PROVIDENCE, R.I. – After he fields local media questions in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts-sponsored backdrop and takes a couple of minutes to get his ankle taped, Bryce Hopkins walks across the gym and into his routine. Same as usual. Five midrange makes from five spots, corner-to-corner. Then a big step back, then 10 makes from five spots beyond the 3-point line. Light work as the clock winds down to another Providence men’s basketball practice, sure, but also a comfort. This is every day. There’s serenity in doing the same thing from the same place, over and over, off two planted feet.
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Hopkins finishes up and takes a front-row seat for film right about the time his head coach, still way back at the other end of the gym, tells everyone that the Friars’ top option is only scratching the surface. That the best Bryce Hopkins has yet to be seen. That he can’t wait to see that guy. No one asks Ed Cooley for a guess as to when it’ll happen, because, well, who knows. It’s also not the most important part. Before he could be anything at all, Bryce Hopkins had to get his location right.
“I feel like I’m wanted and needed here,” he says, “so that makes me feel like I’m at home.”
It didn’t happen with a heel-click of his LeBron XX Time Machines, recently plucked from an online shoe exchange, but there was something like a blustery disaster involved. In this college basketball season of 2022-23, Hopkins is the leading scorer and rebounder for the No. 17 team in the land, a 6-7, 220-pound positionless train car trending toward the top of the Big East Player of the Year race. In the college basketball season of 2021-22? He was a cipher. The guy at the party whose name you can’t quite recall. A top-40 prospect who showed up at Kentucky with the same vision as every freshman who shows up in Lexington, who then fell all but out of sight entirely: 28 games, 181 minutes, one double-digit scoring night, total misery.
At the very end of it, TV cameras found Hopkins on the bench, staring out at an impossible NCAA Tournament loss he didn’t even play in. “The rock bottom of my career,” is how Hopkins puts it, when anyone asks. That it comes up at all, though, is kind of a win. No one would notice if Hopkins’ world didn’t look so much different nine months later, while the world he left behind roils more than anyone prefers.
It’s the remarkable result of a simple but hard-learned lesson: Trust your instincts when you know where you belong. “I do know this: This is where he always wanted to be,” Providence assistant coach Ivan Thomas says. “He feels comfortable here. You can see him flourishing in that comfort zone. We always tell kids, choose the people, not the brick-and-mortar. I think these are the people he wanted to be around.”
King of the Boards – Bryce Hopkins @BryceHopkins
With 9 rbs
Chief of Dimes and That Dude – Jared Bynum @JBDimes3 With 19 pts and 5 assists (7-8 Fg, 3-4 3 pt, 2-2 ft, 2 st) pic.twitter.com/g9VkNA7Q1i
— Providence MBB (@PCFriarsmbb) January 29, 2023
This is a Providence story, a Bryce Hopkins story, a story about a basketball mind-wipe that gets someone to 16.4 points and 9.1 rebounds a night for what is, as of Wednesday morning, a team tied for first place in the Big East. Dwelling on what was feels a little paradoxical.
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Still, a clean slate suggests the slate was, in fact, previously messy, and it’s undeniably why everyone is here.
This was Kentucky. This was an Illinois state player of the year, a kid rostered at the Jordan Brand Classic, a four-star prospect who averaged 24.4 points and 12.5 rebounds as a senior, wondering how he could be forgotten by John Calipari and the Wildcats’ staff before he had a chance to do anything to remember. “Going there, it’s the highest of the highs,” Hopkins says. “In the summer, Coach Cal was telling me I’m one of the best players on the team and I was making a big name for myself going into the season. Then I dealt with a back injury that sent me off for a week and a half or two weeks, and after that it was the next man up and guys were making names for themselves while I was out. So when I came back, I had to work from the bottom up. I had to fight for my spot again. Things just didn’t really go in my favor. He pretty much already had his rotation, and I just had to keep fighting through that adversity, and that’s pretty much that.”
Coaches told him to trust the process. He trusted the process. “But nothing was really changing,” Hopkins says. He tried to reframe it as a learning experience, left without much else to call it. He worked out with his father, choosing to believe Clyde Hopkins when he said everything would come back into the light. “It can’t rain all the time,” Clyde would say, against mounting evidence to the contrary. In Kentucky’s last 14 games, Hopkins played more than five minutes one time. He genuinely hurt for his teammates after Saint Peter’s summoned a miracle and sent the Wildcats spiraling into the offseason, and he also knew he wouldn’t be around for whatever came next.
“From what he said to me, he just wanted a chance,” Friars forward Ed Croswell says. “He’s trying to prove himself. And, boy, is he proving himself right now.”
To say Hopkins always wanted that chance specifically at Providence is at odds with committing to one school (Louisville) and attending another (Kentucky) before looping around to the Ocean State. This is fair to note. It’s also not a preposterously revisionist claim.
