After Going in Circles, Higgins Is Back in L.A. : He Can Save Career With Lakers

He’s 6 feet 8, 23 years old with Reggie Miller range, so what’s missing?

Try a guaranteed contract.

A lot happened to Sean Higgins between Fairfax High and the Lakers’ training camp, some of it good. He was part of a ballyhooed freshman class at Michigan. He played on an NCAA champion as a sophomore, winning the semifinal game against Illinois with a rebound basket at the buzzer.

He declared for the draft after his junior year.

That was the problem.

Talk about your stay in school ads. Higgins could be a billboard for completing eligibility, the latest in a line of young men dating to the fabled Bill (Poodles) Willoughby, a 1970s New Jersey high school star who passed up his college career entirely to embark on what turned out to be a brief career as an NBA journeyman.

Higgins declared for the ’90 draft but almost missed it altogether. San Antonio took him with the last pick, No. 27 on the second round.

After that, it was color him expendable.

The Spurs cut him to make room for returning holdout Rod Strickland.

Orlando picked him up, but more on a rental basis than to buy.

“They better go in the lottery if they come out or they’ve made a mistake,” Magic General Manager Pat Williams said last season. “The classic case is Sean Higgins.

“He came out two years ago . . . didn’t get a guaranteed contract, and now he’s doing everything he can to keep his career alive. If he had stayed one more year at Michigan, he probably would have led the Big Ten in scoring, been a first-rounder and gotten a five-year contract. He made a bad mistake.”

After the season, the Magic dropped Higgins to clear money for Shaquille O’Neal and Stanley Roberts.

Higgins had help making his mistake.

When Magic Johnson, debated leaving Michigan State as a sophomore, he asked around, even calling his idol, Julius Erving, for advice.

Higgins asked around, too, but it’s the day of the glad-hander and a promise-’em-anything time of year, and his advisers were all interested parties.

“I got bad information from agents,” Higgins says. “I had a couple of basketball people--GMs whom I won’t mention--call. They said certain things. So I figured I would have a good chance to go on the first round. . . .”

On draft day, he sat in a hotel room in Atlantic City, N.J., where he had just participated in a one-on-one tournament against fellow prospects Lionel Simmons, Bo Kimble, Chris Jackson, Travis Mays and Bimbo Coles.

Simmons, Kimble, Jackson and Mays went high in the first round.

Coles went high in the second.

ESPN was showing drag racing by the time Higgins went.

“It wasn’t a real big deal,” Higgins says. “It was disappointing. It was depressing, but I don’t look back. That was two years ago. You never know how it goes. You see a guy like Bo Kimble, the way his career’s going. I’ve played more in the NBA than he has.

“I’ll bet you one thing. I’ll bet there’s a couple GMs out there wishing they’d drafted me ahead of the guys they drafted.”

Says Johnson: “He took that chance. It’s on him. He’ll tell you that, too. But sometimes when you don’t make it, it makes you a better player and I think it made him better. . . . I think, before, he was lost in knowing what kind of player he was, trying to be a big guard, passing, scoring, doing it all. His game is shooting. . . . What I understand from other people, he was a little cocky and his game didn’t match his cockiness.”

After two years of riding benches to practice humility, Higgins saw daylight late last season, starting for the injury-riddled Orlando Magic.

On April 7 against the Charlotte Hornets, he hit 12 consecutive shots, 13 of 16 overall and scored a personal-best 29 points.

Invited to join the Lakers’ summer-league team, he averaged 20 points, shot 60% and won a trip to camp, where he’s considered the front-runner over another young free agent, Alex Blackwell, for the last spot on the roster. The Lakers, eager to get younger and more athletic, are looking for firepower in reserve after the departure of Terry Teagle. This reads like Higgins’ resume.

Higgins has a partially guaranteed $250,000 contract, which is progress, if slow progress.

Kind of keeps the pressure on, doesn’t it?

“Kind of and kind of not,” Higgins says, laughing readily. “I know I can play basketball, and that’s not the issue. It’s just being at the right spot at the right time. A lot of guys go through that. That’s why you see guys getting the big deals. They’re at the right spot at the right time. That’s going to happen. I’m only 23 years old.”

And wiser, too.