to babysit me.

“I just felt as though it was a place where I was really going to be able to let my true colours shine.”

Landale ended up doing exactly that during his time in Memphis, starting 25 of 45 games and averaging a career-high 11.3 points and 6.5 rebounds per game while shooting 38.0 per cent from beyond the arc.

The Australian, who scraps for every offensive rebound and does the dirty work as a screener, was a perfect fit for Iisalo’s system which emphasises buy-in from every single player and a team-first mentality.

Landale’s growth as a shooter, increasing his 3-point attempts from 0.6 per game in Houston to 2.9 in Memphis, also added an extra wrinkle to his offensive game.

But the Boomers big man, who played “some of the best basketball of my career” with the Grizzlies, said a lot of his success went back to simply being able to play through mistakes.

“I think just for me, feeling a mutual respect goes a long way. Feeling as though that I have value with what I bring to the table breeds a lot of confidence,” Landale said.

“When you’re a rotation player in the NBA and you’re being yanked at the slightest mistake and you’re always having a look over your shoulder because there’s another guy on the bench with you who they’re happy to slot into those minutes as well, night in and night out, it’s a stressful environment where instead of playing with the freedom to make mistakes and take risks, you’re kind of hamstrung in this, ‘I’ve got to play well, and I’ve got to play perfect. Otherwise, I’m sitting on the bench’.

“It’s a tough role to play because you don’t feel as though you can go out and take risks and shoot that shot that you might not have shot coming off the bench or not having the opportunity that you’ve got in this system. I don’t think it gets the best out of players.

“I do understand it. Obviously, there are 17 guys on a roster.

“… I think that, for me, that confidence kind of shows itself in that you’re allowed to play through mistakes and feel games out, rather than having to come in and produce in a short period of time otherwise it’s deemed a bad game.

“It’s been quite liberating being able to just play with a freedom.”

After years of wondering if he would ever find that sense of belonging in the NBA, Landale said his time in Memphis had “reinvigorated” him — “to the max”.

“This year has made me feel really good about all the hours that I’ve put in and made me feel as though you’re seeing it all come together finally,” he added.

“Not that I was ever losing my fire for and my work ethic, I suppose, but I had kind of resigned myself to the fact that maybe the NBA wasn’t it for me, and this year has just kind of done the reverse.”

Then came the trade, and that long, six-hour drive.

SIX-HOUR RESET LANDALE NEEDED… AND BIGGEST LESSON IN HIS CAREER

There were plenty of benefits to driving to Atlanta — not least the time it gave him to think.

For starters, it was just “handy” to have the truck there. It meant Landale could load it up with some extra stuff he wouldn’t have otherwise been able to take on the flight, including all his recovery equipment.

It was also the mental reset Landale needed at that point of the season. He was coming off a few “difficult” games in Memphis. His wife had been in hospital, so he was “dealing with that stress” and it was beginning to impact his performance.

“It gave me a second to just catch my breath and really take six hours to myself,” Landale said.

It wasn’t like he had the option to catch up on sleep either, as may have been the case if he flew into Atlanta. So, for the first hour or two, Landale just sat there in silence.

“I just thought things through and came to terms with the fact, because there’s so much that goes into a trade mid-season man,” he said.

“I put together a really good performance in Memphis. Internal conversations start to happen around, ‘Hey, is this going to be a spot that we’re in the long term? Are they going to take care of us financially and all these things?’.

“And then you get traded, and I think the rule used to be that you couldn’t re-sign with a team that trades you. So, there’s a little bit of panic that comes with that of, like, ‘Crap, I’ve just put in 60 games with a club that’s really allowed me to blossom for the first time in my NBA career and now they’ve gotten rid of me. Like, is this back to square one? Has this kind of ruined my off-season?’

“So, I’m thinking through that, and as I do, I plan 20 steps ahead, and I’m thinking through what does this do for the off-season?”

For example, there was already a plan in place for India and Archie to go home to Australia at a certain point in the NBA summer. Now, Landale is having to watch son Archie grow up from afar.

“That part’s really hard,” he said.

“For us, it wasn’t a place to have an eight-month-old in a hotel.”

Then there were all the notifications on his phone. New numbers to know. People to meet.

“You’ve got 20 people texting you all at once from your new team being like, ‘Hi, it’s such and such, we’ve got to get this done, and we’ve got to do this and here’s this information’. So, you’re kind of digesting it all,” he added.

Then there is the most important number of them all — new coach Quin Snyder.

“And we’re talking shop and talking about the style of the team and where I fit in,” Landale said.

