The 2020 NBA draft was postponed from June 25 to November 18 because of the league’s delayed season, which means there’s been five more months for prospects to train and teams to evaluate. No player has taken greater advantage of the extra time than Tyrell Terry, a 20-year-old freshman point guard from Stanford who’s seen his stock rise from a projected second-rounder to a potential lottery pick. “I was able to find a little bit of positive out of this horrible situation that the world is going through,” Terry recently told me. “If the draft was in June, I wouldn’t have been as strong as I am now, or had this explosiveness, or been as mature on and off the floor, or been able to master some of the arts of the game that I have been studying.”
When Terry declared for the draft in April without forfeiting his collegiate eligibility, he weighed only 155 pounds while standing at 6-foot-2 barefoot. Scouts and executives didn’t think he was physically ready for the pros and advised him to return to school. Stanford coaches also believed he’d come back for his sophomore season and make a run with incoming freshman Ziaire Williams, one of the 2021 draft’s top prospects. But he felt too much progress to remove his name from the draft.
Terry was put on a 4,000-calories-a-day diet coordinated by a chef/nutritionist while working with an on-court trainer and sports performance coach. Together, they worked to find the right balance between weights and cardio, while he also adjusted to consuming more food than ever before. He weighed in at 170 pounds at the NBA combine on October 19, and hopes to reach 175 by the time the season begins on December 22. “You find out what happens when you add extra muscle to your body: You can do things athletically that you couldn’t do before,” Terry’s AAU coach Jay Fuhrmann said. “Tyrell gained a couple inches on his vertical, and he’s putting the ball between his legs and dunking.”
Terry told me he first felt the difference in his vertical on a weekend afternoon in early September when he was at the gym with his friend Nico Carvacho, who plays overseas in Bulgaria. “I was upstairs doing bike work and I had a great view from a balcony overlooking the court,” Carvacho said. “Tyrell’s head was at the rim doing windmills. He was just dunking for like 20 minutes straight.” The first thing Terry did when he got to his place was call his skill development coach, Joey Burton. “Whoa, I just jumped out of the gym,” Terry told Burton, who said he could hear the excitement in his voice. “What we’re doing is working.”
All 30 teams have interviewed Terry, and he’ll be one of the prospects invited to the NBA draft’s virtual green room. “Nobody thought he would be a one-and-done, including himself. But as he got going, he kept exceeding everybody’s expectations,” Stanford associate head coach Adam Cohen told me. Stanford considered redshirting Terry for his freshman season so he could work on his body, but he ended up starting all but one game and averaged 14.6 points, 4.5 rebounds, and 3.2 assists. “We started getting more calls from NBA guys about Tyrell as the season went on,” Cohen said. “We had a feeling he might enter the draft.”
What NBA scouts observed was a small but skilled player who flashed a style fashioned for the modern league, with dynamic shooting, natural feel, unselfishness, and a will to win.
Terry’s most obvious pro-level trait is his shooting from midrange and 3-point land; on 4.9 triples per game, he shot 48 percent on catch-and-shoot 3s and 32 percent on off-the-dribble 3s. Terry can effortlessly pull up from outer space and he has a knack for moving without the ball.
Stanford ran him off screens and handoffs to spring him free, and he’d often make plays for himself by relocating after giving up the pass within the flow of its motion offense. “That’s definitely something I picked up in high school from watching Steph Curry,” Terry told me. “I’ve got to use my ability to shoot to the fullest, and when you pass the ball, there’s a tendency for defenders to relax a little bit. That’s the perfect opportunity to explode out to a different location on the floor and find an advantage to score.”
Terry was about 135 pounds during his freshman year at DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, according to Fuhrmann, which was when he first saw him play. It was 2015, and Fuhrmann was searching for a point guard to lead his AAU team, D1 Minnesota. He wanted to run an offense that mimicked what the Golden State Warriors were doing, with lots of motion, cutting, shooting, and passing.
