Biedrins, Ha taking different routes
By Chad Ford
NBA Insider
Send an Email to Chad Ford
Friday, May 21
LOS ANGELES - Andris Biedrins and Ha Seung Jin represent the changing face of international basketball and the ever-morphing NBA draft.
Biedrins, who just turned 18 several weeks ago, is the first prototype of a new Euro hybrid that destroys just about every stereotype there is about European big men. His game is closer to Kevin Garnett's than Dirk Nowitzki's. He is strong, athletic and can jump out of the gym.
He's a 7-footer who doesn't hang out on the perimeter shooting jumpers. He lives in the paint, hustling for rebounds, blocking shots and spinning off his defenders for power dunks. Unlike most of the untested 18-year-old Euros in the draft, he not only plays on a senior team -- he stars on it.
Ha, who also just turned 18, is at the other end of the spectrum. He's one of a growing group of physical freaks who loom large over the future of the NBA paint. Standing over 7-foot-4 inches in shoes and weighing a whopping 323 pounds, Ha has taken a new path to the NBA that could become a major trend in the league if he succeeds.
Instead of languishing in a bad league with a coach who had no idea how to prepare for the NBA, his agent, SFX's Bob Myers, took Ha out of South Korea over six months ago, rented him an apartment in L.A. and then brought in the very best physical trainers and basketball coaches to see if they could create the NBA's version of Frankenstein -- a man-made NBA giant created through the art of science.
Insider traveled to L.A. this week to watch Biedrins and Ha prepare for the draft.
The new Euro
Andris Biedrins is the prototype of the new Euro big man.
Andris Biedrins is about 30 minutes into his workout on Wednesday with the L.A. Lakers at their practice facility and he's barely breaking a sweat.
Lakers assistant coach Bill Bertka hands Biedrins a medicine ball and asks him to crouch down and then dunk it as many times as he can. Biedrins dunks. And then he dunks again. An assistant throws Biedrins another, heavier basketball. He grabs it and dunks it again.
As the balls get heavier, the thud of them hitting the floor gets louder. Biedrins picks them up and slams the home -- mostly with ease.
Bertka walks away shaking his head. Bertka has been around the Lakers since the days of Wilt Chamberlain. He's seen a lot. Today, he's getting a new experience.
Biedrins goes into a four-corner drill. Bertka and company set up four cones around the NBA lane and ask Biedrins to shuttle through it as fast as he can. The drill is supposed to measure lateral quickness -- a key element for any NBA player's defense.
Bertka hits the stopwatch and Biedrins is off in a flash. His feet are moving in blur. Lakers GM Mitch Kuphchak moves a little closer in his chair.
Then the real fun begins. Biedrins picks up the ball and starts shooting NBA 3s.
Clank!
Clank!
Then swish -- as the ball sails under the rim and just catches the net. Biedrins works his way around the perimeter and the brick laying continues. He nails a few shots in the corner and walks away shrugging his shoulders. He wants to go back into the paint and start working on his post moves again.
About three years ago, NBA scouts began traveling over to Europe in droves hoping to find players with key ingredients that had become rare in American collegiate players -- size, shooting skills and rock solid fundamentals.
The quest reached a fever pitch last season when over 20 international players were taken on draft night. Most of them had the same thing in common. Enormous size and enormous skills for kids that size. However, as the season played out, their detractors started coming out of the woodwork.
The lack of defense, the lack of toughness and athleticism and an inability to use that size where NBA coaches wanted it most -- in the paint -- earned most of the international players drafted last year bench time instead of accolades.
Unlike most Euros, Biedrins prefers to live in the paint.
As one coach told Insider, "What do I want a 7-foot jump shooter for? I've got 6-foot-5 guys who can do it just as well or better and they can play their position."
Biedrins may be the answer to their prayers. He's unlike any Euro I've ever seen. He's long (7-foot with a 7-1½ wingspan), has great lateral quickness, is an explosive leaper with a 34½ inch vertical jump (Chris Bosh and Carmelo Anthony each have a 33 inch vertical by way of comparison) and . . . drum roll please . . Biedrins prefers to play in the paint where most 7-footers belong. He's a pure four whose specialty is defense, shot blocking and energy -- not real staples of the Euros who have been flooding the draft the past few years.
