Thompson Twins are ready for the NBA, but not breaking up

Amen Thompson and his twin brother Ausar sat side-by-side amid a swirl of tourists at Carmine’s restaurant in Times Square around 8 p.m. Monday. They had flown to New York that morning for the NBA draft at Barclays Center, and now they were trying to decide which dishes to share with their family. Their father, Troy, who is also their agent, ordered sautéed chicken, shrimp spaghetti, and an anchovy Caesar salad on the side.

Ausar tried an anchovy for the first time while thinking about the week ahead.

“It will be a bittersweet moment when we are called up,” he said. “It’s something we’ve been preparing for all our lives, but it means we’re going to be apart for the first time in our lives.

“We’ll keep pretending everything is normal, and we’ll be together forever, but it will be over” – he picked up his phone from the white tablecloth and looked at an app – “in two days and 23 hours and 18 minutes.”

The twins’ preparation for the NBA began more than a decade before the Houston Rockets selected Amen and the Detroit Pistons selected Ausar in the first round of the draft on Thursday night. They grew up in Oakland, California, with Troy; their mother Maya; and their older brother, Troy Jr., who played college basketball for Prairie View A&M. When the twins were 9 years old, they created a vision board to motivate them on their journey. It had handwritten goals such as “become the greatest NBA player of all time” and “become a multi-billionaire” and “become 6 feet 9 inches”. It also included a child’s idea of ​​concrete steps to make it to the NBA, such as “running two miles dribbling left-handed” and “eating vitamins, healthy food, and milk every day.”

Monday before dinner, they had seen their vision board on a billboard in Times Square.

Amen now jokes that the only goal he regrets is length. He and his brother measured in at 6 feet 5.75 inches at the NBA draft combine last month in Chicago. “I should have said I wanted to be 7 feet tall,” he said. “Then I would really be 6-9 now.”

Their preparation was accelerated in 2021 when they became one of the first players to sign with Overtime Elite, a semi-pro basketball league based in Atlanta. And it became a daily obsession from last June when Ausar and Amen attended an NBA draft party for their friend Josh Minott, who was selected in the second round by the Charlotte Hornets. On his way home, Ausar decided he wanted to know exactly how many days, hours, minutes and seconds there were before he too became an NBA player.

He also wanted to know exactly how much time he had left to be with his brother.

Then he started looking for a countdown timer for his iPhone. He downloaded one and agreed to pay the $9.99 annual subscription fee. Scrolling through the photos on his phone, he chose a photo of him and Amen celebrating on the OTE basketball court to use as the background for the timer. He then keyed in the date and time of the next version: June 22, 2023 at 8 p.m. There were still 364 days to go.

When Ausar first counted down to the draft, time seemed to be slowing down. The brothers were 19 at the time, and when the OTE season started on October 20, there were 245 days left.

For the past year, Ausar checked the app as often as once a day but at least once a week. When he needed a little extra motivation to get up for an early alarm, he opened the app. He nudged his brother and held his phone open when they considered whether they’d be late again after another workout.

They were part of OTE’s second draft class, but they were the league’s first players expected to be drafted in the first 14 picks, a segment known as the “lottery” that is a signifier of top talent. And so the design status of the twins was not just a matter of personal pride, but one KPI for OTs half a billion dollars company.

When the OTE season ended – the team of the twins, City Reapers, won the league title on May 6 – there were only 47 days left. When they arrived in New York on Monday, they knew this could be their last chance to be together for a while. “The longest we’ve ever been apart is two days,” Ausar said. “I went to Florida last year and he stayed in Atlanta. He called me like 30 times!”

On Tuesday, they headed to the Empire State Building for a photo shoot with the other candidates who were invited to sit in the green room on the floor of Barclays Center. They both have a fear of heights and had to make sure the railing was higher than themselves. Even then, they were apprehensive about climbing the ladder to an observation deck not open to the public. Then they went to a courthouse to shoot a segment with the “Today” show, went to two brand photo shoots, and ended the day training with the popular NBA trainer Chris Brickly.

On Wednesday, they did a series of interviews hosted by the NBA and then attended a meeting with the NBA players’ union before heading to Brooklyn for an OTE draft party. In an art warehouse converted into a content studio with a fenced-in basketball court, the Thompsons conducted five interviews in 90 minutes. They eagerly answered one question about what they were working on in their games (“shoot,” they both said) and tolerated another question about whether they had dual telepathy (“no” was their short answer). After Ausar hit a deep 3-pointer over the fence, they returned to their hotel to try on their suits. There were still 21 hours to go.

On Thursday, design day, they woke up at 9 a.m. to have their hotel rooms touched up by a hairdresser, then invited four camera crews—including one from their designer and one from The New York Times—to watch them get ready. They joked about a last-minute change of their matching double-breasted suits by designer Waraire Boswell. They also teased the idea of ​​swapping places with each other when they were selected, to see if anyone noticed. But in the end, Amen wore the cream suit and Ausar stuck with navy blue.

About 30 minutes after the countdown timer expired, Amen was sitting with his family at a long table in Barclays Center when he received a call from the Rockets letting him know they would be selecting him with the fourth pick. Ausar jumped up from his chair in celebration.

“My heart was beating so fast,” said Ausar. “I was more concerned about where he would be called up than where I would be. And I think I was happier for him than I was for myself.

As Amen took the stage to shake hands with NBA commissioner Adam Silver, Ausar’s phone didn’t ring. Troy hadn’t heard anything either. Ausar was about to open Twitter on his phone to see if one of the NBA insiders had tipped off the next pick when he noticed that none of the TV cameras had moved from his table. Watching Silver return to the podium, he felt he was about to be picked up by the Pistons at No. 5.

When he heard his name called, he stood up and paused, almost instinctively looking for his brother, but Amen was already gone. Instead, he hugged his mother. Nearby, Amen was plugged into a microphone for an interview and he clapped his fist in the air when he heard his brother’s name. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that they found each other again, but they only had enough time for a high-five before being pulled in opposite directions for interviews.

After leaving Barclays, they went to another OTE party. “If I ever have a son who goes into military service, I’ll tell him to put up a sign at every party that says ‘Please, no photos,'” Ausar said with a laugh. “I feel like all we did was walk in, shoot for an hour and a half and then leave.”

Finally, at 2 a.m., they collapsed into Ausar’s room and had a moment to celebrate with each other. The moment they’d been counting down to since that design party had come a year and a day before, and it had gone better than they’d originally thought. “We didn’t just get into the top 10,” said Amen later. “We finished in the top five.”

The next morning, on their way to appearing live on “Today,” they got another bit of good news from their father: The Rockets would fly Amen to Detroit first to stay with Ausar until Sunday, and the Pistons would allow Ausar to to fly to Houston to repay the favor for Amen. The countdown timer had expired 13 hours ago and time seemed to slow down again. The Thompson twins would be together for at least a few more days.