Kevin Porter Jr. Is Caught Between a Rough Past and the NBA’s Future

The gym inside the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club in Seattle is packed with pros and local players. Nate Robinson is playing. So are Brandon Roy, Spencer Hawes, and Jamal Crawford. A seventh-grade boy in a black track jacket looks on from the sideline. He thinks he should be out there too. So he struts onto the court in between games and timeouts. Oh, I can make that shot from there, he tells the players, pointing at a spot on the floor. I can outshoot you.

Kevin Porter Jr. was still years away from being a 6-foot-6, 213-pound first-round NBA draft prospect. But in his mind, he already belonged on the court with the pros. “He would always say, ‘Let’s play one-on-one,’ in between the games,” says Jamal Crawford, a 19-year NBA veteran who now runs Seattle’s pro-am league. Porter would even make bets that he could make certain shots and they couldn’t. “He was trying to show us that he could play, too,” says Crawford, “and that he had game.”

These days, anyone who watches Porter play for only a few minutes can see he has game. He was a five-star prospect coming out of high school in Seattle, and most draft analysts agree that he’d be a lottery pick based on talent alone. But after an uneven freshman year at USC in which he sat out a third of the season, Porter finds himself closer to the bottom of the first round on most mock drafts. His lethal isolation game and stepback jumper give him the potential to become James Harden’s successor … or his style may be a tough fit in the NBA if he can’t score as efficiently as Harden. One day away from the draft, he’s perhaps the biggest curiosity in this year’s class.

But getting into the NBA is a feat alone, considering everything he’s already been through.

Before Crawford recognized Porter’s game, what stood out to him was Porter’s last name. Crawford had played with Porter’s father, Kevin Porter Sr., at Rainier Beach High School in the late ’90s. But while Crawford moved on, eventually carving out an NBA career that persists to this day, Porter Sr. was swallowed up by the streets of Seattle.

Porter Sr. grew up hard. In 1993, he was charged with first-degree murder at 19 in the point-blank shooting death of a 14-year-old girl. The lone witness later recanted a statement that the shooting was intentional, and Porter Sr. was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for first-degree manslaughter. He served his sentence and became a young father, but tragedy struck again in 2004. According to Porter Jr.’s mom, Ayanna, his father was trying to help someone who was getting beat up at a bar when he was shot five times and killed. Porter Jr. was just 4 years old when it happened, which is why he wears no. 4. Soon after he arrived at USC on a basketball scholarship, one of the assistant coaches, Martin Bahar, referred to him as just “Kevin Porter” in conversation. Porter Jr. immediately cut him off: “Junior.” His Instagram captions often end with the hashtag “#RIPBIGKP.”

“At first, I didn’t make the connection with Kevin because Kevin was so young,” Crawford says. “But once I found that out, I was more drawn to him because I knew that there wasn’t a man in the house.” Porter’s mom picked up as many jobs as she could. Crawford and those around Porter Jr. helped keep him close to basketball and out of the dangerous streets of South Seattle. Kenan Oliver, a local semipro basketball player and Porter Jr.’s mentor, says if you’re not on a straight path while living in that area, “you’re going to become a statistic.”

Jerry Petty, one of Porter’s AAU coaches, would notice that he would spend a lot of his time at the Boys & Girls Club. “I just know that [basketball] was his outlet from having those kinds of trials and tribulations in his life,” Petty says. “To be able to utilize his skills and his talent, I would say just to have a release.”

Porter showed signs of advanced talent as early as the fourth grade. Petty, who coached him for one season on the AAU team Rainier Select Basketball, remembers him throwing full-court passes with both hands. “I could have given the ball to Kevin and said, ‘OK, go get me 30 every single game,’ and it would have been no problem,” says Joshua Martinez, Porter’s AAU coach on the A Plus program, for which he played from sixth to ninth grade.

When he wasn’t playing at the Boys & Girls Club, Porter would be at any one of the other courts around the city, likely accompanied by Oliver. Oliver met Porter through a nonprofit organization for at-risk youth in Seattle and made sure he had a haircut and clothes, and the occasional Jumbo Jack and fries at Jack in the Box. Oliver knew the importance of occupying Porter’s time with school and basketball, so he would take Porter to see his ABA team, the Seattle Mountaineers, play.

“Here, if you don’t play basketball you’re gang-banging, because you need that protection,” Oliver says. “Even on a sunny day, it may look nice, but the inner workings, man. … It’s a wasteland.”

Porter convinced his mom to let him attend Rainier Beach High, where his dad had played. With the decision came expectations. Head coach Mike Bethea says Porter Sr. once told Bethea he wanted Bethea to coach his son when he grew up. But Bethea still wanted to make Porter Jr. earn his place, so in 2014, when Porter Jr. was a freshman, he started him on the JV team. He was starting on the varsity team by the end of the season and took off from there. “I’m basically a 2.0 of my father,” Porter Jr. told Bleacher Report recently. “That means I got two legacies to fulfill. … I want to create my own but bring his with me.”

Porter Sr. was a good athlete; Bethea says he could throw a baseball 90 mph. But Porter Jr. was on another level.

Bethea also says Porter Sr.’s drive overcompensated for what he may have lacked in skill. “This is what I told Kevin: If he had his dad’s motor, they might be picking between him and Zion for the one and two,” Bethea says.

The Rainier Beach coach didn’t have to impose his advice on Porter Jr. too much because Crawford was always available when he needed to talk; if Porter got too emotional after losses—like he did his senior year against Garfield High—Crawford would sometimes be the one to calm him down. Crawford would give him new shoes and even advice about girls. Perhaps most importantly, he held the blueprint for how someone from Seattle could go far if they focused on basketball. By the time USC assistant Jason Hart saw Porter at an AAU tournament in Las Vegas in 2017, he had the look of a future pro.

