tlongII
02-06-2009, 12:24 PM
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1151486/1/index.htm
The Blazers have entrusted their future to a 24-year-old guard with the game of an aging veteran. Now, all that prematurely mature Brandon Roy has to do is learn to play like a kid
DEEP IN the fourth quarter of any tight game in Portland, shooting guard Brandon Roy sets the rhythm. As the sold-out Rose Garden urges its young Trail Blazers to go-go-go, Roy peacefully decelerates his dribble, making his way across half-court like a senior citizen oblivious to surrounding traffic, puttering along while an impatient defender swats futilely at the ball until, at last, he is ready to make his move, cross-stepping abruptly into the lane ...
... And then the ball is descending high off the glass through the net, and he is heading upcourt, his blank expression unchanged. When Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade attack the basket, they lurch, lunge and leap with enough g-force to lift spectators out of their seats. When Roy drives, fans' mouths drop open as they sit, dumbfounded. How did he make it there? "He's very deceptive," says Blazers center Joel Przybilla, who has been Roy's teammate for three years. "I don't know if it's how he plays the angles or what. It's amazing, because it looks like he's not even asserting himself, but he gets to the spot where he wants to get to and then, man, you're in trouble."
The 6'6" Roy plays like an aging vet who takes pride in outsmarting the rim-scrapers while conserving energy to extend his career. In fact, he is a 24-year-old blessed with a 41-inch vertical leap, which he uses only when necessary. He wears neither tattoos nor jewelry. In this era of unparalleled athleticism and style over substance, Brandon Roy is the NBA's curious version of Benjamin Button—a young body driven by an old-school mind. "He's of the same ilk as Oscar Robertson and Walt Frazier, and I don't say that lightly," says Blazers assistant Dean Demopoulos. "The defense is never threatening to him, and he's that way as a person too. He is a very secure, grounded guy, a throwback who could play in any era."
A four-year collegian at Washington, Roy has startled many in his three seasons as a pro, revealing the sort of upside normally associated with rawer prospects. He was named Rookie of the Year in 2007, and last Thursday he earned his second straight All-Star berth. At week's end Roy was leading the Blazers with a career-best 22.6 points per game, along with 5.1 assists and 4.6 rebounds, as the team (29--17) chased its first postseason appearance in six seasons. Roy's importance truly shows when the game heats up: Only James, Wade and Bryant are more prolific down the stretch than Roy, who through Sunday was averaging 7.1 points in the fourth quarter. "He has a pace about him that is calming for me and the players," says Portland coach Nate McMillan, who, when he was in Seattle, used to watch Roy play for Garfield High. "He's better than I thought he would be."
Roy has been hearing such remarks for as long as he's been playing basketball. "Even my high school coach, I can understand why he didn't think I could play," he says. Roy is well aware that he has never embraced the flamboyant role of modern-day prodigy: While others his age have grown up playing recklessly and reached the NBA in need of discipline, he has faced the opposite problem. He has been unable to play without restraint, to let himself go.
HE'S ONE of my favorite players in the league," says Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers, who asks his staff to make highlight videos of Roy as teaching tools for his sons Jeremiah, a junior redshirting at Indiana, and Austin, a high school sophomore in Winter Park, Fla.—both guards. "He plays under control, he plays unselfishly, and he plays at gears that young players don't play at. Most young players play fast and out of control, and for them it's all about getting 'my shots.' But his whole attitude is based on team play."
Few younger stars have had a more profound effect on their franchises than Roy. At week's end Portland was drawing an average of 20,543 fans at home, the third-best attendance in the league. That's a huge turnaround from 2005--06, when the team was known nationally as the Jail Blazers for off-court incidents involving their talented but undisciplined players and attendance was 15,049. Local department stores didn't bother to carry Blazers T-shirts and other team gear, and commissioner David Stern had to personally intervene to keep disaffected owner Paul Allen from selling the franchise.
