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Isaiah Stewart Athletic article
Neighbor2972
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He’s powerful, versatile, head-strong and thoughtful, all of which is why Isaiah Stewart ended up at Washington
SEATTLE — Isaiah Stewart wears Crocs.
Not by accident. Not because he couldn’t locate a pair of slides or flip-flops, not because someone dared him to appear in public with lubberly rubber gondolas on his size 16 feet. This is a choice. This is a strategy. Stewart likes fashion, which means he likes to wear nice shoes from time to time, and nice shoes tend to be narrow. And in narrow shoes, his toes fall asleep. When he mentioned this to Washington’s athletic training staff, they suggested a specific countermeasure. Something with a little more room and cushion, to let those tingly doggies breathe. The pair of gray Crocs he’s sporting, then, were a conscious selection recommended by adult professionals with full grasp of their faculties.
And Stewart likes them. Easy to slip on, easy to slip off. Plus, you can plug little shoe charms in the holes. Cartoon characters, emoji faces, whatever — the freshman big man wants a few of those. His Crocs are currently charmless. “Yeah, I know,” he concedes, looking at the termini of steel pipe legs stretched out in Alaska Airlines Arena. “I didn’t get into that yet. My Croc game is at Level 1 right now.”
The former consensus No. 3 recruit in the nation is here, clear across the continent from home, far away from places where a lot of people assumed he’d be, for a pretty uncomplicated reason: Isaiah Stewart knows what he wants. He also has clarity on what he doesn’t want, and a blast-proof wall separates one category from the other. He wants to play for a program that’s a little more ravenous than others, with and for people he likes and trusts, and he wants to make everyone around him better so he can put himself in the best possible position to make a lucrative living in the sport and beyond it. He does not want to be around negativity or people he doesn’t like or people he suspects might prey on his future. It does not take long to understand that the shoe fits Isaiah Stewart, and not the other way around.
Not all 18-year-olds think this thoroughly. Not even all 18-year-olds who are five-star prospects think like this. Of course, not all 18-year-olds of any kind are 6-9 and 250 pounds with preposterous strength, boundless energy and an emerging knack for hitting guarded face-up 3-pointers. Stewart has adjudged himself to be somebody who’s worth a lot in a lot of ways. But when he explains why he thinks like this, when he explains where he has come from and where he’s coming from, he sounds calculating but not all that cynical. He’s just decided what makes the most sense. It’s tough to argue with where that leads anyone.
“I didn’t really have a problem with being different,” Stewart says. “Some people were questioning it, saying, Why am I going to Washington? What is Washington? And I didn’t care much at all. If I work hard, do what I got to do and win games for everybody here, I’ll be perfectly fine. A lot of schools have fake brotherhoods and a fake family atmosphere. I felt this one was a real family atmosphere. I could just tell — they’re just really genuine people and want you to come here because it’s a great school and I’ll have a great opportunity.”
One day earlier, enough professional scouts are on hand to watch Washington practice that team staffers scurry to locate extra chairs to accommodate the crowd. Judging by this, Stewart is not anywhere near over-ambitious in how he views himself and what’s to come. These scouts are not here entirely for him, not with fellow uber-talent Jaden McDaniels in the room as well, but they are here in large part for him. It could be a burdensome scene. It isn’t, based on what happens in the ensuing two-plus hours. It isn’t, based on Stewart’s belief that being himself will be more than enough.
He’s the one almost bouncing out of the Huskies’ active stretch routine, with head bobs and knee bends and leg kicks so animated and exaggerated that you might assume Stewart is another puerile teen taking the piss out of someone. He’s not. He’s kinetic because he’s out there, period, an assessment underscored by the practice itself. Unofficially, it seems as if Stewart gets at least one mitt on every rebound. He stays on his feet for shot fakes. He moves fluidly from end to end. When he’s mismatched in the blocks against fellow freshman Marcus Tsohonis, who’s giving up six inches and about 80 pounds, Stewart more or less discards Tsohonis with one arm and sends him to the floor. “It’s like, if he wants to move you, he basically will,” junior Naz Carter says. “He just goes out there and competes. He doesn’t want anything given to him. He tries to earn it.”
