A year after a misstep marred his UConn debut, James Bouknight is primed for next-level stardom

Sooner or later, as the course of the pandemic allows, the lights will go on and James Bouknight will stand in the glare. The NBA’s talent evaluators will be watching, listening. Opposing coaches will be looking for a sign of vulnerability for their relentless defenders to exploit.

Bouknight, 20, is ready for all this, he and everyone around him is certain about that. He’s bigger, stronger, wiser and more sure of himself as his sophomore season dawns at UConn.

“My confidence is at an all-time high,” Bouknight says. “I feel like I have different abilities. I’ve been working on my game all summer, getting stronger, faster, more explosive. I’m the closest with my teammates that I’ve ever been, I feel like we’re in a good space right now, and I’m in a good space.”

Good space was far from the place one would have found Bouknight a year ago, as his freshman season with Dan Hurley’s UConn men’s basketball team was approaching. Oh, he had come in with high expectations, and earned high praise for his skills then, too.

But in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2019, Bouknight left a get-together on campus, jumped behind the wheel of someone else’s Audi sedan and made a series of bad decisions, all well chronicled later, because that comes with playing for UConn.

After hitting a road sign in Storrs Center, he ran from police. He was later charged with evading responsibility, interfering with a police officer, traveling too fast for conditions and operation of a motor vehicle without a license. Coach Dan Hurley suspended Bouknight after the incident became public.

“He was aware,” says Maurice Clarett, the former college football star whose own career was derailed by off-field troubles. “Listen, you know when you do stupid crap. He was like, ‘man, I did this. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m going to mess up my opportunity.’ The thing is, when you do bonehead stuff, you don’t expect to get caught. When you get caught, you’re like, ‘man I shouldn’t have done it.’ But you have to own it. That’s how you get through it. To be free, you have to own stuff.”

Clarett, 37, who had told the Huskies his story a few months earlier as part of a summer lecture series Hurley had arranged, became a consultant for the program and took a special interest in Bouknight.

“I love the dude,” he says. “We can make a moment bigger than it is, if we let it define us. You hold yourself accountable and then you move on.

Bouknight had support around him. His mother, Patty Leo, and father John Bouknight and his immediate family back in Brooklyn; his older teammates at UConn, like Christian Vital and Alterique Gilbert, who admonished him to “stay in the fight;” his prep school coach, Jacque Rivera, and his AAU coaches in New York. “There’s a support system that wraps itself around your life when you need it most,” Rivera says.

Hurley, who has described himself as “a mess” as a young college player in the early 1990s, took on the challenge of putting Bouknight’s basketball dreams back on the rails with his mix of empathy and tough love.

“Credit the growth to Coach Hurley,” Rivera says. “For taking his hand and walking him through this entire process is the transition of taking somebody from a boy to a man.”

On Nov. 18, 2019, Bouknight, with his attorney, Rob Britt, appeared in Rockville Superior Court, where he was accepted into the accelerated rehabilitation program, agreeing to pay for the damage caused in the incident.

“I’m extremely sorry for what happened,” Bouknight told reporters in the lobby when the process was finished. “I’m learning from this. I’m learning I need to be the student, best athlete, best citizen I can be.”

One year later, with no further trouble, Bouknight completed the requirements of the accelerated rehabilitation program and the case was dismissed.

“Coming in here as a super-talented freshman,” Hurley says, “but not quite at the maturity level, his maturity level and development as an individual has been really, really, impressive.”

Making a splash

Three days after Bouknight left the courtroom, Hurley lifted the suspension, which covered the first three games of the season, putting him on the court for the first time against Buffalo at the Charleston Classic on Nov. 21. He had eight points and six rebounds, showing the first flashes of ability that would become a big factor later in the season.

“Last year, it was more of a learning process for me,” Bouknight says. “I was trying to learn from the older guys, what you need to do to be a good player in college, how you need to come to practice every day, learning from Alterique, from Christian, from Zay [Isaiah Whaley].”

Bouknight, 6-foot-5, who grew up in Brooklyn, had played at La Salle Academy in Manhattan for two years, then moved on to MacDuffie School in Granby, Mass., to play top-level prep competition for Rivera, who has since moved to Woodstock Academy.

“You’ve never heard one of his teammates say anything bad about him,” Rivera says. “He’s unbelievably selfless. He talks about we, never says ‘I.’ You watch him on the bench you say, ‘hmm, I really can’t read him, what’s his deal,’ and yet he is one of the most kind-hearted people you will meet. He reaches out. One of the nicest people in the world."

Loyalty matters to him. When Bouknight was out with a knee injury, many coaches who had been recruiting him dropped off. UConn’s coaches stayed on him, and that made the difference when he made his college choice in September 2018.

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After scoring 55 points in his first four games for UConn, Bouknight was learning the value Hurley placed on defense and ball security. If he got lax, careless, he sat. Often, he got into foul trouble. Bouknight scored two points vs. Iona, and did not score against Indiana at Madison Square Garden, turning it over three times. A tentativeness was apparent.

After scoring 55 points in his first four games for UConn, Bouknight was learning the value Hurley placed on defense and ball security. If he got lax, careless, he sat. Often, he got into foul trouble. Bouknight scored two points vs. Iona, and did not score against Indiana at Madison Square Garden, turning it over three times. A tentativeness was apparent.

“You come in as a freshman,” Clarett says, “and you’re coming into a team that has been defined by others. You may be more talented, but you don’t want to disrupt things immediately.”

