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Mario Chalmers Ready to Make a Comeback
In an article written for the Player’s Tribune, Mario Chalmers announces he is ready to make his comeback to the NBA.
In March 2016, the point guard ruptured his achilles. After his surgery, he wasn’t allowed to do any basketball work for five months.
He’s shown his resilience during the recovery process, using Kobe Bryant, who also tore his achilles, as inspiration to return to playing.
I couldn’t do anything, and I wasn’t supposed to. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t walk. I had a little scooter that I got around on. My mom, my dad or my older sister, Roneka — basically whoever was around — took me where I needed to go. Besides bingeing through the end of Narcos, I used all the time I had on my hands to learn about the Achilles — how I tore it and what it was going to take to rehab it. I just wanted to do a lot of research and figure it out for myself. At the time, I didn’t know what I was up against. Knowing myself, that was a good thing.That was the longest I’d ever been without basketball, by far. But that was also the time when I realized that I wasn’t done. I want to get back to the Finals. Once you know what it takes to get there, you can’t play any other way.
Chalmers wants to get back to the Finals, and he might get the chance with a championship contender, Cleveland Cavaliers. He participated in a workout Wednesday afternoon with the Cavs.
His former teammate, James Jones, is all for the possible Chalmers grab.
“I played with him and I won with him. I won championships with him and usually under pressure is where you can learn the most about a person and see how they deal with adversity so of course (he’s a fit),” Jones told cleveland.com. “I’ve always been a Mario Chalmers fan and always will be. Not just because he’s an ex-teammate, but because he’s a good player.”
The point-guard is no stranger to success. Chalmers won back-to-back titles with the Miami Heat during his first eight seasons in the league. He was a solid role player, helping the Heat appear in four straight finals.
He of course, is also no stranger to LeBron James.
“I came to understand what it was like to be a contributor on a world champion,” Chalmers said. “I didn’t just learn how to win games, I also learned what it was like to hold up my end of a winning culture.
Playing with guys like D-Wade and Bron, who had both been to the Finals in previous seasons, you didn’t want to be the guy they looked at and said, “We lost ’cause of him.” Those two guys looked at me like a little brother, so all those times you saw them yelling at me, that was brotherly love, man. (But it was also real yelling!)”
Chalmers was averaging a career-high 10.8 points with the Grizzlies before he was hurt.
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