“They just wanted to be the best, and at the end of the day, they were friends.”
Their closeness in age meant they went through the same levels of competition and attended the same schools together.
“He’s been through every stage of life with me,” Shai said. “Picking up a basketball, to going to prep school, to making the NBA. We’ve gone through every situation together. For both of us to be where we are is special.”
They were closely rated as prospects all through their time playing hoops, and Nickeil said they dreamed of having kids talk about them one day in the same way they talked about the greats of the game they watched as kids.
“How we talked about LeBron, how we talked about Kobe, how we talked about Allen Iverson, there was always that debate on who’s the best,” Nickeil said. “We wanted that to be for us, we wanted guys growing up and kids coming in elementary school. Like, no, Shai’s the best. No, Nickeil’s the best.”
Shai also played soccer while Nickeil wanted to go into hockey, but Nicole steered him away from that. She also fostered a love of reading in Nickeil that he kept with him into his NBA days, and you could sometimes catch Nickeil reading books at his locker earlier in his Wolves tenure.
