Dylan Harper wakes up at his mom’s new house in Paramus at 4 a.m. on a recent day, ambles into a black Audi Q8 that his brother, Ron Jr., recently gifted him and drives up Route 17 to Don Bosco’s Immaculata Hall. Rapper NBA YoungBoy’s music blares from the speakers.
Substitute teacher Seve Cousins lets Harper in a back door to the gym with a swipe card, and trainer Kenny Miller follows. Harper, a 6-foot-6 guard with a 6-foot-11 wingspan and James Harden starter kit, stretches, corkscrews through the lane and steps back for threes. Sometimes he uses high school balls; other times he mixes in official NBA balls, which are larger and heavier, to test his strength. There is no clock on the walls so Harper, the top prospect out of New Jersey and the nation’s No. 2-ranked senior, keeps his own time and pace.
He rotates from the corner to the wing to the top of the key, and they all know where he is going: To Rutgers — where he will co-star in the program’s best freshman class ever and inherit his brother’s legacy that includes helping to resurrect the program with NCAA Tournament appearances in 2021-22. Dylan envisions a Final Four run with fellow five-star recruit Ace Bailey, who he calls his best friend. They then plan to compete to be the 2025 NBA Draft’s No. 1 pick.
“Being in the moment is really special,” Dylan says. “I’m on the hunt.”
He manipulates the tempo of each game he plays, and his decision to attend Rutgers instead of Duke disrupted the status quo. After decades of Rutgers failing to retain the state’s top talent, his commitment commences a new era for the Scarlet Knights. He has marked his spots on campus already, and knows how to get to them. A year ago, Don Bosco scrimmaged inside Rutgers’ practice gym and he lit up Rutgers Prep from beyond the arc as Ron Jr.’s former teammates watched from seats overlooking the court. Dylan alights at the memory.
“I was hooping! I was hooping!” he says. “I ain’t ever shoot the ball that well. Everything was just going in. It was just surreal. I felt them all there.”
An ambidextrous contortionist around the rim, Dylan is in constant motion. He moves purposefully between hardwood courts, hyperbaric chambers and hot yoga mats as he prepares for a senior year that ramps up with a game against Bailey at the City of Palms Classic in Florida on Dec. 19. In June, he played for Team USA in Hungary. In August, he guarded Stephen Curry in the NBA star’s camp in San Francisco. In between, Lebron James sent him a laudatory direct message.
Dylan, 17, wears free-form dreadlocks and Kobe Bryant sneakers that haven’t been released to the public. He bounces alley oops to himself on fast breaks and snaps his fingers to alert teammates he is about to cut back door for a dunk. When hungry at halftime, he is known to place a McDonald’s order on DoorDash from the locker room: 15 McNuggets, large fries and a strawberry banana smoothie. On his left leg is a tattoo sleeve that includes a Lion’s head and three words: FIND A WAY.
“You think you have him guarded, and then he is by you,” Don Bosco coach Kevin Diverio says. “He slithers through tiny holes to make shots at all kinds of wild angles.”
The brothers weave a braided narrative. When Ron Jr., who is six years older, plays games for the Toronto Raptors or their G League affiliate within driving distance, Dylan sits courtside with their mom, Maria, a Filipino immigrant who played Division I basketball at the University of New Orleans; his father, Ron Sr., an Ohio native who played 15 NBA seasons and won five titles (three with Michael Jordan; two with Kobe Bryant); and Drew Gross, his brother’s agent from Roc Nation. When Ron Jr. is not on court, Dylan slides his phone out of his sweatpants pocket to watch college or NBA games.
“I’ve been in the gym with him and mom more than anybody,” Dylan says. “All the arguments, the fighting, yelling. That’s what has made us who we are.”
He knows what he lacks. When it comes to state championships claimed for the Ironmen, the scoreboard reads: Ron Jr. 2, Dylan 0.
On the first day of practice, Dylan leads his team through drills for two and a half hours before working on bouncing an alley oop to 5-foot-9 reserve Malik Sheppard, who can’t quite get the ball over the rim.
One by one, the Ironmen file out of the gym, but Harper remains to shoot for another 45 minutes. During free throws, all he can hear is the janitor vacuuming the weight room.
“I gotta walk out of here with a state championship,” he says.
‘Find Dylan’
Dylan Robert Harper arrived in New Jersey via Englewood Hospital on March 2, 2006. He was a quiet baby who observed intently. Between 18 months and 2 years old, Maria wondered why he wasn’t speaking. He would drool and point at objects, but when he tried to speak, he sounded like he was under water. Tests ruled out autism but revealed fluid in his ears, which was then removed. Words trickled out.
