Washington Wizards rookie Rui Hachimura’s fanbase is only going to grow after the night he had against the Los Angeles Clippers, but he’s already gaining fans, some of them pretty well-known.
Even before he poured in a career-high 30-point, nine-rebound performance against the Clips, Hachimura found Shohei Ohtani courtside in support of his fellow countryman and athlete.
Ohtani, a Japanese pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, was in attendance for the Gonzaga product’s 16-point outing against the West’s first-place Los Angeles Lakers, cheering on the Toyama native courtside.
They met up before the tilt — unfortunately for Rui, a 125-103 loss for the Wizards — to talk and sign autographs, unbeknownst to both on the eve of Hachimura’s breakout performance.
“It’s encouraging to be around Japanese baseball players excelling in the major leagues. I’m really happy he got to see the game,” offered the first-year forward about Ohtani, via the Japanese Times.
“We’re part of the same younger generation [of athletes from his home country] striving to do our best,” he added, perhaps thinking of the trailblazing Wataru Misaka, who helped smooth the path for people of Japanese ancestry to play major league sports in North America.
Hachimura, who met Misaka briefly before the NCAA tournament run that helped raise his profile among NBA teams ahead of the 2019 NBA Draft, will soon have a small army of supporters should he more consistently find the bottom of the next as he did Sunday evening.
Paul George on Rui Hachimura: "He's a good rookie, a really good rookie. It was great to see him for the first time. We've seen a lot of rookies now, but he definitely stood out as one of the better players and one of the best players in the long run, in his class."
— Mirjam Swanson (@MirjamSwanson) December 2, 2019
Garnering praise from the likes of Clippers superstars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George for the offensive eruption, the former Bulldog showed flashes the Wizards front office gambled on by taking him higher than most analysts had expected.
Currently, on the fringes of most Rookie of the Year boards, Hachimura could move up the ladder of prospects in a hurry if he can produce even a facsimile of the play he deployed against one of the league’s best defenses.
In the meantime, however, the rookie forward is starting to turn heads — and a few of those heads are known for doing the same.
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