RiffDash

Claude Nembhard was just about to duck out the door with his wife, Mary, for a quick Home Depot run when he saw his oldest son, Andrew, sitting on the sofa. Sent home from college because of COVID, Andrew had just finished his own workout and was relaxing. “Go out on the driveway with your brother,’’ Claude instructed. Like a good foot soldier, Andrew dutifully did as he was told, seeking out his high school-aged brother, Ryan, for some one-on-one work outside their Ontario home.

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Claude and Mary ran their errand, returning home no more than an hour later, to an eerily quiet house. They discovered Andrew back on the sofa. Ryan, they learned, already had retreated to his room. Claude was just about to ask about the abrupt end to the workout when Mary yelled to him.

Workers only recently had completed painting the entire house, and Mary hadn’t gotten around to putting anything back on the walls. Yet there by the door hung a picture that hadn’t been there an hour earlier. Worse, Mary didn’t even recognize it. “Those two idiots, they got in fight in the house and put a hole in the wall,’’ Claude says through pauses to catch his breath from laughing. “Then, they went to the neighbors and got a picture to hang on it. Like we weren’t going to notice? I won’t lie. My wife was mad. I just laughed. At least they tried to hide it.’’

The boys, admittedly not very good interior designers, sheepishly acknowledge their guilt. “We butted heads but no real fights,’’ Andrew says, before pausing to correct himself. “Well, OK sometimes there were some fights, but we always smiled after.’’ Concedes Ryan, “I mean, we know how to push each other’s buttons. Mostly it was talking but, uh, there could be some physicality to it.’’

Drywall repairs notwithstanding, the cost of the kerfuffles appears worth it. The Brothers Nembhard are beating up opponents as much as they used to one another. Andrew, a senior, is the engine of a rather sweetly purring offensive machine at Gonzaga, and Ryan is the pressed-into-service freshman point guard helping a young Creighton team navigate the choppy Big East waters.

It is, in so many ways, a classic big brother/kid brother story, of Andrew creating a blueprint for Ryan to follow. But if you look a little more carefully, really analyze the map, you realize neither the original blueprint nor the follow-up is neat and clean; there are detours and do-overs for both Andrew and Ryan. This, then, isn’t necessarily about following the basketball-dimpled road to glory. It’s really about carving your own path.

Claude did not force his boys into basketball. Yes, he loved the sport, sucked in at an early age by the Doctors of Dunk at Louisville, and Georgetown’s Hoya Paranoia. He never made it to the big stage, his career relegated to the men’s leagues, but it was never about living life vicariously. They found it on their own, a Fisher-Price hoop parked in the basement calling like a beacon, first to Andrew and then to Ryan. They’d play first-to-11 on the toy hoop, Andrew naturally almost always winning. On the rare occasion he didn’t, well let’s just say the whole house heard about it — from the winner and the loser.

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As the boys grew up, they took their game and their caterwauling to the driveway. “I, uh, definitely had a little bit more of a mouth,’’ Ryan says. “Andrew, he always did what he was told. All, ‘yes sir,’ and that. I’d push back a lot — on my dad, on Andrew. Typical second kid.’’ Folks in their Aurora neighborhood grew accustomed to both the boys bickering and the beat of a basketball on the macadam, a departure from the more stereotypical sounds of slapshots in the Toronto suburb.

Andrew came up just as Canadian basketball exploded, his father memorably “discovering” Marcus Carr when the 6-year-old started messing around during halftime of a rec league game that featured both Andrew Wiggins and Duane Notice. Claude snatched Carr up for his Vaughn Panthers team, and he and Andrew were teammates all the way through, from runs on the Canadian national team to Montverde Academy in Florida.

Though Claude loved coaching his son, he understood that Montverde could offer him competition and exposure that Claude’s high school program, St. Andrew’s Prep, could not. “Their dad made a lot of good decisions with both of them,’’ Creighton coach Greg McDermott says. “A lot of right decisions, and selfless decisions.’’ After one of his high schoolers, Chris Egi, turned the move to Montverde into a spot at Harvard, Claude called the Egi family for information and a recommendation. Andrew made the move to Montverde for his final two seasons.

Andrew might very well have ended up in exactly the same spot without Montverde thanks to his innate quickness, basketball savvy, and ballhandling skills. Partnering with R.J. Barrett didn’t hurt, though. The two combined to lead Montverde to a national championship in 2018, Barrett scoring 25 points and Andrew dishing out 13 assists without a turnover. He ranked 28th in the nation by the end of his senior season, the eighth-best point guard in his class, and seemed a natural fit for Florida, which needed to replace Chris Chiozza.

It worked, by all accounts, well. Nembhard started every game in Gainesville, averaging 11.2 points and 5.6 assists for Mike White’s squad. And then the pandemic hit, the season was canceled, Nembhard put his name in the draft, went home, tussled with his brother … and made an entirely unexpected pivot.

Andrew sat down for a preseason interview two years ago, arriving just before practice and not yet fully dressed in his Gonzaga gear. He was wearing an SEC T-shirt. “Oops,’’ he replied with a smile.