And he hits those 3s. From the corner, from the top of the key, all during live-action periods with a defender closing out. The form is good. The makes are no flukes. Stewart even rattles off more in a post-practice shooting session with assistant coach Dave Rice. He guesses he never even attempted a jump shot until his junior year at McQuad Jesuit High in Rochester, N.Y. He says the mechanics in the early days of his shot involved pulling the ball across his body and then releasing it, before one of his grassroots coaches advised him to alter his pocket and then worked with Stewart to do so. Now, it looks like a jumper should look. Now, a 6-9 marble sculpture laments that he hasn’t completed the “Ray Allen Drill,” in which a participant has to make consecutive 3s from five spots around the arc, and then back again, in less than two minutes. He made it back to the wing once, let the positive thoughts enter his brain and immediately started bricking shots. “I definitely have to beat that drill,” Stewart says.
SEATTLE — Isaiah Stewart wears Crocs.
Not by accident. Not because he couldn’t locate a pair of slides or flip-flops, not because someone dared him to appear in public with lubberly rubber gondolas on his size 16 feet. This is a choice. This is a strategy. Stewart likes fashion, which means he likes to wear nice shoes from time to time, and nice shoes tend to be narrow. And in narrow shoes, his toes fall asleep. When he mentioned this to Washington’s athletic training staff, they suggested a specific countermeasure. Something with a little more room and cushion, to let those tingly doggies breathe. The pair of gray Crocs he’s sporting, then, were a conscious selection recommended by adult professionals with full grasp of their faculties.
And Stewart likes them. Easy to slip on, easy to slip off. Plus, you can plug little shoe charms in the holes. Cartoon characters, emoji faces, whatever — the freshman big man wants a few of those. His Crocs are currently charmless. “Yeah, I know,” he concedes, looking at the termini of steel pipe legs stretched out in Alaska Airlines Arena. “I didn’t get into that yet. My Croc game is at Level 1 right now.”
The former consensus No. 3 recruit in the nation is here, clear across the continent from home, far away from places where a lot of people assumed he’d be, for a pretty uncomplicated reason: Isaiah Stewart knows what he wants. He also has clarity on what he doesn’t want, and a blast-proof wall separates one category from the other. He wants to play for a program that’s a little more ravenous than others, with and for people he likes and trusts, and he wants to make everyone around him better so he can put himself in the best possible position to make a lucrative living in the sport and beyond it. He does not want to be around negativity or people he doesn’t like or people he suspects might prey on his future. It does not take long to understand that the shoe fits Isaiah Stewart, and not the other way around.
Not all 18-year-olds think this thoroughly. Not even all 18-year-olds who are five-star prospects think like this. Of course, not all 18-year-olds of any kind are 6-9 and 250 pounds with preposterous strength, boundless energy and an emerging knack for hitting guarded face-up 3-pointers. Stewart has adjudged himself to be somebody who’s worth a lot in a lot of ways. But when he explains why he thinks like this, when he explains where he has come from and where he’s coming from, he sounds calculating but not all that cynical. He’s just decided what makes the most sense. It’s tough to argue with where that leads anyone.
“I didn’t really have a problem with being different,” Stewart says. “Some people were questioning it, saying, Why am I going to Washington? What is Washington? And I didn’t care much at all. If I work hard, do what I got to do and win games for everybody here, I’ll be perfectly fine. A lot of schools have fake brotherhoods and a fake family atmosphere. I felt this one was a real family atmosphere. I could just tell — they’re just really genuine people and want you to come here because it’s a great school and I’ll have a great opportunity.”
