DRIVEN TO SUCCEED
Having once lived in a car, any shot to play NBA minutes is meaningful to rookie Queen
On the day the Rockets signed him to a two-way contract, Trevelin Queen ignored the first two calls from his agent.
Queen was in McAllen, where he had been playing for the Rockets’ G League affiliate the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, but was absorbed in a game of “Call of Duty.” When he finally answered the phone and received the news, he broke down in tears.
He thought of the long road he took to get to that moment, his first NBA contract. He thought of his zero scholarship offers out of high school, the three junior colleges he attended, his brief homelessness. He thought of how this contract would enable him to provide for his family, for his daughter who would be born less than a month later on Jan. 10.
Then he told nobody.
“This business is crazy, like I could have signed that day and then got cut the next day,” Queen says. “So I just wanted to actually get here and then tell everybody so I know it’s real. I’m just not a big announcement guy. I just always feel like there’s more work to do. I’m not satisfied (with) short-term gratification, so I don’t really need, like, extra hype. I got emotional because I’ve been waiting my whole life, but I just know there’s more work to do. I know I can do more than the two-way, so I just want to let them know.”
Queen, a 24-year-old rookie wing, is emblematic of the state of the Rockets, a franchise that in its early rebuilding stages is dependent on young, oft-unproven talent. Part of the rebuild will be accomplished with draft picks, including this year’s No. 2 overall choice, Jalen Green. But the other side is guys like Queen — the undrafted diamonds in the rough who might not be foundational building blocks but could be equally useful as cement to fill in the cracks.
Garrison Mathews, another undrafted wing player who started this season with the Vipers, made his Rockets debut as a two-way player. Mathews was so successful in his NBA minutes that the Rockets converted his contract to a standard deal and waived Danuel House Jr., opening the door for Queen to sign a two-way deal on Dec. 18.
Queen made his NBA debut for the Rockets that same night in a win at Detroit. He scored his first NBA points a game later in a loss to the Bulls, making the only shot he attempted in four minutes on the court. It was garbage time in a 15point blowout, but Queen did not care. The dream was real at last.
The way Queen sees it, his position with the Rockets now is a direct counterpoint to how his life could have turned out.
He barely played a full season of varsity high school basketball before he graduated, headstrong but lacking direction as he jumped from one junior college to another. When he finally got to a Division I NCAA program at New Mexico State, he had to fight his way from a 13th man role to Western Athletic Conference tournament MVP.
At his lowest point, he slept for days in a 1982 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale with three Marin College teammates, who took turns refilling the car’s leaky gas tank on long drives across the San Francisco Bay Area.
The only way he knew how to get through it was to keep moving.
“It was my will to keep going,” Queen says. “You know, my grandmother always told me, like no matter what it is, you can get through it as long as you have faith in what you’re doing and God and stuff like that. So for me, it was just always the bigger picture. I knew I could get here with my work ethic and my mindset that I already had.”
He says this all in almost one breath. When Queen talks, it is with the cadence of someone who is not used to staying long in one place. Words tumble out of him as if he is afraid they might evaporate before he is finished.
Time is a luxury in today’s NBA. So is permanence.
And who knows? Maybe someday he can have both.
Relentless beginnings
Queen can’t help but smile as he recalls the birth of his hunger on the basketball court.
He was 8, playing in a youth basketball league in his hometown of Glen Burnie, Md. When Queen was on defense, he kept hearing his father’s voice echoing in his head: “Don’t let that man cross half court.”
Never mind that the “man” he was guarding was another 8-yearold boy. Queen was diligent, a tormentor even. Possession after possession, he forced a turnover. He estimates he must have had 15 or 16 steals that game.
“I was just souped up,” he says. “That’s all I remember — just stealing the ball, stealing the ball, stealing the ball from this poor kid. His parents are in the stands, like, ‘Stop doing that!’ I was just stealing the ball, stealing the ball. Layup, layup, layup.”
Queen’s relentlessness helped him persist through multiple obstacles to his dream of playing college basketball. He attempted to transfer to a high school in Florida for his junior year but was ruled ineligible to play and lost the season. When he returned to his old school in Maryland as a senior, he didn’t get along with the new coach and did not complete the season.
