Basketball in Secret, or a Day at the Nike Hoop Summit

The gym in the Portland Trail Blazers Practice Facility, just south of Portland, is the most precisely climate-controlled room I have ever been inside. The room has white walls, two full basketball courts, two rows of chairs for spectators, and a temperature of precisely 65 degrees, with no excess moisture. It is in every way a remarkable feat of indoors exercise engineering, and if I had not been surrounded by other people, I would have fastened together a pair of exercise shorts out of a ball bag and taken a breezy jog around the perimeter, just to know what it was like to exercise in perfect air, air engineered for maximum workout efficiency.

But I was surrounded by other people—basketball scouts, coaches, executives players, and reporters—because I was there to watch teams practice for the Nike Hoop Summit. The Summit is a yearly event put on by USA Basketball in which a team of America's best prep players square off against a team of foreign-born players of equivalent age picked from European teams and American prep programs.

Many future NBA players are playing in this game. There are NBA people everywhere, and there are no college basketball people anywhere. This is, unmistakably, an NBA event, and these players are being evaluated, by 150 or so scouts, with regards to their potential as NBA professionals. They will be the benchmarks for other college basketball players during that weird year they have to spend in the hands of the NCAA, but those other players were not invited to the Nike Hoop Summit.

And so these players are basically attending a headhunting conference, where they are expected to show that they can be professionals a year before they are allowed to actually be professionals. Some of the players—namely the Europeans on club teams—already are professionals. We have some very odd ideas about what people should have to do before being allowed to make money playing a sport, although you already know that.

There are similar circularities, even at this more straightforwardly business-oriented event. These practices are nominally in preparation for the actual Nike Hoop Summit, which happened at the Rose Garden on Saturday, but the game is actually an excuse to have the practices, so that the players' skills and habits can be more thoroughly observed over the course of a week by the many people there to observe them. Some scouts do not even attend the actual game, which is very, very fun to watch but also noisier, in both the data collection and auditory senses, than a practice environment. The game is for the players and the public, and the practices are for all the NBA people there to grade, quantify, evaluate, and rate.

Before the first practice started, I had to run to my seat because I got up to get some water too late. I was consumed by a shame I cannot describe, a feeling that everyone in the gym was watching me and absolutely annihilating my running form in their heads, picking out every flaw, noting the hitch in my gait from when I permanently tore foot ligaments when I was 20, checking out my extra 50 or so pounds and jotting "CONDITIONING PROBLEMS" in their phones, crossing me off not only their lists of viable NBA players, but viable humans. I don't understand how anyone can put up with this kind of scrutiny. You would need the preternatural confidence of a professional athlete.

I went to two practices on Friday afternoon. The World's practice is standard-issue stuff: a transition drill in which a guard and a big man ran down the court facing each other from about four feet away, passing back and forth and making a layup, a short jumper, or a stepback jumper, depending on the phase of the drill. The World Team's assistant coach, Marin Sedlacek, a 50-ish Serbian with grey hair, lets out a "Jesus Christ" or a "That is not the drill" after botches. This produces some laughter from the gathered scouts and reporters, which is something like the day's only mass exclamatory response. The room is extraordinarily quiet.

The players sedately walk up and down the court with massive high kicks to get limber. Then, everyone stretches—obscure stretches, ones that look very complicated. None of the scouts seem to be watching any of this; they are looking at their phones. I slid my eyes to look at what was happening on these screens, and saw that its owner was browsing the Google Play store.

The players go through three separate five-minute scrimmages. The first two are standard five-minute games, and the third emphasizes beating a full-court press, which is one of the signatures of USA Basketball teams up and down the spectrum of competition. It's about as exciting as it sounds.

But there is also something beguiling about it. Watching basketball in this environment is different. It's as if you are watching basketball players deliver their doctoral thesis to a panel of 150 scouts, who in turn have seen a million NBA plays in their lifetimes, and also are at work, and therefore provide none of the audience-response cues that basketball players are used to. The players play and the scouts sit, take notes, observe, and formulate conclusions and opinions they will take back to their offices. These impressions will be added to others not yet made, and eventually make some of these players very wealthy NBA players.

