When Tasmania's new professional basketball team announced Sam McDaniel as its inaugural signing, it had not only landed its first player, but a cracking story it could sell to a new generation of Tasmanian hoops fans.
Sam's father, Wayne McDaniel, was a talisman for the JackJumpers' predecessor — the Tassie Devils — who played in the National Basketball League during the halcyon days of Tasmanian basketball.
The McDaniel name would be the bridge between the old days and the new, as Tasmania prepares to re-enter the league after decades in the basketball wilderness.
Upon signing, Sam offered up some polite platitudes about his father's playing days, and what it meant for him to return to the place where he'd made his name.
But, for the 25-year-old, the awkward reality was that, until recently, he'd never really had a meaningful relationship with his dad.
They've only recently re-connected, after years spent apart.
"I see him more as a mate now, a friend. We can joke around. We can talk about things," Sam told ABC Sport.
"He will never be that 'father figure' to me."
Lure of sporting stardom
Wayne McDaniel retired from the NBL in 1994.
A year later, he had split with Sam's mother and left the family. Six-week-old Sam was whisked to Adelaide, where he would live for the next 20 years with his mum.
Wayne stayed in Hobart, before eventually moving to Sydney.
"There was a large part of my life he missed out on and that was his choice," Sam said.
Before Sam was born, McDaniel senior was a star of the NBL whose profile ranked alongside the likes of Andrew Gaze, Shane Heal and Leroy Loggins.
The early 1990s was a time when Australian basketball was sizzling, and the NBA in America had just reached the zenith of the Jordan-led superstar era.
In McDaniel, Tasmania had its own slice of showtime basketball.
He once scored 57 points in a game for the Devils, and only Gaze, Paul Stanley and Al Green have ever bettered his 33.9 point per game average from the 1990 season.
McDaniel played in Hobart, where simply existing as a 6-foot-6-inch (198 centimetres) black man turned heads, and the social renaissance born from David Walsh's mind-expanding MONA museum wouldn't happen for another 20 years.
But basketball was big, and McDaniel was a big fish.
Now 61-years-old, McDaniel senior still oozes the confidence that was a hallmark of his playing days.
"But I was required to be selfish in the way that the team relied on my scoring output."
He is still charming and passionate. There are no regrets as to how things unfolded back in 1995.
"We'd always keep in contact through letters and things, there were no emails at that time," he recalled.
"I remember going to Port Adelaide with [Sam], having fish and chips and just hanging out," he said.
"It was beautiful how it panned out, and I have no real regrets about that."
Years of separation, however, meant Sam grew into a vastly different man to his father, both on and off the basketball court.
"How you're raised is how you're raised," Sam said.
Like father, but not like son
Sam is an indoor cat, introverted and introspective.
Wayne, on the other hand, drips with self-assuredness and positivity.
Post-basketball, Wayne transitioned from dishing dimes to rehearsing lines and, to this day, part-time acting is how he earns some of his income.
In fact, the timing of the interview with ABC Sport was pushed back due to a last-minute audition for a Delta Airlines commercial.
He went for the part of the pilot.
Without his father around as a kid, Sam was never pushed into basketball. While he was aware of his father's feats, he didn't feel obliged to take up the sport.
As cliched as it may sound, however, the game was simply in his DNA.
At age 14, a bad experience with a junior soccer coach saw him abandon that sport and fall into the arms of the game his dad had dominated.
His genetic gifts were soon unwrapped, as he quickly realised he was stronger, taller and faster than his schoolmates.
Soon he was putting up shots in an Adelaide gym with former Melbourne, Perth and Cairns guard Rashad Tucker.
He fell in love with the grind of training and a desire to improve.
"To a downfall," Sam said.
"I fell in love with the process of getting better and better and better"
News filtered through to Wayne that his son had taken up basketball. He was thrilled.
Sam's career began to take flight.
Next, he was off to college in the US to play with the University of Louisiana Monroe's Warhawks.
Wayne, who originally hails from northern California, would attend games when he was stateside, but later regretted that he didn't get to more.
He wishes, too, that he had watched Sam's early hit-outs with Noarlunga Tigers in South Australia, the same club he'd played with in the early 80s upon touching down in Australia.
"Going through and seeing that would have been powerful," he said.
It was upon Sam's return to Australia from college and signing with Melbourne United as an NBL development player that father and son began to truly connect.
Basketball was, of course, the circuit breaker.
"Ever since I came back, it's been a message on Facebook or calls. A little bit more advice. I'd see him, and he'd see me a bit more often," Sam said.
They bonded over the game, but specifically health, fitness and physical wellbeing.
During his playing days in Hobart, Wayne McDaniel may have been one of Tasmania's only vegans, and his requests for liquid echinacea and ginseng root would raise eyebrows, even at the local pharmacy.
These days, he's into meditation, breathing and visualisation, tools that Sam is keen to use to help expand his on-court repertoire.
"He'd text me and ask me what's that meditation thing you do? Or what's that breath technique you do?" Wayne said.
"Just little tips like that: how to stay motivated, how to stay positive"
Accepting their differences
Wayne is at ease with the knowledge that he and his son are diametrically opposed, both as players and as men.
Unlike his Dad, an offensive beast who would bulldoze opposition defences, Sam is defensively minded, and prefers to stop the opposition's best player from getting to the basket, to scoring himself.
Along with his famous name, it's that trait that made him an attractive signing for Tasmania, where coach Scott Roth has instilled a "humble and hungry" credo, and targeted grit over glamour when building his inaugural team.
In a basketball sense, Wayne would like to see his son come out of his shell a little. He believes Sam can become a leader of men with the JackJumpers.
"In the position he's in now, he's going to be required to become a leader, become vocal and assertive," he said.
Ultimately, it was that mutual love for basketball — the game — that spurred a reset of their relationship.
"I love him," Sam declared.
"We have a good relationship now, so I can't say too much bad about him."
Wayne is philosophical about the past. It's now all about the present. Living in the now.
"It's about meeting him at the level that he's on now. Where he's at now" Wayne said.
As he embarks on his own fatherhood journey with partner LaShai and 8-month-old son Malakhi, Sam McDaniel knows the path he wants to forge.
"I want to create my own legacy, for Malakhi as well. If he wants to play basketball and make his own name as well, that'd be great," he said.
