MILWAUKEE — Bruce Brown Jr. thinks he was 6 or 7 years old one fateful day in Boston when he remembers watching his father play basketball in a men’s league.
The game was at the Lee Academy, and Brown was in awe as he watched Bruce Sr., who is all of 5-foot-10, rise up and dunk.
“He went up and dunked the ball, and that was the first time I was like, ‘OK, I want to play. I want to do that,’” Brown told The Athletic.
Roughly 21 years, countless 6 a.m. workouts, stints at a Vermont boarding school and the University of Miami, being drafted 42nd overall by the Detroit Pistons in 2018, a fateful, three-team trade that brought Brown to Brooklyn and a hamstring injury to James Harden later, and Brown found himself in a position to take the most important shot of his life Thursday night. He missed.
