Enrique Freeman is answering the phone in northeast Ohio. This is late Friday morning, about 16 hours after the Indiana Pacers have selected the 6-8 rebounding machine from Akron with the No. 50 pick of the 2024 NBA Draft. Freeman is softspoken at all times, but at this moment he sounds tired. Been a long night, as you can imagine. A great night – but a long one.
He’s about to perk up.
He’s about to hear how this whole thing came to be, and not just his NBA future, but the college career that came first.
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It was a former Pacers legend who got this story started in the late 1990s. Enrique Freeman, born in July 2000, wasn’t even alive yet when the first domino fell in Washington D.C., a domino that would lead Freeman to Akron, and now to the Pacers. His basketball career turns on one amazing plot twist, a twist he didn’t know about until he answered the phone Friday and I told him.
“Wow,” he says, softly, after hearing the story that changed the trajectory of his life.
“Wow,” he says again.
“Wow,” he says once more.
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Walter Ray, 57, started a non-profit program more than 25 years ago in Washington D.C. – Education, Goals, Opportunities and Sports, or EGOS for short – for kids like Evann Baker.
Freddie Lewis, who won three ABA titles with the Pacers and retired in 1975 ranked fourth all-time in the league in assists and sixth in scoring, got involved with the program to help kids like Evann Baker.
Who is Evann Baker? He’s another domino that fell, way back in 2006, when Enrique Freeman was 6 years old.
Baker grew up in the inner city of Washington D.C., where the only thing more abundant than basketball was trouble.
“If it wasn’t for Walter and Freddie, I know for sure I wouldn’t have gone to college,” Baker is telling me Friday. “My type environment – who knows, man. Who knows. The temptation to go left was as soon as I stepped off my porch. Freddie Lewis, Walt Ray, those type of guys – they saved my life, to be honest.”
Baker was a great basketball player, but growing up where he grew up, academics weren’t stressed. He coasted through his freshman and sophomore years at Archbishop Carroll High, lost his eligibility, got it back but suffered broken ribs. He finally played a full season as a high school senior, and was named the 2006 Gatorade Player of the Year for Washington D.C. Scored more than 600 points that season, including 51 in a game – No. 9 on the all-time single-game list in D.C.
Baker kept playing basketball because Walter Ray and Freddie Lewis insisted. He had no scholarship offers, though, because he’d been unknown for three years and was academically ineligible coming out of high school. Ray and Lewis organized an open gym for Baker, invited coaches from around the country to watch, and found a taker in then-Wichita State assistant Scott Spinelli, now the head coach at Chicago State.
Spinelli and Wichita State coach Mark Turgeon offered Baker a scholarship and helped him get into a prep school in Maine, where Baker got himself eligible for college. Turgeon left for Texas A&M, but thanks to EGOS – thanks to Walter Ray and Freddie Lewis – Evann Baker now had college options. He went to Quinnipiac, averaged 9.7 points per game as a freshman, blew out his knee, and went into coaching.
Fast forward, please, to 2018. Baker’s on the staff at Akron. Enrique Freeman is a student at Akron. He’d been a decent little player at Saint Martin de Porres High in Cleveland, emphasis on little: 6-4, maybe 160 pounds. He averaged 12 ppg as a senior. No scholarship offers – well, none for basketball. Akron gave him an academic ride, and Freeman accepted. He was going to major in Communications. See where that took him.
Pay attention, now, because all these worlds are about to collide. And they’re about to collide exactly where you’d expect:
Outside a Chick-Fil-A.
Freddie Lewis, still assisting the Pacers!
Enrique Freeman is in the Akron student union to study. Evann Baker is there for lunch. He’s headed to the union’s Chick-Fil-A when he sees Freeman.
By now, Freeman is starting to grow. It’s weird – he’s 18 – but he’s in the middle of a late 4-inch growth spurt that will leave him 6-8 by the end of the year. Baker sees Freeman, introduces himself as a member of the Akron coaching staff, and asks him to try out for the team.
Freeman says no.
He’s on campus for academics. The Akron staff invites Freeman for a meeting anyway, invites him to games as a guest, stays in touch. A year later they ask Freeman again to try out. By now Freeman is all of 6-8, crushing people in campus pick-up games, where everyone’s been telling him to try out for the Zips. Freeman says yes. Makes the team.
Freeman spends that first year on the bench, behind All-MAC forward Xeyrius Williams, then hits the weight room. He comes back for the 2019-20 season at 6-8 and weighing nearly 200 pounds. In his third game he has 22 points and 21 rebounds. Four years later he has 1,843 career points, 1,405 career rebounds – first all-time at Akron – and is coming off a senior season where he averaged 18.6 ppg and 12.9 rpg, tops in the country.
The Pacers notice, and draft him 50th overall Thursday night.
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On Friday morning, Evann Baker is sitting with Walter Ray in the Washington D.C. gym where Freddie Lewis devoted so much time to so many kids. Baker’s telling Ray, “If it wasn’t for the way you and Freddie helped me, I would never have prioritized (Enrique Freeman’s situation) like I did at the time.”
Ray is calling Freddie Lewis, telling him about the dominoes he’d been knocking over since 1999, how one of them led to second-round draft pick Thursday night – by the Pacers, of all teams.
“Freddie was tickled pink,” Ray says. “He’s still giving back to the Pacers!”
In Cleveland, Enrique Freeman is still trying to make sense of the story. His road to the NBA was strange enough – the academic scholarship to Akron, the growth spurt, the longstanding invitation to walk-on – but now he knows more of the story, more ofhisstory. Not even the Pacers knew about their second-round draft pick’s connection to Freddie Lewis until I told them Friday morning, shortly after telling Freeman himself.
“It just seems so surreal,” he says. “It hasn’t hit me yet. The process hasn’t hit me yet.”
He’s so quiet, Enrique Freeman.
“It’s just crazy,” he says.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStaror atwww.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Akron's Enrique Freeman owes NBA shot to Pacers legend Freddie Lewis