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Who is the Michael Jordan of St. Lucia? A look at the greatest player in each country’s history
- Updated: September 17, 2026
Chris Boucher throws it down during a 2023 game. (Photo courtesy: Chris Boucher Twitter)
It’s 2 a.m. on a freezing December night, and the teenage Michael Jordan of St. Lucia is passed out on a city bus.
He paid $11 to ride this route from the north side of Montreal to the west side. It’s a two-hour trip on the heated bus, where he can sleep and get some reprieve from the frigid single-digit temperatures.
Chris Boucher does this most winter nights. His father, he says, doesn’t want him around. He doesn’t get along with his stepfather, who lives with his mother and two siblings, and his aunt also grew tired of the extra company, he says. So, he has nowhere else to go.
He’ll ride the city bus until it reaches the last stop. The driver takes a break, and Chris will get out with him, hang out for a little while and then get back on the bus as it resumes service, heading back to the north side of Montreal. Sometimes, if he’s lucky and has enough money in his pocket, he’ll take the whole trip all over again and sleep for eight-ish, interrupted hours. Then, the sunlight will finally come out again.
It’s probably not the visual you had when you imagine the greatest basketball player in St. Lucia history.
But Boucher was born in Castries, the island nation’s capital, and moved from paradise to frigid Montreal when he was five years old.
He described his life story in an excellent essay on The Players’ Tribune, and says of his departure from St. Lucia:
“I don’t even know exactly why we left the island. My dad was already living in Canada at the time with my younger brother. So we were going to meet up with them, and we had to leave fast. That’s all I knew then, and it’s all I know now. It was basically just … one day we were living in the mountains on an island, and the next day we were in Canada, in a big city. And it was freezing.”
Boucher grew up playing soccer and like most kids in Canada, ice hockey. With his family living in poverty in north Montreal, he dropped out of school at 16 to work at a restaurant. As a teenager, functionally homeless, he walked the freezing city streets, playing games like “let’s see if I can jump and touch this street sign” to keep himself busy. It’s about as unlikely a journey to the NBA as you can possibly imagine.
Amazingly, thanks to his height and skills he developed while playing pickup on the city’s west side, coaches from Quebec’s Alma Academy found him and recruited him to play for their AAU team.
“You gotta remember, though: I had dropped out of school,” Boucher wrote in The Players Tribune. “These games I was playing in … they’re outside. Blacktop courts. I’m not dunking over guys in high school gyms in front of scouts. I’m playing pickup ball against grown-ass men, right near some swing sets and sliding boards. So I wasn’t for a second thinking about pro ball or making it to the NBA back then. Fortunately for me… It seems like maybe if you dunk on enough guys’ heads, they’ll find you no matter where you’re playing.”
Things got better for Boucher fast after that. A wiry 6-8 forward who could shoot, he ended up at New Mexico Junior College, and then Northwest College in Wyoming, putting up, as he said, “video-game numbers.” He was named National Junior College Athletic Association Player of the Year
He eventually landed with head coach Dana Altman at the University of Oregon, and played well there, averaging 12 points and 6.8 rebounds and leading the Pac-12 in blocks as a senior in 2016-17. Boucher played alongside future NBAers Payton Pritchard and Dillon Brooks, and would have suited up in the Final Four as a senior if not for a torn ACL suffered in the conference tournament.
Because of the injury, he went undrafted, but made the Golden State Warriors roster. As fate would have it, he was cut by the Warriors but signed by Canada’s team, the Toronto Raptors. He played on the NBA championship team in 2019, averaging just 5.8 minutes per game that season, but grew into a starter and one of the Raptors’ best players, putting up 13.6 points, 6.7 rebounds and 1.9 blocks per game in 2020-21. He played seven seasons with the Raptors, and spent an injury-marred 2025-26 season with the Boston Celtics.
It’s a long way from the freezing streets of Montreal, and certainly a long way from Castries, Saint Lucia, but Boucher is undoubtedly the greatest player ever to come from the island– even if he spent more time fighting through zero-degree days and walking through Arctic winds than he did in the tropical Caribbean breeze.
It’s a life straight out of a movie. And one of the greatest underdog stories in basketball history.
