THE RIGHT PICK
Rookie Wiseman has always impressed the Warriors with his ‘sense to care’
One night last October, 19-yearold, 7-foot James Wiseman walked alone into a swanky restaurant in Miami’s fashionable South Beach district. He was there for a job interview.
At an outdoor table sat the brass of the three-time NBA champion Golden State Warriors: owner Joe Lacob, GM Bob Myers, coach Steve Kerr and head trainer Rick Celebrini. They peppered Wiseman with questions, and Wiseman, as unintimidated by the company as he was by the expensive steak on the plate in front of him, calmly answered.
Do you like to go to parties, one of them asked.
“I don’t go to parties,” he replied. He told them about growing up with a single mom who worked multiple jobs in the projects of Nashville, Tenn., where he’d sometimes have to finish his homework under the lights of the school bus she drove. At one point, Wiseman turned the interview around on the men, all of them more than twice his age. He asked them how he
would fit with the team’s culture and what role he would play on the court.
“Clearly impressive,” said Myers, recalling that dinner three months later. “I wonder how I would perform as a 19-year-old with a bunch of 40-, 50-, 60-yearolds at dinner.”
It was at that point that the Warriors knew what to do with the No. 2 pick in the draft. For months, they had been unsure. Wiseman, the raw prospect from Memphis, Georgia’s Anthony Edwards and YouTube sensation LaMelo Ball were options. So was trading the pick.
But at that dinner, they decided Wiseman had what it takes to become the future face of the franchise, not just because of what he can do on the court, but also because the adversity that shaped him off it.
***
Now Wiseman lives in San Francisco, walking distance from Chase Center and worlds away from Nashville. He has an $8.7 million salary and lives in the same high-rise apartment building as his mother, Donzaleigh Artis. He’s on the sixth floor, she’s on the second. She moved to the Bay Area in January. That’s also when she saw her son play his first game as a Warrior.
“It almost made me cry,” Wiseman said.
Raising a family in the Village Trail section of Nashville wasn’t easy. Wiseman’s father separated from the family when Wiseman was young. Artis drove the bus and worked other jobs to feed and clothe James and his sister, Jaquarius Greer, eight years older.
Artis woke up Wiseman every day at 4:30 a.m. and started the bus route at 5:30. Wiseman accompanied her so he could get to the YMCA at 7, when he’d catch the connection to school. After school was basketball practice, then sometimes he’d get a ride home from his AAU coach, Thomas Coleman.
“She’s a prideful woman,” Coleman says of Wiseman’s mom. “If they had tough times, the way she handled herself, you wouldn’t know.”
But sometimes a power bill went unpaid, and the lights in the house went out. On some of those nights, the family would huddle on the bus where they could turn on the lights for as long as the battery would allow and finish their homework.
“I was by myself, trying to raise them,” Artis said. “And, with James growing up like a sprout, it was hard raising him. … Every other week it seemed like his pants got shorter.”
By the time Wiseman was in the eighth grade he was 6-foot-7. He could have jumped, dunked and blocked shots on his way to a college scholarship, but he wanted to be a more complete player. While walking the halls between classes, Wiseman bounced a tennis ball. When friends asked what he was doing, Wiseman said he’d read that it would improve his handle. He often skipped lunch to get up shots in the gym and watch YouTube clips of his role models, David Robinson, Chris Bosh and Kevin Garnett. After school, he worked out with the big men, then the guards until he was picked up around 6 p.m.
When shuttling a young Wiseman between practices, Coleman would occasionally turn around from the front seat, hold a phantom microphone up to Wiseman and ask in his best broadcast voice: “How did you score 30 points tonight?” Eyes to the floor, Wiseman at first answered modestly and tentatively. Coleman coached Wiseman to deliver PR-friendly answers with confidence.
“When you get on television,” Coleman told him, “you want to make sure you can speak right.”
Back at home, Wiseman practiced until the street lights came on. The rim on his rollaway hoop was bent, mangled by years of Wiseman’s dunks. That rusty hoop provided refuge from the entrapments of a troubled and violent neighborhood. But it became clear to local gang members — who would sometimes break from dealing drugs to play pickup games on the hoop — that Wiseman could make it out. So they left him alone.
Wiseman became the man of the house early on. There wasn’t a consistent presence of a father. There had been a brother, Bobby Ray, but he died in a drowning accident at age 5, six years before James was born. Wiseman spent many nights alone while his mother and sister worked. He’d do his schoolwork, cook dinner, wash clothes and feed their black cat, Tita.
So years later, after the Warriors sat down with Wiseman at that swanky South Beach restaurant, they were struck by his maturity.
