Season at Dysfunctional Sevilla Should Have Kristaps Porzingis Ready for Knicks

[DaNGeROuS KiLLeR]

Kristaps Porzingis (6) appeared in all 50 ACB and Eurocup games, averaging 11 points, 4.6 rebounds, 1.4 turnovers and 21.4 minutes last season.

 

Kristaps Porzingis might feel more at home in the environmental unpredictability orunrestrained wackiness of Madison Square Garden than one would think. At 19, he has already seen and experienced worse.

 

Porzingis, the promising 7-foot-1 Latvian taken fourth by the Knicks in last month’s N.B.A. draft, trained and played as a growing teenager in Spain’s top league, the ACB, with Baloncesto Sevilla, a team that descended into organizational chaos this past season and could be on the brink of collapse.

 

“Oh, man, that season was a mess,” said Derrick Byars, a teammate of Porzingis’s in 2014-15. “At this point, I don’t even mind saying that was the most unprofessional team I’ve been around.”

 

And Byars — an American who has also played pro ball in Germany, Greece, France, Belgium, Puerto Rico and the N.B.A. Development League — has been around.

 

As feuding Americans figure prominently in this strange Spanish inquisition, Porzingis probably wouldn’t be shocked if the Knicks — should they improve only marginally next season — divide into camps driven by the respective agendas of their president, Phil Jackson, and their franchise star, Carmelo Anthony, with James Dolan, the Garden’s mercurial chairman, having the ultimate say.

 

The good news is that Dolan is not likely to run out of money, ensuring everyone gets paid.

 

As with many European teams that are not among the elite, financial interests were at the core of Sevilla’s troubles, leading CaixaBank, the company that controls the team, to strike a deal last year with a Colorado-based businessman, Jeffrey Meythaler. According to organization insiders and reports in Spanish newspapers, Meythaler was supposed to make an initial investment in the team while agreeing to gradually assume operating expenses.

 

He became a visible presence, according to Byars and Dane Watts, another American player with Sevilla last season. Meythaler attended practices and games, involved himself in personnel transactions and was soon clashing with the team’s newly hired coach, Scott Roth, another American import with a decade’s experience as an N.B.A. assistant.

 

Roth had played in Spain following a brief career in the N.B.A. and fancied working with Porzingis — already projected for the 2015 lottery — and two other young players who wound up being chosen in the second round, Guillermo Hernangomez (by Philadelphia, which traded his rights to the Knicks) and Nikola Radicevic (Denver).

 

“Soon as I got there, it became very obvious that the situation wasn’t good and it was going to spiral out of control,” Roth said.

 

Scott Roth was unable to get a license to coach  ACB games so he was relegated to the status of a team manager.

 

To coach in ACB games, Roth needed a license sanctioned by the league and by FIBA, the international governing body. Given his N.B.A. experience, he had been assured he would get one. He didn’t. Officially, he was relegated to the status of a team manager during Spanish league games, forbidden to call timeouts, address officials or stand up to stretch his legs, much less counsel a player.

 

One Spanish newspaper referred to him as entrenador fantasma — the phantom coach — but plain for the players to see was that the team was lacking in stable front-office leadership.

 

“I hadn’t had anything like that in my six years playing abroad,” said Watts, 29, who played college ball at Creighton. “You would think that with Americans it would have been more secure, but it was a crazy situation — a lot of weird stuff going on every day between the coach and the owner.”

 

The license mandate was in keeping with rules influenced by a Spanish coaches’ association, Roth said, but there was suspicion that Sevilla was being singled out because of the club’s tactics in circumventing restrictions on the number of Americans allowed per team.

 

Byars and Watts said they had played under passports mysteriously obtained from the Ivory Coast. On the Eurobasket website, the nationality for Watts, who is white and originally from Missouri, is listed as “USA-Ivorian.”

 

Roth ran practices and coached the team in its Eurocup games, where Spanish league rules did not apply. His assistant, Audie Norris, also a former American pro who had played in Spain, handled ACB in-game chores, but the team was roiled by extreme front-office pressure for the coaches to use certain players.

