“You have to fucking hit me.”

It was barely after 9 a.m. on May 1 and St. Bernard High School’s tiny gym was already booming with the sound of bouncing basketballs and shouted commands. It was a cool, overcast day in Los Angeles, but inside Mohamed Bamba was sweating. The 7-foot former University of Texas center was busy working with Drew Hanlen, the man Bamba hopes will help transform his game. On that morning, the line between trainer and drill sergeant was blurring, as Hanlen barked for Bamba to go “full speed” and to “stop thinking, just do it.” He was pushing his student to learn the lesson at hand: a midpost move that required a combination of footwork and physicality. Hanlen wanted more from Bamba on both fronts.

Hanlen—who had a puffy cushion strapped to one arm and acted as the lone defender—instructed Bamba to take the ball on the left side of the floor, just inside the high school 3-point line, and back him down with his left shoulder and hip to begin a move that would give the center the option of pushing into the lane or pivoting toward the baseline for a fadeaway jumper, depending on the defense. They drilled it over and over. The crucial component of the move called for Bamba to slam into Hanlen with appropriate force to create space.

“Be a fucking bully,” Hanlen implored. “Be an animal.”

With Hanlen’s help, Bamba set out to improve three key areas of his embryonic offensive game: low-post moves, mid-post moves, and shooting. For each move, Hanlen said there are essentially three stages that take three to four weeks each: understanding it, implementing it, and mastering it. As of May 1, Bamba was in Stage 2.

The rough idea is to model Bamba’s game after Joel Embiid’s, another Hanlen client who had come through that very same gym a few years earlier. So did Jayson Tatum, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine, Jordan Clarkson, and a host of other NBA prospects looking to boost their draft stock. Bamba, who is coming off the “done” of his one-and-done season with the Longhorns, had been planning to make the jump to the pros since he was a sophomore at Westtown School, a prep program in a suburb about an hour outside Philadelphia (Bamba was born in Harlem). “I would be sitting here lying to you if I said I figured it out when I got [to Texas],” Bamba said about his predetermined path to the NBA. “The goal was be a guy who could have a great impact in just one year and go out and do big things.”

When I first met Bamba, he was in Philly for games 1 and 2 of the Sixers’ first-round series against the Miami Heat. Embiid hadn’t been cleared to play yet, so he and Bamba spent what Mo called “a pretty decent amount of time together.”

Embiid would drive Bamba to the games, and afterward they’d go back to Embiid’s place to break down film for hours. “He’d give me his input on what I should change,” Bamba said. “He told me to play lower. It’s all about leverage and being more explosive.” Rip-throughs. Pump fakes. Drawing fouls. Playing with pace and composure. Bamba told me Embiid gave him all the cheat codes.

But before Embiid became the Process, he first had to go through one. That’s where Bamba is right now. He’s already a rim-protecting monster with a silly 7-foot-9 wingspan that makes Mister Fantastic look like he’s got alligator arms. His defensive ability has positioned him to be one of the first few names called at this year’s draft on June 21. We have him sixth overall on the Ringer draft board; ESPN has him fifth. Everyone I talked to over the past few weeks—scouts, coaches, front office executives—mentioned his enormous upside. Almost all of them also used another word to describe Bamba on offense: raw.

Embiid would drive Bamba to the games, and afterward they’d go back to Embiid’s place to break down film for hours. “He’d give me his input on what I should change,” draft prospect Mohamed Bamba said. “He told me to play lower. It’s all about leverage and being more explosive.”

It’s the kind of label that talent evaluators casually toss, though no one is totally certain what it means. The glass-half-empty crowd probably can’t imagine a scenario in which Bamba improves so much that his offensive skill set overflows. The last time anyone saw him in a competitive game, he was planted in the paint. In his final Longhorns game, he had 13 points, 14 rebounds, and three blocks in an NCAA tournament loss to Nevada. (He also took one 3-pointer, which he missed.) Most of Bamba’s points came within a few feet of the rim. To the extent that Texas asked anything of Bamba on offense during his brief stay in Austin, it was to fill the traditional college big man role and hammer home dunks that would make Bill Raftery shout something like “get up high and throw it down hard.”

