Hollywood’s fast break

It’s Saturday afternoon at a high school gym, and two basketball teams are battling it out for the league championship title. The sweat is flying, the benches are in a mad frenzy, and the 250 spectators are clapping thunder sticks. It could be Anywhere, USA., except that Will Ferrell is passing the ball to Donald Faison of “Scrubs.” Dean Cain is cheering from the bleachers, and Johnny Alves, a consultant for HBO’s “Entourage,” is nearly stealing the show with his enthusiastic stretching and flexing courtside, like something out of, well, “Entourage.”

This is the hottest basketball game no one can get into.

The NBA Entertainment League is an official offshoot of the National Basketball Assn., with 16 teams named after real NBA franchises. So this season, you had the NBAE Cavaliers and Nuggets locked in a championship battle at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, populated not with professional basketball players, but professional Hollywood players (writers, actors, agents, managers, musicians and directors).

Commissioner Shane Duffy runs the NBAE, which was launched in 1999 to increase celebrity face time, like some cross between an intramural league, an exclusive Hollywood club and a kiddie fantasy camp. And it has serious cachet. Justin Timberlake, Adam Sandler, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashton Kutcher, Jamie Foxx and Don Cheadle have all taken turns in the league, which operated in a near media blackout until now (the first time anyone had heard of it was after director Ted Demme collapsed on the bench during a game and died of a heart attack afterward at a hospital).

The games are officiated by professional NBA referees, timeouts are filled with entertainment from on-loan Laker Girls and the Sacramento Kings break-dancing squad. There’s even sponsored swag (Wrigley’s Doublemint is apparently the “official chewing gum” of the NBA and the NBAE).

Considering the number of tabloid cameras, you’d think the crowd at the April 12 championship game would have been star-studded. It wasn’t. In fact, people cheered more for the free NBA clothing than for the teams, which were long on determination but short on scoring percentage.

Duffy decides who gets into the league, and he drafts the teams. “We have a big kickoff party at the beginning of the season,” he said during a break. “And the guys find out who is on their team two days before they play their first game.”

Attention to detail is crucial, he says: “Every little thing: the socks, the official uniforms, not allowing players to wear T-shirts underneath, these things all help create the ultimate fantasy of being in the NBA.”

A glance around the gym reveals that the players take the league -- and the competition -- quite seriously too. The Cavaliers hired a shooting coach for the season (a first for the league, Duffy notes). Behind the Nuggets bench, Alves, cousin of Mark Wahlberg and inspiration for Kevin Dillon’s “Johnny Drama” character on “Entourage,” is splayed out on the floor with a trainer, while kitted out in purple Los Angeles Lakers track pants, a Sunday white Lakers jersey and a pair of white and purple Nikes embroidered with the Lakers name and his jersey number.

Cain said he’d passed on a project that would have taken him to South Africa because it would have conflicted with the end of the season. A player since the beginning of the league, Cain was still lamenting the elimination of his team, the Heat. “It should be us out there against the Nuggets,” he said, shaking his head. “The Cavs eliminated us earlier in the week with a last-minute basket, and I’m still bitter about it.”

And when the Nuggets took the championship, Morris Chestnut (“Boyz n the Hood”) stood proudly hoisting his crystal trophy.

“This,” Chestnut said, “is the high point of my career.”

The score, by the way, was 54-46.

--

adam.tschorn@latimes.com