His body is ripped and he's got a strong core that allows him to play in the post despite turning 18-years-old just weeks ago. He bench presses 185 pounds around 15 times. Only one big guy in Chicago (Jason Keep) topped that in combine testing last year.
When one NBA executive saw him with his shirt off he proclaimed, "Good God! That's not the kid I saw in Latvia six months ago."
He has much more in common with Dwight Howard and Tyson Chandler than he does with Darko Milicic or Pau Gasol, and coaches may like it that way. There will be no reprogramming for Biedrins. Coaches won't pull their hair out when he wanders out to the 3-point line or when he allows a 6-foot-3 guard to grab a rebound over him. Biedrins is one of the rare athletes in a super sized frame who wants to play to his strengths.
Biedrins' journey to the NBA is pretty amazing. He went from an unknown kid playing in Latvia to one of the hottest prospects in the NBA draft after he flew to Las Vegas last summer and enrolled in an AAU tournament. NBA scouts were stunned to see the young 7-footer dominate against some of the top talent in the U.S. For the tournament, Biedrins averaged a triple double in points, rebounds and blocks and became the buzz of the camp.
Over the past six months, many NBA scouts have made the trip to Latvia and they liked what they saw. While there's no question that Biedrins is still very raw offensively, they loved his energy, bounciness and his willingness to defend. Even with a so-so shot and only a handful of post moves, by the end of the season he began averaging 20 points a game. Unlike most of the Euros in the draft who only saw action in practice, Biedrins began dominating international play by the end of the season. At the time he was still just 17 years old.
Biedrins is a physical specimen with all the tools. If his outside shot improves, he could be a special player.
His agent, Rade Filipovich (an associate of Bill Duffy), has already worked out an NBA-friendly $350,000 buyout with his club in Latvia. He's been working out in L.A. with a group call Athletes' Performance and they've already added 10 points of muscle and several inches to Biedrins' vertical jump.
In the space of those weeks he's also become fluent in English, picked up an L.A. tan and two diamond earrings and spends the few hours of free time he gets each day playing PlayStation and listening to Snoop Dog. I don't think NBA teams are going to have to worry too much about an adjustment period.
Biedrins' potent mix of athleticism, size and low-post sensibility is non-existent among any of the other Europeans in the draft (and Americans for that matter) with the exception of the much rawer Johan Petro from France. The difference between the two? Biedrins took Petro apart in a recent matchup in a junior tournament in Croatia.
What will ultimately scare a few teams away is his pedestrian outside shooting ability and questions about the competition level he played against in Latvia. Biedrins' outside shot isn't bad (in fact, in the second workout with the Clippers and Nuggets it was actually very, very good), but it's clear from his shooting form that he struggles to hit anything consistently outside of 12 feet from the basket -- think Andrei Kirilenko when he first came into the league.
Based on what I saw him do at two private workouts -- one with the Lakers on Wednesday and one with the Clippers and Nuggets on Thursday -- he'll likely be the first international player off the board on draft night and could go as high as the No. 3 pick in the draft depending on what team got the pick. More realistically, he'll probably fall anywhere from No. 5 to No. 12 on draft night.
Biedrins is the closest competition to Howard that there is in the draft at the four and my guess, after having seen both of them play, is that Biedrins could give Howard a real run for his money because of his aggressiveness and toughness. Teams have a few concerns about Howard's drive and toughness. Those just aren't issues with Biedrins. While Howard is certainly more skilled offensively and a better athlete, the top few teams in the draft should insist that the two players work out against each other. I think it would be a lot closer than people realize.
Ha is no laughing matter
Ha Seung Jin is head and shoulders above where was last year at this time.
Around this time last year, SFX brought a young Korean kid named Ha Seung Jin over to the United States and had him work out. The workout, which I later saw on video, was one of the bigger disappointments I had seen from a supposed top-notch prospect.
