Plan for the Future With Kids

Remember the NBA draft?

The scouts sure do. With the top pick, you used to get franchise players. Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Brad Daugherty, David Robinson and Shaquille O’Neal, were all chosen first between 1984 and 1992.

And then, of course, sometimes you stuck in your thumb and pulled out a plum such as in 1984, when Michael Jordan was the third pick, Charles Barkley went No. 5 and John Stockton was No. 16.

Now, with players arriving ever younger and each college class all but picked clean of prospects by its senior year, it has become more a developmental exercise, like the baseball draft.

In baseball, which has long taken high school players, scouts must project many years into the future, which is why prospects as physically imposing as Dave Parker, Andre Dawson and Jose Canseco could last 10, 11 and 15 rounds, respectively.

Now, NBA scouts find themselves at high school games, such as the recent Pangos Tournament at Pauley Pavilion, which featured 6-foot-10 Dwight Howard, a prep from Atlanta, and the hot Brooklyn point guard, Sebastian Telfair, in front of an announced 6,000, mostly agents and posses.

The scouts then go back to the office and give the speech every general manager tired of long ago: “I haven’t seen a guy who’s ready to be an NBA player in two weeks.”

There weren’t many who were ready when everyone stayed in school but there are fewer now. This year’s best prospects are 6-9 Connecticut junior Emeka Okafor and Howard.

Howard is bigger, more athletic, has a higher upside and would be the choice of the Atlanta Hawks, who see him as their LeBron James, the Cleveland-area prep who turned the Cavaliers around.

(No, Howard isn’t another LeBron. Nor is Telfair, who’s on this week’s Sports Illustrated cover in its never-ending fight for the teen demographic with ESPN the Magazine. Only in the sportswriting biz can you have a once-in-a-generation prospect such as James and a year later be asking, “Is he the next LeBron?”)

However, the 6-9 (hopefully) Okafor is ready to make a difference now, which is why he might be the choice of such teams as the Chicago Bulls and Orlando Magic, which aren’t into five-years plans.

Other teams don’t know what they’d do. Last week, the general manager of a lottery team said, “I hope we don’t get the No. 1 pick.”

That’s one you don’t hear every day. The GMs aren’t crazy about this new draft, either, because they’re not assured of still having their jobs in the three seasons it takes a Kwame Brown to start playing a little.

Now, teams often try to trade high picks. Last season, the Toronto Raptors, Miami Heat and Bulls shopped Nos. 4, 5 and 7, respectively, right up to the draft.

However, you rarely get a proven prospect for a projected one. So the Raptors reluctantly took 19-year-old Chris Bosh, who at 6-10 and 220 pounds turned out so well, they now consider him their foundation, even more than Vince Carter. The Heat took Dwyane Wade, who has been spectacular, averaging 18.5 points since Dec. 1 and shooting 52%.

The Bulls took Kirk Hinrich, whom Coach Scott Skiles calls his best player.

And that was after James, 7-foot-tall Darko Milicic and the remarkable Carmelo Anthony went 1-2-3.

Unfortunately, unless we’re headed into a golden age, that was an anomaly. The 2001 draft, in which three preps, Brown, Tyson Chandler and Eddy Curry, went 1-2-4 and developed at an agonizing pace, will be more the rule.

This prompts scouts to say the draft is overrated as a way of building a team, but there’s one little problem with that: Because 95% of the players enter the NBA through the draft, it’s not a matter of how long you have to wait for players. It’s still a matter of who gets whom.

In 1995, the Timberwolves’ Kevin McHale got Kevin Garnett, a high school kid, at No. 5, after teams had taken Joe Smith, Antonio McDyess, Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace. That pick turned the Minnesota franchise around.

Then there’s salary cap management, which is all-important. Draftees represent five years of affordable service, so if you choose well, you’ve got a chance, even if you’re in Denver.

And if you try to rebuild on the fly, you become the New York Knicks, who could lure premium free agents if they ever had cap room but never do and are caught in an endless cycle of rebuilding.

“You just jump into the abyss and hope it all works out,” says Indiana Pacer President Donnie Walsh. “What amazes me is how many of these kids do make it work. But I don’t think you have any idea. It’s going to take time for most of these kids to develop. You’ve got to be willing to wait on them....

“I’m amazed at LeBron James.... Anthony, the same way. I’ve never seen anything like this but don’t think it’s happening every year.”

It might still be fun for us draftniks, but it’s tough on everyone else. But whatever it is, it’s as important as it ever was.

Faces and Figures

Where did I put my marbles? The Bulls’ prize preps from the 2001 draft, Curry and Chandler, continue to evolve, if slowly, while the grown-ups are losing it. Skiles sat Chandler down after he’d gone into a game with his shirt tucked into his tights, rather than his uniform pants.

Skiles: “My intention was to play him quite a bit. But when he checked in the game, he didn’t have proper uniform appearance. He had his black tights and shorts way down, so I took him right back out and made it clear that wasn’t acceptable. It’s a shame that we have to police that. But it is what it is.”

Proper uniform appearance?

Then there was Skiles’ response to a question about why he stopped playing Eddie Robinson. Said Skiles, “I’m not real concerned about him right now.”

Hooray for Isiah: When the Knicks benched creaky Dikembe Mutombo, his agent, David Falk, called New York General Manager Isiah Thomas “vindictive” and “dumb,” suggesting the move stemmed from their old problems.

“Some people, you give them enough rope and they hang themselves,” Falk told the New York Daily News. “I have a saying, ‘The decision that you made set the price that must be paid.’ ”

The crowning irony is that no one made things more personal than Falk, as when the Clippers passed up his client, Mike Bibby, as the No. 1 pick in 1999 and Falk went around crowing, “Revenge on the Clippers!” Now with Jordan and his star clients gone, he’s just another agent, paying the price for the decisions he made.

This is so over: After Allen Iverson went out because of an injury for the second time this season, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that “for the first time in memory, players are questioning whether Allen Iverson, a renowned gamer, is dogging it.”

Meanwhile, interim Coach Chris Ford had already benched Iverson for missing a practice and fined him for failing to inform Ford personally that he wouldn’t attend a game. Iverson then returned and shot two for 21 in a home loss to the Knicks.

What can we add but amen: Former Clipper Eric Piatkowski: “I think when you decide to be on the Lakers, you realize it’s going to be a circus over there. You’re on the Lakers. You’re in Los Angeles. You have Shaq and Kobe [Bryant]. Even minus all the problems going on right now, the whole nine years I was there, there was always something going on. So many people are interested.

“They do an awfully good job, putting that stuff on the back burner and focusing on the task at hand usually. You get numb to it, especially living in L.A. It’s a different world. A lot of those guys love that spotlight. Guys on that team, guys want to be movie stars. Guys want to be rappers. They love the spotlight. It doesn’t seem to affect them at all. They handle it awfully well. This year, they’ve had more to handle than in the past.”