Everywhere you looked Monday night, there was something interesting to see at the BioSteel All-Canadian game.

You could start with the 23 players taking part, representing some of Canada’s top high school basketball talent, with nine of them committed to American college programs.

As good as those players looked — Kalif Young and Jahvon Blair won MVP honours in a 120-118 Team White win over Team Red — it really got interesting on Team White’s side of the court.

On that side sat the game’s 24th player, Thon Maker, who dressed but didn’t play and was named the Canadian high school player of the year at halftime.

More than a week after declaring for the NBA draft, the 19-year-old Australian from Orangeville’s Athlete Institute prep is distancing himself from these high-school all-star games, going the same route with Portland, Oregon’s Nike Hoop Summit on the weekend.

His body of work — two years in Orangeville with dozens of games played against other prep schools in front of scouts throughout the U.S. this season — will have to speak for itself, if it gets the chance to be drafted in June.

“I just did this (not participating in the all-star games) because I wanted to get better and get ready for the draft,” Maker said before Monday night’s game started, at U of T’s Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport

The hope is they can convince the league he graduated in 2015 and spent this year as a post-graduate one, making him eligible to be taken in June’s draft. Maker, his coach and guardian Edward Smith, and Orangeville coach Brandon Lesovsky think it’ll be enough to open the door for him to the game’s highest level.

Lesovsky thinks Maker — who’s been projected as a late first-round pick — will get drafted.

“Yeah, I am (confident),” he said. “I don’t have any inside sources or anybody telling me that. I think at minimum next year you’ve got a seven-foot-one rim-runner that can shoot the three, a high-motor guy. That’s valuable at a minimum.”

Maker has been training in South Carolina the last week and will resume that regimen on Tuesday. Neither he nor Lesovsky had a timeline on when they’d hear from the league on Maker’s eligibility.

“It’s one of those things where the only ones in a hurry are you,” Lesovsky said. “It could be three days, it could be three weeks . . . anything in between as far as we know.”

The league’s decision will be a big one. It set an age limit of 19-one year removed from high school in 2006 when a wave of players declared out of high school after Kevin Garnett landed with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1995.

Maker’s situation certainly wasn’t what the NBA had in mind when David Stern implemented the rule, nor is it what the NCAA would want.

And if Maker leaving the U.S. to play in Canada makes a difference in a positive ruling, it could have a big impact on the prep school scene in this country.

“I think it would change a lot of things for a lot of people, not just us,” Lesovsky said. “It’s got to be on each individual. Mentally, physically emotionally, all those things have to come into it.”

For the time being, Maker’s camp isn’t thinking about the NBA denying the declaration. Should that happen, or even if he were allowed in and not drafted, Maker said he has backup plans in place.

“I never wanted to do the overseas thing,” he said, “but college still is an option in terms of keeping it open and doing things the right way.”

Lesovsky promises there’s a monster on the court waiting to be developed in Maker.

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Whatever uniform he wears next, that motor won’t stop purring.

“He’ll still be in the gym at 6:30 tomorrow morning, the same he would be if they say no,” he said.

“That’s not going to change for him. That’s what’ll make him great. That’s what’s been ingrained, that’s what he’s been taught and what he knows: just go to work.”