Queen wasn’t on the radar of any NCAA coaches, but he was inspired by his older sister Jasmine, who played college basketball at Florida Atlantic and Tallahassee Community College and pursued a degree while pregnant. Trevelin figured if she could do that, he could get through whatever life threw at him.
Queen intended to play for his former AAU coach at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, but he missed the deadline for his financial aid paperwork and was forced to redshirt. Just 45 minutes from home, he felt bogged down by distractions and transferred instead to Marin College in California for the 2016-17 season.
Queen played in 14 games for Marin as a freshman, averaging 21.3 points, 7.9 rebounds and 2.4 assists with five double-doubles. All the while, he and more than 10 nonlocal teammates were living in a two-bedroom apartment in a retirement community, sleeping on air mattresses. They eventually got kicked out for being too noisy, which is how Queen and a few teammates wound up sleeping in the beat-up white Delta on the streets of East Oakland.
A teammate’s family member eventually took in the basketball players, but they were still living in extremely cramped conditions with 12 people under one roof. Around that same time, Queen’s grandmother died, and he found it tougher and tougher to focus on basketball. But he couldn’t bring himself to give up.
“If I just do what I love, then I could find happiness with that eventually,” he said. “I mean, everybody’s going to go through trials and tribulations. It’s just, what do you do after that? I’m not going to forever be stuck in a hole. … I knew — I knew — I was destined to make it somewhere.”
Queen craved structure but didn’t know how to get it. That’s when a family member suggested military school.
Another new start
Queen enrolled for the 2017-18 school year at the New Mexico Military Institute, a combined high school and junior college in Roswell. As a new cadet, Queen had to shave his head, wear a military uniform throughout the day, take orders from teenaged squad leaders, and adhere to a strict schedule (lights out at 10 p.m., wake-up at 6 a.m.) — in addition to his obligations as a member of the basketball team.
“Sometimes they’d bang on my door at five o’clock in the morning, and I got to go run, touch that tree and go back to bed,” Queen says. “Actually, that was one of the best moves I made, because it helped me accept and appreciate more stuff outside of basketball, whether it was timing, making my bed and just taking care of myself — the small things I didn’t really pay attention to that made me feel better as a person.”
That feeling translated to electricity on the court. In Queen’s first game with the Broncos, he scored 40 points. He went on to average 26 points, 7.3 rebounds and 2.2 assists in his sophomore season.
Former NMMI coach Ralph Davis became quickly enamored with Queen’s talent as a lanky, athletic, 6-foot-6 guard who was a natural first-option scorer. He also admired Queen’s unshakeable attitude.
“One thing I will say about him: He had an unwavering confidence, especially for somebody at that time with a checkered past,” Davis says. “In this day and age, you can Google somebody’s name who’s successful at anything — basketball, art, writing — and they’ll have 15 pages on ’em.
“At that point in time, if you searched ‘Trevelin Queen basketball,’ you’d get his Marin stuff, a stat page from there and a few, three or four, AAU highlights. Maybe a blurb about him playing a high school basketball game, but nothing more than that. That’s four or five years ago. For him to not be some highly touted recruit or four-, five-star player and have the confidence and belief in his game, that’s wild. He said, ‘Can’t nobody stop me. I’m the best player here.’ ”
That same headstrong conviction proved somewhat of a doubleedged sword once Queen arrived at New Mexico State the following season, at last realizing his dream of playing for a D1 program. Except among the Aggies, Queen wasn’t the top man on the totem pole anymore.
New Mexico State coach Chris Jans, who himself had a junior college background and had recruited multiple juco players before Queen, understood the growing pains inherent to that transition. Although Jans and Queen butted heads initially, it proved to be a good fit.
Queen was a naturally gifted scorer, but he’d always measured defensive success solely by counting steals, as if he were still playing in the Maryland youth league. On offense, he chucked up absurdly long 3-pointers or tried to pick one-on-one isolation battles on every possession. Once he adopted a
team-based perspective and accepted that being a great defender meant staying vigilant off the ball, too, a new level was unlocked.
Early in his first season with the Aggies in 2018-19, Queen was lucky if he played 13 minutes off the bench. By the end of the season, he was the sixth man in the rotation and was named MVP when the Aggies won the WAC tournament.
In 2019-20, Queen assumed a starting role and led New Mexico State in scoring average (13.2 points per game) and minutes per game (27.5) in his senior season, which was ultimately cut short by the pandemic.
