Scoot Henderson Thinks He Should Go Number One

Twenty minutes south of the Vegas Strip, in a placid palm-tree-lined parking lot shared with a bank, a dental service company, and an aviation firm, is a luxury apartment complex that’s home to players on the G League Ignite—the first-of-its-kind basketball team, in the NBA’s developmental league, which serves as a non-college way station for some of the planet’s best prospects. I’m waiting in a second-floor activity room (couches, pool table, half a dozen televisions; think upscale hotel lounge) for Scoot Henderson, the Ignite’s 19-year-old star and an all-but-certain top-three pick in June’s NBA draft. Henderson, wearing tie-dyed sweats with a frayed poncho fringe, perfectly mismatches the sterile vibe of his team-provided apartment and of the small Vegas suburb that’s served as his temporary hometown for the last eight months. The star-on-the-rise points proudly to his brand-new Crocs slides, which he wears with no socks. “Gotta let the dogs out,” he says, grinning.  

The morning we meet happens to mark the beginning of March Madness, a blitz of 67 games that crowns a national champion—but also serves as an introduction to a new generation of stars. For a teenage hooper, it is the moment to introduce yourself to the world. Of course, Henderson, the best 19-year-old in America, isn’t playing, having traded in his college eligibility for a two-year deal with the Ignite. While freshman standouts Brandon Miller, Jarace Walker, Anthony Black, and Keyonte George spent a semester or two building relationships with massive college fanbases, Henderson has been taking online classes, going to life-skill seminars, and playing games against grown men in the NBA’s minor leagues, in the hopes that it will give him a smoother runway to the big show. 

But it turns out that Scoot won’t be playing in the G League anymore, either. A few hours before I arrive, news breaks that Henderson, his agent, and his family have decided, having already established his NBA Draft bona fides, Scoot will be shut down for the remainder of his season to make sure he stays healthy for pre-draft workouts. So, as we meet in the Vegas suburb (coincidentally named Henderson, Nevada), the point guard known for his fast-twitch explosiveness must sit still and wait, out of sight, as the kids in his draft class have the eyes of the country and all 30 NBA teams upon them. 

Everyone in and around the world of basketball seems to believe that Scoot will be a star. But even before the Tournament, Henderson has had to get used to the NBA’s gaze pointing elsewhere: 2023 is the Year of Victor Wembanyama, the generational 7’4” center from France with guard skills and highlights that look CGI’d. I tell Henderson the draft experts have him at either #2 or #3 behind the ascending Miller of the University of Alabama and Wembanyama. “Yeah, I think I should go one,” Henderson says. “I know I’m gonna go one.” Does going first overall really matter? “Yes. Of course.” He gets stern as he answers, a bit confused I’d even ask. “Who doesn’t want to go one?”

Whether or not he goes #1, Henderson’s life is about to change. It’s changed drastically once already, and that went according to plan: he graduated from Carlton J. Kell High School in Marietta, Georgia, at 17, and signed the first-ever two-year deal with the G League Ignite. He became a millionaire without a driver’s license, still too young to vote. But this next leap, from minor-leaguer to crown jewel of an NBA franchise will be something else entirely. 

It’s not that he isn’t ready. Henderson’s spent the past two years—and the dozen before that, honestly—preparing for exactly this moment. “I’ve always dreamed of being a household name,” Scoot says. “I wanted people to know who I was not just to brag about it. But just to show how hard I’ve been working and what I really stand for.” Accordingly, he’s already signed a shoe deal with Puma worth seven figures annually, and many more sponsorships will surely follow. Soon he’ll ink a rookie contract worth tens of millions and become an NBA star of the sort we’ve not yet seen: an American-born player who went pro before turning 18, all while staying stateside. The Scoot Experiment borrows from the European soccer model, with a dash of Kobe, KG, Brandon Jennings, and LaMelo Ball tossed in. Where Henderson lands in the draft and how he performs in the league could impact American basketball for years to come. 

But that’s all coming later. When we talk, Henderson’s still 19 in a town not exactly built for teenagers. “You got to be 21 to be in Vegas, dang near,” he says. So, for now, Scoot waits. He hangs with his pitbull. He meditates. He reads (“The Secret, The Four Agreements, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success”). And, like other teenagers, he likes to lose himself in video games. Recently he’s been obsessed with Hogwarts Legacy, set in the world of Harry Potter. 

He’s biding his time until the commissioner calls his name and he can start living his dream. More than one, really, depending on how quickly he finds the right architect: “I want to be a wizard for real,” he says. “When I grow up, I’m gonna have something in my house where I need a wand to open the door. That might be childish, but I don’t care.” 

