Road to Duke
His bedroom was in the basement, and on the basement wall was a team photograph from the 1990s, a USA Basketball squad in which one of the players was his mother. “That USA team photo was hung up in the basement, and my room was in the basement. I saw that every single day,” Paolo Banchero told the Associated Press in 2023, the summer he had to decide which country to play for. “That was literally one of my biggest dreams as a kid, to play for USA.”
Rhonda Smith-Banchero left the University of Washington in 1995 as its all-time leading scorer, played in the ABL and then a season with the Sacramento Monarchs of the WNBA, and coached, at a junior college and then at Holy Names Academy, an all-girls high school in Seattle, where her son tagged along to practice. Her husband, Mario Banchero, had played tight end at Washington; his family had come from northern Italy in the early 1900s to mine coal in Black Diamond, in the Cascade foothills. Paolo was born November 12, 2002, in Seattle, and named in a way that took some living up to. “I like having a unique name,” he said. “When you think of Paolo, you think of me.”
The mother was the harder coach, and the standard was hers. “When I was younger I was hearing it after every game, even if I played well,” Banchero told ESPN during his rookie year. “And it’d be like, ‘Oh well, you didn’t do this,’ or ‘Your hands wasn’t up in the midpost.’ She’d find a little stuff to pick at. That’s why I love her. She always told me she wanted me to just make it farther, be better than she was. She always felt like she sold herself short a little bit with her career. So, she never wanted me to do that and make those same mistakes.”
At O’Dea High School, his father’s school, he averaged 22.6 points and 11 rebounds as a junior and was Washington’s Gatorade Player of the Year; 247Sports had him second in the country in the class of 2021, behind only Chet Holmgren. In February 2020, at seventeen, he took Italian citizenship, and the Italian federation asked him to play for the senior national team. “I was 17 when they asked, and that was a time in my life where I felt like I couldn’t pass up on that opportunity because my dad’s side of the family is Italian,” he said later. USA Basketball had cut him from its youth teams. He had grown up, as he put it, thinking he was “a regular Black kid from Seattle.” He held onto the passport and did not use it, and the photo stayed on the wall.
Most of Seattle assumed he would stay home and play for Washington. He chose Duke, 2,300 miles east, for what turned out to be the last season Mike Krzyzewski would coach.
At Duke
Duke had gone 13-11 the year before and missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1995. The freshman from Seattle was the reason that did not happen twice. He debuted at Madison Square Garden on November 9, 2021, against Kentucky, and scored 22 on 7 of 11 shooting with 7 rebounds in a 79-71 win. “We felt we had a chance to make a statement with this game,” he said. Mark Story of the Lexington Herald-Leader, whose Wildcats had recruited him hard, wrote that Calipari “got an emphatic look at what they missed.” Seventeen days later in Las Vegas, against No. 1 Gonzaga and Holmgren, the one recruit ranked ahead of him, he had 20 in the first half and 21 for the game, and Duke won 84-81. Mark Few: “Paolo was terrific how he came out and was just a handful.”
Over 39 games he averaged 17.2 points and 7.8 rebounds on 47.8 percent shooting, the most points by any true freshman in the country, with 12 double-doubles and 15 games of 20 or more. Brad Brownell of Clemson gave the scouting report every ACC coach was giving: “He makes all kinds of shots. He had a couple threes. He drives it in there. He posts you. He’s a three-level scorer, obviously, at almost 20 points a game. I mean, it’s a tough cover.” Banchero’s own description of the last two minutes of a two-point win over Clemson in January, after Duke had dropped close games to Miami and Florida State: “We were like, ‘There’s no way we’re losing.’ Make the right plays. Don’t make mistakes, take care of the ball.” Then: “It was winning time.” Duke won the ACC regular season outright for the first time since 2006, at 16-4, and he was the conference’s Freshman of the Year, first-team All-ACC and a consensus second-team All-American.
