Dillon Brooks, basketball monk, has never been afraid to be the bad guy

Long before he became the NBA’s super villain, the Dillon Brooks you know was nearly ruined by Tony McIntyre. The coach and co-founder of CIA Bounce, a Canadian AAU basketball powerhouse, knew Brooks had potential. He was a strong, gifted teenager who lived to play ball. Brooks could dominate against lesser players and worked meticulously to refine his game.

There was no question that he was very good, but at the time he wasn’t always the most talented player on the floor.

Not that Brooks would believe that. Even then, as a 16-year-old, he carried an unwavering belief in his ability to best anyone that crossed his path. He carried the kind of confidence a player needs to actually reach those heights. But the switch between his fearless, competitive edge and a fiery, uncontrollable temper flipped too easily. He took senseless technical fouls. He swore at refs. He challenged opponents to fight. In those too-frequent outbursts, Brooks’ anger eclipsed his skill. It threatened to become his undoing.

During a Nike Youth Elite Basketball League tournament in Virginia, a Brooks outburst had hurt his team. At the team’s hotel, McIntyre sat Brooks in his room and grounded him there until he could find a way to better control that rage.

“You can’t just tell me this is something that happens,” McIntyre told Brooks. “Your temperature has to rise. There has to be a feeling. There has to be something that you feel is a trigger — so you can let me know when it’s happening and I can help you.”

Brooks had no answer. They sat in that hotel room for several hours. Nothing. Brooks could not describe it.

But after a questionable call the next game, McIntyre locked eyes with his ticking time bomb forward as he ran back down the court.

“It’s happening,” Brooks warned.

“Sub! Sub!” McIntyre called out, frantic to clip the wire before another Brooks explosion.

When Brooks went on to play at Findlay Prep and in the NCAA at the University of Oregon, his old coach wondered if he’d done enough to help him harness his intensity.

Today, Brooks is the NBA’s most notorious menace. His antics on the court earned him an NBA-leading 18 technical fouls, a threshold that caused him to miss two games due to automatic suspensions for picking up too many techs in a season. The Memphis Grizzlies’ swingman is regularly assigned to defend the opponent’s best scorers and has generated highlight reels of his ability to get under their skin.

He’s called out Luka Dončić and Kyrie Irving. He’s gotten in Kevin Durant’s face and bumped chests with James Harden. He traded barbs with Damian Lillard, and tussled with Donovan Mitchell (after punching him in the groin). He’s chirped at Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. His ongoing feud with Draymond Green led the former NBA Defensive Player of the Year to call Brooks an idiot and a clown.

Brooks seems to relish the controversy, leaning into the agitator role that has made him one of the most discussed players in the NBA this season. When the Grizzlies beat the Warriors after Green’s podcast insult, Brooks used a courtside interview with TNT to make sure the feud continued.

“That’s what I do. I talk. I told him … keep doing his podcast, keep blogging,” Brooks told TNT. “Keep doing his thing off the court, it’s cute. It’s fun for him. … You should give the mic to Draymond. Make him keep talking about me so I can play better.”

McIntyre has since realized he was wrong all along. The passionate intensity that filled Brooks when he was barely a teenager wasn’t his worst flaw. It was actually his super power.

“I tried to take that out of him,” McIntyre says. “But I really think that part of surviving in the NBA is that you have to have some a–hole in you. … He’s going to survive in the NBA because he can be an a–hole and he’s a big enough a–hole to believe in himself more than everyone else.”

While Brooks’ rage is ever present, it was particularly fed during the 2022 Western Conference semifinals. That’s when the Memphis Grizzlies swingman took out Gary Payton II with a hard foul, ruled a “flagrant 2,” on a fast-break layup. Payton fractured his elbow on the play and Brooks was ejected and suspended for Game 3 of the series.

After the incident, Warriors coach Steve Kerr called Brooks out for breaking “the code” with the hard foul. Didn’t matter. Brooks received a flagrant 1 foul for pushing Steph Curry in Game 6.

The Grizzlies lost that series in six games and Brooks has been public enemy number one in the Bay Area ever since.

On Christmas Day, a few months ago, it was abundantly clear to Diane Brooks what everyone around her thought of her son.

At the Chase Center in San Francisco, Golden State Warriors fans were determined to be unambiguous.

As she sat amid the insults aimed at her eldest child, she was careful not to give away her relationship to the target of their scorn. The Memphis Grizzlies security advises family members to avoid engaging with opposing fans. Not that Diane would. When it comes to heat-of-the-moment temperament, she and her son are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Diane spent years rushing home from her job with a bank in downtown Toronto to shuttle her son. They’d travel to practices and games across the city and its sprawling suburbs — often with her two younger kids in tow — to make sure Dillon had every opportunity to reach goals that he set for himself as a child. He decorated his room with a giant Dwyane Wade head and spent most of his time playing basketball on a portable net outside, until the city of Mississauga carted it away one night because it was a bylaw infraction.

