The Toronto Raptors had a difficult decision to make after their victory against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Saturday.
Normally the domain of team vet Kyle Lowry, head coach Nick Nurse had collected the game ball at the final buzzer. It’s a shame there weren’t a few more to go around. Yuta Watanabe scored a career-high 14 points in a strong bench performance. Malachi Flynn joined Damon Stoudamire as the only Raptors rookies with a 20-point, 10-assist double-double. Gary Trent Jr. obliterated his previous career-high with 44 points with the most efficient shooting 40-point night in franchise history.
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Career nights can be beaten, though. You only score your first NBA points once. The smile on the Raptors postgame Instagram post gave it away — the game ball had been given to Freddie Gillespie. The 23-year-old earned it in the same way he’s earned everything in his basketball career, and the same way he intends to turn this 10-day contract with the Raptors into a longer-term fit — not by trying to be a star, but by starring in his role.
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Over on Gillespie’s Instagram account, you’ll see “Faith of a mustard seed” and a basketball emoji as his bio. As he explained to Memphis Grizzlies host Kelcey Wright Johnson in an unaired Memphis Hustle media day interview, Gillespie keeps the phrase as a reminder that “no matter what happens, no matter how high you get, how low you get, always keep a little bit of faith and that’ll be enough to accomplish your dreams.”
While deeply religious at its root — Jesus’ mustard seed parable appears in three Gospels — the analogy to Gillespie’s basketball career could not be more clear. At 6-foot-9 and 245 pounds, Gillespie’s basketball beginnings were small.
It wasn’t until eighth grade that the Minnesota native even gave basketball a shot. Primarily a football player at that point, he tried basketball “really just to hang out with my friends.” Any intention to play in Grade 9 was derailed by an ankle injury. It was with the junior varsity team the following year at East Ridge High School in Woodbury, Minn., when basketball finally took root.
“That’s when I fell in love with the game,” he said.
Normally, that meant playing on the AAU circuit in addition to high school ball in hopes of getting better and being noticed. However, Gillespie, though, injured his other ankle, then tore his ACL during what could have been a breakout junior season. The injuries and time missed closed the door on him getting recruited by Division I NCAA programs. For someone who came to the sport late, he felt he picked up the game quickly. His goal was still to play at the collegiate level.
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Some 4o miles down the road in Northfield, the Carleton College Knights, a Division III team in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, sensed an opportunity. Associate head coach Ryan Kershaw had been intrigued by Gillespie while scouting one of his teammates and led an aggressive recruiting push.
Kershaw and the Knights knew how rare it was for a program like theirs to have a chance at a player with Gillespie’s gifts. You have to go back to 1922 for the last “notable alumni — athletics” entry on the school’s Wikipedia page (a serious snub to our own Seth Partnow, himself a Carleton product). Fictional accounting geek Ben Wyatt from the show “Parks and Recreation” might be the most notable recent product of the school, a nod to how well-known the program is for its academics — not athletics.
“Just watching him play, you would see these snippets of him. When he would come in, you’d be like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool, that’s pretty neat,’” Kershaw said. “And then you kind of hear, ‘Yeah, he’s a really good student, too,’ and you’d hear things about, ‘He just started playing basketball when he was in (eighth) grade.’ And so going into the spring of his junior year, he was one of our top targets. But to be honest with you, there was a series of things that kind of transpired that led him here. And I tell people, honestly, he probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place, outside of a couple things happening.”
The torn ACL and ankle injuries, the lost AAU exposure and the Gillespie family’s priority for a strong education opened the door. On the last possible day to accept, Gillespie enrolled in the school’s computer science program. (Kershaw jokes that it created The Freddie Gillespie Rule, where basketball players can only wait that long to commit if they’re going to make the NBA.)
“It was mostly academic. Almost all academics,” Gillespie said. “For me, I thought at that point, playing professionally seemed so far away, I didn’t see any natural path to it. So I was like, ‘I gotta put emphasis on academics. I want to get the strongest degree possible.’ Didn’t get any looks except DIII schools. Decided, ‘OK, I’ll go to go play DIII, play basketball for four years there, have fun, go to a good school, get a good degree, and then go work my desk job.’”
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Gillespie’s path to the NBA is so unlikely that not only is this a story of a player going from Division III to the NBA, it’s one of a player going from riding the bench in Division III to the NBA. Despite being “one of the biggest, tallest, most athletic people” on his team — and in the entire MIAC — Gillespie played just 16 minutes as a freshman. Carleton had a very good player in Tianen Chen ahead of him on the depth chart and the upper-class heavy team prioritized as such. Gillespie, meanwhile, was strong and skilled but mobility was an issue after so many lower-body injuries.