The flip side of that is the people who see someone with enormous physical gifts that just need to be properly shaped. Hanlen falls into that camp. When I asked him to describe how Bamba looked when they first started working together less than two months ago, the trainer also called his newest client raw, but he said it in a way that came off as positive, not pejorative—as though he had someone new to work with, and he was excited to see the results.

After playing four years at Belmont University (2008-09 to 2011-12) and helping the Bruins make two NCAA tournament appearances, Hanlen launched Pure Sweat Basketball and began training some of the best players in the NBA. Last week, Tatum FaceTimed him from the Celtics’ locker room after scoring 28 points in Boston’s Game 1 win over the Sixers in the Eastern Conference semifinals to ask how his shot looked.

Tatum shot 34.2 percent from 3-point range on 4.0 attempts per game in one season at Duke. After tweaking his shot with Hanlen and firing up countless 3-pointers in practice, Tatum hit 43.4 percent from 3 as a rookie, good for eighth in the NBA. The results surprised even Tatum. Whether Hanlen can help Bamba add a 3-point shot is another critical part of the center’s development. No one expects Bamba to take a Tatum-sized leap as a long-range shooter (he shot 27.5 percent from 3 at Texas on a grand total of 51 attempts), but if he can make opposing defenders respect his jumper, he’ll be among the rarest of unicorns—a 7-footer who can block shots at one end of the court and give the opposition fits at the other, acting as a kind of stretch 5. Each morning, Bamba shoots 100 3s. Each night, in the second of his two-a-day workouts with Hanlen, he shoots another 150. Soon enough, they’ll increase the evening 3-point attempts to 200, then eventually top out at 250, ratcheting up to 350 per day by the time the draft rolls around.

Even a whiff of a jump shot would go a long way toward persuading skeptical organizations that Bamba is more than just a human fly swatter. There’s a reason he hasn’t been mentioned as a potential first-overall selection, even though he thinks he should be. (When he recently appeared on ESPN’s The Jump, he was asked whether he’d like to play for the Knicks, his hometown team. “That’s funny,” Bamba said. “I didn’t know the Knicks were in [contention] to be the no. 1 pick.”) Among the handful of league executives I spoke with, several expressed concern about Bamba’s offensive ability. As one longtime front-office executive said, “centers his size are becoming less attractive” because more teams than ever are going small and “playing five-out with the middle wide open on offense.” A guy like Rudy Gobert—someone Bamba has been compared to defensively—is a good example. Gobert could very well be the Defensive Player of the Year, but at times he was a postseason liability for a Jazz team that could desperately use more offense. If Bamba can convince franchises that his game is closer to Embiid’s than Gobert’s and that he really can play inside and out, it could help him move up in the draft.

After working with Bamba for more than six weeks, Hanlen thinks Bamba is sanding down the edges of his offensive game—which doesn’t mean that he is a finished product or that Hanlen will let up on him anytime soon. Toward the end of the morning session, Bamba took the ball on the left block, bumped into Hanlen twice with his left hip as though he were making a move into the paint, then spun out toward the baseline at the proper angle for a fadeaway jumper that will be impossible to block considering his height if he can perfect it. (The video at the top of this story is the clean, edited version that Hanlen and Bamba provided.)

“Nice footwork!” Hanlen yelled. “Hell yeah! That’s a perfect rep—right until you missed it.”

It’s all part of an arduous process that the 19-year-old big man hopes will shape him into the best player in the upcoming class. Bamba starts shortly after the sun comes up and ends long after it’s gone down. In addition to the twice-daily basketball sessions, he packs in physical therapy, strength-and-conditioning workouts, business meetings, a nap, and more food than any human ought to be able to consume without having his stomach pumped. I spent 14 hours with him on a recent Tuesday and watched it all up close.

I met up with Bamba around 7:30 a.m. at his two-bedroom apartment in Marina del Rey. He’s been living there for a month and a half with Greer Love, his longtime mentor, friend, business manager/partner, consigliere, chauffeur, target of his practical jokes, and emergency cook. Bamba has a personal chef, but that week’s delivery of prepackaged meals wouldn’t arrive until later the same afternoon, so Love was pressed into breakfast duty. He made scrambled eggs with cheese and multigrain toast with butter, and mixed up the first of five chocolate protein shakes that Bamba would throw back at various points that day. Love likes his eggs fluffy when he’s eating them himself, but he’s learned to make them denser for Bamba. Love told me he’s getting “OK” at it while we talked in the kitchen.

