National Basketball Association

Tanks for the memories: Kaminsky must prove himself to NBA teams

Published Jun. 3, 2015 5:00 p.m. ET

Reid Forgrave

There’s a story from Frank Kaminsky’s high school days that says as much about college basketball’s reigning national player of the year as anything. It’s a story so telling that it’s become part of his legend.

And as the only college senior likely to be a lottery pick in this month’s NBA Draft tackles the many questions around his dynamic skill set -- Can the 7-footer handle the physicality of the NBA? Can he defend at the next level? What’s the ceiling for a player who is already 22 years old in a league where that’s senior citizen status for a rookie? -- it would behoove front office executives to pay attention to the moral of this story.

It was the summer after Kaminsky’s sophomore year in high school, and he was excited to play summer ball for the Illinois Wolves AAU team. But it was a stacked team that year, with six high major players -- names like Chasson Randle, who would later go to Stanford, and Nnanna Egwu and Tracy Abrams, who’d go on to play for Illinois. Kaminsky’s AAU coach, Mike Mullins, had a tough message to deliver to the skilled young man.

Go home, he told Kaminsky one day. You’re not going to get minutes this summer. Lift weights. Work on your body. Work on your game. Come back next year.

“It broke his heart,” Mullins said the other day. “His father told me afterwards Frank was crying out in the parking lot, crying all the way home. He wanted to quit and play for different people. But his dad said, ‘This is what you need to do.’ And that was the turning point for Frank.”

Things turned quickly. His junior season at Benet Academy outside Chicago, Kaminsky developed into a star. During the state tournament, Kaminsky scored 15 points in a loss to Jabari Parker and Simeon Academy. Kaminsky looked like the best player on the floor that day. Howard Moore, then a Wisconsin assistant, was in the stands, and he knew what the Badgers and head coach Bo Ryan had to do: Get Kaminsky on campus as soon as possible, and get a commitment before the summer season started.

Because once summer season started, Kaminsky -- a player who’d always been overlooked, who never made anyone’s list of top 100 recruits -- was going to be a star, and everyone was going to see it.

Why should NBA front offices pay attention to this story from six years ago, the cliché of a high school kid who was overlooked but used those slights as motivation to get better? Because that was the story of Frank Kaminsky in high school. And that was the story of Frank Kaminsky in college, as he went from a 10-minute-a-game backup as a sophomore to leading his team to two Final Fours as a junior and senior. And it only stands to reason that if this is a kid who has always been underrecruited and always overdelivered, that may also become the story of Frank Kaminsky in the NBA.

“Frank had an adapt-and-adjust period from every level,” Mullins told me. “He’s not a kid who came in and hit the ground running, not ever the top recruit or the kid you built a program around. But at the end of all those levels, Frank always had a lot of success. He just took his time to adapt and adjust. That’s part of the reason he chose Wisconsin. There’s a developmental aspect to basketball that’s not just running and jumping.”

The moment his coaches realized Kaminsky had officially adjusted from flashes of potential to finished college product came in the fourth game of his junior season. He scored a school-record 43 points against North Dakota, making all six of his three-pointers. Moore, who had moved on to become the head coach at University of Illinois-Chicago, was texting with his old Wisconsin teammate Michael Finley that night, the player whose record Kaminsky broke.

“It was almost like in ‘The Matrix,’ when Morpheus says about Neo, ‘He’s beginning to believe,’” Moore said. “That was the game where I was like, ‘OK, he’s going to be special.’”

When Kaminsky returned to Wisconsin to chase a national title his senior season, he became the face of college basketball. He was the tall, goofy kid who was that rare commodity in today’s college hoops: a guy who stayed in school all the way through, and who appeared headed to the first round of the NBA Draft. Kaminsky was the nation’s top-ranked player in offensive rating, per KenPom.com, with the third-highest offensive rating in the 12 seasons the statistic has been tracked. He was the centerpiece of the nation’s best offense. He averaged 18.8 points, 8.2 rebounds and 2.6 assists his senior year, enormous numbers for a team with one of the slowest tempos in college basketball. The NBA concerns about Kaminsky -- that he wasn’t a plus athlete, that his length didn’t match his height, that he simply didn’t have the body of an NBA player -- dissipated.

Still, his age might be the biggest concern. Think about it: Most of the players taken in the lottery will be in the NBA the year after their freshman season in college. The year after Kaminsky’s freshman season at Wisconsin, he was a sophomore backup who averaged 4.2 points. Kaminsky was in the same freshman class as Anthony Davis, who has developed into one of the brightest stars in the NBA.

“I’m 22 years old, and I get treated like I’m 65 going into the league,” Kaminsky said recently. “I don’t think age plays as big of a deal as other people think it does. It’s hard to top being named national player of the year, so I don’t know what else I could have done.”

What else could he have done? Not much. His path to today’s NBA is highly unorthodox. He wasn’t rushed to the league and told to develop his natural talents there. Instead, he was put in a slow cooker in Madison and given time to marinate in his own juices. Low and slow was the perfect combination for a guy like Kaminsky; he was only 6-foot-3 as a high school sophomore, so he was able to develop the ballhandling and outside shooting skills that make him lethal as a 7-footer.

“He just kept working,” Wisconsin assistant Gary Close, the coach who worked closest with Kaminsky in Madison, told me. “We didn’t rush him, didn’t pressure him. We told him he was progressing fine.”

“And now you’re getting a very mature player that’s obviously come a long way,” Close continued. “I don’t care who you are -- you’re going to get some knocks, get some down moments in NBA. That’s the nature of the beast. His ability to get up, to rebound and to continue will only help him.”

Some people have called him the most skilled player in the draft. One talent evaluator told me Kaminsky is the “star of the draft”-- not just a good NBA player but a great one, someone who’ll be better than the presumptive top two picks, Karl-Anthony Towns of Kentucky and Jahlil Okafor of Duke.

Though I think that’s overstating things, look deeper and there’s a point. Kaminsky faced both of those players in the Final Four. In Wisconsin’s upset of undefeated Kentucky, Kaminsky scored 20 points and grabbed 11 rebounds; Towns had 16 and nine. In the national title game, Kaminsky netted 21 points and 12 rebounds and forced Okafor into early foul trouble. Okafor played only 22 minutes, with 10 points and three rebounds. In the NCAA Tournament, Kaminsky faced off against the best post players in the draft -- and don’t forget his dropping 29 points in the Elite Eight on Arizona’s stout defense and 7-foot beast Kaleb Tarczewski -- and outplayed them all.

When it comes down to it, every pick in the NBA Draft is a gamble. With Kaminsky, even with the question marks that surround his defense and his body and his age, you know exactly what you’re getting: a hard worker who takes coaching. A high-character player who can be The Guy but isn’t driven by that. A stretch four who feels like a perfect fit for today’s spread-the-floor NBA.

Maybe he goes as high as fifth. Surely he’ll be taken in the lottery; I don’t see Larry Bird passing up a player like Kaminsky when the Indiana Pacers pick at No. 11. And certainly he’ll be an NBA player -- maybe a star, definitely a key contributor -- for a long time after.

“There’s been a lot of people in draft history who’ve come in with big questions marks but have proved people wrong,” Kaminsky said. “I want to be one of those people.”

Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.