COMMENTARY : Season of Judgment Has Arrived for Tisdale

The Sacramento Kings began their sixth season Friday evening, and their prospects in a rebuilding year rest heavily on the lumberjack shoulders of Wayman Lawrence Tisdale ... who may merely be the very best player on a very bad team, or a late-blooming force in professional basketball. At 26, he is still young. It could go either way.

DEAR WAYMAN,

I’m a very big fan of yours.

I like your emotion. Win, and you grin. Lose, and you damn near weep. You’re like those happy/sad masks they wear in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.

The Kings have had lots of players who didn’t seem to care much one way or the other -- but despite all the losses, you haven’t grown numb, which probably speaks to your character.

You work hard. You run. You jump. You perspire. And when the game is at stake, you are always demanding the basketball.

Lloyd Free, a guard who also played with bad teams, was another who always took the big shot -- because, he said, when he tried to pass to his teammates, “All I’d see was their BACKS.”

Being a hero is risky. You can end up the goat. But you are always facing up to the challenge.

No one questions your guts.

You make $2 million and change every season ... which from all indications you try hard to earn. Still, because of the money, and because you were the second player named in the ’85 draft, and because you are so very active, so VISIBLE, people expect big things of you. Maybe, sometimes, too much.

After all, you have never played in an All-Star Game. Or been an All-Pro. Or led the league in any statistical category. You are not Karl Malone. Or Charles Barkley.

The problem is, Wayman, I’m not sure I know why.

You averaged 22.3 points last season, a thing to be proud of. But I tend to think that you can leap tall buildings in a single bound and do more than just score. You can rebound, for instance.

On THIS team, if you don’t, then who will?

Yet last season you averaged only 9.7 rebounds per 48 minutes -- the lowest number in your five-year career. The season before you managed a dozen, a figure that put you in the top quarter of the league’s regulars.

What explains the big drop-off? It’s a full 20 percent!

You averaged 3.0 offensive rebounds (per 48 minutes). Another career low. And 60 percent of what you averaged four years ago.

I’ve had coaches tell me that offensive rebounds measure a player’s tenacity. Is yours less than it was? If you were playing next to a rebounding fool last season, a Chamberlain, a Russell, some wonderful teammate who didn’t leave many rebounds for you to retrieve, then that might explain it.

But Wayman ... GREG KITE?

You blocked 54 shots, four more than Malone or Barkley, and twice as many as Otis Thorpe -- but nothing to brag on. Antoine Carr blocked 68 with only two-thirds your playing time.

In your five-year career, you have blocked only 210, or roughly one for every 60 minutes you play.

Four years ago, in 108 minutes across four playoff games with the Pacers, you didn’t block any.

I know, you are only 6-foot-7, two inches shorter than the popular quote.

But you are wide, Wayman. Strong. And quick. You have that great body. And you are not a poor leaper by any means.

Yet rebounding and defense are what separate you from the elite in the game.

Maybe you are just too preoccupied with keeping yourself in the game, too concerned with not fouling. The memory persists of a guard soloing in on a breakaway and dunking the ball in your face as you stood there, flatfooted, not even lifting your arms.

Malone would have knocked him three rows into the crowd and taken the foul, even if it meant fouling out -- which is why people think twice before challenging him.

Word gets around.

Beyond that, Wayman, you averaged 1.7 assists per 48 minutes last season. That isn’t many for a low-post player who is double-teamed all the time, and who can run up lots of assists by passing back out. Malone’s 48-minute figure was 3.5 and Barkley’s 4.8.

People question your hands and your passing ability. And yet two years ago you averaged 2.6 -- 53 percent more.

Enough numbers. You get the idea.

In four years with the Pacers, you never did crack their lineup. You thought of yourself as a quality player, and anguished. Now you are settled in here, you are playing for a coach whose whole offense is keyed to his forwards, and you are The Man.

It is time to be great now, if ever.

I’m convinced -- and I’m not alone in this -- that you have what it takes to be an All-Star, an All-Pro, a force.

The trick, it seems to me, is in convincing yourself.