There’s a stack of notebooks that are never too far from hand. They hold within them every single action a wiry high school sophomore has taken since he decided to leave behind his home state of New Jersey to transfer to a Lutheran school an hour and a half away in Long Island.
“His work ethic, we still talk about it today,” said Thomas Espinosa, who has built up Putnam Science as a magnet school for post-grad, fifth year transfers including this kid. “He was like Kobe Bryant level… He charted everything
in a notebook, a journal, whatever you want to call it… We had a shooting machine so he’d do a hundred shots from the corner where he would catch it and do a fadeaway off his right foot… and then he’d sit there and write about it and then he’d do a different shot.”
“He had incredible commitment, incredible dedication…”
How do you measure growth? How does anyone keep track of what it means to evolve and change? It’s up to you.
One of my closest friends and I see each other sparingly. He once told me that he loves that we’ve known each other at every stage of our lives, while still having enough distance to see our changes not as incremental things, but as large leaps.
There’s no way to have that relationship with yourself. We are, invariably, forever bound to see ourselves in the mirror every single day. So I’ll ask again, how can you measure growth when every step you take results in you just moving one step forward, without the distance from yourself to see your whole journey?
For Tyson Etienne, the answer is simple. You record every second of every day, of every workout, of every drill in that stack of notebooks.
And you never stop working.
Or maybe that’s not right.
Let’s start over.
Before Etienne was the leading all-time scorer of the Long Island Nets, or a bright spot of another lost season in Brooklyn, he was a scrawny recruit trying to find a home.
That seems oxymoronic. After all, modern high school basketball is built on movement. Finding home is an impossibility when the pursuit of opportunity and notoriety means perpetually chasing a larger spotlight.
With that chase comes new coaching staffs, impacting and teaching the player different things in pursuit of bettering him. There’s a churn to it. Faces are replaced by other ones, voices replaced by others echoing the same message, and yet each of those voices told me stories about a player that had become so memorable by the very plasticity he needed to adapt to those moves.
“I was coaching him hard…” remembered John Buck, a Long Island native who has been leading Long Isand Lutheran’s basketball team since 2007. “He was kind of defending himself… and I said ‘listen, when we talked about coming here, you said you want to be held accountable. Will you still allow me to hold you accountable?’… and from there on, there was no pushback. He accepted the challenges.”
“Tyson has an incredible ability to – especially as he’s grown – seek and be open to growth,” continued Buck, “but not lose himself or lack confidence in who he is.”
A few years ago, I wrote a story on Luka Garza, the Celtic big man. During our interview, he spoke about exactly the same thing: the ability to change anything … coinciding with the heartfelt desire to not lose yourself.
That’s the good thing about flexibility; everyone values it. Willingness is ultimately the most important part of changing. However, it carries with it the same difficulty. Just as everyone values that inclination for growth, they also all have different ideas for how to mobilize it.
You see this everywhere in the NBA, or sports as a whole. Players are miscast as one thing when they are another. It seems like the question worth asking is not how to track growth, but how not to lose yourself within that rapid upheaval and replanting of who you are.
For Tyson Etienne, that never-ending tie to who he is, the thing that allows him to hold on to his core while he fights, is those journals.
Or maybe it’s not that either.
Let’s try one more time.
Everyone who’s crossed paths with Tyson Etienne has a story about Tyson Etienne. He has that effect on people, an air about him that just transforms people, that reshapes them by example.
A few weeks ago, Etienne was inducted into the Putnam Science Hall of Fame. It’s a great honor for any player at any institution but especially exciting for someone who spent his whole high school career moving around.
Coach Espinosa was happy to celebrate the now 26-year-old point guard, but needed to remind his former player of secrets previously left unsaid.
“Once in a while, we’ll have a kid that has a car on campus… you bring it here, you leave it in the parking lot, you’re not allowed to drive it to Walmart or get pizza. You use it when we get an email from the parent…” he said, while laughing “One time, I was leaving and I saw him pull in, and he parked his car and he hid in his car until I left. We never talked about it… Tyson was going to the YMCA for the sauna and the steam room.”
There were so many smiles shared between the two men. Memory after memory, grinning retelling after grinning retelling, all in celebration of a duo that helped each other reach the National Prep Championship semi-finals some five years ago.
Still, despite all those stories, all those memories, no one quite knows when that process of journaling started. It has just always been a part of him.
But, that’s not quite right either.
In 2015, Armoni Sexton was shot and killed in Patterson, New Jersey in a drive-by shooting that still has no clear motive.
“I will remember him as a kid who really, really tried both on and off the court and who served as an example to everyone else at Paterson Charter School,” said the school’s dean of students.
He was Tyson Etienne’s childhood best friend. They had pushed each other, and in doing so became pillars for others to count on.
