Malcolm Hill doesn’t really believe in luck. For someone in his position, that presented a bit of a conundrum. Luck is a word you hear a lot when you’re a professional basketball player fighting to get to the NBA. “To make it, you have to get lucky,” everyone says. A little bit of luck is an essential piece of a very complex equation:
Talent + Athleticism + Hard work + Sacrifice +
Opportunity + Luck = NBA
Take luck out of the equation, and everything falls apart. It becomes unsolvable.
But after reading about and ruminating on the subject, Hill stopped believing in luck. He believes in taking all the necessary steps to pursue his goals, regardless of how uncomfortable those steps may be. He believes in willing things into existence through his actions. Believing in luck is much easier; it relinquishes control. Hill’s process is strenuous. It puts the onus squarely on his shoulders, and requires patience, persistence, and discipline—an absurd amount of discipline. But in his mind, if he fully commits to it, then he leaves nothing to chance.
He wouldn’t get lucky.
He would make his own luck.
Given where he was at the beginning of 2021, and where he intended to be by the year’s end, most others would have said that Malcolm Hill needed a treasure chest filled with horseshoes and four-leaf clovers. They probably would have said he needed a miracle. Hill, then twenty-five years old, was playing for Hapoel Jerusalem of the Israeli Basketball Premier League—well, not exactly playing. Most of the time, he was sitting on the bench in street clothes.
It was peculiar. Hill wasn’t a huge name in the basketball world, but he was still the third all-time leading scorer at his illustrious alma mater—the University of Illinois—and had been dominant in other pro leagues throughout Europe and Asia. This was his fifth year overseas. He was established, his game had steadily improved, and the six-foot-six forward was probably in the best shape of his life. And now he wasn’t even getting a chance to play? He wasn’t even wearing a uniform? How did that make sense?
There were a few possible explanations. Hill had suffered a broken hand early in the season that stifled his initial progress. Hapoel Jerusalem had a stacked roster, so Hill wasn’t the primary option as he had been for much of his career, which was an adjustment. And the organization was in disarray, shuffling through multiple head coaches over a six-month span.
Still, it didn’t make sense that Hill wasn’t in the team’s rotation. “I don’t know the games that they were playing with him over there, but I knew he wasn’t the fit for them,” Hill’s father, Malcolm Sr., later reflected. “And that was the first time overseas where he wasn’t the fit. When they did insert him a couple times, he would have a breakout game where he had 23 points or 19 points and you’re wondering, Was that enough?”
It wasn’t. It never was.
The situation was frustrating, of course. Back in the United States, Hill’s stepbrother, Clayton Hughes, was blown away by how calm his sibling remained. “He kept his mind straight—to not flip out. If that was me, I would’ve said something,” Hughes remarked with a laugh. “That’s why me and Malcolm are two totally different people. I was mad for him, because it’s a situation that he can’t control. And I know how good he is. It was just the fact, like, why are they treating him like that? That was my thing.
“He’s a different type of human being,” Hughes added. “I don’t know how he kept his cool.”
Hill was accustomed to not getting the recognition he deserved, dating back to his days dominating at Belleville East High School, where he scored over 2,000 points. He received little buzz while at the University of Illinois, despite being one of the top players in the Big Ten Conference. No matter what jersey he was wearing, his game always seemed to fly under the radar.
But this was a new type of obstacle, perhaps the greatest test yet of his belief in himself. Hill was up for the challenge. In the middle of possibly the biggest setback of his career, he made a curious decision: he aimed higher. Instead of tempering expectations, he chose to become even more ambitious. Sitting in his apartment in Jerusalem one January day, he picked up a pen and wrote down a goal: “Make the NBA by the end of 2021.”
Ha!
At one point, it wasn’t such a far-fetched target—it was actually there for the taking. Hill had a chance to be selected in the second round of the 2017 NBA Draft. A few teams were prepared to pick him, but none were a great fit. Rather than get tied down by one organization, Hill did what many in his position do: he bet on himself. He kept his options open, eventually signing lucrative contracts in the Philippines, Germany, Russia, and Kazakhstan with the hope of winding his way back to the NBA. But in Israel, that light at the end of the tunnel—the light he had been chasing all along—had begun to dim.
