Johnny Davis went from national afterthought to National Player of the Year front-runner. JeremyWoo on his self-motivating path, his poker face and the twin brother who’s helped him blossom
When it comes to player development, particularly in the most extreme cases, nothing happens overnight. Star turns are the product of time and circumstance. We may not see them coming, but they are always intentional. And while it’s a bit unclear to all involved exactly when Johnny Davis decided he had become the proverbial; it matters only that he decided.
“I was nervous as hell to get there,” Davis says. “I attacked every day like it was a game.” Of the 27 players invited to Texas, 12 made the final cut. The team was built around Gonzaga-bound Chet Holmgren and Purdue’s Jaden Ivey. Davis didn’t arrive as a known quantity. But he separated himself from his peers and earned a spot on the plane. “I felt like I was completely playing out of my mind,” he says.
“Kobe King is literally what I envisioned myself to be in high school,” he says. King was the measuring stick, Johnny kept pushing himself, and a month or so into the season, his game began to take off. “It was like all of a sudden, Johnny had touched it,” says Todd Fergot, La Crosse Central’s head coach. “He saw how good he could be.” The twins came off the bench, but by the end of the season, they were closing games.
Mark Davis, a 6' 6" sharpshooter out of Old Dominion, was a fourth-round pick in the 1985 NBA draft—two spots after Arvydas Sabonis, eight picks ahead of Spud Webb. He logged just 33 games in the NBA, primarily in two stints with the Milwaukee Bucks in the ’88–89 season, but built a 13-year pro career that spanned seven countries, and ended in his third stint with the CBA’s La Crosse Catbirds. Davis retired from hoops in ’99 and stayed put in northwest Wisconsin.
He developed that poker face, attacking games, practices and his brother with an almost frightening focus and intensity. Johnny was always the quieter twin, but his parents and coaches started to wonder if, maybe, he was a little different. “JohnnyThe twins still make a point of guarding each other in drills and in offseason pickup runs, and work out together in their spare time.
The Badgers still rate near the bottom of the pack nationally in KenPom’s adjusted tempo metric, which measures pace of play, but entering Wednesday, 66.7 was Wisconsin’s fastest number in the KenPom era, which dates back to Bo Ryan’s first season in 2001–02. Its turnover rate is the second-lowest in the country. It’s surrendered more than 70 points just six times. The recipe is fairly simple: stay solid, share the ball and let Davis do his thing.
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