Wright forged his own path, and it paid off just fine
TORONTO • Ray Wright slept soundly on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. His son Delon was set to start his professional career, a candidate to be selected somewhere in the back half of the first round of the NBA Draft. That can be nerve-wracking for a father. Ray had done this before as a father, though: His son Dorell entered the league straight out of high school back in 2004. He knew what to expect. With that, draft night was not so scary.
About 14 months prior, Ray was having trouble sleeping; Stacy Adams-Wright, Delon’s mother, too. Delon, a stellar point guard who had just finished his first year at the University of Utah after two seasons at junior college in San Francisco, wanted to declare for the draft. Nearly everybody in his life was against this idea — his parents, Dorell and his coaches at Utah.
“Of course the coaches over at Utah didn’t want him to leave,” Ray said knowingly.
That is when Stacy opted to exert her well-earned maternal influence.
“It was a very stressful couple of days,” Adams-Wright said. “Being a mom, I got all of the calls. … I talked to him. I said, ‘Delon, I’m getting a lot of calls, too.’ (The coaches) felt like I had a lot of influence on you as a mom. We were both in school together. I had just graduated. I said, ‘You don’t know how special that would be, for you to follow me and get your degree just a year later. That would be just special.’ I also mentioned, ‘Delon, does it bother you that so many people have shown an interest in you and want the best for you and said if you go back to school, it will increase your stock? You’ ll come out with a degree and you’ll have an awesome senior year.’ That’s when he said, ‘ You know what, Mom, it’s my life.’ That’s when I said, ‘OK.’”
Delon said that it was his coaches that got through to him.
“It was in the middle of the night, about one o’clock L.A. time, he called and said, ‘Mom, I’m going back to school,’” Adams-Wright recalled. “And I slept so good.”
It is impossible to say how entering the draft in 2014 would have worked out, but the path he chose has paid off. He won the Bob Cousy Award as the top NCAA point guard in 2014-15, improving his scoring, rebounding and defensive statistics from the previous year. The Raptors selected him with the 20th pick on Thursday and with the trade of Greivis Vasquez, he now slots comfortably behind Kyle Lowry as the Raptors’ developmental priority in the backcourt. Even if the Raptors upgrade at point guard during free agency, they will put a lot of time into Wright’s improvement.
He just had to show a little patience, and that has never been a problem for him. After finishing his time at Leuzinger High School a few credits shy of graduation, he headed to Philadelphia Rise Academy, a prep school, to try to qualify for Division I status. It was a bust; the school didn’t provide the academic boost he hoped for.
“After high school, I took about four months off,” Delon said. “I wasn’t doing anything. I was going to the gym and working out. I didn’t know where I was going to go after that. Once I figured out I had to go to junior college, I started looking at some other schools and going on recruiting trips. I kind of restarted my career after that.”
That has led him to the sport’s best league, where he knows he has work to do just to get on the floor in meaningful games for the Raptors. For a point guard, Wright is an excellent finisher in the lane, using his 6-foot-5 frame to finish above the rim, and his slithery style to get into the paint in the first place. Plus, his defensive intuitiveness should endear him to coach Dwane Casey immediately.
However, he does not have incredible athleticism or a reliable jump shot — he shot just 22 per cent from the college three-point arc last season. Opponents will make him shoot over them until he succeeds consistently. It is a rite of passage for rookie point guards.
“As a rookie you have to start over again, back at the bottom,” Delon said.
Based on his atypical path, though, histor y suggests Wright will be able to make progress given time.
“He had a plan, and he stuck to it,” Ray Wright said. “He kind of got off the road a little bit last year, but he got right back on the road.”