This is The Athletic's major feature story for today. It's long, after all, it's The Athletic, but really good insight on Adonis.
Duke will always have the McDonald's high school All-Americans. Beard will always get the all-conference transfers from Utah, Minnesota and Creighton, but Tech will thrive with the street dogs like Arms -- hungry, chip on the shoulder, ZFG about the opponent -- just go play. Adonis defines the 2021-2022 Texas Tech basketball team.
Eamonn Brennan 7h ago
15
SAN DIEGO — It was the preseason team retreat, and also mostly a meet and greet, the first time the group had been together, and so the Mesa Community College men’s basketball team was breaking the ice. Who are you? Where are you from? What’s one interesting thing about you?
Adonis Arms didn’t hesitate. My name is Adonis Arms. I’m from Milwaukee. And I’m going to play in the NBA. Everybody laughed.
Of course they laughed. It was a completely ludicrous thing to say. They were all there together, in Mesa, Arizona, at a far-off community college, and everybody knew the score. Arms was there for many of the same reasons as the rest of the guys were there: He hadn’t been recruited by anyone. College coaches at all levels hadn’t been the least bit interested in his potential. This was, frankly, his last chance to play basketball, his last hope beyond the high school level, where as an undersized guard he had hardly been a roaring success anyway. He was here, in part, because a Mesa assistant coach, Michael Contreras, had seen Arms play on the grassroots circuit, had seen him play really well, picked him up for his own club team, saw how much the kid cared and figured there was no harm in trying to help get him one last shot.
The ambitions of the other kids in the room were far more pragmatic: Some wanted to get a scholarship somewhere, anywhere, any level would do. Some hoped to get picked up by a Division I team a couple of years down the road. Some even considered the possibility of getting paid for basketball — overseas, maybe, some day. But even that was on the wild end of the spectrum. The NBA, though? A ridiculous idea. “Everybody sort of laughed at him, like, ‘Pfft, OK, sure you are,’” Contreras said. “Like, come on. We’re at Mesa, bro.”
Arms didn’t laugh. He didn’t play it off. He was perfectly serious. Five years later, he would take the floor in the first round of the NCAA Tournament as the starting point guard for the No. 3 seed Texas Tech Raiders, the ballhandling focal point for a team with genuine national title ambitions. On Thursday, he will do the same yet again against Duke, against perhaps the greatest coach in the history of the game, against players whose talent and NBA potential has been universally acknowledged from an early age. If Arms plays better than them, beats them, outlasts them, many people will be surprised. He will not.
“Adonis,” his mother, Shayba Canady, says, “has always believed in his dream.” With one of the most unlikely paths in recent college hoops history behind him — from junior varsity to junior college to Division II to a mid-major bench role to here — her son keeps getting better, and keeps getting closer to that dream coming true.
“You never stop working,” Arms said, “and you never know what’s around the corner.”
This confidence, this relentless self-belief, absolutely started at home, though there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario happening here. “I always knew Adonis was going to be cold,” Canady said. “Little kids, you can just see when they’re doing something they’re meant to be doing. He always had it.” How much of this she suffused in her son, and how much was just naturally there, is hard to exactly tease out. You could start with his name, maybe: If you go by “Adonis Arms,” at least some level of innate assurance must creep in. But the story of Arms’ now semi-famous (and actually descriptive!) name is a pretty simple one: It was his father’s name, too.
In any case, Canady remembers her son having a certain look on the floor from a very young age. He had a hard-eyed, intense glare, an interesting turn for an otherwise fun-loving little kid. In Milwaukee, Canady remembers, people around the gym would call Arms “baby Jordan.” It was like he was doing an impression of what an elite basketball player should look and act like on the floor, while at the same time willing himself to believe the act was real.
He and his mom were, from the beginning, two of the very few people who did. She has been the driving force in his life, bar none. He calls her and his sister his “superheroes.” (“This whole deal, the driving force,” his future coach, Pat Kelsey, said, “starts with his mom.”) He was absolutely above average as a childhood hooper, no question, if not an obvious prodigy, so he had opportunities to play travel and Milwaukee-based grassroots basketball with his family’s support. When he was 11, his mother — now an operations analyst at Bank of America in Phoenix — decided to take Adonis and his sister, Averie, out of Milwaukee, striking out west as a single mom in the hopes of raising her children in a better all-around situation.
