CHICAGO– If Providence College’s 6-4 All American point guard Kris Dunn had left school early to enter the NBA at the end of his red shirt sophomore season last year, no one would have blamed him.

Dunn spent a large part of his early life in a two bedroom apartment in the projects of New London, Conn. and Alexandria, Va., often without adult supervision. His mother Pia James was in and out of prison for a string of minor offenses like credit card fraud and DUI and at one time he was basically raised by his 13-year old brother John for five months when he was just nine-years old.

“It wasn’t easy,” Dunn said. “It was me, my bother and my mom.I didn’t know my father at that time. My mother was in and out of jail for certain reasons. She was trying to provide for us. She was just in a bad situation. She’s a great person. So we don’t judge. That’s always going to be my mother. We lived in the projects, We came from poverty. We did everything in our power to survive. It made us men very early and made my brother and me tighter. I think we filled those bonds through the rough times. We had each other’s back. Now, we’re both in a great space. He’s going very well. He graduated from Central Connecticut and now everything is so easy for us because we took care of the struggles earlier.”

The two brothers told no one after his mother’s prolonged absence., afraid they might be separated in foster care. They stopped going to school, ignoring knocks on the door. They heated up Hot Pockets for dinner. They sold their Air Jordan and jeans at a discount. John made money playing craps games with rigged dice and Kris would play older boys in one on one on the outdoor courts for $20, even though he had no money on his own. At night they fought teenage drug dealers and shook them down for cash.

It was no way to live.

When Kris Dunn looks back at his past, he realizes he is one of the lucky ones who survived without becoming a statistic and used his McDonald’s All American basketball abilities to build a future for himself. This week, Dunn will graduate from college. “I came back for the education,” he said. “Not many kids in my neighborhood have a college degree and I wanted to do this to show them it is possible.”

Dunn suffered from injuries early in his career and only played two full seasons for Ed Cooley at Providence. He made the most of them, becoming the first guard in Big East history to win both Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year in two consecutive seasons. Dunn averaged 16.4 points, 6.2 assists and 2.7 steals for the Friars last season when they advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament.

Six weeks from now, Dunn is destined to become a Top 5 lottery pick in the upcoming NBA draft at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. He was measured at 6-4 2/5 in shoes, has a strong 220-pound frame, a six-foot nine inch wing span and a standing reach of 8 foot, 4 inches, great numbers for a point guard. Dunn was the only one of the top five American prospects to meet with the media. Ben Simmons of LSU and Brandon Ingram of Duke both skipped the combine all together. Buddy Hield of Oklahoma and Jamal Murray of Kentucky decided to only speak with team representatives. Dunn handled himself well with the media.
The first thing he plans to do with his first paycheck is buy his brother a house. “He was a father figure to me and has a child of his own now and I want to do something nice for him,” Dunn said.

Dunn’s life began to change when he and his brother reconnected with father, Seldon, who had been searching for them for eight year since James packed up the kids and left their house for parts unknown. Seldon, a former college football player at Dodge City Community College, was a married father with a 10 year old step son and two daughters. When Dunn discovered where John and Kris were, he went to court to obtain custody and he drove six hours down 1-95 with a friend to pick them up.
Kris went through an adjustment period with his new family, struggling with house rules and fighting with classmates for shoes and PlayStation portables, then selling them for cash. When his father gave him an iPod, a Mongoose bike and a pair of Air Jordans for Christmas, Kris initially thought they were for someone else.

Eventually, the father and son became close and Seldon, an assistant basketball coach at New London High, began to research MIchael Jordan’s workouts and took Kris to scrimmage college kids at Central Connecticut and then drive him to AAU tournaments after working an overnight shift as a poker room supervisor at Mohegan Sun, catching a nap in the parking lot between games. It was easy to see the kid had talent. Dunn was the starting point guard for New London as a freshman, led his team to the state title game as a sophomore and then an undefeated season as a junior. He was selected Connecticut Player of the Year his junior and senior year and became the first Connecticut player in 30 years to be selected for the McDonald’s game.

After a growth spurt from 5-7 to 6 feet and a breakout summer when he played for the same travel team and NBA center Andre Drummond, Dunn was being recruited by Kentucky, Louisville, Florida and Connecticut. But he chose Providence largely because the coach there Ed Cooley had similar back story. Cooley came from low income South Providence. He was one of nine children in a family of a mother on welfare. His father was rarely around and the refrigerator was usually empty. Cooley remembers using water as a substitute for milk on his Corned Flakes. When he was 10 years old, he taken in by neighbors Gloria and Eddie Searight, the working class parents of a friend who provided Cooley with meals and a place to sleep and provided a stable environment for him to grow into a basketball star who was the captain of the Stonehill College team for three years before he entered coaching.

“His upbringing. That’s the reason I came to Providence College. For him to tell me his story and to see how far he’s come to where he is today, I needed somebody who was gonna to keep me inspired and get me past my struggles in life and never forget my pain,” Dunn said. “I knew he was that person. He taught me a lot on and off the court. He told me to always have good character. That’s what resonates in me. I want to be a good role model for my sisters.”

Dunn had to fight through a torn labrum in his right shoulder as a freshman that limited him to 25 games. Then he suffered a second painful injury to the same shoulder while diving for a loose ball in an exhibition game against Rhode Island College at the start of his sophomore season. He tried to tough it out for four games but the pain was unbearabl and he had to red shirt, missing out on the Friars’ Big East tournament championship run. Less than a month later, his mother died. “I was in a bad place,” he said. “Coming in, the buzz was kind of high. McDonald’s game, Jordan Brand Classic. And it brought me from top to bottom real quick. But the coaching staff helped me a lot, telling me to keep working hard, chase your drams don’t let nobody take it from you. I just kept grinding, grinding, grinding.”’

Dunn started to blossom into a game changing player as a red shirt sophomore. He eventually turned into the best point guard at Providence since Ernie DiGregorio in the early 1970’s.

The future offers endless possibilities for a kid who toughed it out and was willing to spend an extra year in college even though he could have been a first round pick in 2015. “I only had one full year of college basketball as a point guard,” he said. “I know the NBA is fulled with a bunch of great point guards. In order to hang with those guys, I needed to learn the game more. I needed to know more about my game, what I needed to work on.

“This year was an improving season for me. Last year I was just going out there and playing freely. This year I tried to correct the things I needed to work on and go from there.

Dunn has become a master of running the pick and roll and a lock down defender.

I had a target on my back all year,” he said. “Teams were going to be more excited to play against me because they wanted to take me down. But I had great teammates.”

And a good idea of where he was headed.