Bennedict Mathurin is expected to become the highest-picked Quebec native in NBA Draft history on Thursday night. He was born and raised in Montreal before playing for an NBA Academy team in Mexico City.

 Kelly Presnell, Arizona Daily Star

Nearly all the same people who helped lift Bennedict Mathurin all the way from a challenging adolescence in Montreal into a projected NBA lottery pick will be sitting at his NBA Draft green-room table Thursday in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.

Except one. Dominique Mathurin died in 2014 at age 15 after he was hit by a car while riding a bicycle, leaving the 12-year-old Benn without a navigator for the courts and streets in the rough Montreal-Nord neighborhood.

His older sister, Jennifer, a former player at N.C. State who now coaches collegiately in Quebec, will be sitting with Bennedict at the draft Thursday. So will Mathurin’s legal guardian, Michel Metellus, along with his mother, his agent and Arizona associate head coach Jack Murphy (UA coach Tommy Lloyd changed initial plans to attend).

Bennedict Mathurin will feel his brother’s presence at the draft. He’s used to that.

He sports a tattoo honoring Dominque and using a #domixworld hashtag on social media to remind himself to honor his brother by going all out.

β€œDomixworld means everything to me,” Mathurin said last week, during his virtual NBA predraft media interview. β€œHe was the reason why I keep going every day in life. He’s the reason why I want to just want to be the best at everything I do in life. That’s just #domixworld.”

After Dominique’s death, though, there were no guardrails, no goals, no direction for Mathurin to follow.

Mathurin did not have a father figure in his life, and his mother, Elvie, had been working long hours in health care for years after emigrating from Haiti at age 20. Benn’s older sister, Jennifer, became a parental figure of sorts but, at the time of Dominique’s death, she was entering her sophomore season playing basketball at N.C. State.

β€œHe’d come home from school and it used to be him and his brother because his sister was away at college,” Murphy said. β€œBenn and his brother kind of looked after each other. And then there came a point in his life where he lost his brother. He lost his safety net. It was just Benn.”

Before long, Jennifer Mathurin’s former club coach, Metellus, took Benn in and became his legal guardian, though there were still temptations. Jennifer declined an interview for this story but once told The Athletic that β€œit really could have gone either way” with her little brother, having noted the drugs and gang violence of their neighborhood.

Benn saw all that and, eventually, turned away.

β€œWhere I’m from, there’s a lot of people who chose the wrong path or on didn’t have the opportunity to just to be successful in life,” he said. β€œI think it really shaped me. I wanted to be different. I wanted to do great things in life.”

He poured himself into basketball, first standing out for the Park Ex Knights youth club team in Montreal, the same one former ASU standout Lu Dort played for, and eventually picked up MVP honors while playing for Team Quebec in a 2018 Canadian youth tournament.

That’s where his next break happened. Hernan Olaya, an assistant coach for the NBA Academy’s Latin America program, started chatting in Spanish with Mathurin’s Team Quebec coach after that event. He then moved over to ask Mathurin what his goals were.

β€œMy goal is to make it to the NBA,” Mathurin told Alaya.

Mathurin was soon on his way to play for the Academy in Mexico City, and it wasn’t just about the basketball. Mathurin also lived on his own, spending one of his two seasons rooming with Mali’s Oumar Ballo, who became his UA teammate last season.

Mathurin learned how to speak Spanish β€” he already spoke French, English and Creole β€” and how to really take care of himself.

β€œHe needed time to develop as a young man, and the academy gave him that,” Murphy said. β€œI give a ton of credit to Michel for being the person to lead him towards the academy and then you give the academy, their staff and their coaches a ton of credit for developing Benn and his teammates.

Murphy said Mathurin was β€œalready on his way” to becoming a high-character young man by the time he flew to Mexico to scout Mathurin early in the 2019-20 school year.

By then, word of Mathurin’s basketball ability was quickly spreading. Powerful and athletic, with prototypical NBA wing size, Mathurin had a raw explosiveness about him and, thanks to influences from his sister, guardian and the Academy coaches, he also played well within a team structure.

β€œThe experience I had at the academy was amazing,” Mathurin said. β€œJust to have the chance to go to a different country, learn a new language, get used to living by myself.

Bennedict Mathurin drags down a rebound over a trio of Houston defenders in the Wildcats' Sweet 16 game against Houston in March.

β€œAnd the basketball part was great. I was able to be around great people. My dream was to play in the NBA, so I was able to just understand what it took for me to get to the next level.”

Mathurin just needed one more developmental stop between the Academy and the NBA.

