Knick picking

Maciej Lampe gets a lesson in the business of basketball

It works this way, the Polish teenager was told. The NBA draft is like a TV game show. The emcee, David Stern, will appear from behind a curtain every five minutes. Eventually, he will call your name. An audience of Americans who have never seen you play -- never even heard of you -- will cheer and applaud anyway, because when David Stern calls your name it means you've won millions of dollars.

The teenager shook his head. This was his first visit to the United States. "I didn't know this whole draft thing would be so big," said Maciej Lampe, the 6-foot-11 inch center, on the eve of Thursday's draft. "Everybody is acting like you are a superstar when you aren't. It's crazy. I'm an 18-year-old kid."

Nothing in his background would prepare him for this. When Maciej Lampe (MAH-chek LAHMP-ay) was 6, he emigrated with his family from Poland to Stockholm, Sweden. He was 10 when he took up basketball and 15 when he moved by himself to Spain, where he had been recruited by the famous basketball club Real Madrid. He lived in a two-room apartment with a pair of young Spanish teammates and attended a foreign high school every day before practice.

A few months ago, he was discovered by NBA scouts while playing on loan for the tiny club Universidad Complutense in the Spanish second division. He averaged 18.6 points and 7.5 rebounds in just 17 games and all of a sudden was being forecast and promoted as a lottery pick. At first, Lampe couldn't believe that so little was being asked of him: He would go from making $45,000 to $3 million on the basis of a half-season's work against weak competition?

What did the NBA see in him? "I don't really like to talk about my game too much," he said. "I can shoot decent from the outside, but there is a lot for me to improve in my game. I feel like it's not for me to talk about what I can do. If you prove you can do it on the court, then they'll talk about you."

Lampe moved into an apartment with his Chicago-based agent, Keith Kreiter, and has spent the last several weeks traveling around the U.S. auditioning for most of the teams in the lottery. An early workout with the Knicks was cut short when Lampe hurt his back; a Monday session in Miami ended prematurely when he was elbowed in the eye, leaving him with a shiner that was still visible at the draft. "I don't think I'll be nervous,'' Lampe had predicted. "I know some people worry about where they are going to go, but in the end it's what you do on the court that matters and not where you're drafted."

If only it could be so simple. His agent had predicted that Miami would pick Lampe at No. 5, but that was never going to happen -- Pat Riley would never waste such a high pick on a project like Lampe. Then No. 11 Golden State and No. 13 Memphis passed him by, and Lampe was in free fall. For two and a half hours he sat at a table with his agent and parents, looking up to watch other players walk by on their way to the stage and their seven-figure handshakes with Stern.

Two factors were strangling Lampe. The money he would make as a late first-round pick wouldn't be enough to pay off the $1.8 million portion of his contract buyout with Real Madrid, so why would a team waste a first-round pick on a player who couldn't afford to join the NBA? There was also the matter of his hype. In his workouts he failed to live up to the inflated reports that he was a bona fide top-10 pick, which meant that he was always a disappointment and never a pleasant surprise. In a league that yearns for upside, no team is going to gamble a top-10 pick on a disappointment.

Every few minutes a TV cameraman would kneel directly in front of Lampe and broadcast his sallow expression to a national audience -- his black eye, his peach fuzz and acne. He looked awfully young. As the first round ended, he began to hear chants of "Lampe! Lampe!" from the Knicks fans in the studio audience at the Theater at Madision Square Garden. Lampe turned around to see the crowd holding up instantly drawn signs with his name. The fans wanted the Knicks to draft Lampe with the first pick of the second round. New York did, a loud roar went up and Lampe turned and raised a fist to the Knicks faithful, breathing in big gulps of air to suck back the tears. It was fine television.

But Stern was gone from the stage, replaced by his deputy commissioner, Russ Granik, whose second-round handshakes carry no contract guarantees. Because there is no wage scale for second-round picks, it is now up to the Knicks to decide if they want to pay Lampe enough to let him cover his buyout and play in New York next season. The Knicks may also decide to abandon him to another season in Madrid, which would mean that in three reality-TV hours the nation had watched as Lampe's NBA dream was shrunk steadily down to nothing more than a return ticket to Europe. Lampe had assumed that the draft would be a formality, a bit of useless entertainment before he could move on to the business of playing basketball. Today he realizes that basketball is in fact an entertainment business. Welcome to America.

Senior writer Ian Thomsen covers the NBA beat for Sports Illustrated. He is a regular contributor to SI.com.

 

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