One day earlier, enough professional scouts are on hand to watch Washington practice that team staffers scurry to locate extra chairs to accommodate the crowd. Judging by this, Stewart is not anywhere near over-ambitious in how he views himself and what’s to come. These scouts are not here entirely for him, not with fellow uber-talent Jaden McDaniels in the room as well, but they are here in large part for him. It could be a burdensome scene. It isn’t, based on what happens in the ensuing two-plus hours. It isn’t, based on Stewart’s belief that being himself will be more than enough.
He’s the one almost bouncing out of the Huskies’ active stretch routine, with head bobs and knee bends and leg kicks so animated and exaggerated that you might assume Stewart is another puerile teen taking the piss out of someone. He’s not. He’s kinetic because he’s out there, period, an assessment underscored by the practice itself. Unofficially, it seems as if Stewart gets at least one mitt on every rebound. He stays on his feet for shot fakes. He moves fluidly from end to end. When he’s mismatched in the blocks against fellow freshman Marcus Tsohonis, who’s giving up six inches and about 80 pounds, Stewart more or less discards Tsohonis with one arm and sends him to the floor. “It’s like, if he wants to move you, he basically will,” junior Naz Carter says. “He just goes out there and competes. He doesn’t want anything given to him. He tries to earn it.”
And he hits those 3s. From the corner, from the top of the key, all during live-action periods with a defender closing out. The form is good. The makes are no flukes. Stewart even rattles off more in a post-practice shooting session with assistant coach Dave Rice. He guesses he never even attempted a jump shot until his junior year at McQuad Jesuit High in Rochester, N.Y. He says the mechanics in the early days of his shot involved pulling the ball across his body and then releasing it, before one of his grassroots coaches advised him to alter his pocket and then worked with Stewart to do so. Now, it looks like a jumper should look. Now, a 6-9 marble sculpture laments that he hasn’t completed the “Ray Allen Drill,” in which a participant has to make consecutive 3s from five spots around the arc, and then back again, in less than two minutes. He made it back to the wing once, let the positive thoughts enter his brain and immediately started bricking shots. “I definitely have to beat that drill,” Stewart says.
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Freshmen such as Stewart can be a poison or an elixir in that way. For now, the evidence says he’s more the latter. Stewart grew up without deep pockets but with a responsibility to hold up his end. He made his bed every day before he left for school. He swept the house. He learned to do laundry by age 10, he guesses, which became a weekend ritual; if Stewart felt like laying in bed or playing video games and the whir of dirty clothes soaking in a machine wasn’t audible when his father, Dela, woke up, this was a problem. He’d soon hear Dela yell out: I don’t hear no washer going.
“Chores weren’t even chores,” as Stewart puts it. The discipline and humility were routine and ordinary; see something out of order or on the ground, and, well, you pick it up and put it where it belongs. It might explain why Stewart has a keen understanding of his place and how it might affect a group at large. “I suppose the way to describe it is that there’s nothing really to describe,” senior center Sam Timmins says. “He does a really good job of just blending in and being part of the team. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing he has to do to try and be like, OK, I’m this high-profile player, so I need to do these specific things to fit in. He just acts himself.”
In practice, it’s a handshake to redshirt freshman Nate Roberts and a pat on the backside for junior Hameir Wright for nothing more than the sake of doling out handshakes and pats to the rear. At the 50th birthday gathering for Hopkins, it’s Stewart stepping out of the line for food so Hopkins’ wife, Tricia, could help herself before him. During the recruiting process, it was apparently Stewart asking Hopkins what would happen to a certain player on the roster if Stewart committed to Washington and, ostensibly, gobbled up all the available floor time for that player.
Hopkins replied that the two players were hard workers and would grow close, and Stewart pushing the player daily would help prep that player for a bigger role when Stewart departs. “He would never come across as, I’m different than anybody else, or I’m better than anybody else,” Hopkins says. “Isaiah is empathetic. Who asks that question? Who would ever ask that question? Tell me one top player that would ask that question.”