In a late-season game against the Claremont Mudd-Scripps, Gillespie got an opportunity. Down 20 points, Gillespie was given a few minutes of run, and it was clear he’d progressed significantly despite rarely playing. On one possession, Gillespie switched multiple times before denying 250-pound Claremont centre Nick Lund post position before blocking a fading hook-shot attempt.
“We were all on the bench, like, ‘Watch, Fred’s gonna get this kid,’” Kershaw said. “You could kind of see him coming.”
There was no hiding Gillespie the next season. He started 23 of 27 games for Carleton, averaged nearly a double-double with over 2.5 blocks per game and earned Second-Team All-MIAC.
Gillespie’s goals changed as success arrived. His unrelenting work ethic affirmed, the idea of playing professionally no longer seemed like such a long shot. If nothing else, he wanted to test himself up against Division I competition.
At the time, Baylor head coach Scott Drew was trying to recruit another Minnesota native, Tre Jones, to his program. Drew didn’t land Jones, but he was alerted to Gillespie’s desire to transfer through a mutual friend of the family. Baylor came away impressed, though with some hesitation. In Gillespie, they saw a player who had improved quickly and could benefit from their proven ability to develop bigs. This was a player who’d spent more time in chess club than on a basketball court until he got to Carleton, providing a nearly blank slate to work with.
“He had a long way to go,” said Bill Peterson, a special assistant to Drew who joined the team around the same time after a few years of coaching in the D-League. “He was a big, raw, 6-foot-9, 240-pound kid. But his willingness to get better and get in the gym every day was off the charts.”
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Baylor didn’t go as far as to offer Gillespie a scholarship. He would have to redshirt for a season as a walk-on, then see where he was in his development a year later. That was all Gillespie needed. He made the jump, switched to a political science major so he could graduate on time without losing credits in the transfer, then got to work.
“I knew it was what I wanted to do. When I played basketball, that’s where my passion was. I really love the game,” he said. “So that’s what I felt like my purpose kind of was. I knew I wanted to do it at the highest level. There was a little bit of anxiety and worry, but I was like, ‘I get to do what I love. I’m gonna work hard and prove myself.’ That’s what I thought. That was my thing: I knew my work ethic, I knew my character, I was confident in myself.”
His work ethic would be tested. Baylor broke him down to start from scratch during his redshirt season. Drew joked that Gillespie struggled to score alone in an empty gym. Baylor’s focus with bigs has historically been on their hands and feet to improve coordination, tasking players with skipping rope, catching a variety of different-sized and weighted balls and even doing some boxing speed-bag work. Peterson laughs about it now, but Gillespie’s footwork was so poor he “couldn’t skip one jump” at first.
“Within two months, it was amazing how much better his footwork was,” Peterson said. “That’s the kind of person he is. You give him a task, you show him what you want him to do, and he’s gonna stick to it. He’s not going to take days off. He’s not going to come in with a slack attitude. He’s going to get after it.”
The path to success wasn’t quite as dramatic as at Carleton. Following his redshirt season, Gillespie’s role and minutes were up and down. Around Christmas, he told Peterson he was disappointed and frustrated. Peterson told him to keep working. A few weeks later when Tristan Clark was injured, Gillespie was soon starting in his place.
Everything snowballed from there. The improved footwork, the strong hands, the natural rebounding, the shot-blocking instincts and a renewed confidence carried over into Gillespie’s senior season, where he was one of the NCAA’s breakout players before things shut down. He earned Big 12 Most Improved Player, Second-Team All-Big 12 and Big 12 All-Defensive Team honours, starting every game for the Bears and averaging nearly a double-double with more than two blocks per game. By the end of his senior season, Peterson said Gillespie was picking things out on film before the coaches could tell him what to look for.
“I’m so competitive that I just want to get better, because I don’t like getting beat,” Gillespie said. “I’m so competitive, when I get beat, I’m like, ‘OK, I’m gonna go get better and then come back and I’m gonna try again.’ Eventually, I’ll come out on top.”
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In a normal year, Gillespie would have helped Baylor make a run in the NCAA Tournament, attend the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament and visited teams for pre-draft workouts, possibly playing his way on to the second-round radar. The pandemic threw all of that into disarray, which was difficult. Once again, Gillespie missed opportunities to showcase himself.