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He’d arrived in Spokane a month or so earlier, and still was in that semi-awkward new kid in school mode. “I still don’t know where everything is,’’ he said at the time. The easy thing would have been to stay put. Nothing was wrong at Florida. He got plenty of playing time and his stats were good — his 5.6 assists his sophomore year ranks second in the team record books. There was no obvious or even necessary reason to leave — especially because this all came before immediate transfer eligibility. To bolt from the Gators likely meant a sabbatical from competition.

He did it, anyway, which maybe doesn’t sound like some sort of transcendent decision. Except that it is. Patience in college basketball is about as popular as prudence in social media. But two years wiser, Andrew approached his transfer recruitment with a far more mature set of eyes. He didn’t care about bells and whistles. He wanted fit.

That’s what he was ruminating on when the pandemic chased him home in the spring of 2020, to a reunion with his kid brother.

Ryan naturally followed Andrew to Montverde but he did not enjoy the same seamless transition as his big brother. The line in front of him was long and stuffed with good players. Even by Montverde standards, the roster in Ryan’s first two years was loaded — eight players ranked in the top 100 in the country, three in the top 10.
By then Ryan had already asserted himself at home. At the FIBA U16 Americas Championship, Ryan averaged 14.3 points, nine assists and two steals as he helped Team Canada to a runner-up position. Now, here he was, two years in, fighting for regular playing time in high school. “There were definitely times that I wanted to go home,’’ Ryan says. And then the universe answered, COVID offering a backhanded answer to Ryan’s wish.

Stuck together again, the two boys butted heads and knocked out walls like always, but they also discovered a new pastime — listening. Though Ryan didn’t enjoy waiting at Montverde, it did pay dividends. He banged against great players every day in practice and watched in a way you can’t when you’re on the floor. Andrew could see himself in the same situation, getting better in his sit-out year if he chose a place loaded with talent. Former Gonzaga assistant Tommy Lloyd had recruited Andrew back in high school, and as soon as Andrew put his name in the portal, the Zags were on him.

Andrew thought their fast-paced offense, so reliant on the pick-and-roll, would be ideal for him and that a year in the system would only make him better. “He’s one of the elite guards in college basketball, especially for the way Gonzaga wants to play,’’ says Bulldogs assistant Brian Michaelson. “He’s great in transition, and in ball screens, which we run as many as anyone in the country. He can make the read. He can make every play regardless of coverage.’’

Andrew chose the Zags.

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As for Ryan, he already had plenty of colleges interested, even if his playing time at Montverde didn’t sit where he liked it. McDermott spied him on a side court at Peach Jam the summer going into Ryan’s junior year and asked his assistant, “Who’s the little guy making all the right decisions?” Stanford also expressed interest, as did Seton Hall, USC and Ohio State. McDermott didn’t make any promises, and the way the roster was construed, Ryan realized he might have to bide his time again. But he listened to what Andrew said, about the importance of fit, and chose the Bluejays anyway.

The universe, of course, loves to mess with plans. Neither brother sat. Gonzaga filed a longshot waiver claim last year for Andrew, which actually came in last year, and he wound up playing immediately, and this season a foot injury to Shereef Mitchell pressed Ryan into immediate service. Now here’s the twist on the twist: Andrew, who was a starter at Florida, first became a sub and Ryan, who was a sub in high school, became a starter at Creighton.

And both are just fine. Andrew matched perfectly with an old and established Gonzaga team last year, picking his spots to star, before becoming the critical part of the Zags machine this year. The same player who, per Synergy Sports, averaged .9 points per possession in the pick-and-roll at Florida, and .874 off the dribble is now at 1.044 and 1.048. A near ideal tag team for Drew Timme, his only fault is his selflessness. “We want him to hunt shots,’’ Mark Few says. “But he makes every right decision.’’

Ryan isn’t quite there yet — he’s averaging 4.4 assists to 3.4 turnovers — but McDermott says it would be unfair to expect him to be. Ryan is playing 34.5 minutes per game, the third most of any freshman in the country and per KenPom that 85.1 percent rate is 97th in the country among all players. “In most cases freshmen have the luxury to come out of a game, regroup and get back out there. Ryan doesn’t have that flexibility,’’ McDermott says. “He has to play through it all, which is hard, but he has been great. Not one single complaint since the day he’s been here. Not one bad day.’’ He’s already been named the Big East Freshman of the Week five times.

“Honestly all that time I put in at Montverde, it prepared me for this,’’ he says.

A year ago, Gonzaga played Creighton in the Sweet 16, the Zags bullrushing the Bluejays by 18 points as Andrew scored 17 and dished out eight assists in 36 minutes.

It was uncomplicated Nembhard family fun. Ryan was committed to Creighton, but he wasn’t yet officially a Bluejay. In fact he was busy, at the time, leading Montverde to a high school national championship. “Most definitely was rooting for my brother in that one,’’ Ryan says. “Now? Now it’s a different story.’’

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And yet people keep suggesting to Claude how fun it would be to have a rematch. He thinks they’ve lost their minds, and not merely because he and Mary would have the agonizing misery of rooting for both boys. “They’d want to kill one another,’’ he says. “It would get ugly. Very ugly.’’

Claude has the lousy interior decorating to prove it.

(Top photo of, left to right, Claude, Mary, Andrew and Ryan Nembhard: Courtesy Nembhard Family)

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