NEW YORK — Danilo Gallinari shakes his head while he smiles. This is about where he is mentally these days, a positive outlook combined with lingering I-can’t-believe-all-of-this-happened. He is with the Nuggets on this trip, Friday back in New York where he started his NBA career, his first road trip with the team since undergoing a second procedure on his injured left knee — ACL reconstructive surgery on Jan. 21.

Gallinari, with ice bags on both knees Friday morning, watched shootaround and then talked to The Denver Post about the ordeal, his first interview since the surgery.

“I’m feeling good,” Gallinari said. “The surgery went very well — this one went very well — and so we’re just on the road, back from the beginning on the road to recover. The good thing is that all the work that I put in before is going to be, I can use it. The rehab is going to be much easier, so it’s going to be much better.”

Gallinari expects to be ready by the time training camp rolls around in October. He’s already walking, and says he has been for “the last four or five days now.”

“One of the reasons I was able to walk so fast after surgery is because of all of the work that I did before,” Gallinari said. “So, I’ll be following the team and doing the rehab with the staff.”

The Nuggets could use him. Only the point guard position has taken a worse hit than small forward this season. And Gallinari wasn’t just any player. At 16.2 points per game, he was the team’s second-leading scorer in 2012-13 — and rapidly improving.

The most difficult part, particularly in the immediate days following the surgery, he said, was staying upbeat.

“It was tough,” Gallinari said. “But I am pretty good in this situation. I’ve been in this situation before. This is my fifth surgery in six years in the NBA. So, I’ve been through that already, and the most important thing is the mental part, to always be positive and think that things are going to go in a good way. I think it’s important to approach the rehab in a better way.”

Gallinari says he never felt the left knee, which underwent a healing response procedure late last spring, was completely stable. An MRI in January confirmed it wasn’t healed correctly.

“The knee wasn’t feeling as good as the right one,” Gallinari said. “And when you’re going through the rehab you don’t know if it’s something that is mental or if it’s that is going to get better playing. You don’t know that. And the fact that the MRI that we did wasn’t good, it was the signal that the knee, the fact that I wasn’t feeling as good as the right one, it was just confirmed by the MRI. I could have played, maybe. But it wasn’t good for my long-term career because … the structure of the knee wasn’t there.”

After that MRI, Gallinari said: “I had a couple of meetings with the doctors, and also with the doctor that did the surgery on me. And they gave me the advice of doing surgery again because the surgery that we did didn’t work out. So we made the decision to do the surgery again.”

Asked to look back at the decision to go with healing-response surgery, Gallinari paused.

“Right now, probably I wish I did (ACL reconstructive) surgery before. But when you go through an injury, you’re kind of in the doctor’s hands. And I’m not a doctor; I’m a basketball player. So the decision that he made didn’t work out, so we made another surgery with (Nuggets physician Dr. Steve) Traina, and it was very good. So, on to the next one.”

The next one for him is a summer of work to get ready to play a sport he’s been away from for nearly a calendar year now.

“I have the whole summer in front of me,” Gallinari said. “We have a lot of time. The positive thing about doing it right away is I have a lot of time to work with the staff and to stay with the team. And I think I’ll be ready for training camp.”

And if he ever hears the words “healing response”?

Gallinari shook his head.

“Don’t even mention it to me.”

Christopher Dempsey: cdempsey@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dempseypost