Forget Votes, Play’s the Thing for Van Exel

You feast your eyes on Nickey Maxwell Van Exel as he goes darting through the taller men, pounding the basketball with a shoulder-high dribble, attacking furiously and fearlessly. And the more you watch, the more you wonder how they found five guards better to represent his conference at the NBA All-Star game.

Charles Barkley chews on this himself.

“I’ll tell you what, Nick Van Exel is terrific,” says Barkley, whose America West Arena in Phoenix will welcome the league’s best players next Sunday. “When they talk about young players who are going to be stars, they better mention his name more often.”

Yes, as Marv Albert would say.

And you know who else should mention his name more often?

Nick Van Exel.

When the ballots listing the All-Star nominees were first issued and the Lakers included were Cedric Ceballos, Vlade Divac and Van Exel, it was time to spread a little goodwill and cheer, start getting the word out among the fans. They’re the ones who do the voting. Some in other towns needed a nudge to let them know that out here on the coast, Van Exel was playing his heart out.

From the Laker publicity department, Rhonda Windham went to all three Lakers to see about doing some promotional stuff, interviews and public appearances and the like. But soon she came back to John Black, the team’s director of public relations, to let him know: “Nick won’t cooperate.”

Black was surprised. Van Exel had been extremely accommodating about anything and everything since joining the Lakers.

“Nick, you should get your name out there more, so more people will vote for you,” he recommended.

“No. I want people to vote for me because of the way I play ,” Van Exel said.

They should have. All right, so it is pretty hard to have a Western Conference backcourt without John Stockton in it, and clearly Mitch Richmond is a fabulous player, and OK, so maybe Gary Payton is having the season of his life, and no way Phoenix was going to have a game like this without Dan Majerle being out there. But Latrell Sprewell? Over Van Exel? Come on, you voters, get serious.

Maybe last year. Back then, little Nickey was a rookie who got picked 37th in the whole NBA draft, so obviously he didn’t make the All-Star ballot and nobody knew he could play this way. That includes Del Harris, who kept his eyes on everyone in the league, not knowing at the time that he would become the Lakers’ coach the following summer.

“Did you see Van Exel in college?” Harris was asked.

“Hey, I saw him in high school,” he said. “I was at an Easter Seals benefit up in Wisconsin, which is where Nick is from. He’s a Kenosha kid. And you can imagine, he was just a little-bitty thing, out there against all the bigger guys. He was real good, but no way in the world I could picture him doing what he’s doing today.”

What he is doing is amazing. If he isn’t bombing home a last-second shot at Boston Garden to beat the astounded Celtics, he is banging away with 16 three-point shots in a single night and making half of them. If he isn’t leading the Lakers in assists in 33 of their first 44 games, he is averaging 24.5 points a game over a hot spell of a couple of weeks.

That run was ended Friday when the Lakers had an unseasonable cold snap, scoring a piddling 74 points. Van Exel had a rare terrible night.

“One of those things,” he said later.

“Denver threw its biggest guards at you,” it was pointed out.

“And that Jalen Rose, he’s got quick hands,” Van Exel said. “Teams are going to try different defenses to see what works against you. Teams are still trying to figure me out.”

“Are the bigger guards effective?”

Van Exel laughed.

“Yeah. The ones with quick hands,” he said.

There are two kinds of guards in the NBA, the quick and the dead, and Van Exel is one of the quickest. The left-handed gun is a Laker weapon who can shoot or pass with equal skill, who tried to curb his shooting after doing too much of it at Cincinnati and during his rookie season.

He takes his game very seriously. When teammates sit around listening to loud music in the locker room before a game, Van Exel gets edgy. It breaks his concentration. He works diligently during the off-season and doesn’t want to backslide into habits that affected people’s perceptions of him, coming out of college.

“I’m just going to keep working and seeing if I can keep taking my game up to another level,” he said.

Maybe that All-Star level. Maybe soon.

Someone said casually to his coach: “I think the Lakers didn’t realize just how good this guy was going to be.”

“Let me tell you something,” Harris said. “The league doesn’t recognize how good this guy is going to be.”