It’s rare for the top two prospects to face off in a marquee matchup—and even rarer for the duel to live up to the hype. But this season began with Wembanyama’s French-league team, Metropolitans 92, coming to Vegas to battle Henderson and the Ignite in two exhibition games in front of packed crowds at the Dollar Loan Center, the Ignite’s home floor. The first game was attended by 200 NBA scouts and front office personnel, watched by a national TV audience, and streamed for free on the NBA’s app—all presumable firsts. It served as proof that the French unicorn was not a myth: Wembanyama put up 37 points, hitting seven 3-pointers and blocking five shots. But Henderson’s performance—dropping 28 points, dishing out nine assists, and grabbing five rebounds while leading his team to a 122-115 victory—was just as revelatory. The 6’2” point guard with a 6’9” wingspan played with a ferocity that jumped off the screen. His first step has led scouts to compare him to Ja Morant or Derrick Rose, and the fearlessness with which he attacked the 7’4” rim protector was reminiscent of both. Henderson insists he approached the game the same way he would any season opener. But he admits: “I wanted to let people know that I’m here.” 

Henderson signed the first two-year deal with the G League Ignite as a sort of experiment. At 17, he became the youngest pro basketball player in the country, earning $1 million over two seasons to play for the nascent NBA development team. It did not come a moment too soon. Ignite coach Jason Hart had spent years recruiting teenagers while coaching at Pepperdine and USC. When he met Henderson, he was struck by a kid his family’s called “Old Man” since kindergarten. “I’ve seen a 17-year-old recruit before,” Hart says. “He was like a 17-year-old man.” (Scoot gets this a lot. This winter, a photograph of him flexing went viral. “I got a little oil on my body, got a little sweat on me,” he says, laughing. “She got a great photo, man. No Photoshop there. That’s just genetics.”) 

Right away, Hart watched the young point guard work like a pro. He was impressed by how quickly Scoot got a handle on the pressure of being the bonus baby with a target on his back. “He was placed in that bubble, in that fishbowl, and for a young kid to come in who nobody knew about when he came here, when he blew up he stayed humble,” Hart says. “He stayed true to who he was.” Hart tells me the team now gets calls every other day from parents wanting their kids to sign the same two-year deal, “because Scoot made it look easy.”

Hart has built the Ignite not like a halfway house for prospects but in the image of a grind-it-out pro team across the pond. “We try to run our program like the European model, where every single day we do skill development and fundamentals,” he says. There’s a reason, he implies, that the NBA’s biggest stars—Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic—didn’t come from the American developmental circuit: “Everybody wants everything in a rush, so now we have a league in the NBA that was started in America, which is being dominated by the Europeans.” To Hart’s mind, Henderson’s experience playing with and against grown men scrapping for their next paycheck is less comparable to a traditional prospect’s than to the teenage experience of another point guard phenom: Dallas Mavericks superstar Luka Dončić. 

Few Americans know the European game more intimately than Pooh Jeter, the Ignite’s 39-year-old point guard-slash-assistant coach. Jeter has played professionally since 2006, in Spain, Ukraine, China, and France. He spent 62 games in the NBA, all with the Sacramento Kings. He’s embraced his role as a less jaded, more pious Crash Davis to Henderson’s Nuke LaLoosh. “With all the information that I have, I have to be able to leave an inheritance for the ones up next,” he says. “I feel that that’s my mission on this earth.”

Jeter lives next door to Henderson at the Ignite’s apartment complex. At shootaround before a game in March, the two stand under the hoop rebounding and cracking jokes. They talk every day, a curriculum of Jeter’s design. “It’s conversations about family, or it’s conversations about women, or it’s conversations about money or about LLCs,” he says. “If we’re in chapel before games, it could be about God.” He’s old enough to be Scoot’s dad, but he feels like his big brother and can’t help but gush about Henderson as we talk. “He really does not bring his phone in the gym at 17, 18 years old. That’s how serious he is! He’s not on that,” he says, grinning. “I’m living my dream through him.”

From their first workout, Jeter recognized Scoot’s rare gifts. “I had to stop the drills and say, ‘Hey, man, how old are you?’ He says, ‘17.’ I said, ‘Man, I’m 20 years older!’ And I’m looking around like, ‘Yo, this is crazy,’” he says. “What I was seeing, and how serious he was, how mature. At his age, playing against men, it’s done so much for his growth.” During this second season, Jeter has focused their lessons on the finer points of being the lead guard. He knows it’ll be a challenge for a 19-year-old to take the reins of both an offense and an organization. “We seen everything last season. My goal for him this year was really to see: let’s see if he can run a team. Can you run this company? You’re the CEO; can you run this franchise? Because he’s gonna be put in the same situation next season with another young team,” Jeter says. “Are you making sure everybody else is able to eat? Can you bring others with you? Can you be that point guard known to get people paid? That means everybody want to play with you.”