“There’s just so much that happens in a short frame of time. So to be able to sit in a car and really take six hours and digest it, I feel like when I got there and woke up the next day, I was in a real clear frame of mind and was really, really excited.

“It wasn’t that surprising to me that I was able to kind of handle that situation and come out on the other side and have a big game that night.”

In case you need reminding, Landale celebrated his Hawks debut by tying his previous career-high mark of 26 points in a 121-119 win over the Jazz. He also had 11 rebounds, five assists and four blocks.

That was despite only arriving in Atlanta that morning at 1am.

Landale isn’t big on social media, but he heard all the commotion. His new fans raving about the Australian’s dedication in driving six hours to suit up that night against Utah.

He was asked about it in his post-game press conference too. Landale didn’t like it. At all.

“Like, plain and simple, I almost wanted to cough up a bad game just to get people off my case a little bit and kind of go back to being that underdog and not having the spotlight,” he laughed.

“Because I don’t enjoy that part of the industry.”

He was getting plenty of text messages from back home as well, and they were pretty much all asking the same thing: ‘What’s the big deal?’.

“It wasn’t a big deal to me,” Landale said.

“I’ve got a lot of mates who live in the country and are sitting in a car for many hours a day. When this story started really cracking on social media, they were all hitting me up like, ‘What’s the big deal’… it was cool, a lot of people got joy out of it and it was a good story, but I was pretty eager to go back to being a little under the radar.”

In some ways, the move to Atlanta has allowed Landale to do just that.

In Memphis, while Landale wouldn’t go as far as to say he was a “focal point”, he was an “important part” of the offence under coach Iisalo. In Atlanta, it’s an “entirely different role”.

“Here I’m probably an eighth or seventh option,” Landale said.

“It’s really different in that capacity… in Memphis… I had multiple games where I shot more than 10 shots. Here, I’ve probably had three.

“So, it’s about being efficient and doing the little stuff that will help the team win.”

The Hawks have been doing plenty of that lately, winning 16 of their last 18 games to firmly cement themselves as a playoff team in the Eastern Conference.

“It’s probably one of the better ones (organisations) I’ve played for. It’s probably the best one I’ve played for,” Landale said.

“I think that they’ve done a really good job putting together a roster that enjoys one another. It feels like I’m back on a college team in the sense that everyone’s supporting each other and really goes to battle for one another.

“Quinn does a phenomenal job of running a system that benefits all his players. He’s really probably the best I’ve seen at putting players in a place to succeed. It’s a pleasant surprise.”

The winning certainly helps, but it is not a move without its challenges. There is no “grace period” for Landale, no training camp or pre-season games to figure his new teammates out.

“You’re thrown into the fire,” he said.

“You’re playing on instincts, which can go one of two ways. There’s a whole bunch of different styles, concepts, jargon and all of that kind of stuff that you really have to figure out on short notice, and especially doing it on a team that has playoff aspirations — it’s really important that we figure this out.

“There’s no warm-up period. We’re trying to make the playoffs, we’re trying to win right now.”

Fortunately for Landale, he is already plenty familiar with one of his new teammates in Boomers guard Dyson Daniels.

“He’s helped me get acclimatised to the new situation really quickly,” Landale said.

There is one other thing Landale now has in Atlanta. There is a “newfound sense of belonging”, one which he found during his time at Memphis and has taken on new meaning with the Hawks.

A belonging which comes from repetition. From the ability to prove himself on a nightly basis.

There was once a time when Landale didn’t think that was in his future. But now?

“There’s a newfound sense of belonging that I have,” he said.

An understanding that to belong doesn’t mean to dominate. That self-worth is not measured in the amount of shots taken or points scored, but an impact that goes far beyond the box score.

He has started to “find joy” in the process of the day-to-day rather than the results. Landale said it is the most important lesson he has learned about himself in his career.

From the “dog days in Europe” to trade noise and more recently the silence of an open road, Landale has found belonging of a different kind. Not to wins or losses. Not to the nightly stat line. But to the process itself.

“I think that if you fall in love with that, the outcome and the anxiety that a lot of people feel towards performance and all of that kind of washes away,” Landale said.

That isn’t to say Landale has perfected the art of letting go.

“I definitely still deal with it. I’m human. Everyone does,” he added.

“But realising that an individual game doesn’t make or break your career is the biggest thing that you can come to terms with, and I think that only really comes with age.

“A lot of people you see can hang their hat on one game or something, and it just kind of snowballs.

“So, I’m trying to master the ability to not live and die by the moment, but instead make the most of each moment.

“I think that’s probably the most important thing I’ve discovered through my career, and it’s made my career a lot more enjoyable than it used to be.”