Derrick White’s old friends were looking out for him. They were watching with the rest of the world when White awkwardly landed face-first on the court during Game 5 of the NBA Finals, chipping his two front teeth.
By the end of the night, those were the teeth of a champion. As confetti rained on the Boston Celtics, a fantasy football group text of former college basketball teammates was buzzing. Andrew Bucholtz could relate to White’s situation. After they were done playing together at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs in the mid-2010s, Bucholtz transferred to Whittier College, where he once chipped his front teeth during a (much less meaningful) game.
Friends and family scream out as Derrick White sits calmly in his chair after the announcement that the San Antonio Spurs had selected him 29th in the first round of the NBA Draft on June 22, 2017 in Parker, Colorado. (Photo by John Leyba/The Denver Post)
First, he poked fun at White by asking in the group chat who did it better. Then he offered advice on how to handle a broken tooth. “Not a fun time,” Bucholtz attests.
White has maintained friendships with many of his teammates from Legend High School and Division II UCCS, where he got his humble start before blossoming into a first-round draft prospect at CU.
A product of Parker, he has made the NBA All-Defensive team in consecutive seasons. Now he’s a first-time champ after averaging 15.2 points on one of the best statistical starting lineups in recent memory. During a week of celebration, several of his former teammates shared memories of White’s Colorado beginnings.
“I think he’s the new Chauncey Billups,” high school teammate Avery Carlson said. “He’s the new face of Colorado sports that really takes pride in where he’s from.”
1. Volunteering for fouls
Cleverness and a sense of humor were essential traits during White’s unorthodox prep basketball experience.
He was in the first graduating class at Legend High School, which opened his freshman year with inaugural sports teams made up entirely of athletes in his grade. The varsity basketball squad was a few sizes too small for most matchups, especially that first season. Carlson was a self-described “way undersized center” on a roster that had only a handful of players capable of faking their way through the position.
“We were sort of deer-in-the-headlights against those (bigger) teams,” Carlson said. “But D-White didn’t really have that. He kind of just shrugged it off.”
Hacking was often an unavoidable defensive strategy for Carlson, but Legend couldn’t afford frontcourt foul trouble. So the shorter, skinnier White developed a habit of trying to fool referees into counting fouls against him instead.
“I probably had more fouls than points in our basketball games. I would commit the foul, and then he would put his hand up and be like, ‘That was me,’” Carlson recalled. “The ref would kind of laugh. But sometimes they would give it to him. Really, he was just trying to keep me in the game. I think he was like, ‘Oh, this dummy fouled again.’”
2. Un-redshirted
White’s well-documented lack of college offers led him to a $3,000 scholarship as a preferred walk-on at UCCS. His talent and IQ were evident, but the team’s vision was for him to fill out his frame while redshirting the first year. Preseason workouts forced a change of plans.
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs junior guard Derrick White, 14, shoots over Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Nicholas Kay, 4, in the second half at Metro State on February 27, 2015. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
“It was like he was born to play basketball,” said Jordan Carter, who was entering his junior year at the time. “He was just so much better than the rest of us. There was no way we could stop him. We were much bigger and stronger. It didn’t matter. His team would win every drill.”
Carter had first played alongside White earlier that summer in a pro-am league at Highlands Ranch High School. White had just graduated from Legend. Their first game went to sudden-death overtime, and White drained a step-back 3-pointer for the win. As Carter watched the shot, he thought to himself that he was never confident enough to try anything like that fresh out of high school.
“Once practice started and scrimmages started, (White) was just destroying the first team, the starters,” teammate Dalton Patten recalls. “Getting anything and everything he wanted. And we had exhibition games at that point, and redshirts could play in those games without it having to occupy a whole season of eligibility. So he was playing, of course, and it was just the same thing. After that, he was no longer redshirting.”
By the end of the season, White was crowned Freshman of the Year in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference.
3. Cereal and Oreos
White and five of his UCCS teammates lived together in a house across the street from campus, spending their free time playing video games and Ping-Pong. After early-morning practices, they would return home, and White would prepare his daily bowl of cereal then hang out in the living room. His friends were often baffled by how methodical his routine was.
