Ryuuji Yazawa

Yazawa is ambitious and confident in his natural talent. He wants to improve quickly and believes that playing in the United States will accelerate his development beyond what Anzai's program can offer.

That ambition is accompanied by impatience. Anzai sees deficiencies in Yazawa's fundamentals and tries to make him develop systematically, but Yazawa interprets the restrictions as something holding him back.

His story consequently becomes inseparable from Anzai's approach to coaching. Yazawa possesses extraordinary potential, but talent alone does not provide the discipline required to realize it.

Yazawa is portrayed as an exceptionally gifted basketball prospect with unusual height and athletic potential. Anzai considers him talented enough to become a major player if he develops correctly.

His weakness lies in incomplete fundamentals and decision-making. Anzai's insistence that he remain in Japan is not based on doubting his potential, but on believing that his game is not yet ready for the level of competition he wants to enter.

Yazawa's physical gifts therefore exceed his technical maturity. His history illustrates the distinction between possessing professional-level potential and having the foundation necessary to use it.

Yazawa appears through Anzai's past and explains much about the coach Shohoku knows in the present. When Anzai coached at university, his harsh methods earned him the nickname "White-Haired Devil."

Yazawa becomes dissatisfied with that environment and wants to pursue basketball in the United States. Anzai advises him against leaving before strengthening his fundamentals, but Yazawa rejects the warning.

Yazawa goes to the United States against Anzai's advice, struggles to establish himself and eventually abandons organized basketball. He later dies in a traffic accident. Anzai receives a letter and footage showing Yazawa's regret, and the experience contributes profoundly to his withdrawal from university coaching and transformation into the gentler coach seen at Shohoku.

Mitsuyoshi Anzai is Yazawa's former coach. Their failed mentor-student relationship becomes one of the most painful experiences of Anzai's career.

Hanamichi Sakuragi later awakens Anzai's excitement as a coach because of his enormous untapped potential, recalling the sense of possibility Anzai once saw in Yazawa.

Kaede Rukawa's desire to play in the United States causes Mitsuyoshi Anzai to remember Yazawa and influences the advice he gives the younger player.