GLEN ELLYN, Ill. — Though the ask technically came from three or four blocks down Prairie Avenue, it was a little bit out of nowhere: As Jamie Plumb planned a birthday for her fifth-grade son, she thought the most special part of the event could be a drop-by from a jaw-dropping VIP. And only one would do. So while she had never actually met or spoken to her neighbor, Stacey Huff, Facebook messages have a way of bulldozing through social roadblocks. Jamie logged on. She inquired about Stacey’s son, a lanky lefty in the middle of his senior year of high school, and his availability for parties.
It was worth a shot. This village about 25 miles west of downtown Chicago is a relatively small pond. And Braden Huff, in pretty much every sense, is the biggest catch in it.
The Huffs’ answer was yes. Of course it was. Once upon a time, Braden Huff was a kid dreaming of hitting big shots for the state tournament, years before he was actually hitting big shots for the state champions. Scheduling was challenging; Jamie’s son told pretty much everyone at his school that Braden Huff would be at his party. On the big day, Braden showed up with friend and fellow Division I-bound teammate Cade Pierce, and they spent 45 minutes messing around in a driveway, running drills and playing games and stuffing the driveway hoop with every ball they could find.
“It’s so cute,” Stacey Huff says now, laughing at the life her son and his friends have ended up living. “They’re like little celebrity basketball clowns.”
Nothing cute or little about the weeks and months to come, though. In mid-June, Huff arrives at Gonzaga – the lone freshman signed by Mark Few’s monolith in Spokane – with the not-subtle expectation of evolving into the next singular Zags big man. He’s 6-foot-10-and-a-half in socks. He played point guard for a loaded Illinois Wolves team that won the Under Armour summer circuit in 2021. He led Glenbard West High School to that state hoops title and won Illinois Mr. Basketball honors while averaging all of 10 shots a game. Four years ago, Huff was five inches shorter and a spot-up shooter coming off the bench for his high school team. One year ago, he wasn’t even a four-star prospect. Now the cutthroat life at a blueblood awaits. It’s … a lot.
All that’s left is Braden Huff jumping into one of the biggest ponds imaginable and paddling like hell. “I always believe in myself and felt like I could take a chance on them,” he says. “I knew I’d develop, and if I was willing to work and learn, there would be an opportunity for me. I still know it’s going to be a challenge. But I’m excited for it.”
In retrospect, the dots connect. Huff’s maternal grandfather was a long-legged 6-7 and played college ball in upstate New York. Stacey Huff, meanwhile, is 5-11 and Braden’s father, Alec, is 6-3. His older sister, Taylor, topped off at 6-1. There are a couple running jokes given the particularly exaggerated heights Braden has achieved – “Especially the last couple years,” Alec Huff says, “people look at us and say, ‘Do you know who Braden’s parents are?’” – but the nature bit generally checks out. The nurture part follows as well, with a Dad who loves basketball happily shooting in the yard with his kids and passing the passion along. Taylor ultimately played at NYU by way of Glenbard West, but Braden truly obsessed over the game, sometimes with heavy foreshadowing. Yes, he scoured highlights and tried to emulate moves like any other kid, but then there was also that time Alec surveyed Braden’s first-grade rec league team and asked each boy for his favorite player. Most said Jordan or LeBron. Braden Huff went with Magic Johnson. “Even his father was a little shocked by that one,” Alec says.
Environmental conditions, as it happened, were also ripe for growing a super-sized forward with a guard’s feel and tool kit. Huff says not one youth coach ever told him to sprint to the dunker’s spot and wait for a pass, even though he was always one of the taller kids for his age group; he had the same opportunities to get comfortable on the perimeter as anyone, all the way through his middle school years with the local Glenbard West feeder program. “We want kids to play five-out, positionless basketball,” says head coach Jason Opoka. And, simply but critically, he played with like-minded friends. The dudes who hoisted the Class 4A championship trophy in March were the same dudes Huff played with from more or less the infancy of his basketball career. They were the guys who, during 5-on-0 practice run-throughs, would over-pass and then razz whoever eventually took the shot for being “selfish.”
It’s easy to want to make your teammates better when you, you know, like them. “I knew I could shoot this contested shot, but if I kick out to, say, Caden, and he’s got a wide-open 3 in the corner, then that’s probably a better shot,” Huff says. “Nobody really cared what their stats were. I’m not sure how we developed that. But everyone had that similar mentality, where it’s not about me, it’s about the team and what’s best for us.”
By the end of seventh grade, Opoka had conversations with Huff about winning titles and building a legacy at Glenbard West. “One of his best characteristics is that he acts as a professional,” Opoka says. “And that maturity comes with wanting to have goals and wanting to accomplish those goals and striving for greatness.” By the end of ninth grade, Huff had piqued the interest of Mike Mullins, the director of the Illinois Wolves, who extrapolated promise from the skinny, 6-5, spot-up shooting version of Braden Huff he saw coming off the bench at Glenbard West. “He had a really good feel,” Mullins says. “He had good shoulders, he had long legs, he had a long wingspan. He paid attention to detail. He was preparing himself to play and I’m not quite sure at that point in his career if he knew he was going to play. That’s important.”