Portland general manager Kevin Pritchard, who as player personnel director orchestrated the team's breakout draft in 2006, coveted Roy's maturity and character as well as his talent. And Roy wanted to be in Portland as well: The proximity to Seattle would enable his parents—Gina, a school lunchroom attendant, and Tony, a city bus driver and former Marine—to attend his games. "My Number 1 pick was to go to Portland," Brandon says. In a flurry of draft-day deal-making Pritchard packaged the No. 4 choice to the Chicago Bulls to land LaMarcus Aldridge, a 6'11" forward from Texas who would make the NBA all-rookie first team; then he acquired Boston's pick at No. 7, which he swapped with Minnesota for the rights to Roy, whom the Timberwolves had taken sixth. "We felt like Brandon could be a really good leader," says Pritchard, "and that he and LaMarcus had the ability to change the culture of our team."
No sooner had their two lottery picks arrived in Portland than the Blazers were marketing around them—especially Roy. He was a low-risk choice for a front man: a gifted, selfless player who was well-spoken and outgoing, the middle of three children raised in a church-going, two-parent home. The burden of off-court appearances and interviews to promote the team's brand was exhausting during a rookie season in which Roy flew home in between games for the birth of his first child, Brandon Roy Jr. (Roy and his fiancée, Tiana Bardwell, had their second child, daughter Mariah Leilani, in January.) "The first two years they really had him everywhere, and [quietly] he complained," says McMillan. "He did it because he knew where the organization was at. He did it to get us to where we are now."
The Blazers even dispatched Roy to the 2007 draft lottery, where he served as the public face of a franchise that overcame a long-shot, 5.3% chance to win the No. 1 pick and the rights to Ohio State center Greg Oden. After Oden underwent microfracture right-knee surgery and sat out last season, Portland fans, haunted already by the physical collapses of centers Bill Walton and Sam Bowie, began to fret again over the long-term prospects of their young roster. Roy was available at the No. 6 pick only because he had undergone two knee operations and was regarded as brittle by several teams, according to league sources. He has already missed 36 NBA games because of a sore left heel and other ailments. Will Roy's body hold up long enough for him to lead the Blazers' promising young rotation of Aldridge, Oden and rookie swingman Rudy Fernandez to a championship? "You can't predict the future with injuries," says Pritchard. "But whatever happens going forward, we knew Brandon was right for us because he absolutely changed the direction of our team."
ROY ISN'T worried about his staying power. "I see myself as having just as long of a career as I want," he says. "I look at some of the older guys and watch how they carry themselves, and they play a lot different in their later careers."
The irony is that Roy already plays like those older guys. "He is a glider, and I remember getting on him about playing harder," says Jason Jones, who was Roy's junior varsity coach at Garfield High. "Brandon would say, 'But, Coach, I am playing hard.' It was hard to recognize at first because you never see a kid that age play that mature style."
"I would get so mad because I would be trying to run harder, but my game would never let me get out of control," says Roy. "When I went to college, right away coach [Lorenzo] Romar was like, This guy just doesn't go hard. He was just hammering me, hammering me, hammering me, and I would say, 'Coach, I am playing hard.' Even my first couple of practices with Nate, he was like, Brandon, push the ball down the court! But I am pushing it! I'm playing hard as heck out there. I'm beat, I'm tired."
So how does he make the spectacular look so effortless? The answer is fundamental: Roy can dribble so well that you can't tell which is his weak hand, and at 211 pounds he has the size to shield the ball as he reads the defense and waits for a play to develop. He has a coach's mind, an intuitive understanding of teammates and opponents swirling around him as if they were X's and O's diagrammed on a whiteboard. "He's always on balance, so if someone reaches in, he's able to spin and he's not falling over," says Portland point guard Steve Blake, who becomes a spot-up shooter when Roy takes over in the fourth quarter. "Then he sees the next guy coming and he just goes into another move."
"Brandon has a crossover, a pump, a spin—he has three moves that will get you," says McMillan. Back off and he'll pour in jumpers out to the three-point line; guard Roy tight, and he'll lever on by. "He goes in straight lines," says New Orleans Hornets point guard Chris Paul. "Anybody who knows basketball knows if you go around a guy, you need to go right by him. He takes a minimal amount of steps, and then he's at the rim. He uses his right hand and his left hand equally, and if he has to get that burst to dunk on you, he will." But only if he has to.
So where does Roy go from here? The answer goes against everything he believes in. "I need to make some mistakes," he says. "I need to make that tight pass, because I'm always trying to make the right pass. Even this year I've learned to shoot shots I wouldn't shoot in the past. Let go a little bit, don't try to play so under control. And I think that's where my potential lies—taking more risks, trying to play with more flair and having more fun out there."
