Tryggvi Hlinason first played competitive basketball four years ago. Now the son of Icelandic sheep farmers is on the NBA’s radar entering Thursday’s draft. (photo via FIBA)

At the border between Iceland’s rugged north and its uninhabitable interior, at the end of a twisting mountain road that only 4-wheel drive enthusiasts dare traverse, there’s a sprawling patch of land that belongs to a family of sheep farmers.

This is where one of Europe’s top basketball prospects calls home.

Whereas other members of the 2018 NBA draft class began perfecting their jump shots and crossover dribbles in grade school, Tryggvi Hlinason did not play competitive basketball for the first time until he was 16 years old. Hlinason instead had the blue-collar childhood of a farmer’s son, helping his parents run their homestead by scrubbing stables, herding sheep, maintaining fences, gathering hay and shoveling manure.

The closest neighbors to the Hlinason family live nine kilometers away. The nearest grocery store is more than an hour’s drive north. When too deep a layer of snow blankets the road to the farm, the only way in or out for days at a time is via snowmobile.

“Even Icelandic people would say I grew up in the middle of nowhere,” Hlinason said. “There was always work to do on the farm, but the freedom you have is insane. It’s so far to the next house that you can do whatever you like and nobody really cares.”

For years, Hlinason was content to spend his whole adult life on the family farm just like his parents and grandparents did. He even went away to school in Iceland’s second largest city to learn to be an electrician in September 2013 because that’s how he thought he could help the farm the most.

Everything changed a few months later when Hlinason decided to give basketball a try as a way to stay in shape. At the time, there was no way the tall, gangly teenager could have known that would be the start of an unfathomably rapid ascent that has catapulted him to the highest level of European basketball, landed him on the NBA’s radar and forced him to leave sheep farming far behind.

View photos In 2014, Tryggvi Hlinason poses with coach Ágúst Guðmundsson soon after playing competitive basketball for the first time. (photo via Bjarki Ármann Oddsson) More

Hlinason’s rocky beginnings

The tryout that launched Hlinason’s basketball career did not get off to an encouraging start. Hlinason got so hopelessly lost trying to find the gym where Icelandic club Þór Akureyri’s under-17 team was practicing that coach Bjarki Ármann Oddsson had to come pick him up at a nearby gas station.

When Oddson finally located Hlinason, the newcomer’s appearance caught him by surprise. Hlinason was already close to 7 feet tall at that time, something he had naively failed to mention when he called Oddson to ask permission to show up at a practice. The sheep farmers’ son also wasn’t exactly wearing traditional basketball attire.

“There probably wasn’t a basketball shoe big enough to fit him in Iceland at that time, so he just had regular sports shoes on,” Oddson said. “He also wasn’t wearing a basketball jersey. He just wore a regular T-shirt.”

Intrigued by Hlinason’s size yet skeptical of his skill and coordination, Oddson asked if he could dunk. Hlinason answered that question by assaulting the nearest rim with a series of soaring jams.

“He did it like 10 times in a row, each better than the last,” Oddson said. “I was amazed because the second tallest player on our team was like 6-3 and nobody could dunk.”

Unlocking Hlinason’s potential was a painstaking process because the young big man was a basketball beginner in almost every way. He had never even watched a 5-on-5 basketball game at that time, let alone played in one.

Hlinason had a loose grasp on how to shoot, dribble and pass from messing around with his friends growing up, but the vocabulary and intricacies of the sport were entirely unfamiliar to him. He didn’t know he needed to vacate the paint to avoid a 3-second violation, nor did he realize he couldn’t vie for a rebound on a free throw attempt until the ball had left the shooter’s hands. When Oddson first mentioned the 24-second shot clock to him, Hlinason asked his coach what that was.

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