A Bad Mark

Mark Madsen was rated the NBA’s worst player in Sports Illustrated’s preseason basketball issue.

The folks there prettied it up and called it a “player value ranking,” and employed a special, secret formula that along the way also uncovered the whole Oregon State college football mix-up. In the end, though, and at the end, there was Madsen, which is all part of being Madsen, a guy the Lakers happen to love.

“For real?” Robert Horry said. “I’m biased. But, that’s not true, though. Like, who’s the cat up in New York? He’s just flat-out awful.”

Ten feet away, in a Laker locker room that houses 12 Madsen fans, Samaki Walker looked up.

“I know that might be your boy, but I’m sorry,” Horry said. “I mean, you got lots of guys.”

Madsen pushed back in his chair and smiled.

“I didn’t even see the article,” he said.

“Who’s No. 1?” Horry demanded.

Shaq.

“Where’s Kobe?” he asked.

Six.

“Mark’s last ?” Horry huffed.

“Doesn’t bother me,” Madsen said.

“Think of it this way,” Horry said. “The same guy who rated you, you’re probably a million times better than the guy who rated you. Some guy who knows nothing about basketball rated you. He probably just forgot about you. Like, ‘Oh, I forgot Madsen. Put him in there somewhere.”’

“I’m used to it,” Madsen said.

“Me too,” Horry said. “I’ve been talked about like that all my life. I was ranked as the most overrated basketball player in the whole country in my senior year in high school. The most overrated high-school player in the country.”

Dick Vitale said that, Horry said.

“I was on a team with Jimmy Jackson, Todd Day and Jay Bias at Nike Camp, and I walked off the court. Said, ‘I’m not playing with those guys.’ Because I never touched the ball. I just played defense.”

Jay is Len’s brother.

“I never touched the rock,” Horry said. “So I was like, I ain’t playing with these cats.’ And they wanted me to play center. I weighed 185 pounds. So, Mark, don’t listen to them.”

“I think it’s funny,” Madsen said.

“Please ,” Horry said, now offended.

One had to rummage through the magazine’s Web site to discover there actually are three players worse than Madsen, they being Brian Cardinal, Hanno Mottola and Menk Batare.

So, he’s better than Menk . “Whatever,” Madsen said. “Really. Whatever.”

Officially, that made Madsen No. 345, out of 348.

That’s 344 players worse than Shaquille O’Neal, 151 players worse than Walker, 105 players worse than Horry, nine players worse than Chris Dudley, eight players worse than Felton Spencer, and one player worse than Scott Padgett (344). Three better than Menk, though.

“It doesn’t get old,” Madsen said. “People can rank me where they want. But, when I step on the court, it doesn’t matter who ranks me where. What matters is if I can get the job done. I rate myself on performance, not what other people think about me.”

It comes with being Madsen, built thick and, well, white, that being the color of the worst five players in the NBA, according to SI, and 10 of the worst 13. It comes, maybe, with averaging fewer than 10 minutes a game last season for the Lakers, and 2.0 points and 2.2 rebounds, and with an unfounded reputation for being slow and awkward. Unfounded for being slow, anyway.

According to Laker performance coaches, Madsen tests very well for vertical leap, both standing and running. In late-practice springs, he runs with all of the people you’d expect him to run with, and a few you wouldn’t. He also is remarkably strong, particularly in his legs.

“I used those things as motivation,” said Laker assistant Kurt Rambis, to whom Madsen is sometimes compared. “Cotton Fitzsimmons once said, and this was in Sports Illustrated, ‘The Los Angeles Lakers will never win a championship with Kurt Rambis as power forward.”’

Four Laker championships later, Fitzsimmons signed Rambis as his power forward in Phoenix.

Appreciation for players such as Rambis, like Madsen, is acquired in practice gyms, and in five-minute stretches during games, and in small efforts that make large differences. Madsen might very well be the Laker starter had he not lost an entire summer and training camp to wrist surgery and an abdominal strain.

Four games off the injured list, Madsen is inching back into a power-forward rotation already thick with Walker, Horry and Slava Medvedenko. On Monday, when practice was long over, Madsen scrimmaged for another 30 minutes against Walker, and then took low-post instruction from Rick Fox for 30 more.

“People look at the fact he can’t shoot, probably, and say, ‘Well, he can’t play,”’ Rambis said. “But he rebounds. He defends, off-ball or on-ball. He runs the offense well. He passes. And he scores around the basket.

“So, if a guy can score but absolutely stinks on defense, he’s a good player. And if he defends and does all those other things, he’s the worst? Right.”

The line of people who wouldn’t see Madsen’s value runs long.

When he made the varsity team at San Ramon Valley High, Madsen said, other league coaches telephoned his coach, just to laugh at him.

On the way to a park one afternoon, a high school friend told him, “You just don’t look like a basketball player.”

Madsen was 6 feet 9.

But Madsen doesn’t jangle when he walks. His eyes aren’t hard enough and his smile isn’t rare enough and his muscles are thick and bunched, not long. He is unusually kind and always has time when Eugenia Chow, the director of community relations, asks him to read a book in an elementary-school classroom.

Although that might not make him a better basketball player, it makes him something other than last too, because a guy such as that can always count on the roll of the basketball.

Bob Myers played at Monte Vista High, not far from Madsen’s San Ramon Valley in Northern California. Myers went to UCLA, where he played through the 1996-97 season. Myers and Madsen became friends in high school, stayed so, and now Myers works for SFX, the agency representing Madsen.

Occasionally, in their youth, Myers and Madsen struck out for the courts at Bollinger Canyon, an Oakland playground where the facilities were decent and the game was pure Oakland. It was on one such night when Myers looked out over a playground filled with players with NBA bodies and hardtop games, looked back at Madsen, and noted the difference.

“He does have--how to put this nicely?--a little bit of an awkwardness about him,” said Myers, who does color commentary on UCLA basketball games. “But there is a lot of effectiveness there. This is where perception is not quite the reality. A lot of guys look pretty. But you soon realize how Mark is an asset to your team. He takes people out of their comfort zone.

“He’s going to get everything out of his body that he can. By the end of his career, he’ll have drained every bit out of himself, and he’ll be content.”

Few, if any, of those playground players ever were first-round picks, or won NBA championships, or was the worst player in the league. Madsen, apparently, was just lucky that way.

“I don’t even think about that stuff,” he said. “People tell me, I hear it for about five seconds, and I don’t think about it the rest of the day.”