CANTON, Ohio — At first mention of the green room, Jack Greynolds Jr. laughed.
"Not in a million years," the basketball coach at Canton GlenOak High School said. "Nobody would have guessed that. And good for C.J., because obviously a lot of people had that one wrong."
The inexact science that is basketball scouting is again under the microscope as the countdown to maybe the strangest and most unpredictable NBA Draft in years ticks closer to Thursday night.
Nobody seems to know who's going No. 1 overall, making Nos. 3, 6, 10 and the like even harder to peg. There's more smoke than fire and more questions than answers about any of the top prospects.
Ten players have formally been invited by the league to this year's draft and the green room in Brooklyn's Barclay's Center on Thursday night. One of them is C.J. McCollum, combo guard from Lehigh University — and from GlenOak High School in Canton, Ohio.
Greynolds is now in his second stint as GlenOak's coach. McCollum was a seventh grader the year he first started, and Greynolds taught in one of the district's middle schools at the time.
"I can picture a kid who's maybe a little over 5-feet tall and not 100 pounds, in a cut-off green GlenOak t-shirt with these long skinny arms sticking out of it," Greynolds said. "He didn't say much then. Once I was around him and got to know the family and saw him play basketball, I thought he'd be a pretty special high school player if he grew and kept doing the right things."
Growing into that green shirt came first.
**
If anybody truly believed a spot in the green room awaited, it was McCollum himself. Basketball was his first love, his hobby and what got him out of bed, even when he was barely a teenager, at 6 a.m. during the summer. When his friends told him he was crazy, he told them he was working toward getting a shot at the NBA.
"They all laughed at me," McCollum said.
He grew up in a duplex not far from GlenOak High School, shooting hundreds of times a day at the family's backyard hoop, working on developing six or seven different crossover moves and playing against his older brother, Errick, for hours on end. Errick played at Goshen (Ind.) University, at the NAIA level, and now plays professionally in Greece.
C.J. came off the bench, but played starter's minutes as a high school sophomore, a wide-eyed kid in an over-sized uniform shooting 3-pointers from well beyond the arc. After a 3-3 start, the 2007 GlenOak team won 20 straight games and advanced to Ohio's big-school state tournament. It used a four-out, one-in offense focused around the center, Kosta Koufos, who went from there to Ohio State for one season and then went in the first round of the 2009 NBA Draft.
Opposing defenses collapsed on Koufos. Shooting deep 3-pointers wasn't a bad strategy for the other, generally wide-open players on the court, both because Koufos often rebounded their misses and because McCollum made more than his share.
"He always had the green light from me," Greynolds said.
It was Big Kosta and his little teammates — "and little is a nice way to say what we were back then," said T.J. Sutton, a freshman on that GlenOak team and now a Kent State baseball player.
"It's kind of amazing we got the ball to the rim from deep behind that line, because our uniforms were so big on us that we had to roll the shorts several times to keep them up," Sutton said. "And I spent as much time trying to keep my jersey pulled over them so no one could see I rolled more shorts as I did with anything else.
"But even back then, C.J. wasn't just a good shooter. He was a rare shooter. And through the years he kind of had two growth spurts, from maybe 5'7" then to 5'11" or so, then he sprung up to almost 6'4" in college and a lot more people started knowing what I knew all along. I played against him in fifth grade and he had the same shooting form and work ethic then. He has the same moves — he's just perfected them."
Open 3-pointers became tougher to come by over McCollum's last two years of high school without Koufos in the post, but McCollum kept scoring. By the time he was a senior, he was good enough to be Ohio's Gatorade High School Player of the Year.
When it came to recruiting, though, he was treated like an off brand. Nearby Akron showed interest, but didn't have a scholarship open. Kent State had one but had quality backcourt depth and already had a point guard committed in McCollum's class. Bigger programs either saw a player they deemed too skinny or didn't see McCollum at all.
McCollum played in the LeBron James-sponsored King James AAU program out of Akron as a high schooler, but he didn't start on his team.
"A few times when we saw him in big (AAU) tournaments, he only played two or three minutes a game," then-Kent State coach Geno Ford, now at Bradley, said. "That was a team we watched; a team a lot of college coaches watched often, as much as we could. We scouted him a bunch, and we saw a really, really skinny kid who could shoot it but had a long way to go.
"I'm not ashamed to say I missed with that evaluation, and credit for that goes to C.J. himself and the work he put it. Guys get better, and he didn't just blow up but he did it in a hurry. He's a confident guy who can get his own shot and has a great mind for the game, too. He always had a knack for scoring and here we were worried that he was too skinny or that he wasn't getting enough time in AAU."
**
A Lehigh assistant noticed while perusing box scores that McCollum had a 54-point game as a high school junior, and he requested a transcript and a longer look. As McCollum continued to post crazy numbers against double teams as a senior, other programs called or stopped by, but Greynolds said only Lehigh seriously recruited McCollum.
Greynolds even talked to the family about prep school, taking a year that would allow C.J. to grow physically and as a player and allow power-conference basketball programs another chance to see what they'd missed the first time around.
But Lehigh had been loyal to C.J., and his mind was made up. Eventually, anyway.
"I jumped on the computer and did my research," McCollum said. "I had to. I had never really heard of Lehigh."
Off to Eastern Pennsylvania and the Patriot League he went, and immediately he thrived. He was the nation's leading freshman scorer at 19.1 points per game in 2010-11, and his 26-point game at Kansas left NBA scouts wondering what Greynolds and so many others back in Canton had been wondering for two years.
How did this kid end up at Lehigh?