“Make the NBA by the end of 2021” now seemed like a laughable target—to people not named Malcolm Hill, that is. He saw it as attainable, and he was willing to take all the necessary steps in its pursuit.
“I’m a believer in dynamic thought, just that thoughts can play a huge role in what goes on in one’s life,” Hill said. “Thoughts of disbelief or doubt—that can kind of mess up the flow of things. If you study or come across some people who have done some amazing things that you would call miracles, it’ll be like, how can I explain this? You would think there’s no way. You gotta believe in yourself before anybody believes in you. The more you progress along in your journey, the more that the universe will align things or people your way that will help you achieve [your goals], whether they know your goals or not.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hill had adopted a more regimented approach. He read numerous self-help books about the importance of establishing a routine. Favorites included The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill—a near-century-old bestseller that begs the question “What makes a winner?” He regularly listened to motivational speakers like Les Brown, Earl Nightingale, Steve Harvey, and Jim Rohn. He spent a lot of time studying successful people from various walks of life, not just athletes. He found that he could learn from all of them and apply their philosophies to his own profession.
“They all kind of say essentially the same thing just in a different way, relating to their careers and what they do,” Hill explained. “The routine and daily habits that you do over time are what allow the man to become who they are in the present moment.”
So Hill focused on his routine. He built it out gradually, adding more and more practices. It incorporated meditation and prayer, an hour of yoga, forty-five minutes of breathing exercises, grounding (a therapeutic technique in which Hill walked around barefoot on the grass to electrically reconnect to the earth), multiple basketball workouts, weightlifting, and writing in a journal. He read and reread his goals every single day:
Make the NBA by the end of 2021.
Make the NBA by the end of 2021.
Make the NBA by the end of 2021.
“Once I wrote down that particular goal, I just started challenging myself personally—what can I do within my daily routine and habits that will help me attain my goal?” Hill said. “My AAU coach always told me, ‘Every decision that you make is either helping you or hurting you go towards your goal—every single decision that you make in life throughout the day.’ That’s tough for a lot of people. A lot of that comes down to being able to change up your routine, which puts you in an uncomfortable situation and position. That’s not easy at all. It’s tough to have faith in something when you’re not sure how it’s going to look.” Or, put differently, it’s tough to have faith in something when you’re not sure how it’s going to work.
“I would just always tell him, ‘I wouldn’t let the circumstances determine my work ethic, because you want to have the work ethic for where you’re trying to go,’” said Machanda Hill, Malcolm’s mom. “‘So even if you’re not playing, you want to continue working on your game, because when that opportunity presents itself, you want to be ready for it. And you don’t know when it’s going to happen or what it’s going to look like, but when it happens, you want to be ready.’ And honestly, when he was in Israel, in street clothes, I didn’t know how it was going to happen. But you just have to trust the process and do the work and trust that it will happen.”
Malcolm trusted. He trusted the process. He trusted the work. He wholeheartedly believed in his new routine—that it could help deliver him from point A (sitting on a bench in Jerusalem) to point B (making an NBA roster) if he just stuck with it. But the path between those two points? That part remained a mystery.
About 4,400 miles from Jerusalem, in the bustling city of Beijing, China, Joe Young was also fixated on the NBA. Unlike Hill, Young had been there before: three years and 127 games with the Indiana Pacers, after being selected in the second round of the 2015 NBA Draft. He was in Beijing now in part because he hadn’t fully cherished those three years and 127 games. He wished he had done things differently, of course, but he was younger then. Less mature. Slightly overeager. A couple of mistakes here and there had contributed to his fall from the NBA.
In 2018 the Pacers had decided not to pick up the fourth-year option on his contract, which came as a surprise to Young. No other NBA teams expressed significant interest in signing him. Young knew he couldn’t let a year go by without playing, so he agreed to a deal with the Nanjing Tongxi Monkey Kings of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) and boarded a plane bound for the other side of the world.
There, Young quickly became a star—the type of star he dreamed of becoming as a kid. Only this was in China, and he had never pictured himself in China. He had pictured himself in the NBA, where his dad, Michael Young, played three seasons in the 1980s, following a stellar career as a member of the University of Houston’s legendary “Phi Slama Jama” team. Because of Michael, Joe was exposed to basketball at a very young age.