The Dallas Mavericks liked Gillespie enough to bring him into camp. With the Mavericks opting out of the G League bubble, Gillespie became one of the most interesting names in the G League draft. Memphis selected him second overall, before the Raptors — who really liked him as a potential piece for Raptors 905 — could grab him.
His shortened G League season went as the last few had. He improved noticeably from the start of the 15-game schedule to the end despite limited practice time. By the end of the season, Gillespie could be mentioned among the top potential frontcourt call-ups, having averaged — you guessed it — a double-double and over two blocks per game (plus 1.3 steals).
“I was just like, ‘OK, it’s a short season, you have to find ways to get better,’ he said. “I was dissecting film more. I sat down a lot with the coaches and looked at film and different players, and they went through it with me. Doing more stationary shooting. There’s different things so you don’t have the wear and tear on your body but you can still get better.”
That included an attempt to expand his range out beyond 15 feet. Gillespie was 0-of-3 on 3-point attempts and never took one in college, but he sees a player like Brook Lopez improve over time with reps and believes he can add the corner 3 to his repertoire soon.
“Am I gonna wake up and be Steph Curry? Maybe. I’m not gonna rule it out,” he said. “But for me it’s just incrementally getting better, getting more comfortable and getting the right coaches to help me improve.”
It all makes Gillespie an interesting development. He’s still fairly raw at 23, having only played significant minutes one year of high school, one year in Division III, a year-and-a-half in Division I and a shortened season in the G League. Given how quickly he’s improved at each level, what might he look like a year or two from now if an NBA team gets him into their developmental system?
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“He still has tremendous potential to get better because he’s not a normal kid. He didn’t play basketball when he was young,” Peterson said. “He’s not ready to come in and be a big-time star right now. We teach our guys here at Baylor every day, ‘You gotta find a role, that niche, to be really good in the NBA. And then you’ve got to stay in that role. If you want to make it in the NBA, you’ve got to learn to star in that role.’ I think Freddie understands that. He just needs more experience doing it.”
That’s exactly what Gillespie is trying to do during his 10-day window with the Raptors. While spending the requisite amount of time quarantined in Tampa waiting for the green light to play, Gillespie tried to absorb as much Raptors film and virtual coaching instruction as he could. His background in chess comes in handy in moments like these, as he believes the pattern recognition and anticipation of opponent moves use the same parts of his brain. The “crash course at a distance,” as he called it, is another opportunity to show how hungry he is to improve.
Given a surprising amount of playing time over the last two games, Gillespie has only taken five shots in 27 minutes. His focus has been on rebounding, using his 7-foot-6 wingspan to deflect passes and using his strength to set some very good screens. The Raptors’ centre position has had so much trouble this year that reliable screening, pass-catching and rebounding stands out. Gillespie was the first big off the bench for Nurse on Sunday even with the team getting healthier and adding Khem Birch. Those opportunities may not continue, but Gillespie has shown his size, strength and motor provide a solid floor — his development is worth investing in.
Peterson sees the Raptors as a natural fit for him given their developmental track record. Gillespie, too, was eager to land with Toronto.
“One of the reasons why I was excited when they called me, you know, one, they’ve got guys who’ve got a chip on the shoulder. I see that. They’ve got guys who work,” he said. “But their development stands out. They get guys better. At the end of the day, that’s what keeps you in the league, gets you closer to your goal of staying in the league is getting better. In terms of this, nothing would make me happier than if they were like, ‘Hey, Freddie, we love you, we want to keep you on, keep you as a developmental piece, help you get better, and we want you to contribute.’ That’d be great. But in this league, you’ve gotta take it day by day.”
Everyone he’s come in contact with is rooting for Gillespie to succeed. He’s earned rave reviews at every level as a worker, a teammate and a person, to where it’s hard to get people off the phone when they start talking about him. The Raptors have become quick fans, too, with Gillespie fitting right in as someone willing to play to the Open Gym cameras and bring energy on the bench. He’s a natural culture fit, even if he still needs more developmental time. If there’s one thing Gillespie’s career to date has shown, it’s to never rule out continued improvement.
“We were the best team in the Big 12, he got Most Improved Player and he just kept getting better,” Peterson said. “That’ll be his projection, too, if someone stays with him. If they do that, they’re going to have a diamond in the rough.”
(Photo: Tony Dejak / AP Photo)