“They still need work,” Bamba shouted from his bedroom.

When he emerged, Bamba was wearing a black Michael Jordan sweatshirt with the words “Laney High School Class of 1” stamped on the front, black Nike leggings, gray UT shorts, and pink KD sneakers. He’d planned to wear a pink hoodie but Love was wearing a pink polo and Bamba wasn’t about to head out the door in matching outfits. They have an interesting dynamic. They’re together all day, every day, and the net effect is their own private screwball comedy, a basketball version of The Odd Couple, with Oscar played by a 19-year-old, 7-foot future NBA lottery pick and Felix played by … actually, Felix would still be a middle-aged white dude of average height who dotes on Oscar. That part would be the same.

Love is 35. He met Bamba when Mo was a fourth-grader at P.S. 208 in Harlem. Love was working in finance in Manhattan and was looking to get into mentorship work. He helped start a basketball program at the school called Locke’s Lions and coached the team. He also cut Bamba in the fourth grade—something Mo tells me during a tour of the apartment. (“I point to my 14-2 record,” Love said by way of self-defense. “Your what?!” Bamba responded.)

The next year Bamba made the team, and he hasn’t looked back since. In addition to Bamba, the squad produced Souleymane Koureissi, who will play hoops at Richmond, and Eddie Lewis, who will play football at Rutgers. Love, Bamba, and the rest of the Lions never lost touch. They see each other regularly and have a text chain that’s active almost daily. There’s a running gag where Bamba sneaks up on Love—not easy considering Bamba’s height—and scares the shit out of him, then sends the video to the group for yucks.

Bamba and Love admit their relationship is unique. Maybe it’s not unusual for a young player to have someone shepherd him toward the pros, but the fact they’re so tight raised suspicions in the past. Love is almost twice Bamba’s age, grew up in a Detroit suburb, and has an undergraduate degree from Indiana University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. Some people looked at the two of them and figured there must be some shady, implied quid pro quo. Most notably, Bamba’s half brother, Ibrahim Johnson, posted a Facebook video before Bamba started playing at Texas alleging that Love had given Bamba improper gifts. The NCAA investigated and deposed Love for more than three hours before declaring that the two had a long-standing existing relationship and cleared Bamba to play.

“All of the stuff he was alluding to,” Bamba said about his brother, “Greer has been spot-on and very careful with the relationship we had and making sure the NCAA knew what was going on. Everything he gave me always had a meaning and a purpose behind it. Greer would never, ever just buy me a random car. Everything was—you need orthotics. I’m going to get you some orthotics. This is what you need. You need dress shoes, I’m going to get you dress shoes. You need to look presentable. You’re coming into being a man. It was always stuff like that.”

Bamba said he’s forgiven his brother and still talks to him, but since the drama he’s kept his distance while working toward the NBA. (Bamba is close to his mother and father and talks to them regularly. He has another half brother, Sidiki Johnson. Like Mo, Ibrahim and Sidiki were also good basketball players. Unlike Mo, Ibrahim and Sidiki got in trouble with the law; Sidiki did time on robbery and attempted robbery charges, while Ibrahim was arrested last October on forgery charges.) “Obviously I’m not going to say I’m happy it happened,” Bamba said, “but it added a level of thickness to my skin.”

It’s part of why Bamba’s circle is so small. Love pretty much handles everything, or if he can’t, he finds someone who can. “He’s an expert at finding experts” is how Bamba put it. Until recently, Love was a vice president at Huron Capital in Detroit. He quit in February to become CEO of Lenox Partners—the umbrella business they established in Austin to handle all things Mo Bamba. Instead of hiring an agent, they’ve gone with what they call the “à la carte” route. It’s how Bamba ended up with Hanlen for hoops, Rory Cordial for physical therapy, Amoila Cesar for strength and conditioning, and Avery Pursell as chef. Hanlen, Cordial, and Cesar have all worked with big-name athletes and came highly recommended, as did Pursell, who among other accomplishments won a show called Around the World in 80 Plates.

