Everyone who had any iron in any basketball fire was in Portland for the Nike Hoop Summit.
It was mid-April of 2013, the same event that had launched Dirk Nowitzki 15 years earlier. Now the scouts were eager to see Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins and Dante Exum for the World squad, and Aaron Gordon and Jabari Parker and the Harrison twins for the U.S.
Joel Embiid was there. So was Julius Randle. And so was a mysterious name from Germany: Dennis Schröder. Maybe there was some Nowitzki dust on this fellow, too.
The scouts watched the practices and looked, in vain, for a blond, blue-eyed guard. Instead, they learned that Schröder was the spindly Black kid, son of a German father and a Gambian mother, and he was screwing up the script.
Exum, from Australia, was the point guard of the moment. Now he couldn’t dribble past Schröder in the World team’s scrimmages.
The World team beat the Americans, 112-98. Schröder played six more minutes than Exum and scored 16 points with six assists. He also got to the free-throw line 10 times. The scouts went home with an extra file and a new name for the draft board.
“It was a ridiculous game,” said Michael Schmitz, a draft analyst for ESPN. “Probably it was one of the most loaded Hoop Summits ever. I had seen film of Dennis in Germany and saw that he was a pesky defender. His quickness stood out. You didn’t see as much of his offense in that league. He turned himself into the player he is today.”
Now the Lakers have that player.
Last season Schröder averaged 18.9 points and 30.8 minutes for Oklahoma City, playing behind and occasionally beside Chris Paul. He also improved his 3-point touch from 34.1 percent to 38.5.
The Lakers traded Danny Green and a first-round draft pick for him, and now they have a true point guard in the sweet spot of his career, a more volatile version of Rajon Rondo with a better shot.
The Lakers won the NBA championship with two of basketball’s ruling players. They also won it because they were simpatico, because LeBron James and Anthony Davis enjoyed and enriched “the others.” They should be better with Schröder, Wesley Matthews and Marc Gasol coming in and Rondo, Green, Avery Bradley and Dwight Howard going out, but only if they keep playing happy.
That brings us to Schröder’s announcement on Monday. He said he should start at point guard and help James because “he doesn’t have so much stuff in his mind. For him to play off-the-ball would be great.”
The theory that James should adjust to what Schröder wants was quaint if nothing else.
But if the Lakers wanted to run even more freely, they picked the right guy.
At times Schröder plays with the recklessness of a skateboarder, which he was, until Liviu Calin, the coach of the youth program in the town of Braunschweig, came to the park and noticed his crazed agility.
For years Schröder was a defiant individual playing his first team sport, not always practicing and rarely deferring.
The death of his father Axel, when Dennis was 16, brought him to earth.
Then came Portland. Ademola Okulaja, a former North Carolina player from Germany, was Schröder’s agent. He guided Schröder toward the first game of the rest of his life.
“It changed my life,” Schröder said, simply. “Nobody knew who I was. I played against a lot of names there.”
The Atlanta Hawks took Schröder with the 17th pick of the 2013 draft, three months before his 20th birthday. Of the 2013 draftees, Schröder has the fourth-most NBA points.
“But I was young back then,” Schröder said. He didn’t like losing, and he severed his social media accounts with the Hawks in an effort to get traded. He also was one of four defendants in a DeKalb County parking lot assault that tore the victim’s ACL.
Schröder also averaged 19.4 points and 6.2 assists in 2017-18. The only four players who surpassed those combined statistics were James, Paul, James Harden and Russell Westbrook.
His Oklahoma City tenure was calmer and more productive. “I’m married with two kids now,” he explained. “Chris was there and he is at least one of the top five point guards of all time. I learned a lot from him.”
Schröder said the German sporting public “went crazy” when they heard he was an incipient Laker. Calin, the Braunschweig coach, told Bleacher Report that he likens Schröder’s story to Jamal Malik’s in “Slumdog Millionaire,” in which Jamal survives the violent streets of Bombay and becomes India’s latest quiz show superstar.
You always need something a little different for the sequel.
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