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Roughly six years before Hopkins’ name appeared in the transfer portal, it appeared on Providence’s radar. One of Thomas’ former high school players, Tony Young, called about an eighth-grader he was training just outside of Chicago, and so began the relationship between the Friars and the Hopkins family out in Oak Park, Ill. Not long after, former Providence player Tom Planek took a job at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, and soon he, too, sent flares to his former coaches about the can’t-miss kid on campus.
Nor was Providence a dot Hopkins couldn’t find on a map. His mother, Karen, grew up in New Bedford, Mass., or roughly 32 miles southeast of campus. The Hopkins crew made regular trips to Massachusetts to visit the extended family, and sometimes that included a side trip to visit with Karen’s sister in Providence. When Hopkins hit the market in April 2022, only one school offered him the chance to rebuild himself upon a trust a half-dozen years in the making, with basically a lifetime of built-in familiarity backing it up. “Our relationship,” Cooley says, “was very authentic and real.”
No surprise, then, that the very first call came from Providence’s head coach. From the basketball angle, there could be no better systematic fit than a wing with the potential to produce at three levels offensively while guarding four — and maybe five — positions at the other end. “A jack-of-all-trades matchup nightmare,” Cooley says. “He’s like a prototypical player that does well with us. Multidimensional. Tough. Those guys, man, are gems for the way I coach. And he fits that. I don’t think we’ve ever had a player in his position not have a ton of success.” The Friars’ coaches hammered away at that on Hopkins’ official visit, sequencing film of Hopkins with film of former players like Noah Horchler, Alpha Diallo and LaDontae Henton, providing a like-for-like look at a potential future. “It was just clear as day,” Hopkins says.
But he needed more than a solid pitch about on-floor deployment. Hopkins needed some emotional triage. He had some scar tissue to clean out. He needed someone he could trust, yes, but more to the point: He needed to be able to trust someone when they said they believed in him.
This is pretty much where Cooley started: He told Bryce Hopkins how good he was.
“Who doesn’t want to be told something positive?” the Friars coach says. “You’ve got to instill confidence in them: ‘You’re a good player. Don’t judge what you did last year compared to what we’re going to do this year. This is where I see you, and this is where you’re going to be at.’ You can coach them into their existence at the end by instilling confidence, by having a really good relationship.”
After playing sparingly as a freshman at Kentucky, Hopkins is a front-runner for Big East Player of the Year at Providence. (Kyle Ross / USA Today)From there, Providence became Hopkins’ body shop. It’s one thing to be 6-7 and 220 pounds. It’s another thing to be able to unleash that body on the Big East, where many similar and often bigger bodies are happy to pinball off you every night. The first step, actually, was leaning out a bit, to improve muscle tone and durability; that meant fewer carbs, especially late at night, and steady intake of any available protein and vegetable combination. “I’m not as sluggish with all the salt and stuff like that,” Hopkins says. “It just feels better when you eat clean.” The next step was introducing Hopkins to the concept of life in the Big East, and how to properly use his upgraded frame, and establishing how physical Hopkins would have to be to succeed.
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Cooley had an idea for that. The idea was Ed Croswell.
Every day, the newcomer and the 6-8, 240-pound, unsparing vet from Philadelphia — the one who’d basically spent the previous two years wrestling in gravel every day against Friars big man Nate Watson — matched up in the gym. It was not subtle. Nor was Croswell. During the first couple weeks of workouts, Hopkins would absorb a particularly hard foul and cast an eye to the coaching staff. You’re not going to call that? You’re just going to let that go? The coaching staff’s general response: Nope.
At one point early on, Thomas pulled an incredulous Hopkins into his office to explain what was going on. Croswell would unlock Hopkins’ own capacity to dish out punishment, all while soldering a bond for the upcoming season. As much as they beat up on each other, Hopkins and Croswell were essentially the same. They were the identity of Providence basketball. “I said, he will be your best advocate in games,” Thomas says. “He will be the guy in the foxhole that you want.”
It went about as you’d expect from there. Hopkins came after Croswell’s age. Croswell returned fire by questioning Hopkins’ credentials, calling him “kid,” telling Hopkins he had to earn his stripes. At one point — no one remembers how — Croswell gave Hopkins a bloody nose. At another point, Cooley nearly kicked both of them out of practice, because they were so involved with beating the tar out of each other that the team wasn’t getting anything done. Finally, in the fall, the two were sent to their corners, assigned different practice matchups. “It was a good move,” Croswell says. “We wouldn’t have lasted for the whole season, going at each other like that.”
“Even though we do bump heads sometimes, he really does help my game,” Hopkins says. “It’s rough. You take a lot of shots, a lot of elbows. It’s just a lot. I had to embrace it.”
In all, it’s been an unburdening. No worries about holding up in a power conference this time; a summer of Ed Croswell, plus an August spent playing against pros and former Friars in pickup runs organized by Croswell, was equal parts education and reaffirmation that Hopkins could, in fact, do this. No worries about being on the floor, nor being yanked off of it with the first mistake. Play free, Cooley told Hopkins, and he meant it. Hopkins didn’t have to find an outlet after a defensive rebound; he was the outlet.
