Jamorko Pickett’s phone doesn’t ring while he’s visiting his grandma.
She lives in Chinquapin, North Carolina — a small, rural community where it is near-impossible for cell phones to pick up a signal. When he’s with her, he’s isolated from the outside world.
Except for one time, when his phone suddenly rang. It was July 2017, and Pickett was in-between schools. He had recently decommitted from Ole Miss and was nervously figuring out his next steps only a couple of months before his freshman season was supposed to start. Pickett answered the phone, and Patrick Ewing introduced himself.
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Ewing, the Hall of Fame NBA center, was hired as the head coach of Georgetown’s men’s basketball program two months prior. And he was filling out his 2017-18 roster. Pickett became a four-star recruit after a strong postgraduate season at Massanutten Military Academy in Woodstock, Virginia. His long, 6-foot-9 frame and shooting ability were attributes Ewing was looking for.
It wasn’t a tough sell for Pickett. He was raised in Washington D.C. and Georgetown was one of his dream schools.
Ewing told him he would immediately have a role as a freshman. Pickett ended up becoming a day-one starter despite missing his entire freshman summer session, starting 109 of 119 games during his four-year career. During his senior season, he helped the Hoyas win the Big East championship — the school’s first since 2007— and earn their first NCAA tournament bid since 2015.
Now, he’s in the NBA. The Detroit Pistons signed Pickett to a two-way contract in September after his surprise standout showing at summer league in August. Pickett went undrafted in July, but he started their final three games in Las Vegas and knocked down nine of his 16 attempts from the 3-point line.
“I know I belong here,” Pickett said at the time. “Just always having that mindset of knowing I belong, knowing that I should start. That’s what pushed me when I did have the opportunity to excel.”
The importance of the right coach
Pickett credits one person for putting him on his current path — his head coach at Eastern High School in D.C., Emmanuel Kakulu.
A late-bloomer, Pickett didn’t play his first full season of varsity high school basketball until he was a junior. He was academically ineligible as a sophomore. And he received scant minutes as a freshman at Spingarn, a school steeped in basketball tradition that shuttered at the end of that season.
“His journey is atypical,” Kakulu told the Free Press during a phone interview. “Most guys who get to the NBA are guys who have been playing basketball at a high level for the majority of their career, the majority of their life. They learn this stuff that Jamorko was trying to learn as a junior. Most guys in his category learn this stuff in middle school, and maybe even prior to. He never had any of those opportunities.
“Jamorko, he was never a problem child in the sense that he was going to be running around fighting, or smoking or drinking or any of those things. “Those things didn’t interest him. He was surrounded by those things in the neighborhood that he comes from, but he wasn’t interested in it. But it’s easy to slip through the cracks when people don’t notice you.”
It was Kakulu who taught Pickett about the amount of effort and consistency that success requires. Pickett’s three years at Eastern were a crash course in accountability, leadership and decision-making. He’s thankful for Kakulu’s undying patience and commitment to getting him to where he is now.
“He definitely pushed me the hardest to get focused, not just basketball, and it was just really starting to break those bad habits that I had, and realizing that I’m the one and I’ve got the power to impact and change a lot of people’s lives, not only in my family, but in my community,” Pickett told the Free Press. “It was the base foundation of starting that mindset and instilling that in me.”
‘The best-kept secret in D.C.’
Pickett was born and raised in northeast D.C. His neighborhood was rough, he says, but he credits his tight-knit family for keeping him out of trouble. He grew up playing football with his cousins, then went from 5-8 to 6-4 between eighth and ninth grade. It encouraged him to pursue basketball.
Kakulu was an assistant boys basketball coach at Eastern when he watched Pickett for the first time. Pickett was a freshman at Spingarn, which produced Elgin Baylor and Hall of Fame Pistons guard Dave Bing, among other athletes.
But Pickett rarely got off the bench and when the school closed at the end of the 2012-13 season, Pickett enrolled at Eastern.
His talent was evident from his first week at Eastern. Pickett was big enough to play center, but possessed the shooting and mobility of a guard.
His issues were on the academic side. Pickett had poor study habits and often skipped his classes. Until he got to Eastern, he wasn’t penalized for his lack of effort in the classroom. Kakulu views it as a structural problem with the D.C. school system, as well as a byproduct of problems within the local neighborhoods that students sometimes take to school.
Pickett didn’t have the GPA he needed to be eligible to play basketball as a sophomore. Kakulu saw his poor habits firsthand, as he was also Pickett’s physical education teacher.
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“He wouldn’t do really simple things to improve his grades,” Kakulu, a former point guard at Lincoln University, said. “And I would talk to him about it all the time, like bro, this doesn’t make any sense. You’re getting ready to fail my class for literally no reason. You’re going to fail my class because you won’t do some simple things.
“Before, the only thing that was required of him was to not be a detriment to the class. Not be a goofball. Not be a problem for any of the educators. In his mind, as long as he wasn’t being a problem, he should be fine. Of course that wasn’t the case. And it took time for him to understand that.”