“He really loved the game,” Michael said. “I told him, ‘If you want to play at the NBA level, if that’s your dream, it’s a lot of work.’ And the thing was, at an early age, he understood what I was saying. I’m telling you, early in the morning, the sun hadn’t come out, you could hear him out there pounding that ball. This was in elementary school. He went out there on his own.”
Michael put him in track early on, knowing how important it was that Joe be in elite shape. By the time he was nine years old, Joe was training like a mini–Rocky Balboa, waking up at 5:00 a.m. to do twenty minutes on the treadmill, twenty minutes on the elliptical machine, and twenty minutes on the StairMaster. He was okay with the work—enthusiastic about it, even. He understood the bigger picture: to be like his father, to do what his father did, the work was necessary.
“He really comprehended it,” added Michael, who also served as the strength and conditioning coach at Houston for almost a decade. “I mean, you’re talking about a kid who in middle school was making a thousand shots in all different kinds of ways. That’s a lot of work, man.”
Joe didn’t do all that to play in the CBA. Still, it was hard not to grow at least somewhat comfortable with his new situation—he was making millions of dollars, averaging over 36 points per game seemingly in his sleep (he even had a historic 74-point performance), and beginning to gain the attention and fame he had always imagined. The NBA never completely slipped his mind, but it had—both literally and figuratively—grown more distant.
By 2021, however, after another three years had somehow come and gone, he was done with it. All of it. The CBA wasn’t the dream. This was only meant to be a detour. Young was partly to blame for prolonging it—he had passed on a few nonguaranteed training-camp offers from NBA teams through the years. COVID was also partly to blame, making movement in and out of the NBA even more difficult. Young realized, though, that the longer he strayed down this path, the further he was getting from the NBA. And he was nearing the point of no return.
His life in China, while comfortable, was often secluded. For American players overseas, it tends to be that way. Time tends to slow down. Thoughts tend to race. That’s especially true in a place as foreign as China. Young passed many hours alone in his room, just reflecting on his brief stint in the NBA. The distance and separation allowed him to analyze things through a more honest lens. “Being honest with yourself can bring you a long way,” he later said. “I was just sitting there and maturing. Like, Yo, you shouldn’t have done that. You should’ve done that better. I would just put stuff on paper and write down what’s going on, how can I get through it, and what did I do to put myself in this position here.”
He joined a new CBA team for the 2020–21 season: the Beijing Royal Fighters, coached by former NBA All-Star and CBA legend Stephon Marbury. That season, more than the previous two, motivated him to get back to the NBA. It was played in a bubble—all teams lived and competed in the same city (Zhuji, Zhejiang), isolated from the rest of society—due to the pandemic. That bubble was far stricter than the one put together by the NBA in Orlando, Florida. This wasn’t Disney World—it was more like the Loneliest Place on Earth.
Nobody could leave the hotel in Zhuji, except when shuttling to and from the gym. Players and coaches had to wear Li-Ning gear (or brands with no visible marks) and ate basically the same foods every day. They were completely separated from friends and family and could do practically nothing of their own accord.
More isolation meant more time to think, and overthink, and dwell on every little thing he might have messed up with the Pacers. On the court, Young was still taking care of business, leading the Royal Fighters in points, assists, and steals on most nights. At the hotel, though, his mind was elsewhere, brooding over his experience in the NBA. His belief that he belonged there—not in the far-less-talented CBA—was strengthened by the entire Royal Fighters’ staff. It was a theme often reiterated by Marbury and two of his assistant coaches, Jay Humphries and Korey Harris.
“Being an international coach over the years, you see what type of players come through China—some on their last legs, some that don’t have the ability to play in the [NBA],” said Humphries, who was an NBA player from 1984–95 and an assistant coach for the Brooklyn Nets in 2014–15. “When you have a player that has the ability to play in the [NBA], puts in the work ethic, you tell him those things and brighten his future and keep him motivated to try to play at the highest level because as a kid, that’s what he wanted to do. You just continue to preach those things to him to get the best out of him—for you, but then the best out of him for himself, so that he doesn’t get stagnant and just become an overseas player. He can always be an overseas player.”
“My verbiage every time I spoke to him or any time we had some type of film session was constantly reassuring and reaffirming, like, ‘You’re an NBA player. You’re better than your situation,’” added Harris.