Huff had reservations about making the leap from his semi-local travel program at that point, but no such hesitancy after he’d sprouted into a 6-9 go-to star as a sophomore. Mullins invited Huff to workout sessions in the fall of 2019 and it didn’t take long for him to see enough.
Those workouts consist of six different stations, more or less, with varying emphases at each. But they’re not guard drills or wing drills or big-man drills. Everyone goes through the same paces. “He wasn’t trying to do stuff, which most big guys do,” Mullins says. “He was just doing it.”
Not that anyone would know, for a while. Exposure the following winter and summer was all but non-existent; stringent Illinois state regulations during the pandemic more or less wiped out high school basketball and most standard travel-team opportunities. But this ironically gave Huff what he needed otherwise. He’d heard all the talk about adding weight and muscle to a lithe frame, and, well, days of remote classes allowed him to load up on meals and graze on snacks non-stop. And while there would be no summer grassroots season for his age group … there was an ad hoc version, behind-scenes, and of a higher quality than Huff might’ve seen out and about in July.
The older, idling Wolves players were looking for somewhere, anywhere, to play. When state protocols allowed the opportunity to arise, they relied on their club to get work in. Which, in turn, meant the younger Wolves were scrimmage foils. So out of a summer of nothing came something fairly immense for Huff: He and his group faced off against the likes of Max Christie (Michigan State), Isaiah Barnes (Michigan), Chris Hodges (Wisconsin), Scottie Ebube (Southern Illinois) and Louis Lesmond (Harvard) regularly, in over their heads in the most productive way possible.
“It was a tough group to kind of get thrown into the deep end with,” Huff says. “I’m not sure we were necessarily helping them get better, but they were definitely helping us get better.”
Huff hadn’t gone totally unnoticed to that point. Northwestern and Virginia Tech, most notably, were already in the mix. Huff guessed he’d land somewhere in Big Ten country, and happily so. Then came the 2021 grassroots season. Mullins more or less intentionally scheduled a couple blowouts early against programs like Brad Beal Elite – “In all the years I’ve done this, we never got our butts kicked that bad,” Mullins says of the group’s first games in Milwaukee that spring – to reintroduce a group of suburban kids to the level they’d need to meet in order to succeed in July. Which they did. Huff and eventual Duke commit Jaden Schutt led the Wolves to the Under Armour circuit title and along the way opened eyes – including their own, to some degree. Huff’s springtime effort against the Georgia Stars effectively broke the seal; he scored 19 second-half points, scoring and playmaking from all levels, while being checked by top 50 prospects. (The highlights are still on the Wolves’ Instagram page, for those patient enough to scroll.) “He was facilitating, scoring, defending, directing traffic offensively and defensively,” Mullins says. “I think he finally saw in himself what I and other people saw in him.”
At a hotel in Dallas weeks later, the Wolves players shot the bull and talked about the future in the way teenagers do, when one of them mused about Huff’s to-be-determined destination. Jalen Quinn, a downstate Illinois guard who’d sign with Loyola-Chicago, said he saw Huff at Gonzaga. That Huff fit the mold for that program. That his multifarious teammate could play for a program arguably a level above any he’d considered so far.
I don’t know, Huff replied. Maybe.
Minutes later, Huff’s phone rang.
“Sure enough,” Huff says, “it was them.”
There had been some advocating from Illinois high school basketball cognoscenti for Huff to be more widely appreciated, a message that surely made its way to Gonzaga assistant coach Roger Powell, a Joliet native who played four years at Illinois. While presumably scouting Schutt at the Dallas event, the Zags staff evaluated Huff’s skill set as well. That led to the call, which led to an official visit in the fall, which led to a commitment days later.
The fit had its logic. A smaller-campus feel appealed to Huff; he took a trip to Michigan with friends after the Gonzaga pledge, immersing himself in the clamor of a football weekend in Ann Arbor, and the atmosphere only reinforced his intuition. “I made the right decision,” he told his parents, unprompted, when he returned home. Gonzaga, meanwhile, brought up names like Kelly Olynyk and Kyle Wiltjer to give Huff context on how they’d like to grow and use him. “They have that blueprint, which is really cool,” Huff says. “I think they want me to develop, to improve my low-post game and all that. I know they’ll allow me to kind of handle the ball and do some of that stuff, similar to what Chet (Holmgren) did this year, and be able to push the pace a little bit. Just affect the game in similar ways as I’ve been able to do at the high school level and in AAU. That’s what they’re hoping for me to do.”
Sounds great. It also has to work.
First up is Opoka, the high school coach: “Shoot, he’s 6-10 – great passer, great shooter and can handle it. I think he needs to work on his turn-and-face game in the post – reverse pivot, show, and then one dribble, attack, attack to kick. He didn’t do that a lot as a senior. That’s something he can benefit from next year. But he played a lot, for us, through the elbow. I think the Zags will put him in that position, to be a playmaker at the elbow, rub some split cuts or some different actions off him. But he’s interchangeable. He’s a basketball player. He’s not specifically a stretch four. He’s a basketball player who does what you ask of him, when needed.”
