Thon Maker has never been your average teenager, not even your average seven-foot high-school basketball player.
Born in Sudan, transplanted first to Australia, then to the U.S. for hoops grooming and then again to Orangeville, Ontario, for more of the same; His life’s journey has been a tortuous one to be sure.
And now he has declared his intent to enter the NBA draft. Hopefully that works out well. When I talked to him he seemed like a great kid, smart, sociable, definitely committed. He’s made a lot of sacrifices to get as far as he has. Still, you have to wonder about his attempt to jump from Orangeville Prep to the Association. You have to wonder about it on a couple of counts. One: Is he really ready to make it? Two: Would a different, more conventional, less circuitous route have better prepared him?
Let’s address No. 2 first.
A year ago at this time, with a season in Orangeville behind him, Maker was weighing his options. He had set himself up to be academically eligible for the 2015-16 NCAA season. He had made recruiting visits to a bunch of colleges, powerhouses among them. He had scholarship offers. If he had committed to Indiana or Kentucky or Kansas at the time, we’d be talking about his play in the NCAA tournament. Maybe he’d have played a large role. Maybe he’d have played a lesser one. Maybe he’d have played none at all.
Maker decided however to return to Orangeville Prep for another season. I could see why.
Last March, I had made the trip with the team to Marshall County, Kentucky, for a prep-school tournament, one of the strongest fields of the season. Orangeville won a game, lost a couple. Maker struggled to make an impact. He watched a lot of the tournament from the bench with foul trouble. I wrote about that tournament in Sportsnet Magazine. If you went to Youtube and searched Maker’s name you’d find amazing mix tapes and stupendous dunks, a hyper-athletic big throwing it down with extreme prejudice. But what I saw in Paducah, Kentucky, was a willowy teenager who was pushed out to the perimeter by kids six inches shorter and had little impact at all. Orangeville Prep was missing a couple of players because of injuries and with Maker ineffective, Jamal Murray put the team on his back and shone.
A few weeks later I was out in Portland for the Nike Hoops Summit, a game that pits a U.S. high-school all-star team against a rest-of-the-world team. Maker’s struggles in Oregon were even more conspicuous than those in Kentucky. He played just a handful of minutes for the world team, none with the game on the line in the late stages. Maker wasn’t in any sort of foul trouble. He looked out-matched. Not that Maker didn’t have tools or tremendous upside. It’s just that he wasn’t in the same conversation as Ben Simmons, who is the projected first-overall pick in this year’s NBA draft and, by coincidence, another Australian-born kid who came to North America to pursue his hoop dreams. And he wasn’t in the same conversation as Jamal Murray, who wound up winning MVP honours, leading the international team to a win over the U.S.
https://youtu.be/_Vf5yYk0YRE
If Maker had decided to go to college last fall, I really wouldn’t have questioned it. He wouldn’t have been a dominant figure, an immediate game changer, but he would have worked with top flight college coaching and working against elite players, many NBA prospects, in games and in practice. Unlike Murray and Simmons, I didn’t see him as a one-and-done for the 2016 NBA draft. Maker you could project playing in the NBA someday, just not that soon. There’s more work to be done.
When Maker decided that he was going back to Orangeville Prep for a second year, it looked like he was postponing his entry to college and looking ahead to the 2017 NBA draft. And then came this announcement this weekend, that he was applying to enter the draft in June.
The logic of all of this is hard to follow or swallow; If all of Maker’s decisions were to be clear and correct, if there is some sort of master plan, then the decision to return to Orangeville Prep last fall was made in the belief that another year of high-school ball would be the best preparation Maker could have to enter the NBA draft, better than, say, a year at Indiana or Kentucky or Kansas.
With due respect to the Orangeville Prep program and its coaches, I can’t see it.
If Maker had gone to an NCAA school last year or if he was heading to one this fall, either being the more conventional route, you’d have to presume it would have better for his development and readiness for the pros.
Which brings us back to No. 1 and really most important question of all: Is he really ready to make the jump? It’s tough enough to jump from one year of college to pros but from high school, well, that might seem to be raising the bar to an unreasonable height.
The course that Maker has chosen seems on its face to be an attempt to circumvent the NBA’s draft rules, those that require American kids to enter the draft no earlier than one year after their classes graduate high school. Maker will make the case that he got his diploma last year and that this past season was something like post-secondary graduate work in Orangeville Prep. Not to say that he was a hoops equivalent of David Wooderson, hanging around with high school kids, talking about “L-I-V-I-N!”
Seriously though, if this is circumvention of a draft rule, it’s hard to be against it. There’s nothing goofier than the NBA’s requisite one-year holding pattern for elite kids after high-school graduation. Nothing like that is in place for NHL prospects— Connor McDavid attended his high-school grad last spring. But the NBA was worried about its brand and its relationship with the NCAA, so management and the players association negotiated this one-year clause in collective bargaining to avoid the heartbreaking story of the original less fortunate McDavid, Taj.
Of course, if you look at the top 50 NBA players of all time, you’ll find a couple of guys whose careers weren’t quite ruined by the jump from high school to the pros: Moses Malone and Kobe Bryant.
That’s not to say that Thon Maker will be Moses Malone, but understand this: When Moses Malone turned pro out of high school, he struggled mightily, couldn’t have been more raw. Some even declared him a bust. He learned and, better, he earned while he learned.
Is Thon Maker ready for the NBA entry draft? The point is hardly relevant. The draft is always about the unready. Yeah, these days a few have an immediate impact one year removed from high school (e.g. Andrew Wiggins), but most don’t (e.g. Anthony Bennett). If Maker can learn in the pros, if he can learn in the D-league, if he goes to Europe or wherever, good on him. His long, strange trip seemed overdue for another unexpected turn and this is it.