Georgia State Sharpshooter R.J. Hunter Won't Be a Mystery for Long

Editor's note: R.J. Hunter's deep 3-pointer with 2.7 seconds remaining propelled No. 14 seed Georgia State to a stunning 57-56 upset of third-seeded Baylor in a West region first-round game.

R.J. Hunter doesn't have much time for anything other than swishing jumpers. So for the last three years, almost every night around midnight while most of his peers are cramming for tests or crushing beers, Hunter has made his way to the Georgia State gym to get up shots. Well, actually…

"I make a lot of shots," Hunter says. "I'm not good on just getting a lot of shots up."

This kind of obsession—Hunter adds that he only counts swishes—is what helped turn the junior shooting guard into a potential NBA lottery pick. Hunter is averaging 22.1 points per game this season and the heavy favorite to win Sun Belt Player of the Year honors for the second straight year. He's also coming off a summer in which he tore up the camp circuit to put his name on the national radar.

But at first glance, he looks like anything but a future pro.

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Hunter, at 6'6", weighs in at 190 pounds. And that, as we typically say with player heights, could be a generous listing—he was 180 pounds this summer at the LeBron James Skills Academy, according to DraftExpress.com. Hunter is rail-thin and just starting to grow into his body. Ron Hunter, Georgia State coach and R.J.'s father, says that he just recently taught his son to shave.

"We were so embarrassed that we went in the bathroom in the locker room when everyone was gone," Ron says.

Once you get past the frame, however, there's a lot to love. Hunter has solid handle and great vision—he's averaging 3.6 assists per game—to go along with a quick trigger.

"If you talk to him now and you call him a shooter, he'll probably stop the conversation," Ron says. "He hates being labeled that. But he's one of the best shooters in the country."

Hunter has range out beyond the NBA three-point line, and he never hesitates to shoot wherever he has space. In his freshman year on the road at Towson, he drained a three that measured about 30 feet without altering his normal shooting stroke.

Credit: Screen shot via Synergy Sports

"My dad says shoot where you can see," he says. "I think I can see from full court."

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Courtesy of the Hunter family

Ron, who played at Miami (Ohio), got his first head-coaching job at IUPUI before R.J.'s first birthday, and his son was a staple at IUPUI practices from the time he was two years old.

Even though R.J. was with him all the time, Ron tried to let him find his own calling. He had him play soccer and baseball growing up, but R.J. never even made it through an entire season. "Let's get back in the gym," he'd tell his dad. "It's not for me."

Until R.J. got to high school, Ron thought he was training him to be a coach. The two would watch film together, and Ron would test his son.

Why did the coach make that adjustment? Why do you think he ran that play? Why did he sub out that guy?

As R.J. got older, Ron would ask him to watch a play and then diagram it.

"I really wanted him to think like a coach," Ron says. "He just got to be a better player."

Ron realized his son had a future playing the game once he got to Pike High School in Indianapolis.

In one of his first games as a freshman, with his oversized uniform hanging off him, R.J. hit two clutch shots in a big moment. Ron turned to his wife and told her, "I don't know if he'll grow, but I do know that he'll be a special player."

For his first three years of high school, R.J. had to settle for being a sidekick. He played in the shadow of Marquis Teague, who was a McDonald's All-American and helped Kentucky win a national title in 2012. All the college coaches came to Pike to see Teague.

But everything changed during R.J.'s senior year of high school.

Ron took the Georgia State job the previous spring, and with no pops or Teague around, R.J. was the center of attention. He led Pike to the state championship game in what was supposed to be a rebuilding year.

"That was the hardest thing I've ever had to do," Ron says of being away from his family. "They would send me tapes back, and I realized then the light switch went off for him, where he felt like it was his team."

Part of Ron wanted his son to follow him to Georgia State so he wouldn't have to miss any of R.J.'s college games. It killed him not to be around that year. He even spent the opening minutes of a Georgia State game in the locker room so he could watch his son's senior night over Skype. But Ron thought R.J. might go elsewhere to escape his dad's shadow.

R.J. was recruited by several major-conference schools, including Iowa, Wake Forest and Virginia Tech.

Ron became even more hesitant to have his son follow him to Georgia State when he talked to another college coach who coached his own son. That coach regretted coaching his son because it was hard on the family.

R.J. had also watched his always-demonstrative dad roam the sidelines for years and had his own doubts.

"I know he's crazy," R.J. says. "I know he's wild and he stomps and is yelling at players every other play for made shots, missed shots, anything. Do I really want to do that?"

Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

Ron reached out to every father-son duo he knew, and Valparaiso coach Bryce Drew, who played for his dad Homer, convinced R.J. that playing for his dad was his best choice. Bryce told R.J. that it was the best four years of his life.