Ha was being billed as South Korea's answer to Yao Ming. All he really was, however, was all the things we feared Yao would be. He was slow, mechanical and lacked none of the skill or finesse Yao would go on to show in the league.
The rep that Ha was a joke quickly spread throughout the league and he was forgotten . . . until a few days ago when Ha began working out for NBA teams.
Frustrated with the progress Ha was making in South Korea and aware of the many physical problems Ha needed to work through, SFX took the unprecedented step of pulling him off his team and putting him into full workout mode six months ago.
They flew Ha and his family to L.A., put him up in an apartment in Brentwood and began working out all the flaws that they found. They hired Athletes' Performance to get rid of the body fat and make him more explosive. They worked him out every day in a gym in Santa Monica with a big man coach and several other former NBA players, including Eddie Griffin and Jelani McCoy. They even hired Ha a yoga instructor to teach him balance and flexibility.
The results have been simply . . . impressive. I watched Ha work out in front of several NBA teams, including the Lakers, Clippers, Jazz and Nuggets on Thursday, and I think it's safe to say that we all walked away a little stunned by Ha's improvement.
Six months of diligent workouts have increased Ha's strength, quickness and flexibility.
Over the course of six months Athletes' Performance has replaced the body fat with muscle, greatly improved his lateral quickness and vertical jump (he's now up to 25 inches with one step), given him a lot of strength in his lower body (his legs look like tree trunks) and taught him how to run the floor.
Everyone moved to the edge of the bleachers on Thursday when SFX put him into full court drills. His ability to get up and down the floor and dunk the basketball seems to have improved a hundred fold.
He was much better athletically than I had suspected. Surprisingly, however, he was also not quite as good skills wise as I had heard. His shot is still a little flat and he had trouble converting any shots that weren't dunks during his workout.
Still, when you measure 7-foot-4½ inches with shoes, have a 7-foot-5 wingspan a 9-foot-7 standing reach and weigh 328 pounds -- people aren't going to worry so much about the basketball skills at this point. He's already had private workouts for the Spurs and Blazers. He was so impressive in Portland on Wednesday that they are flying down to L.A. to see him again on Friday.
Still, Ha-quille O'Neal (as his agent calls him) isn't a slam dunk just yet. It's obvious that he's put in a lot of hard work over the past six months and that he's improved by leaps and bounds. But workouts are one thing. Playing in a game is another. SFX's decision to take Ha out of games and into full time training mode has paid off in one area . . . but will it backfire in another?
Several of the folks Insider talked to whom have seen Ha recently are understandably impressed with his size, athleticism and agility (he can even do the splits and a handstand thanks to the yoga training). However, they're worried that the zero playing time, combined with not a lot of great competition in Korea, has him way behind the curve of the other two enormous big men in the draft -- Pavel Podkolzine and Peter John Ramos.
"At the end of the day, as important as the workouts are, they're just one factor in the process," one NBA scout told Insider. "You've got to evaluate the entire package. That includes the workouts, the mental evaluations and the playing time. This kid really has nothing to evaluate on the court. He really hasn't played. He's a lab experiment in many ways. How do you draft a kid like that? I'll tell you . . . in the second round where nothing is guaranteed."
Teams in the late first round are showing interest in Ha.
That's just one opinion, however. Teams in the late first round are already showing enormous interest. Podkolzine and Ramos will be off the board by the time the draft hits the late first round and several teams hoping to find a diamond in the rough might be willing to take a shot on Ha based on his size and dramatic athletic improvement.
The fact that he already has a rabid following in South Korea will also help his cause.
"I really respect Yao (Ming)," Ha told Insider. "If he had given up or failed it would be much harder to do what I'm doing. I know he's helped me."
Can he help enough to get Ha in the late first round and guaranteed millions based on six months of intense training? At least one NBA scout thinks so.
"You can teach all of that other stuff," one scout told Insider. "As the old adage goes, you can't teach size. He's got that in abundance and it looks like with the proper training he can become a decent athlete. That's enough for someone to take him in the first."
If only we could get Podkolzine, Ramos, Ha and Cleiton Sebastio on the floor together. . .
