ON JAN. 26, 2006, an 11-year-old boy received a writing assignment from his sixth-grade teacher at Northeast Elementary School in Parker, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. He stood about 5-feet tall and was rail thin. He played baseball, tennis and football, but he loved another sport above all. The essay prompt: “What I want to be when I grow up.”
And so the boy wrote: “There are so many things I want to do when I grow up, but if I had to choose one it is to be a basketball player.”
In his 126-word answer, he said he plays every day in the living room on a small hoop. He practices with his dad, he wrote. He acknowledged he isn’t the best at the other sports, but in basketball, people say that he is one of the best passers, and that his shooting is improving. He hopes to attend North Carolina, he said, his favorite college, and play for his hometown Denver Nuggets. “That is what I want to do in the future. I hope you like basketball or I’ll chase you down like a grumpy old man with a stick.”
But less than a decade later, by his senior year, that dream was in peril. He stood 6 feet tall, weighed 150 pounds. His parents had recorded his games with camcorders, editing footage together for highlight reels, then sent dozens of DVDs to colleges, hoping to spark interest. No one responded.
He considered a junior college in Wyoming that had little in the way of facilities. He pondered a non-scholarship offer from an NAIA school in Denver. His hopes dwindled.
He began to accept that, perhaps, he would attend college, graduate with a degree and leave basketball behind for good. That the sixth-grade assignment would become a totem of his childhood, a reminder of a life that never was.
That the boy ever reached the NBA seemed impossible. But little did he know — little did anyone know — that 17 years after that writing assignment, he’d be leading a legendary NBA franchise to the precipice of glory, with the opportunity to play in the Finals against the very team he wanted to play for all those years ago.
SATURDAY NIGHT’S HEART-STOPPING Game 6 in Miami featured Derrick White‘s buzzer-beating, season-saving tip-in, forcing a winner-take-all Game 7 in the Eastern Conference finals against the Heat (Monday, 8:30 p.m. ET, TNT). “Derrick White, like a flash of lightning, came out of nowhere and saved the day,” Celtics swingman Jaylen Brown said.
But White did more than just win the game for the Celtics. His teammates shot 6-of-8 off his passes for 12 points, according to ESPN Stats & Information. He held the Heat to 1-of-12 shooting (and 0-of-4 from 3-point range) when he contested the shot. And Heat star Jimmy Butler shot 0-of-6 when White was his primary defender.
White, who joined the Celtics via a mid-February trade with the San Antonio Spurs a little more than one year ago, started 70 games this season, averaging 12.4 points, 3.6 rebounds and 3.9 assists — numbers that betray his outsized impact.
Since White made his Boston debut on Feb. 11, 2022, the Celtics have ascended, posting a regular-season and playoff record of 102-49 (.675 win percentage), the best in the NBA during that span. During that stretch, White has the fifth-best plus-minus in the league, trailing his Celtics teammates Jayson Tatum and Al Horford, along with Denver’s two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic and Aaron Gordon. He has played 150 games in that span, the most in the league. He received second-team All-Defense honors this season — his first career All-Defense selection — and led the Celtics with 76 blocks, the most of any guard in the NBA.
“Derrick was — and maybe still is — the most underrated player in the league,” one Eastern Conference front-office executive said.
In Boston, the praise for White is effusive, overflowing, borderline obsessive. “He does whatever it takes to win a possession,” Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens told ESPN. “He plays really hard, and he’s really smart. And he always plays with a second effort.”
Said Celtics governor Wyc Grousbeck, “He makes everybody better. We love Derrick White.”
This season, their first full campaign with White, the Celtics posted 57 regular-season wins, their most since 2008-09, when Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen headlined a Big Three squad that won one title and reached two Finals. Then, in 2013, the Celtics dealt an aging Garnett and Pierce to the Brooklyn Nets for a cache of first-round picks that they hoped would form the foundation of their next title contender. Those picks eventually yielded Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. But in the decade since that 2013 blockbuster trade, the Celtics’ efforts to round out their roster — moves that have landed Gordon Hayward, Kyrie Irving, Isaiah Thomas, Kemba Walker and Terry Rozier, among others — have largely failed.
Over time, the Celtics realized they needed, in many ways, a player just like Derrick White.
“The best compliment you can get as a player is probably that you made everyone around you better,” Stevens said. “And how many guys can you get on the court that can do that for each other? I think that’s a superpower.”
Said another Eastern Conference executive: “You would think that there’s a lot of those guys. “There’s not as many as you think.”
How White helped unlock this version of the Celtics is as much a story about his own journey as it is about their own yearslong journey to find someone like him. Today, and never more so than in Game 6, White is the key that turns everything for the Celtics — moving them 48 minutes from their second consecutive NBA Finals appearance.
IN APRIL 2012, a man by the name of Jeff Culver changed the course of White’s life. Culver had previously recruited the guard to an NAIA school, Johnson & Wales, and had then become the head coach at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, a Division II program. And he asked White to join him.
But there was a catch: Culver’s offer came late in the recruiting process, so all he could give White was a partial scholarship with a $3,000 room stipend toward housing; White and his father took out a $17,000 loan to cover the rest. White wore No. 14, a reference to all the schools in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference that didn’t recruit him, and, before games, he’d remind himself why he wore it: “They said I wasn’t good enough.”
