Like most children who turn into NBA Draft hopefuls, Giddey grew up playing all sorts of sports. His list, thanks to where he grew up, was a bit different from the norm — instead of tossing on pads and lining up at wide receiver, Giddey played Australian rules football; instead of dominating his local little league, he played cricket.
"He couldn't sit still," Giddey's mother, Kim, recalls. "He couldn't sit and play with Legos, or watch a DVD. He was just outside. He always had a ball — be it football, basketball, or tennis ball — something in his hands, outside or inside, bouncing or kicking."
Everything ultimately came back to basketball. Giddey concedes that it's something of a cliché, but with both of his parents playing professionally in Australia (Warrick stressed that any scoring acumen Josh has comes from Kim), Warrick getting into coaching after his playing career ended, and his sisters, also, being hoopers — his older sister, Hannah, plays at Oral Roberts — this was an inevitability.
"It's always been basketball, and it's always been about basketball," Giddey says. "And it probably will always be about basketball."
Throughout his childhood, Warrick served as his coach, with an assist from Australian basketball legend Andrew Gaze. Warrick made it a point to never give Josh preferential treatment or push him too hard, even though other parents would say the coach's kid was something special. It was more important to Warrick to hammer home the importance of playing the game the right way, to play hard, and make correct decisions. If the referee makes a call, do not complain – just focus on what you can control.
His teams would obliterate their age group, a collection of children well-drilled in the art of passing and correct reads by a retired professional basketball player. From the time Josh was eight, they'd have to play up an age group or two, Warrick recalls, "so they could have some decent competition."
Still, while Giddey was consistently the best player for his school or club team, he was never able to quite break through to represent his State-level sides — these are the collections of the top talents in each region, all of which come together to play for the right to be named national champions in their particular age groups. Looking back, he wonders what might've been if he put in the extra work when he was a kid instead of just going through practice, heading home, and firing up his PlayStation.
"When I was 14 or 15, I said I wanted to be a professional basketball player," Giddey remarks, "but how real of the thing it was, I wasn't sure."
The Giddeys are from the Australian state of Victoria, which tends to have a pretty high concentration of talented young athletes. Between that level of talent and his status a late bloomer (including a growth spurt that saw him sprout up to 6'8), Giddey never made a U-16 team and earned a U-18 nod only in his final year of eligibility.
Josh Giddey owns a lawnmower. There’s a disagreement over the last time he used it — his dad, Warrick, says it was last year, Josh says it was two or, more likely, three — but in an attempt to get some extra cash in his pocket, Giddey and his best friend, Liam, built up a little business.
“We would literally go around the neighborhood with our lawnmowers, knocking on doors saying, ‘You want us to mow your lawn for $10, $15?’” Giddey recalls while sitting in an Irvine, Calif. hotel lobby, a seemingly permanent smile plastered to his face.
At one point, someone posted to Facebook that the two teens were taking care of lawns in the area, which led to a wave of requests coming in. Not wanting to turn down a chance to make even more money, Josh and Liam made it work, even if it wasn’t always easy getting from Point A to Point B in Melbourne, Australia.
“We were literally catching trains with our lawnmowers around,” Giddey says. “But the jobs were a bit bigger, we got a bit more money from them. It was just an easy way ... it was fun to make money like that.”
Mowing lawns is almost certainly not how Giddey is going to pay his bills for the rest of his life, even if the money was pretty good and he enjoyed being outside. The NBA Draft is rarely predictable, but the overwhelming likelihood is that we are going to hear Giddey’s name announced early in the proceedings on Thursday.
No one is more surprised by this meteoric rise than Josh Giddey himself. The lifelong goal was to play professional basketball, but he admits he had no idea how to actually get to that point.
"Every time I was growing up in and somebody asked me, 'What do you want to do after school?' I never gave another answer besides playing basketball or playing a professional sport," Giddey recalls. "But to be honest, I didn't think it was realistic until probably two years ago."
