IT WAS IN NOVEMBER, THE day before the Toronto Raptors were set to play the Boston Celtics at TD Garden, that the then-20-year-old deemed to be the future of the team and the man who helped set the foundation for the franchise in the mid-’90s coincidentally met at Saks Fifth Avenue in Boston. Scottie Barnes was doing “a little shopping” when he ran into none other than Damon Stoudamire.
At that point, Barnes had yet to fully embark on the entirety of a season that many are now calling perhaps the most impactful rookie season in Raptors’ history. But to have the chance to chop it up with a member of the inaugural Raptors team (Stoudamire won Rookie of the Year that season in Toronto, like Barnes) just seemed like fate.
“He was just really telling me to try to get Rookie of the Year, keep doing what I got to do and really take over this League,” Barnes says while on set of his SLAM 239 cover shoot.
That was Stoudamire’s first time meeting Scottie officially; he’d watched him play in high school and at different Nike EYBL and AAU events, but now he was actually seeing what Barnes was capable of doing in the League. Just a month prior to their meeting, the No. 4 overall pick in the 2021 NBA Draft had dropped a double-double on the Cs—in just the second game of his career.
“He was a matchup nightmare,” Stoudamire, who’s now an
