Emmanuel Mudiay may be on his way to becoming this season’s Royce O’Neal for the Utah Jazz. Royce was always an underdog. He was not heavily recruited in high school. He played at a smaller school in the University of Denver, after that he transferred to Baylor for two years. He was undrafted following his senior year. Following the draft, he went the international route to try to make his way to the NBA. He spent two years playing collecting a paycheck playing in Europe. He received a summer league invite from the Jazz in 2017. It was all uphill from there. Royce worked his way into the rotation. He wasn’t just a benchwarmer. He became an integral part of the rotation. With injuries hitting some of his other teammates, Royce found his way into the starting lineup. He has consistently been the team’s sixth man since signing a long-term deal with the team in 2018.

As a player, Emmanuel Mudiay’s path to the NBA seems like it has been the opposite to what Royce went through. The backstory to Mudiay started in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He and his two brothers were left with one parent at a very early age when their father passed away due to a heart condition. Amid the country’s civil war, his mom was able to transplant the family to America where Mudiay became a basketball sensation.

As a high school basketball player in Texas he exploded onto the scene. The three bothers all were gifted on the court, but Emmanuel’s talent was going to carry him the farthest. He finished his senior year being the nation’s fifth-highest ranked recruit according to ESPN and the number one recruit by many other sites. He originally committed to play basketball at SMU in Texas. He later withdrew his commitment to the university and signed a one-year $1.2 million deal with Guangdong Southern Tigers of the Chinese Basketball Association.

While playing in China, Mudiay started to see his draft stock fall. He suffered from a leg injury early on that affected him for the rest of the season. He was still taken as a lottery pick in the 2015 NBA draft. The Denver Nuggets selected him with the 7^th overall pick. He was immediately thrown into the starting rotation and it did not work out very well for him. His statistics weren’t very good for a lottery pick. In three years with Denver he averaged 10.8 points, 4.2 assists, and 3 rebounds per game.

In February of his third season he was traded to the dumpster fire that is the New York Knicks. The organization was trying to acquire a better starting point guard than what they had. The issue for Mudiay was that he was expected to become a star for them. Trading for him was only a small portion of what the Knicks needed to do to turn things around. All the pressure though was put onto Mudiay as if he was the solution. The Knicks had been through a handful of coaching staffs through the previous five years. They had continuously struck out on signing any marquee free agents to put them back in the NBA spotlight. They were consistently at the bottom of the league instead of the top. And they had done a bad job of drafting and developing talent. It didn’t seem fair to have the pressure of being the solution for the organization all thrown onto Mudiay. After two semi-promising seasons with the Knicks, he averaged 11.8 points, 3.9 assists, 3 rebounds per game while trying to carry the team. The numbers weren’t what stuck out to teams around the league. The game finally looked like it was slowing down for him. Mudiay was finding his groove.

This summer his contract with the Knicks expired and he signed a one-year deal with the Utah Jazz. The Jazz are a team that many around the NBA view as having one of the best developmental staffs. They’ve taken many subpar players and turned them into role players. They turned Gordon Hayward into a household name. They helped Rudy Gobert turn into a two-time Defensive Player of the Year. And they’ve been right at Donovan Mitchell’s side at he’s made his ascendance to stardom.

Mudiay’s agent BJ Armstrong played a major role in getting him to Salt Lake City. Armstrong thinks highly of the Utah’s development staff and believe that with the guidance of Quin Schneider his client will be able to turn into the player he was projected to become as a high school athlete.

It’s way too early to project where Mudiay’s career with the Jazz will take him, but the team needed to add depth at the point guard position and Mudiay was the best player available. His upside gives the Jazz hope to what he can become with the right amount of coaching and a stable situation around him.