Not that Stewart has valid reason to be a squeaky wheel anyway. His relationship with Hopkins dates to middle school and early high school, when the Huskies coach was still Jim Boeheim’s top lieutenant at Syracuse. During Stewart’s final prep season at vaunted La Lumiere School in northwest Indiana, Hopkins kited in for some face time with a prized recruit. (“Sometimes I worry about his health, because he’s doing a lot of crazy stuff,” Stewart says.) It turned out Stewart had about five minutes to chat post-practice before he had to leave to catch a flight to a camp. Nevertheless, Hopkins ran up and hugged Stewart as soon as he could. Those five minutes were time enough to leave an impression, to underscore Washington’s overarching sales pitch about being hungrier than everyone else pursuing him.
So if it’s longstanding trust Stewart is after, then he can’t plausibly complain about the choice he made in his college coach. Nor can he plausibly complain about what that college coach has in mind for him. Washington’s philosophy ultimately is tailored to his skill set. Long before Stewart signed, the Huskies staff figured it had a shot due to a proven template of playing inside-out through forwards who both score and distribute. That was how it was with former Washington post star Noah Dickerson, who had usage rates of 26.8 percent and 25.8 percent in his two seasons with Hopkins after using 17.4 and 21.1 percent of possessions in two campaigns before Hopkins arrived.
Predictably, the coaches pushed the 39 touches Dickerson had in an upset win over Kansas in 2017 as a primary case in point. It all but became a program hashtag, precisely targeted at one individual. No other situation would offer fewer basketball variables than Washington’s. “How many people really play inside-out anymore?” Hopkins says. “We will go to you.”
The argument took hold. Stewart is confident he can score on the block. He’s also confident he’ll draw multiple defenders while down there, but he takes care to emphasize his willingness to distribute from there either way. “If they’re going to double me and then go away,” he says, “I’m going to keep taking my time, play with it, and then it gets my teammates open.” Lip service, this is not; at one point in that aforementioned practice, Stewart receives the ball in the post without a second defender en route, patiently surveys the scene over his left shoulder, then drops a nifty feed to a cutting Carter for an easy score at the rim.
It’s one moment of hundreds or thousands in a preseason, yet it underscores a singular dynamic at Washington: The program can be all about a one-and-done freshman this season and that can make everyone better for it. Stewart’s skill set and apparently precocious capacity for balancing self-interest and selflessness allow it to happen without getting anyone upset. Maybe that might have happened elsewhere too. Stewart can’t say. He says he started to hear coaches make a case against Washington more than they were making cases for their own programs, railing against the lack of visibility at a Pac-12 school and other perceived shortcomings. It was not the best tack. It seemed a bit disingenuous and mean-spirited, and that is a bad way to seem to Isaiah Stewart. So those voices began to sound distant and fade, like how all the noise in the room runs away from someone’s ears just before he’s about to faint.
Where others allegedly saw problems, Stewart saw holistic opportunity to execute a plan he had for himself, for the near- and long-term. He saw a chance he didn’t want to pass on. “People were telling me, don’t choose Washington, you’re not going to be successful,” he says. “I’m like, not successful? As long as I work hard and continue to do what I do, like, why wouldn’t I be able to be successful? For me it definitely sparked a fire. It made me love Washington even more.”
They hadn’t said a word to each other at that point, but this was the beginning of their conversation. “He worked hard every moment of that practice even as others took some plays off,” Jassy says in an email to The Athletic. “He was the last one to leave the court. You could see he had that burning desire.”
Maybe not the most innovative description, but his point is taken. Stewart looks like someone who gives you a lot to work with. Then you talk to him. And then you realize, as Jassy did, that there may be more there than you assume. You realize Stewart is always after the next answer.
Washington has taken advantage of its location, creating mentoring relationships between its basketball players and leaders from some of Seattle’s many lodestar companies. A week before my visit, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson stopped by to speak to the group, on top of his mentor connection with sophomore guard Jamal Bey. The program matches players and professionals based on career interests, but the goal is more broadly to educate the players on skills they can use in life inside and outside of basketball. Basically, the Huskies get a sounding board they otherwise would never have, to imbue them with perspective that not a ton of people often get. For Stewart, this was something like manna. He wants basketball to lead to better things in every sense, naturally. That is not an unusual objective. More notable is that, even at 18, he’s trying to position himself to properly manage all that exists on the periphery of basketball, to give meaningful thought to what he can do now in order to create a fixed future on and off the court.
