From Pistons blogger to likely 2021 NBA Draft pick: Meet Jason Preston

#From Pistons blogger to likely 2021 NBA Draft pick: Meet Jason Preston| 来源: 网络整理| 查看: 265

Jason Preston, a 17-year-old basketball player who wasn’t playing much basketball, had to start figuring out what was next.

As a member of the varsity team at William R. Boone High in Orlando, Fla., Preston was handing out more high-fives and waters than he was buckets and dimes. He stood 6-foot with shoes on. Preston was so skinny he could dodge rain, similar to his favorite hooper growing up, the Pistons’ Tayshaun Prince.

Preston’s mother, Judith, a native of Jamaica, was a big Pistons fan. Preston, though, wasn’t sure why. He just remembers Detroit’s 2004 championship team always being on the television in his central Florida home. Naturally, he gravitated toward Detroit, too. Preston was in high school in the late 2010s, meaning he navigated social media regularly. With little playing time on the varsity team and his hopes of making it to the NBA diminishing, Preston chose to have his world revolve around the Pistons. He followed every reporter. He’d read all the blogs. He’d reply to every tweeted-out story.

“I’ve actually seen your tweets for a while now,” Preston told me during our phone conversation earlier this week. “I knew a little bit about you even before we got on this call.”

Preston wanted to be one of us. Plan B, as he tells it, was to be an NBA reporter. So, around the age of 17, Preston started blogging about the Pistons for a fan site called PistonPowered. He’d type and file stories after games, handing out grades and player evaluations following each contest. As Preston recalls, his first story was about how Reggie Jackson was due for a breakout season in 2017.

“I was big on reading articles online, getting in-depth news on players, getting different people’s perspective on the team,” Preston said. “I followed PistonPowered, and after every game, they’d have a story, like, ‘Grade every player’s performance’. It was just a person giving their thoughts on how certain players played. I’d read that and be like, ‘Ahhh, I agree.’ Sometimes I disagreed, and I wanted to make my own points about what I watched, what I saw. That was something I really wanted to try. I wasn’t playing a lot in high school. I didn’t think I’d have a lot of options to continue to play basketball, and I wanted to pursue something that kept me around basketball still.”

Preston got his wish. He will remain in basketball. He’s likely to hear his name called during this month’s 2021 NBA Draft.

It’s a truly crazy story, one about a kid who rarely played in high school, enrolled at the University of Central Florida to study journalism, played two final AAU tournaments after college orientation (while taking classes), went to a prep school in Tennessee and then wound up as the face of a mid-major program that took down a college hoops Goliath in the NCAA Tournament.

Preston decided last week that he would leave Ohio University and remain in the NBA Draft after impressing at the NBA Combine in Chicago and during workouts. There’s a lot of momentum behind him right now, which had never really been the case in his basketball life before.

Preston lost his mother to lung cancer when he was 16. He was then taken care of by his cousin, Justin Morgan, who moved from Jamaica to Florida to help him out, and his mother’s best friend’s sons, Brian-Marc and Russell Whittaker.

Before Judith’s passing, she and her son often talked about this moment right now, the one he’s living in, where he’s on the cusp of living out his dream of becoming an NBA player.

“I wasn’t alone during this whole process, with my people and my faith,” Preston said. “I had a great support system during that. I surely wanted to carry on everything I told my mom about being an NBA player. She knew about it.”

If you ask Preston, he’s always been this nice. It’s just that while he was in high school in Orlando, he wasn’t the most imposing physical presence, and he played for a coach who was very into detail and doing whatever it takes to win. Sometimes that meant holding onto the ball for what felt like an eternity when going against the bigger and better teams.

To paint a picture, Preston told a story about how after he graduated, his old high school was facing off against one of Florida’s top-ranked teams. The score at the end of the first quarter was 4-2. At the end of the game, it was 18-16.

“It wasn’t a bad thing,” Preston said while laughing. “He still won. They beat one of the best teams in the state. I guess it’s hard to showcase your skills in that type of system.”

