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Eric WoodyardESPN
ARTHELIA AND TONY Warren Sr. sat glued to the television in her Raleigh, North Carolina, home on the night of August 1st.
“Baby, look here. He already got 19 points,” Tony noted after the opening quarter of Indiana’s first seeding game against the Philadelphia 76ers. “He can have a great game tonight. He can get 50!”
Tony sold his son shortly. TJ Warren, more than 600 miles away at ESPN’s Wide World of Sports in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, placed TJ Warren with 53 points a career.
“When you’re in that zone like that, it’s just hard,” the Indiana Pacers forward told ESPN. “I always knew I could do all this, but to do it in this kind of setting under these kinds of circumstances that are going on, it’s hard.”
Warren soon proved that he was not a one-game wonder, averaging 31.0 PPG on 57.8% shots during the resume to earn Ear-team All-Bubble honors. But Warren’s leap was not entirely unexpected.
“He’s just a hooper,” said Devin Booker, his former teammate with the Phoenix Suns. “That’s the term to describe TJ”
Warren might still be teammates with Booker if not for an offseason trade that sent him to the Pacers – a trade that was a direct salary dump from the Suns’ perspective. All Phoenix that got back from Indiana was cash considerations.
“The way they treated him on draft night, I thought this was bush league,” Tony said.
Warren did not let it bother him. Instead, he focused on contributing to a winning organization, one that provided him with his first taste of postseason basketball. The challenge now for Warren is to translate his strong play in the NBA rematch into the playoffs, where the Pacers have a 2-0 series deficit against the Miami Heat. And he is ready to prove the doubters wrong again.
“I’ve always underrated, the underdog, whatever you want to call it,” Warren said. “I feel like it’s just been a pattern and my permanent position just to be the underdog, the underrated guy. That’s what I’m comfortable with. I like to keep a chip on my shoulder.
LONGTIME BREWSTER ACADEMY head coach Jason Smith was driving to his home in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire on August 1, when his phone started ringing.
“TJ is leaving,” said the text message he saw when he looked at his phone.
The Pacers’ lead was up to 29 points at halftime – the most by any Indiana player in the first half all season – en route to the 53rd. Smith was not surprised to score Warren in tackles, even if it was a bit otherwise when Warren was in high school.
“I may have indirectly contributed a little to the chip,” Smith said with a cry. “I was probably the only madman of a high school coach who brought a McDonald’s All American and future lottery from the bench.”
Smith said he brought Warren off the bench as a senior, not because he did not deserve to start, but because he kept Warren’s direct appeal during his lone season at Brewster Academy. Warren was one of seven players on that team that went through with professional basketball, including his current Pacers teammate JaKarr Sampson.
Despite coming off the bench, Warren averaged 21.3 PPG and earned the aforementioned McDonald’s All American nod. He went on to play just two more seasons at NC State, finishing third in the nation in scoring (24.9 PPG) as a sophomore. The Charlotte Hornets were able to draft the in-state product with the No. 9 pick in 2014, but instead selected Noah Vonleh. Warren later moved five picks to Phoenix.
“I was always self-motivated. No one allowed anyone to set a limit on my talent,” Warren said. “No matter what the political stuff was or anything from high school, college to the NBA, you always stand in opposition, but I feel like it’s how you react and how you rise to the occasion.”
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRANDPA,” was the text Tony Warren Sr. sent to Pacers head coach Nate McMillan.
It was two days after TJ Warren’s career night. McMillan, a new grandfather, celebrated his 56th birthday with a victory over the Washington Wizards in which Warren finished with 34 points and 11 rebounds.
McMillan has long been a fan of Warren. In Tony Warren sr. Fan, that is.
“His father was a legend in our community,” McMillan said. “He was a boy I once saw growing up. His father, Tony, was an excellent ballplayer in our community and could be one of the first in the community to go to a great ACC school and play. by NC State. “
The Pacers coach grew up in Raleigh when the older Warren played for Norm Sloan’s legendary NC State teams. Tony Warren Sr. was a sixth round of the Chicago Bulls in 1979 and played briefly abroad before returning to Raleigh and developing a relationship with McMillan, who followed in his footsteps at NC State.
“[He] was a guy that a lot of us wanted to be, so I’m very close to Tony, “McMillan said.
Pacer GM Chad Buchanan told ESPN that the team was aware of the relationship between McMillan and Warren’s family when the Pacers acquired Warren last summer, but that it did not play into the decision to prosecute him. The team wanted Warren to play for him. The fact that he was in the second year of a four-year, $ 50 million expansion he had signed with Phoenix – a relative bargain in the current NBA – also did not hurt.
“Nate has always been a fan, as we are from a front office perspective,” Buchanan said. “The relationship was a bonus.”
