THE DRILL ITSELF is pretty standard as far as draft workouts go. A player starts on offense and stays on offense as long as he keeps scoring. As soon as he misses, he rotates over to defense. As soon as he allows a bucket, he rotates out and the next player rotates in -- it's a game of one-on-one. The Phoenix Suns routinely used it as a part of their draft-evaluation process.
When Devin Booker got into the knockout line in 2015, he was just the latest prospect the Suns were looking at with the 13th pick. Then, a glimpse.
"He just kept scoring," former general manager Ryan McDonough recalled. "Nobody could stop him. He just kept scoring and scoring to the point that we were like, 'OK, we've seen enough. This is really impressive. Let's move on to the next drill. We only have an hour or so and there's a number of things we want to do.'"
Booker wasn't having it. With a few four-letter words, he let the Suns' brass know there was no way he was ending the drill until someone stopped him.
"I think he was 18 at the time," McDonough says. "And for an 18-year-old kid to say 'F that' to a group of executives and coaches -- we were a little surprised by it.
"But we also loved it."
Booker didn't start in his lone season at the University of Kentucky -- he wasn't even projected as a lottery pick when he initially declared for the 2015 draft. But after averaging 27 points in his first NBA playoffs and scoring 27 points in Game 1 of the 2021 NBA Finals, Devin Booker is not going to leave the stage until someone stops him.
SHORTLY AFTER BEING drafted, then-assistant coach Earl Watson asked Booker a simple question: How good do you want to be?
Without skipping a beat, Booker looked at Watson and said, "One of the best to ever play."
"When he said that," Watson says, "that allowed me to hold him accountable for those words."
Booker was great at catching and shooting when he came into the league. Watson told him that wasn't enough.
He was great at driving straight to the basket. Watson told him that wasn't enough.
They'd meet at the Suns' practice facility or the gym at Arizona State. Booker lived near the campus in Tempe. He would text Watson to come work out at all hours of the day -- or night -- along with him and his older brother, Davon Wade.
They'd work on playing off the bounce, on his handle and how to manipulate defenses. When Booker was good, he heard praise. When he wasn't, Watson would lay into him.
"There'd be times when I come out of a game and I'd see his father," Watson says, "and he'd be like, 'Did you cuss him out? OK, cool. I won't have to.'"
Booker wanted to be pushed. He'd moved from his mother's house in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Moss Point, Mississippi, so his father, Melvin, who played professionally in the NBA and overseas, could push him.
"When Devin played with my friends, I didn't protect him," Melvin Booker says. "I would play against him. I would let him get in arguments -- in open gyms there's always arguments -- and I let him have his own battles against these old men.
"I'd sit on the sidelines, like, 'Handle it yourself.'"
Watson took the same tack when Booker got to the NBA. He put defensive stopper P.J. Tucker on him in practices and never called fouls.
"You got two elite players who are very intense," Watson says. "One is offensively gifted, one is defensively gifted. So I'd just let it go -- let iron sharpen iron."
One time, Watson says, the practice battle grew so heated, Booker and Tucker nearly came to blows.
"They were grabbing, body-slamming, holding on, locking up," he says. "And one of our coaches was like, 'We got to break this up.' I said, 'You can't break it up. This is critical for Book.'"
What neither of them knew then -- and how could they? -- was they'd be facing off against each other six years later, in the NBA Finals.
"It was my job to make him better," Tucker said on Monday. "I knew what I had to do, for what he was going to see, and what was coming and what he needed to be ready for."
IT WAS HARD to see greatness from anyone on a team that had been mired in a decade of disappointment. Phoenix had churned through lottery picks and missed the playoffs for 11 straight years before this season. The Suns' 306-489 regular-season record from 2009-10, their last playoff appearance, through last season was the third worst in the NBA.
But Booker stood out.
"I would be screaming to everybody, anybody who wanted to listen, 'Yo, Book is that dude. Trust me,'" says Tyson Chandler, who played with Booker from 2015 to 2019. Chandler was signed in 2015 to help turn around a team that hadn't made the playoffs in five years -- and hadn't reached the NBA Finals in more than two decades.
"That organization was f---ed up after the [Steve] Nash years," Chandler says.
Chandler had won a championship with the Dallas Mavericks in 2011, an Olympic gold medal with Team USA and a Defensive Player of the Year award in 2012, and became an All-Star for the first time in 2013.
Initially viewed as a key recruiting piece for LaMarcus Aldridge, the Suns signed Chandler right as free agency began, then brought him as a surprise guest to their recruiting meeting with the former Trail Blazers big man.
Aldridge eventually signed with the San Antonio Spurs instead, but by the end of the summer, Chandler was convinced he could soon be part of a different star tandem in Phoenix.
"A lot of rookies, they're taking in too much information," Chandler says. "Their eyes are wide open. They're moving a hundred miles an hour. With Devin, you were able to talk to him and he was able to process."
Booker asked Chandler about everything. What were the Olympics like? What were the Western Conference finals like? What was winning a championship like?
"People talk about [the losing] situation that I was in and how it was unfair to me, but I always see the bright side in it," Booker said. "Being able to develop a relationship with somebody like Tyson, who has accomplished everything that I want to do in this league ...
"I always leaned on him. I still do."
And what did Chandler tell him those experiences were like?
"Once you get a taste of it," Booker said, "there's nothing else that you're going to want in the world."
AFTER THE SUNS won Game 4 of the Western Conference finals, Booker sat quietly at a table in the back of a lounge at Staples Center, eating a plate of sushi while Chris Paul addressed the media.
Normally, players will wait in the locker room before entering the news conference room, to avoid any extra exposure. But Booker was content to wait, and listen, while Paul talked.
Whether from a veteran center like Chandler or his new superstar backcourt teammate, if there's insight to be had, Booker is there to glean it.
"I watch every game and that was before I was in the NBA," Booker said. "So I've been a fan of his for a long time, and I've learned so much from him this year."
It is not lost on Booker that his first chance to win it all might also be Paul's last -- that he's gotten to the NBA Finals in his first playoffs, while Paul finally made it after 16 years in the league and 13 playoff appearances.
"I have a lot of respect for him as a man, not even as a basketball player, just understanding how bad he wants this and how much time he's put into it," Booker said. "Sixteen years, that's a long time. ... Me and Deandre [Ayton] are sitting here, Mikal [Bridges], it's our first time here."
But it is not the first time Booker envisioned himself in moments like this.
"It's like he was preparing himself for this the whole time," Chandler says. "A lot of the questions he wanted to know from me, 'What is that moment like?'
"Once you're there," Chandler told him, "you're just so free and loving every minute. It's the highest competition of basketball that you'll ever face in your life. Every single moment, every single possession."
He could sense Booker picturing it.
"He just wanted to live in those stories," Chandler says, "and in those moments."
And he's not getting off the court until someone knocks him off.