For Mutombo and Nuggets, the NBA Is Just One Big Block Party

Dikembe Mutombo walks into the Denver Nuggets locker room 90 minutes before Tuesday night’s game against Charlotte, humming a tune in his bottomless baritone. It’s the melody of Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock” from the ‘60s. But Mutombo has given the song new lyrics:

Hey mon, have you heard

da word?

No more flyin’ like a Bird

No more Mail delivery

He don’t come into da key.

The new song is called “The Dikembe Block” and it will be in your record stores soon. Seriously. A video will follow. Some might think it a bit presumptuous that the rookie from Georgetown recorded the song before he even signed his five-year, $13.75 million contract. But as it turns out, Mutombo’s play in the first 13 games of his professional career has been too sweet for mere words.

Mutombo has been the surprise of the NBA season. There are those, especially in the Nuggets’ front office, who thought the 7-foot-2, shot-blocking center from Zaire would have an impact immediately. But it would be difficult to find anybody who sincerely believed he would be averaging 20.2 points, 14.8 rebounds (second in the league) and 2.5 blocked shots per game.

Anybody, that is, except Mutombo and his college coach, John Thompson.

“I knew,” Mutombo said. “I’m telling you I knew. Why do people say I would not score in NBA, I don’t know. Why do they say that? I can grab offensive rebounds and put it back, if nothing else. So why do people snub me?”

If it sounds as if Mutombo is taking this a little bit personally, he is. With his usual good humor, of course. Charlotte chose Larry Johnson with the No. 1 pick. New Jersey took Kenny Anderson. Sacramento drafted Billy Owens and then traded him, leaving Mutombo to slip to Denver at No. 4.

This made Tuesday night’s 21-point, 20-rebound, 4-block performance in a victory over the Hornets that much sweeter. The day before the game, a Denver Post reporter had asked Mutombo if Johnson (averaging 14 points and 11 rebounds) was his closest competitor in the race for rookie of the year. “He’s not my contender,” Mutombo said. “I don’t know who is my contender. I think I’m by myself. Some of those guys who came in with me in the draft got much more press than I did. I didn’t get anything. I got too many critics before the draft.”

In Tuesday night’s game against Charlotte, Johnson looked like the more-polished player. Johnson, by the way, has been no slouch. Against Denver, he had 25 points and 16 rebounds. And if he starts taking and hitting the jump shot everybody says he has, the comparisons between him and Charles Barkley will be appropriate.

But Mutombo, who still at times looks awkward on offense, can dominate the game in ways Johnson never will. In all but two games, he has had double figures in scoring and rebounds. He’s shooting only 44 percent, but an impossible-to-block hook shot is starting to fall with regularity.

Against the Hornets, Mutombo had 15 points on put-backs and free throws alone. Three hooks provided the rest of his scoring. In the first quarter, he blocked three shots and forced guard Kendall Gill to miss a dunk just by standing with his hands up and holding his ground.

“I knew he’d get 15, 16 points a game,” teammate and Georgetown buddy Reggie Williams said. “And I knew he’d play the hell out of the D (defense). But I didn’t think he’d do all this right off the bat. Sometimes he shoots the hook from too far out, and sometimes he gets pushed out from the basket, but he’s got actual moves, drop steps, spins. I thought it would take a couple of months for him to be this advanced.”

The man who drafted him, General Manager Bernie Bickerstaff, and the man who coaches him, Paul Westhead, cite Mutombo’s superior physical condition and his exceptional aptitude as the primary reasons for this quick bolt from the gate. It also helped that he signed and got into camp right away.

Bickerstaff said that because Mutombo didn’t have 15 years of playground ball cluttering his game, “everything he learned he learned the right way. We didn’t have to break him down and start him from scratch.”

Westhead called him “an instant learner,” and recalled a game against Phoenix in which the coaches gave Mutombo incredibly complex advice at halftime, then decided it was ridiculous to expect a veteran, much less a rookie, to change his habit before a month or so had elapsed.

“The first play of the half,” Westhead said, “he dropped-stepped to his left, away from the overplay against his hook and dunked. First play. It was exactly what we talked about. He didn’t have benefit of film or time to think about it.”