“I think that every player should want that and fight for that,” the 27-year-old Tasmania JackJumpers guard says.

“Selfishly, I have very lofty expectations for myself. I’m very hard on myself,” the US import says.

JackJumpers coach Scott Roth agrees that Adams has the talent to be among the elite players in Australia’s premier basketball league.

“I think he has a little bit of a chip on his shoulder and wants to prove to people how good he is,” Roth says.

An Arizona native, Adams moved with his family to Colorado when he was 10. He turned heads playing for the Chaparral High School basketball team, and continued to impress at the University of Wyoming.

Adams suited up for the Wyoming Cowboys for four years (2012-16), sharing the court with Larry Nance Jr., who today plays for the Portland Trail Blazers, and Nathan Sobey, now an Olympic bronze medallist and guard with the Brisbane Bullets.

Despite finishing fifth all-time in scoring at Wyoming, the 187cm (6 feet, 2 inches) tall Adams went undrafted in the 2016 NBA Draft. And while he had a stint with the Denver Nuggets’ Summer League team that year, and later with the Dallas Mavericks in 2018, Adams is yet to officially make it to the NBA.

But that’s not to say he hasn’t enjoyed success in other top leagues around the world. Adams has wowed hoops fans in Europe, China, Russia, and Canada with his extraordinary athleticism and high-flying antics.

Now he’s one of the inaugural players for the JackJumpers, Tasmania’s first team in the National Basketball League since the Hobart Devils were dissolved in 1996. Adams is one of four import players in the foundation squad, along with fellow American Josh Magette, Canadian forward MiKyle McIntosh, and Russian wunderkind Nikita Mikhailovskii.

Describing himself as a combo guard, Adams says he models his game after Russell Westbrook of the Los Angeles Lakers and Derrick Rose of the New York Knicks, both of whom were hyper-athletic, rim-rocking guards in their prime years.

“I’m fast, I can jump, I can shoot it well – which is an aspect that I’ve worked a lot on,” Adams says.

“I tend to be a good passer when I’m able to attack first, and then draw defences and then kick (the ball) out. I’m better at shooting once I have the ball in my hands for a little bit, get a rhythm, get up and down the court a little bit.”

Adams left Europe with a bitter taste in his mouth, having played for teams including Besiktas in Turkey’s Basketball Super League and, most recently, Virtus Bologna in the Italian League, with whom he won a championship earlier this year.

Despite his success overseas, Adams says being a professional basketballer in Europe is “very difficult if you’re not in the right situation”. And that right situation is not always easy to find.

“Those are hard to come across in Europe – without throwing any clubs or teams under the bus, because, for the most part, they’re good people,” Adams says. “It’s just a business. It depends on the front office, it depends on the coach, the players that they have on the team, the role that they want you to play. There’s so many different things that come to the forefront. And they’re so incredibly hellbent on winning games and winning games immediately. There’s not a lot of patience.

“And changing teams every single year can become difficult but there’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes that the regular person wouldn’t understand or even know existed that’s not basketball-related, and that can wear down on a player – as well as being away from your family for 10 months, all alone in a foreign country.”

Adams was near the top of the list of players Roth wanted to sign when he first got the coaching job with the JackJumpers. As he followed his progress in the Italian League, the 58-year-old sensed an opportunity to secure Adams’s signature.

“I know that timing is everything and he didn’t have a great experience over there (in Europe),” Roth says. “And I’ve come to find out that he was playing at a really high level for the last four years but really not enjoying himself. And I thought this would be the perfect situation if I had the opportunity to sign him.”

At once softly spoken and intense, Adams is a deep thinker who isn’t afraid to be candid about his own flaws and neuroses. A distinctive scar across his right eyebrow serves as a constant reminder of the serious car crash that almost killed him five years ago.

“My family had just moved to a new suburb outside of Denver, (and) in order to get there, there was this road that would cut the drive from about 45 minutes down to about 20,” he recalls. “But it’s out in the middle of the country, in the middle of nowhere. There’s no lights out on that road, there’s no little reflectors on the side of the road – so it’s literally pitch black out there. I dozed off as the road turned left, so I went straight off the road into a ditch up off of a service road, airborne, and then landed back into the other side.”

Adams emerged from the crash with two fractured vertebrae in his neck, a dislocated sternum, and a gash across his right eye that required 46 stitches. He came centimetres from being paralysed from the neck down.

All this just a week before he was set to move to Russia to begin his professional basketball career with Avtodor Saratov in the VTB United League. Thankfully, Adams made a quicker recovery than expected, and was playing his first game six months later.

Five years after the crash, he possesses a sort of serene confidence, born of his renewed Christian faith.

