They had flown to New York that morning for the NBA draft at Barclays Center, and now they’re trying. To select the dishes you want to share with their families. Their father, Troy, who is also their agent, ordered sautéed chicken, pasta with shrimp and a Caesar salad with anchovies on the side.
Ossar tried anchovies for the first time when thinking about the next week.
“It’s going to be a bittersweet moment when we get drafted,” he said. “It’s something we’ve prepared our whole lives for, but it means we’re going to break up for the first time in our lives.
“We keep acting like everything’s normal, we’ll be together forever, but it’ll be over” – he picked up his phone from the white tablecloth and looked at an app – “in two days, 23 hours and 18 minutes.”
The Twins’ preparation for the NBA began more than a decade ago before the Houston Rockets selected Amin and the Detroit Pistons selected Osar 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. She had handwritten goals, such as “become the greatest NBA player of all time,” “become a millionaire,” and “become 6 feet 9 inches.” It also included a kid’s idea of concrete steps to get to the NBA, such as “running two miles and dribbling left-handed” and “take vitamins every day, healthy foods and milk”.
Before dinner on Monday, they saw their vision board on a billboard in Times Square.
Amin now jokes that the only goal he regrets writing is getting high. He and his brother measured 6 feet 5.75 inches in the NBA draft in Chicago last month. “I should have said I wanted to be 7 feet tall,” he said. “Then I’ll be really 6-9 now.”
Their preparation ramped up in 2021, when they were among the first players to sign with the Overtime Elite, a semi-professional basketball league based in Atlanta. And it became a daily obsession that began last June when Osar and Amin attended an NBA draft party for their friend Josh Minot, who was selected in the second round by the Charlotte Hornets. On the way home, Ossar decided he wanted to know exactly how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds were left until he was also an NBA player.
He also wanted to know exactly how much time he had left with his brother.
That’s when he went looking for a countdown timer for his iPhone. He downloaded one and agreed to pay the $9.99 annual subscription fee. He scrolled through the photos on his phone and snapped a shot of him and Amin celebrating on the OTE basketball court to use as the timer’s wallpaper. Then he punched in the next draft date and time: June 22, 2023, 8 p.m. There were 364 days left.
When Ossar played the project’s countdown for the first time, time seemed to go further. The brothers were 19 years old, and when the OTE season started on October 20, there were still 245 days to go.
Over the past year, Ausar has repeatedly checked the app, not once a day but at least once a week. When he needed a little extra motivation to get up for his alarm clock early, he’d open the app. He would nudge his brother and keep his phone on when they had second thoughts about staying up late again after another practice.
They were part of OTE’s second draft class, but were the first players in the league expected to be drafted in the first 14 picks, a part known as the “lottery” and evidence of top talent. Thus the enlistment status of the twins was not only a matter of personal pride, but also KPI for OTE’s Half a billion dollars a job.
When the OTE season is over — the Twins, the City Reapers, won the league title on May 6 — there are only 47 days left until the end. When they arrived in New York on Monday, they knew it might be their last chance to be together for a while. “The longest we’ve been apart is two days,” Osar said. “I went to Florida last year, and he stayed in Atlanta. He called me 30 times!”
On Tuesday, they went to the Empire State Building for a photo op with other hopefuls who had been invited to sit in the green room on the floor of Barclays Center. They are both afraid of heights and had to make sure the wall was taller than them. Until then, they worried about climbing the ladder to an observation deck not open to the public. Then they went to the court to shoot a clip with the “Today” show, went to a photo shoot for two brands and ended the working day with the famous NBA coach. Chris Brickley.
On Wednesday, they gave a series of interviews arranged by the NBA and then attended a meeting with the NBA Players Association before making their way to Brooklyn for an OTE draft party. In an art warehouse converted into a content studio with a gated basketball court, the Thompsons conducted five interviews in 90 minutes. They eagerly answered a question about what they were working on in their games (both said “shooting”) and tolerated the other about whether they had twin telepathy (“no” was their curt reply). After Osar hits a deep triple-pointer over the fence, they head back to their hotel to try out their suits. There were 21 hours to go.
On Thursday, draft day, they got up at 9 a.m. to get touch-ups from the barber in their hotel room and then called in four camera crews—including one from their stylist and one from The New York Times—to watch them get ready. They joked about last-minute switching out of their matching twin 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 Osar stuck to the navy blue.
About 30 minutes after the countdown ended, Amen was sitting at a long table with his family at the Barclays Center when he received a phone call from the Rockets letting him know that they were going to pick him with the fourth pick. Ossar rose from his seat to celebrate.
“My heart was beating so fast,” Osar said. “I was more worried about where he would be recruited than he was about where I would be. And I think I was happier for him than I was for myself.”
As Amen made his way to the stage to shake hands with NBA commissioner Adam Silver, Ossar’s phone wasn’t ringing. Troy didn’t hear anything either. Ausar was about to open Twitter on his phone to see if any of the NBA insiders changed the next pick when he noticed that none of the TV cameras had moved from his table. When he saw Silver return to the podium, he felt he was about to be picked by the Pistons at number five.
When he heard his name called, he stood and paused, almost instinctively searching for his brother, but Amen was already gone. He hugged his mother instead. Nearby, Amen was connected to a microphone for an interview and punched him in the air when he heard his brother’s name. They didn’t find each other again until a few minutes later, but they only had enough time for five before they were pulled in opposite directions for interviews.
After leaving Barclays, they went to another OTE gig. “If I had a son in the draft, I would have him hold up a sign at every party that said, ‘Please, no pictures,’” Osar said, laughing. “I feel like all we did was walk and take pictures for an hour and a half and then leave.”
Finally, at 2 am, they broke down in Ausar’s room and had a moment to celebrate with each other. The moment they had been preparing had come since that recruitment party a year and a day ago, and things had gone better than they had initially imagined. “We didn’t just make it to the top 10,” Amen said later. “We climbed into the top five.”
The next morning, on their way to appear live on “Today,” they got some good news from their dad: The Rockets were first going to let Amin fly to Detroit to stay with Ausar until Sunday, and the Pistons were letting Ausar fly to Houston to return the favor to Amen. . The countdown timer expired 13 hours ago, and time seemed to slow down again. For at least a few days, the Thompson twins will be together.