“I didn’t know anybody, I hadn’t worked for six months, we just came,” Canady said. “I just didn’t want us to be in Milwaukee anymore.” Adonis impressed club coaches on his first cold-call tryout. He stayed in the local hoops scene from there, and ended up at Desert Vista high school, a top high school hoops program filled with talent where he didn’t come close to the varsity team as a freshman. Or as a sophomore. Or as a junior. He was another obscure kid on a good high school team hoping to make his varsity squad eventually.
Part of the problem was size. Arms was rangy but barely 6-feet and 150 pounds, if that. (He was listed on MaxPreps at 6-foot-3, which no one bought for a second. His mom called him “5-foot-11 and a buck-oh-five.”) And he wasn’t so skilled at that size that he could still impress coaches and scouts – though he was maybe better than he thought his own hoops program, or recruiting services, gave him credit for.
When he was a junior, future Gonzaga star and current Memphis Grizzlies wing Brandon Clarke starred for Desert Vista, leading the team to a state title game against Marvin Bagley III. Arms was never overawed by the top prospect from his school, even as Clark’s career took off and his own essentially stalled. “I think that might have been an unsaid thing in his mind all along,” Contreras said. “He used to play against him in practice every day. Like, ‘Man, I could definitely hoop with BC.’”
Arms didn’t get his chance to play varsity basketball until he was a senior. He didn’t start a single game, averaged 17 minutes off the bench, and scored 2.7 points, 1.6 rebounds and 0.5 assists. He had no college offers. He kept going. He worked the grassroots scene hard; he didn’t go to his senior prom because he had a showcase event in Las Vegas the same day. As his senior year wound down, Arms’ mom remembered him coming home and asking him if all of this basketball stuff was really going to happen after all. “I was like, Adonis, what are we going to do?” she said. “Are you going to go to school? And he was like, ‘Mom, I’m going to get picked up. I am getting picked up.’” In the summer after graduation, he played with a team of unsigned seniors, a basketball island of misfit toys.
Contreras remembers Arms scoring 38 points in a summer game against Contreras’s own club, and thinking there was still something there. Around that same time, Jordan Ballard — son of Mesa Community College coach Sam Ballard — became the head coach at Desert Vista, and recommended his dad come look at this unsigned kid who worked like crazy and still didn’t have any looks. The elder Ballard saw him play at an L.A. Fitness and decided to offer him a scholarship. Adonis had been right: One way or another, he would get picked up.
Adonis Arms, surrounded by his family and Texas Tech coach Mark Adams, on Senior Night. His collegiate journey took him from a junior college to Division II to Winthrop to Texas Tech. (Michael C. Johnson / USA Today)
There are two points in his college basketball career in which Arms lost some semblance of his confidence, when the big metal hull of self-belief actually took on water. Another would come later. The first was at Mesa. A few weeks after his bold proclamation that he would one day be in the NBA, Arms discovered that Ballard didn’t have any immediate plans to play him. Maybe ever. He sat the first seven games of his freshman season.
Maybe for the first time, Arms looked around at where he was, really saw it for what it was — and what it wasn’t. The Mesa program existed in a precarious financial limbo; it had no dorms or meal plans, and its scholarships were worth $325 a semester. (In 2021, after COVID-19 canceled an entire season, Ballard decided to retire from the school, telling the Arizona Republic, “I love to coach, but not in the French Foreign Legion.”) Arms was starting to understand why the other players snickered when he said he was going pro. He remembers being in the Mesa gym by himself, crying when he missed shots. This was a last-hope sort of place. And he couldn’t even get on the floor here?
Was it possible? Was he … not good enough?
“That was the first time those thoughts ever really came into my head,” Arms said. Despite the trajectory of his high school career, he figured he’d need one shot at a college roster of some description, and that as soon as he got it he’d be off the races. Instead, he wasn’t playing at all. His size was still a slight issue; he showed up to Mesa 6-foot-1, still growing from his high school measurements but still very much your average to below-average size for a guard. In retrospect, he realized now that Ballard was putting Arms (and one other freshman, who quit the team) through the how-serious-are-you ringer. Arms would go to Contreras every day.
“Why am I not playing? Like, I’m really not good enough? How am I going to make it?” Contreras told Arms the only certain thing was that if he gave up now, he definitely wouldn’t make it. The assistant coach found a receptive audience, a human being preternaturally wired to find reasons to keep going, and a mother willing to hammer home the exact same message. She told Adonis to “stay in the light.” Arms was back at it straight away.
Then Ballard gave him some run. His first game, he scored 27 points. As a freshman, he went on to average 10.4 points. By the end of his sophomore season in 2017-18, that number was up to 13.3. Arms had grown to 6-foot-4. He was named to the all-conference team. Sensing another big break just around the corner, Arms transferred to Northwest Nazarene, a Division II school in Nampa, Idaho. His mom had doubts about him leaving Mesa to go all that way, but the step up in level was the exact thing Arms felt he needed to make for his career. Once again, he was was right: He averaged 20.6 points, 5.4 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game for a Nighthawks team that went 20-8. He was the 2019 Great Northwest Athletic Conference Player of the Year and the league’s Newcomer of the Year. Having barely clung on to a community college shot, Arms had now become a genuine DII star, the kind that draws interest from mid-major Division I programs.
It was time to make another leap. This made mom nervous. “You’re doing so well there,” she remembers thinking. “Do you really want to risk it?” Arms was convinced. He wasn’t just playing basketball to do well in Division II. All along, he had larger goals. He’d meant what he said, and he was willing to go wherever it took to achieve them. And nothing could be as hard as where he started. “That’s where the dogs are,” Arms said. “If you make it out of juco, you can make it anywhere.” And he was happy to go anywhere. Idaho? Sure. South Carolina next? Why not?
This brings us to the second challenging period, perhaps just the second time in his life that Arms thought maybe he wasn’t good enough after all: Winthrop, which Arms had chosen from among the offers his Nazarene star turn had inspired. After sitting out a redshirt transfer year in 2019-20, he joined up with the Eagles for 2020-21, soon realizing that coach Pat Kelsey wasn’t planning on making him the team’s obvious star, or even necessarily starting him. He had joined a team of experienced upperclassmen, into which, like Mordor, one does not simply walk. Those players were stalwarts, veterans of one Big South title team and NCAA Tournament appearance, and they were the foundation of a team that went 23-2 while Arms spent the majority of his team’s available minutes on the bench. Chief among them, and in Arms’ position, was Chandler Vaudrin, a 6-foot-7 senior point guard who led the nation in triple-doubles.
“We had an elite team, and he had a role,” Pat Kelsey said. “Everybody has a role. I give him a lot of credit for his personal growth and his willingness to be committed to the team, to be a star in his role.”
Adonis Arms is now drawing professional interest with his combination of size, athleticism and intangibles. (Tim Heitman / USA Today)
If Arms didn’t expect to make it his team, he at least expected to play more than 17 minutes per game. When he was on the floor, he was generally pretty good, accounting for big swaths of the Eagles’ possessions and shots while posting elite defensive rebounding numbers. He also drew seven fouls per 40 minutes, making him a relatively efficient offensive option despite just-OK shooting from the field. He was an interesting bench player on a very good mid-major team, but one who definitely did not want to be on the bench. In the middle of the season, he didn’t play a single minute in two road games at Radford — DNP-CD. “I wouldn’t say he was going off the deep end, but he was questioning a lot of things mentally,” Contreras said. “What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I get on the court? The coaches were trying to explain it to him. He didn’t understand. That was probably his mental low, the middle of the season.”
And yet Arms, as ever, kept at it. “It’s just a supreme belief in himself,” Kelsey said. “And he believes in the goals that he sets.” He had 10 points in 17 minutes in a valiant first-round NCAA Tournament loss to Villanova. And he had been intriguing enough in limited time that when he entered his name into the transfer portal — he had one more year of eligibility, thanks to COVID-19 — the Texas Tech staff was quick to reach out. In Arms, they saw everything new head coach Mark Adams wanted his guys to be: rangy, hulking, versatile, multi-talented, guys who could guard anywhere and switch anything. Now 6-foot-5 with a 7-foot wingspan — Arms’ name has, over time, become a fantastic example of nominative determinism — and with genuine guard skills left over from his days as an undersized kid on the offensive end, and a proven ability to rebound and defend, Adams found exactly the player he was looking for.