***
The Warriors weren’t always so high on Wiseman. When Myers scouted Wiseman in November 2019, his impression may have been best described as lukewarm. Wiseman struggled defending Oregon’s pickand-roll and with foul trouble. The takeaway: He was big and athletic, but raw.
Myers had hoped to see Wiseman again, but that game in Oregon would be Wiseman’s last. He played just three games for Memphis before a recruiting scandal related to Wiseman’s pre-existing relationship with head coach Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway forced him from the team.
After his sophomore year at Ensworth School in Nashville, Wiseman and his mom moved across the state so he could play for Hardaway at Memphis East High School. In 2018, Hardaway accepted the Memphis job and, months later, Wiseman committed to play for the Tigers. The NCAA opened an investigation and found that Hardaway had helped Wiseman’s family with moving expenses. That financial aid would have been OK if not for Hardaway’s prior donation to Memphis, which defined him as a booster. The NCAA suspended Wiseman for 12 games and ruled he must repay the $11,500 Hardaway lent the family in 2017. A few days after the NCAA announced its decision, Wiseman left the program.
Nine months passed between his final game at Memphis and his draft interview with the Warriors. Before dinner, the Warriors put Wiseman through a workout. He smoothly executed a battery of drills and impressed with his size and strength. Kerr was floored by the size of his hands.
“We didn’t necessarily have him at the top before,” Myers said. “In the end, he was our favorite guy.”
A month later, the Warriors made Wiseman the No. 2 pick after Edwards went No. 1 to Minnesota. In front of a camera feeding to ESPN, Wiseman sat on a couch in Memphis, flanked by his mom, sister and Hardaway, and put on a gray Warriors hat. He didn’t cry, he didn’t smile. Fittingly, he exhaled. He and his family had come a long way from the bus route.
A moment later, his phone lit up with a text from Draymond Green: “Enjoy this day Rook,” it read. “But as soon as you get up here, it’s time to work.”
*** Angry with himself for picking up his fifth foul early in the third quarter of a January game against the Lakers, Wiseman smacked a Gatorade cooler on his way to the bench. As the cooler landed on the floor, Kerr turned to assistant coach Mike Brown.
“I love that,” he said. The Warriors don’t mind when Wiseman gets upset with himself. This is a team led by fiery personalities in Kerr and Green, and proud perfectionists in Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. Like them, Wiseman cares.
“He’s a perfectionist and he wants to be great,” Curry said. “That’s great. You want him to have that sense of care.”
More and more, the Warriors feel they made the right pick. The youngest opening day starter in Warriors history, Wiseman scored 37 points in his first two games, the most since Rick Barry’s 42 in 1965. Myers remembers sitting up in his chair during the team’s fourth game of the season after Wiseman blocked a shot, dribbled down the floor, Euro-stepped and crammed a right-handed dunk.
“There’s not a lot you can say that he won’t have the potential to do,” Myers said. “Can’t really put him in a box.”
Former Warriors center Zaza Pachulia, now a consultant for the team, was wowed by Wiseman’s speed in transition. “He was the fastest player out there,” he said. “That’s pretty unique when talking about a 7-1 guy.”
The Warriors are using the regular season to put Wiseman through stress tests. Kerr has empowered him to push the break after rebounds, designed plays to get him open 3-point attempts and defend elite big men such as Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic.
But Wiseman is toiling through the steepest part of his learning curve. He still struggles with the timing of Kerr’s read-andreact offense, the nuances of NBA defense and the physicality of opposing big men. After opening the season as the starting center, Wiseman was moved into a bench role where he can be brought along more slowly.
This is the tricky balance facing Kerr this season. Most top picks are drafted to bottom-dwelling teams and can play through growing pains. But the Warriors are trying to make the playoffs while at the same time developing their franchise center-in-waiting.
“Steve is trying to thread the needle of letting him grow and make mistakes and also try to win,” Myers said. “So James is on a little bit of a shorter leash sometimes, a little bit of pressure. It will be good for him in the long run.”
Wiseman in a phone interview listed the milestones he wants to reach.
“I want to be an All-Star, win MVP, win some rings, be one of the best players in the league,” he said.
Is that all?
He added franchise records, too. When quizzed on who holds the singleseason record for rebounds, Wiseman responded correctly with Wilt Chamberlain. He mentioned how Curry and Kobe Bryant spent their entire careers with one team.
This is the goal for Wiseman. If all goes to plan, the Warriors will have found the next franchise star because of a steakhouse dinner in Miami.
“I want to become a Warrior forever,” Wiseman said.