Carlton “Big Bub” Carrington, a Baltimore basketball figurehead who championed a quarter-century of the city’s best basketball players, died Thursday night after a nearly year-long bout with cancer. He was 53.

Basketball and family were the centerpieces of his life in ways that often overlapped.

Back in October, Bub, his wife, Karima, two sons, Kareem Montgomery and Carlton “Lil’ Bub” Carrington, and daughter, Faith, visited their old West Baltimore home flanked by a documentary crew. Lil’ Bub, having been drafted by the Washington Wizards months prior, now standing beside his dad at a neighborhood court, said, “You can’t really run from it, like the name. Everywhere I go, people automatically know me cause they know him. … He kinda got a name, or whatever.”

Big Bub’s eyes pointed toward the concrete under his feet, almost uncomfortably listening to this heap of praise. He snickered at the “kind of got a name” comment, shaking his head with a grin. Even if Lil’ Bub said it somewhat in jest — a son reluctantly complimenting his dad — it’s an understatement to say “he got a little say in this town.”

“His biggest legacy,” said Malcolm Delaney, one of numerous local players coached by Carrington who reached basketball’s professional heights, “was getting exposure to the kids who wouldn’t typically get exposure in a city like Baltimore.”

It’s a lengthy list.

Before Sean Mosley played at University of Maryland and enjoyed a career overseas, Carrington advocated to get him into Nike camp his freshman year at St. Frances. When Donté Greene took his first unofficial visit to Syracuse as a sophomore at Towson Catholic, it was Carrington who drove the future first-round draft pick in his Chevy Cavalier down to Washington National AirportDCA, accompanying Greene on the only nonstop flight to upstate New York. Will Barton, who played a decade in the NBA, credited Carrington’s oversight for the AAU spring and summer of 2009, “that ultimately changed my life and the course of my career.”

“Nobody did it like him,” said Davon Usher, who, after one full summer under Carrington’s tutelage, climbed from 16 points and nine rebounds per game as a junior at Digital Harbor to 27 and 12 as a senior. “And he did it with a bunch of inner city kids that, if we didn’t trust his process or trust his program, half of us wouldn’t have these opportunities.”

Carrington was a straight shooter — equal parts teddy bear and firecracker. He was not the kind to cuss you out but the kind to hold his guys accountable, knowing their potential could be their reality.

His role shifted and blossomed throughout the years, first coaching the high school age group for the AAU team Baltimore Blue. That rebranded to Baltimore Elite, backed by Nike sponsorship, with Carrington serving as the program director. Still mentoring and traveling with the team but handing coaching duties over to Darrell Corbett. He also worked a stint coaching the St. Frances junior varsity team in the early 2000s.

Sometimes Carrington would have players over to their old house on Oakford Avenue in the Arlington neighborhood to shoot on the backyard court or to devour a bushel of crabs. There was a playground they’d frequent up the street, too. But all his former players credit Carrington’s home base in West Baltimore: Mt. Royal, an elementary and middle school. They call it “The Hotbox” — an exposed-brick gym on St. Benedict Street with narrow margins and no air conditioning.

“It got us our toughness,” Greene said. “That’s from all guys that come out of Mt. Royal.”

“That [stuff] is like military training,” Usher added. “It was work. Heavy balls, wall touches, suicides and nonstop cone work. The workouts were intense.”

The first time Delaney ever put an orange ball through nylon 10-feet tall was in that gym. He was 5 years old. After playing organized basketball at Madison Square Recreation Center until the age of 12, he transferred to Carrington’s Mt. Royal gym. “That was a pivotal point in my career,” Delaney said. “That changed the trajectory of what I was doing.”

Former Terps assistant coach Bino Ranson said, “He had a great eye for young talent. … I spent a lot of time with him, I think he was a visionary in terms of his thinking about the game.”

There are generations of Baltimore hoopers who reaped the benefits.

Most recently, he was able to see his son, Bub, saunter across the NBA Draft stage to shake the commissioner’s hand — an accomplishment most would trace back to early morning and late night father-son workouts. That, and the surplus of mentors who played for Dad before him. The Wizards’ lottery pick has had an impressive rookie season thus far, named to the Rising Stars Challenge at All-Star Weekend in February.

Long before refining his son’s game, Carrington, in that same stuffy “Hot Box,” helped lay the foundational brickwork for basketball legend Carmelo Anthony. Desmond Thomas, a former player now an AAU coach in Baltimore, remembers it vividly. And somewhere buried at his grandparents’ house is a tape with proof. “Footage people don’t have,” Thomas said, of Carrington teaching Anthony triple threat principles.

The move Anthony forged a Hall of Fame career on — facing up to the hoop with the ball pressed against his hip setting up a shot, pass or dribble — has roots in the “Hot Box.”

“Bub was the one who taught him and helped him develop that skill,” Thomas said. “And I can say that because I’ve actually seen it, like I was in the gym.”

First, it was Anthony and Darnell Hopkins. Mosley, Delaney and Greene came a few years later. Jamel Artis, C.J. Fair, Barton and Josh Selby followed. Usher then Darryl Morsell. So many more.

All those relationships were rooted in basketball but extended much further.

“He was a father figure to me,” Mosley said. “He just understood what others needed to be successful in life.”

Mosley’s father was a Vietnam veteran and his mother didn’t attend a game until his senior season at St. Frances. The world of basketball beyond Baltimore’s borders felt daunting. Mosley had Carrington to lean on. They shared laughs in the Chevy Cavalier listening to Jay-Z. They had hard conversations too, about life and family in that front seat. Someone to, as Mosley put it, “show me the way.”

Barton was on the phone with Carrington just last month, thinking about his former coach’s influence on Baltimore hoops. He encouraged Carrington to write a book or get cracking on a documentary about his life.

“Coach Bub has had a huge imprint on a lot of guys that made it out from Baltimore,” Barton said, “and that’s something to be very proud of.”

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