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    Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Brings His Friends on Ride to NBA Stardom

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    Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard, is having a career season as one of the N.B.A.’s top scorers. He’s had a little help from his childhood friends.Mark Daigneault thought he had his first day in Hamilton, Ontario, all mapped out: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the star guard he coaches on the Oklahoma City Thunder, would make his morning rounds to shoot hoops and lift weights, and Daigneault would ride along.There was only one problem.“I don’t have room in my car,” Gilgeous-Alexander told him, “because I pick up all my friends.”Sure enough, once Daigneault hopped out of his Uber at Gilgeous-Alexander’s preferred gym in nearby Burlington, Daigneault found him working on his shooting as several young men in matching Thunder T-shirts rebounded for him.Gilgeous-Alexander soon introduced Daigneault to his “super close homies,” five childhood friends whose coordinated outfits that morning were no coincidence. They knew Daigneault was in town.“We wanted to make a good impression,” said Sunday Kong, a former high school teammate.In Oklahoma City, Gilgeous-Alexander, 24, has established himself as one of the N.B.A.’s most dynamic players. On a young team with promise, he ranks among the league leaders in scoring, averaging a career-best 31.4 points a game, while shooting 50.5 percent from the field — supercharged numbers that hint at his abilities as a 6-foot-6 guard who can absorb contact at the rim and create space on the perimeter.Gilgeous-Alexander is averaging a career-best 31.4 points per game while making about half of his shots. That puts him among the N.B.A.’s elite scorers.Garett Fisbeck/Associated PressBack home in Hamilton, a small city about 40 miles southwest of Toronto, five of Gilgeous-Alexander’s pals — a crew that also includes Mark Castillanes and Maurice Montoya, two of his best friends since elementary school, and Vincent Chu, who sat next to him in ninth-grade homeroom — practically fall off their couches whenever he crosses up a defender.“Anytime I see him do something on the court, I’m like, ‘Hey, we practiced that!’ ” said Devanté Campbell, who played youth soccer with Gilgeous-Alexander.Gilgeous-Alexander is always trying to improve, said Daigneault, now in his third season as the Thunder’s coach. That makes him an ideal fit for Oklahoma City — the same place where a young Russell Westbrook became a triple-double machine, Kevin Durant honed his perimeter game and James Harden crafted his step-back jumper. Each summer, Gilgeous-Alexander devises his own to-do list.“Shai’s got every resource available to him,” Daigneault said. “If he wanted to hire a staff and move to Hawaii in the off-season, he could do it. Instead, he parks himself in Hamilton and works with friends who have been in his life forever.”In Gilgeous-Alexander’s self-styled basketball lab, where a sneaker salesman and a restaurant manager throw defensive traps at him, and a college student and an aspiring doctor feed him passes, he prepares for his future by returning to his past.“Those guys give me a sense of home,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “They give me back a piece of myself that feels like so long ago.”‘I’ve got to get better’Before he was getting buckets at Madison Square Garden and walking the runways at fashion week in Paris, Gilgeous-Alexander was someone else: the new kid at Regina Mundi Catholic Elementary School.After moving to Hamilton from Toronto when he was 11, Gilgeous-Alexander met Montoya and Castillanes on his first day of sixth grade. Castillanes recalled showing him around.“Kind of quiet,” Castillanes said. “But once you got to know him, he became himself.”Gilgeous-Alexander impressed on the basketball court, Castillanes said, by being able to dribble and make layups with both hands. But as an undersized ninth-grader at St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, Gilgeous-Alexander was cut from the equivalent of the junior varsity and wound up on a team of other freshmen.“I wasn’t hurt by it,” he said. “It was more a feeling of, I’m not good enough, so I’ve got to get better.”From left, Sunday Kong, Maurice Montoya, Vincent Chu and Devanté Campbell on the outdoor court at Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School, Gilgeous-Alexander’s former high school in Hamilton, Ontario.Cole Burston for The New York TimesIn his spare time, Gilgeous-Alexander would hoop with Montoya and Castillanes at their Filipino basketball league — the start of a basketball odyssey. Gilgeous-Alexander spent his sophomore year at Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School on Hamilton’s west side before he transferred again, this time to Hamilton Heights Christian Academy in Chattanooga, Tenn., as he sought better competition.Gilgeous-Alexander eventually landed at the University of Kentucky, where John Calipari, the team’s coach, knew he needed to be tough on him. Otherwise, Calipari was going to hear about it — from Gilgeous-Alexander’s mother, Charmaine Gilgeous, a former Olympic runner for Antigua and Barbuda.