Many NBA first-round picks are pre-ordained. 

Their talent, size and circumstances have them at the forefront of the basketball conversation for years before the NBA ever comes knocking. 

Allen Graves, the versatile forward taken by the Raptors 19th overall in the first round on Tuesday, was not that kind of prospect. 

The first person he had to convince that elite basketball was his path forward was his mother. 

The way Graves tells it — and the gregarious 19-year-old can tell a good story — he was nursing an elbow injury suffered playing football (“I love football, growing up in Louisiana, you kind of have to play football, you got to love it”) when he told his mom, Amy, that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his older brother Marshall and older sister Amoura who played college basketball at LSU and Auburn, respectively. At the time, Graves was six-foot-one and carrying a little bit of extra weight, and his mom gave it to him straight. 

“She told me — we're in the car — and she was like, 'Well, I don't think you're athletic enough, you're not tall enough, if you want to play a college sport, then I think it's gonna be football, so you need to stick with it,’” Graves recounted at his introductory press conference in Toronto on Thursday. “I was like, ‘I'm gonna show you, mom.'”

What followed was a growth spurt that changed everything as Graves went from six-foot-one to six-foot-seven over the course of the summer prior to his Grade 10 year. Two Louisiana state........

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