Basketball phenom focused on The Show, not showboating
As the members of Canada’s junior men’s national basketball team warmed up for an intra-squad exhibition game this week, the layup line turned into a trick-dunk procession.
Here were 17 of Canada’s best players age 18 and under — energetic young men all long and lean and spring-loaded. They threw down a succession of self-tossed alley-oops and spinning reverse jams. Kids in the modest crowd howled in approval.
But while various teammates revved their engines, Andrew Wiggins cooled his. Amid the corkscrewing slam dunks, Wiggins mostly swished step-back jump shots. If you’d come to the Humber College gym unaware of the electrifying talent contained within Wiggins’ 6-foot-7 frame, the pre-game warmup wouldn’t have separated him from the pack.
Luckily, you’d done your YouTube research. Wiggins, the soft-spoken 17-year-old from Vaughan who attends high school in West Virginia, is a gifted flusher of dunks, not to mention the highest-rated high school player in North America currently residing in the graduating class of 2014.
In other words, he’s likely the best 17-year-old hoopster Canada has ever produced. The scions of March Madness — there probably isn’t an NCAA Division 1 coach that wouldn’t love to have him join the program. The NBA — judging from the recent trend of players of similar pedigree, it wouldn’t be a gross assumption to think Wiggins will be coveted as a first-round selection after he fulfills his league-mandated year as a collegian.
But as for layup-line showboating? Wiggins, even at his tender age, sometimes appears to see the game as more business than circus.
“I mean, if you ask him to dunk, he’ll dunk. But other than that, he’ll just do his warmups, take his jump shots and layups,” said Xavier Rathan-mayes, a junior national teammate who counts himself among Wiggins’ best friends. “He’s low key. He’s real humble. He’s a great guy to be around.”
Certainly Canada Basketball is happy to have him around. This has been an important spring in the governing body’s ongoing effort to turn around this country’s fortunes on the international scene.
The senior men’s national team won’t be at the Olympics in London this summer; the maple leaf hasn’t qualified for the five-ringed tourney since Steve Nash captained the squad in Sydney in 2000. But Nash’s appointment last month as general manager of the marquee squad has bolstered the new-era sentiment. And in a country in which the best players haven’t always chosen to represent the maple leaf, Wiggins and his teammates represent a talented generation that appears won over to the idea of spending the summer wearing red and white.
Wiggins is hardly the only bigtime talent in the group. Trey Lyles, another class-of-2014 head-turner, is a 6-foot-9 forward committed to attending Indiana Uni- versity. Brampton’s Tyler Ennis, a 6-foot-3 point guard, is fresh off being named New Jersey’s state high school player of the year. Rathan-mayes, a Scarborough native who also teams with Wiggins at West Virginia’s Huntington Prep, has had dozens of scholarship offers from the cream of U.S. powers.
Nevertheless, the hype around Wiggins is outsized. He certainly has genetics on his side. His father, Mitchell, played in the NBA for six seasons. His mother, Marita, helped win two silver medals for Canada as a member of the 4x100and 4x400-metre relay teams at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. His older brother Nicholas recently signed a letter of intent to attend Wichita State University, an NCAA Division 1 school. The list of family athletic achievements — Andrew is the fourth of six children — goes on.
This week, when national team staff attempted to quantify Andrew Wiggins’s vertical leap, Wiggins jumped higher than the measuring apparatus could measure. Officials had to elevate the device to properly assess the bounds of Wiggins’ explosiveness. The gist: His 44inch vertical leap and 6-foot-11 wingspan mean he can touch 12foot-6, six inches below the top of an NBA backboard.
Pure athleticism isn’t the only reason for the fuss. His jump shot is a smooth re-enactment of the textbook freeze-frame. His knack for timing rebounds and blocked shots speaks to his on-court matu- rity. “He’s already NBA size for his position. He already has NBA athleticism,” said Rowan Barrett, Canada Basketball’s executive vice president. “When you put those two things together and you add the refining of the skills . . . He’s 17 this year. Imagine what he’s going to be when he’s 20. Absolutely scary. I don’t see him as a kid who’s going to get caught up in the hoopla. If he stays on the same track he’s on, the sky’s the limit for him.” As he makes his ascent, he is accompanied by well-armed protectors. His mother, en route to Olympic glory, trained alongside Ben Johnson; she says she can look back on her career proudly because she competed “with integrity and honesty.” His father’s NBA career, meanwhile, was waylaid by a 1987 suspension for cocaine use that cost him much of his professional prime. Mitchell Wiggins, who grew up playing against the likes of Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins and represented the U.S. at a world championship, speaks from the hard experience of great success and dark setbacks. “I’ve told him since he was young, it’s not just about talent. You’ve got to continue to be humble, be hungry and work like you’re one of the worst players on the team,” Mitchell Wiggins said. “To make it, it’s all a progression. You’ve got to keep working.”
That’s valuable advice, to be sure. Andrew Wiggins makes no secret of his goal: It’s the NBA or bust, and he’d know that being the best player in a high-school graduating class guarantees little. It was only a handful of years ago that Tristan Thompson, the NBA forward from Brampton, was pegged by some as the No. 1-ranked high school freshman in North America. By the time Thompson had ventured to the University of Texas, he’d fallen out of the top 10 of those nebulous rankings, but it didn’t stop him from being picked fourth overall in a far more important rating system — last year’s NBA draft. The evaluation of young athletes is ongoing; opinions can change with your next game.
For Andrew Wiggins, pro draft projections are for another day. The task at hand is a trip to the FIBA Americas U18 championship in Brazil beginning June 16. It’s a qualifying tournament for next year’s world junior championship, another in a line of warmups for when the unsentimental business of a kids’ game gets serious.
“Since I’m a big name in Canada, I know people want to see me on the FIBA circuit,” Wiggins said this week.
“Playing for Canada, it’s an honour, it’s a pleasure. I love it, representing Canada wherever I go.”