Dereck Lively II on building Legos: My Lego Mona Lisa would be the Cathedral of Notre Dame or the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars

Dereck Lively II on building Legos: “It helps with hand-eye coordination. I try to not use my right hand to get better at using my left hand. My Lego Mona Lisa would be the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was a 10,000-piece Lego, or the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Now I'm working on the Eiffel Tower, which will be 4 feet 10 inches tall. On game days, I'll wake up, get my treatment, lift, work out, then come home, eat, and build Legos for an hour or two. I'll take a nap, build some more Legos for half an hour, go to my game, and then build for another hour or hour and a half at night."

Source: YouTube

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Dereck Lively II on hobbies and Interests Beyond Basketball: "I have a lot of like childhood dreams that I've been trying to live out now since I've been able to have the ability to. I just gave the money to my people to get a new saltwater aquarium in my office. I currently have six fish tanks. I have a wall full of Legos, anything from 200-piece Legos to 10,000-piece Legos. I just started picking up collecting cards again, no matter if that's like Yu-Gi-Oh cards, Pokemon cards, or my mom's old basketball cards. I have six tanks. One's like 20 gallons, then it goes 30, 55, 60, 63, and a 260-gallon. One tank is like a community tank with angelfish, different rams, and tetras. My discus tank just lost nine fish in two days because they got worms. I have a koi tank and a guppy tank that’s breeding. My 260-gallon tank is my Amazon River tank with a silver Arowana, albino Arowana, red parrots, Roseline sharks, and an albino alligator gar. When I was a kid, I was always watching videos on YouTube about reptiles, fish, snakes, and lizards. I always wanted to do that but never had the space, money, time, or patience to set it all up. Now, besides basketball, I work on my little hobbies and enclosures because I like to sit there and watch them grow.” -via YouTube / December 14, 2024

Dereck Lively II on Luka Doncic: "In Madrid Luka is God, Luka is God. Like you think that there's a lot of fans in America… No way. I’m one of his disciples. You just got to like look at what he's doing, how he's carrying himself. (…) When I get to Dallas he's not there. I go through a whole training camp, like the summer league, preparing for summer league, after summer league and then working out to prepare for training camp to start the season. We've been playing five-on-five for weeks and Luka finally gets there, so what they do is we play five-on-five and they put me and Luka on the same team for the first time. That game I'm pretty sure the first plays were like four back-to-back lobs in a row and he's throwing lobs and I'm like is that a lob, I'm just going to jump just because and then I catch it and finish it and I'm like ‘wow like he really put it like he puts it at the dot each time’. We never had a conversation, we never really played together and it was lob dunk, lob dunk full court, lob dunk, three, he's going to look like he's shooting it, throw a lob dunk and it was like that the whole season.” -via YouTube / December 14, 2024

Executives around the league have poked around to see whether Dallas would part with either center Daniel Gafford or Dereck Lively, but that has been met with initial resistance for now. -via HoopsHype / December 2, 2024

This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Dereck Lively II on building Legos: My Lego Mona Lisa would be the Cathedral of Notre Dame or the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars