Road to Duke
Taylor Steven King was born on May 30, 1988, in Orange County, California — the youngest of four children. His father Steve King was a basketball-loving father who, by his own account in the family interviews that would eventually be conducted on the 5 Point Play Podcast, had become sober from alcoholism in 1981 and brought to his fatherhood a discipline-and-recovery sensibility that he applied first and foremost to his children's relationship with sports. From the time Taylor was two or three years old, his father gave him a basketball. By kindergarten he was on a club team. By fifth grade he was working with a personal trainer, with his father serving as his initial coach. The household was a basketball household first.
The family lived a block from the beach in Huntington Beach, California. The 2019 Mike Jensen feature in the Philadelphia Inquirer captured what was probably the most striking detail of King's childhood:
> "The King family lived a block from the beach, but Taylor never so much as glimpsed the shoreline. 'I never went,' he said."
By fourth and fifth grade he was training with peers who included Tyson Childress and Josh Childress — soon-to-be NBA players whose families lived nearby. By seventh and eighth grade he was training with pros and college players who aspired to enter the NBA. The trajectory was the kind that California prep basketball families in the early 2000s understood well: a Marinovich-style basketball-only adolescence in the country's strongest prep basketball region, aimed squarely at major Division I scholarship and the NBA pipeline.
He landed at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana — one of the most decorated athletic programs in the United States. Mater Dei alumni include NFL quarterbacks Matt Leinart and Matt Barkley, plus nine NBA players and roughly ten total NFL players. Under legendary head coach Gary McKnight, Mater Dei played a national prep schedule against the country's strongest high schools each season. King wore his Mater Dei uniform for four years and posted some of the most prolific scoring numbers in the program's history.
The Mater Dei career, line by line:
- Career points: 3,214 (4th-most in California high-school history, top-10 all-time as of 2024)
- 1,224 career rebounds (Mater Dei school record)
- 370 career three-pointers
- 2006 single-season rebound record at Mater Dei: 444
- 2007 single-season scoring record at Mater Dei: 987 points
- Senior year averages: 27 PPG, 11 RPG
- 2007 Mr. Basketball California
- 2007 Second-team Parade All-American
- 2007 McDonald's All-American (West squad — scored 8 points in the game)
- RSCI #27 nationally in the class of 2007
- Four-time ABCD Camp selection (2003-2006) — a frequency only the country's most-discussed prep prospects achieved
His college recruiting started early. In summer 2003, the summer after eighth grade, he announced his verbal commitment to UCLA — a then-record-young public commitment that the NCAA's later landscape would not repeat. The commitment lasted less than two years before opening to a national recruitment that included every major program. In February 2007, he committed to Duke University under head coach Mike Krzyzewski. He was 18, 6'6", 230 pounds, blessed with a left-handed shooter's stroke and the deep range that the modern game would soon make essential. He joined the recruiting class of 2007 — the same class that included Kyle Singler, Nolan Smith, and a freshman class that, three years later, would help win the program's only national championship of the entire between era.
His father Steve King rented an apartment in Durham when Taylor enrolled. The Marinovich-style proximity carried with him to college.
At Duke
The Duke debut on November 9, 2007 captured exactly why every program in the country had wanted Taylor King. Against N.C. Central in the season opener at Cameron Indoor Stadium, the freshman came off the bench and led the Blue Devils with 20 points. He became just the fourth player in Duke history to score 20 or more points in his collegiate debut — a list of names that, in the program's modern era, places his opening line in serious company.
The shooting was real. He shot 36.6% from three-point range as a freshman, on the kind of high-volume bench-scoring profile that Krzyzewski's program had built around shooters like J.J. Redick a few years earlier. Across 26 games of action, he averaged 5.5 points per game in fewer than 10 minutes per appearance — the highest per-minute scoring rate on the team. He posted a career-high 27 points in a single game (the second-most by an ACC reserve all season). He scored 18 points on 7-of-12 shooting against Michigan on December 8. He scored 15 points in 12 minutes at the Wachovia Center against Temple on January 9 in his only Philadelphia appearance — and in doing so, became the first player in Duke history to lead the team in scoring while playing the fewest minutes in a game. He had six total double-digit scoring games.
But the freshman year was, by King's own account in subsequent interviews, also the year his Duke chapter began coming apart.
Within weeks of arriving on campus, by his own subsequent admission to CBSSports.com in 2012, King failed a drug test. The freshman who had come to Durham as the fourth-leading scorer in California high-school history and a McDonald's All-American was, in his own framing, immediately "in the doghouse" of the program. The bench minutes did not expand the way the recruiting profile had projected. The team's deep rotation — featuring Jon Scheyer, Gerald Henderson, Kyle Singler, DeMarcus Nelson, Greg Paulus, and a senior chasing-the-tournament-bid roster — would have made his upward path narrow under any circumstances. The internal-discipline situation made the path narrower still.
The team finished 28-6, won the ACC tournament, and lost in the Sweet Sixteen to West Virginia. King played in 26 of the season's 36 games. The freshman 20-point debut would, when his Duke career ended, remain his most-watched moment in a Blue Devils uniform.
In spring 2008, after one season, King decided to leave Duke. He had a Villanova connection through his godfather, who was the brother-in-law of Whitey Rigsby — the Villanova radio analyst and major-gift officer for the school's athletic department. He visited Villanova, met head coach Jay Wright and the Wildcats players, and committed. The transfer was announced in summer 2008, with King required to sit out the 2008-09 season under NCAA transfer rules. The Duke chapter was over. He had played 26 games. He had scored 142 points, including the 20-point debut that put him in a small fraternity of Krzyzewski freshmen, and would not, under any reasonable measure, ever again be celebrated for a basketball moment in a Blue Devils uniform.
What King would later say about the Duke chapter, in his 2025 interviews on the 5 Point Play Podcast, was the kind of clear-eyed retrospective that a former addict in three years of sobriety could finally offer about decisions made when he was 19. He had failed his first Duke drug test. He had played fewer minutes than his recruiting ranking projected. He had transferred. He had made, in his own subsequent description, decisions that subsequent decades would slowly reveal as unsustainable. The Duke chapter was the first chapter of a much longer story.
After Duke
Villanova (2008-2010). King sat out 2008-09 as an NCAA-required transfer year. He spent the year, by his own subsequent reporting to CBSSports.com in 2012, partying with non-team friends — a chapter that he later described as "freedom in helpings never available to him before" (the 2019 Inquirer feature's framing). On the floor when he became eligible in 2009-10, he was effective in the role Wright had projected for him: 32 games, all coming off the bench, averaging 7.4 points and 5.3 rebounds per game in 19.0 minutes per contest, shooting 36.4% from three-point range. He was the team's second-leading rebounder. He scored 20 points and grabbed nine rebounds in Villanova's 97-89 win over Saint Joseph's on December 9.
The 2009-10 season's bad ending began the following spring. Late in the regular season, when King became aware that a random drug test was forthcoming, he went to coach Jay Wright's office and informed him directly that he would not pass it. He had used marijuana with one of the team's starters the night before. He was suspended for the last regular-season game. The Wildcats lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament to St. Mary's. After the season, by King's account in subsequent interviews, Wright asked him to enter rehab as a condition of returning to the program; King declined. On June 21, 2010, Villanova announced that King had "voluntarily withdrawn from the men's basketball team". King later said, in interviews, that the withdrawal was not voluntary.
The wandering chapter (2010-2018). King initially committed to USC under coach Kevin O'Neill in August 2010 — a commitment he never enrolled on. He instead chose Concordia University Irvine, an NAIA school in Southern California, where in 2010-11 he averaged 21.1 points and 9.7 rebounds per game before, by his own later admission to Grokipedia sources, flunking out due to "mental burnout." He then began an eleven-country professional career that would define the next eight years of his basketball life:
- National Basketball League of Canada (2011-12): London Lightning (signed October 2011, released January 2012); Quebec Kebs (signed February 2012)
- Taiwan (2012-13): A full season in a league where, by his own description in the 2019 Inquirer feature, "no one, including his coach, had spoken any English"
- Iran (2013): Petrochimi Bandar Imam of the West Asia Basketball Association — and the most-told story from his international career, immortalized in the 2019 Mike Jensen feature: a visa problem kept him from traveling to a tournament in Erbil, Iraq with his teammates; he flew separately from Iran to Dubai to Erbil International Airport; arrived to find none of his teammates there, no Wi-Fi signal, no cell service, and 30 people total in the small airport. The 2019 Inquirer opens with that scene as the symbol of where his basketball life had taken him.
- British Basketball League (2014-15): Cheshire Phoenix under coach John Coffino. King led the entire BBL in scoring at 20.1 points per game over 33 games, including a 36-point game against the Sheffield Sharks. He was also fifth in the league in rebounding at 9.5 RPG. He met his future wife Holly during this season.
- Subsequent stops included Continental U.S. circuits and additional international leagues
- 2017-18: LA Clippers G-League affiliate (Agua Caliente Clippers). The Clippers' G-League head coach Casey Hill described King's value to the roster in a December 2017 interview with the Uproxx Dimemag feature:
> "In this league, you run into guys who've had some stuff in their past, and they're trying to get things sorted out. With Taylor, he's got a really clean perspective on his career. He's got a ridiculously high basketball IQ, and you can see some of the residue from his status in the way that he plays — you can tell he was a high-level guy."
- July 2018: Retired from professional basketball at age 30.
Where Is He Now
Taylor King is 37 years old, lives in Irvine, California — fifteen minutes from the Huntington Beach house he grew up in — with his wife Holly and their young son. He retired from professional basketball in July 2018 and immediately began the second chapter of his basketball life as a teacher of the game.
He runs a private basketball training business in Irvine focused on shooting mechanics, footwork, and overall skill development for youth, high-school, and college-level players. In April 2019, his old AAU friend Keith Wilkinson was hired as the head boys' basketball coach at JSerra Catholic High School in San Juan Capistrano. King reached out to Wilkinson to learn about the coaching profession; Wilkinson hired him as assistant coach. As Wilkinson framed the decision in the 2019 Inquirer feature:
> "We felt like he was at a good stage of his life."
King has, in the years since, made his own past public in ways that most former Division I athletes do not. In April 2025, he gave a two-part interview on the 5 Point Play Podcast that has become the most candid public document of his life: "Reflections w/ Taylor King Part 1: Basketball Life" (April 4, 2025) and "Reflections w/ Taylor King Part 2: Addiction Battle and Recovery" (April 7, 2025). The episodes, summarized in subsequent reporting, document:
- His substance use began at age 15 with marijuana
- Failed drug tests at Duke and Villanova eroded coach trust and playing time
- Substance use escalated to cocaine during overseas pro seasons
- A 2021 COVID-era rock bottom
- By 2025, three years of sobriety — achieved through Alcoholics Anonymous
- Made amends with coaches he had affected during his playing years
The podcast appearance is, in the long arc of an athlete's public life, the kind of testimony that very few college-basketball washouts ever give in their late thirties. The Marinovich-style upbringing, the basketball-only childhood, the family-pressure dimensions captured in the 2012 Philadelphia Inquirer report (the now-famous detail of King crying on the team bus at Villanova after a phone call with his father, despite having played well), the eleven-country pro career, the airport-stranded scene in Erbil, the brink of basketball collapse — all of it sits behind the man who is, in mid-2026, four years into sobriety, married with a young son, and mentoring the next generation of Mater Dei-pipeline JSerra basketball players in the same Catholic high-school basketball ecosystem that produced him.
His own reflection in the 2019 Inquirer feature captured what he had come to understand about his career and his life:
> "If I stayed on the straight and narrow path, like I should have, I probably would have been in the NBA at some point. Do I regret it? I wanted to go wherever I could to play basketball."
His relationship with his father, by his own account in the 2018 Uproxx feature, is "the best it's ever been." His own father has been sober since 1981. The discipline-and-recovery sensibility that Steve King had brought to his children's basketball lives — and that had failed, at the level of paternal pressure, to produce the unbroken career trajectory the family had aimed at — has, in the long curve of his son's life, brought father and son to the same recovery framework, on common ground neither of them could have predicted twenty years ago.
What he carries from Duke remains complicated and honest. Twenty points in his collegiate debut. A 27-point game. The fifth-highest scoring debut in Duke program history. A failed drug test within weeks of arriving. One season of bench minutes. A transfer. The Krzyzewski program does not always produce the basketball career it is recruited to produce. Some of its alumni, like Taylor King, end up producing a different kind of basketball career instead — one whose value emerges decades later, in the small private gym in Irvine where he now teaches teenagers a shooting form he developed twenty-five years ago, with the kind of hard-won perspective that his McDonald's All-American class could not have given him then.
If you played with Taylor at Mater Dei or Duke, were on the Cheshire Phoenix roster with him, sat in a JSerra coaches' meeting with him, or know him from his Irvine training business or his AA work today, the program would love to hear from you. Tip the site through the contact form. We will update the page with what we learn.