CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The best conversations are held behind closed doors.
And last Wednesday, behind a thick set of wooden frames, in a hallway filled mostly by the sound of bouncing basketballs, two high schoolers shared an exchange that was short on words, but said it all.
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Sam Cunliffe, a 6-6 forward in the Class of 2016, was getting loose for his upcoming game at the Under Armour All-America camp. He wondered aloud, semi-sarcastically, whether the teams had been divided by where each prospect might go to college.
Next to him, Mitch Lightfoot, a 6-7 forward in same class, smirked a little, turning to a reporter standing nearby.
Was Lightfoot laughing because he thought Cunliffe was overthinking the random rosters?
“I don’t know,” Lightfoot said. “But I’m with Thon Maker, so I’m good.”
Lightfoot was right. Roster conspiracy theories notwithstanding, being next to Maker was the best place to be last week. If you were with him, it meant you didn’t have to guard him.
Up until a month ago, the popular sentiment was that Maker would reclassify, opting to graduate a year early and begin his college career in Fall 2015. But Maker didn’t quite meet the credits requirement to graduate after three years. Rather than take summer classes and expedite his diploma process, he decided to take his fourth year in high school.
Now that he’s locked in to wait until 2016 to go to college, we get the benefit of seeing a more polished Maker, and Maker gets to work on some of the few weaknesses he has left to address.
A 7-1 center who runs like a small forward, Maker put on a four-game showcase at Queens University’s Levine Center last week. He dunked, he ran the floor and he showed off an impressive handle against some of the nation’s top recruits. And through all of it, he never stopped moving.
Whether it was in the thick of a head-to-head matchup against 2017’s No. 1 prospect DeAndre Ayton or in warmups, Maker’s motor was on full display. He has a remarkable blend of size, speed and coordination.
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And the best part of his Under Armour camp performance was that Maker looked totally uninhibited.
It was nice to see from a kid who has been asked to grow up just as fast he has grown tall. It wasn’t just that Maker was nearly unstoppable to opposing defenders. He didn’t get in his own way, either.
But there’s one more reason Maker’s decision not to reclassify is so positive, a more sentimental motive. It means he gets to play with his younger brother, 2017 forward Matur Maker.
“We probably won’t get this opportunity to play together again,” Maker told Sporting News. “At the next level, we’ll play for different colleges; we’ll play against each other. In the NBA you hardly ever see two brothers on the same team, except maybe the Morris twins. It’s really hard to get that chance. And when you have that chance, like right now, I really have to take that chance. “
The brothers Maker escaped Civil War in their home country of South Sudan at a young age, leaving their parents behind. They both now live with guardian Edward Smith, the man who first brought Thon to the United States after seeing his basketball potential five years ago.
He eventually brought Matur, too, re-kindling a bond that is central to their lives and, now, their careers.
In this brotherhood, sibling rivalry takes a backseat to sibling nurturing. You can hear it in the way Thon speaks about Matur — hopeful and positive, but with a discerning edge about how he can improve. And so when Thon had the chance to play with his brother for a second season, he was in no rush to pass it up.
That’s a scary thought for teams who will square off against them.
Matur still has a way to go to catch his brother. But with Thon around for another year, they will both reap the benefits of playing alongside one another. Matur gets a year to be a sponge absorbing his brother's knowedge, and Thon will finally be able to share the burden of carrying his team.
“It makes the game easier for me, because he sees what I do and he tries to bring the same thing to a game with the intensity,” Thon said. “So I’m on the bench and I can know we’re still in good shape. Sometimes, you miss your star player, and the other teams come back. When I’m off, he’s up. When he’s off, I’m up. And when we’re both on the court, it makes it really hard for the other team.”
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“Really hard” might be putting it lightly. But before he could play alongside his brother, Matur had to take the usual beating reserved for little siblings in backyard sports.
Matur recalls that when he beat Thon for the first time, in what he described as a “hard one-on-one drill,” he didn’t even celebrate.
“I didn’t really get excited,” he said. “I wanted to win more.”
That competitive nature of their relationship isn’t going away any time soon. After this year, neither brother thinks they’ll play together again. Matur doesn’t even think he would want to play with his brother after this year.
“I just want to be, like, in the NBA finals,” he said. “He’s coming from one side, I’ll be coming from the other side. I want to play against him.”
But before the competition begins, he’ll have one more year to watch, and absorb as much as he can.
“I want to learn more from him within the coming year,” Matur said. “It’s brotherly love. He wants to teach me, but it’s not the main reason he stayed.”
The one major gap in Thon’s game, his defensive presence, is made much easier to manage when his brother is playing with him.
And if Matur can take on a bigger share of the load defending opposing big men on the ball, it frees up Thon to do what he does best on defense: block shots.
On one occasion at the Under Armour camp, Thon was guarding mostly power forwards. But when the defense broke down, and the opposing center got a clean look at the basket, he came flying in out of nowhere to reject the shot out of bounds.
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It was the kind of play that made Lightfoot so glad to be on Maker’s team at the showcase.
“When people beat you, he’s there,” Lightfoot said. “He’ll just throw that thing into the stands.”
But before Maker’s hype gets (further) out of control, it’s important to put all this in perspective.
He is an elite offensive big man at his level, and has very strong potential to be that in college. While an increasing number of big men are able to run the floor, few, if any, can do it with the ball at the level Maker can.
All that said, he still needs to work on his defense. And that’s pretty much the point. This is a rising senior who would have had a great chance to make an immediate impact if he were a rising college freshman.
Instead, he’ll stay at home another year. He’ll play with his brother. And he’ll be better for it.
Maker now has an entire year to shore up the elements of his game that would have been at risk of getting exposed if he debuted in the Big Ten, Big 12 or Pac-12 this November.
And when he finally does make the jump, some power forward is going to be very happy to have Thon Maker on his team — just as long as it’s not his brother.