“I learnt to appreciate each day, appreciate the little details, how important those things can be,” Adams says. “Not only do I have a limited amount of time to play basketball, but you’ve got a limited amount of time on earth that can be taken from you at any point. So I’ve just really compounded my faith in God, and just appreciate being able to do what I do that much more.”

As for whether he thinks the crash altered the trajectory of his career, Adams says: “I try not to think about that because that’s not anything that I can control.”

“This is where I’m supposed to be,” he says. “This is the path that God has made for my feet. So I’m trying to walk that the best that I can, and I know that whatever could have been is not as good as what God has in front of me.”

When asked if he still dreams of playing in the NBA, Adams says he takes things day by day.

“I have a goal each and every day when I wake up to be the best teammate that I can be, the most positive teammate that I can be, and lead with the utmost effort that I can give,” he says. “And if I handle that on a daily basis, then the rest will take care of itself.”

Roth describes Adams as being “very worldly as far as knowing what he wants, where he’s at in his career, and what he’s looking for”.

“I think he’s just going to be a fan favourite (for) just how hard he plays,” he says. “He can be a very emotional kid … and I think fans will just love watching him.”

Roth, once a journeyman NBA player, has held assistant coaching positions with the Dallas Mavericks, Vancouver/Memphis Grizzlies, and the Golden State Warriors. Over the years, he’s taken a number of superstar players under his wing, including Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, and Stephen “Steph” Curry.

In Adams, Roth sees an explosive scorer who will be a “focal point” of the JackJumpers’ offence in their first season.

“He likes to play on both ends of the floor,” Roth says. “So I just see him as a guy that’s going to have a lot of freedom to play smartly with our group.”

Adams admits his time in Europe, coupled with the mental and physical trauma he suffered in the 2016 car crash, led to him being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and depression.

“My religion, my faith, helps me a lot with that (mental health),” Adams says.

“But I don’t want to come off and seem like I’m this self-righteous, perfect God-following person. I make mistakes every single day. I fall short every single day.

“It’s some of those shortcomings that produce a lot of the anxiety.”

Over the American summer this year, Adams engaged the services of a mental performance coach in Colorado, who he credits, in part, with preparing him for the upcoming NBL season.

“I learnt a lot … this summer and put a lot of time and effort into my mental health, so that I have strategies in place to really counteract and fight against some of those issues,” he says.

Rosemary Purcell, head of the elite sports and mental health program at Orygen, a youth mental health organisation, says there are numerous factors that make elite athletes particularly vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

“Most elite athletes tend to be young,” Professor Purcell, who is also the deputy head of the Centre for Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, says. “And that’s the period of life when most people experience mental health issues, full stop.”

“Then they’re working in high performance environments … where winning and success are kind of the metrics (they’re measured against). So it brings an enormous amount of pressure on their mental wellbeing.

“And then we know that there are a few other risk factors – being injured, having drops in performance and the like.”

A member of the International Olympic Committee’s Elite Athlete Mental Health Consensus Group, Professor Purcell notes that professional sportspeople also have to grapple with intense scrutiny via both traditional and social media.

“(Athletes) must feel safe to speak about (mental health),” she says. “And that’s a huge problem in elite sports because athletes say: ‘If I talk about this, am I going to get dropped? Is it going to impact my team selection, or my contract?’ So there absolutely has to be that element of what’s referred to as psychological safety rusted into sports.”

Roth says professional basketballers aren’t immune to self-doubt.

“I think players, especially during the course of their careers, have moments where they question themselves or doubt themselves or wonder whether or not this is the right path to be taking,” he says.

“I think with Josh it’s more about a connection, hopefully, with me – that he can trust me to find some of the things that have been missing in his game and exploit those and have him have some fun doing that, not ever having to look over his shoulder at me and (worry about) being taken out of games.”

After less than a month in Hobart, Adams can feel himself falling back in love with the game thanks to the warm welcome he’s received from his new teammates and coaches, as well as other JackJumpers staff.

“The big thing that (Roth) sold me on was the fact that I could come in here and have fun playing basketball again, and get out of the space where it’s kind of more of a job than a game that I love to play, which is what it kind of turned into over the years, as more political and business things took a front role,” he says.

“So coming here to have fun, get that competitive edge back and really just fall in love with playing basketball again, I can say with 100 per cent confidence that over just three weeks that that is certainly the case.”

He might want to be the best player in the NBL, but Adams’ real desire is actually much simpler than that.

“Happiness playing basketball is the ultimate goal,” he says with a knowing smile. ●

■The JackJumpers will kickstart the NBL’s new season with a blockbuster debut against the Adelaide 36ers at the newly refurbished MyState Arena (formerly the Derwent Entertainment Centre), in Hobart, at 7.30pm on December 3. This will be followed by a round 2 clash with the Brisbane Bullets, in Hobart, at 7.30pm, on December 9.

To purchase a membership and support the team go online to https://www.jackjumpers.com.au