By Chad Ford
NBA Insider
Send an Email to Chad Ford
Friday, May 21
LOS ANGELES - Andris Biedrins and Ha Seung Jin represent the changing face of international basketball and the ever-morphing NBA draft.
Biedrins, who just turned 18 several weeks ago, is the first prototype of a new Euro hybrid that destroys just about every stereotype there is about European big men. His game is closer to Kevin Garnett's than Dirk Nowitzki's. He is strong, athletic and can jump out of the gym.
He's a 7-footer who doesn't hang out on the perimeter shooting jumpers. He lives in the paint, hustling for rebounds, blocking shots and spinning off his defenders for power dunks. Unlike most of the untested 18-year-old Euros in the draft, he not only plays on a senior team -- he stars on it.
Ha, who also just turned 18, is at the other end of the spectrum. He's one of a growing group of physical freaks who loom large over the future of the NBA paint. Standing over 7-foot-4 inches in shoes and weighing a whopping 323 pounds, Ha has taken a new path to the NBA that could become a major trend in the league if he succeeds.
Instead of languishing in a bad league with a coach who had no idea how to prepare for the NBA, his agent, SFX's Bob Myers, took Ha out of South Korea over six months ago, rented him an apartment in L.A. and then brought in the very best physical trainers and basketball coaches to see if they could create the NBA's version of Frankenstein -- a man-made NBA giant created through the art of science.
Insider traveled to L.A. this week to watch Biedrins and Ha prepare for the draft.
The new Euro
Andris Biedrins is the prototype of the new Euro big man.
Andris Biedrins is about 30 minutes into his workout on Wednesday with the L.A. Lakers at their practice facility and he's barely breaking a sweat.
Lakers assistant coach Bill Bertka hands Biedrins a medicine ball and asks him to crouch down and then dunk it as many times as he can. Biedrins dunks. And then he dunks again. An assistant throws Biedrins another, heavier basketball. He grabs it and dunks it again.
As the balls get heavier, the thud of them hitting the floor gets louder. Biedrins picks them up and slams the home -- mostly with ease.
Bertka walks away shaking his head. Bertka has been around the Lakers since the days of Wilt Chamberlain. He's seen a lot. Today, he's getting a new experience.
Biedrins goes into a four-corner drill. Bertka and company set up four cones around the NBA lane and ask Biedrins to shuttle through it as fast as he can. The drill is supposed to measure lateral quickness -- a key element for any NBA player's defense.
Bertka hits the stopwatch and Biedrins is off in a flash. His feet are moving in blur. Lakers GM Mitch Kuphchak moves a little closer in his chair.
Then the real fun begins. Biedrins picks up the ball and starts shooting NBA 3s.
Clank!
Clank!
Then swish -- as the ball sails under the rim and just catches the net. Biedrins works his way around the perimeter and the brick laying continues. He nails a few shots in the corner and walks away shrugging his shoulders. He wants to go back into the paint and start working on his post moves again.
About three years ago, NBA scouts began traveling over to Europe in droves hoping to find players with key ingredients that had become rare in American collegiate players -- size, shooting skills and rock solid fundamentals.
The quest reached a fever pitch last season when over 20 international players were taken on draft night. Most of them had the same thing in common. Enormous size and enormous skills for kids that size. However, as the season played out, their detractors started coming out of the woodwork.
The lack of defense, the lack of toughness and athleticism and an inability to use that size where NBA coaches wanted it most -- in the paint -- earned most of the international players drafted last year bench time instead of accolades.
Unlike most Euros, Biedrins prefers to live in the paint.
As one coach told Insider, "What do I want a 7-foot jump shooter for? I've got 6-foot-5 guys who can do it just as well or better and they can play their position."
Biedrins may be the answer to their prayers. He's unlike any Euro I've ever seen. He's long (7-foot with a 7-1½ wingspan), has great lateral quickness, is an explosive leaper with a 34½ inch vertical jump (Chris Bosh and Carmelo Anthony each have a 33 inch vertical by way of comparison) and . . . drum roll please . . Biedrins prefers to play in the paint where most 7-footers belong. He's a pure four whose specialty is defense, shot blocking and energy -- not real staples of the Euros who have been flooding the draft the past few years.