Maybe it’s real estate. Maybe it’s owning food franchises. Maybe it’s harkening back to the days of buying and flipping shoes and building upon his own fashion sense in some way. Maybe it’s diving deep into a community to offer help that his basketball profile permits him to offer. Maybe it’s all of that. Ask Stewart to identify people who have impacted his life and worldview beyond parents and coaches, and he invokes Shaquille O’Neal and LeBron James, both of whom used a game to create universes. It’s almost ludicrous in its ambition. But it can’t be accomplished without ambition either. “You always have to have a backup plan,” Stewart says. “For me, right now basketball is everything. I want to be a pro. I want to make it at that level, not just get there. But after that, I definitely have a feel for what I want to do when the ball goes flat.”
The relationship with Jassy, then, is another one of those things that makes sense to Stewart, and as such he wrings as much out of it as possible. The two meet about once a month, for a meal on campus. They share occasional text messages in between. And Stewart asks questions. Lots of questions. “Really good questions,” Jassy says. He has asked about the beginnings of Amazon Web Services and how the team’s vision essentially encouraged making that vision a reality. He has asked Jassy how his relationships with friends and family have evolved as the business grew. They’ve talked about general work skills for young people and exchanged book recommendations. “He’s a deep, curious, observant thinker,” Jassy says. “He’s comfortable in his skin and willing to trust and invest in relationships.”
Cautiously, anyway. Suspiciously, even. “On my way to bigger stages and places in life, I’ve had to cut people off and stop talking to certain people,” Stewart says. “Because I’d start to see changes.” It’s why he asked Jassy how success may or may not changed those around him, but it also goes to the long game of honing his focus and eliminating obstacles or distractions. That’s not necessarily an easy task at 18 or 28 or 38. And yet Stewart is at Washington at least in part because he’s conscious of sound-proofing his mind against that insidious, ever-ubiquitous concept of noise.
That process continues each time a potential future millionaire sits down with a current millionaire to chat. “He asked me about whether I knew (Amazon Web Services) would be successful when we first started working on it,” Jassy says in the email. “I said that we all hoped, but had no idea. I shared some of the doubts that we had as a team, and the doubts some of us individually had. Coupled with a lot of skepticism from other internal and external folks, we felt like there was a time when we were wasting considerable energy angsting about whether we’d succeed. We came to the conclusion, which seems obvious now but wasn’t to us back then, that we needed to stop listening to all the noise and to control what we could control — which turns out to be a lot. You can always control your work ethic, your energy, your enthusiasm, your zeal to invent, listening to customers and what they want, and your focus.”
Stewart’s focus, limited to what’s next on this particular afternoon, is using those Croc-snuggled feet to march upstairs to the practice gym and fire off another round of shots on a nominal off-day. He can view the world and what’s to come through a wide-angle lens, but the picture gets distorted or deleted without precious intent in the present. Auspiciously for Washington, Stewart’s mind is open but not wandering. He knows what’s best for him but he also knows he must turn that into the best for everyone around him too. Of all his many plans, the one he has to manage, that might be the most basic.
“I know I’m going to be the hardest working freshman in the country,” Stewart says. “To me, no other player is going to outwork me. I know if I play hard, everything else will fall into place.”
One of his favorite parts about Washington, appropriately enough, is the view. Most days he walks past iconic Drumheller Fountain on campus and takes in the Rainier Vista, and he pleads guilty to applying an almost corny symbolism to what he sees before him. Maybe it’s the forthcoming lift, or practice, or whatever. It reminds him of some sort of obstacle he needs to get by. So he thinks about climbing over it. Or just going through it. Just about every day, really, Isaiah Stewart thinks about moving mountains.