Stanford’s Ebuka Okorie is the freshman superstar no one saw coming

You may have heard about the 18-year-old freshman sensation currently tearing up the ACC. You know, the kid who currently leads the league in scoring. The one who dropped 28 in an upset win over Louisville and then who, just four days later, scored 31 points and hit the game-winner just before the buzzer at Virginia Tech. Same guy scored 36 Wednesday night against the No. 14 team in the country.

No, we’re not talking about Duke superstar and potential No. 1 draft pick Cameron Boozer. This isn’t human highlight reel Caleb Wilson from North Carolina either.

The ACC freshman currently setting college basketball ablaze at a higher temperature than any other was ranked No. 119 overall in the recruiting class of 2025 by 247 Sports, and 227th overall by Rivals/On3. He wasn’t featured in any summer mock drafts, and he didn’t earn any preseason distinctions or individual awards.

If you’re still unfamiliar Stanford star Ebuka Okorie, the time to change that is now.

Against 14th-ranked North Carolina on Wednesday night, the 6’2 Okorie carried the Cardinal to its most significant win of the season by delivering his most impressive college performance to date. For a kid averaging just shy of 23.0 points per game, that’s saying something.

Okorie went highlight for highlight with UNC’s Wilson — currently widely projected to be a top five pick in this summer’s NBA Draft — and ultimately came out on top, finishing with 36 points on 12-of-20 shooting to go along with 9 assists and a pair of steals.

The list of freshmen since 2010 who have produced a game of 35 or more points and 9 or more assists:

Ebuka Okorie, Stanford (2025-26)

That’s the end of the list.

If you didn’t see this coming, you’re far from alone.

A native of Nashua, New Hampshire, Okorie made a name for himself playing for New Hampshire’s Brewster Academy, one of the nation’s premiere high school basketball programs. As a senior in 2024-25, he averaged 14 points, four rebounds, three assists and two steals per game while helping Brewster to reach the semifinals of the Chipotle High School Basketball National Championships.

Despite being widely regarded as the team’s heart and soul, Okorie was overshadowed at Brewster by higher-profile teammates like Sebastian Wilkins, who signed with Duke, and Dwayne Aristode, who signed with Arizona. Okorie, meanwhile, wasn’t just not being prioritized by power conference programs, he was being ignored by them entirely.

Nearing the start of his final season of high school, Okorie had received just a handful of Division-I offers: Samford, Bryant, Albany, Fairfield and a pair of Ivy League schools, Brown and Harvard. Both of Okorie’s parents — Charles and Ljeoma — had attended Harvard, and having already sent two siblings to Cornell, both parents were eager to have at least one of their children follow in their footsteps and attend school “in Boston.”

“His commitment to Harvard really was because of us, the parents,” Ljeoma told Basket Under Review in November. “I’ll say that just because of the pressure from us, he ended up committing.” 

“We forced him,” his father added. 

During his school’s fall break in October of 2024, Ebuka Okorie and his parents had a heart-to-heart about his future. The son told his parents that he didn’t want to go to Harvard, and that while academics were still important to him, he wanted to prioritize basketball at this moment in his life. Worried that his son would look back in 20 years and regret not attending America’s most prestigious academic university, Charles Okorie phoned Brewster head coach Jason Smith and asked him to get in touch with power conference schools that had a blend of great academics and solid basketball.

Smith phoned schools like Georgetown, Michigan, Northwestern, Vanderbilt and Virginia, as well as Stanford. Kyle Smith, who was hired as Stanford’s head coach in 2024, was already familiar with Okorie. Soon after getting the job, Smith had called Jason Smith to talk about Brewster point guard Elijah Crawford. Crawford had previously been committed to the Cardinal, but re-opened his recruitment after Stanford had fired previous head coach Jerod Haase.

The Brewster head coach let Kyle Smith know that Crawford wasn’t comfortable re-committing to a staff he was unfamiliar, but said he had another guard Stanford might be interested in. Smith was impressed by what he saw from Okorie, but had barely had an opportunity to begin the evaluation process before the commitment to Harvard happened. When he received word that Okorie was back on the open market, two Stanford assistants were in New Hapshire before the end of the week. A commitment to the Cardinal came shortly after that.

During his first summer at Stanford, Okorie started to generate a bit of a buzz. There was a growing sentiment among the folks who watched the team practice that Okorie “might be good enough to start.”

Okorie didn’t just start, he became the first Stanford freshman to post 20 or more points in four consecutive games since Brooke Lopez accomplished the feat in 2007. Okorie did it in the first four games of his college career.

After lighting up Stanford’s non-conference competition throughout the month of November and ending December with a 32-point performance against Colorado and a 30-point effort a week later against Cal State Northridge, it seemed like Okorie was destined for at least something of a regression in production once ACC play began.

It turned out he was just getting started.

Okorie was nearly unguardable during Stanford’s first signature win of the season, an 80-76 triumph over No. 16 Louisville. The Cardinals, playing without the services of the player who was supposed to be the ACC’s most dominant freshman point guard — projected lottery pick Mikel Brown Jr. — simply could not keep Okorie out of the lane. He finished with 28 points.

Four days later in Blacksburg, Okorie grabbed the faces of those who were still refusing to look in his direction. He dished out 6 assists and scored 31 points, the final three coming on a 26-footer just before the horn that lifted Stanford to a 69-68 win over Virginia Tech.

Okorie’s former high school coach, who also coached six-time NBA All-Star Donovan Mitchell at Brewster, seems to be the only one not surprised that the point guard he saw score 14.0 ppg at the high school level a year ago is currently the nation’s fifth-leading scorer.

“It’s like people who asked me if I was surprised that Donovan Mitchell has had the success he’s had in the NBA,” Jason Smith told Basket Under Review, “Not really because I saw the work. I saw the work that he put in every day and the type of person he was, never too high, never too low. Ebuka is very similar.”

While his outside shooting numbers (just under 33% from three) have been something of a pleasant surprise, Okorie’s bread and butter remains his ability to get his 6’2, 185-pound frame to the rim against all odds. His combination of burst, shiftiness and misdirection have allowed him to self-create nearly 97% of his shots at the rim. The skillset has also allowed him to get to the free-throw line, where he shoots 81.5 percent, on an average of 8.5 times per game.

Okorie’s star turn will undoubtedly leave him with a decision to make in a few months. Yes, he’s started to generate some attention from NBA scouts and coaches, but even if he doesn’t project as a first rounder just yet, he’ll still have the ability to cash in via the slew of transfer portal NIL offers that will assuredly be coming from the nation’s premiere basketball programs.

“I’ll handle that when it gets here,” Okorie told the San Francisco Chronicle back in November. “For now, I’m focused on the season. … Stanford is a really good fit.”

Thanks in large part to Okorie, a Stanford team that lost stars Maxime Raynaud to the NBA and Oziyah Sellers to a St. John’s transfer is looking like it’s capable of more than the second round NIT run it produced a year ago. The Cardinal currently sit at 14-4 overall and 3-2 in the ACC with the big wins over Louisville and North Carolina. Their resume is being weighed down a bit by a pair of bad early season home losses to Seattle and UNLV, but their four Quadrant I victories are the most of any team in the ACC outside of sixth-ranked Duke.

There’s certainly no guarantee that Stanford will be an NCAA tournament team, which means there’s no guarantee that one of the sport’s most under the radar superstars will get a chance to shine on the sport’s biggest stage.

If you’re a true hoop head, don’t take that chance. Find Stanford on national TV when you have the opportunity and enjoy college basketball’s most pleasantly surprising show.