Ray Estrada

He played eleven games of high school basketball in his life. Eleven. One season, his senior year, and he only got that because he enrolled in classes at a community college to pull his grades up high enough to be eligible. His first sport was baseball. He came to basketball late and he was not good at it for a while. Both of his parents played basketball, in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and he says that is where his feel for the game came from. Nobody recruited him. Not one school. After graduation he took a job in a warehouse. His mother is the reason he is not still there. Yissel Raposo told him to quit it and go play, and she picked the school herself, which was Arizona Western, a junior college in Yuma, Arizona, about 2,500 miles from their house in Pennsauken, New Jersey. He was angry about it. Here is how that school even heard his name. A DePaul assistant named Marc Hsu saw him at a camp near New York for Dominican kids and sent a text. Kyle Isaacs, the coach at Arizona Western, remembers the message. "Hey, we saw this guy, do you guys have scholarships available?" Isaacs has also described what he was working with. "Him understanding how to play organized basketball was definitely at the basement." He showed up at 195 pounds and left three years later at 230. Year one was 14 games because of COVID. Year two he averaged 12 and 11 and was both the conference Freshman of the Year and the Player of the Year, which should not be possible at the same time. Year three he averaged 17.7 and 11.4, made Second Team All-American, and went for 30 and 14 in his last junior college game. Then UAB for two years, where he became one of the best rebounders in the country. Then Michigan, where he was the top transfer in the sport, shot 37 percent from three, and won a national championship. 190 college games in all. Golden State took him 11th overall in June. He turned 24 in September. Tonight in Denver he put up 31 points, 12 rebounds and 6 assists in a Warriors win. The last rookie in that organization to do 30 and 10 and 5 in the same game was Stephen Curry, in February of 2010. Be straight about what this is. It is one night in the fourth game of a season, he is 24 years old in a league full of 20 year olds, and nobody should decide anything about him in October. His junior college coach already said the part that matters. "They're getting a survivor." Eleven games of high school basketball. He has now played 190 more than that in college and he is just getting started on the ones that pay.