The N.B.A. draft at Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, is a scene of family happiness that feels both intensely cathartic and also overdetermined. The players sit at round tables before an enormous stage; behind them are rows of press tables and, behind that, two separate TV sets with live commentary. The proceedings are witnessed by half an arena of fans, most of them wearing jerseys of the Knicks, Boston, Philly, Lakers, OKC, and so on, including two different Shawn Kemp Seattle SuperSonics jerseys. The atmosphere in the stands is a peculiar mixture of slavish devotion and a yearning to lament. Chants of “Fire Phil!” ripple through the arena now and then, driven by a bearded young man in a Knicks jersey who stomps around with a piece of cardboard on which these two words are written.
The N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, appears at the podium. Names are called. Thin young men rise to hug their weeping mothers, kiss their smiling sisters, slap hands with fathers, brothers, and friends. Each is handed a cap with the name of the team that drafted him on it as he makes his way up to the stage. It’s like a graduation, though it’s not entirely clear what they are graduating from. Not high school; there is an N.B.A. age minimum of nineteen for players, even though the one-and-done era is getting awkward and is probably nearing its end. The first seven picks of this year’s draft were all freshmen, a record. And the draft is not a college graduation; there were only two seniors drafted in the first two rounds.
Up on the podium, there is a handshake with the commissioner—or a soul shake, depending on last-second hand communications. Then a smile for the cameras. A huge video monitor is filled with highlights of the young man onstage, doing his thing. Then the draftee steps off one stage and onto a television set for a live interview with N.B.A. “Fantasy Insiders” Dennis Scott and Rick Kamla. This produces some nice moments, such as when Josh Jackson, a large, athletic player whose highlight reel of cacophonous dunks is playing on the screen, is asked, “Where do you get that competitive spirit?” “My mom,” he says. He adds that he would play her one on one, and she would regularly win and make him cry.
From there, the players move onto a haunted house of media obligations that wend their way through the concrete hallways of the Barclays Center like stations of the cross—the social-media room, the interview room, the Tissot-watch presentation room, and, finally, the live room. The players must stop and talk at each stall. In the hallways, they are harassed or approached or ignored by the free-floating mob of journalists and functionaries, and also random kids who are, I presume, related to someone who knows someone somewhere who is important somehow.
The Frenchman Frank Ntilikina, a resident of Strasbourg, in Alsace, on the border of Germany, is draft pick No. 8 by the Knicks. I go down to the interview room to see him up close. He wears a dark-red suit and a red bow tie with a crisp white shirt. All basketball players look more slender in person than on TV, doubly true of these young guys in the draft, but Ntilikina is nearly avian. The child of Rwandan parents, he is a six-feet-five point guard who was born in Belgium and moved to France at an early age. He is asked for his thoughts on Phil Jackson and replies, “The triangle is a system that brings him a lot of championships. I think I can definitely fit with this system.” He is asked about his suit. He has been working with a tailor on his suit for about three months, he says.
I ask him a question that begins, “I’m wondering about your childhood in France.” I point out that New York is famous for producing point guards who hone their skill in competitive pickup basketball games. “I’m wondering if any such thing exists in Strasbourg, and if you could say anything about when you fell in love with the sport when you were a kid.”
“I fell in love with the sport when I played with my brother in the park. I was every day going to the park trying to play.”
“Which park?”
“Close to my house. It’s called La Citadelle.”
Then he is out in the concrete hallway, surrounded by a gaggle of press like a statesman emerging from a high-level meeting. They are all French—correspondents from Le Figaro, Le Monde, and others. The journalists are full of gossip. Ntilikina is leaving in a few hours, for a 2 A.M. flight back to Paris, because the professional team for which he plays, SIG Strasbourg, is in the last game of the league finals the following night. It’s a charter flight that, one of them claims to know, cost ninety thousand dollars. A camerawoman named Gaelle mentions that Ntilikina’s childhood coach, Abdel, was among the party at his table, and was happier than she had ever seen him. I am intrigued that Ntilikina, the youngest player in the draft, had flown his childhood coach over from France to join his family on this occasion.
I ask Gaelle how she knew Abdel. She explains that he had been her coach when she attended basketball camp at age eleven. Meeting him is suddenly my top priority. Gaelle, amazingly, has his number. There is a series of texts and confused, murky phone calls. I go to an arranged spot and realize that I am scanning the crowd for a person whose only defining characteristic is that he is, as Gaelle put it, “glowing with joy.” Twenty minutes later, I am standing before Abdel Loucif in the food court, next to Cafe Habana. He is still glowing with joy. He wears a gray suit and a shirt with no tie. His frizzy hair is combed back, his forehead broad and gleaming. He doesn’t speak all that much English, and I speak almost no French. But it is wonderful to talk to him because his basketball lexicon is infused with unusual ingredients that I cannot readily identify but that make me happy, too.
Abdel first coached Frank when he was thirteen, he says. “He worked a lot. When he missed a lot of shots, he got to the playground after practice and worked alone.”
“Which playground?” I ask.
“The Citadelle! At the Citadelle, he played very free, but in practice he was very rigorous. My philosophy when working with young players is to give them a sense of pleasure in working. Frank’s values, I saw it in his eyes from the first day. We begin the first practices and you tell him, ‘Go to this line,’ and he goes. And when he plays in a game he immediately uses what you taught him. But he uses it in a way that makes it his own.”
“Not a lot of young players have this ability to combine what you tell them with the ability to improvise. Not a lot of young players can do that.”
It turns out that Abdel came to basketball from an unusual angle. He grew up in Schirmeck, a small town near Strasbourg, and studied mathematics and physics at the university at Strasbourg. From the ages of twenty-three to thirty-two, he was a math teacher. Only then did he begin teaching and coaching young kids in basketball. A bunch of young kids in Knicks jerseys walk by. I ask one of them to take our picture, and while he sizes up the frame—“Portrait or landscape?” he asks, earnestly—I can’t help but blurt out, “This guy right here coached Frank Ntilikina when he was a kid!” They besiege Abdel with questions about how Frank is going to help the Knicks, which Frank interprets to be questions about how Frank will improve himself. He starts mimicking weight lifting until I explain that their interest is not in Frank but in the Knicks. The kids are suddenly seized with a sense of duty to explain the basketball horror in which they have spent their whole lives—I don’t think they were even born during the Sprewell glory days, never mind Ewing. They take turns saying how awful and hopeless the Knicks are, and how Phil should be fired. Sometimes I think being a Knicks fan is just the process of fermenting bitterness until it turns to joy.
Abdel continues to exude a magnificent mixture of gravity and elation. “The N.B.A. was for him a great dream,” Abdel says, when I ask him more about Frank at thirteen. “When his name was called tonight, I was so happy. I remember when he began to play, and we speak a lot of times of N.B.A. and some players, like Durant, one of his favorite players. And now he is here.” Afterward, as we prepare to part, it occurs to me to ask what kind of math Abdel specialized in as a teacher. In what might be the most auspicious Knicks news of the night, he responded, “Geometry.” “You’re kidding! That is so great!” I shout. “The triangle!” And Abdel throws his head back and laughs, and the Cafe Habana is lowering its gates, the hour is getting late, and we shout and laugh some more, and pat each other’s shoulders. I am at last enveloped in the irrational joy of sports fandom, when you think other people’s triumphs are your own.