“When he played well, she would call me and say, ‘Don’t you let up on him,’” Calipari said.Gilgeous-Alexander had arrived at Kentucky with a hitch in his jump shot — Calipari compared it to Charles Barkley’s herky-jerky golf swing — and spent the early weeks of the season mostly coming off the bench. By the middle of January, he was blossoming as a starter. By June, he was the 11th overall pick in the 2018 N.B.A. draft, headed to the Los Angeles Clippers.Gilgeous-Alexander played so well as a rookie that the Thunder put him on their wish list. That summer, when the All-Star Paul George wanted to be traded to the Clippers from Oklahoma City, the Thunder insisted that Gilgeous-Alexander be included in the deal.Now in his fourth season with the Thunder, Gilgeous-Alexander is the face of a franchise that should come equipped with training wheels. Although Chet Holmgren, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2022 draft, is out for the season with a foot injury, the Thunder have a core that includes Josh Giddey, 20, and Luguentz Dort, 23. Even amid his emergence, Gilgeous-Alexander has never sought to separate himself from his teammates.“I might have sworn at Lu before,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, “but me and Lu lived together, and we’re like brothers so it doesn’t count.”Luguentz Dort, left, and Gilgeous-Alexander bonded as teammates and roommates in Oklahoma City.Alonzo Adams/USA Today Sports, via ReutersGilgeous-Alexander and Dort, who are also teammates on the Canadian men’s national basketball team, are candid about their bromance. When Gilgeous-Alexander was vaccinated against the coronavirus, Dort held his hand. (Gilgeous-Alexander is afraid of needles.) When they were roommates, Dort accepted the perils of sharing space with someone who was recently voted GQ magazine’s Most Stylish Man of the Year.“I don’t want to say his clothes are everywhere,” Dort said. “But he has a lot of clothes — clothes that have a lot of volume to them.”But while life in the N.B.A. is rewarding — Gilgeous-Alexander is in the first year of a five-year contract extension worth about $180 million — it can also be disorienting. So he dodges complacency as if it were a traffic cone, supplementing his time with the team by working with Olin Simplis, a high-profile skills coach.And, of course, he heads to Hamilton at the start of each off-season to work out with friends who neither expect nor ask for anything in return.‘Just something that friends do’After his first season in Oklahoma City, Gilgeous-Alexander wanted to make his summers more structured. So he hit up his buddies: Would they help him out five mornings a week?“It wasn’t even something that needed to be said,” said Campbell, who works full-time at a Kids Foot Locker and assists with a girls’ basketball league. “It was just something that friends do: If we want to see this guy grow and succeed, we need to be there for him no matter what.”Last summer, Gilgeous-Alexander would text his friends a few minutes before 7 a.m. to let them know that he was leaving his house — his hoops-centric version of flashing the Bat-Signal.“You get that text, and you know you have about 15 minutes to get ready,” said Chu, a student at Toronto Metropolitan University.Gilgeous-Alexander’s friends help him with shooting and passing drills during the summer in Ontario.Cole Burston for The New York TimesGilgeous-Alexander would retrieve his friends, one by one, in his pale brown Mercedes-Benz G-Class. Castillanes was typically the first stop.“He always got the front seat,” Chu said.Once assembled, they often had enough time during the ride to Burlington to cram in a homespun version of “Carpool Karaoke.” In June, Jack Harlow’s album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” was on repeat. By July, they were tearing through Burna Boy’s latest tracks.“It’s a refreshing start to the day to see all your friends,” Chu said, “even when you’re mad tired.”At the gym, they would warm up and stretch, then Gilgeous-Alexander would polish his shooting for about an hour as his friends rebounded for him. He usually filled the second hour with drills — footwork, defense, passing — before transitioning into half-court games of 3-on-3 with a lopsided feel.“Shai takes all the shots,” Campbell said.His court work complete, Gilgeous-Alexander would drop his friends off so he could lift weights — in another buddy’s two-car garage. Nem Ilic, 27, who describes his work as “athlete development,” spent last summer building Gilgeous-Alexander’s lower body: lunges in the garage, weighted sled pushes in the cul-de-sac out front. (The neighbors always knew when Gilgeous-Alexander was around.)“Guys in my position, you usually have to work your way up from high school to college to the pros,” Ilic said. “And I have a unique timeline. It went straight to Shai.”In their own way, the friends are a part of it all.A poster of Gilgeous-Alexander is seen on the doors of Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School.Cole Burston for The New York Times“I think the N.B.A. is so crazy that he wants to come here and feel grounded,” Chu said, “and we’re all so grounded up here that we want to hear about N.B.A. life.”They can see Gilgeous-Alexander’s progress — and feel it, too, whenever they try to defend him on those early summer mornings.“I want to say it’s never really that much of a fun time,” Campbell said.They have busy lives of their own. Montoya, for example, manages a Hamilton-area restaurant. Castillanes recently relocated to Oklahoma City after Gilgeous-Alexander asked him if he would help manage his day-to-day life. And Kong works in public health while he prepares for medical school.“You know how they say commitment will pay off if you improve by 1 percent every day? It’s something you see in real time with Shai,” Kong said. “And it’s something I can apply to my own life.” More