Providence would deploy him as the tip of a spear, so he had permission — to an extent — to make mistakes of aggression. Hopkins can’t remember which early-season pass it was that went out of bounds, or who the opponent was, but he clearly recalls looking at the bench with a sinking feeling as Cooley spun around to say something to his assistants.
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The Friars coach then turned back to the action. No one jogged to the scorer’s table. “Doesn’t sound like a lot, but it means a lot, because you’re not having to look over your shoulder when you make a mistake,” Hopkins says. “I feel like last year when I got out there, I was under a microscope. (Calipari) only wanted me to do certain things, and it was like I was playing like a robot. Now when I get on the court, it’s like coach Cooley is allowing me to do whatever I want, but under his system. I just can’t thank him enough for that.”
This is the roadmap for passing if and arriving at how much in a matter of months. “If Bryce is in school three years, he may be the all-time leading scorer here,” Cooley says. “He’s just learning.”
Let’s not forget this too. pic.twitter.com/7BnRHyauao
— Kevin Farrahar (@Kevin_Farrahar) January 22, 2023
Hopkins, on offense, is an emerging riddle. He’s averaging 1.132 points per possession on post-ups, per Synergy Sports, good for the 92nd percentile nationally. He isn’t affected by contact; he’s averaging 6.1 free throw attempts per game and has taken 10 or more on four different occasions, while converting 75.4 percent of the chances. Watch a mid-January blowout win over Butler at Amica Mutual Pavilion, and there’s Hopkins, shoulder down and clambering to the rim for a transition dunk on one possession and drawing a foul on another dunk attempt on the next. There’s Hopkins throwing a lob to freshman Jayden Pierre for a rousing fast-break dunk. And there’s Hopkins, backing down his defender and using a gnarly spin move to draw another two-shot foul on the next trip down. “Not a lot of guys his size can put the ball on the floor and shoot,” Croswell says. “What I’ve learned in college is if you can shoot and you can dribble, you can basically do anything on a basketball court.”
No one at Providence frets over assist numbers (2.3 per game) as a reflection of Hopkins’ playmaking ability. For the moment, he’s tasked with scoring, so he tries to score. “His uncanny ability to get everybody involved, his feel to see the next play — that’s the next thing people will see,” Thomas says. His midrange efficiency is average — 0.760 PPP on jumpers from 17 feet and in, per Synergy — but at least a threat. The big step, the one that gets Cooley talking about what the best version of Hopkins will look like, is consistent 3-point shooting. Hopkins’ 33.3 percent accuracy from behind the arc … could be better. He hasn’t made a 3 in half of Providence’s 22 games. These numbers belie Hopkins’ efficiency in other settings, at least according to his teammates. “If we’re doing shooting drills,” Friars guard Devin Carter says, “he’s one of the top four, five people every time.”
That short pre-practice shooting routine suggests there’s both more there and more work to do. Hopkins misses his first five attempts from the corner, once he steps behind the line. At his next stop, on the wing? Hopkins hits 10 of 13 attempts before he moves along. “I just think he’s so good at going to the basket and getting to his midrange that he doesn’t need to rely on the 3,” Friars guard Jared Bynum says. “He might just think, I can get to the basket whenever I want. Or I can get to my midrange shot whenever I want. But if you leave him open for 3, or I drive and kick it to him, I’m expecting it to go in. That’s how good of a shooter I think he is.”
As Hopkins tells the assembled media crowd before diving into his mini-workout: If I’m open, I’m going to shoot it. This is what someone sounds like when they remember. When they’re again comfortable with who and what and where they are.
Sometimes, the where part has to be right before anything else is. And that’s what nibbles at Hopkins a little. He might’ve avoided all of this. He knew better. But he didn’t know any better.
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Because you ask Bryce Hopkins if the Kentucky choice was still the right choice in the moment — not in hindsight, but back in that very moment he pledged allegiance to Calipari and Co. — and he says no.
“I was coming here, honestly,” Hopkins says. “And then I had people in my ear telling me that I should go to Kentucky, just to see what I can do there. People were saying I could do it at that level, and I still feel I could do it at that level, but it just didn’t work out. But I don’t really know. I feel like the right decision would’ve been to come here first and then just go from there. As soon as I got here, coach Cooley gave me my confidence back and made me believe that I’m the player I believe I am. And that’s big for me.”
He’s a part of something, is really what it comes down to. Fully immersed, for the first time in too long a time.
On another midwinter Friday, Hopkins stands in front of that portable backdrop for another midwinter media session, and he says things players say when there aren’t any questions anymore.
He feels comfortable, he says. He feels great, he says. Friartown is a great place to play, he says. He’s surprised there hasn’t been more snow, he says. Someone asks him to identify the key to becoming the alpha performer Providence needed him to become, to coming as far as he has since he first arrived. It’s another easy one.
“Endurance,” Bryce Hopkins says, “is probably the biggest thing.”
(Top photo: Eric Canha / USA Today)
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