Everything else falls under Love’s purview. Because of his background, he handles “investment and proprietary opportunities.” (Bamba hasn’t signed a shoe deal yet, but Nike and Adidas are after him. He has stacks of shoes sent gratis by both companies that he’s piled in the corner of the living room halfway up the wall near the flat-screen television.) When Bamba wanted fashionable new glasses, Love called Warby Parker. When they were trying to get him new social media handles, Love worked with the league, which put him in touch with Instagram and Twitter. When they started looking for a fresh new suit for draft night, Love tracked down a tailor and showed fabric samples to Bamba. Love is a human alarm clock in the morning and Bamba’s biggest competition at night when they play chess. There’s no written agreement between them—Love wouldn’t discuss who’s currently paying for everything and said only that “we don’t have any formal financing arrangement or future agreement right now”—and even if there were Love knows Bamba could always rip it up and move on without him. It’s a delicate mixture of business and friendship that comes with built-in risk.

“If I went back into the world of corporate finance tomorrow and never made any sort of career out of the world of Mo,” Love said, “I’d be beyond fulfilled by whatever I’ve been able to contribute to helping him get in the position he’s currently in.”

For now, Love isn’t going anywhere. He’s single with no kids, which makes their bachelor business pad setup easier for everyone. But that doesn’t mean the arrangement will last forever. After the draft, Love will break down their Marina del Rey digs and then move to whichever city Bamba ends up in. They won’t live together, though.

“No, no, no, no,” Love said. “We each get our own separate corners after June 21.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Bamba questioned from the kitchen.

“’Cause I’m sick of getting startled every time I turn the corner,” Love deadpanned. “You’re gonna give me a heart attack, Mo. I have heart disease in my family.”

After breakfast and that first morning training session with Hanlen, it was off to physical therapy with Cordial in Santa Monica. Love drove. Love almost always drives. (While we scooted all over Los Angeles, Love hinted that maybe Bamba had dinged up his car, at which point Bamba said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”) Bamba was there for over an hour, stretching his hamstrings, working his core, getting a massage with a large hand-held vibrating device called the Hypervolt. Cordial also had Bamba lie on his side on a table and used a suction cup that pulled the muscles away from the skin and made his shirtless teenage client grimace in pain. When I noted how much effort and money professional athletes put into their body, Love replied “unfortunately we don’t have $1 million to invest like LeBron.”

“$1.5,” Bamba corrected through gritted teeth.

While he was doing planks and sweating—careful, as Cordial instructed, to be “mindful of the core muscles”—Bamba turned to me said, “When things get hard, you know what I think? [Deandre] Ayton’s not doing this. [Marvin] Bagley’s not doing this.”

Of course, they very well might be. But that’s not the point. The point is for Bamba to prove to himself and everyone else that he’ll put in the work. “It’s very easy for me to find motivation,” Bamba said. “Being born and raised in Harlem, you’re born with a chip on your shoulder. Two-bedroom apartment. Five or six people living there. We always had a cousin or an auntie or an uncle staying with us.”

“When things get hard, you know what I think? [Deandre] Ayton’s not doing this. [Marvin] Bagley’s not doing this.” —Bamba

Bamba’s mother, Aminata Johnson, still lives in Harlem. His father, Lancine Bamba, recently returned to Cote d’Ivoire. Bamba is close to both of them and gushes about how his parents worked hard enough to help him go from public school in New York City, to a boarding school in New Hampshire for eighth and ninth grade, to Westtown School for high school before landing at Texas. But “as much as some people want to see you succeed,” Bamba said, “other people want to see you fail.”

Bamba knows there are reservations about his game. In addition to his shot and overall offensive ability, the biggest questions you hear about Bamba pertain to his “motor.” That’s scouting jargon, and it has a nebulous meaning. There’s no advanced metric to prove whether someone is engaged and giving maximum effort all the time—but there’s been persistent gossip to keep the perception alive. When I put it to his college coach, Shaka Smart scoffed. “He works hard and he’s a talker on defense,” Smart said over the phone. “That’s what you want. People who say those things don’t know.”