Marbury constantly challenged Young as well. The two shared many emotional conversations, discussing their individual careers and how they both encountered unforeseen obstacles—in basketball and in life—that led them to China. Some of those conversations brought Young to tears. Marbury pushed him to fight through the adversity and raise his game to a level needed to get back to the NBA. Hearing that, especially from someone of Marbury’s stature, sparked something in Young. He wanted to go for it—to really go for it. Whatever it took.
It would take a lot. A lot of sacrifice. A lot of commitment. A lot of resolve. That was the message Michael had for his son when they talked over the decision. Joe was twenty-nine years old. He would be turning down millions of dollars, accepting a lesser role, and giving up stardom.
But his mind was made up long before that talk ever happened. Joe had traveled this road long enough. His dream had slipped away three years prior. Now it was time to chase it again.
Like Joe Young, Zylan Cheatham was supposed to follow in his father’s footsteps. In this case, that meant taking over the family business—a local mechanic shop in Phoenix, Arizona. As Young was learning basketball, Cheatham was supposed to be learning engines and transmissions and oil filters and disk brakes.
None of that really interested him, though. Cheatham wanted something different for his future. What, exactly, was still unclear. He was trying to figure it out while constantly being on the move. His parents were divorced and living in different parts of Phoenix. At the age of twelve, he moved from the West Side to the South Side with his mom. “That’s kind of when things got real for me,” he said.
South Phoenix was a more perilous part of the city, overrun by gangs and plagued by violence. Cheatham was exposed to it all right away. His mom worked long hours, so he was often on his own after school. That independence was more of a curse than a blessing, especially at such a formative stage of his life.
“I’m out in the city. I’m moving around, gangs, doing all that,” he said. “I wasn’t a druggie, but I was definitely in the streets. I’m fighting and all kinds of shit. All my friends—the dudes I was hanging out with when I went to school—were all gang-affiliated, all smoking before class. That’s all I hung out with every day. To this day, they’re still in the hood, trapping, doing what they do—or dead, or in jail.”
Cheatham was an exceptional football player, a bruising running back with striking athleticism. He began dreaming of a future in the NFL—of a life as a superstar athlete, not a mechanic. He played some basketball, too, but mainly just for fun and to stay in shape. Football had his full heart and full attention—until a shocking development during his eighth-grade season. Cheatham’s coach unexpectedly quit on the team that year, frustrated with his players’ lack of discipline. The season was cut short, and Cheatham was devastated. What was he supposed to do now? Where was he supposed to turn?
In South Phoenix, those were not questions one wanted to be asking. Thankfully, Cheatham found a new hobby right away. His best friend, Darvis Fletcher, was obsessed with basketball and encouraged Zylan to make the transition to the court. That transition would save Cheatham from venturing down a dangerous path.
“Zylan was hanging out with some young gangsters. They were all street kids,” Fletcher recalled. “We all grew up together; we’re all from different parts of South Phoenix. But he was kind of in that pack and going down that path. It wasn’t looking too good for him at a young age, I’m not going to lie to you. But I don’t know—he likes to give me credit for the basketball thing. I was just playing it. I wasn’t like, ‘Here, you should play basketball.’ It was kind of unspoken.”
“Darvis literally changed my life,” Cheatham said. “He taught me how to play basketball. He’s not gonna say it, but I am. I’m gonna tell it like it is.”
At that point, Cheatham wasn’t particularly skilled at basketball. He had little knowledge of the game, but all the physical tools were there. He was fast, strong, agile, athletic. He and Fletcher began training together, developing a daily routine. The minute school let out at 3:00 p.m., they would hustle to the Central Avenue bus and ride it straight up the street to the South Mountain Community Center. They were usually the first two people to arrive at the gym. They would shoot around, play one-on-one, mimic moves they had seen on TV. Zylan would try to dunk, springing toward the rim but coming up just short, over and over and over again. Older kids—sometimes grown men—would trickle in. They would split into teams and scrimmage full court. Zylan and Darvis typically stayed at the facility until the doors were closing around 10:00 p.m. Their blossoming love for basketball kept them in the gym, as did their understanding of what existed just outside—the many negative influences that threatened to steer them off course.