When we speak, Scoot has another lesson—one about cars—in mind. It was reported in 2021 that Henderson didn’t know how to drive, so I ask if he’s taken his driver’s test yet. He grins and tells me: “I passed that junk! I nailed it.” He shares big dreams for the luxury cars he’ll be getting for himself and his dad once he makes it (“I need the Maybach in the garage; I know my dad want one”), but Scoot says the biggest blessing of having a car is just being able to make sure he’s always punctual. He spent time with Celtics star Jaylen Brown last summer, who shared this piece of advice: don’t be in a rush to get everything all at once. “He said, you gotta start small first. He had a deal with Mazda and got all his people cars. But with Mazda, though,” Henderson tells me. “But from there it just went up.” The path to the Maybach starts with a Mazda? “Facts.”

Henderson comes from a family of wildly gifted athletes: Scoot’s brother C.J., 22, played with him in high school, while his oldest brother Jade, 29, played football. Scoot’s three older sisters all played D-1 basketball. Scoot’s youngest sister Moochie, 17, might be the best of them all. When I get on a Zoom call with his older sisters—Diamond, 31, China, 28, and Onyx, 24—they explain that to understand Scoot, you have to understand the house he grew up in. “We were in middle school, and we were working out-working out because we were talented. Scoot and Moochie are in first grade, kindergarten, with us, with ankle weights on,” Onyx says. “They running up a hill, and it’s just like, ‘This is absurd! Who is allowing this to happen?’” 

“Someone call Child Protective Services!” China says, laughing.

But the sisters explain that their dad Chris’s ethos was: if you want to play with the older kids, you play by the same rules. Scoot always played on C.J.’s teams, which meant he was always years younger than the competition. Still, he was talented, he was freaky strong, and he’d been sharpened by those Henderson family games. “Even when he was playing up, there were parents who were like, ‘No, this kid is not in the seventh grade!’ And we’re like, ‘Actually, he’s in the fifth,’” Onyx says, grinning. China tells me their mom Crystal had to bring Scoot’s birth certificates to every game.

These days, Henderson’s older sisters have become part of the burgeoning business of Scoot: China and Diamond help him with styling, while Onyx handles his social media. They don’t talk draft order with their brother, but when I ask, they tell me it’d be foolish for NBA teams to let their little brother drop to #3. “You can have all the clout. You can be in a college, you can be overseas, you can be wherever you want. You can be in the sky, you can be an alien. I don’t care. If you come down, the work is going to show. So, the people that put the work in is going to rise to the top. Cream always rises. And that’s what he is,” Diamond tells me. “March Madness is dope, but I just hope people are ready for that professional bump.”

They can’t wait for NBA pundits to argue over their little brother’s legacy. “I want the top-five talks: I got Mike, Kobe, Scoot,” Onyx says. But they also see it as their job to introduce the world to the real Scoot: the sweet, goofy little brother that breakdanced for Onyx after her second ACL surgery, the supportive sibling who is passionate about women’s basketball. Tucked away in a Vegas suburb, it’s been hard for the world to meet that Scoot. Part of the problem is: once the ball tips, their little brother transforms. “A certain animal come out of me when I step foot on the court,” Scoot tells me. “I just go into a crazy mode where it’s damn near [like] I’m fighting for my life.” 

“Right now, all they’ve seen is: straight face. Serious. I’m picking on people. I’m yelling. See my muscles popping out? And that is him. Don’t get it wrong. Don’t get it twisted,” Diamond says. “But he’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Off the court, this guy’s hilarious. He’s one of the best people you want to be around all the time.” 

So, the task before China, Diamond, and Onyx is: how do you let the wider world know that your little brother isn’t, as Onyx puts it, “Kawhi Leonard-like”? How do you help Scoot maximize his off-court impact? They tell me they’re not that worried about the challenge, because they believe in what they’re selling. More than that, they know the Henderson family can be insulation against the gusts of wind that blow prospects off the path. “A lot of times with these kids that are young and they come into money, they just get piranhas around them, they get sharks around them, that want to try to take advantage,” Diamond says. “That’s one of his strong suits: it’s not going to be easy to penetrate this circle.” 