Bamba thinks he gets hit with the “motor” stuff because he smiles on the court. He likes basketball—sorry, “loves” it, he insists—and doesn’t see enjoying himself as an impediment to being competitive. But yeah, Bamba knows all the knocks against him—from people who say he’s a one-dimensional player to those who say he doesn’t play hard enough.

“Me hearing that I’m this or that and so-and-so is projected to go higher than me,” Bamba said, “it’s like, ‘All right, I’m going to work my ass off.’”

Amoila Cesar is happy to test that statement. By 3:30, we were in Burbank at a gym called MusclePharm HQ. It took more than an hour to get there because of the traffic. Bamba slept in the passenger seat almost the entire way while Love weaved through L.A.’s clogged highway arteries and toggled between various radio stations. He didn’t bother to lower the volume. No need. Bamba can knock out anywhere, something he learned during his AAU days, when he’d sleep between games. He woke up just in time to tell Love where to turn into the parking lot; like the eggs, he thinks Love’s sense of direction still needs work.

Inside the gym, though, Cesar was in charge. He said Bamba looked sleepy. Cesar is over 6 feet tall and looks like he was created with the same CGI they used to chisel Thanos in Infinity War. He’s worked with Tatum, Solomon Hill, and Boogie Cousins, and he’s most famously responsible for transforming Julius Randle’s body from soft to swole. Cesar put on music, cranked the volume, and said, “Oooh, we’re gonna work today.”

MusclePharm looks exactly the way you would expect a place called MusclePharm to look. It’s a massive hangar with a giant bank of weights, a basketball half court, treadmills and cardio machines, speed bags and boxing equipment, and a full-size octagon. To add to the aesthetic, MusclePharm has muscle cars parked inside the facility near a stretch of AstroTurf track: a brass ’68 Shelby Mustang GT500, a forest green ’67 Chevelle, a black ’70 Chevelle, and a Big Bird–yellow ’70 Pontiac GTO Judge. There’s also a Rolls Royce. Because, sure.

Over the next hour and a half, Cesar made sure that Bamba did, indeed, work his ass off. There were dead lifts and leg presses, balancing, stretching and core exercises, sprints on the treadmill, and plyometrics. In one brutal session, Cesar attached Bamba to some resistance cables and instructed him to make a 90-degree turn while keeping his pivot foot planted and then explode off two feet with a heavy medicine ball extended above his head like he was about to dunk with two hands. That went on for a while until Bamba was sweating so much it looked like he’d just stepped out of the shower. In another maneuver, Cesar tethered Bamba to a weight sled and had him pull it down the AstroTurf strip while high-kneeing.

“He’s in a better place to start than most of my guys in terms of mobility,” Cesar said. “A lot of guys we have to focus on how they move, but he’s already there. We’re just trying to build him up and get him strong enough to take that NBA impact and pounding.”

Texas had Bamba listed at 225 pounds, which is the kind of number cooking that colleges do. (Draft Express had him at 207 pounds coming out of school.) When I saw him last week, he weighed 226 pounds. That represents progress, but it comes at a cost. With some players, like Randle and Cousins, the goal is to turn fat into muscle while also shaving pounds. “The challenge with Mo is the opposite,” Cesar said. He estimated that because of Bamba’s age, height, “crazy metabolism,” and the amount of energy he expends on two-a-day basketball workouts and strength-and-conditioning sessions, “he’s probably operating at a 6-7,000-calorie deficit.”

That’s where all the food comes in. And there’s a lot of it.

The five shakes Bamba drinks throughout the day—MusclePharm chocolate protein that comes in a 10-pound bag—come to a rough total of 6,500 calories. That’s just to get him back to a net zero after everything he burns off. To put on weight and muscle, he has to eat. Constantly. As Shaka Smart said, “It’s easier to grow one way than the other.”

In between the eggs and toast for breakfast and a chicken parm sandwich from Bay Cities for lunch, Bamba had various snacks in the car and sipped on a smoothie (strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, Greek yogurt, and spinach). When we got back to the apartment after the workout with Cesar in Burbank, it was around 6:15 p.m. Pursell, Bamba’s personal chef, was waiting in the parking lot. She had a cooler and a box full of food in tow.