It was at that point something in him changed. Everything started to make more sense and his childhood dream became more attainable. As a result, this 18-year-old Aussie is on the verge of becoming a Lottery pick, all while shouldering the hopes that he will become the next star basketball player to emerge from Down Under.
The composure that makes Giddey such a tantalizing prospect is evident when he speaks. For that reason, even the most emphatic proclamations about how breakneck his ascent has been in this Draft class comes off as just another thing.
“Even 12 months ago, if someone said I'd be in this position that I'm in today, I would've called them crazy,” Giddey says. “Because back then, my development was so late and quick, that it kind of shook me, and shook everyone.
“Because 12 months ago, no one thought I'd be where I'm at today,” he continues. “And I didn't even think I'd be here.”
by BILL DIFILIPPO // ASSOCIATE EDITOR
UPROXX STUDIOS
Twelve months ago, no one thought I’d be where I’m at today.
And I didn’t even think I’d be here."
It’s always been basketball, and it’s always been about basketball.
And it probably will always be about basketball."
These showcases serve as an opportunity for organizations to get looks at kids that they want to get into their pipeline. One of those, the NBA Global Academy at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, was headed up by Marty Clarke, a family friend who attended the AIS with Warrick decades earlier and had seen Giddey play from the time he was with under-10 teams.
"For us it was, how did they not pick him?" Clarke says when asked about Giddey's lack of opportunities. "How can they not see the potential? But you do have to look at it through their eyes, and those people are picking teams to win national championships right now. And they may not see it. So it's understandable, but it's also like, 'I wish they could see things through other people's eyes. This guy is going to be really good. We've got to give him that opportunity as early as possible.' Now, did it end up hurting him? Probably not. Did it end up hurting them? Yeah, probably."
Getting to play against a new level of competition — along with the environment created by Clarke at the Global Academy to help players grow on and off the court — was akin to strapping a rocket to Giddey's back.
"They've basically changed my entire life," Giddey says. "Because before I went up there, I was a good player, but I was not even close to where I'm at today. So a lot of credit to them. They developed my body. They developed my game. You get to play against the best guys in the country every day, you're living with them. It's a professional environment, so you're learning. They're getting you ready for that pro experience."
In Clarke's eyes, Giddey's comfort when thrown into different sorts of environments, with levels of competition that progressively got more and more difficult, forced him to take his game to new levels. From not making it onto his State team until his final chance to playing professional basketball in less than two years, Clarke believes each step forward has required Josh to "assess and make judgements quickly," something he's inherently wired to do.
One of his final stops before playing professional ball came with the NBA Global Academy at the Torneo Junior Ciutat de L'Hospitalet in Barcelona, where Giddey was named the MVP. He thinks this tournament, in particular, helped his confidence bloom. Clarke had the team play an unselfish style that emphasized ball movement, which Giddey prefers, against some of the best young players in Europe.
"The European style system is similar to the Australian style," Giddey explains. "So they're not overly great athletes, but they're smart, they play in a system and a structure and it suited my game well. And I think that tournament, I grew in confidence. Marty had a lot of confidence in me. He played me multiple positions, allowed me to carry the ball, play off the ball. It was a great group of guys I got to play with. They were unselfish, they moved the ball. It was never about themselves, it was always about sacrificing for the greater good of the team."
Upon getting back to the Academy, Clarke sat down and went through his debriefing process. There, the lightbulb went off above his head.
"I was writing my plan notes up," Clarke says. "That's when I wrote: 'This guy's as good as anyone in the world.'"
There was a bit of a drawback to Giddey focusing so much of his life on basketball — he's the first person to admit that an education was never exactly his number one priority. He "hated" school as he got older, he says, with homework being a particularly big thorn in his side. He could be playing basketball or footy, he could be outside, he could be on his PlayStation with his favorite game, Grand Theft Auto V. Why, then, would he worry about something as silly as math or science?
The good news was Kim and Warrick weren't exactly helicopter parents.
"We just thought, as long as he's passing, we're happy, we just want him to pass," Kim says with a smile.