I ask Scoot what it was like to bring a girl home to the Hendersons with all those older sisters. He shakes his head and says he never did. Onyx smiles and admits that they do have high standards for Scoot. But his sisters understand what the NBA life will bring. They recently learned that more than half of their little brother’s social media followers are women. “The ladies love Scoota,” Onyx says. And she, more than anyone, would know: Onyx tells me when she posts a Scoot photo to Instagram, she has to activate her phone’s Do Not Disturb mode so it doesn’t overheat. And the DMs? “Oh my gosh! It’s so bad. I literally turned off Instagram notifications because I don’t even want to see it,” she says, laughing through a cringe. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I just post the pic and get out. I do respect his privacy. I post. I get out. I don’t want to—I’m scared.”

Scoot tells me he’s held onto a piece of advice Chris Paul gave when the Phoenix Suns legend spoke to the Ignite: “Keep the main thing, the main thing.” If he forgets that, his sisters won’t be shy about setting him straight. “The way we were raised, there’s not many things that are going to be able to push him off this path or break him down,” Diamond says. “When he getting a little jazzy, I might tickle him. He’s so ticklish. It’s one of those things where he’s gonna always be our baby. So, I don’t think that’s ever gonna change.”

Diamond laughs when I tell her Scoot’s afraid to bring a girl home. “We don’t want it to be a situation where he feels nervous, but that’s also a good situation because he’s gonna pick wisely; he’s not gonna bring just anybody home. It’s definitely a gift and a curse having so many female siblings,” she says. But on the whole, she thinks Scoot came out on top in the birth-order bargain. Having older sisters meant he always smelled good, looked presentable, and didn’t embarrass himself. “Women are naturally a little more mature than guys at the same age. So, we’re like his cheat codes.” 

I’m courtside at the Dollar Loan Center a few hours before the tip-off of the Ignite game versus the Sioux Falls Skyforce, the first since Scoot decided he was hanging it up until the draft. The day before, Scoot was loose. But today, when I ask what he thinks about a wave of NBA Draft experts dropping him to #3, behind Alabama star Brandon Miller, he stiffens up. “It is what it is. The NCAA Tournament is what’s going on right now. Obviously, I knew that was gonna happen. I knew people were gonna start talking a lot more about college,” he says. He bounces the basketball he’s fiddling with against the court, shifting his weight from side to side as we speak. I ask if he’ll be okay with it if he does actually fall to #3 on draft night. “Nah,” he says. “It’s not acceptable.”

The argument for Wembanyama at #1 is easy: we’ve never seen a 7’4” guy with guard skills who can shoot off the dribble. The argument for Miller at #2 is also pretty straightforward: he’s 6’7”, and lengthy wings are irresistible in today’s NBA. Scoot, meanwhile, is either 6’3” (if you believe his Twitter bio) or 6’2” (if you believe the draft experts). Either way, his height, along with questions about his shooting, have some scouts rethinking their rankings. When I ask Jeter how tall Scoot is, he tells me: “He’s 6-monster. The boy can jump. He’s explosive. He’s getting that leadership in him. It’s about how big that heart is. Heart over height. Always.” Jeter sees Henderson’s closest comp as Duke-era Jay Williams, who went first overall before his career was derailed by a motorcycle crash. Jeter also mentions Eric Bledsoe’s name, and I ask if he thinks he can really fill out like the famously muscular guard. “Yes, Scoot is huge. Scoot has abs underneath his armpits,” Jeter says. “He sent me a video the other day on Instagram and a person had abs on their back. I said, ‘That’s you, man!’ We always joke that he puts Muscle Milk in his cereal.”  

The Ignite’s elder statesman scoffs at the idea of Henderson dropping past two. “Like, come on. The whole year they’ve talked about players outside of college. The whole year. But it’s March Madness, so they have to start pumping somebody in college,” Jeter says. “Matter of fact, they were either talking about Vic, they were either talking Scoot, they were talking about the Thompson twins [Ausar and Amen, who play for Overtime Elite]. But they have to find somebody. Perfect. Brandon Miller is a great player.” He reminds me that everyone in the G League “was the number one player on their college team.”

Then, Jeter gets quiet for a moment and looks me square in the eyes. He asks if I remember the comments Wembanyama made ahead of his matchup with Scoot. “He said, ‘If I wasn’t born, Scoot would be number one.’ Something on that type of level,” Jeter says. (Wembanyama’s precise quote was: “If I was never born, I think he would deserve the first spot.”) “And I sent Scoot a message like, ‘You saw that?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that was cool.’ And then we saw the ferocity.” He wants the NBA world to think about Henderson’s 28-9-5 performance against Wembanyama’s Metropolitans 92 come draft day. “Whatever happens, man, he hears it. I know he hears it. But watch and see what his response is,” Jeter says. “He’s a warrior, man. This is a warrior. So, be careful.”