MUDIAY’S DRIVE
New Knick with sky-high potential has beaten odds from war-torn Zaire to Texas to playing in China
Emmanuel Mudiay can be Derek Harper.
Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown, who knows a thing or two about great point guards, looks at Mudiay and sees Harper, the gritty floor general who helped to get the Knicks to Game 7 of the NBA Finals in 1994.
The Knicks traded for Mudiay last week in a move that crowded their backcourt, put pressure on 19-year-old rookie Frank Ntilikina, and gave Mudiay a chance to revive his career after two and a half underwhelming seasons in Denver. Brown remains close to the Mudiay family after first recruiting him to play at SMU, and he thinks now that the 21-year-old is in New York, he can finally reach the potential everyone’s been talking about for years.
And when he does, the Knicks could have Derek Harper 2.0 on their hands.
“The reason I point him out is because he had toughness, he could run a team, he had no ego, he just wanted to win,” Brown said of Harper, who famously fought Jo Jo English in the 1994 conference semifinals at the height of the legendary KnicksBulls rivalry.
When it comes to guards, there may not be a better authority than Brown, who has spent a basketball lifetime riding — and clashing — with the likes of Allen Iverson, Mark Jackson, Stephon Marbury, Rod Strickland, Haywoode Workman, Travis Best and Chauncey Billups, to name a few of the guys the Hall of Fame coach demanded play a certain way.
“All I wanted them to do was be the front line of my defense, be a coach on the floor, make everybody on their team better and be committed to playing the right way,” Brown said.
“I see that in Emmanuel.”
The rest of us are still trying to figure out what we see in Mudiay and what to make of this latest roster shakeup. Because while guys like Brown talk glowingly about the limitless potential Mudiay has, how he stood out with his passion, his strength and his athleticism, the rest of us see a kid whose career has yet to take off.
Right now, he’s a former lottery pick the Nuggets gave up on. Mudiay, who was selected three spots behind Kristaps Porzingis in the 2015 Draft, averaged more than 30 minutes per game as a rookie. By the end in Denver, he was averaging just 17.9 minutes this season. “He craves to be coached,” Brown said. “I just look at this staff and I look at Jeff (Hornacek), I think he’s in an ideal position. People that love the game appreciate what he does. I don’t think there’s any more knowledgeable fanbase than the Knicks or any more supportive fanbase than the Knicks. They just want to see a kid come out, play hard, make his teammates better and try to improve. I think he has all that and he’s way more mature than a 21-year-old kid.
“When somebody tells you basically you failed in a short period of time, kids with character grow from that,” Brown said. “I think he will grow from that experience.”
One thing Mudiay has going for him is that he has been surrounded by incredible character his entire life. He’s had to endure hardship and challenge every step of the way. So while Brown may be partial to the kid, he may have a point when it comes to the stuff Mudiay is made of.
It’s the kind of stuff — heart, hustle, smarts — that always play well in New York.
And how he got here may offer some insight into whether Mudiay has what it takes to stick. Mudiay was born in the war-torn country of Zaire, which is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Two wars raged there between 1996 and 2003, and Mudiay was a young child in a place where violence was omnipresent. Gunshots rang out all night and in the morning, there were dead bodies in the street. “It was pretty bad,” Jean-Michel Mudiay, Emmanuel’s older brother, said. “It may have been at its worst right before we left. We saw a lot of things kids our age shouldn’t see.” Death eventually touched the Mudiay family. In 1998, when Emmanuel was only 2 years old, Mudiay’s father, JeanPaul, died of a heart attack. His death forced oldest
brother Stephane to grow up fast as the new patriarch, and Mudiay’s mother, Therese, was forced to do whatever she could to provide for her family. That duty, and a search for a better life, led her to save for a one-way flight to the United States. In 2000, she left the boys to set up a home in Texas near relatives. She would send for them as soon as she could afford to bring them over.
“It was tough,” Jean-Michel said. “All we knew was our mom, and we thought we’d never see her again.”
For 10 long months, the Mudiay boys, all younger than 11 years old, waited in Zambia for Therese to call for them while the bloodiest conflict since World War II raged in Africa. They were even more terrified when they watched the 9/11 attacks on TV and feared their mother was also killed. Emmanuel was 5 years old.
Not long after, the family was finally reunited, but their challenges did not end. Making a new life in this country is not easy, and the brothers watched their mother work long hours, often working the overnight shift as a nursing assistant in an assisted living facility.
“It hurt,” Jean-Michel said. “We saw our mom did everything for us. That’s why we all worked so hard, so we could give back to her. We thought if one of us could make it in sports, we could take care of our mom.”
Emmanuel dreamed of making it to the NBA from a young age. The Mudiay brothers excelled at sports and basketball was the fastest and easiest way for them to assimilate to American society. Emmanuel grew up to be a star high school player first at Grace Prep and then Prime Prep, a charter school founded by Deion Sanders. He got so good, Larry Brown and a long line of other big-time college coaches came knocking. He could have gone anywhere he wanted, but he chose SMU.
After he committed, Mudiay’s high school was shut down by the Texas Education Agency. Fearing the NCAA would penalize players who came out of the disgraced charter school, Mudiay opted to turn pro and went to play in China for a year on a $1.2 million contract. In China, there was only more adversity. Injuries limited Mudiay to just 10 games, but he won over teammates first when he refused to go home, opting to stay in China to immerse himself in the game, and again in the playoffs when he outplayed Stephon Marbury, despite not being totally healthy.
Brown never wanted Mudiay to go to China and he said if he would have stayed and played for him at SMU, he could have molded Mudiay into a No. 1 or 2 pick. Instead, he went to the Nuggets at No. 7 with skyhigh potential.
He never realized it there. So now here’s Mudiay, seeking what he calls “a new beginning.”
“It’s going to be great,” Jean-Michel, who also serves as Emmanuel’s manager, said. “For whatever reason, it didn’t work out in Denver. It’s a change of scenery. It’s where he wanted to be all along.” Why? “Because it’s the Mecca of Basketball,” he said.
Jean-Michel laughs when he’s told New York hasn’t felt like that in a while. He said his brother is excited to change that, to make it the center of the basketball universe again.
If that’s going to happen, then Mudiay is going to have to turn into the player the Knicks and people like Brown think he can be. Derek Harper 2.0 would be nice, but if you buy into the hype, Emmanuel Mudiay 1.0 might be better.
“Coming in at 19 you’ve got so much on you,” Mudiay said. “Coming out of high school I was kind of given everything, the easy route. So that was my first time kind of going through something. I think it formed me well. I didn’t hold my head down. I always tried to just control what I could control and work as hard as I could.”
Most of what Mudiay said is true. The parts about being young and working hard can all be verified. But the stuff in the middle about how easy he’s had it and how he never had to go through adversity? Pure nonsense. Mudiay’s entire life has been marked by adversity, and that’s why the Knicks might be smart to take a chance on him.