THE BIG QUESTION

Lee Andrew Bynum has now worn a Laker uniform for two weeks, and when he wasn’t surrounded by microphones, TV cameras and autograph-seeking kids, he managed to give the Lakers and their fans a glimpse into the future.

It looked like a mixed bag.

Playing eight games in Long Beach’s Summer Pro League, which concluded last week, the Lakers’ 6-foot-11, 270-pound top draft choice showed flashes of glorious potential ... and all but disappeared during other spans.

“It’s not any different from what I expected,” Bynum said of his first taste of professional basketball. “I expected it to be tough and it’s definitely tough.”

And that, of course, was during a summer league that includes precious few players who will make NBA rosters next season.

The Lakers saw what they expected too. In taking Bynum 10th overall with their highest draft selection in 11 years, the team knew it was taking a calculated risk, choosing long-term potential over the temptation of taking a more polished player as a quick fix.

“I think it’s gone as good as we can hope, keeping in mind that it’s just a summer league,” General Manager Mitch Kupchak said after Bynum was held to four points in the team’s final game. “We don’t want him really playing next year, or the year behind it. Certainly that’s not in the plans.”

But while downplaying their immediate expectations for a player still three months shy of his 18th birthday, the Lakers are more heavily invested than even the two-year, $3.8-million contract they recently gave to Bynum might imply.

Having become enamored with his 7-foot-6 wingspan, soft hands and shooting touch around the basket during private workouts, they took him at No. 10 this year because they figured they’d need a top-three pick to get a player like him in another year or two.

And so, if only in potential, he suddenly became heir apparent to such luminaries as Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal at center of the NBA’s most glamorous team -- one that missed the playoffs last season for the first time since 1994.

Heady stuff for a kid from St. Joseph High in Metuchen, N.J., who wasn’t even among the 16 players the NBA invited to sit in an area especially designated for them at the draft. When Bynum was chosen, he emerged from the general admission seats at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where he and his family were among thousands of others who paid $15 a ticket to watch the proceedings.

Indeed, Bynum, who likes to play chess and alien-invasion video games in his spare time, has his share of skeptics who question his talent as a basketball player. A few of them come from close to home.

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Plainsboro, N.J., is a rural town of 21,000, with tree-lined streets and grassy lawns that give it a friendly Midwestern feel. Located halfway between Philadelphia and New York, it is home to a handful of professors from nearby Princeton University but is characterized more by its cornfields, pond fishing and sleepy summer nights.

Bynum, who has lived there from the age of 4, seems a product of the mix -- quiet and grounded, but sharp intellectually, with a quick wit that can belie his humble nature.

In his first dealings with the Los Angeles media, Bynum took a jab at O’Neal’s well-chronicled free-throw woes and stated his intention of becoming an All-Star within the first two years of his career.

On the other, more modest hand, his mother, Janet McCoy, used to refer to him as “The Hermit” because he rarely left his bedroom, preferring to play Xbox and watch TV inside the sanctuary of teenage surroundings.

Bynum’s mother and father divorced when he was 15 months old, with his mother remaining the larger part of his life. His father, Ernest, a cook who resides in North Carolina, has rarely been a presence, attending few events outside of his son’s recent high school graduation.

A few years after the split with her husband, McCoy moved with her two sons from larger and more industrial Newark to Plainsboro, settling into a modest two-bedroom apartment where the boys shared a room with twin beds. As Bynum grew, the bed wasn’t replaced -- an extension was added to the foot of it to accommodate him.

McCoy had two jobs, working full-time as a medical secretary at a Newark hospital and part-time in the evening a couple of days a week as a nurses’ aid at a Trenton hospital. It wasn’t rare to log 16-hour days when she worked both.

“It’s been hard, but we got it done,” McCoy said. “I had to work two jobs to get food on the table. You do it. I wanted them to be able to afford the different activities here, but you’ve got to pay.”

McCoy’s living room is something of a monument to her youngest son, who prefers to go by Andrew, his middle name. Basketball trophies line a shelf. Workout equipment takes up precious floor space. The Laker cap he wore while shaking NBA Commissioner David Stern’s hand on draft day sits in a curio cabinet.

McCoy stayed on top of her son academically, and it paid off. A member of the school chess club, he earned almost all As and Bs as a senior -- there was that one C-plus in English -- and ran with a small, commonplace crowd.

Bynum met his best friend, Nolan Mickey, on the Northeast Corridor line as they shared daily 22-minute train rides to and from school. They were an odd couple of sorts: Bynum, the senior basketball star, and Mickey, a 5-5 ninth-grader.

Lacking size and basketball skills, Mickey failed to make the school’s freshman team last November, but his friend arranged for him to become the varsity team’s manager. That set up long postgame conversations between the two of them on the train as the towns of Milltown and Black Horse slipped past.

“He’s quiet when you first meet him, but he’ll feel more comfortable around you once he gets to know you,” Mickey said of Bynum. “Then he’ll be a funny guy, making jokes and stuff like that. He’s a nice guy. If I was short on money at lunch, he’d give me some. He never asked me to pay it back. But I did.”

