Jeff Capel has a hard time explaining just how smart of a basketball player Carlton “Bub” Carrington is.
There was the play the former Duke star introduced to his team in early December that Pittsburgh didn’t run again until March. Even the veteran coach had to jog his own memory, but the freshman from Baltimore could distinctly recall the action and the name they gave it. Or how Carrington, still 17 when he arrived at campus after a standout career at St. Frances, could defend a doctoral thesis on countering ball screen coverages.
“As talented as he is — and I told every NBA person that’s called me,” Capel said, “I think his greatest gift is his mind. He is incredibly smart. I think that’s the reason why he’s gonna become a really, really good pro.”
Wednesday night, that stage of Carrington’s basketball journey begins from inside the NBA draft’s green room, where the youngest of 24 prospects to accept an invitation will eagerly await NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to call his name to the Barclays Center stage in Brooklyn, New York.
Carrington is expected to become the first player drafted out of Pitt since Lamar Patterson in 2014 and the first St. Frances graduate to be selected since Mark Karcher in 2000. If he were to come off the board in the first 14 picks — he’s projected to be taken between the 12th and 20th picks in most mock drafts — he’d be the fifth lottery selection out of the Baltimore Catholic League.
Sponge-Bub
Carrington’s brain is naturally wired toward basketball. His dad nurtured that superpower. His name is also Carlton, and he’s the original “Bub.” Many know the father and son as “Big Bub” and “Lil’ Bub.”
Through his Nike AAU program Baltimore Elite, which spent many summers playing a national schedule, Big Bub coached just about every recent Baltimorean who made it to the NBA. Thus, his son was exposed to a surplus of basketball mentors.
From a young age, Carrington was in workouts and runs with Will Barton, CJ Fair, Josh Selby, Malcolm Delaney, Jamel Artis and others. Playing for Team Melo, Carmelo Anthony has been a basketball resource in his development, too.
Rudy Gay, an NBA veteran who is Carrington’s second cousin, showed him the ropes of shot creation off the pick and roll. With that, Gay, a Spalding graduate before he starred at UConn, taught counters for different coverages, the mastery that left an immediate impression on Capel.
Carrington has shades of Anthony’s patented triple threat to find separation without putting the ball on the deck. He learned it from the future first-ballot Hall of Famer himself.
When Sam Cassell, a Dunbar legend who played 15 years in the NBA, isn’t busy in-season as an assistant with the Boston Celtics, he’s another adviser to the younger generation. Cassell gives pointers to refine Carrington’s ability to use his body to create for himself and others within an offense. When Cassell is coaching in-season, Carrington watches old highlights on YouTube to keep studying.
“He’s a sponge,” Carrington’s older brother, Kareem Montgomery, said. “It’s part of the environment that he was in since before he could walk.”
He started to see the game more like a teacher, St. Frances coach Nick Myles added, rather than a student. Carrington spent so much time around successful players that he never questioned what he needed to make it. The blueprint was there in front of him and he was willing to do whatever it took.
The soon-to-be draftee now stands 6-foot-4 with a 6-8 wingspan, 195 pounds and the mold of a prototypical NBA wing. As a freshman at McDonogh, he was 5-7 and scrawny. He transferred to St. Frances in 2020 but had to sit out his sophomore year, per Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association rules.
All the while, he was training two or three times a day with his brother and father.
Montgomery played four years of football at Lehigh and transferred to Maryland as a grad student. He got Carrington out of bed to lift weights before the sun came up. Then Carrington met his dad for a basketball workout. Often in solace, at St. Benedict Gymnasium in the morning and St. Frances’ east Baltimore campus after school, Big Bub and Lil Bub drilled conditioning and shot-making.
“The every day in the gym,” Myles said, “he really did it the old-fashioned way.”
When Carrington finally took the floor for St. Frances in 2021 — having grown to 6-1 — the sharp-witted guard tore through BCL play with his backcourt mate Jahnathan Lamothe, who played his freshman year at Maryland last season and recently transferred to North Carolina A&T.
The two made a pact before their senior season: always guard one another in practice. “Fussing and fighting the whole practice,” Lamothe said, only strengthened their relationship.
“They would compete heavily in practice,” Myles said. “It was an everyday thing. … Every day he had another Division I player to play against.”
Together, they used to disrobe defenses with a set called “Baltimore.” It’s a three-man action with a handoff to the corner and down screen from the wing that got Carrington one-on-one in space. “He’d just Kobe fadeaway and always make it,” Lamothe said. If the defense double-teamed, he could just feed it back to his open partner.