If only the rest of the league had such problems.
The Blazers have entrusted their future to a 24-year-old guard with the game of an aging veteran. Now, all that prematurely mature Brandon Roy has to do is learn to play like a kid
DEEP IN the fourth quarter of any tight game in Portland, shooting guard Brandon Roy sets the rhythm. As the sold-out Rose Garden urges its young Trail Blazers to go-go-go, Roy peacefully decelerates his dribble, making his way across half-court like a senior citizen oblivious to surrounding traffic, puttering along while an impatient defender swats futilely at the ball until, at last, he is ready to make his move, cross-stepping abruptly into the lane ...
... And then the ball is descending high off the glass through the net, and he is heading upcourt, his blank expression unchanged. When Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade attack the basket, they lurch, lunge and leap with enough g-force to lift spectators out of their seats. When Roy drives, fans' mouths drop open as they sit, dumbfounded. How did he make it there? "He's very deceptive," says Blazers center Joel Przybilla, who has been Roy's teammate for three years. "I don't know if it's how he plays the angles or what. It's amazing, because it looks like he's not even asserting himself, but he gets to the spot where he wants to get to and then, man, you're in trouble."
The 6'6" Roy plays like an aging vet who takes pride in outsmarting the rim-scrapers while conserving energy to extend his career. In fact, he is a 24-year-old blessed with a 41-inch vertical leap, which he uses only when necessary. He wears neither tattoos nor jewelry. In this era of unparalleled athleticism and style over substance, Brandon Roy is the NBA's curious version of Benjamin Button—a young body driven by an old-school mind. "He's of the same ilk as Oscar Robertson and Walt Frazier, and I don't say that lightly," says Blazers assistant Dean Demopoulos. "The defense is never threatening to him, and he's that way as a person too. He is a very secure, grounded guy, a throwback who could play in any era."
A four-year collegian at Washington, Roy has startled many in his three seasons as a pro, revealing the sort of upside normally associated with rawer prospects. He was named Rookie of the Year in 2007, and last Thursday he earned his second straight All-Star berth. At week's end Roy was leading the Blazers with a career-best 22.6 points per game, along with 5.1 assists and 4.6 rebounds, as the team (29--17) chased its first postseason appearance in six seasons. Roy's importance truly shows when the game heats up: Only James, Wade and Bryant are more prolific down the stretch than Roy, who through Sunday was averaging 7.1 points in the fourth quarter. "He has a pace about him that is calming for me and the players," says Portland coach Nate McMillan, who, when he was in Seattle, used to watch Roy play for Garfield High. "He's better than I thought he would be."
Roy has been hearing such remarks for as long as he's been playing basketball. "Even my high school coach, I can understand why he didn't think I could play," he says. Roy is well aware that he has never embraced the flamboyant role of modern-day prodigy: While others his age have grown up playing recklessly and reached the NBA in need of discipline, he has faced the opposite problem. He has been unable to play without restraint, to let himself go.
HE'S ONE of my favorite players in the league," says Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers, who asks his staff to make highlight videos of Roy as teaching tools for his sons Jeremiah, a junior redshirting at Indiana, and Austin, a high school sophomore in Winter Park, Fla.—both guards. "He plays under control, he plays unselfishly, and he plays at gears that young players don't play at. Most young players play fast and out of control, and for them it's all about getting 'my shots.' But his whole attitude is based on team play."
Few younger stars have had a more profound effect on their franchises than Roy. At week's end Portland was drawing an average of 20,543 fans at home, the third-best attendance in the league. That's a huge turnaround from 2005--06, when the team was known nationally as the Jail Blazers for off-court incidents involving their talented but undisciplined players and attendance was 15,049. Local department stores didn't bother to carry Blazers T-shirts and other team gear, and commissioner David Stern had to personally intervene to keep disaffected owner Paul Allen from selling the franchise.
Portland general manager Kevin Pritchard, who as player personnel director orchestrated the team's breakout draft in 2006, coveted Roy's maturity and character as well as his talent. And Roy wanted to be in Portland as well: The proximity to Seattle would enable his parents—Gina, a school lunchroom attendant, and Tony, a city bus driver and former Marine—to attend his games. "My Number 1 pick was to go to Portland," Brandon says. In a flurry of draft-day deal-making Pritchard packaged the No. 4 choice to the Chicago Bulls to land LaMarcus Aldridge, a 6'11" forward from Texas who would make the NBA all-rookie first team; then he acquired Boston's pick at No. 7, which he swapped with Minnesota for the rights to Roy, whom the Timberwolves had taken sixth. "We felt like Brandon could be a really good leader," says Pritchard, "and that he and LaMarcus had the ability to change the culture of our team."