He considered both Arizona and Baylor, taking an official visit to Tucson in November 2019. He saw the Wildcats blow out Long Beach State at a time when it was already clear Arizona would have opportunity for him in the backcourt the following season after then-freshmen Nico Mannion and Josh Green took off.

Mathurin chose the Wildcats but was slowed in transition by COVID-19 concerns. He arrived at UA in the summer of 2020, soon finding players were barely allowed to hang around each other off the court, and fans would not be allowed to watch him.

He excelled anyway. Mathurin played the first 12 games of 2020-21 off the bench behind Dalen Terry, who is expected to follow him later in the first round of Thursday’s NBA Draft, then exploded once then-coach Sean Miller promoted him to the starting lineup in January 2021.

In his first start, Mathurin scored 31 points and logged eight rebounds in 30 minutes against an Oregon St ate team that would reach the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight. Mathurin wound up making the Pac-12’s all-freshman team along with teammate Azuolas Tubelis, and was quietly projected as a possible first-round pick had he left for the NBA last summer.

Mathurin said he considered both leaving for the NBA and entering the transfer portal until he knew Lloyd would become the Wildcats’ coach to replace Miller, who was was fired in April 2021.

He had other incentives, too. Murphy said Mathurin wanted to improve his NBA stock by coming back as a sophomore in 2021-22 and growing physically. Peter Yannopoulos, an NBA analyst for Quebec’s RDS sports network who speaks with Mathurin regularly, said Mathurin also β€œloved everything about Arizona.”

Mathurin had hardly had the full UA basketball experience in 2020-21, with the Wildcats unable to play before fans because of COVID-19 protocols and unable to participate in the NCAA Tournament because of the school’s decision to self-impose a postseason ban due to its NCAA infractions case.

Mathurin wanted another year as a Wildcat.

β€œIt was disappointing the way it ended up last year not being able to participate in the postseason,” Yannopolous said, having heard plenty of detail from Mathurin. β€œBut with the guys who decided to come back and coach Lloyd coming in, they decided, β€˜Hey, we can do can do something special.’”

They did just that. With a fast-paced, fun-loving and unselfish style of basketball, the Wildcats ran away with the Pac-12 title, picked up a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed and finished at 33-4.

Averaging 17.7 points and 5.6 rebounds per game β€” clearly the best player on clearly the league’s best team β€” Mathurin won the Pac-12 Player of the Year award and became a consensus second-team all-American pick.

Mathurin also grew in multiple ways as a sophomore, breaking down the walls he set as during an isolated freshman year, making friends with teammates and becoming a leader.

β€œYou know, in his freshman year James Akinjo was kind of our leader and James did a really good job,” said Murphy, the only UA coach who returned from 2020-21. β€œThis year, I felt like Benn and Dalen really took the reigns in the most critical moments of the season, whether it was on the road at Illinois, on the road at Tennessee when we got down or the Pac 12 Championship versus UCLA.

β€œBenn, in some instances, really pushed us along.”

After the season ended, Mathurin performed in only limited workouts for teams in his projected draft range β€” such as Detroit (5), Indiana (6) and Portland (7) β€” while drawing praise for his interviews with NBA clubs.

Now, in the glow of the NBA Draft, it’s Mathurin’s turn to spread recognition back to those in his green-room circle and beyond.

If Mathurin is picked fifth or sixth, he’ll be the fifth-highest player ever selected from Arizona. At minimum, he’s expected to become the Wildcats’ 17th top-10 pick.

At any spot, Mathurin will become the first player ever drafted from the NBA Latin America Academy, and the second one ever from all NBA academies (the NBA Academy of Australia produced last year’s No. 6 pick, Josh Giddey, and will produce another this season in Dyson Daniels).

Then there’s home.

Mathurin is almost all but certain to become the highest-drafted player ever from Quebec. Montreal’s Bill Wennington, the province’s previous top NBA pick, went 16th overall in 1985.

There’s nobody who would’ve celebrated that achievement more than the older brother who guided young Benn through the streets a decade ago.

During the SiriusXM portion of his virtual NBA predraft interview last week, Mathurin grinned broadly when asked what Dominique might say now, with his name about to be called on NBA Draft night.

β€œI’d say just be happy. He’d just be really happy for me,” Mathurin said. β€œIt was a dream of his to get drafted. So, for sure, he’d be really happy and proud of me.”

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Contact sports reporter Bruce Pascoe at 573-4146 or bpascoe@tucson.com. On Twitter @brucepascoe