When it came time to figure out what he wanted to do once he was finished with the Global Academy, two paths opened up. One involved coming to America, playing college basketball, and spending a few years at a university. Like plenty of folks who make the trip to Boulder for one reason or another, Giddey fell in love with the University of Colorado, to the point that he was "99 percent locked in after my visit" to playing basketball in the Pac-12.
Upon returning to Australia, though, he realized that the biggest con of playing college ball outweighed all of the various pros.
"NCAA Division 1, it was a lifelong dream of mine, growing up, to play in Division 1 college, and then you have coaches that are working with you every day to develop you. Whereas in the pros, coaches are playing for their job, essentially. They've got to win to keep their job. In colleges, there's coaches trying to develop you, and there's all that side of things.
"But there's also the education part, which was probably a down factor for me, because I hated school," Giddey continues. "I really disliked it. And college, the thought of studying and practicing didn't sit well with me."
Behind door number two was the Next Stars Program. Launched in 2018 by Australia's National Basketball League to try and provide a pathway for young talent to professional basketball, Giddey was given the chance to become the first Australian player to go through the program.
Jeremy Loeliger, the commissioner of the National Basketball League, admits that the league had Giddey pegged as a potential Next Stars player for some time. He wasn't, however, the first Australian approached for a spot. Josh Green, now of the Dallas Mavericks, opted to head to the University of Arizona instead of the NBL, while Mojave King signed a Next Stars contract the same day as Giddey.
The program was not necessarily created as a way to develop a homegrown star who made the jump to the NBA. As Loeliger tells it, the seeds for Next Stars were planted while Terrance Ferguson, in 2016, opted to sign a professional contract with the Adelaide 36ers instead of playing college ball. While not a Next Stars player himself, the general concept of a player like Ferguson coming through the league presented an opportunity.
The logic: If young, talented basketball players come to Australia and get prepared for life as a professional athletes, the league grows in recognition, which leads to more eyeballs, which leads to more talent coming, which led to a cycle forming and growing a little more each time.
And eventually, Loeliger says, "it was really going to provide us with an opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of the young Australian and New Zealand talent coming through the league."
Basketball is gigantic at the grassroots level in Australia. While it does not quite reach the level of Aussie Rules among the general populace, both Giddey and Loeliger stress that it's growing rapidly, in part due to the fact that there are a number of Australians playing in the NBA right now. Next Stars, to that end, plays a role in capturing the attention of kids who see their domestic league as a place that they can use as a springboard to nationwide popularity.
"One of the big problems we've had historically is that when you get to 14, 15, and 16 years of age, if you were a seriously talented athlete, the natural progression was to go into one of the football codes," Loeliger says. "We want to, at the very least, make that decision a lot harder for them and make them well and truly that you can play professional basketball in Australia, make a good living, and go on to stratospheric heights."
The challenge is in keeping kids on the basketball track as they get older instead of bailing to play sports that are more ingrained in the Australian culture, whether it be one of the aforementioned football codes (i.e., sports like Aussie rules and rugby) or otherwise. But in its first year, Next Stars brought in Brian Bowen Jr., a five-star recruit and McDonald's All-American who missed out on college ball due to his implication in Louisville’s recent NCAA troubles. In its second, R.J. Hampton picked the NBL over heading to college, and LaMelo Ball opted to spend a year in the program.
From an attention perspective, Ball and Hampton were damn near the best things that could have happened for a brand new program looking to establish itself as a viable pathway for top talent. While there were practical reasons for Giddey to sign a Next Stars contract — Warrick pointed out that, if he went to college, he'd have nine months between the end of his schooling and the start of the college basketball season, while Next Stars gave him a chance to be in a professional environment right away — the proof of concept is there, too, along with plenty of institutional support, at home in a country that wanted to see him succeed, from coaches down to fans.
The basketball world was a little bit sidetracked at the time, but about 2.5 hours after the NBA announced it was suspending its season following Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell's positive COVID-19 tests, the NBL announced that Giddey signed a professional contract with the 36ers. While he expected he'd need to fulfill both years of the contract he signed to get himself ready, a press release made clear he had aspirations of playing in the U.S.
