Worth The Wait: Canada's Leonard Miller ready to turn heads at NBA level

Leonard Miller was supposed to be drafted a year ago. Or at least, there was some hope the long-limbed teenager from just outside Toronto would make the leap from a high school prep team based in Fort Erie, Ont. straight to the NBA. 

There was an on-paper argument for it: Miller was six-foot-10 with the movement skills of a much smaller player. He could handle the ball, run, jump and shoot it pretty well, although with mechanics that didn’t fit the classic look. 

Still, his resume was pretty skimpy: he essentially came out of nowhere to dominate the Ontario Scholastic Basketball Association but had little in the way of credentials beyond one good high school season in Canada. Then again NBA teams have taken fliers on players with equally thin credentials based on athletic advantages that were too hard to ignore. 

Sometimes it works out spectacularly: Giannis Antetokounmpo is one of the best players of his generation after creeping into the 2013 draft as a gawky, skinny teenager playing second division in Greece. Sometimes, it doesn’t: Toronto Raptors fans might remember a raw, unproven prospect named Bruno Caboclo being taken with the 18^th pick in the 2014 draft.

But the pre-draft excitement around Miller came and went pretty quickly once he took the floor for live scrimmages at the NBA pre-draft combine in Chicago in May of 2022. 

The decision-making wasn’t complicated: Miller wasn’t good enough. His game wasn’t advanced to the point where he could hold his own against players with years of college experience under their belt. His skills weren’t sharp enough to shine in what was effectively a live job interview. 

Statistically, he was the least efficient player at the combine in two five-on-five scrimmages and looked lost defensively.

As one NBA talent evaluator put it to me: “He just didn’t seem to understand how much each possession matters in the pro game. He has a long way to go.”

Miller took the hint. He withdrew his name for consideration from the 2022 draft and signed with the G-League Ignite, the NBA-run development team that has become a promising way station for young players who want to prepare for professional basketball outside of a college setting while also earning a $500,000 salary. 

Flash forward 12 months and it’s clear that Miller made the right decision and took full advantage of the opportunity with the Ignite, as he has positioned himself nearly perfectly to hear his name called in the first round on Thursday night. 

“I think he's shown a lot of actually really good progress with the Ignite program,” said Raptors assistant general manager and vice-president of player personnel Dan Tolzman who has been tracking Miller since he was an 18-year-old playing for Fort Erie Academy in the OSBA. “I think it was a really good move for him to go there and he got comfortable with the speed of the [professional] game, and honestly, just learning the nuances of high-level basketball …. it was a, I'd say a pretty smart decision on his part to prepare him for the next step. He was playing against grown men every single night and physically improved his body and his skill set. I mean, he's still very much a raw prospect but at the same time, he's more comfortable playing in an NBA game than he was a year ago when he was flirting with the draft process.”

His performance with the Ignite bears that out. He averaged 16.9 points and 10.1 rebounds to lead the Ignite in both categories and became the first player in the three-year history of the program to average double figures in points and rebounds. He also set a program record with 17 double-doubles.

He did it with impressive efficiency too, shooting 53.7 per cent on two points field goals and an encouraging 79.2 per cent from the free-throw line. That latter number is something that teams look at to assure themselves that a prospect can improve as a three-point shooter, and Miller, who shot 30.4 per cent in his first season playing with the deeper NBA three-point line, has shown hints of promise there too. 

But those who know Miller best say that the real reason that his future is so bright and that he could end up being the surprise of the draft for a team that takes him in the 20s, for example, is that his ascent has been so rapid, bordering on unprecedented. 

Even without the calendar year, Miller has gone from being out of place at the NBA combine to being a step slow while playing for Canada’s U23 team at GLOBL Jam to having some uneven performances with the Ignite – predictably given it was his first exposure to professional basketball. But by February Miller was dominating at times – he had 13 double-doubles in his last 14 games, a stretch in which he averaged 20 points and 13 rebounds a game on 55 per cent shooting. 

“His trajectory is crazy, I've never really seen anything like it in my experience in Canada,” said Charles Hantoumakos, his coach at Fort Erie who got to know Miller after coaching two of his older brothers, Elijah, and Emanuel. “And the one thing I've really tried to get across to the scouts that have called me and even getting his agent to understand is like, Leonard has played basketball for two years at six-foot-10.”

Miller’s NBA career – or any kind of professional career  – was much closer to never happening than the prospect of Miller becoming a first-round pick Thursday night where he would be one of two Canadians to go in the top 30, along with Olivier Maxence-Prosper of Montreal. 

Miller played two years of high school in the Toronto area before gaining some interest thanks to the emergence of his brother, Emanuel who is returning for his senior season at Texas Christian University outside Dallas. The younger Miller headed to the U.S. for high school but ended up buried on the bench on a powerhouse team at Wasatch Academy in Utah. For his fourth year of high school, he transferred to Victory Rock Prep in Florida. By this time he was six-foot-eight, having grown five inches since leaving Toronto. But rather than a breakout year, Miller broke his wrist early in the season on a dunk attempt and the subsequent surgery – along with Covid – cut short his 2020-21 season. 

By this time Hantoumakos was back from coaching professionally overseas and starting the OSBA program at Fort Erie Academy. One of his first calls was to Elijah Miller, the older brother to Emanuel and Leonard and who gave up his own basketball dreams to work and help finance his younger brother’s path. 

“It was like a two-second phone call,” says Hantoumakos. “I said I was starting this program and it was like, ‘I’m coming.”

By this time the youngest Miller was six-foot-10 and capable of playing above the rim, while still maintaining the coordination and guard skills he developed before his growth spurt. The problem was that having gone two years without playing serious basketball, the learning curve was steep. 

“He had no idea about rotations, coverages, nothing, like nothing,” says Hantoumakos. “He shot the ball from under his chin, like almost from his chest. So there was a lot like we kind of had to unpack in that year with him, including the motor:  I used to tell him like your motor is like, right lawn mower. it's terrible. You've got to play harder.”

To his credit he did. And he listened. And he watched film, and he dominated a quality high school league brimming with plenty of U.S. and Canadian college prospects. 

Last summer Miller played for Canada’s U-23 team at GLOBL Jam and once again it was evident that his skills and acumen weren’t quite on par with his talent. He looked lost when he didn’t have the ball in his hands and sometimes looked even more confused when he had it, and he tried to figure out how to attack players two, three and four years older. Instead, it was his brother Emanuel who shone as a lock-down defender and an athletic, opportunistic offensive presence. 

But Canadian head coach Nate Mitchell was impressed regardless. The former Raptors assistant coach, Canada Basketball coach and long-time player development expert saw in Miller four things that made him confident that the raw talent would eventually shine: size, athleticism, skill and – most importantly – an urge to improve. 

“Every [NBA] team wants what he has,” said Mitchell. “Look at the Raptors. The two guys they have at his size who can legit dribble, legit pass and have legit defensive versatility are Pascal Siakam and Scottie Barnes – one is an all-NBA player and the other might be if he develops. And if he’s a kid who screams ‘I want to get better’ – and Miller was like that last summer, he wanted to be coached, he appreciated being coached  -- I’m going to go get that get kid and develop him. Maybe he’s going to be able to play right away, maybe not, but I do know in two, three years. The investments will be well worth it.”

That’s the decision that NBA teams will be making on Miller Thursday night, a year later than originally planned, perhaps, but the wait has been worth it.