Yuta was drawn to basketball the same way many players his age were: by watching Kobe Bryant. His parents both played professionally: mom for the national team and professionally for the Chanson V-Magic, dad for the now-defunct Kumagai Gumi Bruins in Tokyo. Dad had the Lakers game on TV one day, and Yuta was hooked.
At the time, his parents seemed like natural models for his career: no Japanese-born player had ever earned an NCAA Division I scholarship. But as Watanabe developed into a dominant 6’8” high school player, he focused his sights on the U.S. And then, Japanese basketball leaders advised him not to go.
“The Japanese Basketball Association actually told me, ‘You gotta stay in Japan,’” he recalled, paraphrasing their arguments. “‘If you go to the U.S., you’re not going to get playing time. You might get injured. You don’t speak English. So what are you gonna do over there?’ I was just like, work hard. And make a way.”
So, at 17, Yuta moved to Oakdale, Connecticut, to join the team at the prep school St. Thomas More. He learned American basketball culture one Drake bus ride and Lil Wayne layup line at a time. “I had never listened to rap music before I came to the U.S.,” he said. “First time I came here I was like, what are we listening to?” He soon became the first Japanese-born player to earn a Division I scholarship; at George Washington University, he was named A-10 Defensive Player Of The Year in 2018.
He signed as an undrafted rookie in Memphis, playing two years between the Grizzlies and their G-League affiliate. Yuta then hung on for another two-way deal in Toronto, followed by his first standard NBA contract in 2021.
After four on-and-off years, he was finally introduced to casual fans—though not exactly in the way he’d have hoped: by being dunked into oblivion by Anthony Edwards. Kevin Hart posted a photo of Yuta sandwiched between Edwards’s thighs mid-air. The caption: “this defender has to be thrown out of the league immediately….there is no coming back from this.”
The moment didn’t deter Yuta. Tiago Splitter, a player development coach with the Nets and himself a former international NBA player, was impressed.
“He was not afraid of anything—to go for a dunk and get blocked and then go again. Or, if he goes to block a shot and gets dunked on, next one he’s going again,” Splitter told me. (He reminded me that he, too, had been on the wrong end of a meeting at the rim—in his case with LeBron James in the 2013 NBA Finals.)
The Nets brought Yuta to training camp this past fall. Even after four years in flux, he never wavered. The goal was always the same. “I just always try to do my best every day,” Yuta said. “I just focus on the present and let things happen. So I didn’t even really think about going back to Japan or Europe.”
Jacob Forchheimer
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