They lived in Upper Saddle River then. He tagged along when she coached Ring City, her Nike travel program for girls. During breaks in game action, he sprinted on court to get up as many shots as he could before referees chased him across the baseline. At home, Ron Jr. and his friends coerced him to jump off the top of an air hockey table. His fearlessness was forged amid the free-for-all physicality of their basketball battles.
“I would beat the crap out of him,” Ron Jr. says. “Every time we played, an argument was had and he ran upstairs crying. One day, mom said, ‘Why don’t you let him win one time?’ I was like, ‘Hell no, I’m not going to let him win. No way. Losing builds character.’ That’s what my cousin always told me when he killed me in ‘Mortal Kombat.’”
They were opposites: Ron Jr., the righty, and Dylan, a lefty. Ron Jr. carried the name of a father who was the No. 8 pick in the 1986 NBA Draft, and whose career-highs included 40 points, 15 assists and 10 steals in a game. Onlookers expected immediate success from Ron Jr., but he struggled to move up and down the court with feet that kept growing. In the fourth grade, Ron Jr. was overwhelmed during a week of coach Mike Rice’s basketball camp at Rutgers.
“I had the worst experience ever,” Ron Jr. says. “And I told my mother I was never going back to Rutgers ever again. Verbatim. I remember saying, ‘I’m never coming back.’ Rough week. Coach Rice’s intensity was a little much for me at a young age. Just crazy.”
Shortly after Dylan was born, Maria became an assistant coach for Paterson Catholic’s girls’ team. Four years later, she inherited a team at DePaul that won five games. In Year 1, she flipped the Spartans to a 17-6 record. She also coached Ron Jr. and Dylan, a wiry, goofy kid with a smooth stroke. Dylan experimented with football, and baseball, where he batted righty and threw lefty. In basketball, he eluded defenders.
“It was always, ‘Where’s Dylan? Find Dylan!’” Brady Loughlin, a youth rival, says.
Change was constant. He transitioned from an afro to low fro to mohawk to flat top then back to mohawk. There was a period with one line buzzed on the side, and then there were three lines. There was also the blonde streak he had bleached down the middle made famous by former Giants wideout Odell Beckham Jr.
“He’s always trying to figure out how to be himself,” Maria says. “People think Ron Jr. has it hard, but Dyl has the Ron and the Ron. He’s trying to reinvent himself as his own person.”
When it came time to choose a high school for Ron Jr., Maria, who as a youth had attended St. Gerard’s, a Salesian-run school in Paterson, decided he would go to Don Bosco in Ramsey. He played on the freshman basketball team, and he could hear his mother shouting from the stands. It reached a breaking point.
“I remember after the game saying, ‘I don’t even want you to come to the games no more,’” he says. “We went to a sports psychiatrist. I was like, ‘Yeah, I just want to see how I play without my mom there.’ Looking back, it’s kind of funny, but we needed it to maintain the relationship. We went a few times over the course of a month. It definitely helped us.”
Ron Jr. welcomed all challenges. As a junior, he spurred Don Bosco to a state title. Then, in a scrimmage at the start of senior year, Ron Jr., working on his conditioning, threw up a floater against Gill St. Bernard’s and assistant coach Scott Moody confronted him.
“Ronnie, if you want to play at the next level, you gotta dunk that!” Moody said.
On the next possession, Ron Jr. grabbed a rebound, pushed the ball up the floor, crossed over and dunked on Gill’s center. He stared down Moody.
“He was going insane,” Ron Jr. says. “Tone setter.”
Another state championship came, and Dylan watched as his brother, who had few scholarship offers, parlayed his high school team’s success into a free ride to Rutgers, where new coach Steve Pikiell steadied the program following Rice’s ouster. Video had surfaced of Rice berating players during practice, throwing basketballs at them, kicking them and taunting them. Ron Jr. placed a premium on being able to play close to home, where he maintained regular access to his maternal grandmother Lilian’s adobo chicken with rice.
With Ron Jr. at Rutgers, Maria served as an assistant coach on Don Bosco’s junior varsity the next season. Another year later, Dylan enrolled at Don Bosco. During his first varsity practice, Moody and a senior got into a heated argument by the baseline and the senior punched a door by a sign that features a quote from St. John Bosco: “Tell My Boys I Await Them in Paradise.”
Dylan turned to a teammate.
“Yo,” he said. “This how Bosco is?”
‘Own the game’
On June 2, 2021, Mike Krzyzewski, the all-time winningest coach in NCAA history who led Duke to five national championships in 41 seasons as head coach, announced that he would retire following the next season, and that Jon Scheyer, his former player who was then an assistant, would inherit the kingdom.
Scheyer, all of 34, moved quickly to secure his first recruiting class, and so it was that fellow assistant coach Nolan Smith joined him on a visit to Don Bosco around 4 p.m. on Dec. 9, 2021. They arrived early for a preseason scrimmage wearing matching royal blue jackets and black pants and sat in the front row of pull-out bleachers. Nolan Smith donned a mask; Scheyer wore glasses.