Journaling no longer carries the stigma it did even 10 years ago. It’s also not as monolithic as it once was. The act of recording the world is no longer one that needs explanation or defense, it’s something that hundreds of thousands of people do. So why do I keep coming back to the journals?
There’s one voice that’s notably absent in this piece. That is Tyson’s.
We weren’t able to interview Etienne for this story — the press of business at the end of a season — an interview that could’ve given us answers to those questions. There will be no access to him, or the journals. There will be no explanation of why or when it started, no explanation of anything else.
Instead, let’s follow the approach of one of his other passions.
On September 18th, 2025, just a few months after his NBA debut, Tyson Etienne returned to Dwight-Englewood Highschool, the place where everything started, to show the rewards of his effort. With the help of his former teacher, Caitlyn Young, he presented nine years of artistic passion.
The Swartley Art Gallery hosted Tyson Etienne’s first art exhibition, titled A Journey Seldom Seen. A collection of photography and paintings focused on the places that shaped him – from basketball courts to open streets to community gatherings – brought him back to where his journey started.
“Basketball is an art form in itself,” says Etienne. “Every day I play basketball, and every day I create.”
There’s something to be said about the capturing of moments. In words or in frames, Tyson has found a way to save things that are ever-fleeting. From passion to preparation, there’s some element of saving the present for whatever the future holds. Everything is always an accessed SD card or a turned page away.
Before digital photography became the norm, film cameras would create negatives of their images. More accurately, the negative was the image captured as an inversion, one that would then be projected and enlarged in order to be printed in its positive format.
Let’s find the outline of Tyson through other’s retellings of him, trace the outline, create a stencil of it, and whatever remains will lead us back home, to where his journey started and where it’s been. Fom LuHigh to Wichita State to the G League, first the College Park Skyhawks, then the Long Island Nets and finally, the ultimate goal of everyone who’s ever picked up a leather ball and pounded it: the NBA.
So who is Tyson Etienne? How has all that self-reflection made him who he is?
“It’s always good to have somebody that brings great energy. And, you know, he [Etienne] does just that night in, night out. So it’s good for us. It’s good for the group, you know, especially even on practice days when people may not want to be there right now. It’s like, you know, it’s good for us. Keep everybody, be everybody excited to enjoy our opportunities.” said Noah Clowney, a current teammate of Etienne.
“It’s great taste,” he continued, “phenomenal energy. Like, you don’t see that shit twice. Energy is second to none. Like, I’ve never seen it like this, you know?”
It’s no surprise to Coach Espinoza.
“He had the work ethic before he came here, but he had to learn how to be on his own.” clarified Coach Espinosa, “That’s what Putnam Science did for him. It taught him how to be himself when he was on his own”
“I remember the meeting we had to explore his staying out here in Long Island. He insisted he could commute back and forth… they were all saying ‘Hey Tyson, logistically, this is ridiculous’… I could really sense how strong his will was, and I really sensed how resolute he was in feeling that this was the best decision for him.” remembered Buck.
The hour and a half long drives did not become an impediment. “He would wake up so early that he would show up and have a workout before school…”
Tyson Etienne is a contradiction. He is stubborn about maintaining his rituals. From staying at home with his mother during high school to those everpresent journals to his art, he refuses to sacrifice any bit of those habits for anything.
He is simultaneously always open to changing his schedule, his identity, and his role on the court. He was asked to accept different coaching styles and different positions at his three stops, and then reshaped himself once again upon reaching Wichita State, where he excelled in an ACC that could’ve crushed him
He is equally a calm, thoughtful young man and a fiery, uber-competitive maestro who is so obsessive about his workouts that he has recorded every single one for multiple years.
“Coaches see you in stress, and stress reveals a lot about your character” said Buck.
Stress created a diamond in Etienne. Funny enough, I’m not sure if meeting the man would change much about this piece if he had the chance. He is what everyone says he is. Especially on the fringes of the NBA, the things that keep one player in a locker room instead of surfing around on the bubble are all the things that Tyson has built himself to be.
From the smile he is always sporting to the work ethic to the effortless air of change that he brings, Etienne fits not just one of those failed starts to this story, but all of them. For a Nets team trying to find success within yet another rebuild, maybe that’s most impactful of all.
Tyson Etienne isn’t searching for home anymore. He has found it with a Nets team that needs him more for who he is than what he brings whenever he’s on the court. The rest is yet to come for that picture-perfect image to come to pass, but one thing is certain.
Every moment will be recorded and reflected upon, you know, including where he goes next. The Nets are in the midst of change. Sunday’s NBA Lottery is just part of it. Will there be room for a 6’0” guard who turns 27?
“I try to absorb everything from every aspect and just put it together in how I approach the game.” said Etienne, on the day of his debut.
How far we’ve come since.