 

“We had good talent, veteran guys and the three young players who wound up getting drafted,” said Byars, 31, who played in college at Virginia and Vanderbilt. “But it started with the coaching situation — I mean, the guy can’t even stand up — and then there seemed to be so many things going on in the front office. We were 0-5, and people started blaming Scott.”

 

Byars recalled that he had last seen Meythaler at a team Christmas dinner, and then he seemed to be gone. The team struggled with expenses, and Byars says he is still owed around $22,000.

 

Meythaler did not return a message left at a Denver-area office to answer questions about his brief involvement with the team or its current status; the team is conducting an urgent search for new investors.

 

Roth departed Sevilla in midseason. Watts, who was signed by Meythaler while training in Las Vegas, left in January because he wasn’t playing much and his wife was pregnant. Byars stayed on as the team, fortified by two new players, won just enough ACB games, 12, to avoid relegation to a lower division next season — if there is a next season.

 

Byars and Watts are looking for work elsewhere, not looking back. “We were kind of the outcasts of the league,” Watts said.

Porzingis was largely unfazed by it all, according to his older brother, Janis.

 

“Maybe for the older players, what happened there affected them more because it’s their job, their way to make money,” he said. “For the younger ones, I think it was easier because they only want to play, get better.”

 

Through it all, Porzingis appeared in all 50 ACB and Eurocup games, averaging 11 points, 4.6 rebounds, 1.4 turnovers and 21.4 minutes. He made friends and fans of the Americans, Roth, Watts and Byars.

 

Having worked with a young Pau Gasol and Andrea Bargnani, among other European big men, Roth said he knew the difference between a star prospect and a pretender.

“Kris is a tough kid with passion, a worker, and he’s not going to back down from anyone,” Roth said. “He’s going to get knocked around a bit the first couple of years, but by the time he’s 23, you could have a monster on your hands.”

 

Watts recalled a preseason game against Valencia, one of Spain’s better teams, in which Porzingis had dominating stretches on the offensive and defensive ends, including a flurry of blocked shots.

 

Watts, a 6-8 forward, said: “I’ve been in Europe a long time and never had my shot blocked that many times in practice. I mean, he’s got that length.”

 

When contacted by N.B.A. teams looking for red flags on Porzingis, Byars told them there were none he could see, with the exception of Porzingis’s need to fill out.

“I don’t want to go on the record predicting the Hall of Fame, but he’s as seasoned and mature as any 19-year-old in Europe I’ve been around,” Byars said. “He’s thin, but it’s a strong thin frame.”

 

He added, “Kris has endless potential given the right situation, the right opportunity.”

 

There lies the danger of a volatile workplace, of Jackson’s — and Anthony’s — inability to draw A-list free-agent talent to the Knicks, which in all likelihood consigns the team to at least another season or two on the fringe of the playoffs, at best.

 

Porzingis coolly shrugged off the knee-jerk booing of his selection at the draft in Brooklyn, but impatient Knicks fans may be the least of it, given the Garden’s history of internal quarreling. With no first-round pick next season — and with the odds of attracting a 2016 star free agent probably no better than this year, as much better teams will also be flush with salary cap space — the measure of Anthony’s moods will become a constant and potentially destabilizing narrative.

 

Jackson recently called him the Knicks’ “favorite son,” but for the sake of the team’s long-range [CENSORED]ure, the argument could be made that a nurturing incubator for Porzingis is a bigger priority.

 

“The sky may be the limit for him,” Watts said. “I’m just not sure anything can prepare a 19-year-old for the Garden.”

 

No worries there. Porzingis will turn 20 on Aug. 2. But having survived Sevilla — a place Byars called “dysfunctional, top to bottom” — he will now be a tall lightning rod in New York, the embodiment of Jackson’s delicate balancing act, now versus next, for a franchise without a title for nearly four and a half decades.

 

They’d be well advised to play nice with the new kid, and handle with care.