In the NCAA Tournament he was the West Region’s Most Outstanding Player. He had 19 in the second round to get past Michigan State, after which Krzyzewski told him, in three words, “You were terrific.” Against Texas Tech, the best defense in the country, he scored 22 on 7 of 12 in the Sweet Sixteen. Duke beat Arkansas to reach the Final Four, and the semifinal in New Orleans on April 2, 2022, was the game the whole sport had spent a year waiting for: Duke and North Carolina, for the first time ever in the tournament, with Krzyzewski’s career on the line. Carolina won 81-77. Banchero had 20 points and 10 rebounds in the last college game he would play. “I’m just proud to have played with this group,” he said afterward. “We gave it our all, and it sucks we came up short. But I’m proud of the effort we put in and the way we went out.” And of the coach: “Coach, recruiting me, he lived up to everything he told me. And made me a better player, made me a better man, and I thank him for that.”
After Duke
The mock drafts had Jabari Smith Jr. going first to Orlando. On June 23, 2022, Adam Silver read Banchero’s name, and the cameras caught the surprise on his face. Krzyzewski sent a message that night, which Banchero read aloud: “Paolo, congratulations, I’m so happy for you and your family and the commitment you’ve made.” He called Krzyzewski “the greatest coach I ever had,” and said the rest of it plainly. “He really taught me how to really be a man, just being away from home, being so far from home. He was there for me.”
His first NBA points came on a spin move and a turnaround hook over Saddiq Bey in Detroit, and he finished his debut with 27, the most by a No. 1 pick in his first game since Allen Iverson in 1996. He averaged 20 points a game, led all rookies with 40 games of 20 or more, and on April 25, 2023, won Rookie of the Year with 98 of 100 first-place votes, the third Magic player to win it after Shaquille O’Neal and Mike Miller. He told the story of a conversation from earlier that year: “He looked at me and he asked me if I was going to be rookie of the year. I confidently said yes.”
That summer he settled the two-passport question, choosing the photo on the basement wall. He played for the United States at the FIBA World Cup, and when the trip took him to Italy for the first time, he described it the way people describe a homecoming: “You know how you kind of go somewhere and get like butterflies in your stomach because of the feelings you get? It was like that for me, no exaggeration. I was so proud that I got to do that.” Grant Hill, running the program, said he had watched Banchero since before Duke and that “he has a chance to be a part of USA Basketball for many more opportunities.”
Year two: 80 games, 22.6 a night, an All-Star, and a first playoff series, seven games against Cleveland in which he averaged 27. Year three: a torn oblique in the fall that cost him nearly half the season, then 25.9 points a game in the 46 he played and 29.4 in five playoff games against Boston. On July 7, 2025, he signed the extension that makes him the face of the franchise through the decade: five years, $239 million, up to $287 million with an All-NBA selection, a player option on the last year. Every young player’s goal, he had said that spring: “establishing yourself early, get a second contract.”
Where Is He Now
The 2025-26 season was his healthiest and his most complete: 72 games, 22.2 points, 8.4 rebounds and 5.2 assists, career highs in the last two. The Magic finished 45-37, took the eighth seed, and led Detroit three games to one in the first round. Then they lost three straight. In the seventh game, a 116-94 loss on May 3, 2026, Banchero scored 38 with 9 rebounds and 6 assists, and averaged 26.3, 9 and 6.3 for the series. It was the third straight year Orlando had gone out in the first round.
Asked afterward whether this team was good enough to reach the conference finals, he gave an answer that a franchise player is not supposed to give, and that is why it is worth quoting in full. “I mean I can’t really answer that. I want to say yes, but we haven’t been out of the first round, so if you’re going off the last three years, the answer is no. But the nice answer would be yes, but honestly speaking, I can’t say that we’re good enough to be in the Finals or the Eastern Finals, because the last three years, we’ve had the same result, so that’s your answer.”
He is 23, turning 24 in November, and Orlando is his through 2030. In November 2025 he bought into the ownership group of the Seattle Seawolves, the Major League Rugby club in the city he is from. “As someone who grew up in Seattle, investing in the Seawolves is a chance to support my hometown,” he said. His mother still coaches. The passport is Italian and the jersey says USA, and the question that a seventeen-year-old could not answer got answered, in the end, by a photograph on a basement wall.