The senior duo capped their high school careers combining for 54 points to upset top-seeded Mount Saint Joseph, 78-75, in overtime for the MIAA A Conference championship. Carrington scored the Panthers’ final six points in the extra session to finish with 24. And even that fell below the 26.4 he averaged for the season as he became the first in program history to score 1,000 points in a campaign.
Pitt assistant coach Milan Brown took notice of Carrington as a 10th grader while on a DMV recruiting tour. He was quick to get on the phone to tell Capel, “I think the kid is gonna be a guy that we should offer.” But he was patient because college coaches are barred from direct contact with recruits until June 15 heading into their junior year.
It was 12:01 a.m. on June 15, 2021, when Carrington’s phone started ringing. Brown was on the other end.
“That sends a message to the kid and his family that we’re serious,” Capel said.
A month later, Capel got to see Carrington with his own eyes. He perked up during a matinee at an AAU tournament in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They played another game later that night. He was sold. Capel called Carrington’s dad to let him know Pitt was going to offer his son.
“Cape, that’s all I needed to hear,” Big Bub told him. “He’s yours. You’ll get him.”
Big Bub and Capel have a longstanding relationship that traces to Capel recruiting one of his players, Andrew Fitzgerald, to Oklahoma in 2009. Big Bub never pushed his son on Capel. He wanted the recruitment process to happen organically, for them to be genuinely interested in his son.
Carrington committed to Pitt on June 15, 2022, exactly one year after that first phone call, over offers from schools like LSU, Rutgers, La Salle, DePaul and Loyola Maryland.
Kim Hairston / Baltimore Sun
Carlton Carrington drives to the basket for his 12-and-under team, the Mount Royal/Baltimore Elite, during the second annual Sherron Bogues Day at Druid Hill Park in 2017. (Kim Hairston/Staff)
‘How do you wanna handle this?’
It would be disingenuous for any Pitt basketball player or staffer to say they expected Carrington to strike as quickly as he did. They all saw the writing on the wall in preseason workouts. Scrimmages teased how good he could be. But an 18-point, 12-rebound, 10-assist triple-double against North Carolina A&T in his college debut?
His Nov. 6 introduction was a feat only three Panthers have ever achieved, and it was the first since 1998.
Carrington’s lone college season began with a summer two-game foreign tour in Spain. Capel had an inkling then — from those games, initial workouts and a private scrimmage with Georgetown — that Carrington could one day flirt with a triple-double.
“I thought that it would be possible at some point,” Capel said, “but not the first game.”
Back in Baltimore, Myles crowded his team around the TV in their basketball locker room after practice to tune in. “It was a great day to be a Panther,” he quipped. Lamothe remembers the thrill of watching it live but even more clearly, since transferring to the Aggies, rewatching it during his new team’s film study.
“I wish we could play y’all again this year,” he texted Carrington.
The triple-double thrusted Carrington into the college basketball zeitgeist. It put him on a new trajectory to the NBA. Capel, at one point during the game, sank into his seat on the bench, turned to his assistant said, “this could happen a lot quicker than we thought.”
Not only because of that debut, but really starting with his first four.
The youngest player in the Atlantic Coast Conference averaged 18 points, 6.3 assists and 5.5 rebounds over that 11-day stretch. He finished his freshman year averaging 13.8 points, 5.2 rebounds and 4.1 assists per game while making 65 3-pointers. He holds the program record for most minutes played by a freshman (1,986) and tied for most single-game 3s (seven at Boston College).
“After his first four games,” Capel said, “I called his parents and talked to them like, ‘How do you wanna handle this? Because this thing is happening. Let’s navigate this.’”
Capel met with Carrington the Tuesday after not hearing their name called on the NCAA Tournament’s Selection Sunday show. They reflected on the success of his freshman year. Capel posed the looming question: Did he want to return to Pitt or test the NBA waters?
The freshman hadn’t given it much thought. Before the season, one-and-done was never something they even considered. He went home that weekend to talk more about it with his family.
Capel started scouring “real information” — positive and constructive — from NBA personnel, scouts and general managers. The scuttlebutt was Carrington would “definitely” be a first-round pick, potentially a high one. Carrington’s dad, who promised Capel they wouldn’t draw out the process out of respect for the program, called a week later to say they were going all in on the draft.
The decision was made public at a news conference on April 3 from Pitt’s Petersen Events Center.
Carrington leaned toward the microphone, Capel sitting to his right. He thanked his Panthers coaching staff for believing in him “when nobody else really did,” and showed gratitude to just about every person in the room.
“I didn’t do this myself,” Carrington told reporters. “I had my dad, my brother, my mom every step of the way. To see that they worked so hard to help me achieve my goals and for me to go out there and have a chance to do it, I’m not only doing it for me. I’m doing it for them.”
NBA draft
Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York
Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m.
TV: ABC, ESPN