It didn't take long for the Hunters to realize R.J. could thrive under his old man's watch.

"The first time R.J. played an exhibition game, and he had 30," Ron says, "I thought, 'OK, I made the right decision.'"

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R.J. proved to be a great mid-major player his first two years of college, but this summer was about proving to himself that he could hang with anyone.

His confidence started to grow when he made his first stop of the summer at the Kevin Durant Skills Academy and got the attention of Durant during a five-on-five game.

With Durant watching from the sideline, Hunter had been struggling until he knocked down a fadeaway jumper from the post.

"I heard Kevin Durant say 'Damn,' like 'He hit that,'" R.J. says.

Next possession, he scored again.

"It was kind of getting loud," R.J. says.

Then he scored again with a floater and followed that up with a fourth straight bucket.

"[Durant] just pulled me aside and said, 'You're a really good player. Just keep doing what you're doing,'" R.J. remembers. "I think we kind of had the skinny thing going on."

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That skinny thing is the one hesitation that NBA scouts have with R.J., but there are other mid-major players who have had the skill for franchises to look past their frames. Former Lehigh guard C.J. McCollum went 10th to the Portland Trail Blazers in the 2013 NBA draft, and former Davidson guard Steph Curry is the poster child for what a skinny mid-major scoring machine can be at the next level.

Curry had the luxury of playing in a system at Davidson where he could show off all the different ways he could score—from running off multiple screens to getting the ball in more isolation sets later in his career.

R.J. has had a somewhat similar career curve. He scored a lot of his points on spot-ups during his first two seasons. This year, he's still excelling in catch-and-shoot situations, but he's getting fewer of those looks because the scouting report says not to leave him.

The Panthers have had to get more creative getting R.J. the ball, and that means running him off a lot of screens. One of his favorite players to study growing up was Ray Allen, and like Allen, he has a great understanding of how to move without the ball and get himself open.

Also in the Curry mold, R.J. has a penchant for getting his own shot off the dribble. 

No one is ready to tab R.J. as the next Curry, but he did get labeled as a potential lottery pick when he played well in front of scouts at the LeBron James Skills Academy.

"He looked like he belonged," an NBA scout who was in attendance told Bleacher Report. "That's always the toughest thing for some of those guys who come from a smaller school. If they're NBA players, they just look like they belong. If they're a little bit out of their element, they could fail. He looked like he belonged."

Ron had told R.J. to go to the camp in Las Vegas by himself and enjoy playing without dad watching over.

"Then I got 1,000 calls," Ron says. "Everybody was calling saying how great he was playing. I couldn't take it. I got on the next flight.

"I wanted to go as a father. I didn't want to go as a coach."

The two are hoping for at least one more special father-son moment this season as they try to get Georgia State to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2001.

R.J. helped lead a turnaround last season when Georgia State went from a 15-16 record his freshman year to winning 25 games and the Sun Belt regular season title. This season, Georgia State is tied for its best start in the program's last 10 years (6-3) against the toughest nonconference schedule during that stretch, according to kenpom.com's metrics (subscription required). The three losses have come to teams that have lost a combined two games.

Ron credits R.J. with changing the culture—many of his teammates now join him for his middle-of-the-night workouts—and he's also helped his dad generate interest in the program.

"If you went to my freshman-year home games, it'd probably be like this plus 10 people," R.J. says during a shootaround at Iowa State last month. "Now you go back and it was a sellout for an exhibition."

Bill Haber/Associated Press

The Panthers were on the verge of playing on the national stage last March when they led by nine with just over three minutes left in the Sun Belt tournament championship game against Louisiana-Lafayette, who ended up rallying and winning by one in overtime.

"Just being that close, you can really taste it," R.J. says. "You almost start celebrating, and then you just lose it. That just gave me a different hunger. I'm a completely different player mentally and physically because of that."

R.J. is also motivated by what a tourney bid would mean to his father, who made three NCAA tournaments as a player but has only made one as a head coach.

The Hunters paid special attention last year to the McDermotts, another father-son duo who made the tournament and were one of the biggest stories of the college basketball season.

R.J. has picked Doug McDermott's brain about what made them so successful, and Ron likes to remind his son that McDermott decided to play four years at Creighton instead of leaving early.

"I tease him, 'You know McDermott came back now,'" Ron says, laughing.

R.J. will face his decision after this season, and if he takes Georgia State to an NCAA tournament, he may have accomplished everything he can accomplish in college.

But if pops wants to read between the lines, his son has grander visions than just one more season and one NCAA tournament.

"I think I can get him to two more before I leave," R.J. says.

C.J. Moore covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @CJMooreBR.