“He took forever to eat his bowl of cereal,” Alex Koehler said, laughing. “He would be sitting on that couch, scrolling on his phone for like 30 or 45 minutes before he finally finished that bowl of cereal.”
“Seemed like it’s just sitting in the bowl, getting soggy,” Patten added. “He’s probably spending all of his time joking around.”
White’s dietary habits also included keeping a specific snack in his car. One of his UCCS teammates was recently contacted by a Celtics fan who was brainstorming potential gifts to present to White at the championship parade in Boston. He suggested that they buy him Oreo cookies.
“I remember him driving us to practice, and he had Oreos in the glove compartment,” Carter said.
4. The Kobe Bryant of video games
White is known to be unflappable on the court and mild-mannered off it. He and the Celtics were businesslike in their clinical dominance of the NBA playoffs. His presence was exactly the same as an amateur player in Colorado. Stoic, mature, laid-back. Not much of a trash talker.
Except in pretty much everything else outside of competitive basketball.
“If you get him started on FIFA …” Bucholtz warned, trailing off.
“That guy just wants to beat you. He just wants to destroy you,” Patten said. “But you can never be mad at him, because he’s such a good person.”
White played intramural softball with Koehler and a few other teammates during the offseason. Whenever they won, he always made sure the rest of the basketball team knew about it. He was a fierce yapper on that Ping-Pong table, and even more competitive at Xbox games such as NBA 2K and his beloved FIFA. Whenever one person defeated everyone else in the house in the soccer video game, he earned the title of “The Sheriff.” White reveled in it. He still talks trash in a fantasy football group chat with his former teammates.
“He had a remarkable ability to recall what kind of scoring run his team was on,” Carter said. “Some of the things that you hear Kobe Bryant and those guys would say in NBA games, that’s the kind of stuff Derrick would say in 2K.”
5. Derrick White’s first epic block
In an NBA Finals that generally lacked memorable last-minute theatrics, White was responsible for one of the signature moments of the series when he and Jaylen Brown chased down P.J. Washington for a clutch block with 50 seconds remaining in Game 2. White finished the playoffs with 23 blocks — the most by any non-center — bolstering his reputation as the best shot-blocking guard in the NBA.
It all started in Colorado.
At UCCS, Bucholtz remembers White getting yelled at for chasing blocks, occasionally overzealous in his weak-side help defense.
“He would kind of do what he does now and just try to block stuff,” Bucholtz said. “He wasn’t really a defensive guy at UCCS, just because he had to carry most of the offensive load. The one game we put him on the best player, he got two fouls right away, and then he never guarded the best player the rest of that year, it felt like. But you could tell he was a good shot-blocker.”
The precise origins of that skill are murky — “I have to admit, I don’t remember him blocking a single shot in high school,” Legend teammate Brad Dalby said — but they can at least be traced to one specific rejection.
Carlson remembers it vividly, probably because he was on the wrong end of it. During a one-on-one fast-break drill before their junior year at Legend, just as White was growing marginally taller, Carlson attempted to confront him at the rim.
“We’re all trying to dunk on each other,” he said. “But (White) just absolutely bundled me. I mean, he palmed the basketball, ripped it down and just dribbled away. I kind of ended up on the ground. That moment, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s in a different tier.’ It was just surgical, his body position.”
Dallas Mavericks forward P.J. Washington (25) is blocked by Boston Celtics’ Derrick White (9) and Jaylen Brown (7) during the second half of Game 2 of the NBA Finals basketball series, Sunday, June 9, 2024, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
6. The superstar role player
White and Bucholtz used to get into dozens of silly semantic debates about various sports. Most of all, they were both big Nuggets fans. White’s freshman year at UCCS coincided with a 57-win Nuggets team that featured Andre Iguodala in his only season in Denver.
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Bucholtz once posited to White that Iguodala was a “superstar role player” for his team, filling the gaps however he was needed.
There’s no such a thing, White would say. Superstar role players don’t exist.
“I should probably text him in the next couple of days,” Bucholtz said this week, “and be like, ‘Hey, remember that argument we had 15 years ago?’”