It has been a perfect fit. At every level along the way, Arms has eventually shown he is good enough to be there. One of the best teams in the country, playing in the best, toughest league in college basketball, has not been the exception.
At first, Arms was slightly concerned that he would end up back in the sixth-man role. (Which, again, given where he started, seems like a wild concern, but by now you should understand Arms’ self-belief transcends all league affiliations.) He didn’t start the first eight games of the year. Game No. 9 was a neutral-court contest against Gonzaga. Having played well the previous outing against Arkansas State, Arms got the call. Playing against the best team in the country, he scored 14 points on 5-of-10 shooting, including 3-of-7 from 3. He has started all but three games since. He is averaging 8.4 points, 4.3 rebounds, 2.7 assists and nearly a steal per game. He is, functionally, exactly what Adams wants in a point guard — big, long, strong, and versatile on both ends of the floor. His perimeter shooting has taken a slight dip with the increase in competition and volume, but he is a credible 3-point shooter who uses his size and athleticism to get to the rim, and who also occasionally does things like this:
Arms’ pattern of rising to meet the competition at every stop has made him one of the key players on one of the best teams in the country. The Red Raiders — now ranked sixth in adjusted efficiency — understandably view themselves as the spiritual underdogs, but when they take the floor against Duke in the Sweet 16 Thursday, Arms & Co. will be the favorites.
This is in part because of where they come from, how their journeys have shaped them. Adams, the no-middle defensive guru and Texas hoops lifer of the highest order, spent plenty of his own time in junior college and NAIA gyms and left coaching for years before returning to it out of little more than love. Davion Warren started his career at Olney Central College, then transferred to Hampton, before coming to Texas Tech. Kevin Obanor was an unsung star at Oral Roberts before last season’s Sweet 16 journey put his name on the map. Marcos Santos-Silva transferred from VCU.
“So many of our players come from humble beginnings,” Adams said. “They’ve had difficult times even getting here. There are so many great stories of how guys got here, and how maybe people gave up on them, and how they didn’t give up on themselves. “All of these transfers have a lot of scars. They’re tough people.”
None more so than Arms. When he arrived, he found a coach and a team full of guys just like him, guys who have at every turn refused to believe in the limits of their own ability, despite the rest of the world telling them to. “This is definitely my favorite team I’ve ever been on,” Arms said. “From day one, I was accepted. It just clicked.” He cites his friendship with Tech junior Kevin McCullar, the closest thing the balanced, unselfish Red Raiders have to a star.
As he does so, McCullar walks by, and gives Arms a gentle, ooh-look-at-you pat on the back. Arms laughs, almost sheepishly. He is being interviewed next to the podium before the round of 32 at the NCAA Tournament. The previous day, his mom was at Viejas Arena to see him score 15 points in a blowout first-round win over Montana State, another one of thousands of schools that didn’t see him coming. The next day, as the Red Raiders finish off a nervous win over Notre Dame, no one will celebrate more joyously — jumping up and down, smiling, doing invisible goofy plyometrics — than Arms.
“He’s so happy now,” Canady said. “And it makes me so happy. His whole life, my daughter and I would watch basketball games and tell him he was as good as anybody on the TV — he should be out there. And so to see him out there, playing well, it just means so much.”
Now, after his circuitous journey, Arms is not far off his dream. When Contreras is reached to talk for this story, he asks if he can call the reporter back; he is on the other line with an agent who is inquiring about Arms. There’s been a lot of that lately. The guard’s size and modern versatility — and yes, his arms — will get him at least a few NBA looks. At bare minimum, it would be a surprise if he didn’t get paid to hoop somewhere this summer.
First, of course, there is the small matter of Duke. On Thursday, there will come another challenge, another level to get to, another opportunity to steadfastly return to self-belief, even if the rest of the world doesn’t yet share it.
“We’re out to win the whole thing,” Arms said. “Work hard, believe in each other and yourself, and you never know what can happen.” Arms said that from the press conference dais between NCAA tourney wins. Even that idea, like a lot of his career these days, would have seemed ridiculous a few years ago. But nobody is laughing now.
