NEW YORK—The NBA scout doing advance work at a recent Knicks-Pelicans preseason game couldn’t stop raving about Noah Vonleh, the former Portland Trailblazers lottery pick now striving to make the New York roster without a guaranteed contract.
“He’s gonna get a lot of run without (Kristaps) Porzingis,” he said. “He can help them.”
Advertisement
There’s plenty to unpack about the current NBA, how teams build, and what we’ve come to know about player development in that one observation. But Vonleh is symptomatic of a group of players that teams can acquire fairly easily every summer.
Vonleh is well-traveled—Charlotte, Portland and Chicago are already on the back of his basketball card. And yet: he only turned 23 in August, and the very reason expectations reached so high for him in his three previous stops are why the scout made sure to give him extra attention: he was once a lottery pick, ninth overall in the 2014 NBA Draft.
When lottery picks step on the court, even after they’ve proven to be poor fits in their previous stops, you can see why other teams decided to bet a significant part of the future on them. So it is with Vonleh, his enormous hands, a legit 6’10 frame capable of banging inside and versatile enough to step out and shoot. Even amid the relative slumber of a preseason game at Madison Square Garden, Vonleh brought the crowd to life with a feed from Trey Burke, finding a lane and punctuating with a thunderous dunk. A few possessions later, Vonleh brought the ball up himself, every bit the point forward, and pulled up for a long three.
“I feel like in college I had a mid-range game down,” Vonleh said after the game, standing in front of his locker. “I had some three-pointers, I didn’t shoot too many, but the ones I did shoot in college, I knocked them down. I’m just trying to do it with more consistency, that’s the main thing with my shooting.”
Vonleh knows what makes up the most appealing parts of his game—the ball-handling at his size, the ability to post up, elite defensive rebounding numbers—were largely present back when he was an undergrad at Indiana. So what needs to change for Vonleh to become the starter he and the collective wisdom of the league projected him to be? “I mean, yeah, it comes down to comfort,” Vonleh said. “It also comes down to getting playing time and being able to grow as a player, that’s the main thing.”
Advertisement
If you hear more than a bit of the mental approach in Vonleh’s words, you aren’t alone. The Knicks are working to supplement their young stars and own lottery picks—Kristaps Porzingis, Frank Ntilikina, Kevin Knox—with other former lottery picks, still young enough to represent more promise than a cemented sense of failure. There’s Vonleh, in camp on a non-guaranteed deal. Mario Hezonja, former fifth overall pick by the Magic back in 2015, signed a one-year, $6.5 million deal this summer. Emmanuel Mudiay, selected two picks later in that same draft by the Nuggets, earned a start against the Pelicans. And the reason, per Knicks coach David Fizdale, was more mental than strategic, wanting to see him “playing free and relaxed”, avoiding the worry about a quick hook.
“A lot of this stuff is psychological for these kids, if it doesn’t work out right away that’s the first time they probably failed in their life,” Fizdale said. “These guys have been great since, what, the 9th grade? And all of a sudden they’re in the NBA at 19, 20 years old, and all of a sudden, boom, you get punched. And that takes a toll on you. So, breaking through to them psychologically is probably the biggest part for me, and reassuring them that they belong here, and their skills are valued here.”
The scout had his doubts about Mudiay, having seen him against the Nets struggle to impact the game. Though his shot wasn’t falling against the Pelicans, Mudiay managed to collect six assists over 22 minutes, managing the game in a way he’d never consistently found in Denver.
He’s 22, and Emmanual Mudiay is searching for control, pushing to get back on top of his own destiny here in his second stop. He’s still got a chance to prove to the league that the swarms of scouts who once put him among the most coveted players in a class with Porzingis, Karl-Anthony Towns and Myles Turner can still get there. His perception of himself as a player is no different than the day he was selected by Denver, he insisted, as reporters surrounded him after the game by his locker.
“I wouldn’t say it’s changed,” Mudiay said. “Just being aggressive, whether that’s aggressive passing or scoring. Just today was aggressive making plays for other people, so today it was this.”
Advertisement
Across the court, the Pelicans have adopted a similar pipeline of former lottery picks. Their starting point guard is Elfrid Payton, the tenth pick in the 2014 draft by the Sixers, then sent to Orlando, followed by a brief stop in Phoenix. The biggest acquisition of the summer was Julius Randle, a victim of salary cap re-arrangement by the Lakers to accommodate LeBron James, the lottery pick every team dreams of as Adam Silver steps to the podium to tell the public the big news. Even Jahlil Okafor, former Sixer, former Net, was in Pelicans camp, trying to make the roster and erase several years of professional heartache.
“I think in those situations, sometimes it’s just fit,” Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry told The Athletic. “A guy that’s a lottery pick that didn’t make it somewhere else, sometimes there’s a system that you feel like he may be better equipped to play in. Nothing against the team that drafted him or anything, but it doesn’t always work out. It’s just never an exact science. In those situations, I just think sometimes a system that a guy is playing in may be better suited for his ability than another system.”
That’s what Gentry thinks he has in Randle, who certainly showed himself to be a capable contributor after the Lakers selected him seventh overall in 2014, though not important enough for Los Angeles to find a way to keep him around once James came to town. His multi-faceted game, most notably the ability to operate as a secondary facilitator out of the four-spot, seems built to both maximize Anthony Davis and hopefully for New Orleans, keep Davis in town.
As for Payton, he sat quietly at his locker on Friday before the game, thinking about the ways he intended to show New Orleans that he, too, is part of the solution.
“I think the talent fits me,” Payton said in his understated way, almost a whisper. “[This team] needs someone trying, pushing pace. This team’s trying to run, this team has shooters, guys that can do a lot of versatile things, you already know it’s real good defensively as well.” He looked up, paused, seeming to consider his place in the league. “I think so. It’s still gotta work itself out. Just gotta play.”
Payton did plenty of that, looking at all times like he’d been shot out of one of The Garden’s t-shirt guns onto the court, particularly as the second half started—straight down the floor, ahead of the New York defense, a quick trigger pass to E’Twaun Moore in the corner for three, then deflecting the ball out of Knox’s hand on the subsequent possession from behind, earning the respect of the advance scout, who like Gentry, wanted to know whether the promise of talent could be realized somewhere new.
On this night, though, it was Vonleh who most resembled the dreams all these lottery picks still hold, the ones who broke through immediately like Porzingis and Davis no less than the strivers still in their early 20s like Payton and Vonleh, the latter of whom finished with a double-double in just 13 minutes.
Advertisement
And so Fizdale, who said he has been assured he can take the 15 best players from camp, guaranteed contract or not, was able to dream on Vonleh the way Vonleh has about himself for years, back when he came to Madison Square Garden as a talented freshman with the Hoosiers.
“Oh yeah, I think you could see it,” Fizdale said. “With him, I think it stands out… The first day we got him for pickup, the first thing I told him was, ‘If you rebound the ball, push it.’ ‘Cause big guys love that crap. And turns out, the kid’s got a great handle. And so, you start to see, yeah, some talent there. Athletically, IQ-wise, I think hitting bottom a little bit. It helps these guys sometimes, they spring back pretty quick. Some of them take a little longer.”
(Photo Credit: Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images)