The summer after graduating high school, Preston was on to the next phase of his life. He was on the campus of UCF taking classes. He’d already gone through his college orientations. However, in the middle of the summer, he got a call from a friend who asked if he wanted to play in back-to-back AAU tournaments. Apparently, you can continue to play AAU after high school if you’re under a certain age and not signed to play at a school. That, too, was news to Preston and he ended up accepting the offer.

At this point, Preston was 6-foot-4. A growth spurt made him a little more imposing, particularly as a point guard. The team he ended up joining played in tournaments in Florida and Georgia. Preston, looking like a completely different person, played well. He said his squad “beat teams we probably shouldn’t have beat.” Some Division I and II schools came calling about Preston’s services. Some told Preston that they didn’t have any open scholarship spots and that he could redshirt for a year. Other coaches said he should go to a prep school for a season. Preston ended up doing the latter, dropping out of UCF and enrolling at Believe Prep Academy in Athens, Tenn. There, Preston averaged 12 points, nine assists and seven rebounds per game on a squad that went 31-8.

“I felt like that was the first time I got a chance to prove myself, and not just for myself, but everyone else that I could do what I was doing,” he said. “I had already been doing it my entire life but those tournaments reinforced it. I had a whole map out of what was going to happen.”

Preston accepted a scholarship offer from Ohio University. He started 22 games as a freshman and made the MAC All-Freshman Team. Preston’s breakout season, though, came as a sophomore. He played and started in all 32 games. Preston led the Bobcats in points, field-goal percentage, 3-point field goal percentage, assists, assists per game and minutes per game. Additionally, Preston finished second in the nation in total assists that year.

Jason Preston (Patrick Gorski / USA Today)

Now on the radar of every team he came across, Preston took his game to another level as a junior. In a close loss against No. 8-ranked Illinois, Preston scored a career-high 31 points to go along with eight assists and six rebounds. That performance marked the first time in his life that he became a national talking point, as his life story was being told on broadcasts across the country.

“I didn’t think it was going to get the attention that it did get,” Preston said. “It was amazing to see the support from everybody — pros, former players, other inspirational people, family members. It was amazing. It was really a humbling experience. Thankful they could get my story out there.”

Last season, Preston led the Bobcats to the MAC Tournament championship, therefore landing a berth in the NCAA Tournament. Preston was named the conference tournament’s MVP.

Right under “make it to the NBA” on Preston’s bucket-list items was “play in the NCAA Tournament.” Check.

“As a kid, I’d fill out hundreds of brackets,” Preston said. “I was a big Bracketology guy. Now that I’m out of college, I’ll probably do it some more. I’d fill out so many brackets. I’d do it in class.”

Of course, fittingly, Preston’s Cinderella Story crossed paths with sports’ biggest Cinderella Story in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The No. 13-seeded Bobcats got matched up with No. 4-seeded Virginia. Ohio outlasted the Cavaliers in the early-round slobberknocker, 62-58, in a game that Preston flirted with a triple-double performance (11 points, 13 rebounds and eight assists in 40 minutes).

The Bobcats would end up losing to Creighton, 72-58, in the next round.

“The NBA was the top goal, but playing in the NCAA Tournament was another goal I had,” Preston said. “I didn’t want to leave a possession behind. I wanted to leave it all out there.”

You read stories all the time about how college and professional athletes aren’t supposed to be in the position that they’re in, yet, here they are. Preston really isn’t supposed to be here. It’s not every day that you hear about a high school player who averaged two points per game on the brink of being in the NBA. It’s not every day that you hear about someone who went back to play AAU after starting college courses. It’s not every day that you hear about someone staying on the straight-and-narrow path after losing the person closest to them at such a young age. Collectively, I’m not sure this story exists anywhere else.

The odds are that Preston will hear his name called come the July 29 NBA Draft. And when you hear his name, just know that this wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Hearing Adam Silver or someone call my name … I don’t know what I would do,” Preston said.