JJ Barea literally got chosen out of the crowd to coach his hometown team.

He was spending the summer of 2017 in Mayagüez, where he grew up on the west coast of Puerto Rico. “I always go to those games just for fun,” he said, “just because I played in that league before the NBA.” He had outgrown Baloncesto Superior Nacional (BSN) long ago — this was after his 11th NBA season — but the island’s pro league was still sacred to him.

The Indios de Mayagüez were floundering. They had just fired their coach. As Barea took in one of their games, they hadn’t named a replacement yet. The Mavericks guard was automatically the biggest celebrity in attendance, as nobody else from Mayagüez has ever played in the NBA.

Around that time, he was already thinking about the future — about coaching someday, after his playing career. But he was not expecting an impromptu job offer.

“The owner comes up to me like, ‘Hey, do you want to coach?’” Barea remembers.

After the surprise wore off, he answered with a question. “Man, I would love to, but I don’t know if I can.”

Barea called Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and general manager Donnie Nelson to ask if the NBA or the team had any rules against him coaching in a separate league during the offseason. Mayagüez just needed someone to get the team through the end of the schedule. “They called me back, said, ‘You’re good to go,’” Barea recalls. “So I did it.”

It’s fitting in hindsight that Barea’s first foray into coaching was in Puerto Rico, the island he loves as much as basketball. Eight years later, he’s on the front row of the Nuggets’ bench as a new assistant coach on David Adelman’s inaugural staff. His tactical role is offense-oriented, but his presence has just as much to do with his effervescent personality, as far as Adelman is concerned — “his attitude, his energy, who he is as a person, the way he can talk to the players.”

To hear Denver’s Bruce Brown describe the 5-foot-10 ex-point guard: “That’s my little Puerto Rican right there.”

Puerto Rican identity has been the through-line of Barea’s basketball life. After college at Northeastern, he played with BSN’s Cangrejeros de Santurce before signing with Dallas as an undrafted free agent and working his way up through the D-League. In 2011, he scored 17 points in Game 5 of the NBA Finals and became the second Boricua to win an NBA championship, and the first since Butch Lee in 1980.

When Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, he galvanized the Dallas community to fundraise for recovery and used Cuban’s private plane to deliver supplies back home. When he finally got too gray to stick around on an NBA roster, he moved back home for one last ride as a player with Santurce, just for the fun of it.

That’s the spirit with which he has always steered his decisions. His mom coached tennis and volleyball in Mayagüez, so he grew up playing those sports in addition to basketball and baseball. Despite emerging as one of the best tennis players in Puerto Rico for his age group — “for some reason, I’m good at every single sport” — he quit at 14 years old. He was too social for it. He preferred being a captain.

“I liked team sports better,” he said. “They’re more fun. I like everything about a team. The hangout. The traveling. Competing and winning together and losing together. Going in my parents’ car, driving around Puerto Rico to play basketball or volleyball. Flying from Puerto Rico to the United States with your whole team. For me, it was the best times.”

He probably wouldn’t have this job without that perspective. After winning the title in Dallas, Barea went on to play three years for the Minnesota Timberwolves. For a time, he lived in the same building as one of their assistant coaches: Adelman, who was working in player development under his father, Rick, and trying to work his way up.

Even though one was a player and one was a coach, they were only two years apart in age. Barea and David often found themselves meeting for a beer after games, rehashing the night, then talking about the league, or maybe baseball. “It was always about sports,” Barea said. Their careers went their separate ways eventually, but they kept in touch sporadically.

“He was really good just talking with players, having that relationship with me,” Barea said. “He’s no bull-(crap). He’ll tell you how it is. He’ll tell you straight up to your face. And his dad is similar. I was always a fan of his dad, the way they did things. … I was like, these are two good people to know and learn from more about the NBA.”

Adelman hired him this summer while in pursuit of ex-players whose voices could resonate with the locker room. Barea had spent the last couple of years coaching the Mets de Guaynabo, another BSN team. He quickly started building relationships with Nuggets players on the golf course, where “he’s really (freaking) good,” Brown said. “We played in San Diego (during training camp). We had rental clubs, and he was hitting darts.”

As for basketball, Adelman is the architect of Denver’s offense and has been throughout Nikola Jokic’s prime, but Barea can add specific insight from his experience alongside another Hall of Fame big.

“I’m really about finding stuff that actually could make us even a little bit better,” he said. “If it’s about just a little bit of spacing, how we did the spacing when I played with Dirk, when we gave the ball to Dirk at the free throw line, how we did the spacing when he got it in a post-up. Any little thing that will help (Jokic) and help us be a little bit better, I’m up for it. … He’s so smart. He will tell you — he won’t keep it to himself — what he’s comfortable with.”

“We’ve been watching Dirk tape for a decade,” Adelman added, “trying to find new ways to get Nikola the ball in space. Ran a version of something (the Mavericks) used to run the other night involving a tight catch at the nail. … It’s always nice to have somebody you can ask, ‘What does it feel like? I like this set from 12 years ago. You were actually in this. What did you think about this?’”

Ironically, the central hub play style that Barea has spent most of his career around is the opposite of how he describes Puerto Rican hoops. “We like a lot of one-on-one,” he said, laughing. “We try to get away from it, to get a little bit more of the ball movement. But Puerto Rico basketball is passion. We play with a lot of passion.”

And everything that’s Puerto Rican, he feels passionate about. As a player, he was similar to Jokic in that he says he was always on a flight home the day after the season ended. He spends most of his time outdoors when he’s home, either on a beach or golf course. He speaks lovingly of the coffee and the food. “Anything you can do with a plantain will do it,” he said. “From mashed plantains to sweet plantains to fried plantains, stuffed plantains with stuff in it.”

His passion project in recent years has been the construction of a sports complex in the heart of San Juan, the island’s capital city, where his family is still living this season (with plans to join him in Denver next year, like Jared Dudley’s).

Previously an abandoned private school, the complex will include three basketball courts and a soccer field. Barea says the national team plans to use it, and his “dream” is for the Nuggets or Mavericks to someday hold training camp in Puerto Rico.