He is shining in his first season in the EuroCup
Next small guard ace Darius McGhee just doing whatever Bourg needs
Player Spotlight
14 Минутное чтение
Shorter guards are enjoying a renaissance among the top tier of European basketball teams, and one of the two undefeated teams in the BKT EuroCup is being led by perhaps the next one to take the game by storm – Darius McGhee from Cosea JL Bourg-en-Bresse.
The American playmaker has helped the French team to a perfect 4-0 record in Group B of the EuroCup. And the main reason, he says, Bourg is succeeding is its balance.
“We’re just super balanced. We’re connected, and we enjoy playing the game together. We enjoy all five people flying around on defense and executing things the right way and getting stops,” the 26-year-old told David Hein.
"We really enjoy offensively playing the right way, sharing the ball. We enjoy when somebody else scores the ball as opposed to guys just focusing on scoring. It makes it fun, it makes it easy to play with, and it breeds confidence in one another.”
McGhee leads Frederic Fauthoux’s side in scoring (18.0 PPG), assists (4.8 APG), steals (1.8 SPG) and PIR (18.2) all while shooting 63% on two-pointers and 46% on three-pointers.
And McGhee’s growing comfort level with his new team can be seen by the fact that his assist-to-turnover numbers went from 10-to-9 in the first two games to 9-to-2 in the last two contests.
“I would say an underrated thing about my game is manipulating coverages, using my strengths to understand how to keep pressure on defenses and putting them in a tough spot,” said McGhee, who is spending his second season in Europe.
McGhee arrived in Bourg from German side Telekom Baskets Bonn. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that he chose that club, since Bonn recently was home to two short guards – Parker Jackson-Cartwright and TJ Shorts. Both were crowned MVP of the German League – Jackson-Cartwright in 2022 and Shorts in 2023 – while Shorts helped Bonn take first place in the regular season and win the Basketball Champions League in 2023.
“My agent and others I trust spoke very highly of Bonn, [they] said it was a great opportunity. After meeting on Zoom and having conversations, I felt it was the right spot. The history behind Bonn and their small guards sealed it,” said McGhee, who stands 1.76 meters. “You always want to be in a position with a history of success.”
It took until college for McGhee to realize his fate as a shorter guard was sealed.
“As a kid, I was a Tracy McGrady fan. He’s like 6’8" (2.03 meters). For whatever reason, I thought I’d be 6'8" too. My parents would just laugh. I was always athletic and could jump, so I didn’t see size as a disadvantage. But in college, when everyone’s huge, that’s when it hit me. So I focused on making the game easier for myself, being efficient, not wasting energy,” said McGhee, who grew up in the town of Roxboro with about 8,000 residents.
After two years of public high school in the North Carolina town, McGhee attended the all-boys boarding school Blue Ridge School. The campus runs from the ridgeline of the Blue Ridge Mountains down to the valley. And McGhee was even on the mountain biking team there.
“It was very academic, a lot of discipline and structure. It narrowed my focus in basketball and accelerated the growing-up process for a teenager,” McGhee said.
One of McGhee’s teammates in high school was Aamir Simms, who played three years in the EuroCup with Paris Basketball and Umana Reyer Venice and helped the school win a North Carolina state title. And Mamadi Diakite from Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz also attended Blue Ridge shortly before McGhee.
After finishing Blue Ridge, McGhee ended up attending nearby Liberty University, where he had a wildly successful career. He was named the Atlantic Sun Conference Player of the Year three times – 2021 to 2023. He became the university’s leading all-time scorer, and on the same night also became the fourth Division I men's player to score 500 three-pointers in his career, along with Antoine Davis, Fletcher Magee and Travis Bader.
And the 162 three-pointers McGhee made during his senior season tied Stephen Curry’s NCAA single-season record set in 2008.
“I’m a basketball fan before a player, so to be mentioned with Steph Curry, it’s something you can’t even fathom. I just appreciate the process. I think about how much my teammates sacrificed to make that happen – guys setting hard screens, taking hits. I’m always appreciative of that and proud to be in that conversation,” McGhee said.
That shooting ability allowed for McGhee to put up some pretty big numbers. He scored 48 points in a game during his junior year and had 43 points in a game during his senior season. Then last season he drained 10 three-pointers as he scored 44 points in a game for Bonn. Two games later he dropped 40 points with 12 three-pointers. And McGhee poured in 37 points in a BCL game last season as well.
McGhee really hasn’t gone off like that yet this season with Bourg. He did knock down 6 three-pointers in scoring 22 points in the first EuroCup game against Dolomiti Energia Trento. But that is his season high in points. In fact, his top scoring output in the French League thus far is 13 points.
“I’m just a very competitive guy. I never really care about how much I score or about scoring explosions. I’m so focused on the quality of the possession,” he explained.
“That’s literally all my focus – each and every possession. Did we get the shot we wanted? Did we execute how we said we were going to execute? That’s what’s in my mind every single possession. It doesn’t matter if I take the shot or somebody else does. So that’s kind of how I judge it. If there are explosions, there are explosions. If not, that’s fine. I judge it based on the quality that we had as a whole, and if that leads us to success.”
And that is all that matters for Europe’s next big-name small guard.