Meet JJ Mandaquit, a UW Player Already With NBA Connections

The University of Washington basketball team has needed a point guard who can get involved in everyone's business. JJ Mandaquit so far fits that profile.

He's the first newcomer on campus for Danny Sprinkle's second Husky team, already bonding with veterans Zoom Diallo and Franck Kepnang, the only holdovers while another 10 or more new players are coming to join them.

He's been regularly conferring with Sprinkle's coaching staff, which considers him the best high school playmaker coming out of this most recent class after it didn't really have have a designated point last season.

And the 6-foot-4 Mandaquit already has built a connection with the NBA and even interacted with one of the game's biggest legends.

When he was a USA basketball player, representatives of the league liked the way Mandaquit presented himself and asked him to be part of its Junior NBA/Junior WNBA Court of Leaders program.

This, in turn, led to him helping select a player in the league to be a recipient of a Social Justice Champion award named for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

His goal is to get to the NBA, but the NBA has come to him first.

Mandaquit was the lone teen on the committee. This led to a Zoom call with a man who was formerly known as Lew Alcindor when he played a number of games against the Huskies in then-called Hec Edmundson Pavilion more than 50 years ago.

"As soon as he spoke at first and he greeted me by name, it was super cool," Mandaquit said.

Meantime, the 6-foot-1 point guard from Honolulu, Hawaii, by way of Utah Prep Academy in Hurricane, Utah, is a throwback player who should fill the biggest piece that was missing last season for Sprinkle's team.

While the coach was a little bewildered at the laissez faire approach some of his players brought to the game, he's counting on Mandaquit to provide a high degree of toughness and leadership to his next basketball team.

The coach and point guard, they're not all that much different in their basketball mentality.

"That's something that drew me to him -- he's from Montana and he's got a chip on his shoulder," Mandaquit said. "I'm from Hawaii. I 've got a chip on my shoulder. I think it's kind of funny, both places we come from, it's not places that are known to be in the basketball world. I think we're similar in a lot of ways."

There's one difference between these two -- Mandaquit is on a first-name basis with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.