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      St. Peter’s Defeats Kentucky in Basketball

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      The small Jesuit university in Jersey City is in high spirits after eliminating Kentucky, a basketball blue blood, from the N.C.A.A. men’s tournament.JERSEY CITY, N.J. — Farouk Sow, a junior at St. Peter’s University, was walking down a set of stairs from the university bridge running across John F. Kennedy Boulevard here on Friday morning when he spotted a blue “ABC 7 Eyewitness News” van on the street. Nearby, a video screen on a wall flashed an image of four members of the school’s men’s basketball team celebrating and holding a blue “March Madness” sign.Spotting a St. Peter’s classmate, senior Stephanie Radakovic, at the bottom of the stairs, Sow said with pride of the men’s basketball team, “They put us on the map.”Sow was referring to St. Peter’s gigantic upset of Kentucky in the first round of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament Thursday night in Indianapolis. It marked just the 10th time in tournament history that a No. 15 seed had upset a 2 seed.“It makes us feel good, because this is a small school, everybody knows everybody,” Sow told a reporter. “We weren’t known for sports. The fact that we beat Kentucky put us on the map. Basically, a small school beat a big school.”Kentucky has about 32,000 students, St. Peter’s approximately 2,300. Kentucky has won eight N.C.A.A. championships; St. Peter’s had never won an N.C.A.A. Tournament game before Thursday. St. Peter’s men’s basketball coach Shaheen Holloway made $266,344 in 2019; Kentucky head coach John Calipari’s base salary is $8.5 million. St. Peter’s basketball revenue was $1.6 million in 2019-20, while Kentucky’s was $29.3 million.Hence the news trucks and reporters descending on the tiny Jesuit university composed largely of red brick buildings in the heart of Jersey City. Chartered in 1872 and originally named St. Peter’s College, the school occupies a 30-acre campus just two miles west of New York City. The student body is 66 percent Black or Hispanic, and many who attend are first-generation college students.Raven Cordner, adviser to forward Hassan Drame, left, and forward KC Ndefo, at the university on Friday.Brian Fraser for The New York TimesEmpty mannequins in the campus bookstore.Brian Fraser for The New York TimesOn Thursday night, Radakovic, a senior on the women’s soccer team, was one of about 240 students in the “Sky Room” of the university student center watching the game on a big screen. There was pizza, popcorn, drinks, a cake, inflatable games, basketball hoops and other entertainment for the students cheering on the Peacocks. The school’s social media account is using the hashtag #StrutUp in honor of the Peacocks.“Everyone was freaking out. It was crazy,” Radakovic said. “There were a bunch of chairs set up, and at the end of the game, nobody was sitting on the chairs. Everybody was standing up.”Olyvia Smith, a junior outfielder on the school’s softball team and the girlfriend of junior guard Doug Edert, was also at the watch party.Dive Deeper Into the N.C.A.A. TournamentsA Catalyst for Change: A viral video by Oregon’s Sedona Prince led to a gender equity review in college basketball. Did the fixes go far enough?​​Throwback Big Men: In an era that prioritizes 3-pointers, Kentucky’s Oscar Tshiebwe and Illinois’s Kofi Cockburn are reminders of what the game used to be.Returning to the Big Stage: After years away from the tournament, these women’s teams made history before taking the floor.A Scout at Heart: Omar Minaya, a former Mets general manager, is a proud dad at Providence games. But he’s also watching for pro talent.“It was an unbelievable feeling. I felt like we were there with them the entire time,” Smith said.The 6-foot-2 Edert, a Nutley, N.J., native who played at the nearby powerhouse Bergen Catholic High School, scored 20 points against Kentucky, hitting a key basket to send the game to overtime, and was a perfect 8-of-8 from the line. He has become a fan favorite on social media in part because of the mustache he has grown in recent weeks.He chose St. Peter’s over offers from Fairleigh Dickinson, Wagner and New Hampshire. Daryl Banks III, the star guard who scored 27 points in the Kentucky game, also chose St. Peter’s over Wagner. Neither was the main option on his high school team or the McDonald’s All-American type that Kentucky routinely recruits.The Peacocks’ trophy case.Brian Fraser for The New York TimesBut neither would trade places with the Kentucky players right now.“Our school supports us so much,” Edert said. “We are a little school, and it’s awesome to put us on the map.”After the game, Edert called Smith to share the moment.“He was just so excited, it was awesome,” she said.Smith is aware that most people — even some who live in New Jersey — don’t know much about St. Peter’s.So, what does she want people to know about the school?