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Bynum, who will be bringing his mother and brother to Los Angeles with him, says he looks forward to 6 a.m. workouts with Laker All-Star Kobe Bryant, with whom he shares the common thread of going directly from high school to the NBA, their lone similarity for now.

Bryant was a well-known phenom at Lower Merion (Pa.) High, the undisputed star of a nationally recognized team and the son of a former NBA player. Bynum was a little-known talent, the second-leading scorer on an above-average team and the son of a former center who never made it beyond the roster of unheralded Long Island University.

Bynum initially attended New Hope (Pa.) Solebury Prep but transferred before his junior year to St. Joseph, an all-boys school of 850, whose alumni include deposed New Jersey governor James McGreevey and former NBA player Jay Williams.

A parochial school spread over 72 lush acres, St. Joseph has a wealthy basketball history -- and Bynum was expected to author another chapter upon arrival.

Instead, he started slowly, sitting out his first 10 games as a junior because of state transfer rules. In his first game, against powerhouse St. Anthony of Jersey City, he was worked over by a reserve forward six inches shorter.

“When he got the ball, I thought the kid was so raw,” said John Haley, a veteran local sportswriter who covered the game. “He was a project. To me, he was just another big guy.”

Bynum improved his skills over the next summer but missed the first 10 games of his senior season because of a sprained knee ligament. He returned weighing 300 pounds, out of shape and often out of breath in his first few games, a condition unrelated to the asthma that had occasionally slowed him since childhood.

But Bynum’s footwork had sharpened, his hands had softened, and Haley noticed another new attribute.

“A lot of people are questioning his heart,” Haley said. “I wanted to see him diving on the court for a loose ball. I didn’t see any of that. But I did see him, when he wasn’t getting the ball, showing anger, which I liked.”

Unlike Bryant and LeBron James, who collected superlatives wherever they went in high school, Bynum was a late-rising stock who, despite averaging 17.2 points, 14 rebounds and six blocked shots a game, didn’t always impress rivals in the 30-team Greater Middlesex Conference.

Bo Henning, coach of the East Brunswick High Bears, doesn’t see any comparisons to O’Neal, who played college basketball for Louisiana State in the rugged Southeastern Conference before joining the NBA.

“This kid’s played against the kids in the GMC night in and night out,” Henning said. “Not to take anything away from our conference, but it’s a little bit different.

“He’s a long, long way away right now. I kiddingly called a couple of kids on my team who guarded him and said, ‘You should get an agent and you’ll probably go in the second round.’ ”

Like many Bynum opinions floating around northeast New Jersey, Henning seemed uncertain of Bynum’s long-term NBA potential.

“I think he’ll do anything for his team to be successful,” Henning said. “[Phil] Jackson will love that about him. He’ll not just be in it for Andrew Bynum. Whether he has the work ethic to back that up, I don’t know. Patience, that’d be the first word I suggest to the Lakers.”

Even his own high school coach has difficulty assessing Bynum’s NBA outlook, sinking deeply into a faux leather sofa in a hotel lobby when asked about the future.

“If he makes up his mind to do this, he’s going to succeed,” Mark Taylor said. “If he gets himself in great shape, he has the body to play. He’s got those shoulders. He definitely has a presence.

“When you start looking at his mentality from a basketball standpoint, I question it. I don’t know if Andrew’s put in enough basketball time yet. I don’t think Andrew played to his potential due to his sitting out the first half of the season. Andrew’s just not ready for the NBA.”

Bynum, who played only 33 games at St. Joseph, chooses to ignore the skepticism.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a long process at all,” Bynum said. “I think if I just get in the gym and work out constantly, I’ll be ready. I’m gonna try and make an impact this season.”

Marquis Jones, an all-county point guard for the South Plainfield Tigers, will not be following Bynum to the NBA, although he did make the winning shot in the waning seconds of the Tigers’ 66-65 victory over St. Joseph in the conference championship.

Four months after the shot, as Bynum strode to the NBA’s draft-day dais, Jones was neither envious nor flabbergasted.

“I don’t think it really surprised me at all,” Jones said. “In high school, one man can’t stop him -- you’ve got to put three or four guys on him to slow him down -- and he did a real good job of passing the ball back out.”

So is he the second coming of O’Neal?

“I don’t know about the next Shaq,” Jones said. “I think he can be good in the league, but those are some big steps to replace.”

Taylor, a 1983 St. Joseph graduate who went on to play at Fordham, coached his alma mater for 10 seasons before resigning in March, the pressures of four children and a bustling third-party warehouse-distribution business carrying greater influence than win-loss records and noisy bus rides.

He and Bynum’s final game together was a loss. In a first-round playoff game in the state tournament, St. Joseph was stunned, 76-66, by Toms River Monsignor Donovan, a smaller and less skilled team that ran a simple flex offense and disciplined pressure defense.

That, perhaps more than anything, left the coach with a question.

“Andrew has an opportunity to be an NBA player down the road,” Taylor said. “[But] if he’s an NBA player now, how do I lose in the first round?”