No one taught Kehinde Babatunde Victor Oladipo, the son of Nigerian immigrants, how to play basketball. Not his father, not an older sibling, not a coach who spotted raw talent on the playgrounds around the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., the community where Oladipo was born and raised. When the child practiced, he flung his body across the neighborhood courts, constantly crackling with an unrefined energy. Always running. Always moving. Running. Moving. Then he’d go home to study Kobe and LeBron on TV. Then back at it: running, moving, running. Buddies called him “Taz.”

His parents weren’t around to control their son’s energy. They were working too much. Chris and Joan Oladipo had four kids to put through school and knew that such a responsibility meant a demanding schedule of employment. That left the parenting to Victor’s oldest sister, Kristine, who handled the bulk of watching Victor, his twin, Victoria, and a middle sister, Kendra, who became deaf in the second grade.

Victor’s days were spent banging around courts and showing off his defense, an area of confidence for Oladipo, and an aspect of the game where hustle has a fighting chance against God-given talent. Mostly, he watched everybody else, other players who seemed to have more instruction, more polish, more ability. “It seemed like all my friends and classmates were so special, so much more gifted,” he says. “My whole life up to college, I was like, Those guys can shoot better, they can do things I can’t. It made me so frustrated sometimes.”

One evening when he was in middle school, Oladipo took in a game at DeMatha Catholic High School—an institution that has produced countless college stars and more than 20 NBA draft picks—and found a basketball home with structure. There, he grew to 6’4” and played well enough out of position as an undersized power forward to become a consensus 3-star (out of 5) player, according to recruiting services (Rivals ranked him the 144th-best player in the nation—hardly the credentials of a can’t-miss guy), but little more. Heading into his senior season, only Maryland had offered a scholarship, which it rescinded when Oladipo didn’t immediately sign. But then Tom Crean came calling, and after watching a single game, the then-Hoosiers coach had the kid with boundless energy signed, sealed, and delivered to Bloomington.

In the past, Crean had had notable success with penny stocks, finding value in Dwyane Wade before the world knew Dwyane Wade. With Oladipo, the coach saw another diamond in the rough who was willing to grind. “Victor was not an entitled guy,” recalls Crean, now head coach of the Georgia Bulldogs. “We knew he had a humility about him, that he’d been formed through days and nights at the gym with nobody else around. But it was still, Are we missing something? Nobody else seems to be seeing this.” But thanks to his history with Wade, another player lightly recruited in high school, Crean trusted his snap appraisal of Oladipo. “You learn to not worry about where people are in the recruiting food chain.”

Soon, even some of the recruiting gurus belatedly began to take note. Here, ESPN’s prescient evaluation: “An athletic and powerful swingman who is tough as nails, Oladipo impacted this game (Hoophall Classic) in a variety of ways by simply outworking everyone else on the floor.”

Oladipo arrived at Indiana University with plenty of Taz. “Vic came in with this energy that could not be matched,” says Derek Elston, who played with Oladipo from 2010–2013 and is now in his fourth year as the school’s director of player development. But the unrefined effort came with a downside. “You couldn’t stop Vic from getting in the paint, but he was always tripping over his feet and falling out of bounds. I was like, Man, this guy is so high-energy, but always out of control.”

Still, Oladipo roared on, hoping to follow the Crean-Wade script from the duo’s time at Marquette based on a fairly rudimentary comparison and pluck. “I felt I could relate,” says Oladipo. “I thought, Well, if Wade’s around my height, I can do the things he does.” It also didn’t hurt that Oladipo and his Hoosier teammates had adopted a pretty Spartan existence. “It was, ‘Let’s get in the gym, stay in the gym, eat, and then go back to the gym,’” says Elston. “We lived it.” Jordan Hulls, another college teammate, watched things lock into place for Olapido. “Not everyone saw it coming on the outside, but all of us who were with him every day saw the strides he was making,” says Hulls. “[Victor] put in the work. He had a hunger for getting better every day.”

Oladipo’s coming-out party came midway through his sophomore year, when IU traveled to Purdue and entered Mackey Arena with a roster of beat-up guards. “That game was a huge, huge step for us,” says Crean. “It was right after the Super Bowl in Indy. We’d gotten beat at Michigan on a Wednesday, and Verdell Jones got hurt. Victor was obviously a very good player at that point, but now he had to take on a different role.” Crean tasked Oladipo with handling point-guard duties, and from that position he led the Hoosiers to a 78–61 win over their rivals with team highs in points (23), rebounds (8), and assists (4). “My career changed from that game.” No one, says Oladipo, knew he could dribble. “People were like, Whoa, he can do that? It opened people’s eyes a little bit.”

Riding the confidence wave as a point guard over the next two seasons, his development as a player paid off in the form of a Big Ten Championship, back-to-back Sweet 16s, and a No. 2 draft pick by the Orlando Magic.

That’s where four years ticked by. Oladipo watched coaches come and go in Orlando, scrambling to adapt to all of their new styles and strategies. In Oklahoma City, he ran into the significant issue of establishing his place next to a guy having one of the greatest individual seasons in human history. “The Oladipo and Westbrook pairing was incredibly intriguing, but it just didn’t work,” says Berry Tramel, sports columnist and a 27-year veteran of The Oklahoman newspaper in Oklahoma City. “The Thunder had two guys who needed the ball, and only one ball was available. But [Victor] never made it an issue. He never griped about it.”

But Oladipo didn’t break out, either, and to some of his friends, he wasn’t the same guy. “When Vic went off to Orlando,” Elston says, “it was awesome. But when he’d come back, he just wasn’t the same. He wasn’t that happy-go-Vic. When he went to OKC, you could see that energy starting to get back a little bit, but it still wasn’t the Vic that I was used to hanging out with.”

When Elston came to one of Oladipo’s early Pacers practices, he ran into someone familiar. “I hear this huge yell, I turn around, and it’s Vic. And I was like, Oh my God, I haven’t seen this guy in awhile. This is the guy. This is the Vic that I know.”

Oladipo says that before, he simply wasn’t seasoned enough. “Yeah, I’m a late bloomer,” he says. “I embrace it, too. I’m glad my skill came later. It benefited me. I wasn’t ready to be that focal point. My path was a little different from everybody else’s. Not everybody can be as gifted and as talented as everyone else. It took time for me.”

It took time on the playground, time playing the wrong position in high school, time marinating in college, time watching Westbrook, and then, when the time was right, bursting into flames.