Tennessee’s Jahmai Mashack chases Defensive Player of the Year while dad helps snuff California wildfires

Tennessee basketball defensive coordinator Justin Gainey starts building every game plan the same way.

“Who is the best player and how we can get ‘Shack’ on him as much as possible,” Gainey tells CBS Sports.

“Shack” is code for Jahmai Mashack, a 6-foot-4 senior guard who rarely shoots and has become the glue of fifth-ranked Tennessee’s 21-5 club. Mashack is one of 15 players named to the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year Watch List and for good reason. He’s a complete and utter terror, capable of blowing up, well, everything.

Mashack is armed with a 6-9 wingspan and posts eye-popping numbers in the weight room. He looks like he should be able to guard. But Mashack’s secret sauce is what has been fostered between the ears for years. His dad, Elton Mashack, was in the 1,000-point club and a first-team All-West Coast Conference selection at Loyola Marymount before embarking on a professional career that included stops in the now-shuttered D-League and overseas. His mom, Meika, ran track at UNLV. 

The Mashacks are self-described “basketball nerds” in the best way. 

“I think the biggest deal was my dad, being able to learn from him and being able to really talk to him about basketball,” Jahmai Mashack says. “He’s one of the best basketball minds I’ve ever been around, and I’m not just saying that because he’s my dad.”

This father-son duo is close. They both have the same nickname and are integral parts of a Mashack family built on faith, giving and sacrifice. While Jahmai is gallivanting across the country meticulously studying how to stop the best players in the best league in the country, his dad was similarly building meticulous game plans on how to attack the devastating wildfires that ravaged Southern California for much of January. 

Elton was a firefighter in the Los Angeles Fire Department for over a decade before earning a well-deserved promotion to fire inspector last March, conveniently one week before Tennessee embarked on its run to the 2024 Elite Eight. 

Last summer, Elton roamed the Palisades, a Los Angeles neighborhood east of Malibu, preaching and enacting precautionary measures to prepare for times like this.

Near the turn of the New Year, gusts upwards of 70 mph and drought-like conditions fueled a blaze that turned deadly and demoralizing. Over 23,000 acres in the Palisades alone were scarred.

“What made it so sad is this was a community that was lost,” Meika Mashack said. “Like where their kids go play basketball, where people meet, like, it’s just so much bigger than, ‘Oh, that house burned down.’ It’s just a loss of so much more than that.”

Elton was in the middle of all of it.

“That guy has stories for days, but it’s a job not meant for everybody,” Jahmai Mashack added. “It’s really made me realize how much, you know just how much mental goes into a job like that, you know, and people know to go home from seeing some crazy injuries, seeing some crazy situations, some heartbreaking situations, and still going home and having to take care of a family, man. It’s something that I don’t overlook.”

As the Southern California fires raged, Jahmai was left helpless in Tennessee. He couldn’t do much other than pray and play. So, he hooped and looked forward to those moments when his dad could find a few spare minutes to play 2K or break down the Vols.

‘Winning requires some sacrifice’

There’s a widespread belief in college basketball circles that Mashack is an NBA-caliber defender right now. This was part of the plan from the beginning. When Mashack was first falling in love with basketball, Elton and Meika wanted him to be focused on winning habits, defense and then offense.

In that order.

“I think when you grow up understanding kind of counter-culture, everybody just wants their kids to go out and just be the number one scorer and jack up shots,” Meika Mashack says. “That is what’s going to be popular. It’s what’s going to get likes (on Instagram). You have the defensive side of the ball, and that’s just not something that’s sexy to a lot of people. There’s not a lot of people being taught how to win, and winning requires some sacrifice, and he bought into that early. Once he got a taste of winning, that’s always been important to him. He’s just not a he’s not a selfish kid.” 

Mashack won at Etiwanda High School, and that winning has followed him to Tennessee. The Vols are on pace for a fourth straight 25-win season in Mashack’s career.

Gainey knew Mashack had the tools to be something special, but it came out for the world to see two years ago when Brandon Miller and Alabama came to Knoxville in mid-February. Mashack didn’t score a single point, but he brought the defensive clamps out, holding the eventual No. 2 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft to a measly 4-for-11 shooting performance in the Vols’ 68-59 victory.

“(Miller) was like the next Paul George,” Gainey said. “I mean, that’s how they were talking about him. And (Mashack) just completely disrupted him and made life really tough. That is the game for me that really stood out like, ‘Man, Shack is an elite defender now.'”

Mashack’s streak of defensive dominance this season is hard to ignore. Tre Johnson, Texas’ future lottery pick, scored 15 of his 22 points in the 11 minutes that Mashack was on the bench, saddled with foul trouble. That’s no coincidence. When Tennessee shut down surging Florida, Mashack guarded Walter Clayton (a sleek sniper), Alijah Martin (a physical driving wing) and Alex Condon (a 6-11, 230-pound center who is a projected first-round pick).