Bamba helped her carry it inside—then examined the goodies with wide eyes as she unpacked it all. Oatmeal with cashew crumble. Turkey bacon, egg, and cheese on croissants. Corn bread with olive butter. Garlic bread. Steak with thyme garlic butter sauce. Roasted garlic mashed potatoes. Roasted chicken in a lemon thyme white wine sauce. Chicken kebabs in homemade barbecue sauce. A mound of individually wrapped chocolate chip cookies for dessert. The deliveries come once a week, but even with all that food, it covers only about 40 percent of what Bamba consumes in a seven-day stretch. Protein bars, bottomless bags of cashews, and veggie egg scrambles help supplement the prepared meals. There are lots of on-the-go sandwiches, most of them with extra chicken.

When we plopped down on the couch, Bamba tucked into a big plate of marinated steak and mashed potatoes. “I call them deposits,” Bamba said. The more deposits he makes into his body, the more those investments might help him grow. It’s all part of the job now—though he wouldn’t describe it like that. Where mere mortals might beg off—they kept trying to feed me, but after the fourth lunch offering I politely declined—Bamba enjoys it. He likes trying new things. While we talked about calories and nutrition, Bamba got a text from Texas assistant strength coach Tyler Janota. He looked at his phone and laughed, a mouthful of steak and potatoes pushing the pockets of his cheeks out like a chipmunk. Then he showed me the message: “Mo, eat more.”

Bamba doesn’t have much down time. The last movie he saw was Black Panther. He enjoys superhero movies, and he’d like to see the new Avengers, but it’s hard to find three hours during the day, and at night he’s usually too wiped out. He works out six days a week. Sunday is for recovery and business and sometimes podcasts that Love recommends. Love makes recordings of the germane parts so Bamba doesn’t have to wade through hours of content. It’s like a personalized 1.5x speed.

With the little free time he can find, Bamba sometimes plays Fortnite. His handle is his real name, which surprised some people he recently played with from Ames, Iowa. They couldn’t believe it. “I was like, ‘Really? It’s no big deal. Let’s just play,’” he said. Bamba promised the three random kids he’d give them a shout-out on Instagram if they won. They won. They ran it back. He said if they won again, he’d get them tickets to see him in the closest NBA city. They won again. The tickets will be forthcoming once Bamba’s name gets called.

“There’s this warmth with Mo that comes across without him even saying a word,” Smart said. “People are attracted to him.”

Smart saw it firsthand. Before they were together at Texas, Smart coached the center on the USA Basketball under-18 team. While they were in Chile, Smart noticed that kids started showing up. A handful at first, then a pack, then a crowd. Before long, adults were in the mix, too—all of them there for Bamba, who wasn’t even playing that much. They chanted his name and had signs that said “Bamba for president.” He signed countless autographs and took endless selfies. After the last game, Bamba took off his sneakers and gave the left shoe to one kid and the right to another. Hours later, he realized that his custom orthotics were inside the shoes. With help from his new friends from Chile, he somehow got the orthotics back, though it took some doing (including a call to a friend who was on a bus to Santiago). It still makes Bamba laugh.

Bamba told me the story while we played chess before heading back to see Hanlen again for the evening hoops session. It was the only real break he had all day. He loves chess. His brothers kept bringing home big basketball trophies when he was a kid. The first trophy he ever won was for chess. He was 7 years old. “It was maybe the size of my phone,” Bamba said. “I was so damn proud.”

He might set up a chess club in whatever city he lands in. Bamba had a two-hour dinner with Caron Butler at Plan Check in Los Angeles recently. The ex-player gave the soon-to-be rookie advice ranging from when he would be expected to pick up the check to making sure he keeps the circle of people around him tight. He also told Bamba he needs something away from basketball, something he enjoys, something that’s his. Chess could very well be it. Is Bamba good? “Yeah, he’s good,” Smart told me, “but it’s not like he’s Bobby Fischer.”