"Obviously the NBA is my goal," he said at the time, "and I believe that playing in the NBL is the best pathway for me to get there.”
This guy’s as good as anyone in the world."
Two things stuck out about Giddey's first NBL game. First, it took place at home, in front of a sold-out crowd, against Melbourne United. It was his favorite squad as a kid, the one that has his father's No. 6 flying high in the rafters in their arena, the one for which his mother played. The second, well ...
"We got smashed," Giddey says of the 89-65 loss. "We got flogged that game. But my first professional game, to be out there, it was good to get the nerves out and get the rust off. Definitely something that I'll never forget, but I'd like to forget it, because we did get beat pretty bad."
The ability to adapt that Clarke praised so effusively took exactly one game to rear its head. Part of the reason, his father says, that Giddey even joined Adelaide was the fact that he was going to have the chance to play, and that the team's coach, Conner Henry, would not have to worry about an edict from the very top to win games that could jeopardize giving a youngster the opportunity to play through mistakes.
As a result, the ball got put in Giddey's hands in the waning moments of regulation during the team's second game of the season, against the South East Melbourne Phoenix. It went poorly (well, in that moment) — his layup attempt was blocked — but the team went on to win in double overtime, with Giddey leading the team in assists and rebounds. Having that trust from his coaches and his teammates stuck with Giddey, who believes, in retrospect, that it was around this time his confidence took another leap. This was critical due to the sheer nature of being an ultra-hyped 18-year-old in a professional basketball league that prides itself on toughness.
"The physical nature play definitely is a step up, what you're allowed to do," Clarke says of the NBL. "The other thing is, men don't like a young guy – not anywhere, but certainly not in Australia, where we have a thing called the tall poppy syndrome. If you project yourself as being better than other people, people are trying to knock you down. Not necessarily a great thing, but certainly a great learning thing, if you're emotionally ready for what's about to happen to you. And again, that was one of the things. Josh is a very emotionally mature person, so he dealt with all those things."
Success begets attention. Between what he did on the court (Giddey averaged 10.9 points, 7.5 assists, and 7.4 rebounds in 32.1 minutes per game), the various age-based accolades he received (youngest person to play for Australia's national team since Ben Simmons, youngest player to record a triple-double in NBL history, being named the league's Rookie of the Year), and the rising buzz of his NBA Draft prospects, it did not take long for that attention to come his way.
"Before this season in the NBL, only hardcore basketball fans knew the name Josh Giddey," Loeliger says. "After this season in the NBL — or in fact, during the season in the NBL — he became the biggest name in sport in Adelaide, which is a football-dominated city. But it was Josh Giddey in the headlines every other week."
Giddey's natural inclination is to take everything in stride. When asked when the last time he was nervous, just generally, he thought hard then said — "I have gotten nervous before," he says with the hurried tone in his voice as a person trying to remember in real-time if they've seen a certain movie. Playing professional basketball is the thing he's always wanted, and he understands with that comes a certain level of attention and scrutiny.
"Whether there's a lot of pressure, or there's people saying this or that, it's not going to affect me," Giddey says. "It's about staying internal and not letting all the noise around you get to your head. So, you're right, there is certainly a lot of pressure because it's the people talking, it's Australia, I'm the first one to take this kind of pathway. And it's being a player in the Boomers at 18 years old. There's obviously a lot of expectations and talk about it, but it doesn't really get to me and I just block out all that outside noise."
Later this week, an NBA team is going to make the decision to bring Josh Giddey into their franchise. It will mark the highest point of a year-long roller coaster for the entire Giddey family — if we could go back in time 365 days, we'd be greeted by a skinny 17-year-old kid who would think our assurances that he'll go in the Lottery of the 2021 NBA Draft were absurd.