Lehigh scheduled a game at Kent State the following year to allow McCollum to play close to home, and Ford remembers a pro-McCollum crowd "with probably 200 of his relatives" in Kent State's MAC Center. Of larger concern than the lack of home-court advantage to Ford, though, was the way McCollum kept scoring.
"He ended up with 42, and it felt like 52," Ford said. "And we were a pretty good defensive team. That team won a league championship and our perimeter defense was a huge part of that."
The home team went on to win despite McCollum recording the most points a Kent State opponent had scored in a single game in 20 years. Ford, both exhausted and impressed, fielded several questions in his postgame press conference about why he hadn't recruited McCollum harder and how a kid who grew up 20 miles down Route 43 ended up going to Lehigh.
"I answered that if he'd come in there and scored 22, the story probably should be that Kent State and Cleveland State and Akron and Youngstown State really whiffed letting this kid get away and all the way to Lehigh," Ford said. "But since he scored 42, I said the story should be that Mike Krzyzewski and Duke missed on him. He was that good."
The following season — on March 16, 2012 — McCollum scored 30 points as No. 15 seed Lehigh eliminated No. 2 seed Duke in the first round of the NCAA tournament. It was Lehigh's first NCAA tournament win.
**
That Duke game got people talking about what would be next for McCollum, and suddenly those green-room dreams didn't seem so crazy. But he tested the NBA waters last spring and got mixed reviews, and more than anything else he chose to return to school because he'd promised his mother he'd graduate and because Lehigh had been loyal to him three years earlier, too.
McCollum broke his foot last January and missed the remainder of the college season. It kept him from possibly winning the national scoring title and gaining all the accolades for which he'd been nominated.
But it hasn't derailed his NBA dreams. McCollum has been on the pre-draft workout circuit over the last month and said he's been cleared by every doctor he's seen.
By Thursday night, he'll be the second first-round pick off that 2007 GlenOak team.
"That's crazy, but it's deserved," Sutton said. "Kosta would come home from Ohio State that next year with not only an even better work ethic, but with all new drills they'd put him through down there. And C.J. was like a sponge. That taste of it, from making the state tournament the year before and seeing the steps Kosta was making, that had C.J. wanting even more. That's when he started to take off; it just took everybody but Lehigh a little while to notice."
Errick McCollum couldn't be reached for this story because he was traveling from Greece to New York City to join his brother and parents in the green room Thursday night.
"Errick was on my first (GlenOak) team and he was a special player, too," Greynolds said. "He had great skills and he always saw the game a play ahead, too. The way Errick handled himself on a player is why I knew C.J. would probably end up being a good one, too.
Watching C.J. come along as a freshman, it was clear that he knew the game and he knew he had the ability to make really remarkable plays, but he couldn't always do it because of his size. He wasn't very strong."
Greynolds said his program uses "hundreds" of different shooting drills in practices and offseason workouts. Sutton remembers one of them pairing two players, one the shooter and the other his rebounder, to shoot from the same spot for a certain period of time — or until the shooter missed.
"I was in the same spot, grabbing it out of the net and throwing it back to him for a long time," Sutton said. "Because when C.J. squared his shoulders and got rolling, he just kept making them."
**
Mike Fuline is now the head basketball coach at Mount Union University in Alliance, Ohio, but when McCollum was in high school he coached at Massillon Jackson, GlenOak's Federal League rival.
Fuline said he called everyone he knew in the college game at the time during McCollum's final two high school seasons "and begged" them to give their evaluations a second look.
After Jackson defeated GlenOak during McCollum's senior year, Fuline told the Canton newspaper reporter covering the game that Lehigh "must be the luckiest program in America" to have secured McCollum's commitment. He'd been a fan "since he was a 5'3" freshman" and said McCollum is as good a person as he is a player.
"I don't remember the exact year, but we walked into the old GlenOak High School and our guys went out to shoot around before the JV game," Fuline said. "They grabbed these basketballs and went down to one end, and of course C.J. was out there shooting by himself. And next thing I know all our guys are down at the other end, 10 of them on one hoop, because C.J. shooed them away. He was getting his work in and told them to go to the other end.
"Maybe that says we weren't the toughest team in America, but it says a lot about the respect our guys had for him. We played against a lot of great teams and great players, but he's right up there. It was impossible to guard him. Our rule was we never left him — two guys never left him. You couldn't because he had unlimited range.
"His older brother was a great player and a great kid, too. They were raised well. C.J. always had a little chip on his shoulder, and that's served him well. He has so much talent and I really think he's just getting started in terms of where it's going to lead him."
Greynolds said he's always believed that the best shooters "are born to shoot, then they perfect their craft as they go." In addition to McCollum's overall demeanor and work ethic, he said he's served as a role model to future GlenOak Golden Eagles by the way he's handled the success he's attained.
"Last summer he decided to stay in school when he was on top of the world," Greynolds said. "But he didn't rest on his laurels. He went to the Chris Paul Camp. He worked and worked on his weaknesses. He went to the LeBron Camp and got to play against the best players in the country. He made the NBA guys take notice, and he did his work before he got injured.
"He didn't one day decide to start chasing greatness. He's worked his whole life to be here, and he's earned it every step of the way."
Greynolds said he now knows that Lehigh got "lucky" but that McCollum was lucky, too, to have a program not only take him but to give him that green light immediately. He said neither he nor McCollum holds any grudges about evaluation mistakes made four or five years ago.
"I don't envy what these NBA guys do," Greynolds said. "It's hard judging talent. It's hard projecting guys four and five years into the future. I go back probably 10 years now and think about this small kid who was young for his grade and the way he showed me that if he ever grew a little bit, he'd be a pretty special high school player.
"At very least, I think I judged that right."