Bouknight got his first start on Jan. 13 against Wichita State, after Tyler Polley was lost for the season with a knee injury. The Huskies were evolving, injuries forcing Hurley to make some changes, under-performance by older players prompting others.

Bouknight and Vital, freshman and senior, who came out of the same AAU program in New York, formed an unlikely, productive duo as the Huskies began to click, winning nine of their last 12 games. Bouknight averaged 15.5 points and 5.1 rebounds after becoming a starter, and moved his profile up several notches with a dunk at East Carolina, reaching far behind him in midair with his right hand and crashing the ball through the rim with a long arc. He had 19 points, 10 rebounds and four assists in that game.

How far UConn (19-12) might have gone had the American Athletic Conference tournament not been canceled due to the pandemic, we will not know. But Bouknight, already appearing on some NBA Draft boards, cited unfinished business and quickly made it known he was coming back to UConn.

“It was always my plan to stay for two years,” Bouknight says, “and I wanted to come back and play with R.J. Cole and Jalen [Gaffney] again. This year, I came in with a different type of mindset, a goal to just help the team win, do whatever I need to do to help the team win. If that’s being a vocal leader, then so be it. So now, it’s more of teaching thing instead of a learning thing, teaching the new guys last year that helped me be successful. I just feel like my energy is at an all time high, I don’t know what it is.”

Summer of social distance

With Brooklyn a coronavirus hot spot, Bouknight secured permission to stay on the UConn campus, and he made it into the Werth Family Center, often alone, to work on his game.

“My 3-point shooting and ball-handling,” Bouknight says. “All summer, even during quarantine, I’ve been able to get into the gym, work on my follow-through and ball-handling drills.”

That’s a nod to the next level. “He thrives on taking the ball to the rack to score,” writes Alan Lu of NBAscoutinglive.com. “He also excels at scoring on off-ball motion plays. He will need to improve his jump shot and defense, but he is a solid offensive player who could be a first-round draft pick in 2021.”

NBAdraftroom.com, which currently projects Bouknight No. 22 in its 2021 mock draft, notes that he needed to add strength to his wiry frame. During the spring, UConn hired Mike Rehfeldt from Cincinnati as sports performance director and the Huskies began looking bigger as the weeks wore on. Bouknight says he’s gone from 172 pounds to 195, “with five percent body fat.”

As practices began in October, teammates were seeing a more complete player.

“He’s taken the challenge of being one of those guys who’s trying to shut you down,” Whaley says, “then score at the other end. So he’s taken his game to the next level by added the defensive side to his game.”

NBADraftNet’s mock has had Bouknight as high as No. 14, SI.com at No. 16, others early in the second round. USA Today’s rookiewire has Bouknight at No. 53 on its 60-player board. All these projections mean is that Bouknight is in the conversation, and what he does with the opportunities that come in this threatened 2020-21 season could vault him into lottery pick territory, where no UConn player has risen since Jeremy Lamb and Andre Drummond in 2012.

“He’s got so much game,” Hurley says. “So much skill and so much competitiveness and passion; it’s like he sees where this thing could go for him right now and he is tracking on it, big time.”

‘The moment’s not too big’

As the Huskies move closer to the season, or at least its scheduled start date, and their entry to the Big East, Bouknight is the focal point, and he has taken on the personality commensurate with the biggest star on a team.

As he has grown, Bouknight has made the transition from learning to teaching, especially with freshman Andre Jackson, who comes in with similarly high expectations and may have the task of following Bouknight into the spotlight.

“Every day I’m in contact with him,” Jackson says. “He’s telling me how his freshman year went, different things to look for, really do in practice that can help you. He’s a really good scorer, but also I like the way he can bring a team together. He helps basically everybody on the team. He’s reaching out to the big men, reaching out to the younger guards. He wants to win. I’ve seen that from the first day I stepped on campus, that he wants to win. Everybody knows he’s a good scorer, but not everybody knows the personality and what he brings to the table mentally.”

Whaley sees the changes, too. “I feel like he’s grown a lot," he said. "He used to be just a young kid, trying to look at everything, a freshman trying to do everything a little too perfect and be kind of robotic. Now, he’s in the corner talking with Andre, giving him pointers, he’s even giving us upperclassmen pointers.”

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This is the good space James Bouknight has found, a year removed from a moment when he worried that he had messed it all up. It was a hard lesson, but it may have also hardened him. Hurley predicts Bouknight will be a “marked man” for physical, Big East defensive players, and Bouknight says he looks forward to that challenge.

This is the good space James Bouknight has found, a year removed from a moment when he worried that he had messed it all up. It was a hard lesson, but it may have also hardened him. Hurley predicts Bouknight will be a “marked man” for physical, Big East defensive players, and Bouknight says he looks forward to that challenge.

“You can see he’s got a lot of confidence, he’s asserting himself,” Clarett says. “He knows his role on the team. It’s going to be fun to see that translate for him.”

Bouknight eyes the future with a cold stare, the one Rivera says can be hard to read for those who don’t know him. Hurley believes he knows what Bouknight is looking at, from a good space and enjoying the view.

“He’s actually equipped perfectly for it,” Hurley says. “He looks like a guy who understands the moment that he’s in, and the type of year he’s primed to produce, and what it could do for his life and career. And it doesn’t look like the moment is going to be too big for him. It looks like it’s exactly what he’s always wanted.”

Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com

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