These players are, at this moment, both hugely unfinished and impossibly talented. Australian Ben Simmons already has the size to be an NBA power forward, and the talent be anything—he is an excellent dribbler, particularly in transition, a shot-devouring defender, and an awe inspiring passer. He's 6'10", and his nine assists in Saturday's Hoop Summit game—a narrow 103-101 win for the World, if it matters—set a World Select team record.

They were all at least a little like this. Skal Labissiere, a Haitian Refugee whose guardian is a very creepy shadester, is very tall and fast and became the top prospect of the 2016 NBA Draft during his week in Oregon. Skal spent the week nailing long two-pointers like some horrible machine and putting the fear of god into Thon Maker, a Malian Prep Product who was once the subject of an unfortunate highlight mix declaring him THE NEXT KEVIN DURANT. He is probably not the next Kevin Durant, because he did not seem to have any particular aptitude for dribbling or shooting.

Everywhere, there is NBA talent rattling around in bodies that cannot yet make a home for it. There's Zhou Qi, 7'2", who panics when he gets the ball under the rim. There's Luke Kennard, Duke-bound and rangy, whose face is absolutely amazing—his eyes are enormous, you can practically drink the pure feelings right off his face, even when you can't tell what the feelings are. Jamal Murray, a Canadian point guard playing in his second Hoop Summit, exploded heedlessly through double-teams. Caleb Swanigan was a lineman, lost a bunch of weight, and is now an extremely wide 6'9" teenager bound for Michigan State. They are all bound for someplace.

These stakes and this type of observation would make a lot of people uncomfortable. Sports, especially live sports, are consumed in a climate elevated and defined by collective emotion. This sterile environment packed with half-bored 50-something dudes in polos is something like the opposite of that. It was less uncomfortable than it might seem, though, and appealing in an odd sort of way. I have often wished I could just watch sports in a quiet museum, a white box in which the action just unfolds and I make up my own mind about what it means and what it is, without the braying of an audience imposing value on the action. I loved the silence so much that I may have a hard time going back.

What actually happens in high level basketball, the turning of the gears and various subtle progressions that result in the punctuating dunks and threes, was easier to sense in this environment. During the second scrimmage, there was a dunk out of a halfcourt set, for the usual mundane weakside reasons. Even before it happened, it was clear that something was breaking down, because the players and the coaches—who talk CONSTANTLY during play, even with a language barrier—began to talk faster and get louder and louder and louder, an auditory macro-panic, that climaxes right before the dunk and ends when Sedlacek calls a timeout.

The practice ends early, to get the players a rest before Saturday's game, and most of the NBA people filter out. The upcoming USA practice is either closed to scouts or not of any particular interest; it's likely that they had already seen plenty of the American players by this point. In their place is a leather jacket-ed Mike D'Antoni, who to the best of my knowledge is not presently working for a NBA team, and does not appear to have a credential. It seems possible that he just walked in to watch and no one stopped him.

In the second practice, D'Antoni and I watch the full 11-Man United States team play three FIBA-Regulation quarters against a ragtag group of ex-college players that I will call "The Red Team," on account of their snazzy red USA Basketball jerseys. The Red Team had five players and two other dudes without uniforms, and was charismatic to the point of distraction. How could anyone concentrate on the basketball subtleties of a bunch of 18-year-olds when The King's Pickup Team was lined up on the other side?

The Red Team was led by an undersized point guard with a tremendous handle; the U.S. guards were reaching in and throwing their arms up in frustration throughout. The forwards were dudes who could shoot or dunk. Their center was Brandon Cataldo, a 6'10" Portland State alum with some heft and skill. He seemed to take a special joy in using his grown-man heft to push Team USA's undersized or underweight centers around in the post. This ragtag group of pickup-game heroes lost every quarter to a team of future NBA Draft picks who were serious and focused as they neared the end of the week that marked the beginning of their lives as professionals.

It is worth mentioning that Red Team seemed to have a blast doing it—joking with the refs, drawing up plays with their coach, and just playing basketball. In this perfect air, under the dispassionate gaze of people ready to be off work, it was a truly inspiring display of humanity. And also a strangely personal one—a private basketball game that had erupted in a climate where that sort of thing shouldn't be able to grow. A funky, forgettable game played for no stakes that grew in the cracks of new concrete, which was only seen at all because some reporters didn't want to go back to their hotels yet. That's the stuff.