“The crazy part about it is, when I first picked up a ball, there were no hopes of making it to the NBA. There were no dreams of getting a DI scholarship offer,” Cheatham said. “It was just, either I pick up this ball and stay in the gym all day, or I go run the streets with my friends and get in trouble. It was that decision, man. I feel like I picked the right one. And I fell in love with it.”
“We knew kids who were really active in gang activity early on in their lives,” Fletcher added. “You see it every day. A lot of fighting. A lot of killings. Kids entered things that you wouldn’t think a kid would be involved in. It’s easy to fall into that. But we fell in love with the game of basketball, and it made it kind of easy to keep that where it was.”
The more they played, the better they got. And the better they got, the more they started dreaming of the NBA. It helped that Zylan hit a massive growth spurt around this time, shooting up from five feet ten to six feet four. Now he was fast, strong, agile, athletic, tall, and skilled. He was also determined. Albert Ramirez, who coached Zylan and Darvis in AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) basketball, used to pick up a bunch of kids from the South Side to take them to the YMCA before school. His phone would ring around 4:30 in the morning.
“Coach, I’m ready,” Cheatham would say. “Come get me.”
“Zylan’s one of the only kids that would call me at 4:30,” Ramirez remembered. “And that was on a constant basis. I never called him or ushered him to go work out. He always initiated the call. To us, we knew that he was going to play at the next level. Just how far, we didn’t know.”
By junior year of high school, it was clear that Cheatham would go at least as far as the college level. He had sprouted to six feet eight and become a top-100 recruit in the nation, with scholarship offers from major Division I programs across the country. San Diego State eventually won his favor. Cheatham spent two memorable years with the Aztecs and two more at Arizona State before setting his sights on the highest level—the farthest level he could possibly reach.
Cheatham understood, even after he signed with a premier agency in Roc Nation Sports, that he was likely to find himself on the fringes of the NBA. After going undrafted in 2019, he got an opportunity with the New Orleans Pelicans—a modest opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless. He appeared in four games and logged fifty-one total minutes during his rookie season, which was suspended in March due to COVID. Under normal circumstances, he would have been on track to find a home and carve out a role in the NBA. But these were not normal circumstances.
Entering the summer of 2021, more than two years since he had left college, those four games and fifty-one minutes remained his only taste of NBA action. Zylan had touched an NBA floor, but he hadn’t “made it”—not in the way he and Darvis had talked about since childhood.
He was right on the doorstep, though, which, considering when and where this had all started, was extraordinary. Of course, it wasn’t enough. Cheatham hadn’t made it out of South Phoenix just to lay down on the doorstep. He had much bigger plans.
“One of Zylan’s biggest statements—we were out in California. We were at the Anaheim Complex, at a tournament,” Ramirez recalled. “He said, ‘Coach, when I make it to the NBA, I’m getting you a gym, we’re getting it in, and we’re gonna help all the South Side kids.’ I said, ‘Right on, son. That’s good.’ He always had a vision of being something bigger than what he was and being able to afford to come back and give back to the community.”
Basketball didn’t become the center of Zylan Cheatham’s life until he was a teenager. For Jared Harper, the situation was different—very different. Basketball was to be the center of his life from the day he was born: September 14, 1997.
Patrick Harper, who played college basketball at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina, had hatched a plan. He was going to be married by thirty and have two sons, both of whom would be basketball players. Jared was the firstborn.
“I think the dream of playing basketball and making it to the NBA was probably settled before Jared was born, before he ever knew who he was,” said Patrick. “I was a college basketball player, so I was planning everything before I even knew his name. That planning goes back a long way. But I think at one year old, he would sit in the swing and not cry, not do anything, and we would just sit and watch games for hours. At a young age, he could just sit in front of the TV and stare at basketball, before he knew what it was.”
Patrick didn’t have to steer Jared toward the game—his son seemed to gravitate to it on his own. When he was two, Jared would play outside their home in the quiet suburb of Mableton, Georgia, dribbling a ball for hours. They had a little Nerf hoop, and he would surprise guests by sinking ten shots in a row. By four, he was dribbling two balls at the same time, up and down the sidewalk. In his first organized game at the age of five, parents and coaches had to introduce a new rule because he was dominating so easily. Jared had to wait at half-court until the defense was fully set before attacking.