His body is ripped and he's got a strong core that allows him to play in the post despite turning 18-years-old just weeks ago. He bench presses 185 pounds around 15 times. Only one big guy in Chicago (Jason Keep) topped that in combine testing last year.
When one NBA executive saw him with his shirt off he proclaimed, "Good God! That's not the kid I saw in Latvia six months ago."
He has much more in common with Dwight Howard and Tyson Chandler than he does with Darko Milicic or Pau Gasol, and coaches may like it that way. There will be no reprogramming for Biedrins. Coaches won't pull their hair out when he wanders out to the 3-point line or when he allows a 6-foot-3 guard to grab a rebound over him. Biedrins is one of the rare athletes in a super sized frame who wants to play to his strengths.
Biedrins' journey to the NBA is pretty amazing. He went from an unknown kid playing in Latvia to one of the hottest prospects in the NBA draft after he flew to Las Vegas last summer and enrolled in an AAU tournament. NBA scouts were stunned to see the young 7-footer dominate against some of the top talent in the U.S. For the tournament, Biedrins averaged a triple double in points, rebounds and blocks and became the buzz of the camp.
Over the past six months, many NBA scouts have made the trip to Latvia and they liked what they saw. While there's no question that Biedrins is still very raw offensively, they loved his energy, bounciness and his willingness to defend. Even with a so-so shot and only a handful of post moves, by the end of the season he began averaging 20 points a game. Unlike most of the Euros in the draft who only saw action in practice, Biedrins began dominating international play by the end of the season. At the time he was still just 17 years old.
Biedrins is a physical specimen with all the tools. If his outside shot improves, he could be a special player.
His agent, Rade Filipovich (an associate of Bill Duffy), has already worked out an NBA-friendly $350,000 buyout with his club in Latvia. He's been working out in L.A. with a group call Athletes' Performance and they've already added 10 points of muscle and several inches to Biedrins' vertical jump.
In the space of those weeks he's also become fluent in English, picked up an L.A. tan and two diamond earrings and spends the few hours of free time he gets each day playing PlayStation and listening to Snoop Dog. I don't think NBA teams are going to have to worry too much about an adjustment period.
Biedrins' potent mix of athleticism, size and low-post sensibility is non-existent among any of the other Europeans in the draft (and Americans for that matter) with the exception of the much rawer Johan Petro from France. The difference between the two? Biedrins took Petro apart in a recent matchup in a junior tournament in Croatia.
What will ultimately scare a few teams away is his pedestrian outside shooting ability and questions about the competition level he played against in Latvia. Biedrins' outside shot isn't bad (in fact, in the second workout with the Clippers and Nuggets it was actually very, very good), but it's clear from his shooting form that he struggles to hit anything consistently outside of 12 feet from the basket -- think Andrei Kirilenko when he first came into the league.
Based on what I saw him do at two private workouts -- one with the Lakers on Wednesday and one with the Clippers and Nuggets on Thursday -- he'll likely be the first international player off the board on draft night and could go as high as the No. 3 pick in the draft depending on what team got the pick. More realistically, he'll probably fall anywhere from No. 5 to No. 12 on draft night.
Biedrins is the closest competition to Howard that there is in the draft at the four and my guess, after having seen both of them play, is that Biedrins could give Howard a real run for his money because of his aggressiveness and toughness. Teams have a few concerns about Howard's drive and toughness. Those just aren't issues with Biedrins. While Howard is certainly more skilled offensively and a better athlete, the top few teams in the draft should insist that the two players work out against each other. I think it would be a lot closer than people realize.
Ha is no laughing matter
Ha Seung Jin is head and shoulders above where was last year at this time.
Around this time last year, SFX brought a young Korean kid named Ha Seung Jin over to the United States and had him work out. The workout, which I later saw on video, was one of the bigger disappointments I had seen from a supposed top-notch prospect.