Even in middle school, Brooks was at the YMCA working on some aspect of his game. And from the moment he started playing club basketball, he carried the same confident edge that has become his trademark today — even when he wasn’t the best player on the court, recalls Sahil Zirvi, who played with Brooks on a Mississauga-based club team when they were in the eighth grade. The team often matched up against opponents who were bigger, stronger and more talented, but Brooks never seemed to care.

“He was super fearless,” says Zirvi. “He was just ready for any challenge.”

For Diane, basketball was a positive outlet for her son’s energy. But she soon realized it was much more than that to Dillon. He was determined to be the best, she says — constantly trying to prove himself.

“He was always the underdog,” Diane says. “He always had this thing … when he was on the floor. They just had that energy. The team seemed to play better.”

It used to be much more upsetting to hear people hurling insults at her son, but she’s grown used to it through his six years with the Grizzlies.

“At first it did bother me, because I was like, ‘You don’t know him, he’s not that kind of person,’” Diane admits. “But now I’m just like, it’s just part of the game. I know who he is. I know what he’s about. I know he’s not that evil person.”

She likens the role her son plays on the court to a heel character in professional wrestling. The people who’ve known him for years are quick to point out the contrast between his brash persona on the court and his soft, goofy demeanor off of it.

In late February, Brooks arrived at a Grizzlies game wearing a back vest with no undershirt and ripped shorts, which many compared to the outfit wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin would wear. Brooks doesn’t work with a stylist, like some NBA stars do. He’s often drawn attention for his sartorial choices, like when he wore a flamboyant fur coat after a game in his hometown against the Toronto Raptors in 2021.

“It’s just weird stuff,” Diane says, laughing. She’s been told by the Grizzlies coaching staff that when Brooks showed up to a game shirtless, in Prada overalls, they knew they were going to win that game. The fashion flare is an extension of the character Brooks plays on the court: a man who plays by his own rules, but with specific intent.

Dillon Brooks stares down the Warriors’ Stephen Curry last month in Memphis. (Justin Ford / Getty Images)

It’s the intent behind Brooks’ fiery side that has made him one of the key members of a swagger-fueled Grizzlies team led by young stars Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson, a team that finished second in the Western Conference the past two seasons.

Jalen Poyser has experienced Brooks’ unbridled competitiveness since they played club basketball through middle school and became close friends. They played AAU ball together and at Henry Carr Catholic Secondary School, coached in part by Jalen’s father, Mark.

Brooks was a constant at the Poyser house in Brampton, where the friends played intense pickup contests fueled by a relentless competitive drive. It didn’t stop on the court though. Late battles over “NBA 2K” or “Call of Duty” could be just as heated. Brooks took any loss personally and had a hard time letting go. Sometimes there were heated arguments, but those always fizzled with the understanding that it was just Dillon being Dillon.

Poyser says that’s just Brooks’ personality. But there was also a method to his villainy.

In his first game with Henry Carr’s senior team, Brooks finished back-to-back alley-oops hanging on the rim and hollering in celebration. It set the tone for a season that saw Brooks lead Henry Carr to the provincial final, losing only two games all year. Brooks played tough and the team fed off that vibe, says Paul Melnik, the head coach at Henry Carr.

“You never want to ruin that spark. What you want to do is help them learn how to control it,” Melnik says. “If you squashed that intensity, I think you’d kill his game.”

It was a fun, intense team, led by the Brooks’ pregame dances and on-court celebrations, says Tanveer Bhullar, a 7-foot senior on that team who became close with Brooks before going on to play at New Mexico State.

“We had a lot of fun on the court,” Bhullar says. “To be honest, it was amazing. Every player loves to have a teammate like that, every player hates to go against a player like that.”

Playing for CIA Bounce alongside Poyser and Jamal Murray, Brooks always wanted to guard an opponent’s top player. He wanted to prove no one could beat him. When they were still in high school, Brooks explained to Poyser that he’d try to throw guys off their game by bumping them, tiring them out and getting in their heads.

“I’m telling you, stuff he’s doing now he was doing when he was a kid,” Poyser says. “He’d even do it with his teammates in practice. Dillon is the same basketball player once he steps on that court. He’s going to go hard … try and throw you off your game and then find your weaknesses.”

Poyser laughs at the reactions Brooks gets from his NBA opponents today. He knows how irritating the banter can be. But over the years, he learned how to ignore it. Grizzlies opponents just can’t seem to do that, Poyser says.

Brooks used to always tell him that his goal was “to build real estate” in his opponents’ heads. These days Brooks is developing subdivisions across the league.

“He owns everyone,” Poyser says. “They all get upset.”