“All of our athletic programs are definitely up-and-coming, and we have a lot of teams that are making a comeback right now,” Smith said. “I think this is huge, and I think that this brings a lot of energy to all the teams. We can all compete, and we can all be there with those other teams.”As of about noon on Friday, the St. Peter’s bookstore, which is undergoing renovation, had sold $2,500 worth of St. Peter’s T-shirts, sweatshirts and hoodies to Jersey City residents and alums.“Oh, yeah, that’s a lot for us,” said Kristyna Stukeo, who manages the bookstore.This wasn’t St. Peter’s first win over basketball royalty. In 1968, long before the internet made players like Edert famous, the Peacocks beat Duke in the quarterfinals of the National Invitation Tournament. Tom Mac Mahon, who scored 902 points in his career at St. Peter’s and was one of the stars of that team, later became the chief executive and chairman of LabCorp and served as the chair of the board of trustees at his alma mater. He donated $5 million to help support the creation of the Run Baby Run Arena, which opened this season and where the Peacocks played an intense defensive style that made life tough on opponents.“St. Peter’s is good, and they’re also good defensively,” a somewhat dazed Calipari said in a television interview during the game.St. Peter’s success may not be enough to keep Holloway, 45, around as the coach. His is a hot name on the coaching carousel, and if Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard leaves for another job (he has been linked to Maryland), Holloway, who starred at Seton Hall and was an associate head coach under Willard, would be a natural fit. Iona coach Rick Pitino, who coached against Holloway in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, said Seton Hall “shouldn’t even make another call.”A student walks through the St. Peter’s University campus.Stefan Jeremiah/Associated PressMeantime, Edert and his teammates are focused on facing No. 7 Murray State — a team based in Kentucky that has won 21 straight games — in the second round on Saturday in Indianapolis.And the mustachioed maverick won’t be shaving anytime soon.“He’s not changing anything until this tournament is over,” Smith said. “I can tell you that.” More

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      Howard Garfinkel's Five Star Basketball Camp Made Hall of Famers. Now He's One, Too.

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      Howard Garfinkel co-founded the Five Star Basketball Camp, which trained big-name stars like Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing and Grant Hill.Grant Hill was introduced to the Five Star Basketball Camp in the form of a Sports Illustrated article that was published in 1984, when he was 11 years old. As Hill flipped through the pages of the magazine, he found himself transfixed. To him, Five Star sounded like basketball nirvana, an exclusive destination where promising players could consume the game.“It was like this mythical place where you could go — if you were fortunate enough to go — and then maybe have a chance to play in college,” Hill said. “I remember being blown away by the idea of it.”Long before the advent of the internet and the proliferation of online scouting services, and long before the emergence of high-profile summer circuits for elite prospects, there was one man, Howard Garfinkel, and one pre-eminent camp, Five Star, which he co-founded in 1966. For several decades, it was the place to be for young players: the place to learn, the place to compare yourself with your peers, the place to draw the attention of college coaches who worked as instructors.Garfinkel, a raspy-voiced New Yorker who died in 2016 at age 86, will be posthumously enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday as a contributor to the game, an honor that many in his orbit consider overdue.“Garf affected more coaches and more players — from Michael Jordan on down — than anyone in the history of our game,” said John Calipari, the men’s basketball coach at Kentucky and a former Five Star camper and instructor. “It’s just a shame he’s not here.”Garfinkel is part of a 16-member Hall of Fame class that includes, among others, Paul Pierce, Chris Bosh and Chris Webber; the perennial W.N.B.A. All-Stars Lauren Jackson and Yolanda Griffith; and Bill Russell, who had already been enshrined as a player in 1975 but will be honored this time for coaching the Boston Celtics to a pair of N.B.A. championships.In a telephone interview, Calipari described Garfinkel as a Runyonesque figure, a throwback from central casting. He ate onion sandwiches covered in salt. He chain-smoked cigarettes. He did not drive. He greeted campers each morning by blasting Frank Sinatra from loudspeakers. He wore orange pants that were adorned with stains from lunch, and he would deign to wear only T-shirts and polos with chest pockets. In fact, he would thank the coaches who gave him pocket-less T-shirts, then toss the shirts in the trash.“He knew what he wanted to wear,” Calipari said.It was no surprise, then, that Garfinkel, the son of a garment worker, built Five Star in his blue-collar image. It was a teaching camp, Calipari said. The players cycled through stations where they worked on fundamentals, and the instructors were often luminaries from the coaching world: Hubie Brown, Chuck Daly, Mike Fratello. For them, Five Star was more like a think tank — an opportunity to share ideas and learn from one another.