“I don’t remember him shooting the ball once that day, but he made his teammates better with the pass and I fell in love with his game,” Fuhrmann recalled. Soon enough, Terry joined D1 Minnesota. He played with his most talented teammates during his senior season: Zeke Nnaji, an Arizona freshman who’s a projected 2020 first-round pick, plus Division 1 athletes Matthew Hurt (Duke), Jamison Battle (George Washington), and Patrick McCaffery (Iowa). Schools like Duke, Arizona, and Kentucky watched those AAU games, but they all missed Terry even though he was second in assists per game on the Adidas circuit and his playmaking helped make Hurt a McDonald’s All American. “He was the forgotten guy, although in my mind, he was the most important guy on that AAU team,” Cohen said. “He made plays to make all their guys better. But he didn’t get the attention they got, and that kept him hungry and humble.”
It was all by design, because that’s what the team needed: a player who could create for others. “Tyrell had the green light, but we had a team with others who needed touches,” Fuhrmann said. “Because of his unselfishness, our teams were able to make the extra pass, whereas other AAU teams would over-dribble and play one-on-one basketball. It became contagious to everyone on our team.”
Terry didn’t run the show at Stanford, as he took on a larger scoring workload, but he displayed those same selfless qualities while passing the ball all over the court with precision and creativity.
Terry spent his first two weeks of predraft prep home in Minnesota with Fuhrmann, but since then he’s been in Indianapolis, Indiana, at the Factory, a training facility opened by NBA point guard Jeff Teague. “When he arrived here, I would’ve bet $100 he wouldn’t stay through the summer,” Terry’s trainer Joey Burton told me. “We didn’t even know when the draft would take place. But no teenager or potential first-round pick would choose to be in Indiana for five or six months. This dude has locked in and stayed true to the process.”
Terry also worked out multiple times against Teague, who has carved out a decade-long career in the NBA at just 6-foot-3. “Jeff obviously did some things an NBA veteran would do to a rookie, but I was impressed,” Burton said. “Ty didn’t pout or back down. Those are the moments that are special.”
Terry has applied that same level of focus to improving on the court. He displayed a crafty interior layup package while shooting a tremendous 62 percent around the rim at Stanford, according to Synergy Sports. He’s especially comfortable in the pick-and-roll, as he displayed the first step needed to turn the corner and then burst to get to the rim. But finishing among the trees in the NBA requires an even greater ability that he is working to develop. “I’m working on my floater, same-hand and same-foot finishes, reverse finishes, finishes high off the glass, floaters high off the glass,” Terry said. “All these smaller guards like Trae Young and CJ McCollum incorporated such great floater games. Kyrie Irving has a one-of-one finishing package, so I’m not going to compare myself to him, but the way smaller guards, like him and Steph Curry, have to find ways to finish around the rim. I’m going to have to do that as well, so that’s been an emphasis.”
Terry got giddy thinking about the chance to be coached by Steve Nash, the Hall of Fame point guard who was hired in September by the Brooklyn Nets. “With the IQ Steve Nash has, being one of the most cerebral guards to ever play the game, that’d be a great fit for me.” In 2010, when Terry was 9, he attended a Western Conference finals game in Phoenix between the Suns and Lakers. “I was always watching and studying Steve Nash’s game from a young age,” Terry said. “His dribble move, where he would drive to the lane and keep probing under the rim to find teammates, is a move that I learned from him very early.”
Having Nash as a mentor would go a long way in furthering Terry’s own pick-and-roll abilities. Nash, or any other coach, should also explore the limits of his shooting ability. Terry was a threat to pull up off the bounce at Stanford, but there was a notable lack of stepbacks and side-dribble 3s—the types of shots we see from Luka Doncic and James Harden.
Terry admits he was less comfortable with those advanced moves in high school and college, but he’s worked every day on it from midrange and behind the 3-point line.
“I’m now able to incorporate that into my game since I feel more comfortable with it than I did at the collegiate level. It’s going to be exciting to showcase the arsenal that I’ve been able to develop over these past few months,” Terry said. “But I’m not sure if I’m going to be allowed to come into the league right away and do it. If coaches allow me, then I’m definitely going to try to use it.”
It’s not often that you hear a young player with the confidence to know a skill is in his bag but also the self-awareness to know that it’s up to the coaching staff to let him use it. Everyone I spoke to for this story, including executives who interviewed him, raved about Terry’s intelligence. He had a 3.5 GPA at Stanford and excelled academically in high school.