“He had the ability back then to get from point A to point B when he felt like it and then he was able to explode athletically in traffic,” Hart says. “That was elite. That’s something that we didn’t teach them. That’s like God-given talent, and when you see God-given talent, that’s that one-and-done-type stuff, that’s that NBA-type stuff.”

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Porter left Seattle for Los Angeles last fall, choosing USC over other Pac-12 schools. But his one year for the Trojans was rocky at times. He missed nine games with a quad contusion, and returned only to be suspended for an undisclosed conduct issue. Porter returned for the last three games of the season, but overall he missed 12 of USC’s 33 games and averaged only 22 minutes a game, averaging 9.8 points, four rebounds, and 1.4 assists. He never had the consistency to develop or show off the full extent of his talents.

Back in Seattle, Oliver noticed that Porter was struggling at USC. Their text chains got longer. Oliver says Porter, who did not respond to interview requests, expressed concern about how he wasn’t fitting in with the team the way he envisioned. Oliver says this was just a bump in the road. “That kid has a powerful weapon in that he believes in himself,” he says.

When Porter was 10 years old, Oliver encouraged him to write down his goals, looking as far as 15 years into the future. Even back then, he knew what he wanted: to get good grades, to start on Rainier Beach’s varsity team and win a state title, and to earn a Division I scholarship. Oliver says he told him he needed a plan B; Kevin disagreed. Now he’s on the precipice of what was his final goal: be a one-and-doner and play in the NBA.

One thing you need to know about Kevin Porter Jr. is he likes to wear Crocs. At a predraft workout in late May, he walked in with a bright green colorway on his feet. When it was time to play, he slipped on a pair of gold-and-black Harden 3s. Porter has always looked up to James Harden. Both players are lefties, which is rare in the NBA. And Porter has incorporated some of the bearded MVP’s best-known maneuvers into his own game.

When Porter shuffles forward and steps back like he’s at a sped-up square-dancing class, you see shades of Harden. The tendencies are raw and not as precise, but watching him is like seeing film of Harden slowly develop.

“I couldn’t ask for a better comparison,” Porter told ESPN recently. “He’s unguardable.”

Harden’s deceleration is one of his best attributes—nobody goes from 100 to 0 better than him. Former coaches say Porter has shown the same ability to change speeds on the fly and attack a defense’s weak spots. Harden, of course, is now a master of the technique. Porter is still a pupil. But with his 6-foot-9 wingspan, natural athleticism, and flair, he projects as an enticing one-on-one scorer, a skill that Harden has used to revolutionize the NBA.

“Everyone stresses ball movement throughout the course of an 82-game NBA season, but then when the playoffs come, things get really tight. It comes down to individual players and having teammates that could play off of them,” Crawford says. “It’s less about ball movement and more about player movement.” The longtime veteran recounts how throughout his career, the toughest players he’s had to guard were lefties who had unique games: Manu Ginobili, Nick Van Exel, and Harden. Porter, he says, has a similar profile.

But it takes more than just having Harden’s style to match his proficiency. Cody Toppert, a former Phoenix Suns development coach who is now an assistant at the University of Memphis, worked with Devin Booker, a scoring guard who is now running the Suns offense like Harden. He says the “Harden way of playing” requires a steep learning curve and a player willing to immerse himself in situational practices and abnormal drills. For Booker, Toppert used “kill box” drills—which features designated areas (kill boxes) in and around the paint where Booker is encouraged to shoot—to avoid inefficient midrange jumpers. They would also go through “scoop-the-hand” drills—letting a defender get close and then pushing both arms upward to scoop their hands—to draw fouls from contact. All of it is done to train the player to make split-second decisions in the pick-and-roll, much like a quarterback does in the pocket.

“It requires an understanding of the different reads,” Toppert says. “Some guys are wired to be able to see, hear, listen, understand, and then execute quicker than others.”

Before Harden perfected his method, the tools were all there. He shot 38 percent from 3 in two seasons at Arizona State and got to the line seven times a game. Porter—whom The Ringer’s mock draft projects to land in the mid-20s—shot well from 3 (41.2 percent on 3.2 attempts) and 47.1 percent from the field, but struggled to get to the line (52.2 percent on 2.2 attempts per game). Leveraging contact into free throws is a learned skill, too; Booker, for instance, has increased his trips to the line every year in the league.

Porter is taller than Harden by an inch, and the same size as Booker. If he’s deployed more as a new-age point guard, he can leverage his size against smaller defenders. And with the floor spaced more in the NBA, he can use his shifty moves to drive to the rim.

“He’s tall and he’s got the vision to make passes, thread the needle,” Bahar says. “That’s one thing people haven’t seen much of yet—he can get you a bucket whenever you want, but also when he comes off a ball screen, he can make some great reads.”

Porter’s talent is undeniable, even in its nascent stages. But he has acknowledged that you need more than talent to be successful in the NBA. “A lot of people say I’m one of the most talented in the draft,” Porter told reporters in May, after a workout with the Miami Heat. “But they have a lot of red flags in my character. And I’ve just been working on that trying to improve off the court and show them that they can trust in me.”

When Oliver looks back on Porter’s journey, he can’t help but think that it’s a miracle he’s here after so many difficult moments. Porter, Oliver says, is aware of the life-altering moment that’s now just one day away, and how it will change his family’s future after a tumultuous past. The two have already talked about the possibility that Oliver will run a youth program that Porter wants to start. It’s not one of the goals he wrote down when he was 10 years old, but now that those are nearly all crossed off, it’s time to add new ones.