Perpetually confident in his own abilities, Giddey concedes that the game has slowed down for him in the last year. That professional experience was invaluable, both in helping him get used to the rigors of being a professional basketball player and in helping him tap into the inherent abilities he possesses. He believes that being able to read the game at a certain level cannot be something that is taught. You must be born with a brain wired in this very specific way.
"It's more like a feel for the game and an IQ, where I can see things happen before they actually happen," Giddey says. "So I can tell if a cut is going to be there before they actually get there. I can tell the pass before the pass is made. That's an advantage for me, because as a bigger guy, I can read defenses, I can see over defenses. But at the start, I wasn't doing it, because I was so frantic and going at full pace all the time. I couldn't do it. Then my coach has just said, 'Josh, just slow down.' That's where I've taken off, because I don't play rushed anymore. I'm always level-headed. I'm playing at my own pace, so that's what allows me to do that."
That metronomic quality is what makes him special and such a fascinating player to watch. NBA senior director of international operations Chris Ebersole posits that watching Giddey once or twice doesn't always do his game justice, and that the more a person watches, the more they begin to get a sense of "just how common he makes those really hard things look."
Playmaking, in particular, is where he shines. "I love to pass," he says, "it's my favorite thing to do on the court." As a 6'7 point guard who is comfortable playing off the ball, that ability to create opportunities for others, he believes, will stick out as the game has becoming more and more positionless.
He's the second very tall point guard in as many years to try and make the jump from the NBL's Next Stars program to the NBA Draft, although comparing him to the reigning Rookie of the Year is a bit off-base, in large part because Giddey himself isn't going to do it.
"He's not spending time cogitating on, 'I'm the next LaMelo Ball,'" Loeliger says. "He's just, 'No, I'm Josh Giddey. I've always been Josh Giddey. I'm going to always be Josh Giddey.'"
Warrick wants him to go to the kind of NBA team that will appreciate this skill set, one that won't ask him to take them to the promised land from day one and be a "30-point, 15-rebound type of bloke." Kim says both herself and Warrick haven't even gotten a chance to really get their heads around their son's NBA career, so they're turning to two of their longtime friends, Dave and Julie Simmons (you have, assuredly, heard of their son, he plays for the Sixers), for advice on what life is like as NBA parents.
As for Josh, the most important thing to him is going to the right spot. Going at the top of the Draft would be nice, sure, but if the best thing for his career would be to fall to 30, a team that would let him play in a system that accentuates his skills, he's happy.
"If I have the opportunity to play for a team later in the Draft, then I'd much rather go there than if I go to pick three and they don't maybe see me as a guy being able to make an impact straight away," Giddey says. "I think the maturity part comes from playing with grown men at such an early age. You're around them every day, you learn professional habits and stuff like that."
When Adam Silver steps to the stage on Thursday night and eventually reads his name off of an envelope, Giddey will experience the biggest moment of his life, the culmination of years of work and the end point of the craziest year of his life. No matter where he goes, Giddey has confidence in his ability, the way he was shaped by path he traveled, and the fact that he's buoyed by the support of basketball fans from back home.
He's positive things will work out, even if life in the NBA means he probably won't need to go door-to-door with his lawnmower again any time soon.
AUSSIE RULES
HOW JOSH GIDDEY BECAME A SURPRISE NBA LOTTERY PICK
Creative Direction: Martin Rickman Design: Daisy James & Ralph Ordaz
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I’ve always been Josh Giddey.
I’m going to always be Josh Giddey."
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by BILL DIFILIPPO // ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Creative Direction: Martin Rickman Design: Daisy James & Ralph Ordaz
Creative Direction: Martin Rickman Design: Daisy James & Ralph Ordaz
Creative Direction: Martin Rickman Design: Daisy James & Ralph Ordaz
by BILL DIFILIPPO // ASSOCIATE EDITOR
by BILL DIFILIPPO // ASSOCIATE EDITOR
by BILL DIFILIPPO // ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Creative Direction: Martin Rickman Design: Daisy James & Ralph Ordaz
Creative Direction: Martin Rickman Design: Daisy James & Ralph Ordaz