Dominique Mathurin died in 2014 at age 15 after he was hit by a car while riding a bicycle, leaving the 12-year-old Benn without a navigator for the courts or streets.
Bruce Pascoe Nearly all the same people who helped lift Bennedict Mathurin all the way from a challenging adolescence in Montreal into a projected NBA lottery pick will be sitting at his NBA Draft green-room table Thursday in Brooklyn's Barclays Center.
After Dominique's death, though, there were no guardrails, no goals, no direction for Mathurin to follow. He poured himself into basketball, first standing out for the Park Ex Knights youth club team in Montreal, the same one former ASU standout Lu Dort played for, and eventually picked up MVP honors while playing for Team Quebec in a 2018 Canadian youth tournament.
Murphy said Mathurin was “already on his way” to becoming a high-character young man by the time he flew to Mexico to scout Mathurin early in the 2019-20 school year. Mathurin chose the Wildcats but was slowed in transition by COVID-19 concerns. He arrived at UA in the summer of 2020, soon finding players were barely allowed to hang around each other off the court, and fans would not be allowed to watch him.
He had other incentives, too. Murphy said Mathurin wanted to improve his NBA stock by coming back as a sophomore in 2021-22 and growing physically. Peter Yannopoulos, an NBA analyst for Quebec’s RDS sports network who speaks with Mathurin regularly, said Mathurin also"loved everything about Arizona."
Mathurin also grew in multiple ways as a sophomore, breaking down the walls he set as during an isolated freshman year, making friends with teammates and becoming a leader. At any spot, Mathurin will become the first player ever drafted from the NBA Latin America Academy, and the second one ever from all NBA academies .Mathurin is almost all but certain to become the highest-drafted player ever from Quebec. Montreal’s Bill Wennington, the province’s previous top NBA pick, went 16th overall in 1985.
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