“The thing that’s probably Trev’s best quality and the reason he’s had the opportunities he’s had is his belief in himself,” Jans says. “If he didn’t have that, I’m not sure he’d be where he’s at right now. And he continues to believe in himself through high school to now, coming up through college ranks. He kept fighting and scratching and clawing to get where he was.”
Despite going undrafted in the 2020 NBA draft, Queen still believed he had more fight to give.
‘He just keeps pushing’
After the 2020 draft, Queen signed with the Rockets for training camp but was later waived. He was with the Vipers for the 202021 season and averaged 10 points in 15 G League games while shooting 45.8 percent from the field but just 28.2 percent on 3-pointers.
This past fall, Queen participated in NBA training camp with the Lakers but was again cut before the season began, subsequently rejoining the Vipers. He averaged 22 points, 6.6 rebounds and 4.2 assists on 45.4 percent shooting through 10 games for the Vipers, with nine starts, before the Rockets awarded him the two-way contract in December.
Davis says Queen considered the contract to be not just validation for the past, but a carrot dangled in front of him as motivation for the future.
“For some players that come out of high school and college highly touted, them being a second-round pick or being undrafted or cut from a training camp squad, those are big blows,” Davis says. “Those are the first times they experience real failure in life. So for him, even getting those opportunities, those are wins. Getting the opportunity to prove himself is a win. He doesn’t get down on himself. He just keeps pushing.”
Queen was up with the Rockets for more than a week before he got his first meaningful chunk of playing time when a coronavirus outbreak decimated the roster ahead of a Dec. 27 road game against the Hornets. Queen played 29 minutes off the bench in a 24-point Houston loss, leading the Rockets with four steals and 17 points, including a 4-of-10 mark on 3-pointers.
In his first three career games with the Rockets, Queen had totaled four points and fewer than eight minutes of playing time. But there he was in Charlotte, leading the break and confidently firing up 13 shots.
The next day, Queen didn’t leave the bench as the Rockets lost to the Lakers. Since then, he has appeared in four more games, the highlight being when he scored 10 points in 15 minutes during the Rockets’ 13point loss to the Nuggets.
Queen says his nomadic basketball life pre-NBA helped make him adaptable and ready to play under any circumstances, no matter how small or inconsistent the opportunities.
“Honestly, it’s just a mental game when you get to the league, to the highest level, staying ready no matter what,” he says. “I’m always going to be a good teammate. I feel I can bring high energy, positivity, a good spirit, defense and offense, and play both ends at a high level once I get comfortable out there.”
The majority of Queen’s playing time has come in blowout losses with the game already decided, alongside fellow inexperienced NBA players in what amounts to the Rockets’ third-string lineup. Those circumstances make it difficult to project Queen’s longterm future with the organization, but he appears capable of at least providing a 3and-D spark this season to a young team struggling to find its identity. Queen knows what that’s like.
“He invested a lot of his time into his game and his profession, and I just think he wasn’t going to let anybody derail him or tell him he wasn’t going to make it,” Jans says. “He’s a baller. That’s what he is, who he is. He sleeps it, dreams it, thinks about it. I think he’ll be playing basketball for as long as he can. He’s going to work at his craft and strive to get better. He’s getting a taste of it now, and whatever happens, it’ll fuel his hunger.”
Mathews and secondyear guard Armoni Brooks, who as a rookie last season was on a two-way deal with the Rockets, have established that a path exists in Houston from two-way player to full-time NBA roster member. Starting forward Jae’Sean Tate, who went undrafted out of Ohio State and played two years overseas before signing with Houston in 2020, is another example of a player who chiseled out an NBA role after a circuitous journey.
Rockets coach Stephen Silas has pointed to Brooks, Tate and forward K.J. Martin as examples of players who made huge leaps from their first season to their second season. Silas said he tries to treat Queen, fellow two-way guard Daishen Nix and other Rockets rookies with the same patience.
Queen is willing to be patient, too. (He was assigned back to the G League on Friday.)
“I’m always under the radar, so that just gives me my edge no matter where I’m at,” Queen says. “NBA, overseas, anywhere. It just gives me that edge because nobody knows who I am, so I’ve got to make a name for myself and my family.”
Now he’s had his name is on the back of a Rockets jersey. He just has to prove it deserves to stay there.