Jyväskylä is the largest city in central Finland, featuring a landscape flush with forests and hills and some 328 lakes, and you start there to understand how a kid from Scandanavia finds himself at home in the Arizona desert. Like most children with affection for the game, Lauri Markkanen shot day after day on a basketball rim in his backyard. Unlike most of those children, he’d do so even when the temperatures dipped to 20-below (Celsius, of course), putting on a beanie and gloves and continuing to work on his dribbling. His father and mother eventually established a rule: No basketball before 7 a.
Thousands of miles from his native Finland, Lauri Markkanen feels at home in Arizona