That’s three different All-SEC archetypes but none of ’em could get anything cooking against Mashack. Martin was a miserable 2 for 12 from the field. Clayton could only manage 10 points on a 3-for-13 outing. Condon scored just one bucket. It certainly ain’t a mouse-in-the-house situation when Mashack switches onto a big fella.

“I love that, man,” Mashack says. “Sometimes I’ll let guys catch it in the post, just so they can know like, ‘OK, this is not a this is not a mismatch.’ And usually, when they find out that they can’t just post me up, they don’t go back to it. So it’s a win.”

When Tennessee needs Mashack to guard a sniper like Virginia’s Isaac McKneely, he’s ready. When Tennessee needs Mashack to guard literally everyone against Louisville, he’s ready. 

When Tennessee needs Mashack to guard a big point guard like Illinois’ Kasparas Jakucionis, he’s ready. Mashack helped force the future lottery pick into seven turnovers in Tennessee’s monster road win two months ago. He spent the three days leading up to that game watching dozens of clips of Jakucionis, and he lobbied hard for the chance to guard the Lithuanian sensation.

“I think the Illinois game was one of my favorites,” Mashack said. “Honestly, when I got that steal, I just took the ball away. Just ripped it away, you just don’t see a guy just snatching the ball away like that.”

As is tradition, a ton of Mashack’s principles were instilled early with dad. 

“I would get upset when guys scored on me, or when I felt like guys had a good game, and dad would come up to me and he would say, like, ‘Hey, the guy took 25 shots to get 15 points. You did your job,'” Mashack says. “Whenever I always thought somebody who got more steals or more blocks were better defenders than me, he would tell me that it’s not about that. It’s about really shutting down your opponent, not gambling, staying in the front and making sure you’re just making their life tough. At the end of the day when it comes to steals and blocks, you can really bail guys out by trying to go for those stats.”

Elton and Jahmai will talk endlessly about the various scouting reports of the teams on Tennessee’s slate. Jahmai is an avid tape-watcher. When he finds out who he’s guarding, it’s a race against the clock to decipher as much film as he can in the countdown to tipoff.

“He studies film like crazy,” Gainey said. “When we’re watching it as a team, you can tell he’s already watched that team. He’s watched that guy, and he’s kind of starting to formulate his own game plan of how he’s going to attack him. And you know, he doesn’t just lock in on one guy. He’ll lock in on everybody, and then he’s able to share that. He does a great job of communicating that with the other guys on the team, and it gives all of our guys confidence.”

Offenses in college basketball are adapting and changing. More 3s are being taken, and this is the most efficient offensive season in college basketball history. Mashack is always trying to get ahead of the curve on how to stop it. Tennessee ranks No. 1 in the country in defensive efficiency thanks to its ability to switch, shrink the floor and force contested jumpers. Mashack says the simple pick-and-roll action is still the toughest one to guard, but the Vols are one of the elite pick-and-roll defenses in the country because Mashack can guard, uh, anybody.

“I feel like I’m the best overall defender in the country,” Mashack says. “And I think that just goes from being able to switch on to any type of matchup and they don’t have to worry about it. They know I’m going to be able to figure it out.”

Tennessee is the only team in America with two guys on the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year watch list. Zakai Zeigler is a pest of an on-ball defender, and there’s a friendly rivalry about who is Tennessee’s Defensive Player of the Year. Zeigler is ferocious on the perimeter, and the 5-9 New Yorker won SEC Defensive Player of the Year last season for a reason.

Mashack hopes Zeigler wins it again, albeit with a caveat.

“I think you would ask him, he knows that I’m the best defender,” Mashack says with a laugh. “He’s special on the ball. But I think he would tell you that I’m the best overall defender in the country because I can do everything. I was telling him, I’m like, I’m totally fine with you getting SEC Defensive Player of the Year, as long as I get the National Defensive Player of the Year.” 

Planting seeds of service

Sometimes, Vols Twitter — it’s a thing, we assure you — can get frustrated by Jahmai’s lack of offense. He’s taken double-digit shots just three times in his 125-game career. But he picked Tennessee because he was obsessed with winning, and he’s used service to build a bond with a community. Mashack’s food drive during the holiday season raised over $14,000 and served 21,335 pounds of food to nearly 400 families in Knoxville. Giving is part of his ethos because that’s all he knows. Those seeds planted by Elton and Meika during those Christmas Day mornings serving on Skid Row in L.A. have produced fruit in the heart of the Volunteer State.

“His heart is in the right place with that,” Meika Mashack says.

It’s one heck of a rise for a guy who had to beat the horrific Guillain-Barré syndrome when he was four years old. His brain was fine but his body was trapped by the autoimmune disorder that can cause paralysis. Picking up a penny is hard. Buttoning a shirt? Nearly impossible. It took years of physical therapy for Mashack get his fine motor skills back.

“He just fought for everything,” Meika Mashack said. “If we were playing the Wii and he couldn’t do something, we’d hear him up in the middle of the night working on it. That’s just him. That’s his DNA.”

Turns out, the apple did not fall far from the tree.