“Growing up, I was always taking care of business in the classroom, and put academics above athletics most times,” Terry said. “People ended up questioning me about that, but it allowed me to develop a certain level of discipline that translated from the classroom to the court.”
Terry is a sponge who absorbs information and can apply it quickly. When Terry began training with Burton, he would sometimes get frustrated when he missed consecutive shots. He’d be visibly annoyed or even yell at himself, and it could affect the rest of a shooting drill. One day, Burton erupted. “Knock it off, I don’t want this extra yelling, look of disgust on your face when you miss a shot. Just focus on the next shot,” Burton recalled telling Terry. “In an NBA season you might have back-to-back nights or four games a week. You can’t let anything dwell because that frustration will pile on. You’ve got to move on.”
From that day forward, Terry says he developed a next-play mentality. Instead of having days where he’d hit only 58 of 100 3-pointers because he got in his own way, Burton said began consistently hitting over 75 of 100 shots from 3. At the AAU level, Fuhrmann saw that same level of intensity. “He has that little ornery in him where he’s a perfectionist and doesn’t think he should ever miss,” Fuhrmann said before pausing and laughing. “Which I think is good.”
Terry is working on it by also doing meditation, daily affirmations, and reading more books. He recently read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, and just finished Legacy by James Kerr, which tells the story of the New Zealand national rugby team and their secrets to success. “My biggest takeaway from the book is the quote from Andrew Mehrtens: ‘If you have personal discipline in your life, then you are going to be more disciplined on the field,’” Terry said. “It’s a mindset I hope to incorporate in my life.”
Terry is maturing, but he’s always been this way. Cohen told me the first time he saw Terry play in person was in October 2018 for a 6 a.m. pickup game at his high school. “Ty was a skinny, small, scrawny kid, but competitive as heck,” Cohen said. “You could see the drive to compete, and these were just pickup games early in the morning.” Once Terry arrived at Stanford, Cohen saw that self-starter attitude in action. “It’s usually hard for freshmen to manage their time, but if we told him to get to the gym at 9 a.m., he’d always be there ready to work,” Cohen said. “We never had to push him to go harder. He always went 100.”
Terry needs to keep this attitude in the NBA. Unless the basketball gods bless him with a late growth spurt, he’s always going to be one of the smaller players on the court, which means offenses will target him. Despite his size, Terry was a reliable defender at Stanford who hustled. He would take a charge or dive for a loose ball or chase down a rebound. If he got switched onto a larger player, he’d battle for positioning and try to use his stature as leverage. In off-ball situations, he was attentive and active in the passing lanes. “We had the seventh-best defense last season on KenPom.com,” said Cohen, citing the NCAA analytics website like a writer would. “It’s because we had two elite perimeter defenders in Daejon Davis and Bryce Wills, and smart defenders like Ty. He has unbelievable instincts and understands how to read the floor.”
Shorter guards like Patrick Beverley (6-foot-1, 180 pounds) and Fred VanVleet (6-foot-1, 197 pounds) have developed into excellent defenders against guards despite their size limitations. Why? Their brains and their heart. It would be silly to suggest Terry can reach that high level given he still needs to add 10 to 20 more pounds, which won’t happen overnight. But no matter how long or athletic a player is, they’ll never earn lockdown status without the win-at-all-costs mentality. Terry has it.
When The Ringer’s 2020 NBA Draft Guide launched on April 15, Terry ranked eighth on my big board. I got more texts from executives about my evaluation of Terry than any other player in all the years I have covered the draft. Most executives doubted he should even stay in the 2020 class. Some saw the long-term upside but thought it was too soon due to his size. Just one executive said they thought the high ranking was warranted. But now, because of Terry’s physical and skill progression and the extra time teams have had to watch the Stanford games they might have missed, nearly every single executive I’ve chatted with believes he’s an obvious first-round pick.
“A lot of players have never had six months like this to really focus on their game,” Terry said. “This process [of waiting six months for draft night] has been very difficult. But at the end of the day, I think we’ll see who used this time wisely and who didn’t.” It’s unusual for a prospect to experience such a rapid rise. But when he hears Adam Silver call his name on draft night, Terry will know the hard work has only begun.