That fall, in the 2012-13 season, White became the conference freshman of the year, averaging 16.9 points. By his junior year, White averaged 25.8 points, 7.4 rebounds, 5.2 assists and 2.1 blocks.
He transferred and finished his career with the Colorado Buffaloes, averaging 18.1 points, 4.4 assists and 1.2 steals in the 2016-17 season while earning All-Conference First Team and All-Defensive Team honors.
Even then, his NBA prospects seemed uncertain, and on the night of the 2017 draft, White’s parents held what they deemed a “graduation party” at a friend’s house, just in case White wasn’t selected. The Spurs drafted him 29th overall in the first round, making him the first former Division II player drafted since Ronald Murray in 2002 and the first in the league since Ben Wallace retired in 2012. One Western Conference front-office executive noted the Spurs were likely the only team in the past 25 years to draft a player who would come into the NBA with student loan debt.
”Derrick is particularly interesting,” one Eastern Conference front-office executive said, “because in the modern basketball ecosystem of the last 10 years or so, when the internet and social media have been fully formed, fewer and fewer guys slip through the cracks than ever before. But he just genuinely wasn’t that good until he was 21 years old.”
During White’s rookie training camp, Colorado coach Tad Boyle visited and checked in with Spurs coach Gregg Popovich to see how White was doing.
“He needs to believe that he belongs,” Popovich told Boyle.
On a roster that included Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, Kawhi Leonard and LaMarcus Aldridge, White shuffled back and forth from the Spurs’ G League affiliate. He maintained a rigid routine. He scouted opposing players intensely. He maniacally focused on sleep, hydration and his diet.
One year later, in his second season, in Game 3 of the Western Conference first-round series against Denver, White exploded for a career-high 36 points for the Spurs. After that game, he says today, he finally felt like he belonged.
From afar, the Celtics were watching.
INSIDE THE CELTICS‘ front office, White’s name had been batted around since his time at Colorado. In 2019, White was named to the 13-man USA Basketball Select Team that trained with the USA national team. He played with Tatum, Brown and Celtics guard Marcus Smart, who all offered a positive response to the Celtics’ brass. And watching him, too, during Team USA practices in Las Vegas was Stevens, the Celtics’ coach.
“It’s very rare that you say, oh my gosh, he just screams, he would be so fun to play with,” Stevens said. “He’s very comfortable in who he is. He’s about the team. And he’s really good. He plays with the right pace. He guards really hard. He always makes the extra pass. He’s an energy-raiser on the court. it was pretty clear in all those.”
White could come off the bench, or start, shoot 15 shots or none at all and would be fine. “Brad really values culture and professionalism and guys who are team-oriented,” one Eastern Conference front-office executive said, “and that’s Derrick to a T.”
“He grew up without being gifted anything basketball-wise,” one Western Conference front-office executive said. “And he turned himself into a self-made player. If you can’t respect that, you’re not seeing the big picture. It sounds corny, but Derrick was just a regular guy who made it to the NBA and never lost who he was.”
A critical point: White didn’t require the ball to make an impact. “When you’re building a great team, you want to get a series of players that can each be their best self with each other,” an Eastern Conference front-office executive said. “And if you get too many guys that are only good with the ball in their hands, you really only get half of what they’re each capable of.”
Boston had run through a number of players who needed the ball to be impactful; it hadn’t worked.
The Celtics needed something else, and, by January 2022, they needed it fast.
They were floundering, with a home loss to a sub-.500 Portland Trail Blazers team dropping them to 23-24. Frustration loomed across the organization. As the Feb. 9 trade deadline approached, the Celtics zeroed in on White — “Boston was desperate to find a guy like him,” one Western Conference executive said — but the Spurs, league sources said, had no interest in moving him. White had become beloved in the organization, a key part of its culture. When White held his wedding in Colorado, several members of the Spurs’ front office attended and White thanked his coaches for helping develop him.
“Derrick was a guy that everybody in the league wanted,” the Western Conference executive said. “The Celtics were just persistent.” Boston came in heavy, offering Romeo Langford and Josh Richardson, a first-round pick in the 2022 draft and a 2028 first-round pick swap. It was the sort of offer the Spurs couldn’t refuse, but, sources said, the Spurs also wanted to ensure they were sending White to a good situation, to a team that was headed in the right direction.
The Celtics had offered a princely sum for someone who averaged 14.4 points per game, but their internal analytics projected White more favorably than surface-level statistics indicated, including as one of the top defensive guards in the league. White’s ability to reach top speed from a stationary position also ranked among the best on the Celtics — and today, the staff marvels at his abilities in transition defense and how he can stop an opposing fast break even if he’s outnumbered. They marvel at his anticipation.
White was just one role-player addition who has paid dividends. Before acquiring White, the Celtics had traded for veteran big man Al Horford In June 2021. After trading for White, Stevens acquired another veteran guard, Malcolm Brogdon, in July 2022. Both Brogdon and Horford have been integral. “Derrick is by far the best acquisition of all those,” the Western Conference executive said. “He is an unheralded star on the Celtics team this year.”
Stevens, the architect of last year’s Finals team and this year’s squad that hopes to join it, and the coach who tried to make it work with so many additions that never quite added up, finally has the player the franchise has spent the better part of a decade looking for.
Derrick White, he says, is a “perfect fit.”
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