SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – It was 5 a.m. on a spring day in 2007 when Myck Kabongo and Tristan Thompson, two young basketball players from Ontario, Canada, jumped into a rental car with their coach from the Grassroots Canada basketball program. Coach Ro Russell and the two prospects embarked on a seven-hour drive to St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, N.J.
Kabongo, a 6-foot-2 point guard born in Zaire and raised in Toronto, Ontario, didn’t know much about the school – other than it had produced an NBA guard.
“I knew it had J.R. Smith [of the Denver Nuggets],” Kabongo recalled. “I was like, ‘They must have a good coach. I want to play at that level.’ ”
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