Ha was being billed as South Korea's answer to Yao Ming. All he really was, however, was all the things we feared Yao would be. He was slow, mechanical and lacked none of the skill or finesse Yao would go on to show in the league.
The rep that Ha was a joke quickly spread throughout the league and he was forgotten . . . until a few days ago when Ha began working out for NBA teams.
Frustrated with the progress Ha was making in South Korea and aware of the many physical problems Ha needed to work through, SFX took the unprecedented step of pulling him off his team and putting him into full workout mode six months ago.
They flew Ha and his family to L.A., put him up in an apartment in Brentwood and began working out all the flaws that they found. They hired Athletes' Performance to get rid of the body fat and make him more explosive. They worked him out every day in a gym in Santa Monica with a big man coach and several other former NBA players, including Eddie Griffin and Jelani McCoy. They even hired Ha a yoga instructor to teach him balance and flexibility.
The results have been simply . . . impressive. I watched Ha work out in front of several NBA teams, including the Lakers, Clippers, Jazz and Nuggets on Thursday, and I think it's safe to say that we all walked away a little stunned by Ha's improvement.
Six months of diligent workouts have increased Ha's strength, quickness and flexibility.
Over the course of six months Athletes' Performance has replaced the body fat with muscle, greatly improved his lateral quickness and vertical jump (he's now up to 25 inches with one step), given him a lot of strength in his lower body (his legs look like tree trunks) and taught him how to run the floor.
Everyone moved to the edge of the bleachers on Thursday when SFX put him into full court drills. His ability to get up and down the floor and dunk the basketball seems to have improved a hundred fold.
He was much better athletically than I had suspected. Surprisingly, however, he was also not quite as good skills wise as I had heard. His shot is still a little flat and he had trouble converting any shots that weren't dunks during his workout.
Still, when you measure 7-foot-4½ inches with shoes, have a 7-foot-5 wingspan a 9-foot-7 standing reach and weigh 328 pounds -- people aren't going to worry so much about the basketball skills at this point. He's already had private workouts for the Spurs and Blazers. He was so impressive in Portland on Wednesday that they are flying down to L.A. to see him again on Friday.
Still, Ha-quille O'Neal (as his agent calls him) isn't a slam dunk just yet. It's obvious that he's put in a lot of hard work over the past six months and that he's improved by leaps and bounds. But workouts are one thing. Playing in a game is another. SFX's decision to take Ha out of games and into full time training mode has paid off in one area . . . but will it backfire in another?
Several of the folks Insider talked to whom have seen Ha recently are understandably impressed with his size, athleticism and agility (he can even do the splits and a handstand thanks to the yoga training). However, they're worried that the zero playing time, combined with not a lot of great competition in Korea, has him way behind the curve of the other two enormous big men in the draft -- Pavel Podkolzine and Peter John Ramos.
"At the end of the day, as important as the workouts are, they're just one factor in the process," one NBA scout told Insider. "You've got to evaluate the entire package. That includes the workouts, the mental evaluations and the playing time. This kid really has nothing to evaluate on the court. He really hasn't played. He's a lab experiment in many ways. How do you draft a kid like that? I'll tell you . . . in the second round where nothing is guaranteed."
Teams in the late first round are showing interest in Ha.
That's just one opinion, however. Teams in the late first round are already showing enormous interest. Podkolzine and Ramos will be off the board by the time the draft hits the late first round and several teams hoping to find a diamond in the rough might be willing to take a shot on Ha based on his size and dramatic athletic improvement.
The fact that he already has a rabid following in South Korea will also help his cause.
"I really respect Yao (Ming)," Ha told Insider. "If he had given up or failed it would be much harder to do what I'm doing. I know he's helped me."
Can he help enough to get Ha in the late first round and guaranteed millions based on six months of intense training? At least one NBA scout thinks so.
"You can teach all of that other stuff," one scout told Insider. "As the old adage goes, you can't teach size. He's got that in abundance and it looks like with the proper training he can become a decent athlete. That's enough for someone to take him in the first."
If only we could get Podkolzine, Ramos, Ha and Cleiton Sebastio on the floor together. . .