So Pickett hunkered down. He attended his classes. He studied. He completed all of his homework. And by the end of his sophomore year, he had the GPA he needed to play.
The next step was acclimating Pickett with the grind that comes with playing varsity basketball. Before his junior year, he’d never lifted weights, attended a daily study hall or completed a preseason conditioning program.
Kakulu, who was now the head coach, understood that they were asking a lot of Pickett, who now had to find a balance between his commitment to both academics and sports. It wasn’t an immediate transformation. But he and his staff saw flashes of the player and person Pickett would eventually become.
A caterpillar to a butterfly
To get Pickett additional exposure to colleges, Kakulu put together as difficult a schedule as he could during Pickett’s senior season. The team got off to a poor 0-6 start, and he began to fear that he was running out of ways to keep his locker room motivated.
But after their sixth-straight loss, the usually quiet Pickett took the lead. He stood up and dapped up every single player in the locker room and told them everything would be ok.
“I had never seen him do that before,” Kakulu said. “Ever. But he did that, and just that one single action showed me it’s starting to sink in. Because I used to be on his ass about being a leader. I’m like, you’re by far the best player, but you don’t lead. You don’t lead by example. You only want to do it with your game, and that’s not enough. Not if you want to be great.
“The rest of the guys are like you. They haven’t been coached. There’s a lot of stuff that they haven’t learned. The only way that we’re going to get it in a short period of time is if you’re first. You have to be the first one to work out. You have to be the first one in study hall. You have to be the first one in every sprint. You’ve gotta lead by example and with your voice, and they will follow you because they will follow you with everything else.
“He got it in that moment. That was the first time that he had used his voice to lead, and the rest of the season, it was like watching a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. It just kept going up and up and up, and in that regard, the change was drastic.”
Pickett still made mistakes.
For example, Eastern had a big game against Pickett’s now-teammate with the Pistons, Luka Garza, who was then a senior at Maret. There was a school event for seniors on the same day Eastern had their last practice before the game. Kakulu told them to have fun, but be on time for practice.
Some of the other seniors decided to skip practice, operating under the assumption that Kakulu wouldn’t bench his seniors for such an important game. Pickett initially followed his teammates, but eventually changed his mind and showed up to practice — an hour late.
Kakulu held Pickett accountable and benched him during the first half of the game.
“Those experiences helped to bring it home for him that you can’t turn the switch on and off,” Kakulu said. “You either have to be about it, or you’re not about it. You’re either two feet in or you’re no feet in. But every time I challenged him to be a better player, to play harder, to be a better leader, to talk more, he might not have got it right there in that moment, but he would always come back and then show me, through his work and through his effort, I’m trying to do the things that you’re challenging me to do.”
By the end of his senior season, Pickett had a handful of Division I offers. He wasn’t satisfied, though.
He felt like he deserved more attention than he had gotten up to that point. So he had a strong showing with his AAU team, D.C. Premiere, that summer. Pickett then did a post-graduate year at Massanutten Military Academy — which solidified him as a top prospect and sealed his path to becoming Ewing’s first top-100 recruit. He averaged 21 points, eight rebounds and two blocks per game after averaging 12 points and four rebounds during his final season at Eastern.
Even before his postgraduate year, Kakulu believed it was only a matter of time before the recruiting world picked up on Pickett’s rapid improvement and readiness for the next level.
“By the time he was a senior, he was the best-kept secret in D.C.,” Kakulu said. “And we all knew it.”
NBA ready
Pickett scored his first unofficial points with the Pistons in the waning minutes of Wednesday’s preseason win against the San Antonio Spurs. He knows it was an exhibition, but after the journey he’s had, the moment was surreal.
“Man,” he said when asked about it. “Most of those feelings that you dream about, I got them out the way in summer league. This was just an exhibition feeling, but still an unbelievable feeling.
“You grow up dreaming about this opportunity and situation your whole life. To finally be able to get it done is the best thing in the world.”
The Pistons have been impressed with Pickett, who’s had a smooth transition to the NBA thanks to four years of tutelage under Ewing. The coaching staff wants him to add strength, but his shooting and defensive impact have been evident.
“The one thing I love about him, most rookies don’t like to talk because they’re afraid to say something wrong,” Dwane Casey said. “He communicates. He tells guys where to be and what to do. He was well-coached by coach Ewing. He’s great. He’s NBA ready.”
Pickett’s plan now is simply to stay the course. With the NBA comes a level of competitiveness he hasn’t experienced before. But it wasn’t that long ago that his future in basketball was in doubt. He’s learned his lessons, and he’s eager to apply them.
“Everybody’s different, and people bloom at different periods of their life,” Ewing said. “For him, it came later and he’s still blooming. He’s still blossoming.”
Contact Omari Sankofa II at osankofa@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @omarisankofa. The Free Press has started a new digital subscription model. Here’s how you can gain access to our most exclusive Pistons content. Read more on the Detroit Pistons and sign up for our Pistons newsletter.