BOSTON -- Malcolm Brogdon and Danilo Gallinari both grew up surrounded by Boston Celtics fandom.
As a kid in Italy, Gallinari was an admirer of Larry Bird. And when he was drafted by the New York Knicks in 2008, he remembers watching the Hall of Famer's highlights daily on a disc given to him by then-general manager Donnie Walsh.
"Larry Bird is a legend, so it's not easy to do the stuff that he was doing," Gallinari said Tuesday. "But I would look at those tapes every day."
Brogdon, too, remembers being inundated with tales of the green and white by his grandfather, a die-hard devotee of Bill Russell and Red Auerbach.