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One of the NBA’s most underrated players is Los Angeles Clippers guard/forward Terance Mann, with the 25-year-old defying the odds to make his basketball dreams a reality.
The Brooklyn-born player took an unconventional path to the big leagues, attending high school in New Hampshire, before his college career saw him represent Florida State University. He was then the 48th overall pick in the NBA draft in 2019 and not expected to pull up any trees at the Clippers.
Instead he gradually won over the hearts of LA basketball fans and then became an outright cult hero in 2020 when he scored career-high 39 points – in the absence of the great Kawhi Leonard – to lead the Clippers to the Western Conference Finals for the first time in their history. His value was underlined before the start of the current season when he was rewarded with a bumper new contract extension worth a cool $22million.
“It’s an emotional thing and crazy to me because of the whole process I had to go through,” Mann told ESPN’s Undefeated. “All of that was playing back in my head. You started at Portsmouth. You did all this stuff. You almost didn’t go to the NBA pre-draft camp. The 48th pick. The G League. Things start hitting you like, ‘Dang, you really did something for yourself.’
“It was just an emotional thing. No tears or nothing. Just really sitting back and reflecting like, ‘How the hell did I actually do this?’”
On his life-changing performance to take the Clippers to the Conference Finals, he added: “Everywhere I go in the U.S. people know me. It’s, like, a big difference. In airports in New York, Florida, everywhere. Now I got a whole airport attire with my hood, mask and shades.
“It’s not that I don’t like attention, but it can be kind of annoying. If I’m on a red-eye flight, I don’t want to talk. There were plenty of times in the offseason on a plane where the person sitting next to me didn’t recognise me until halfway through and they just want to talk the rest of the flight.”
A former college coach of Mann, Leo Papile, explained, “He is a guy who every night is going to give you whatever he got, whether it’s a minute or 48 minutes. He competes. He cares about winning. Plays for the scoreboard and he will make sure he will do whatever the team needs to win. If he has to stand on his head to help his team win, he will do it.”
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Catch the following NBA games live on ESPN this week
- All times CAT
Sunday 26 December
- 03:00: Los Angeles Lakers v Brooklyn Nets – LIVE on ESPN 2
- 22:30: Miami Heat v Orlando Magic – LIVE on ESPN 2