New Jersey had been fertile territory for the Blue Devils dating back to St. Anthony’s Bobby Hurley committing in 1989. St. Joseph’s of Metuchen sent Jay Williams to Durham in 1999. And St. Patrick’s Kyrie Irving followed in 2010. Now they were back to see Mackenzie Mgbako, a 6-foot-6 wing who was starting his junior season.
But on the other side of the court was a growing curiosity. Dylan wore white tights beneath maroon shorts. He had a long gait and casual grace. When a ball rolled on the floor in front of him during warmups, he picked it up by palming the ball in stride. When a teammate didn’t notice he offered a high five, Dylan shook his own hand.
He did not start, and upon entering the game, missed a layup, a three and a free throw. But then he broke out for a two-handed dunk. He unsettled his defender with a crossover, drove left and knocked down a pull- up jumper. To block a 3-point attempt from the right corner, he unfurled his wingspan in front of Scheyer. Using a pick to go right, he edged past a defender, spun left in the paint, slipped beneath Mgbako’s extended arms and laid the ball in the basket on the right side of the rim with his left hand. When he received the ball on the right wing, he dribbled toward a screener before spinning and splitting defenders to convert a lefty lay-in.
Mgbako committed to Duke five months later, but the Blue Devils also ratcheted up their recruitment of Dylan, who took an official visit to campus the next fall and sat with Krzyzewski, who implored him to “own the game.” When the Blue Devils played Iowa at Madison Square Garden last December, there was Dylan, sitting courtside, one row behind Duke’s bench. When Don Bosco traveled to Raleigh, N.C., to play in the John Wall Invitational a few weeks later, Harper and the Ironmen visited Cameron Indoor Stadium as a team on an off day.
While Duke laid the foundation for a commitment, fissures in the family appeared via social media. When former Bergen Catholic guard Elliott Cadeau announced that he had committed to North Carolina last December, Ron Sr., who got divorced from Maria in 2012, wrote on Twitter: “Watch out Duke might be next.”
Within hours, Ron Jr. posted that the decision would be Dylan’s. Maria added: “Dylan has one focus … Don Bosco Prep basketball (and high school). HIS decision will be made whenever we decide the time is right. O (circle) very small.”
Duke kept coming. Spectators were turned away at Don Bosco’s front doors on a 30-degree night in February when the gym reached its capacity, but Scheyer and his assistant coach, Jai Lucas, were greeted at a back door, ushered through the dark weight room and brought to folding chairs along the baseline.
Nobody attended more games than Rutgers, though. If Scarlet Knights assistant coach Brandin Knight, who Ron Jr. credits with helping him develop his game, wasn’t in the official Harper family portrait, he was often just outside the frame. When Don Bosco played Camden before a packed gym at Kean University and Dylan scored 36 points, a cameraman trained his lens on Knight sitting next to Ron Sr. and Knight lifted his hoodie over his mouth as he spoke with his target’s father, lip readers be damned.
When Maria mentioned the possibility of attending Rutgers, Dylan wondered who he would play with. Then, that January, Rutgers received a commitment from Bailey, the highest-ranked recruit to ever pledge to the Scarlet Knights. The day before his commitment, Bailey had attended a Don Bosco game during the Dennis Gregory Memorial Classic in Caldwell, even though Harper did not play due to an injury. With Bailey was his travel team’s director Omar Cooper, whose son, Sharife, a Newark native, plays for the Cleveland Charge of the G League. Cooper and Knight, who starred at Seton Hall Prep, have long known each other.
Though Dylan visited Indiana and Hoosiers coach Mike Woodson traveled to Don Bosco, handicappers saw his recruitment as a two-school race. At Elite Youth Basketball League games, Scheyer and Lucas sat next to Pikiell and Knight. In Atlanta, Duke called in a reinforcement. In town with the Celtics, Jayson Tatum, who played at Duke, sat alongside Scheyer and Lucas as Dylan scored 20 points despite shooting 6 of 12 from the free-throw line and had 6 rebounds.
Something was off. His body language was poor and he missed two free throws that cost his team a win. In the parking lot, Oz Cross, his coach with Team Renaissance, lectured him under a hot sun in front of the team.
“Mr. Harper, everything could be gone in a blink of an eye if you keep doing this,” Cross said.
Dylan absorbed it.
“I was mad, wanted to fight someone, but I needed that because I was cruising,” he says. “Opened my eyes. I haven’t accomplished anything.”
