Ben Luber has an eye for spotting talent. He wants to bring those under-recruited gems to Penn.

Ben Luber has a knack for eyeing under-the-radar talent.

While serving as an associate head coach at Binghamton University in 2014, the Bucks County native traveled to Ontario, Canada, to see a player named Khaleem Bennett during an open gym at Sir Allan MacNab Secondary School.

But another high schooler caught his attention that day and left him wondering, “Man, who is that kid?”

“This skinny point guard was coming off of a flat ball screen, going to his right, and he whipped it over his shoulder to the opposite corner to a shooter, and he put it right on the money,” said Luber, who played collegiately at Penn State from 2004 to 2007. “I was a starting point guard for four years. I knew that position well. When I saw him do that, I said, ‘This kid is special.’”

That kid was Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the now 26-year-old NBA MVP who led the Oklahoma City Thunder to the NBA Finals. The Indiana Pacers took Game 1 on Thursday. Game 2 is set for Sunday at 8 p.m.

Luber, who was named an assistant coach at Penn in April, offered then-freshman Gilgeous-Alexander his first college scholarship and recruited him for the next three years. Nobody knew who Gilgeous-Alexander was at the time, especially in the United States.

But as Luber watched the 6-foot-6 guard’s rise at Hamilton Heights Christian Academy in Tennessee, then Kentucky, then as an NBA star, Luber said Gilgeous-Alexander is still the same player in many ways. He just keeps getting better. That’s exactly what the coach looks for in current recruits and wants to bring to the Quakers program under new head coach Fran McCaffery.

“It’s pretty neat to see where he’s at this point now, because he was an under-recruited player out of high school,” Luber said. “We want students of the game — someone like Shai is what we’re looking for. It sounds crazy, but there are a lot of kids out there who are under the radar and aren’t being recruited at the highest level.

“Maybe because they’re not physically as gifted yet, they’re not mature mentally yet, but then you give them a phone call, you bring them to campus, and you have an opportunity to talk to them, you can tell a lot about a kid’s drive and where they want to go. That fuels me as a coach.”

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Luber’s journey to the college coaching scene wasn’t easy. The hardest part is getting your foot in the door, he said. After a stint playing professionally overseas, with teams in Israel and Iceland, Luber returned to the area looking for any opportunity with a college program.

He drove for three hours one day to visit head coaches, starting at Villanova to see Jay Wright, then Phil Martelli at St. Joe’s, and Fran Dunphy at Temple. He would sit in, watch a practice, and pick their brains about the profession. But there was no movement in terms of an opening position.

Rider University, however, didn’t have a director of basketball operations. He didn’t know anyone on staff, but he visited the school and pitched the idea of a volunteer position to former coach Tommy Dempsey, who also was the athletic director. He ended up spending four years with the program and returned in 2017 for another stint, after coaching at Binghamton.

“I became the first director of basketball operations at Rider, and from that point on, I started to climb the ladder,” Luber said. “Fran McCaffery is the one who gave me the best advice when I first got in. He said, ‘Start from the bottom, learn every role. You want to work from the bottom all the way up.’ That’s exactly what I did, and what I’m doing still.”

McCaffery met Luber while the latter was a high schooler at Council Rock North. He tried to recruit the point guard to come play at UNC Greensboro, where McCaffery was the head coach from 1999 to 2005. The two remained in contact, and McCaffery served as a mentor to Luber over his 10 years in the college coaching scene.

When he got a call from McCaffery sharing the news that he was leaving his position at Iowa, where he led the program for 15 seasons, to take over at Penn, the longtime coach asked, “You coming with me?”

At first, Luber was surprised. For the past five years, he served as the head coach at George School, where he led the program to a Friends League title and a PAISAA championship appearance in 2023, and sent a handful of recruits to the Division I level, some of whom were even being recruited by McCaffery.

But the timing felt right, Luber said.

“I went back to high school to learn how to become a head coach,” Luber added. “How to run your own program, how to manage a program. I wanted to learn the skill sets and eventually come back [to college] and apply those skill sets with what I had already learned in the past. I wasn’t looking or applying for college jobs. I was preparing and waiting for this opportunity that I thought would eventually present itself.”

Also, how could he say no to working under a legendary head coach?

Luber, 40, aspires to lead his own Division I program. For now, he plans on helping McCaffery take Penn to the NCAA Tournament, which the program hasn’t reached since 2018.

“He went from recruiting me, to mentoring me, to recruiting my players, to now let’s work together to win a championship,” Luber said. “It’s pretty cool. He’s one of the greatest coaches to ever coach college basketball. I tell this to recruits, he’s taken four different teams to the NCAA Tournament, and when we go at Penn, he’ll be the [fourth] head coach in Division I history to take five different programs.”