He Was Billed as the Next LeBron. But Will Emoni Bates Make It at All?

Author: Editors Desk Source: N.Y Times

March 3, 2023 at 10:45

Emoni Bates played one season at Eastern Michigan, in his hometown, Ypsilanti, but is expected to enter the upcoming N.B.A. draft.Credit...Jeff Blake/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

Bates was on a magazine cover at 15. He was playing Division I college basketball at 17. Now he’s 19, his college career may be over, and N.B.A. success is anything but guaranteed.

YPSILANTI, Mich. — From time to time, Emoni Bates shows flashes of the player he was supposed to be. Like the moment in a recent game when he received the ball near the 3-point arc and took a couple of hard dribbles toward the basket, a 6-foot-10 bundle of kinetic energy, his spindly arms and legs flailing in rhythm with his bobbing, bundled-up hair.

With his defender scrambling toward the basket, Bates stopped, bounced back, pulled his front knee up above his waist, à la Dirk Nowitzki, and from the top of the key lofted a high-arcing shot that settled in the net.

“You know you’ve got to live with certain shots,” Ra’Heim Moss, the sophomore guard for the University of Toledo who was guarding Bates, said later that night. “He’s what, 6-10? I’m 6-3 or 6-4. Him hitting that shot — hats off to him.”

But that moment of brilliance, which left fans slack-jawed and pro scouts considering the possibilities, told only a part of the story. There is always context for Bates, and often it looks a lot like baggage.

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