Dillon Brooks (left) and Jalen Poyser played AAU and high school ball together. (Courtesy Jalen Poyser)

For a little more than a decade, there has been a Canadian invasion into the NBA. Players such as Tristan Thompson and Cory Joseph showed Canadian kids coming up behind what was possible when they both were drafted in the first round in 2011 and went on to establish themselves in the NBA. Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins — who were both, like Thompson, CIA Bounce graduates — were back-to-back first overall picks in 2013 and 2014. Tyler Ennis went 18th in 2014. Since then, more and more Canadian talent has flooded the league — led by stars such as Jamal Murray and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and the potential of RJ Barrett, the third pick in 2019. At the start of the 2022-23 NBA season, there were a record 23 Canadian players on NBA rosters — making Canada the most represented country in the NBA outside of the United States.

As an assistant coach at Canisius College in Buffalo, Mike Mennenga was a short drive across the border to a pipeline of basketball talent in a region wrapping around Lake Ontario, which is home to 8 million people.

Mennenga connected himself to the AAU and high school programs generating the top talent. He first saw Brooks play in middle school, but didn’t really pay attention to him until he reached Henry Carr.

Brooks was clearly a strong, physically gifted player on a talent-rich team. But at first, Mennenga felt that Brooks had the potential to be a fringe Division 1 player. It wasn’t until Brooks’ summer team, CIA Bounce, joined Nike’s EYBL, playing some of the top talent in the United States, that he started to show what he could do, Mennenga says.

Brooks arrived at Oregon the same year that Mennenga was hired as an assistant coach under Dana Altman. It was a valuable connection.

The two met up regularly at the Original Pancake House, where Brooks ate his go-to dish of pancakes topped with cottage cheese, and they would decompress and dissect his game. Brooks was obsessed with improving, Mennenga says. He was a “basketball monk,” studying opponents before each game, memorizing their tendencies on offense and identifying weaknesses to exploit.

“In Dillon’s freshman year, he really showed how badly he wanted to be good,” Mennenga says. Fitting well into Oregon’s system — alongside fellow Canadians Chris Boucher and Dylan Ennis — Brooks was named to the Pac-12 All-Freshman team.

But there were obstacles. Brooks had a strong, 6-foot-6 frame, but still carried some of the softness of his youth. During Brooks’ freshman year, a veteran teammate started calling him “fat boy.” Brooks took the jabs as motivation, focusing on his fitness and nutrition. He dropped from about 17 to 7 percent body fat, Mennenga says.

“If there was one thing that flipped Dillon into an NBA player it was his commitment to getting his body right,” he says.

Brooks emerged as a star over his three seasons at Oregon, culminating in a trip to the Final Four during his junior year — after which he decided to enter the NBA draft.

With the Ducks, Brooks’ intensity seemed to find a balance. Instead of trying to coach him into becoming a new player, Altman and Mennenga found a way to harness Brooks’ energy.

“To say he colors outside the lines is an understatement. But there is purpose — it’s calculated,” Mennenga says. “He’s very intelligent. And just like everybody else, emotions can get the best of us. But for the most part, Dillon has mastered where to push it and how far you can push it.”

Brooks’ play still led to distractions at times, including some notoriously obvious flops, and the admonishment he received from Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski after Brooks made a late 3 in an already-decided Ducks win over the Blue Devils in the Sweet 16. Throughout his time at Oregon, Brooks was a target for opposing fans — which was a role he embraced.

“He was the bad guy even here in the Pac-12,” says Mennenga. “Nothing motivates Dillon more than winning road games.”

Earlier this year, Mark Poyser typed out a message to the former player he thinks of like a son. He worried that Brooks was trying to take on the world, calling out everybody in the league. Poyser thought that maybe he was taking it too far.

“Dillon, we need to chill for a little bit,” Mark wrote. “We need to calm it down.”

But Poyser hesitated to press send.

He checked in with Brooks’ agent, Mike George — who founded CIA Bounce along with McIntyre — to see what he thought. It was the exact opposite. This was what the team wanted Brooks to be, George told him.

While Brooks’ blind intensity can still be a curse — he was fined $35,000 for shoving a camera operator after falling out of bounds in March — he has made himself impossible to ignore.

For all the rage that Brooks attracts from opponents and fans, his play also has earned him a level of respect from some NBA royalty. Durant and Irving have praised his competitiveness. LeBron James, against whom Brooks will likely battle when their first-round playoff series opens on Sunday, has called him a player you can’t disrespect.

And so that day, instead of chastising his former player, Poyser sent him a message encouraging the NBA’s biggest villain to keep doing what’s brought him to this moment — being the same Dillon Brooks he’s always been.

(Illustration: Samuel Richardson / The Athletic. Photos: Steph Chambers, Jason Miller / Getty Images)

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