LOS ANGELES — This was the moment circled since the release of the Miami Heat schedule in August. Jaime Jaquez Jr. was getting not only his first NBA homecoming, but the ability for the No. 18 pick in last June’s draft to retrace all of his basketball roots.
So time back home in Camarillo, Calif.
Heat practices and shootarounds at UCLA in Westwood.
And then games on Monday night in downtown Los Angeles against the Clippers and Wednesday night against the Lakers.
SoCal rarely has felt so good.
“It’s been a while,” Jaquez said, with the Heat in the midst of a five-day stay in Southern California, “and I’m very excited to get back.”
Born south of Los Angeles in Irvine in Orange County and raised to the northwest of Los Angeles in Camarillo in Ventura County, Jaquez stands as a basketball son of the region.
It is a pride localized to his basketball roots, but one that blossomed beyond the confines of Camarillo.
“I would say I consider myself a SoCal kid,” said the emerging wing who has put himself into consideration for first-team All-Rookie. “The thing is, like with Camarillo, I definitely claim 805, for sure. That’s where I’m from. But when I go outside of there, like no one really knows where that is.
“But I also went to school in L.A. I feel like I have ties to both, in a lot of ways. But I would just say SoCal in general. I’ve been all over, so I would say SoCal.”
Yet it was not necessarily a local story that Jaquez set out to write. In high school there was a degree of wanderlust, albeit while also maintaining his strong family ties.
“My two options, I want to go to Arizona and UCLA were my two biggest schools,” he said of his collegiate choice in 2019. “I have a lot of family in Arizona. They’re big Wildcat fans, so I was really into that. But they never recruited me.
“So I was like, ‘All right, well that makes it easy. I’m going to go to UCLA.’ And that’s where I wanted to go, it was my top two. I loved playing there. I loved my time there. And it was great.”
As a bonus, the Heat scheduled four practice sessions at UCLA this week, further cementing the homecoming feel.
What the schedule, however, did not provide was a UCLA women’s game during the Heat’s stay in Los Angeles. Gabriela Jaquez is a sophomore forward for the Lady Bruins. The next game for the UCLA women is a Friday home game, when the Heat will be completing this five-game western swing against the Phoenix Suns.
After playing in the same college arena as his sister, the season has been a long-distance readjustment.
“Yeah, I mean that’s what FaceTime is for,” Jaquez said. “I talk to her. I was just on the phone with her last night, talking about games and what we’re going to do.”
The irony for Jaquez is that on draft night, the hometown Los Angeles Lakers had the No. 17 pick, one pick before Jaquez went to the Heat. The Lakers instead opted for Indiana freshman forward Jalen Hood-Schifino.
That, Jaquez said, was for the best.
“I wanted to get away,” he said. “I think, for myself, I thought it was important for me to be able to go out of my comfort zone and experience something new. I didn’t want to be a guy that said, ‘Oh, I just stayed in Southern California all my life.’
“I wanted to go live in a different, new place. And that’s why I was very excited to go to Miami. It was new. Everyone compares it, but I think it’s very, very different.”
The two games this week at Crypto.Com Arena, the former Staples Center, stand as the first for Jaquez at the venue in downtown Los Angeles.
“I still call it Staples,” he said of the arena’s name when Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal and other Lakers champions played there. “So I’m very excited to get back out there and play in front of the home crowd.”
Typically for Eastern Conference teams, there could be two separate trips to Los Angeles, with the Heat returning to California for a game in Sacramento as part of a four-game trip in February. Instead, this will be it for 2023-24 homecomings, barring a return trip to Southern California for the NBA Finals.
“I try to take an optimistic perspective, like at least I get to go home,” Jaquez said. “It’s a long stretch and period of time where I get to see people I haven’t seen in a very long time. Because since the summer, I don’t even know how long since I’ve been back. But it’s been a while, and I’m very excited to get back.”
All of which has made the period prior to these games one of personal discovery.
“You kind of learn a lot about yourself,” he said of getting away from Southern California for the first time at 22. “Being alone is one thing. Obviously making new friends, getting close with the guys out here has been great. And you get to look at yourself in the mirror and see what you really see, what you want in life.
“I’m having a lot of fun being in Miami, being away from home, being a real adult I think is the cool part. It’s not like my parents are 45 minutes away like they used to be. So it’s just all about figuring it out, seeing what you can do on your own.”
