GREEN BAY, Wis. -- With a large box under one arm and a brisk pace to his gait, Aaron Rodgers was headed for the Green Bay Packers' locker room exit when he crossed paths with Davante Adams.

“Nice catch,” the Green Bay Packers quarterback said to his wide receiver before continuing on his way.

The praise -- in reference to a breathtakingly acrobatic, over-the-defender grab Adams made on a 50-yard bomb from Rodgers during the team’s first open-to-the-public organized team activity practice earlier Tuesday -- was well deserved. But it was also far more economical than what Rodgers had done around this time last year, when he had praised Adams effusively for the way he’d elevated his game and went so far as to say Adams was “going to be a star.”

Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers says it's important for young receiver Davante Adams, left, to "continue to stack confidence." AP Photo/Morry Gash

That might still happen. But it didn’t last season. And now, Adams is out to prove his quarterback right -- even if the timeline has changed.

Adams insisted this week that he in no way got complacent last year because of Rodgers’ kind words -- or because Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy anointed him the “MVP” of the offseason. He also swore he didn’t crumble under the weight of their high hopes for him.

“That really had nothing to do with anything, honestly,” the 23-year-old Adams said. “The expectations weren’t killing me.”

His ankle, for much of the first half of the 2015 season, was. And then, just as he started to look like the player McCarthy and Rodgers had advertised, a knee injury midway through the Packers’ NFC wild-card victory at Washington ended his season.

Nevertheless, while Adams does believe the two injuries were the biggest reason for his less-than-stellar sophomore season, he also owned everything about his underwhelming regular-season numbers (50 receptions, 483 yards, one touchdown). He swore that being thrust into a starting lineup -- instead of the No. 3 role that he was ticketed to fill -- by Jordy Nelson's season-ending knee injury in preseason wasn’t a case of too much, too soon. And he intends to earn every bit of the high praise he failed to deliver on.

“Obviously, the season I had last year, I wasn’t proud of it. So I’ve got to change it and do what I’ve got to do to move forward,” Adams said. “It’s a new year. Obviously, not everything goes the way you plan it to go. You can’t control some things. I hurt my ankle, I hurt my knee; I can’t do anything about that. What I can do is bounce back from it.

“It’s not just [about] proving it to the team but proving it to myself.”

Adams originally injured his ankle in the team’s Week 2 victory over Seattle on Sept. 20, going down in the second quarter but returning in the second half to finish the game. He tried to play the following week against Kansas City but lasted only three snaps, then he missed the next three games. Although he returned for the team’s Nov. 1 game at Denver, he was never 100 percent. He lacked the burst he’d shown as a rookie and struggled to get off the line of scrimmage against press coverage when pushing off on the ankle.

Then, just when he seemingly had put the disappointment of the regular season behind him and was finally finding a groove, Adams injured his knee with 10 minutes left in the third quarter against the Redskins, after he’d caught four balls for 48 yards and a touchdown.

“That was shaping up to be a pretty good game,” Adams said. “That would have been a fun one.”

Instead, Adams missed the team’s season-ending divisional loss at Arizona. He would have had to sit out the NFC Championship Game had the Packers advanced. The lone upside to the injury, which turned out to be a torn medial collateral ligament and lingered into the offseason, was that it forced Adams to focus on his upper body during early offseason workouts, since he couldn’t run.

The result: He appeared visibly thicker in his chest and arms during Tuesday’s practice. Coupled with the lower-body explosiveness he’d shown going up to get that deep ball over cornerback LaDarius Gunter, Adams looked good physically, which makes all the difference to him mentally.

“When my body’s feeling good, my mind is feeling good,” Adams said.

As Rodgers added, “Davante has a lot of potential. He’s a talented guy. He’s very athletic. He can do a lot of things out there. For him, it’s just [important to] continue to stack confidence. And plays like that will definitely help.”