Shane Larkin’s basketball journey has been filled with highs, setbacks, and reinvention, and the Turkish-American guard recently reflected on his path from a lottery-level NBA prospect to one of the most decorated guards in EuroLeague history.
The latest highlight came this summer, when Larkin helped Türkiye capture silver at EuroBasket 2025. But as he explained in a recent interview with HoopsHype, his mindset on the game is shaped by what he went through a decade earlier, starting with his very first weeks as a professional in Dallas.
“I would tell myself to have more fun,” Larkin said, imagining what advice he’d give his younger self. “When I got drafted, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make it work. And I kind of stressed myself out in ways that the game wasn’t as fun to me anymore. And I think because I got drafted 18th overall to Dallas, it was a winning franchise. We’re in win-now mode. I broke my ankle a week after I got drafted. So I was just sitting there for the first four or five months of the season just watching the team.
“And I knew at some point I was going to get an opportunity. And when I did get my opportunity, we were close to .500 right there, fighting for the playoffs. And instead of thinking about it as, ‘This is my first year in the NBA, I’m a rookie. Let me just go out there, be aggressive, make my mistakes, and just have fun with the game of basketball and play the way that I had always played, which got me drafted’… I thought more like, ‘Don’t make any mistakes. Go out on the floor and don’t f*ck up today. Don’t mess up.’”
That early ankle injury – still vivid in his memory – came during what should have been a routine day.
“I remember the possession. I remember everything. I remember exactly why,” Larkin recalled. “We were in Dallas, about to go to the Summer League on the day. We had practice in the morning, and we were flying out after practice. I think this was the first practice Mark Cuban came to watch. And obviously, he just spent a first-round draft pick on me.”
The play seemed simple enough.
“It was like a one-on-one break with the big guy kind of trailing me. I was like, ‘I’m about to punch this. I’m about to go up and put my whole arm in the rim.’ And I went to kind of take off, and when I took off, I kind of slipped a little bit, and my foot kind of turned in and just… just broke. I heard a big crack, and I was just lying there. I didn’t even get off the ground. It kind of just bent in on me. And I was just lying there like, ‘No way, dog, did not just happen.’”
Trying to mask the pain, he still got up.
“I lay on the floor for a little bit. I was in a little pain, but I got up and I walked off. Like very gingerly, obviously, I walked up the steps, put the game ready on, and I went in, and my ankle was like this on the game ready. And then after I took the game ready off, my ankle was like this. The team was traveling to Vegas later that day. And after I took the game ready off, Casey, the athletic trainer at that time, looked at me and was like, ‘Yeah, you’re probably not going to Vegas, bro.’”
The Cincinnati native did reach his dream of the NBA – logging 267 games with Dallas, New York, Brooklyn, and Boston – but eventually opted for a different path.
“I was lucky enough to accomplish my goal at 20 years old, get drafted 18th overall, break my ankle a week after the draft, and then kind of hopped around. And then there was an opportunity where it was like, OK, take a non-guaranteed deal in the NBA and continue to fight for that or go overseas and play 30 minutes a night and kind of see what that looks like,” he said.
“And, you know, thankfully, I had an open mindset where I didn’t want to do that third point guard kind of non-guaranteed deal, wait for somebody to get injured. It’s like you’re waiting for somebody’s downfall for you to take advantage of it. And that just didn’t feel right to me. I felt like if I wanted to get that opportunity, it was because I deserved it because of my play, not because of somebody’s injuries.”
That choice has led to a new chapter as one of the EuroLeague’s biggest stars. Larkin, who has made 247 appearances in Europe’s top club competition, explained what life is like at that level.
“You have to really experience it to fully understand it. I’m not comparing myself to any star player in the NBA at all, but like the way I’m sure Kyrie Irving was being treated in Cleveland is the same way that Kendrick Nunn is now being treated in Athens, the way that I’m treated in Istanbul, Mike James is treated in Monaco. These superstar players live in these cities and they have these certain lifestyles that you wouldn’t really understand it unless you were over here and you got to see it first hand.”
Shane Larkin revisits ankle injury in Dallas Mavericks practice
— Eurohoops (@Eurohoopsnet) September 18, 2025
🗣️ “I remember the possession. I remember everything. I remember exactly why”
➕ Moving his career overseashttps://t.co/LLPD5RKPYR
