Porter finds his refuge on court
Nugget has seen one brother jailed, another banned
Michael Porter Jr. checked his thoughts at the bench as best he could and used the basketball court as his safe place.
It wasn’t easy, he said, to keep his focus from drifting toward younger brother Jontay, who was banned by the NBA in a gambling probe last week. And younger brother Coban, who was sentenced Friday to six years in prison for a fatal drunk driving crash.
But the sixth-year pro nicknamed MPJ kept thinking of his Denver Nuggets teammates who have taken him under their wing.
Porter delivered a 19-point, eightrebound, two-block performance in a 114-103 win over the Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday night in Game 1 of their first-round playoff series.
“Some bad and sad stuff happened to a couple of my brothers,” Porter said in the locker room afterward. “But I’ve got 15, 16 more brothers in here. So I knew I had to be here for them, come in here and do my job and try to prepare to do it at a high level.”
That impressed teammate Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who made four three-pointers, all in the second half.
“For his mindset to be where it is, I applaud him,” Caldwell-Pope said. “As a brother, we’re going to keep him straight.”
Porter missed practice Friday to attend the sentencing of Coban, a former guard at the University of Denver, after a crash that killed a 42-year-old woman last year.
That was after Jontay, a Raptors reserve, received a lifetime ban for betting on basketball and disclosing confidential information to bettors.
And as much as Michael Porter Jr. wants to say basketball has helped him escape, it was still difficult.
“We’re human, so we carry our emotions, and the things that go on off of the court, on to the court,” Porter said. “But I’m mentally tough.”
He has gone through several back procedures since college and basically missed two years in the NBA before playing in all but one game this season.
Saturday’s performance also earned praise from Nuggets big man Nikola Jokic.
“That’s why basketball is such a beautiful game, that you don’t think about nothing except what’s going on, on the floor,” said Jokic, who had 32 points and 12 boards. “Before and after, of course, the stuff hits you. But I think we all reached out to him, and of course family is the first thing. But we are some kind of family, too. So hopefully he’s going to find peace, and he’s going to be in a good spot mentally.”