Normally he could hit free throws with his eyes closed but while he shot 50% from the field he only hit 59% from the free-throw line. Amid mechanical issues, Harper trained with Team USA in Colorado Springs and then traveled to Hungary, where he faced a French team led by Alexandre Sarr, the 7-footer who is projected to be the No. 2 pick in the 2024 NBA Draft. Pikiell and Knight were the only coaches in attendance for him.
When Bosco hosted open gyms in the fall, Rutgers and Duke resumed their standoff. One afternoon in September, the staffs positioned themselves on opposite ends of the hardwood as Dylan put on a performance that reminded all watching why they were in pursuit.
“I get adrenaline when I see that,” he says. “The adrenaline kicked up even more with me.”
While many prospects announced name, image and likeness deals publicly, Dylan slowly entered the maw of the American marketing machine with social media endorsements largely limited to a meal prep service.
“We’re basketball purists,” Maria says. “We didn’t do this for attention, a bag, the highest bidder. It almost still feels wrong to say like, ‘Oh, we’re going to sign like a money deal?’ Like, he’s still 17. It still feels like there’s something not quite right with it. But I think we operate in a space where we are grateful and not taking advantage of people. If it is truly deserving, we make sure that the partnership with people does not take away from the main topic, which is to become better everyday at the game. He is not a social media personality.”
On Wednesday, his recruitment ended, and his business venture was unveiled. On the seventh floor of the West Village headquarters for Fanatics, a collectibles company owned by billionaire Michael Rubin, three faceless mannequins donned college basketball jerseys: Duke, Rutgers and Indiana. Family, friends, teammates and coaches crowded into the space to celebrate Dylan’s college decision and deal with Fanatics. In a boardroom, Dylan signed an exclusive multi-year contract with Rubin. Then, moments after his announcement, employees stripped the mannequins of the Duke and Indiana jerseys and replaced them with Ron Jr.’s No. 24 Rutgers tops.
“Dylan is about as blessed as anybody could get,” Ron Sr. said.
Next to pizza boxes were two unopened bottles of Armand de Brigand champagne, which is better known as the Ace of Spades.
“We got one Ace,” Maria said. “Now I need the other!”
Dylan 2.0
One morning in the fall of 2021, Ron Sr. pulled into the parking lot at the First Presbyterian Church in Ridgewood and dropped off Dylan for a workout at the Shooting Laboratory with Cousins, who trains Dylan and travels with him on the sneaker circuit. When Dylan got out, Ron Sr. spotted Cousins and shouted out the window of his truck.
“Make sure you got him shooting with the right hand,” Ron Sr. said.
Cousins was confused.
“Right hand?” he said.
“Yeah,” Ron Sr. said.
Dylan shook his head.
“Don’t listen to him,” he said.
“Just work on it!” Ron Sr. said before driving off.
Cousins and Dylan complied, but it wasn’t until a few months later, after Dylan injured his left hand when he hit it on the backboard trying to block a shot. In the next game, Dylan used his right hand to shoot midrange shots and lead Don Bosco to a win.
“I was like, ‘Dang, he was right,’” Dylan says. “I thought he was delusional, like, who works on the opposite-hand jump shot? Turns out Jordan, Kobe. I was like, ‘Oh!’”
Ron Sr., 59, harps on the virtues of visualization when he talks with his youngest son, and Dylan distinguishes himself with efficiency that emanates from his footwork and film study. Two years ago, Miller, his trainer, called him to the back of the bus during one drive with Team Renaissance when the rest of the team was sleeping and on his laptop called up Synergy, a video platform that provides possession-by-possession analytics, to show Harper his moves and how he could be more tactical.
Nowadays, Dylan watches so much film that when he flushed an alley oop over Don Bosco’s 7-footer Keiner Asprilla during a summer run, Dylan obtained the footage from the security camera on the wall. He walks around the house with his laptop, reviewing his performances and rewinding over and over movements of NBA stars like Cade Cunningham, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Paul George and Luka Doncic to master concepts.
“I’ve watched this quietly, not said a word, and he would go in the backyard, take his phone, get the ball and he would continually watch, then try to imitate until he 100% got it,” Maria says. “He watches while I drive him to school. He understands constant learning has value.”
The mimic is now a model, too. Jaylen Lewis, 14, lives down the block from the old Paterson Catholic building, and went over to the fall league on site in recent months to watch Dylan play.
Lewis is a lefty, favors the No. 2 and fashions his hair in free-form dreadlocks. His father, Ivan, is the head coach at Felician, and Jaylen studies Dylan’s slow Euro step that he uses to get to the rim before absorbing contact and moments of flair, like when Dylan caught a ball on a run-out and whipped it behind his back to a teammate without letting it bounce. Lewis watches reels of Dylan’s performances every night as he tries to get his timing down and recently shadowed Dylan at Don Bosco as an Ironman for the day.
Locals say he might be the next Dylan.
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