(Top photo: Brett Wilhelm / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
Duke will always have the McDonald's high school All-Americans. Beard will always get the all-conference transfers from Utah, Minnesota and Creighton, but Tech will thrive with the street dogs like Arms -- hungry, chip on the shoulder, ZFG about the opponent -- just go play. Adonis defines the 2021-2022 Texas Tech basketball team.
The unmistakeable, unbreakable resilience of Texas Tech’s Adonis Arms
Eamonn Brennan 7h ago
SAN DIEGO — It was the preseason team retreat, and also mostly a meet and greet, the first time the group had been together, and so the Mesa Community College men’s basketball team was breaking the ice. Who are you? Where are you from? What’s one interesting thing about you?
Adonis Arms didn’t hesitate. My name is Adonis Arms. I’m from Milwaukee. And I’m going to play in the NBA. Everybody laughed.
Of course they laughed. It was a completely ludicrous thing to say. They were all there together, in Mesa, Arizona, at a far-off community college, and everybody knew the score. Arms was there for many of the same reasons as the rest of the guys were there: He hadn’t been recruited by anyone. College coaches at all levels hadn’t been the least bit interested in his potential. This was, frankly, his last chance to play basketball, his last hope beyond the high school level, where as an undersized guard he had hardly been a roaring success anyway. He was here, in part, because a Mesa assistant coach, Michael Contreras, had seen Arms play on the grassroots circuit, had seen him play really well, picked him up for his own club team, saw how much the kid cared and figured there was no harm in trying to help get him one last shot.
The ambitions of the other kids in the room were far more pragmatic: Some wanted to get a scholarship somewhere, anywhere, any level would do. Some hoped to get picked up by a Division I team a couple of years down the road. Some even considered the possibility of getting paid for basketball — overseas, maybe, some day. But even that was on the wild end of the spectrum. The NBA, though? A ridiculous idea. “Everybody sort of laughed at him, like, ‘Pfft, OK, sure you are,’” Contreras said. “Like, come on. We’re at Mesa, bro.”
Arms didn’t laugh. He didn’t play it off. He was perfectly serious. Five years later, he would take the floor in the first round of the NCAA Tournament as the starting point guard for the No. 3 seed Texas Tech Raiders, the ballhandling focal point for a team with genuine national title ambitions. On Thursday, he will do the same yet again against Duke, against perhaps the greatest coach in the history of the game, against players whose talent and NBA potential has been universally acknowledged from an early age. If Arms plays better than them, beats them, outlasts them, many people will be surprised. He will not.
“Adonis,” his mother, Shayba Canady, says, “has always believed in his dream.” With one of the most unlikely paths in recent college hoops history behind him — from junior varsity to junior college to Division II to a mid-major bench role to here — her son keeps getting better, and keeps getting closer to that dream coming true.
“You never stop working,” Arms said, “and you never know what’s around the corner.”
This confidence, this relentless self-belief, absolutely started at home, though there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario happening here. “I always knew Adonis was going to be cold,” Canady said. “Little kids, you can just see when they’re doing something they’re meant to be doing. He always had it.” How much of this she suffused in her son, and how much was just naturally there, is hard to exactly tease out. You could start with his name, maybe: If you go by “Adonis Arms,” at least some level of innate assurance must creep in. But the story of Arms’ now semi-famous (and actually descriptive!) name is a pretty simple one: It was his father’s name, too.
In any case, Canady remembers her son having a certain look on the floor from a very young age. He had a hard-eyed, intense glare, an interesting turn for an otherwise fun-loving little kid. In Milwaukee, Canady remembers, people around the gym would call Arms “baby Jordan.” It was like he was doing an impression of what an elite basketball player should look and act like on the floor, while at the same time willing himself to believe the act was real.
He and his mom were, from the beginning, two of the very few people who did. She has been the driving force in his life, bar none. He calls her and his sister his “superheroes.” (“This whole deal, the driving force,” his future coach, Pat Kelsey, said, “starts with his mom.”) He was absolutely above average as a childhood hooper, no question, if not an obvious prodigy, so he had opportunities to play travel and Milwaukee-based grassroots basketball with his family’s support. When he was 11, his mother — now an operations analyst at Bank of America in Phoenix — decided to take Adonis and his sister, Averie, out of Milwaukee, striking out west as a single mom in the hopes of raising her children in a better all-around situation.
