Matt Logie was a 27-year-old assistant coach at Lehigh, an academically-inclined Division I university in eastern Pennsylvania that plays in the Patriot League and had never won an NCAA Tournament game in more than 100 years of college basketball.

It was the fall of 2007. He had spent the previous season at Kent State in Ohio and was sifting through some recruiting reports and high school scores from his Midwest connections. He noticed a kid from GlenOak High in Akron had 54 points in the opening game of his junior season.

“It was literally one of those things where the thought went through my head: ‘If he can score 54 points, I should at least call and get his transcript,’” says Logie, recently named head coach at Div. II Point Loma Nazarene. “It was really that simple.”

The kid was Christian James McCollum, CJ for short.


Short being the operative word. He was 5-foot-2 as a high school freshman. He grew a few inches before his sophomore year, and a few more before his junior season. Now he was up to 6-1, 155 pounds.

“Maybe not even that big,” Logie says. He also was young for his grade, not a one- or two-year holdback so prevalent on high school rosters these days.

The transcript arrived; he had good enough grades to qualify for Lehigh. Logie began calling McCollum but wouldn’t see him play in person until April, at an AAU event in Ohio sponsored by LeBron James. It was a few weeks after Davidson’s improbable run to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament fueled by a sophomore guard named Stephen Curry.

“I vividly remember in April 2008 telling CJ: You can do for Lehigh what Steph Curry did for Davidson, be a big fish in a small pond,” Logie says. “He really bought into that opportunity. He obviously made us look really smart.”


Eleven years later, here they are, McCollum and Curry, facing off in the NBA’s Western Conference finals, McCollum for the Portland Trail Blazers, Curry for the Golden State Warriors, leading their respective teams in scoring in Game 1 on Tuesday.

It’s a recurring theme in the college and pro postseasons this year. Curry played at Davidson after Virginia Tech, his father’s alma mater en route to a 16-year NBA career, offered him only a spot as a non-scholarship walk-on. McCollum’s backcourt partner in Portland, Damian Lillard, was a two-star recruit who went to Weber State when none of the big boys were interested because, like the 160-pound Curry, they thought he was too small.

Over in the Eastern Conference finals, Toronto is led by Kawhi Leonard, who received an early offer from a mid-major San Diego State program that at the time had never been ranked or won an NCAA Tournament game, then stayed loyal when the blue bloods finally realized he might be, you know, pretty good. The Raptors’ second leading scorer is Pascal Siakam, from Cameroon via New Mexico State.

They’re playing the Milwaukee Bucks. Their star is Giannis Antetokounmpo, the son of Nigerian immigrants to Greece who was selling knockoff sunglasses on street corners in Athens until (and even after) he took up basketball at age 13.


The NCAA Tournament’s Final Four last month offered a similar storyline. The teams stocked with one-and-done superstars flamed out, but Auburn made it with a 5-11 point guard. Texas Tech reached the final with a starting lineup of no one ranked in the top 150 nationally out of high school, including a guard who spent the first three college seasons at Air Force and South Dakota.

It’s a profound lesson about the imprecision of athletic projection, the blind spot of a youth sports culture that is obsessed with winning under-12 trophies and, as a consequence, casts aside the small, skinny, inexperienced kid who doesn’t hit puberty early or start private training sessions at 9.

The NBA got it right. Curry, Lillard, Leonard, Antetokounmpo and McCollum all were selected in the first 15 picks of the draft. But they were fully grown by then, with open petals, no longer green stocks and buds.

All flowers don’t bloom in the spring.


“Kids just develop at different times,” Logie says. “Projecting what they’re going to look like at 21 or 22 when you’re watching them at 16 or 17 is a pretty inexact science.”

Logie should know. When he got on the scale as a freshman for the first practice of high school football at Mercer Island High outside Seattle, he was 5-9, 112 pounds. He didn’t start a varsity basketball game until his senior year, went to Lehigh, grew to 6-5, bulked up to 190 and ranks as the 11th leading scorer in school history.

He saw some of himself in McCollum, and a kinship formed over the phone. He did his research and learned that McCollum’s older brother, Eric, was the leading scorer in NAIA. That he had a late growth spurt.

Logie wouldn’t see McCollum play live for another five months, but he didn’t have to.


“Literally every time I talked to him he was either leaving the gym or going to the gym, or he picked up in the middle of his workout and said, ‘Hey Coach, let me call you back when I’m done,’” Logie says. “He had a professional work ethic when he was 16 years old, and that’s never changed. You could hear it in his voice, his determination. He’s just a guy who was going to prove people wrong.”

It’s the gift of Mother Nature to the late bloomer. You finally grow, and grow a chip on your shoulder from neglect.

Logie wrote these notes after finally seeing McCollum play live: Very thin, great stroke. Needs strength, has long arms. Great feel, wasn’t soft. Similar to Steph Curry. High ceiling, young body. Offer him.

They did that summer, then watched as schools with more basketball pedigree watch his AAU team and bemoan how the 155-pound kid was a shooting guard in a point guard’s body. In September, on his 17th birthday, McCollum shrugged and committed to the Mountain Hawks.


They knew he was good after he averaged 19.1 points and 5.0 rebounds as a freshman and was named Patriot League player of the year, then dropped 26 on Kansas in the NCAA Tournament. His most impressive stat, though, was 30.

As in, pounds of muscle he added in college to a now 6-3 frame. As in, points in a 75-50 upset of second-seeded Duke in the 2012 NCAA Tournament.

The Trail Blazers took him with the 10th pick in the 2013 draft. He averaged 26.4 points in the Western Conference semifinals against Denver, including a virtuoso 37-point performance in Game 7 punctuated by a dagger jumper with 11.4 seconds left.

Afterward, ESPN’s Doris Burke asked about him the fuel from criticism of Portland’s backcourt following early playoff exits in years past.


“Honestly,” McCollum told her, emotion crackling in his voice, “I got enough motivation. I got it out the mud. I went to Lehigh University, you know what I’m saying? No one’s ever been drafted from there before. For me, it’s just about showing up every night and keeping the door open for the next mid-major.”

Mud, sometimes, is the best fertilizer.