He spend his days on the courts, in the streets and on the porch in front of his Chicago-area home, practicing basketball and playing childhood games.

Basketball would help, sure, as that was the game Demetri McCamey was falling in love with. But he couldn’t have thought a childhood game would help him earn a college scholarship to Illinois and a potential route to the NBA.

Yet that’s exactly what happened.

See, Demetri McCamey is one of the best passers in college basketball, setting a season-high in the Big Ten on Sunday against Purdue with 16 assists, and he leads the league with 6.85 a game. He credits it all to a game almost every kid plays growing up.

“Just going around, playing monkey in the middle and stuff like that, teaches you how to pass and how to try to do trick passes and things like that,” McCamey said. “I don’t think one person taught me how to pass. It’s just playing games and playing basketball growing up as a little kid.”

McCamey admits part of it is just an innate gift. And part of his ability has to do with his height. At 6-foot-3, he is one of the taller point guards in the Big Ten, an issue Michigan will have to deal with at 7 p.m. today (ESPN) when it faces the Illini.

As McCamey has grown, too, it has become more of his primary role. Early in his Illinois career, the Illini had other point guards, so he was looked to more as a scorer.

Yet with the graduation of Chester Frazier last year, McCamey became the team’s true point guard.

“He’s really learned how to play and get it to people,” Illinois coach Bruce Weber said. “He’s had huge scoring games for us also but there’s games where he can just distribute and still help us win.

“I think he is figuring out that if he does that, people appreciate that and he’ll get recognition.”

As he does, he looks back to his time in Bellwood, Ill., and the other places around Chicago, where he was always one of the taller guys out there. That’s how it was when he was growing up. It was how it was when he played at legendary St. Joe’s, the former home of point guard Isiah Thomas and where he played on the same high school team as Ohio State star Evan Turner and Notre Dame guard Jonathan Peoples.

It’s also how he was good at monkey in the middle in the first place, rarely ending up as the guy in the middle.

“I’ve been tall my whole life until I got to college and I’m with 6-9 and 7-footers,” McCamey said. “So I was seeing over the short people as far as passing and things like that.

“If I was (in the middle), it was a couple times that I really got frustrated when we played.”

Now, he’s merely frustrating everyone else in the Big Ten - not only with his passing but his shooting, where he’s averaging a team-high 15.2 points a game and shooting 38 percent from the three-point line.

“He can pass. He can shoot and he has mid-range,” Michigan coach John Beilein said. “So that’s really the most difficult thing. He’s not as quick as (Talor) Battle, few are, but he’s got a big body so he’s able to get leverage on people not just using speed but using that body. He can see over the top of screens because of his great vision and court awareness.

“…He’s a tough matchup for everybody.”

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein