The NBA’s Basketball Without Borders camps have been the launching pad for a number of the league’s biggest stars over the last two decades, and now a young Aussie could be the next name for fans to keep an eye on.
Tasmania’s Jacob Furphy was one of 10 Australian prospects to attend this year’s BWB Asia camp in Abu Dhabi and caught the eye of those watching with a game-winning shot on the final day of the four-day camp.
Furphy, 16, models his game on Oklahoma City Thunder guard Josh Giddey and says he’s learned a lot from an “unreal” experience of working with a number of NBA pros.
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“When we started travelling we actually got our flight cancelled so I got in late and didn’t get the first day to go in and mingle with everyone, but they soon made me feel comfortable and I just did my thing,” he told Wide World of Sports.
“It’s really special to be able to pick their (the NBA pros) brains and (learning) what I could do better and what could take me to the next level. It’s been unreal.”
Furphy was introduced to basketball by his mother, who played the sport, and has played since he was five years old. He has balanced both Australian rules football and basketball through his early teen years, admitting the fitness from football has helped his basketball career.
Furphy and the young campers were able to pick the brains of current NBA players Saddiq Bey and Monte Morris as well as former Chicago Bulls big man Taj Gibson, who enjoyed a 14-year career in the NBA.
Gibson was wowed by Furphy’s game-winner and said it was a sign that the pipeline of basketball talent in Australia was as rich as ever.
“I’ve always been a big fan of Australian players because they’re hard-nosed and tough,” he told Wide World of Sports.
“Just looking at the NBA all the Australian players coming through, Patty Mills, Ben Simmons, I can go on for hours.
“This week alone, the MVP of the whole camp hit the game winner on my team, he’s from Australia.
“They had a really good group of young Australian talent from bigs to point guards and I look forward to hearing their names in the future, hopefully in the NBA.
“When I did the camp in Singapore almost 10 years ago, we had some Australian players there too and I kept saying to myself, ‘There’s a lot of talent here’.
“This week alone blows me away because there’s so much talent, but the talent has stepped up to a whole new level.
“The young man that won today (Furphy) … he hit a step-back three-pointer like he was in the pros. That’s the level of talent you’re dealing with.
“I’m excited for Australia, I’m excited for the national teams in the future because it’s just growing our game of basketball.”
While basketball is a key part of the camps, an emotional Gibson explained that the pros are keen to teach the up-and-comers key life lessons that they can take away.
“The thing that I was preaching was to be good humans first,” he said.
“The basketball part will take care of itself, but once you’re a great teammate, a great person, you try to do the things that you can do in the right way, that’s the main thing to get across.
“It went that way because the way I was hugging these players one by one, some of them weren’t even on my team, you can tell I left an impact on some of them and that was my main goal coming in.
“They would always ask ‘are we human?’ basically. ‘Do we have emotions?’ ‘Do we have letdowns?’ ‘Do we get depressed?’
“Most of the questions from the campers was about depression and how we deal with it.
“My answer was, ‘I’m just like you’. I’m no different, I cry, I sleep, I want to win every game, I want to make a lot of shots, but at the end of the day I know that just trying to be a good person, that’s the first thing, and they understood it right away.”
Gibson’s message was echoed by the NBA’s head of international basketball operations, Chris Ebersole.
“Magical is a great way to describe it,” he told Wide World of Sports when asked about the bond between the campers and their famous tutors.
“Each of these Basketball Without Borders camps I’ve been working on, even though it’s a relatively short amount of time, it’s really an arc and you see the growth and improvement all these young players are making.
“It just speaks to the power that sport and basketball in particular has to really connect people.
“I know the players got better at basketball and they improved … but even more important than that, the connections and relationships that are formed it’s a really powerful thing.
“That’s what Basketball Without Borders, the NBA and FIBA want this program to be all about.”
The list of NBA BWB alumni is rich to say the least. Previous attendees include Giddey, reigning league MVP Joel Embiid, All-Star big man Lauri Markkanen, and the point guard of the newly-minted NBA champion Denver Nuggets, Jamal Murray.
Furphy said it was inspirational to know that Murray was once in his shoes.
“It’s definitely inspiring to see someone who was in my shoes getting that far. It gives me motivation to strive for it,” he said.
Ebersole has been working on the camps for over a decade and saw Markkanen come through as a camper and described a “full-circle moment” this year when the now NBA All-Star returned to help out on a camp in Utah as one of his highlights.
“He was a really talented player at that time, but in our mind, I don’t know if anybody saw him and said NBA All-Star,” he said.
“Fast forward eight years later, we were in Salt Lake City where the Jazz hosted All-Star weekend and it was a full-circle moment with Lauri receiving his first All-Star selection and being a starter in his home NBA city.
“He came back to our Basketball Without Borders camp we did in Utah and spent time with the campers.
“To see those full-circle moments where the NBA alumni from this camp come back and give back their time and share their experiences, that’s what makes this program so tangible.
“You’ve got NBA, WNBA players and coaches that were in these players’ shoes not too long ago, they can come back and make them (the campers) understand that these dreams they have in basketball are attainable as long as they do things the right way and take the lessons they’ve learnt through programs like this and apply them to their basketball careers.”
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