LAS VEGAS — At the New Balance factory in Lawrence, Mass., everyone has a role, a piece of a shoe they install to make a finished product.

Every workday was different for Darius Bazley during his internship with the shoe company, and one day he found himself at 6-foot-9 standing on that line, playing one minor role in the process of making footwear.

“There are a bunch of different stations, and everybody has a specific job and everything comes together and you make a shoe,” Bazley told The Athletic on Monday. “If it isn’t right, you throw it away and you start all over again.”

An NBA career doesn’t work that way.

As Bazley transitions from New Balance intern to Thunder rookie — he made his NBA Summer League debut here on Monday — he knows there’s no chance to scrap your path to the NBA and try again.

He had one shot to arrive here, and he chose a different route than anyone before him, opting out of college basketball — he’d committed to play at Syracuse — in favor of a yearlong internship and his own on-court preparation.

When he took the floor on Monday, it was for his first competitive game since last spring, when he was a senior at Princeton High School in Sharonville, Ohio. For a full season, he worked with trainers to improve his game, and he watched basketball games without playing in a real one.

And if he had the choice, he’d do it again.

“I knew my time was coming,” Bazley said. “I knew it was only a year before you get to play, before you’re on TV and people are watching you. Obviously, it was tough watching your class go out there and play. You want to do that as well. But mental toughness, there’s nothing to it. You just have to know in the back of your head, ‘That’ll be me soon.’”

It’s unclear how soon he might make an on-court impact. His 16 1/2 minutes on Monday were largely uneventful: no points on 0-for-2 shooting, two rebounds, three assists. Bazley felt less rusty, he said, than nervous from his long layoff.

He’s a project, on a Thunder team that seems likely to be rebuilding soon in the aftermath of trading Paul George to the L.A. Clippers. Bazley might be learning under Russell Westbrook or might be part of the first team the Thunder’s ever had without him.

Whatever role Bazley plays, it’s likely to take him time to grow into it.

He has physical tools, including a comfort with the ball in his hands that’s rare for players his size. If he sees a small crease in a defense, he can exploit it and get to spots other players maybe can’t, said Thunder assistant coach Dave Bliss, the head coach of OKC’s Summer League team. Defensively, Bazley has the range and motor to recover from getting beat, Bliss said.

But he’s a wiry 205 pounds with a suspect jump shot, and Bazley has room for considerable offensive growth.

“He’s got a seriousness about getting better, which I really respect from him,” Bliss said. “He knows he’s got a lot of work ahead of him, and he’s not shying away from that.”

Instead, he’s leaning into it.

When Bazley first met with Sam Presti, he said the Thunder general manager told him the organization prided itself on developing players and that Oklahoma City was thinking about what kind of player he’d be three or four years down the road, not this season.

“It was good for me knowing that I’m coming into a place where these people have a plan for me,” Bazley said. “They didn’t pick me just because. They have a plan going forward.”

It wasn’t easy formulating a plan for Bazley, given how little information there was about him in the pre-draft process.

Analysts and fans — even some teams — considered him a mystery man, and the label didn’t bother him.

“In a sense, they were kind of right,” Bazley said. “They haven’t seen me, haven’t seen me play. They don’t know who I am as a person. With me not going to school, they can’t call anybody and say, ‘How is he?’ They had every right to say that. So when I went into interviews, I tried to put my best foot forward and show them me so there was no more mystery when they were going to choose me.”

Here’s a little of what teams learned about him.

Bazley, who was born in Boston and lived there until the age of 7, never dreamed of any career but basketball and always figured he’d take the traditional road to one. He thought he’d graduate from high school, go to college for a year or more and enter the draft, “because that’s all you see.”

As he explored his post-high-school options, though, the concept of focusing on his game while taking an internship became appealing. It was a chance to grow on his own terms, and to expand his life experience with a job.

During his year with New Balance, he lived in an apartment near the company’s headquarters in Brighton, Mass., just outside of Boston. Every workday was different. Some days he’d sit in on design meetings. Some days he’d learn about marketing. He spent a lot of time in product development, testing workout equipment and offering feedback.

For all the diversity in the office, his time on the court stayed about the same: basketball workouts twice a day, weights once.

Now he’s ready for the next step in his basketball development, ready to see the Thunder execute their plan for his future. On this new assembly line, he’ll look to add parts to his game until it’s a finished product.

It might take some time, and the path here might have been unorthodox. But Bazley got right where he wanted to go.

“At the end of the day, my goal was to get to the NBA,” Bazley said. “I was gonna do whatever it took because you only get one shot. So when you get it, you got to seize it. I definitely took a different route, but I’m here. You got to take risks in life, and that was mine.”

(Photo: David Dow / Getty Images)