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Vagaries of the NBA draft come into focus at the Garden
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By Harvey Araton
November 30, 2010
New York, NY — Based on their pedigree, or draft position, we might have envisioned Terrence Williams to be a Nets starter by now and the Knicks’ Landry Fields to be dribbling his way across America as an apprentice in the NBA Development League, or D-League. But scouting reports are not the most effective indicators, given their preoccupation with vertical leap and 3-point range.
Hence, the Nets hit Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night for their first look at the reconstituted Knicks without Williams, the 11th pick of the 2009 NBA draft, while the Knicks were wondering who blessed them with their current starting off-guard, Fields, who was selected in the second round of the 2010 draft with the 39th pick.
“Have you met him yet?” Donnie Walsh, the Knicks’ president, asked a reporter. “Let me tell you something. He’s the real deal.”
At 6 feet 7 inches, Fields is not the second coming of Michael Jordan — or, for that matter, Scottie Pippen. Pound for pound, he may not even be as talented as Williams, currently of the Development League’s Springfield (Mass.) Armor. But there is something in the way this quietly efficient rookie from Stanford conducts himself on the court that encourages you to risk charges of heresy and categorize Fields as downright Holzmanesque.
“He’s got a great temperament, like somebody who has been around the league for years,” Walsh said.
How to be a solid NBA citizen is not necessarily part of the core curriculum in college basketball, where prize student-athletes have most things done for them. It is not just about being responsible with money and celebrity, or mastering the alarm on the smartphone to make it to the airport on time.
It is also about recognizing that if the college game is the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, the NBA is a Ph.D. And study hall is highly recommended. Fields obviously has more physical ability than the many genius scouts who did not rate him first-round worthy believed, despite his Pac-10-leading 22 points a game as a senior. But the point that Walsh wanted to make was related to Fields’s double-figure rebounding in his previous three games entering Tuesday night after hauling in 17 on the road in Denver two weeks ago.
Those numbers are not merely a testament to his size and impressive leaping ability. Fields has an instinct for positioning and the attention span to stay in the moment and follow the direction of the ball.
“It looks like he’s always thinking out there, always anticipating,” Walsh said. “But the best thing is that he’s also thinking about why he’s out there, the little things he can do that become big things at the end of a close game.”
Conversely, the Nets and their new regime of General Manager Billy King and Coach Avery Johnson have been wondering what Williams was thinking when he showed up to the summer league in Las Vegas in July with a bad case of me-first fever.
Johnson wanted Williams, who at 6-6 never averaged more than 12.5 points at Louisville, to be the multidimensional stat-line filler he was for the Nets in March, when he averaged 14 points, 7 rebounds and 5 assists per game.
At the superstar level, stubbornness that begets unprofessionalism is often tolerated and usually blamed on the coach — though judgment day inevitably comes, as Allen Iverson discovered (and even LeBron James just might someday) before boarding a flight for Turkey.
After Williams began this season still behaving like a Chosen 1 — and with a record of tardiness dating to last season — the Nets dispatched him last week to the Springfield affiliate they share with the Knicks and the 76ers but will operate solely next season.
“We want him to get on the court, give him a chance to play, which wasn’t going to happen with us right now,” King said.
To avoid running afoul of the players union, team executives must not characterize a demotion as a behavioral consequence. But in this case, what’s the difference? Without respect for the process, what are the odds of becoming an asset in a winning environment?
Williams had a difficult childhood. Both parents were jailed. His father was murdered. Home life in Seattle was transient and crowded. When he finally had money, he rented a 3,575-square-foot town house on the Hudson for $7,000 a month that Vince Carter, a high-end earner, was going to buy before he was traded to Orlando.
Maybe a couple of weeks in Springfield will teach him that a wise young player knows his place and his role.
“The thing about Landry is that you can ask him to be the fourth or fifth option on a team, or the first, and he won’t waver,” Johnny Dawkins, who coached Fields at Stanford, said in a telephone interview.
Dawkins’s theory on why Fields fell so far in the draft is that “we weren’t that good and people may have looked at his scoring and said, ‘Well, somebody had to.’ ”
“But what we told teams was that Landry shot almost 50 percent while often double-teamed and he scored 22 a game without being a high-volume shooter,” he added. “What I would tell you about him is that he’s a kid who is really a student of the game and very detail-oriented.”
The college coach had one last platitude.
“He’s a true professional,” Dawkins said.
• NBA News Archive Index:
2010, 2009
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