COLUMBIA, Mo. _ While Michael Porter Jr. slid to the No. 14 pick in the NBA draft on Thursday in New York, two men in attendance to support him, Missouri coach Cuonzo Martin and Porter's younger brother Jontay, felt at ease.
"Jontay and I were laughing," Martin said during a Friday conference call. "Talking about different things."
After all, they knew Porter Jr., once a candidate to go No. 1 overall, would hear his name called eventually, even if the night wasn't going as planned. And they knew that everyone at their table in the Barclays Center's green room _ Martin, the basketball playing brothers and their parents, Lisa and Michael Porter Sr. _ might all be back in the same place next year, when Jontay should be a first-round pick.
"The beautiful thing to me was Jontay was right there," Martin said. "He had a great chance to experience it."
Though the younger Porter opted to pull out of the 2018 NBA draft and return to MU for his sophomore season, he has said that testing the waters _ participating in the NBA's combine and interviewing and working out for pro teams _ helped him learn more about how to treat basketball as a full-time job. Martin thinks Thursday's draft cemented that lesson for Jontay Porter, who sat in the green room while prospects heard their names called and "a lot of the talk (among those in attendance) was about playing hard, guys playing defense, guys being a good teammate."
Like Jontay appears to be, Porter Jr. was destined for the green room, the exclusive area reserved for high picks, and Martin made sure to say that the forward's draft stock only plummeted because of lingering injury concerns. But on Thursday, Jontay Porter also saw other players in that room, such as Villanova's Donte Divincenzo and Boston College's Jerome Robinson, who weren't expected to be there less than a year ago.
"It just shows the hard work that they put in," Martin said.
Mizzou's coach said he's already seen growth in Porter's game since the forward returned to Columbia for summer workouts after mostly living and training in Chicago prior to pulling out of the draft. By working out with Porter Jr. and Jevon Carter, a hard-nosed West Virginia guard who went 32nd overall to Memphis, Jontay Porter saw the work required to get where he wants to be: back in that green room.
"I'm about to watch my brother get drafted, pretty special moment for our family," he said in a video tweeted from the Mizzou team account. "I'm about to get back to Mizzou tomorrow, get back to work. Hopefully I'll be in this position next year. We'll see."
Asked what he thinks Jontay Porter learned from his workouts with NBA teams, Martin said "it wasn't necessarily about the talent. It was about the strength of some guys." Which is why the coach feels certain Jontay's numbers will improve next year. The 6-foot-11 forward _ who averaged 9.9 points, 6.8 rebounds and 2.2 assists _ registered the highest body fat percentage at the NBA combine, and he will only get older and stronger.
Porter's skillset is so diverse that Martin even said the rising sophomore could at times act as MU's point guard next season. Regardless of the position he plays, though, Martin does not anticipate the 18-year-old will ever play selfishly, even though he is entering his presumptive final season at Mizzou with a chance to boost his draft stock.
"If Jontay played like that, he'd stick out like a sore thumb," Martin said. "That's really not his nature. ... With that being said, I want him to get up 15-20 shots a game, if he can."
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