Next is Mullins, who’s sent a guy or two to play in college: “I mean, I’ve talked to as many NBA people about Braden Huff as I have college coaches, during the season. He’s not your prototypical 44-inch vertical guy. He doesn’t have a plus-9 wingspan. He has an amazing brain and skill set that really translates well to basketball anywhere, at any level in the world, at any age.”
To be clear: No one considers Braden Huff a finished product, least of all Braden Huff.
He’s fully aware he’ll have to get stronger and quicker to match the physicality he’ll face and also keep up with ball-screen actions he’ll have to guard. To that end, since the end of the Glenbard West season, he’s enhanced what’s essentially been a four-year eating binge. “I think I’m driving my Mom crazy, trying to eat as much as possible,” he says. Three grilled cheese sandwiches qualify as an afterschool snack. The fridge must be stocked with material for breakfast burritos and quesadillas and the occasional rotisserie chicken, plus berries and fruits to mix into protein shakes. “Ordering sushi around here is comical,” Stacey Huff says. “You would think we were having a party at the house.”
Then there’s the four days a week of strength training, covering everything from straight weight work to agility and mobility drills to tricks to improve his vertical leap. All of it, naturally, added to Huff’s routine to maintain and upgrade his on-floor repertoire, and all of it suggestive of someone who knows what he’s in for.
“I’m doing, right now, whatever I can,” Huff says.
Wind along Crescent Boulevard along the south end of Glenbard West’s campus, and the signs of success are impossible to miss: Metal stakes on both sides of the street – five in total – featuring dozens of panels celebrating various state championships won by the school or its students. There’s one for the boys’ volleyball three-peat, one for the girls’ gymnastics back-to-back titles, one for the Color Guard taking home top honors, even one celebrating Bijoy Shah’s landmark forensics championship in 2017, and so on.
And there it is, the lowermost panel on a pole not terribly far from the entrance to Biester Gymnasium.
First one in program history. First one for a DuPage County school since 1909, in fact. Glenbard West didn’t lose to a team from Illinois all season; the Hilltoppers’ lone defeat was to Sierra Canyon High School, which brought Amari Bailey and Bronny James and the whole circus to Wintrust Arena in early February. The game sold out in 20 minutes, and Sierra Canyon ultimately escaped with a buzzer-beater win. “All of a sudden, we walked out from our pregame talk and we look out of the tunnel and directly across is just this sea of green,” Huff says, alluding to the very packed and very loud Glenbard West student section. “It was ridiculous. The butterflies were there for sure at first. I remember thinking, ‘All right – don’t airball the first jumper. Just hit rim.’”
Though the high-profile loss still irks Huff a bit, the 37 other wins are a nice palate-cleanser, up to and including a 22-point runaway victory over stalwart Whitney Young High School in the 4A state title game. Most of the town, apparently, trekked the two and a half hours to Champaign, Ill., for the tilt. No one left disappointed.
This is how a star is born.
“Words can’t describe how the community and the school feel about Braden and the team he was on,” Opoka says.
And yet he’s a kid, still, with a lot very much ahead of him, in every context. He greets a visitor in the gym foyer wearing a backpack and a smile, with a mop of hair on his head and shoulders that need a little broadening. While his coach brags on him in a conference room, Huff bides time on his phone. (Only after receiving permission from the guest, it should be noted.) And then it’s his turn to talk, and Huff’s poise and agreeability are instantly reminiscent of another suburban Chicago high school star who took a confident, massive leap with his college of choice.
It worked out OK for Jon Scheyer, sure. But it all gets left behind, eventually. You can’t take the fifth-grade birthday party invites with you. No one forgets what you did, and everyone wants to know what you’ll do next.
So we’ll see how patient everyone is willing to be or needs to be with Braden Huff. He’s paid off any forbearance, and then some, to date. Gonzaga, too, is likely a futures bet. There are multiple returning bigs, even if Drew Timme doesn’t come back. Efton Reid’s 6-11 frame is en route via the transfer portal, by way of LSU. On the one hand: The staff will ask Huff to do what makes him good in the first place. On the other hand: As with any prospect, actually doing it is a matter of if and when. “What makes the patience and all that easier for me is knowing it’s going to make me better,” Huff says. “It’s just going to make me more prepared for the opportunity when it comes. I’m not necessarily in a rush. But I definitely want to compete and go out there and play as soon as possible.”
After Glenbard West’s season ended, Opoka scoured the team statistics on Hudl. Huff’s blocked shot total, the coach thought, seemed way too low. And a correction might give Huff the school’s career record. So Opoka approached his star with a suggestion: Rewatch the game film, count up his rejections and then the two of them could adjust the ledger accordingly.
Huff shrugged off the idea. Didn’t rewatch the games. Someone would break the blocks record eventually, he reckoned. The state title was his way of being a forever name. That was enough. Time to move on to something bigger.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy Ava Hartsell)