“Always having a ball and always advanced,” Erica Harper, Jared’s mom, recalled, “and always working to perfect whatever he was working on. I remember at a young age, maybe even when he was two, he would keep shooting until he shot a high percentage of baskets.”
“As long as I can remember, I’ve always been around basketball,” Jared said. “It just always came naturally. I remember after school in kindergarten, first grade, my dad used to take me to the gym every day, going there, working on ball handling, just working on simple fundamentals and knowing that those little things would help me in the long run.”
That type of training started early for a reason. Patrick understood, based on his and Erica’s heights, that Jared was likely to be undersized for basketball. So his son would have to be more skilled, more polished, more knowledgeable than everyone else. Patrick purchased instructional videos made by Dave Hopla, who worked as a shooting consultant and coach in the NBA. Jared learned all the proper forms and techniques from studying those tapes. Then, with the guidance of Patrick, he tackled all the game’s fundamentals—shooting, dribbling, passing, defense—in painstaking detail.
The plan was working to perfection; Patrick and Erica even had a second son, whom they named Jalen. The two brothers would often play on the Nerf hoop together, wearing uniforms and official NBA socks. Jared even added accessories at times: a headband and an arm sleeve, just like Allen Iverson, one of his favorite players. They would turn on the fan in the nearby bathroom to simulate crowd noise, the loud hum echoing through their play area. In their minds, they were transported to a large, packed, rowdy NBA arena. They would toss each other alley-oops or pretend the clock was winding down . . . 3, 2, 1 . . . and launch long-distance shots at the buzzer. It’s good! Harper hits the game-winner! It’s all over!
Basketball was fun for the boys, but it was also hard work. Patrick didn’t take it easy on either of them. From the time he was little, Jared always played at least one level up. He was small for his age, so as a fourth grader running with middle school kids or a seventh grader running with the junior varsity squad, he was extremely small. Some of his jerseys looked like night gowns, draping to his knees. Some of his opponents would be six, seven, even eight inches taller.
That was all intentional, all part of the plan. Jared’s dream was to make it to the NBA, and to give him a shot, Patrick knew that his son needed to be constantly challenged, both mentally and physically.
“I had to adjust to Patrick being so hard on him and Jared playing with older kids, being knocked down and all of that,” said Erica. “It was probably more of an adjustment for me than it was for him. But that’s what he wanted to do.”
“The opponents used to always try to capitalize on his size,” Patrick explained. “Like, ‘Hey guys, you gotta play physical with him. You gotta rough him up.’ Which, in my mind, I’m like, great, that’s exactly what I want, so he can learn and have that toughness. So the plan kind of worked. Was it challenging? Yes. His training regimen was tough. I’m a very tough, hard coach.”
It was tough, sure; but over time, it paid off. People constantly overlooked Jared because of his height—on multiple occasions, he was warming up and the referees asked Patrick, “What’s this little kid doing on the court?”—and then he would nonchalantly bury five three-pointers and break down defenses with ease.
“His abilities would always be questioned,” Erica added. “And I would be in the stands, and that’s what I would hear.” She got used to the murmurs: What is he doing here? Who can he guard? Why is he on the floor? “And then it would immediately stop after he started playing.”
Part of Patrick’s elaborate plan was also exposing Jared to the highest levels of basketball. The Harpers went to watch high school championships, AAU championships, SEC (Southeastern Conference) championships, the Final Four, the NBA. They observed more like students in a classroom than fans in a gym. Seeing those stages, experiencing those atmospheres, imagining himself in those situations was important for Jared’s development too.
Of course, others encouraged Jared to dream smaller. Making the NBA was a near-impossible feat for anyone to achieve. And for someone his size? That was impossible. Somehow, none of that noise seemed to get under Jared’s skin. He knew what he was capable of. He had competed against some of the best prospects in the country—Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, De’Aaron Fox, Bam Adebayo, to name a few—and more than held his own. He was crowned co-MVP of the high-profile Nike EYBL (Elite Youth Basketball League) Peach Jam Tournament in 2015, recording 34 points and 8 assists against Tatum’s St. Louis Eagles in the title game. “Of course, you always hear, ‘Oh, you need to have a backup plan.’ Blah, blah, blah,” Harper said. “But I don’t think I ever really listened to that. I feel like my entire life, I always believed I would be in the NBA.”