“I didn’t know anybody, I hadn’t worked for six months, we just came,” Canady said. “I just didn’t want us to be in Milwaukee anymore.” Adonis impressed club coaches on his first cold-call tryout. He stayed in the local hoops scene from there, and ended up at Desert Vista high school, a top high school hoops program filled with talent where he didn’t come close to the varsity team as a freshman. Or as a sophomore. Or as a junior. He was another obscure kid on a good high school team hoping to make his varsity squad eventually.
Part of the problem was size. Arms was rangy but barely 6-feet and 150 pounds, if that. (He was listed on MaxPreps at 6-foot-3, which no one bought for a second. His mom called him “5-foot-11 and a buck-oh-five.”) And he wasn’t so skilled at that size that he could still impress coaches and scouts – though he was maybe better than he thought his own hoops program, or recruiting services, gave him credit for.
When he was a junior, future Gonzaga star and current Memphis Grizzlies wing Brandon Clarke starred for Desert Vista, leading the team to a state title game against Marvin Bagley III. Arms was never overawed by the top prospect from his school, even as Clark’s career took off and his own essentially stalled. “I think that might have been an unsaid thing in his mind all along,” Contreras said. “He used to play against him in practice every day. Like, ‘Man, I could definitely hoop with BC.’”
Arms didn’t get his chance to play varsity basketball until he was a senior. He didn’t start a single game, averaged 17 minutes off the bench, and scored 2.7 points, 1.6 rebounds and 0.5 assists. He had no college offers. He kept going. He worked the grassroots scene hard; he didn’t go to his senior prom because he had a showcase event in Las Vegas the same day. As his senior year wound down, Arms’ mom remembered him coming home and asking him if all of this basketball stuff was really going to happen after all. “I was like, Adonis, what are we going to do?” she said. “Are you going to go to school? And he was like, ‘Mom, I’m going to get picked up. I am getting picked up.’” In the summer after graduation, he played with a team of unsigned seniors, a basketball island of misfit toys.
Contreras remembers Arms scoring 38 points in a summer game against Contreras’s own club, and thinking there was still something there. Around that same time, Jordan Ballard — son of Mesa Community College coach Sam Ballard — became the head coach at Desert Vista, and recommended his dad come look at this unsigned kid who worked like crazy and still didn’t have any looks. The elder Ballard saw him play at an L.A. Fitness and decided to offer him a scholarship. Adonis had been right: One way or another, he would get picked up.
Adonis Arms, surrounded by his family and Texas Tech coach Mark Adams, on Senior Night. His collegiate journey took him from a junior college to Division II to Winthrop to Texas Tech. (Michael C. Johnson / USA Today)
There are two points in his college basketball career in which Arms lost some semblance of his confidence, when the big metal hull of self-belief actually took on water. Another would come later. The first was at Mesa. A few weeks after his bold proclamation that he would one day be in the NBA, Arms discovered that Ballard didn’t have any immediate plans to play him. Maybe ever. He sat the first seven games of his freshman season.
Maybe for the first time, Arms looked around at where he was, really saw it for what it was — and what it wasn’t. The Mesa program existed in a precarious financial limbo; it had no dorms or meal plans, and its scholarships were worth $325 a semester. (In 2021, after COVID-19 canceled an entire season, Ballard decided to retire from the school, telling the Arizona Republic, “I love to coach, but not in the French Foreign Legion.”) Arms was starting to understand why the other players snickered when he said he was going pro. He remembers being in the Mesa gym by himself, crying when he missed shots. This was a last-hope sort of place. And he couldn’t even get on the floor here?
Was it possible? Was he … not good enough?
“That was the first time those thoughts ever really came into my head,” Arms said. Despite the trajectory of his high school career, he figured he’d need one shot at a college roster of some description, and that as soon as he got it he’d be off the races. Instead, he wasn’t playing at all. His size was still a slight issue; he showed up to Mesa 6-foot-1, still growing from his high school measurements but still very much your average to below-average size for a guard. In retrospect, he realized now that Ballard was putting Arms (and one other freshman, who quit the team) through the how-serious-are-you ringer. Arms would go to Contreras every day.