“Nothing like it exists anymore,” Calipari said.Games were played on cement courts, and opposing teams typically went shirts and skins. For reasons that were unclear even to those who knew him best, Garfinkel was opposed to the idea of putting numbers on the backs of the players’ T-shirts. It was a unique form of stubbornness that made it difficult for college coaches to identify the prospects they were scouting.“You’d be like, ‘Garf, you’ve got 400 players here,’” Calipari recalled. “But it didn’t matter. You literally had to go to the scorer to figure out who the hell you were watching: ‘Who’s the kid in the blue shorts?’”Garfinkel in his office in 2011 still working on his report.Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesGarfinkel prohibited dunking. Players were celebrated for voluntarily working on their games at “Station 13,” a sort of basketball outpost where the guest clinicians included the likes of Mike Krzyzewski, the men’s coach at Duke. Players paid to attend the camp, and while a select few were awarded scholarships, they earned them by busing tables at mealtime.“There was something cool about how the best players were serving the other campers,” Hill said. “There was a real life lesson in that.”Hill was a high school freshman when he secured his long-awaited invitation to Five Star that summer at a small college outside of Pittsburgh. His high school coach handed him a brochure, and Hill studied every word, every photograph. “It was like, ‘Wow,’” he said.At the time, Amateur Athletic Union basketball was not nearly the colossus that it is today. Instead, Five Star was the hub for up-and-coming players like Hill, whose coach at the camp that summer was a young college assistant named John Calipari.“From sunup to sundown, it was basketball,” Hill said.Garfinkel also had a Five Star “Hall of Fame,” which was an extensive collection of newspaper clippings about camp alumni who had graduated to the N.B.A. — players like Jordan, Patrick Ewing and Isiah Thomas — that he would attach to poster boards and hang in a hallway. Whenever Hill had free time, he would read the stories and study the photos and dream.“There was so much history, and you were starving for content and information,” he said. “It was such a different time.”A Five Star fixture throughout high school, Hill attended the camp for the final time before the start of his senior year. By then, he had established himself as one of the country’s most prized recruits, with North Carolina and Duke vying to land him. Hill said he was probably leaning toward North Carolina when Garfinkel pulled him aside and told him that he thought Duke was the perfect fit for him.It was no secret that Garfinkel thought highly of Krzyzewski, and Garfinkel shared his opinion without pressuring Hill, who said he knew that it was his decision. But after visiting Duke three weeks later, he understood that Garfinkel had been right all along. Hill went on to win a pair of national championships at Duke before he became a seven-time N.B.A. All-Star.“It worked out pretty well,” Hill said.Grant Hill was considering going to Duke’s rival — the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — but a nudge from Garfinkel steered him to Duke.Doug Pensinger/Getty ImagesThe landscape has changed, of course. Youth basketball is big business, and the top players crisscross the country to play in summer tournaments sponsored by sneaker companies. Their highlights are readily available to anyone with a cellphone or an internet connection, and college coaches no longer flock to remote camps in search of undiscovered gems — because there are no undiscovered gems, not anymore.There is a natural tendency to be nostalgic about the past. Calipari, for example, mourned the loss of basketball instruction in the summer. In that sense, Five Star is a comparative relic.“Everything now is: Just go play,” Calipari said.Still, in his own way, Garfinkel was a folksy precursor to the power brokers — the scouts and the coaches and the sneaker executives — who now wield outsize influence at the grass-roots level. After all, Garfinkel was a businessman, too. He ran his camps and, for many years, sold subscriptions to a scouting report, High School Basketball Illustrated, that he assembled with Tom Konchalski, a close friend who died last year.In a 2013 interview with The New York Times, Garfinkel said he was troubled by the handful of “bad apples” who were taking advantage of young players for their own financial gain.“I’m certainly no saint,” he said. “But I can tell you that when it came to basketball, I earned an honest living. I never made a dime sending any player to any school.”More than anything, Calipari said, Garfinkel was fiercely loyal. A lifelong bachelor, he cared about the coaches and the players who formed his family. Hill said there was an innocence to Five Star, and perhaps that has been lost, too.“Things have become more sophisticated now, a little more glamorous,” Hill said. “And I’m not saying one is better than the other. But I will say that I’m glad that I played and came through when I did.” More