Al Horford passed his father's whole NBA career in his twelfth game

I. Oakland#

The line is short. Milwaukee at Golden State, Saturday, December 2, 1989. The Warriors won, 101-98. Tito Horford played one minute. He did not score and he did not get a rebound.

He was 23 that night, in his second season with the Bucks, a center listed at seven feet one. Milwaukee had taken him in the second round of the 1988 draft, 39th overall, out of the University of Miami, and when he went into a game against Philadelphia on November 9, 1988, for one minute, he became the first man born in the Dominican Republic to play in the NBA.

His son was three. He would grow up with his mother, Arelis Reynoso, in Santo Domingo.

Thirty-two and a half years after that minute in Oakland, on June 2, 2022, the son played his first game in the NBA Finals. It was in San Francisco, against Golden State. He scored 26 points.

II. Milwaukee#

Tito Horford's whole NBA career fits on a few lines.

He played 63 regular-season games over three seasons. He started none of them. He played 376 minutes in all, which is a little under six minutes a night, and he scored 93 points. The most minutes he played in a game was 18, and he did it twice, once in his rookie year against Washington and once in March 1990 against Detroit. The most points he scored in a game was 10, on Valentine's Day 1989, at home against New Jersey, in 15 minutes.

He was in the playoffs once. Milwaukee met Chicago in the first round in the spring of 1990, and he played a minute in each of two games. In the second, at home on May 3, he scored two points. The Bulls won both games and the series.

On October 31, 1990, the Bucks waived him. The next three seasons he played in France, in Venezuela and Italy, and in Brazil. Orlando signed him in September 1991 and waived him in October, before the season began.

Washington signed him on October 5, 1993. He played three games for the Bullets that November, on the 5th, the 6th and the 10th, 28 minutes in all, and he did not score. The last of the three was at home against New York, a Wednesday. He played 13 minutes, his most in a game since March 1990.

Five days later Washington waived him. He was 27. His son was seven.

Tito grew up dreaming of the major leagues, and it took him a while to decide that seven feet one was too tall for baseball. His son had a short run in a Little League in Santo Domingo that the former big-league outfielder Raúl Mondesí ran. "But Al didn't last too long," Tito told Sports Illustrated for a story published in October 2016. "He always wanted to follow in my footsteps."

III. Lansing#

The footsteps led, eventually, to Michigan.

Tito settled in Lansing after he stopped playing. In 2000, when Al was 14, the family decided he should go and live there with his father, on the reasoning that he would have a better chance there at a college basketball scholarship. He arrived to start high school with English he later described to Sports Illustrated as "very, very basic."

"That process," he said, "that was very challenging."

His father, in the same story: "I knew it was going to be hard. Missing his mom, coming from a different country to Michigan, where it's winter almost all year round. But we knew he had a better opportunity to fulfill his dreams. His mother and I, we decided that was best for him."

He went to Grand Ledge High School, west of Lansing. He played summers with an AAU team, the Michigan Mustangs. In his junior year he went to the Nike camp in Indianapolis, among the best players in the country his age, and by his father's account that is where everything changed. "I saw him at that camp," Tito said, "and I told him, 'You're going to the NBA someday.'"

He chose Florida. The Gators won the national championship in 2006 and again in 2007, and in June 2007 Atlanta drafted him third overall. His brother Jon played four seasons at Michigan, from 2010 to 2014, and then one at Florida.

IV. Atlanta#

Al Horford's first NBA game was on a Friday, November 2, 2007, at home against Dallas. He started. He played 22 minutes and 50 seconds and had nine points and ten rebounds, and the Hawks won, 101-94.

That was 5,105 days after his father's last game.

His eleventh game was at Miami on November 21. When it ended he had scored more points in the NBA than his father had. His twelfth was at Minnesota three nights later, and when it ended he had played more minutes. It had taken him 22 days.

He played 81 games that season and started 77, and he finished second in the voting for Rookie of the Year. Atlanta made the playoffs and drew Boston in the first round, and he played every game of a seven-game series.

He would make the playoffs in each of his first six seasons and in sixteen of his first nineteen. He would play nine seasons in Atlanta, seven in Boston across two spells, one in Philadelphia and one in Oklahoma City. He would be an All-Star five times.

V. San Francisco#

By the spring of 2022 Al Horford had played 141 playoff games and none of them had been in the Finals. He was 35, back in Boston after a season in Philadelphia and a season in Oklahoma City, where he played 28 games. In May the Celtics beat Milwaukee in seven games and Miami in seven, and on Thursday, June 2, they opened the Finals at Golden State, at Chase Center, in San Francisco.

He played 32 minutes and 42 seconds. He made six three-pointers. He scored 26 points. Boston won, 120-108.

Golden State won four of the next five, and closed the series in Boston on June 16. He had 19 points and 14 rebounds that night, and lost.

Two years later he was back. On Monday, June 17, 2024, at home, Boston beat Dallas, 106-88, to win the championship in five games. It was his 186th playoff game. He was 38 years and two weeks old. He had nine points and nine rebounds.

There are ten men born in the Dominican Republic who have played in the NBA. Al Horford has played 1,183 regular-season games. The other nine, his father among them, have played 1,087 between them.

VI. Los Angeles#

Golden State signed him on October 1, 2025, twenty days before the season began. He was 39.

His first game for the Warriors was on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, at the Lakers. He came off the bench. Golden State won, 119-109, and he had five points and five rebounds. He played 45 games that season and started 13.

He turned 40 on June 3. On July 6 the Warriors signed him again, for two more years.

On Wednesday night the Warriors open their season at the Lakers again, 365 days after the first one, in the same building. It is the start of the twentieth season of Al Horford's career.

On that first night in Los Angeles a year ago he played 20 minutes and 15 seconds. His father never played that long in an NBA game.

Sources: Basketball Reference player pages, game logs and transaction records for Al Horford and Tito Horford (seasons, games, minutes, points, playoff logs, draft, signing and waiver dates); Basketball Reference birthplace index for the Dominican Republic; Sports Reference college pages for Al and Jon Horford; Sports Illustrated, "American Voices: The Godfather Part II," October 3, 2016 (quotes from Al and Tito Horford, the move to Lansing, Grand Ledge, the Nike camp).