Against me, he might as well be. Bamba knows opening moves and strategy, which puts him light-years ahead of my style, which can best be described as stumbling around and hoping for the best. “Anytime I can turn defense into offense,” Bamba said, “I’m happy.”

He also told Bamba he needs something away from basketball, something he enjoys, something that’s his. Chess could very well be it. Is Bamba good? “Yeah, he’s good,” college coach Shaka Smart told me, “but it’s not like he’s Bobby Fischer.”

Just like on the court, he swatted away my advances and then counterattacked, swiping piece after piece before I knew what hit me. “When it comes to chess,” he said, “I don’t mind sitting back and learning lessons …”

As he said that, I took his pawn with my knight, which made him smile. He immediately swooped in and took my knight with his queen. I never saw it coming.

“… like the one I just baited you into,” he continued. “You thought that was gonna be a 3-ball, but it was a backdoor lob.”

Have you ever been dunked on in basketball? That game was the chess equivalent. I resigned a few moves later.

It was 8:15 p.m. when Hanlen popped open his laptop and began their film session on the St. Bernard High School bleachers. They broke down Bamba’s post moves and shot. “We’re trying to trim the fat on everything you do,” Hanlen told Bamba, “so there’s no wasted movement.” That attention to detail goes as far as making sure Bamba takes only an imperceptible half breath when making a move toward the basket; a deep full breath is a dead giveaway to a clever defender or an advance scout.

Then there’s his shot. As recently as five or 10 years ago, Bamba’s outsized ability as a defender would’ve been enough to make general managers drool. But in the pace-and-space era, front-office executives don’t generally get all hot and bothered about a big man who could be Dikembe Mutombo at one end of the floor unless he has the potential to be Chris Bosh at the other. That’s why Hanlen changed two main components to Bamba’s jumper.

First, the angle of Bamba’s arm. If you connected the dots on the three points where he started his shot at Texas—drawing a line from elbow to armpit to hip—the estimated angle was “around 122 degrees.” Hanlen had him drop the elbow so the angle begins closer to 90 degrees. Second, Hanlen instructed him to move the elbow out slightly from his body. “If I’m trying to describe it to someone quickly,” Bamba said, “it used to be a catapult motion and now it’s more of a launch.”

The idea is to get a nice, high arc with a soft touch so, as Hanlen kept saying, the ball “drops in hot through the net.” On that night, Bamba shot 151 3s and made 100. That’s 66.2 percent. Hanlen said the general rule for an NBA player shooting in an empty gym is to divide the number in half, and that’s about what he’ll shoot in a live game. It’s wonky math, but we’ll go with it for now. That means Bamba shot 33.1 percent that night. (For really rough comparison purposes, Embiid shot 30.8 percent from 3 during the regular season on 3.4 attempts per game.) Hanlen couldn’t have been happier. “I’ll take that all fucking day,” he said.

It was my first time watching Bamba shoot in person. He had a fluid motion, a soft touch, and the high arc that Hanlen wanted. Of course, only six people were in the gym, including Bamba and me, and no one was guarding him. On cue, and almost like he was reading my mind, Hanlen asked a question.

“Hey, you’re from The Ringer, right?”

Yes.

“You guys made a video making fun of JoJo for scoring in an empty gym on a 5-11 white guy, right?”

Yes.

“I’m that 5-11 white guy!”

Before I could burp up a witty one-word retort, he disappeared to find another basketball protégé who had gotten lost out in the dark, largely unlit parking lot near either the baseball or football field. The kid wasn’t sure which. “Well, is it a foul pole or a goalpost?” Hanlen laughed into his phone as he walked out the door.

For his part, Bamba was enthusiastic. “My shot feels good,” he told me while he sat on the bleachers and unlaced his sneakers. “I can’t believe how much progress we’ve made in the last six weeks.” He said he was excited for further improvement in the run-up to the draft. He was also excited about going to bed, though that wouldn’t happen right away. He and Love had a quick chat about an upcoming media appearance—Bamba is scheduled to go for a hike in Malibu with Kevin Garnett for a segment on KG’s Area 21—and they went over the next day’s schedule, another marathon affair. When I left them, it was after 9:30 p.m. Bamba stayed behind to meet up with a sneaker rep. There was still work to do.