However, there was a risk for the Pacers, even if they did not have to give up a player or some concept possession to get Warren. (In fact, they got a Suns second-round pick for taking him, one that they turned to the Miami Heat for three future second-round picks.)
Although Warren averaged 18.0 points, 4.0 rebounds and 1.5 assists with the Suns in 2018-19, he played 43 games just this season and had missed 111 career games this season.
However, this has been by far Warren’s healthiest season, as he missed just four of the Pacers’ first 65 games before the NBA shutdown in mid-March. He missed one seeding game due to plantar fasciitis, but the team says it is not serious and should not miss any playoff games.
The other blow to Warren was that while he could score, he was inefficient and unsuitable for the modern NBA. Over his first four seasons in the NBA, he scored just 1.3 3-pointers per game. He did most of his work in the midrange, something that modern analytics experts may have frustrated, but an appeal to his coach.
“If you’ve seen Dad play, he was a medium-sized boy, soft to the touch, about the size of TJ, and her games are very similar,” McMillan said. “Played in the paint, a really smooth game, they were both ahead, and when I saw Tony and I on TJ, they ran straight. I mean, it’s almost like he’s cloned.”
Yet McMillan knew he needed more from Warren. In the hiatus, he challenged himself to extend his range, and Warren made that a focus of his workouts. When the game went on again, Warren – who scored just three 3-pointers per game before the shutdown – had the green light. He scored a career-high 12-3 pointers in the Pacers ’first restart, turning nine of them to break a franchise record. In the Pacers’ eight-seeded game, Warren averaged seven attempts at 3 points per game, making 52.4% of them.
“I worked very hard on my shot,” Warren said. “[McMillan] just wanted to take me more 3s. When I’m open, it’s just shooting, and the worst thing that can happen is that you miss it and get another chance. … When you’re open, shoot it, no matter where you are. “
NOT TO MANY days go by in Warren’s life, where he is not in contact with his mentor, David West. The now retired two-time All-Star played four seasons for the Pacers, going twice to the Eastern Conference finals. But like Warren, West got his basketball start in North Carolina, and the two often talk on the phone, including in the days leading up to the NBA reboot.
“I thought he was in a good space,” West said. “If you know TJ, you know he’s really smart about the game. He did not know what to expect in terms of how they would approach that first game. He felt like he was just going to go out and play. “He knew how to be himself. It was not surprising.”
West’s brother Dwayne introduced David to a young Warren after he introduced him to play for her Garner Road AAU program. When David West developed into an NBA All-Star in New Orleans, he beamed over Warren to his teammates, including Chris Paul, and told anyone who would listen, “That guy is coming.”
“When he came to us, you could just tell he was one of those basketball kids,” West said. “You looked at him and you knew for sure he had the make-up to be a really good player. He just wanted to be in the gym. He played all the time and he did nothing unrelated to basketball, and that was his focus. “
That was evident to Warren’s parents at an even younger age.
In the fall of 1999, the Warrens registered TJ for his first game at Eno Valley Elementary School in Durham, North Carolina.
“When the game started, they thought he was not 6,” Tony said, laughing as he thought back to that moment. “I had to show the birth certificate. Parents thought he was about 8 or 9.”
Warren grabbed a game-high 27 points that day in a pair of white Nike Air Max Penny IV sneakers. An action photo of the game is still alive on his Instagram account.
“They said, ‘That kid can’t be that good,'” Tony said. “I just sat there and watched. I knew he was basketball, but I did not know. He loves to shoot the ball. “
Warren’s love for shooting has never been in doubt. After putting up 34 points against Washington during the seeding games, Wizards coach Scott Brooks said, “Around the league, coaches know how good he is. He can score flat-outs.”
But Warren wants to be known as more than a score. West helps with that, giving Warren advice on dealing with the increased pressure and attention that comes with playing in the postseason.
“He just encourages me and gives me the need for advice in the playoffs and understands what this time of year means for me to go into the playoffs,” Warren said. “That he’s a man who’s been there and done that has had a very successful career, so it’s good to have him in my corner in the whole process.”
This is Warren’s first taste of postseason basketball. He has averaged 18 points per game since the Pacers fell into a 2-0 hole. But the challenge of trying to lead Indiana to their first comeback from a 2-0 series deficit is nothing compared to the five losing seasons under four different coaches he experienced in Phoenix. Indiana, by comparison, has had McMillan at the helm for four straight years and has missed the playoffs only once in the past decade.
“I always felt like it was absolutely a blessing in disguise,” Warren of the trade told the Pacers. “I could not have asked for a better situation.”
Still, those closest to Warren know the trade that put him in that situation still stinks and continues to motivate him, even if he will not say it himself.
“What Phoenix did and the way she kind of gave it to him, in my opinion, to Indy, no one will ever have to motivate him to play,” West said. “That’s enough. No one ever has to do it differently, because that was like the last straw. I know that very idea drives him crazy.”
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