TOKYO — Kemba Walker lets the work speak for itself. A stealthy assassin on the floor, he is just as surreptitious off of it.



The irony was that one of the best players to come out of New York in his generation, a college legend at UConn, had for so long starred in relative obscurity on a Charlotte Hornets team that has made the playoffs just twice in his eight seasons. This weighed heavily on his mind last week as he waited to find out if he would make an All-NBA team after the best season of his career.



“I just cried. Tears came straight from my eyes,” Walker, who landed third-team All-NBA, told The Athletic over lunch at the Coast 2 Coast basketball café in Tokyo’s iconic Harajuku shopping district. “I was a little kid from the Bronx, so it’s just crazy to me. I still can’t believe it. I just didn’t know if I would get it, because we didn’t make the playoffs. It goes like that...