“Why am I not playing? Like, I’m really not good enough? How am I going to make it?” Contreras told Arms the only certain thing was that if he gave up now, he definitely wouldn’t make it. The assistant coach found a receptive audience, a human being preternaturally wired to find reasons to keep going, and a mother willing to hammer home the exact same message. She told Adonis to “stay in the light.” Arms was back at it straight away.
Then Ballard gave him some run. His first game, he scored 27 points. As a freshman, he went on to average 10.4 points. By the end of his sophomore season in 2017-18, that number was up to 13.3. Arms had grown to 6-foot-4. He was named to the all-conference team. Sensing another big break just around the corner, Arms transferred to Northwest Nazarene, a Division II school in Nampa, Idaho. His mom had doubts about him leaving Mesa to go all that way, but the step up in level was the exact thing Arms felt he needed to make for his career. Once again, he was was right: He averaged 20.6 points, 5.4 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game for a Nighthawks team that went 20-8. He was the 2019 Great Northwest Athletic Conference Player of the Year and the league’s Newcomer of the Year. Having barely clung on to a community college shot, Arms had now become a genuine DII star, the kind that draws interest from mid-major Division I programs.
It was time to make another leap. This made mom nervous. “You’re doing so well there,” she remembers thinking. “Do you really want to risk it?” Arms was convinced. He wasn’t just playing basketball to do well in Division II. All along, he had larger goals. He’d meant what he said, and he was willing to go wherever it took to achieve them. And nothing could be as hard as where he started. “That’s where the dogs are,” Arms said. “If you make it out of juco, you can make it anywhere.” And he was happy to go anywhere. Idaho? Sure. South Carolina next? Why not?
This brings us to the second challenging period, perhaps just the second time in his life that Arms thought maybe he wasn’t good enough after all: Winthrop, which Arms had chosen from among the offers his Nazarene star turn had inspired. After sitting out a redshirt transfer year in 2019-20, he joined up with the Eagles for 2020-21, soon realizing that coach Pat Kelsey wasn’t planning on making him the team’s obvious star, or even necessarily starting him. He had joined a team of experienced upperclassmen, into which, like Mordor, one does not simply walk. Those players were stalwarts, veterans of one Big South title team and NCAA Tournament appearance, and they were the foundation of a team that went 23-2 while Arms spent the majority of his team’s available minutes on the bench. Chief among them, and in Arms’ position, was Chandler Vaudrin, a 6-foot-7 senior point guard who led the nation in triple-doubles.
“We had an elite team, and he had a role,” Pat Kelsey said. “Everybody has a role. I give him a lot of credit for his personal growth and his willingness to be committed to the team, to be a star in his role.”
Adonis Arms is now drawing professional interest with his combination of size, athleticism and intangibles. (Tim Heitman / USA Today)
If Arms didn’t expect to make it his team, he at least expected to play more than 17 minutes per game. When he was on the floor, he was generally pretty good, accounting for big swaths of the Eagles’ possessions and shots while posting elite defensive rebounding numbers. He also drew seven fouls per 40 minutes, making him a relatively efficient offensive option despite just-OK shooting from the field. He was an interesting bench player on a very good mid-major team, but one who definitely did not want to be on the bench. In the middle of the season, he didn’t play a single minute in two road games at Radford — DNP-CD. “I wouldn’t say he was going off the deep end, but he was questioning a lot of things mentally,” Contreras said. “What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I get on the court? The coaches were trying to explain it to him. He didn’t understand. That was probably his mental low, the middle of the season.”
And yet Arms, as ever, kept at it. “It’s just a supreme belief in himself,” Kelsey said. “And he believes in the goals that he sets.” He had 10 points in 17 minutes in a valiant first-round NCAA Tournament loss to Villanova. And he had been intriguing enough in limited time that when he entered his name into the transfer portal — he had one more year of eligibility, thanks to COVID-19 — the Texas Tech staff was quick to reach out. In Arms, they saw everything new head coach Mark Adams wanted his guys to be: rangy, hulking, versatile, multi-talented, guys who could guard anywhere and switch anything. Now 6-foot-5 with a 7-foot wingspan — Arms’ name has, over time, become a fantastic example of nominative determinism — and with genuine guard skills left over from his days as an undersized kid on the offensive end, and a proven ability to rebound and defend, Adams found exactly the player he was looking for.