“Never wavered on it. There’s no plan B. I’m going to the NBA and that’s what it is,” said George Washington, Harper’s head coach at Pebblebrook High School in Mableton. “He’s been that way forever—ever since I met him. ‘I’m going to the NBA.’ Dude, you’re five feet five, what are you talking about? ‘I’m going to the NBA.’ And that’s always been his motto. He hasn’t wavered on that at all.”
Jared often talked about Tyler Ulis, a five-foot-ten guard who played at the University of Kentucky and then for the Phoenix Suns. Ulis was his evidence—his definitive proof—that someone his size could make it to the modern NBA. Because size was by far the biggest knock on Harper as a prospect—in many cases, the only knock. His speed and athleticism were absurd. His basketball IQ was extremely advanced. His talent was undeniable.
At Pebblebrook, he starred alongside future NBA guard Collin Sexton. The two would stay behind after practice to play one-on-one. Harper prevailed in a majority of those battles, according to Coach Washington. They would play to 10, beginning with only one dribble allowed. Then they would go to two dribbles, then three dribbles, then unlimited dribbles, then back to one dribble. Sexton was a year younger and still learning the moves that Harper had already mastered. Washington described the games, which tended to be quite chippy:
Collin would say, “Hey, let’s go to three dribbles.” Because with three or four dribbles, Collin’s going to try to get to the basket. And Jared knew he could be creative off of one or two dribbles—really creative. He would one dribble, pound, pull you, step off, he’d do all kinds of crazy stuff. And that’s when Collin was learning how to do all that. And Jared was just killing him, toying with him.
Finally, Collin won a game and oh my God, when Collin won that game, you would have thought he had won a championship. People don’t understand how much Jared helped Collin to become the player Collin has become, because when Collin came to us, in order for him to score, he would take one hundred dribbles. Jared would tell him all the time, “You don’t need that. One dribble. You should be able to score off of one dribble. You should be able to get to the cup off of one dribble. You should be able to get to your jump shot off of one dribble.” And Collin would lose his mind—he couldn’t do it at first. So they’d go two dribbles. Then they’d go back to one dribble. It would just go on and on.
And on and on and on, often past midnight, to the point where they had to be dragged out by their parents.
Despite standing merely five feet ten by his senior year, Harper had become a top-100 national recruit and earned a scholarship to Auburn University—an SEC school, just like the University of Kentucky, where Tyler Ulis played. During his junior season with the Tigers, he helped lead the team on an improbable run to the 2019 Final Four, averaging 16.2 points and 5.8 assists in the NCAA Tournament. They beat a loaded Kentucky squad, featuring Tyler Herro, Immanuel Quickley, P. J. Washington, and Keldon Johnson, in the Elite Eight, with Harper scoring 12 points in overtime alone.
After that, it was time for the plan to finally reach its pinnacle. Like Cheatham, Harper declared for the 2019 NBA Draft. And like Cheatham, he didn’t end up getting picked. His size—he measured five feet eleven with shoes on at the NBA Draft Combine, which was the second shortest height recorded that year—continued to be a major impediment.
From there, he and Zylan embarked on similar journeys. Zylan got his brief chance with the Pelicans; Jared got brief chances with the Phoenix Suns and the New York Knicks. As of 2021, however, he had logged just twenty-four total minutes on an NBA court, fifteen less than he played in that Elite Eight clash with Kentucky alone. His belief in himself, unsurprisingly, hadn’t wavered, though it was frustrating how much remained out of his control. He could vary his approach and keep improving his game, but he couldn’t change his height. Only ten players under six feet—Harper included—had appeared in an NBA game during the 2020–21 season.
“My thing is that he gets a chance,” Patrick said. “That’s it. Now if he gets a chance and it doesn’t work out, I can live with it. But give him a chance.”
“It’s just trying to control what I can control,” Harper added. “I know I’m an NBA player. And I know there are people out there that understand and know. But it just takes that one team that’s really going to pull the trigger and be, like, you know what, we’re going to give him a real shot. And I feel like that’s all I need.”
As the summer of 2021 began, Hill, Young, Cheatham, and Harper all found themselves in the same precarious position: on the outside of the NBA, fighting to make it in. Chasing a dream. It meant that their disparate paths, from Israel to China to the United States, were about to converge in a single place. A place nobody wants to be.
A place called the G League.