Not long after the Oklahoma City Thunder game against the Toronto Raptors, OKC wing Lu Dort posted a picture with Raptors bigs Chris Boucher and Khem Birch.
“Nothing is given where we come from,” he captioned the photo.
According to Basketball RealGM, Dort and Birch are the only current NBA players who were born in Montreal. Boucher, who was born in St. Lucia, moved to Montreal when he was 5 years old.
The three faced off on Sunday night. Dort and Boucher immediately went to battle, putting up first-quarter point tallies of 21 and 17, respectively.
“We’re actually from the same neighborhood,” Dort said about Boucher. “He’s older than me, so I used to watch him play when I was young. It’s just so crazy how we’re all from Montreal, him and Khem Birch, and we’re all here now in the NBA playing in an NBA game. It’s so amazing just to see how far we came.”
There haven’t been many players born in Montreal to reach the NBA. The RealGM page lists eight total athletes in league history.
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Boucher told the Associated Press that playing against Dort gave him some motivation.
“It put some pep in my step a little bit. It definitely put some more energy into the game,” he said. “I just want people to realize we have guys from Montreal that are really talented. It was an exciting showcase just to show people what we have.”
Dort also said that the city is a talented basketball area.
“Montreal is still an underdog city and we have so much talent there,” he said. “There’s so many kids coming up, and I feel like there’s going to be so many more NBA players from Montreal.”
With that said, he knows it won’t be easy. He advised the kids in his town to keep working hard.
“Me, Khem and Chris, we all have different backgrounds. We all from Montreal, but we all went to different places, we all had different routes,” Dort said. “It’s not going to be easy to get to this point and this level, but I know a lot of kids are going to do it. They just got to work hard.”
On Sunday, all the work from these three players was apparent. Birch, in the starting lineup, finished with seven points and six rebounds. Dort had 29 points and five 3-pointers.
Boucher scored a game-high 31 to go with 12 rebounds, and he iced the game with a 3-pointer to give the Raptors a 112-106 victory.
“He always been a dog,” Dort said. “He always had it in him. Big games, to step up, it’s not new. I’ve seen him do it before.”
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