It has been a perfect fit. At every level along the way, Arms has eventually shown he is good enough to be there. One of the best teams in the country, playing in the best, toughest league in college basketball, has not been the exception.
At first, Arms was slightly concerned that he would end up back in the sixth-man role. (Which, again, given where he started, seems like a wild concern, but by now you should understand Arms’ self-belief transcends all league affiliations.) He didn’t start the first eight games of the year. Game No. 9 was a neutral-court contest against Gonzaga. Having played well the previous outing against Arkansas State, Arms got the call. Playing against the best team in the country, he scored 14 points on 5-of-10 shooting, including 3-of-7 from 3. He has started all but three games since. He is averaging 8.4 points, 4.3 rebounds, 2.7 assists and nearly a steal per game. He is, functionally, exactly what Adams wants in a point guard — big, long, strong, and versatile on both ends of the floor. His perimeter shooting has taken a slight dip with the increase in competition and volume, but he is a credible 3-point shooter who uses his size and athleticism to get to the rim, and who also occasionally does things like this:
Arms’ pattern of rising to meet the competition at every stop has made him one of the key players on one of the best teams in the country. The Red Raiders — now ranked sixth in adjusted efficiency — understandably view themselves as the spiritual underdogs, but when they take the floor against Duke in the Sweet 16 Thursday, Arms & Co. will be the favorites.
This is in part because of where they come from, how their journeys have shaped them. Adams, the no-middle defensive guru and Texas hoops lifer of the highest order, spent plenty of his own time in junior college and NAIA gyms and left coaching for years before returning to it out of little more than love. Davion Warren started his career at Olney Central College, then transferred to Hampton, before coming to Texas Tech. Kevin Obanor was an unsung star at Oral Roberts before last season’s Sweet 16 journey put his name on the map. Marcos Santos-Silva transferred from VCU.
“So many of our players come from humble beginnings,” Adams said. “They’ve had difficult times even getting here. There are so many great stories of how guys got here, and how maybe people gave up on them, and how they didn’t give up on themselves. “All of these transfers have a lot of scars. They’re tough people.”
None more so than Arms. When he arrived, he found a coach and a team full of guys just like him, guys who have at every turn refused to believe in the limits of their own ability, despite the rest of the world telling them to. “This is definitely my favorite team I’ve ever been on,” Arms said. “From day one, I was accepted. It just clicked.” He cites his friendship with Tech junior Kevin McCullar, the closest thing the balanced, unselfish Red Raiders have to a star.
As he does so, McCullar walks by, and gives Arms a gentle, ooh-look-at-you pat on the back. Arms laughs, almost sheepishly. He is being interviewed next to the podium before the round of 32 at the NCAA Tournament. The previous day, his mom was at Viejas Arena to see him score 15 points in a blowout first-round win over Montana State, another one of thousands of schools that didn’t see him coming. The next day, as the Red Raiders finish off a nervous win over Notre Dame, no one will celebrate more joyously — jumping up and down, smiling, doing invisible goofy plyometrics — than Arms.
“He’s so happy now,” Canady said. “And it makes me so happy. His whole life, my daughter and I would watch basketball games and tell him he was as good as anybody on the TV — he should be out there. And so to see him out there, playing well, it just means so much.”
Now, after his circuitous journey, Arms is not far off his dream. When Contreras is reached to talk for this story, he asks if he can call the reporter back; he is on the other line with an agent who is inquiring about Arms. There’s been a lot of that lately. The guard’s size and modern versatility — and yes, his arms — will get him at least a few NBA looks. At bare minimum, it would be a surprise if he didn’t get paid to hoop somewhere this summer.
First, of course, there is the small matter of Duke. On Thursday, there will come another challenge, another level to get to, another opportunity to steadfastly return to self-belief, even if the rest of the world doesn’t yet share it.
“We’re out to win the whole thing,” Arms said. “Work hard, believe in each other and yourself, and you never know what can happen.” Arms said that from the press conference dais between NCAA tourney wins. Even that idea, like a lot of his career these days, would have seemed ridiculous a few years ago. But nobody is laughing now.
(Top photo: Brett Wilhelm / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