No sooner had their two lottery picks arrived in Portland than the Blazers were marketing around them—especially Roy. He was a low-risk choice for a front man: a gifted, selfless player who was well-spoken and outgoing, the middle of three children raised in a church-going, two-parent home. The burden of off-court appearances and interviews to promote the team's brand was exhausting during a rookie season in which Roy flew home in between games for the birth of his first child, Brandon Roy Jr. (Roy and his fiancée, Tiana Bardwell, had their second child, daughter Mariah Leilani, in January.) "The first two years they really had him everywhere, and [quietly] he complained," says McMillan. "He did it because he knew where the organization was at. He did it to get us to where we are now."
The Blazers even dispatched Roy to the 2007 draft lottery, where he served as the public face of a franchise that overcame a long-shot, 5.3% chance to win the No. 1 pick and the rights to Ohio State center Greg Oden. After Oden underwent microfracture right-knee surgery and sat out last season, Portland fans, haunted already by the physical collapses of centers Bill Walton and Sam Bowie, began to fret again over the long-term prospects of their young roster. Roy was available at the No. 6 pick only because he had undergone two knee operations and was regarded as brittle by several teams, according to league sources. He has already missed 36 NBA games because of a sore left heel and other ailments. Will Roy's body hold up long enough for him to lead the Blazers' promising young rotation of Aldridge, Oden and rookie swingman Rudy Fernandez to a championship? "You can't predict the future with injuries," says Pritchard. "But whatever happens going forward, we knew Brandon was right for us because he absolutely changed the direction of our team."
ROY ISN'T worried about his staying power. "I see myself as having just as long of a career as I want," he says. "I look at some of the older guys and watch how they carry themselves, and they play a lot different in their later careers."
The irony is that Roy already plays like those older guys. "He is a glider, and I remember getting on him about playing harder," says Jason Jones, who was Roy's junior varsity coach at Garfield High. "Brandon would say, 'But, Coach, I am playing hard.' It was hard to recognize at first because you never see a kid that age play that mature style."
"I would get so mad because I would be trying to run harder, but my game would never let me get out of control," says Roy. "When I went to college, right away coach [Lorenzo] Romar was like, This guy just doesn't go hard. He was just hammering me, hammering me, hammering me, and I would say, 'Coach, I am playing hard.' Even my first couple of practices with Nate, he was like, Brandon, push the ball down the court! But I am pushing it! I'm playing hard as heck out there. I'm beat, I'm tired."
So how does he make the spectacular look so effortless? The answer is fundamental: Roy can dribble so well that you can't tell which is his weak hand, and at 211 pounds he has the size to shield the ball as he reads the defense and waits for a play to develop. He has a coach's mind, an intuitive understanding of teammates and opponents swirling around him as if they were X's and O's diagrammed on a whiteboard. "He's always on balance, so if someone reaches in, he's able to spin and he's not falling over," says Portland point guard Steve Blake, who becomes a spot-up shooter when Roy takes over in the fourth quarter. "Then he sees the next guy coming and he just goes into another move."
"Brandon has a crossover, a pump, a spin—he has three moves that will get you," says McMillan. Back off and he'll pour in jumpers out to the three-point line; guard Roy tight, and he'll lever on by. "He goes in straight lines," says New Orleans Hornets point guard Chris Paul. "Anybody who knows basketball knows if you go around a guy, you need to go right by him. He takes a minimal amount of steps, and then he's at the rim. He uses his right hand and his left hand equally, and if he has to get that burst to dunk on you, he will." But only if he has to.
So where does Roy go from here? The answer goes against everything he believes in. "I need to make some mistakes," he says. "I need to make that tight pass, because I'm always trying to make the right pass. Even this year I've learned to shoot shots I wouldn't shoot in the past. Let go a little bit, don't try to play so under control. And I think that's where my potential lies—taking more risks, trying to play with more flair and having more fun out there."
If only the rest of the league had such problems.