Let’s All Root for This Icelandic Sheep Farmer to Get Picked in the NBA Draft

Plenty of fans and experts are rooting for Deandre Ayton, Luka Dončić, and others expected to go in the top half of the draft. At Modern Farmer, however, we’re rooting for someone else: gigantic Icelandic prospect Tryggvi Hlinason. Or should we say: former sheep farmer Tryggvi Hlinason?

Hlinason, who’s only 20 years old, has likely had the most obscure upbringing of any NBA prospect this year: he was raised on a sheep farm in far northeast Iceland, in a town of 900 people, that is more than an hour away from the nearest grocery store. That’s unusually remote, even for one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries.

The NBA hopeful lived a childhood familiar to farmers’ children worldwide. Hlinason grew up taking care of sheep, gathering hay, shoveling manure, and doing the thousands of other not-so-glamorous jobs required of a farmer. “Duties? Man, it never stops. It’s a forever job, you know,” recalled Hlinason in an interview. Hlinason has even said that the intensely physical work of a farmer helped prepare him for a job as a professional athlete.

Hlinason didn’t even start playing basketball until he was 16 years old, but at 7’1” and 260 pounds, Hlinason quickly learned the game. The newcomer was a dominant force for Iceland’s surprisingly not-bad Under 20 team, and in two short years, he helped the Icelandic national team qualify for the Eurobasket competition, a sort of European championship in which national teams compete. Some of the best NBA players – Kristaps Porzingis, Goran Dragic, Dario Saric, Pau Gasol – play in this competition. He later signed with Valencia, a Spanish professional team, before declaring his eligibility for the 2018 NBA draft, which will be held this Thursday (tomorrow) evening.

For the record, Iceland is not known for producing basketball players. Only a single Icelandic player ever played in the NBA: Petur GuÁ°mundsson, who scrapped for a few years in the 1980s.

Hlinason isn’t one of the top prospects in the draft; he is a raw talent – an enormous human being who rebounds, blocks shots, and does sick slam dunks. But enormous human beings are valuable in the basketball, and Hlinason might be a target late in the draft for a team that sees potential in him. It’s not a guarantee that he’ll be drafted at all – the late mock drafts, in fact, think it’s more likely that he isn’t drafted – but that makes it all the more important that we root for him.

Let’s go Tryggvi!!!!